Travel: Sense and Sensibilities [Day XLIX]

Wherein I give network TV a fighting chance.

My sister Miriam is a huge Friends fan.

She has all the box DVDs and can faithfully quote Phoebe and Chandler's most rambling monologues.  Watching the show can pull her out of a slump - if I come downstairs and hear Jennifer Aniston's voice and a laugh track coming from the basement I know she needs to be on her own for a bit.  She knows the characters and how they'll behave in a given situation;  I think she sees the Friends as, well, friends.  Recently, she's shifted from a coffee shop to a neighbourhood bar, following another group of thirty-somethings in How I Met Your Mother, still running in its eighth season.

Conversely, I never really 'got' most scripted sitcoms.  I love TV, love the medium and what it offers in terms of character opportunities and chances for prolonged serial plotting, but the 'group of adult friends hang out wacky-style for twenty-two minutes' never really appealed.  Even Frasier, which does make me laugh when I've seen it in hotel rooms and airports, never caught on for me beyond the occasional rerun.  The shows I love try to build epic worlds only to die a painful, limping Death of a Thousand Nielsen boxes in their first couple seasons.  A few times, Miri has watched one of 'my shows' with me - she found the characters I adored unlikeable or unrealistic and the premises far-fetched.  Right or wrong, she's my barometer for public taste in television.

I think she will really enjoy Ben & Kate.  

And that's not a slur on Miri, and it's not a slur on the show.

I haven't talked much about the show itself in these entries because it seemed largely irrelevant, but today we had a table read* and the actors came in.  Hearing them bring so much energy to the lines, seeing the excitement on Dana and the other writers' faces as their show coalesced... I really felt a collection of people imagining something special together.

And it is hard for me to be objective now, even on the fringes of production, but the scripts make me laugh.  The actors - particularly Nat Faxon, whose last gig was as a screenwriter for the Descendants (he and his cowriters won the Oscar for it) - make me laugh.  The jokes make me laugh.  There's no question that Ben & Kate is situational comedy.  In some ways it's safe as houses.

But I'm going to watch it when I get home in the fall, even if I don't have a Nielsen box.

Notes from the 14 bus.

Wonderful Los Angeles.  A teenage boy got on the bus today with skate sneakers, low-riding baggy jeans, an unzipped hoodie that said Thug Lyfe on the back... and a pair of tzizit sticking out from under his t-shirt.

Cheers

Julia

* It's a meeting where the writers, producers and the main actors all get scripts and the producer reads through the entire script, with the actors running their dialogue while seated.  A regular table read of a half-hour show takes about fifteen minutes.

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: 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

Film: Brave - Tradition! Tradition!

*The first three paragraphs are not even remotely relevant unless you’re seriously interested in the politics of animated film production.

            Brave boasts two primary directing credits: Mark Andrews and Brenda Chapman.  Andrews is an old hand at Disney, having acted as Head of Story on the very fine The Incredibles as well as his most recent (and unfortunate) screenplay credit for John Carter.  Chapman is no slouch either – she was Head of Story on The Lion King and directed one of Dreamworks’ best and most cinematically exciting efforts: The Prince of Egypt, a retelling of the Moses story that focuses on the conflicted relationship between Moses and Rameses.

            Anyway.  Nobody denies that the story of Brave is Chapman’s.  She brought the project to the studio and began to develop it as the writer/director.  (At the time, it was much more evocatively titled The Bear and the Bow.)  Not inconsequentially, Merida wasn’t the only female first for Pixar – Chapman was to be the first woman director in a company that is notoriously male-dominated even by industry standards. 

            Eighteen months before Brave was scheduled for delivery, Pixar replaced Chapman with Andrews.  It’s disingenuous to say that this was misogynistic or unprecedented: Monsters Inc., Toy Story 2 and Ratatouille all had directorial switches, for reasons the company is reluctant to disclose.  But it is unusual enough that people wondered about the motives for the change.  After all, who better to tell the story of a headstrong daughter than a woman who admitted that the script was based on her own relationship with her six-year old?  Pixar has never come out with a reason, and probably never will.  But at points in Brave, the cracks show.  It’s impossible to tell whose hands shaped what, but there are definitely two sets of distinctive tonal fingerprints on the film, and it muddies it up somewhat.

