xtcian

8/24/02 I know it's a

8/24/02

I know it's a bit late in the game to start staring in abject wonder at how impressively small and powerful computers have become, but I have to say this 30 gigabyte hard drive in my computer is the size of half a Pop Tart, and that's pretty damned unbelievable. I'd also like to give a big shout-out to the SmartMedia card in my digital camera, which holds 128 megabytes of info on a piece of plastic the size of a broken Dorito chip. And I mean the small chips, the kind near the bottom when you drop the bag.

I once asked a particularly ill-at-ease web guy how big the internet really was, and where it could be stored. This was 1995, and his guess was that it was about 4 tetrabytes and could be fit on hard drives contained in a large top-opening freezer (the kind your grandparents had for various hunks of meat). Since then, the internet has enlarged geometrically, but I get the feeling that no matter how big it gets, the memory chips will get smaller, and it'll still fit into a freezer.

Now the metaphor has taken over, and every time I search the internet, I visualize myself peering from above into that big freezer, removing the slabs of tenderloin and long-picked blueberries, looking for the capital of Botswana and cousin Denny's recipe for squirrel.

8/23/02 I'm typing this directly

8/23/02

I'm typing this directly into Blogger.com tonight - instead of the usual ritual of writing in Word first - because my beloved Tangerine iBook got a new lymphatic system. Post-surgery, it still doesn't know who I am, doesn't respond to my usual sweet nothings, can't remember any of our secret little sayings. My dear little buddy got rid of his puny 3 gigabyte hard drive and now has a 30 gigabyte drive, almost as much memory as I have, but I have yet to install myself into it. This is a computer that has seen me through a major cross-country move, three job changes, countless jaunts around the country and the last drafts of my first produced script. It was with me mere blocks from Ground Zero when our country was seismically jolted, and deflected the pounding rain of typhoons during an evening where a bolt of lightning nearly killed our movie crew. And now it doesn't know who I am.

It sits on my floor tonight like an Alzheimer's patient, a best friend that has to ask your name. I wonder how many rounds we'll have to go through before it allows me to put Word on it, maybe a smattering of Eudora, or even a truckload of Photoshop. Until then, I'm on Tessa's computer, a foreign little place where the buttons are like those in Europe: small, curious, and don't do what you expect them to. The hot water is on the right, here on Tessa's little machine, and the plugs look alien. I long for the Tangerine-fried goodness of my old iBook. I don't care what they say: that it looks like a toilet seat, that it makes me less of a man. If keeping my creamsicle-colored gay iBook is wrong, I don't wanna be right.

8/22/02 In one of his

8/22/02

In one of his occasional geek raveboy moves, my brother Kent sent the family a tidbit from the July issue of Physics World, which, between recipes for butterscotch cookies and the lovelorn advice column, had an article called "Can Noise Actually Boost Brain Power?" Basically, a pair of Japanese physicists discovered that "random noise" may help humans process information more efficiently the latest biological system to exhibit "stochastic resonance," which as far as I can tell, is a theory climatologists have developed to explain the ice ages. Don't worry, I didn't quite get that part either.

Either way, it sounds good to me, since I have a white noise machine purring on my nightstand every night. This may seem grotesquely yuppie and high maintenance, but my fondness for white noise has humble beginnings. My family suffers from a disease called the "croup," which is a bronchial condition that closes up the windpipe of anyone unlucky enough to get it. It's incredibly terrifying, and it seems like we got the croup every six months or so growing up. The only way to survive was to breathe as much hot steam as you could, as quickly as possible. Countless times my dad would bound into the bedroom and take one of the choking children into the shower for a steam bath lemme tellya, it really sucked.

Then we started using humidifiers, and since the croup died down after that, I equated the vaporizer and the sound it made - with blissful safety. I don't carry a noise machine around because I hate other noises, I do it because it gives me an enormous sense of well-being, something others need drugs and Jim Beam to accomplish.

My own stochastic resonance happens every night, but I feel like I deal with it every day in the movies. The trailers we cut today are immeasurably helped by the random blasts of music in them, giving them excitement and narrative drive. During production, we'd often record "room tone," which is that unheard sonic "feeling" of a room that can be edited into any scene to give a sense of continuous place.

