Well, Baby, I've Been Here Before

Obviously a lot of time has passed, and re-envisioning this blog has been compromised into lowering my hopes for it. I don't think this can be a constantly-evolving artistic project, especially not with my focus being entirely on other works, it just has to be a place for me to speak, when I so desire.

One of the priorities I took to a few months ago was finding a lot more good music, too much good music, and I've been moving in that direction.

The novel is suspended indefinitely, I don't read it, I don't look at it, I don't think about it. I've put too much heart into it for a while and I have to figure out how to love it again. I won't leave it forever, but I've decided to let it go its own way until I finish my first screenplay, the first draft of which should be done in four weeks if paces maintain.

If there were an opposite to apology, I would do that in acknowledging that I've not posted for nearly a month, because I've been hustlin', son, or daughter, or mother, or wife.  It's been a hard more-than-a-month grinding out 60+ hours weeks at the Endeavor Agency, but I'm learning more than I'll ever appreciate and I've managed to be very productive despite.  I wrote a new short, I started a new screenplay, and I finished the first draft of the 7th chapter, the hardest chapter, of my novel.  It's newborn and vulnerable and I hate showing it to the world, but I'm not enough of a man to raise it alone, and so I need to find comment from like-minded hearts.  

An agent today at Endeavor told me that once I had a work that I thought was of professional quality, they would read it, or watch it. This marks the single greatest accomplishment I've managed in Hollywood thus far.  I'm considering putting my novel up to the table once the first draft is done, but I might go with the most recent short I've written, one so much more aspiring than the first.  I might, foolishly, drop a few grand, that I do not have, into its production, to make it with the quality it deserves.  

I'm becoming more confident that the best actor I know, and the best rapper I know, both who would blow up in Hollywood with the right guidance, are actually going to make it out here in the next year.  They will take over this town, and its small slice of the world, even if I have to pay for their living and bury myself in further debt to make it happen.  And in some small way, that's what this is all about.

A Month Gone, Much News, Little Effort

I've almost forgotten about everything I intended with this blog, but I have to rationalize that it's mostly because I've been taken by so much else. Since our last update, I interviewed and was hired for a full-time job at the Endeavor Agency, in a position as good or better than I interviewed for at the accursed CAA. I did short but passionate internships at Scott Rudin Productions and Phoenix Pictures and learned a fraction of how much I didn't know about the film industry. I became a Final Cut Pro samurai in attempting to handle the post-production of the aforementioned short, though that's going nowhere at a dreadfully slow pace. I've read a lot, some novels, mostly scripts. Most importantly, I've gotten onto a better track with my own novel than it's ever rode before, and there may be an end in sight. Or at least a definitive half-way point. The final product may exceed 60,000 words and actually qualify as a novel. But I won't get too worked up about it now.

My perspectives on directing have changed wildly as I've started observing and appreciating the shot and blocking choices made in my favorite movies. I've even found pearls of directing in unexpected places, such as the hotel room scene in the third episode of "Greek", a show that I watch only because Clark Duke has a criminally-small part; obviously better that the world receive the graceful genius in small doses than not at all. I also found out that Clark Duke is represented by Endeavor, which is bad ass. It's rare for any man to know absolutely that the cause for which he's fighting is just, but right now I'm a nasty hunk of that rare, absolutely-just meat.

Though my script was trucking along toward a happy ending, I've decided to put it aside until I at least get a first draft of the novel done. This is right for right now.

First Film In The Can

This morning at 3 a.m. Jason and I, under the guise of our production company, "The Misadventures of the White Rhino and Coconut Balls", wrapped our first short. We were set on shooting this weekend, but had initially intended to film a polished version of my first experiment in dialogue. Resourceful as he is, Jason found us an HD camera and a boom mic, and optimistic as I am, I thought I had arranged some French actors that could have really brought the bit home. Come Saturday, the French actors sort of fell through, but sort of weren't ever ours to begin with, and we definitely didn't have a cast for the short.

I was disappointed and depressed about the whole affair. Saturday night I skipped an outing at the Viper Room, stayed home and wrote an entirely new script, which through revision became "Coffee and the Godzilla Apocalypse". Sunday afternoon we built our set, a faux-Tokyo apartment with bluescreen, and by sundown Jason had recruited two professional actors to star. After working with these guys I have no idea what I was ever thinking in trying to use my friends in shorts. Their knowledge and experience gave us a much better sense of what we were supposed to be doing at all points in production and brought more out of the characters than I had initially written into them. My major concern now is about doing as good a job in post-production as they did in physical.

Our actors showed up at 9:30 p.m. and we did two hours of reads before shooting. We then shot for three-and-a-half hours, filming an hour and forty-five minutes for what will probably be a five minute short. I don't know if we were excessive, but I really didn't want to miss anything, and managed to forget the opening sequence despite. We broke down and I digitized until 5 a.m., managed to get a few hours of sleep, and then got to work at 10 a.m. this morning.

I am exhausted but inspired.

A Brief Update...

The brevity is not as much from my being so busy as to be unable to update, as that life passes so slowly I can't stand to wait out the minutes between keystrokes.

I blew the mentioned CAA interview. Keeping up with this blog's tradition of diminishing or ignoring failures, I don't have much to say except that my interviewer was a bipolar cock socket that ended his five minute monologue about how Hollywood hadn't led him down the roads he'd hoped with "I never wanted to end up here." Time and reflection have developed since to convince me to believe that maybe the agency route wasn't the best for me, but time and reflection have been trying very hard to coddle my fragile little person, and would probably lie if it would make me feel better. I would have loved to work at CAA, but I will love another.

I'm writing too much, I'm overstretched, I'm trying to finish my novel while writing my screenplay that has completely derailed itself from real life events though its appeal is that it's based on real life events, while writing and planning for the few shorts that will allow me to make the derailed script explode.

I don't read enough anymore, and obviously I don't blog enough anymore. But I'm learning so much that I'll be super human if all of this new knowledge isn't pushing out my understanding of who I really am and what turns me on.

A Day Late, But

I had to prepare for my interview with CAA. I am still preparing for the interview. All I can offer to distract the masses is the single best analysis of the body of work of Rob Liefeld, the most popular comic book artist of his generation. I'm ashamed to admit that as an adolescent I read almost all of the specific issues mentioned and never realized how terrible Liefeld was an artist.

Minor Update on Major Moves

My good friend Jason, of Hyderabadass fame, moved down to Los Angeles last week and in with me, Flight of the Conchords style. He took to temping as I did for my first few months here, but on his first day was assigned to assistant duty at a mid-level talent agency. He'd never before been exposed to the Hollywood style of management, and did not have a wonderful time. The speed with which he found temp work in the industry inspired me to join his temp agency, however, and in a matter of hours after interviewing and clocking in at 107 wpm typing I had an interview at a Motion Picture Lit. desk at the Creative Artists Agency (answering phones and reading scripts at the biggest talent agency in the world). This might be the best job I could imagine getting right now in terms of gaining experience and connections within the industry, as I will be exposed to screenwriters, directors, producers and actors putting movies together at the highest level. If I nail my interview and get the job, I will be golden gooses for the next year or more. I'm also working on a few shorts that will be described at further length at a later point in this blog.