            This is Pixar’s first foray into a few things: period pieces, female leads, and the dreaded Princess Movie.  In the Scottish Highlands, adventurous young Princess Merida is chafing under the controlling thumb of her conservative mother, Queen Elinor.  Unbeknownst to her goofy, encouraging father Fergus, Merida and Elinor are in an escalating cold war about Merida’s arranged betrothal.    When the day comes, Merida looks for a third option with disastrous results and must struggle to right her wrongs and understand the true meaning of family and tradition.

            It’s probably not worthwhile to go into why it’s disappointing to see Pixar, a company that has historically tried to tell fresh stories with unconventional protagonists, choose the tale of a princess who doesn’t want to get married as their first female-led feature.   That said, Merida has one quality that certainly hasn’t cropped up before in the Disney stable:

            She’s kind of a jerk.

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: The Magic Kingdom [Day V]

Disneyland: ITSO the great, sadly late, Ray Bradbury. Old Dead Things.

In the centre of the park, a grove of carefully tended flowers surround a statue. The bronze is sun-warm to the touch.

Far away, under the earth, eyes blink.

Steam drifts through vents in a cold dark room, pulling heat from a tube in the centre. The body inside, empty, twitches in the cold as the throat works. Veins that once pumped blood now ooze acids: gel and nitric and mystery magic. The mouth is motionless. In a nearby chamber, a heart ticks with mechanical precision on a bed of ice. The brain was removed long ago - everybody knows it is the heart that really matters.

He waits.

Beat. A little girl holds the hand of the statue.  Beat. Tourists squint in the sun, flash cruel lights in his eyes. He cannot close them.  Beat. Underground, his breath steams silently inside the tube, trapped. His fingers yearn to shade his face. Above, a pigeon passes over the sun and falls, suddenly, into the shadows of ringed palm trees.

An enormous, deformed animal lumbers past the statue, and the man in the tube feels a pang of kinship: the monsters that roam the park are trapped too, marooned in a prison of felt and sweat - their hands foreign white bodies hanging from rubbery wrists. He imagines tongues lolling in the heat, sunken eyes inside the bobbing heads. They glint out at him with empathy.

His knuckle itches. It has always itched.

The room has no clock in it, but they check on him twice a day. The door creaks open; it is Connors. The man in the tube imagines a smile. Connors is the best of them, the gentlest and the brightest. Most days he brings a thin sketchpad into the room with him and draws lying on the floor, thin legs kicking at the air like a boy.

"Good morning, sir," says Connors with respect. "It's a beautiful day out there."

He sits and draws next to the tube for a few minutes, gentle-eyed women in flowing dresses and dragons and shining castles, and speaks casually of the world. He has been away from the facility for several days: "My baby sister, married. What a doozy of a place this old rock of ours is." He shakes his head and looks up. "But you always knew that, I suppose. One day you'll see it again."

Yes! the man wants to shout. He wants to reach out and flip through Connors' book, make the skirts on the women twirl and the fire flick forth from the dragons' mouths. He wants to claw away the fog of the room, clamber up, up, up to the sun and the light and the hurt and see his world, the perfect world he always knew he could make and he did, he did make it better than anyone could have imagined. Too well, perhaps. In a perfect world, there is no room for decay.

Move, mouth! he commands. Gnash, o Teeth! Bend, knees, bend and break and bleed, bleed blue fire! The tube trembles, earth reaching out to him. He wants to sing.

Obey! Obey! Obey!

Connors looks up from his drawings, startled. Above, the nails of the statue shift and bite into bronze. The tick of the heart falters. It slows. Connors rushes out, his sketchbook open on the floor.

In a perfect world, there is no room for old dead things.

Notes from a tired brain.

Still not super happy with this, but part of this exercise is letting go of writing before I stomp it into the ground, so there you have it. I am pretty sure Walt Disney's cryogenically frozen body is in no way attached to the statue of him in the park, which is actually quite charming, but Bradbury is the best at body horror and I couldn't pass up a real-live I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream scenario.

In actual news, Disneyland is definitely cool in its own way, though I'm sure I come to it very differently than I would have as a child. Now it's more food for thought than mindless amusement. Still definitely a worthwhile experience. Also, a thriller/chase sequence set inside the It's A Small World ride would be amazing. I want to shoot that now. Kind of DIVA meets Charade - it's a scary and surreal artifact of bygone times, much like Disney himself.

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