Travel: Dyed In The Wool [Day XLV]

Wherein I assist the masses.

I spent the morning today assembling baby quilt patterns on Etsy for Dana.  Apparently infants have very strong opinions on mauve.  Relatedly, and more excitingly, I have begun taking notes on conference calls when Katie (Dana's assistant) is out on errands, which means I get to be in the room for all of the network check-ins.  My quick typing, one of the three abilities I cite when other people ask what I'm good at*, has finally paid off.

The writers' room is kind of a dream for someone as nitpicky as me.  People usually don't like to go see films with me because rather than just say I enjoyed it, I think for about twenty minutes and then double down on what worked and what didn't.  It can kind of kill the buzz.  I try not to do it anymore.  But in the room, seven or eight people are doing the exact same thing at the development stage.  Even though I don't talk at all, I feel in such good company.

It's surreal to think that the show is actually going to go on air and that, for the first few episodes anyways, I'm going to have a lot of information about how different it almost looked, or why the characters are playing out the way they are.  

Notes from Avonlea.

Up at Dana's house yesterday, I was spearheading a campaign against The Room, Dana and Quinn's storage space cum nursery.  There were all sorts of things in there, from wedding memorabilia to old script notes to a large ziplock bag of free cosmetic samples, which Dana cheerfully handed off to me.  

Once I got home, I used one of the moist towelettes on my face.  It didn't sting too badly, and after a few minutes my skin began to feel very stiff.  It was odd, but I figured it was some sort of active ingredient until I threw the wipe away.  My fingers were stained a horrible orange-y tan.

I ran to the washroom in a panic and stuck my face in the sink.

My entire face was streaked with what looked like wood varnish - I felt like a very tall Oompa-Loompa.  Now I know how Anne Shirley felt when the horrible raven-black hair dye turned out green and she had to cut off all her hair.  Fortunately for Mary's bathroom tiles, I did not have to cut off my face: the stuff (which I assume was self-tanner) came off with some vigorous scrubbing and rubbing alcohol.  I have no idea what I would have done had it not: I looked truly ridiculous.

Maybe it would have been a talking point at the office.  I bet they don't get many Oompa-Loompas down here.

Cheers,

Julia

*the other two are spelling and the ability to love even the most awful of cats.

Travel: #TheMysteriesOfSocialMedia [Day XLII]

The office is very excited today: #DanaFox is trending on Twitter.

Also: Dire news.  A plot point depends on a cardboard pastry insert, but the gas-station Hostess Cupcakes of the script come in a tray, according to the serious-voiced man around a corner.  Not in a little cardboard tube.  A tray.  Things are going to have to change.  Someone says Twinkies come with a cardboard edge.  Don't you think Twinkies would be funny?  Yeah, yeah, totally.  I had a teacher in high school and he had a plate of Twinkies that looked exactly the same after nine years.  I'll have my graphics people come up with a Twinkie thing just in case, because everyone has that perception that Twinkies last forever.

Crisis averted.

But wait, more concerns!  In the flashback, do we need Lisa Frank, or will Trapper Keeper do?  Maybe Dana will find the Trapper Keeper too loud.  But that would be awesome.  It's on E-Bay now for like, seventy five bucks.  One of the other staffers speaks up.  Oh my gosh, I have like ten of those at my mom's house.  She is ordered to take pictures and e-mail them.  They think Lisa Frank is more character-appropriate.

It's the little things that kill!

Notes from Katie's desk.
It is really weird to be surrounded by coworkers who are not your coworkers.

Cheers
Julia

Travel: Taste The Rainbow [Day XXXVI]

Wherein swag is had by all and I give notes on a network television script.

Hold your arms out in front of you and make a circle.  Look down to about your waist.

You are looking at the approximate volume of the Skittle duffel bag that just came through the office in the arms of a man named Freddie.  The writers were very excited.  He was handing out packets to everyone at a desk, and I stopped him to ask what had brought on the sugar shack.

"Nothing, really.  Skittles is hoping this will brighten your day."  He left me with a bag and sauntered out.