By the way, for those of you at home just trying out white noise, remember that turning it off in the morning can seem quite uncathectic, like being ripped out of the womb all untimely-like. Also, you don't need a blindingly expensive Sound Soother from Sharper Image to do it right (in fact, some of those soundmakers are on digital loops that you gradually recognize, making it agonizing). A fan will work fine, as long as it's pointing away from you, or my thinking-on-your-feet favorite, the radio tuned to 87.9 and turned up a bit. Do not use AM radio - there's all kinds of shit that can crop up there, especially at night due to the atmospheric skip. You'll go to sleep nicely, then be jarred 2 hours later by the results of the Ipswich-Chelsea cricket match on BBC Shortwave.

today's Kooky Stochastic Resonance Korner was brought to you by Ian Williams and Chopin Blake

8/21/02 The brouhaha currently broiling

8/21/02

The brouhaha currently broiling in my ex-hometown of Chapel Hill, NC reached a fever pitch this week, as tongues are awag-wag-waggin' over the summer reading assignment for all incoming UNC freshmen: Approaching the Qu'ran: The Early Revelations. The situation played out exactly how you thought it might: a conservative think tank somewhere in East Ass, Virginia brainwashed three moron freshmen into suing the University for being un-Constitutional, spewing out platitudes like "why ain't the Bible on the summer reading program?" Thankfully, their suit was struck down using the same Constitutional logic, but not before everyone named Earl, Jed and Crazy Christian Fucko got their digs in. There was even a CNN piece on the cafuffle tonight with one of my fave newscasters, Aaron Brown, waxing poetic about our alma mater.

Now, the administration of the University of North Carolina has a long history of being full of shit: they invested in South Africa long after it was cricket, they let the CIA do secret recruiting, they repeatedly ignored student input on pretty much any topic, they paid their custodians in bread crusts, they destroyed the Lab theater, and they gave us all really shitty seats at basketball games. They always seemed to us a boardroom full of guffawing old white guys smoking cherry vanilla tobacco in long wooden pipes.

But this Koran issue reminded me why UNC is so important. They stuck to their guns on this one. Despite pressure from the General Assembly and letters from thousands of disgruntled parents, they went ahead and did the right thing, and if only one freshman kid decides not to "hate sandniggers" because of this book, then it was worth it. If you want a "conservative arts" education, get your ass to Hampden-Sydney; if you want a "liberal arts" education, take a stroll to the hill where William Jefferson Davie thrust a poplar twig in the ground in 1789 and marked the spot for the first public state university for the people and of the people. Today I have more than basketball to make me proud to be a Tar Heel.

me and Chip on the upper quad at UNC, July 1989

8/20/02 Making movie trailers is

8/20/02

Making movie trailers is about three steps laterally from being a snake oil salesman waltzing through Topeka in the late 1870s. Everywhere else in American corporate society there are pretty strict rules about false advertising, but movie previews remain the one place where lying your ass off is not only recommended, but required. I worked for several of the big movie trailer houses in Los Angeles, and while there was enough money surrounding them to make each place its own hushed enclave of secrecy, the people working there would usually whisper that their advertisements are frequently hilariously off-base.

Most of the time it's just because the movie sucked. Turd-polishing accounts for most of the misrepresentation, as studios will do just about anything to make a few bait-and-switch bucks back on opening weekend. I worked on one Ephron-esque vehicle that shall remain nameless - a lifeless, confusing, roadkill of a film that had the bloated sheen of the recently dead and they told us to come up with a trailer that was as fuckin' happy-go-lucky as a juggling clown on crystal meth. And if I were an ordinary Josephine who paid money to see that movie because of the trailer, I would have been very, very upset.

As for the "giving away all the endings" thing, do what we did: blame the studio. They're the ones that always ask for 19 great ideas and 1 stupid one and always go with the stupid one. They demand that trailer makers give away the endings to movies because they have no faith that your average McNugget-passing schlub has the ability to comprehend a movie unless the murderer is revealed thirteen seconds into the trailer. And thanks in part to the movies the studios make, they're probably right.

I got into trailers almost by accident, if calling every day for five months seems like an accident. My friend Amy Hill said she wrote trailer copy one summer and the money was good, so I banged on doors until they brought me in. At the meeting, the president of Universal called and said that the trailers for Mystery Men "weren't tracking worth a damn" and to get someone else on it. They looked at me, and I was thrown to the wolves. Two hours later I returned with twenty ideas, and the head of the department said, "we're going to make you very, very rich."

Of course, that didn't happen, but I did manage to stay afloat in Los Angeles for a long time by writing everything that guy says you know, the "In a world where love means nothing..." kind of thing. And I did have three or four campaigns that went through the roof, the biggest of which was Sleepy Hollow, whereby three words paid for my 33rd year: "Heads Will Roll."

Los Angeles being what it is, and me being deep-dipped in shit as I was, I lost most of my contacts in the business and moved to New York in mid-2000 and didn't think about trailers again (unless a particularly awful one was screening). Until today, that is, when I suddenly had to make a trailer for my own movie, and another film I hadn't seen until Monday. This was more intense than just copywriting, however, this is the whole shebang: I had to pick all of the scenes, marry them to the words, and still make people feel like filing in the door from thither and yon.