I am suspicious.  What if these Skittles are a bribe, sent by the network in order to prevent Dana from airing the upcoming episode where Tommy, Ben's black best friend/sidekick, explores race relations and self-distances from his black identity in order to fit in better with white friends?  Or the one where little Maddie gets hold of a Judy Blume book and questions the nature of sexuality?  Disastrous.

Okay, so maybe not from the network.

But there must be some nefarious force at work for so many Skittles to have been amassed for no transparently visible reason.  I blame the patriarchy.

They are tasty though.

Notes from a red tongue.

Yesterday, Dana gave me the preliminary script for the second episode - which she wrote - and asked me to give notes.  My head exploded.  I cannot give notes to this woman.  She is an insanely successful screenwriter and I am a ex-college student who missed the last two sessions of my Professional Development class.


Obviously.

I ended up pretending I was writing the notes for an alternate universe version of Dana whom I would never have to see again once she read them.  It worked fairly well, except that when I handed over the script this morning, she did not - upon touching it - shimmer away into another dimension as I had hoped she would.  Life is full of disappointment.


I have had too many Skittles.


Cheers
Julia

Travel: Mix Master [Day XXXI]

Wherein writing is rewriting in music, too.

When pilots get made, the producers don’t have to worry about clearing the soundtracks, since nobody’s officially making money off the show yet.  Once they have a series order, though, the pilot gets sent back through the post process so the mixers can replace the ‘temp music’ with cleared, licensed stuff.

The familiarity of the processes are a strange comfort to me.  I sat in the mix room for four hours with Dana, the director Jake Kasdan (Lawrence Kasdan’s son! Fangirl moment.), and a couple of sound techs as they trudged through every cue.  Maybe it was just hunger, but it gave me flashbacks to four months ago, when we mixed our own infinitely tinier show. 

Sure, there are more people here – the console of blinky lights is slightly larger, and they didn’t have any problems licensing Take On Me for the party scene.  But there’s the same amount of surreptitious eating at the console, the same arguments about whether the levels on the cue should come up five percent or go down ten, the same laughs at the lines that only seem to get funnier the sixth time.  The mix is a slog, but there’s a sense of excitement too – like marathon runners coming into the stadium for the last lap.

They stuck with the composer who did the temp music for the series proper, so he had to rewrite - and slightly tweak - his own compositions for the airing version.  “Do you think it’s too close for comfort?” Jake said as they listened to the temp soundtrack against the one we were using.  Dana didn’t seem too worried.  “It’ll squeak by.”

I asked Randy – the line producer – who had ended up with the rights to the composer’s temp music.  “The Fox conglomerate.  If he so much as tries to demo anything else with one of those tracks, they’ll have a lawyer on him faster than you can say shark.”

“Even if he’s replacing his own music on one of the shows they run?”

“Especially then.”

So not quite like we do it at home, then.

Cheers

Julia

Travels: STEEEEVE! [Day VI]

Wherein I become a much more useful player in Six Degrees Of Kevin Bacon.


I'm down here because I Know People.  This is not through any particular skill or exceptional quality of my own; it is merely an accident of birth and subsequent neighbourly mingling.  This was brought home to me rather forcefully when Mary pulled me along to the premiere of Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World, a film written and directed by one of Dana's very good friends both in the industry and in real life, Lorene Scafaria.

As I have long suspected, for those involved above the line a film premiere is a sort of adult Prom, an opportunity to put on a pretty dress and get in a limo with your friends and drink champagne somewhere fancy.  I am frankly surprised they didn't all pack up afterwards to go camping in the Santa Monica Hills and zip their sleeping bags together.  The atmosphere certainly supported it.

Outside the theatre there was a red carpet set up, with a secondary 'lane' for regular film-festival goers whom nobody was interested in photographing.  There was a small river of paparazzi between us and the real stars [including Dana, Lorene, and an extremely pregnant and pretty Diablo Cody, whom I was too nervous to talk to], and a sort of unofficial third lineup across the street.  I thought at first that they were just observing the cacophony, but as soon as the actors appeared they revealed their true colours.  "STEVE!" they bawled.  "KEIRA, KEIRA, I LOVE YOU!"  A chant went up after a few moments: "Sign this, sign this, sign this!"  The actors gave no indication that they heard any of this nonsense, and I don't blame them in the least.  I'm sure they're coached not to cop to this in public, but I imagine the press junket is very few celebrities' favourite part of the job.  The photographers were hardly more polite: some of the writers and less-seasoned red carpet walkers looked downright shellshocked by all the noise.

I could get really cheesy and describe my experiences before and during the afterparty as Seeking A Friend For The End Of The Film, but I won't, because that would be declasse and God knows I am eternally bound to classiness.  After some theatre lobby nervousness, Dana handwaved me in to a very strange bar where the shot glasses had LED lights in them and cater-waiters were swanning around with mysterious looking puffs that turned out to be crab cakes.  Her kind assistant Kate let me stick close to her and gawk surreptitiously at all the finery, but it did strike me that perhaps the function of these parties is less to exclude the unworthy and more to give the people who do have face recognition some time where they can celebrate their achievements in peace.  I imagine there are very few places in urban North America where Keira Knightley can just sit down and have a friendly chat in a restaurant without being semi-consciously interrupted by a stream of well-intentioned admirers.

It was a very surreal experience.  For me, that is.  Not for Miss Knightley.  I suspect she is fairly acclimated to the LED-infused shot glasses.

Notes from an American premiere.

The film itself is a sort of apocalypse-meets-Lost In Translation-meets-Punch Drunk Love-road-trip... thing, and I was pleasantly surprised by it.  Steve Carrell does downtrodden, passive Everyman [an archetype I'm not particularly fond of] with appropriate hangdog aplomb; Keira Knightley is basically playing a quirky Dream Girl [again, something that tweaks a lot of film critics].  That said, they brought a lot of humanity to the characters and they have good onscreen chemistry.  And I'll admit, I did find myself tearing up a bit during Carrell's confrontation with his father, played by Martin Sheen.  The writing can be darkly funny in parts, and I reckon it's worth a watch even though the predictable last act/love story and uneven tone does bring it down somewhat.

Cheers
Julia

Travels: One's Lot In Life [Day III]

Wherein I take the bus in the wrong direction and Darth Vader presides over Fox.

I often wonder how a studio set functions without occasionally acknowledging the tension of twenty minions politely waiting for their big break... while working for the person whose job they would like.  Bad sentence, but I'll come back to it later.  Point being, at school we all know we're competing, but at least we can kind of do a friendly jostle here and there and there's an understanding that eventually anyone who works hard and has a reasonable balance of good luck to bad will make a stab at it.  Not so at Fox.  I met a good fifteen people today: they would all like to be in the writers' room.  They are not.

I was walking around the lot with Dana's lovely assistant Kate when she circumspectly referred to this weirdness.  I asked her for advice about the summer.  The lot has large murals painted on several of the buildings - the one behind Kate showed a vaguely anemic Luke Skywalker doing battle with Vader.

"Don't be pushy," she said.  "Don't be too smart.  I mean, be smart, but not about the writing.  Make friends who write.  Be smart with them, get your lines out at your dinner parties.  I'm still working on the balance."  We looked up at the mural.  Poor Luke, about to have his hand cut off by the Force.  Stuck up there forever.

"Does Dana ever show her scripts to you, though?  In private."

Kate beamed.  "Dana's really nice with me, actually.  I'm lucky.  One of my jokes made it into the pilot; I called my parents, I was so excited."  I asked her what the joke was, but she wouldn't tell me.  "It'll seem like bragging," she said.  "I don't know you well enough for bragging yet.  Try again next week."

On the way home from the lot, I took the bus in the wrong direction and ended up at the Santa Monica airport.  It's as close as an airfield can get to cozy, with little carts puttering around on the tarmac.  I bet the air traffic controllers there are happy with their jobs - they don't want to eventually get into the cockpit.

Lucky air traffic controllers.

Notes from a stucco workplace.

Any flat surfaces in LA which are not regularly cleaned acquire a thin layer of chalky black dust.  Mary says it is from the big ships that come into the harbour; it makes me feel like the volcanic apocalypse is approaching.

I may come back to this later, but shredding Mary's old patient notes is killing the writer in me.  Every file is a real character - you'd never need to come up with a backstory again!