Writing for trailer copy is basically the marriage of haiku and commerce with a nice "parallel construction" thrown in. By that I mean:

HE TAUGHT HER HOW TO LIVE
SHE TAUGHT HIM HOW TO LOVE
BLAH BLAH BLAH FUCKING BLAH

One of my faves (never used, of course) from the Stuart Little campaign was this:

THIS HOLIDAY SEASON, CHRISTMAS WILL BE BIG...
SANTA WILL BE HUGE...
AND STUART... WILL BE "LITTLE."

THE STORY OF A LITTLE MOUSE
IN THE BIG APPLE.

You get the idea. Looks easy, but you try it. And it's a lot harder to do on your own movie, because you're not used to looking at the forest for the trees. Our project seems to be going swimmingly, however our editor Jessie has lots of good ideas and never fails to admit her bad ones. I, too, am finding it a lot easier to say how bad certain things I make can suck. We're back in the editing bay tomorrow for round two, so I leave you with the trailer for this blog:

IN AN ONLINE WORLD...
ONE YOUNG MAN WILL POST HIS INNERMOST FEARS...

AND SOMEONE DEEP IN HIS PAST
WILL BRIGHTEN HIS FUTURE

THREE FRIENDS ON THE BRINK OF ADULTHOOD
ONE HAS A SECRET
HE TAUGHT HER HOW TO LOVE
BLAH BLAH FUCKING BLAH

our editor Jessie and me on her birthday in February; my hair has been shorn since, as a public service

8/19/02 Yep, that is my

8/19/02

Yep, that is my last unemployment check stub for the foreseeable future. It's quite an accomplishment, since it means That Internet Job has been paying for me, one way or another, since June of 2000. And it's a company that doesn't even exist anymore! They moved me from Los Angeles to New York, paid me for a year, then severance for six weeks, then unemployment for 26 weeks, then with September 11 came 13 more weeks of emergency unemployment. This week is the last week I shall be feeding off that particular teat, and I just want to say one thing: Thanks, That Internet Job. You were a bleeding nightmare and I complained a lot about you, but I have the humility to accept that if it weren't for you, my life would be so much the lesser.

Speaking of gettin' on with one's life, we had the IFP orientation meeting tonight, where we learned the differing style of presenting one's movie whilst at the festival. Last year, some guy who had an ice cream-themed film rented an ice cream truck and apparently embarrassed everybody, so this year they want us to show a little more class. I'm all for that, since my Pink House Acne Scrub was having a tough time getting off the drafting table anyway.

It was fun seeing the infectiously-excited young filmmakers all checking each other out one of them, named Gabriel, tapped me on the shoulder and introduced himself, something that hasn't happened to me since frat rush. I liked him; he's got moxie. The only drag of the meeting was finding out that four of the twenty films will be selected for awards at the beginning of the festival, which I understand for press purposes, but still takes the wind out of the sails of sixteen other movies. I told the director of the Market that I'd been beat up too much in 3rd grade to feel good about that sort of pre-emptive exclusion, but I don't think I got very far.

Tonight, as Tessa went to bed early, I had to stay up and think of trailer ideas for both The Pink House and Martin & Orloff. Making these trailers exercises a muscle in me that has been dormant for a while, but it got erect fairly quickly. What a weird skill to have in one's arsenal. If it weren't so demoralizing, I'd probably make a career out of it.

8/18/02 It seems like the

8/18/02

It seems like the only thing worse than something bad happening is waiting for it terrorists use this logic all the time, and it's why a kidney stone power is so potent. I'm sure any readers familiar with this week's blog could give half a fuck about this topic, having covered it thrice, but if you ever had one, you'd know what I mean. I've never had the sort of mind-body connection that alerted me that one was coming; I think my blog from five days ago was some sort of shamanistic stab at warding it away. I drank gallons of water this week in suspicion, even though I had felt no pain and nothing seemed to be wrong. I just fucking knew. Then again, some religions would posit that I made it happen by mentioning it. After all, the end of the famous Medieval phrase "speak of the devil" is "...and he shall appear."

Passed the stone at 5:45 in the morning, which was nice; the whole ordeal wasn't half as bad as last year's July 4th debacle. The only thing that lingered on was the ghost pain, a heavy-duty Percoset hangover, and yes, that awful feeling of not being in control. It will take a few days to emerge out from under the penumbra of fear and start being cavalier again. Until then, a cookies & cream delight from Bev's Homemade Ice Cream in downtown Great Barrington will have to do.

Sam and Tessa exchange ice cream flavor ideas