Cheers

Julia

Travels: Your Bank Of America [DAY I]

Wherein I find five dollars and the Veteran's Act is put on display.

The Bank of America is the devil, says Mary, but it is within walking distance.  Mary has an account there already and she knows a few of the tellers.  Inside, the bank is neutral and clean, with a collection of red chairs near the entrance.  As we sit down, a ragged-looking man in a canvas jacket stands and brushes past us.

Mary beckons over one of the tellers, a youngish man with blue eyes whose nametag announces him as Beau Kasinsky.  I have never met a Beau before.  They exchange pleasantries.  On the ground near my feet is a crumpled bill.  American bills are much less exciting than our Monopoly money, but five dollars is five dollars.  I smooth it out a bit dumbly, then present it to Beau with the appropriate I found this on the floor caveat.  He laughs and calls his supervisor, 'Nick' - no last name on his tag - who nods jovially and presses the bill into my hand.

"I think the person who dropped it left," I say awkwardly.  "Does it belong to the bank now?"

"Nah, you're a winner," says Nick.  "The bank can't take it anyway, and I think I know who lost it.  He won't miss it."  He drifts off.  He had strangely blue eyes too - I wonder if our teller's are contactually enhanced.  They are very bright.

Beau leads us past a counter with an Investing and Accounting sign over it: the jowly man seated at the desk talks to himself and pokes at his iPad.  He promises to pick up the Prius at five - he looks pleased.  I doubletake and Mary taps the side of her head, smiles.  "Bluetooth," she says.

The man who was sitting in the red chair when we arrived hovers around the door of the bank before opening it and drifting past us.  He looks haggard close up, mostly bald.  Mary glances at him.  "Oh, I thought that was Steven.  He's not, of course, but he could be.  Wouldn't that have been fun?"  I nod knowingly.  I cannot remember if we know a Steven.  Perhaps Mary is thinking of someone in Rochester.  At any rate, the tall man wanders into the line for the clerk and Beau nods at him.

"If you want to return that money, he's the guy who lost it.  He lives next door, comes in here all the time.  He'll just withdraw stuff and then toss bills away as he walks out.  We try to keep things civil - he's on VA.  Really messed up, poor guy."

"Veterans are the only minority group that get guaranteed health coverage down here," Mary whispers.  "But it's not always enough."  I look at the man again.  He shuffles in slow increments towards the teller counter, though there is no one in front of him.  To our left, Investing and Accounting is asking about Fannie Mae - he looks totally insane, nodding at thin air and tapping on his pad.

"Um, if you want, I can give back the money for you."  Beau holds out his hand and I pull the bill from my wallet.

"Thanks."

He hurries over to the man, tapping him politely on the shoulder.  The veteran's back is turned to me, but Beau comes back and smiles.  "He says thank you."  We finish up with the account and Beau jokes with me about my Canadian response to finding the bill.  "My roommate would be pissed," he says.  He thinks you guys are all crazy socialists up there.  He's very, um, American.  Not like, racist or anything though."

I smile.  "You should tell him you met a Canadian Communist and she gave her money to a homeless guy."

"Yeah, I think I will."  He laughs, shakes my hand and waves us out.  I look back through the glass doors, and the veteran is still standing in line, rocking back and forth on his toes.  His beard is unkempt, and his ears stick out.  A thought occurs to me.

"Mary, when you said he could have been Steven - you didn't mean Mr. Spielberg?"

"Well of course.  He lives just up the block."

We walk back to the car in silence.


Writing notes from a large city.

Los Angeles is one shade greyer than Vancouver.  Enormous dead palm trees recalling Cousin It line the streets, bolstered by ten-foot high concrete retaining walls, and every house looks arbitrarily planted on its street, with no connection to its neighbours.  The primary colour palette seems to be sand, beige and white, with pops of green scattered randomly through the town.  This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it looks like David Lynch's colour corrector got to it.  The brightest thing I saw today was a garish billboard for Madagascar 3: THREE DEE THE MOVIE stuck on top of a Trader Joe's.

[Unrelated: Trader Joe's is the best.  Why do we not have them at home?]

Cheers
Julia