February 2012
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At the Gas Station, Just Now
I was just approached at the gas station by a gregarious young guy hawking “spray wax.” He talked a mile a minute and aggressively sprayed my car and windows with the stuff, all while proclaiming how great it was and “hey, thank God it’s Friday, right?”
I’m in a bit of a stressful place right now. I’m moving this weekend, finances are rough, my brand new...
Watchsamreich:
Scott Gairdner honored me with a cameo in the always-hilarious “Clip Cup.”
Sam coming out of nowhere in this killed me, as did the plane crash from The Edge, as did a quick clip from a secret video we worked on once upon a time that no one has seen. Clip Cup has transcended—it’s customizing itself in real-time for the viewer.
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L.A. County supervisors respond to Frisbee fine... →
spiegelman:
latimes:
chriscantwell:
spiegelman:
Los Angeles bans frisbee and football throwing on the beach.
$1,000 fine.
Don’t worry, you can still apply for a permit.
This is good, because all my frisbees and footballs were getting soiled by dirty condoms and syringes anyway.
This turned out to be untrue: “Erroneous reports that L.A. County had enacted a $1,000 fine for playing...
Watchattentiondoozers:
heyelaine:
Dear tumblr community readers,
Based on the number of times I’ve watched this, and the amount of laughs I made whilst watching it, I think this may be the funniest thing since the invention of funny things.
Yours in Josh Ruben,
Elaine
joshruben:
Another amazing collaboration with Mitch Magee. Hana El-Assad did make-up, Andy Myers on art, edited by Kelly...
Hitchcock/Truffaut
A.H.: Well, the silent pictures were the purest form of cinema; the only thing they lacked was the sound of people talking and the noises. But this slight imperfection did not warrant the major changes that sound brought in. In other words, since all that was missing was simply natural sound, there was no need to go to the other extreme and completely abandon the technique of the pure motion picture, the way they did when sound came in.
F.T.: I agree. In the final era of silent movies, the great film-makers--in fact, almost the whole of production--had reached something near perfection. The introduction of sound, in a way, jeopardized that perfection. I mean that this was precisely the time when the high screen standards of so many brilliant directors showed up the woeful inadequacy of the others, and the lesser talents were gradually being eliminated from the field. In this sense one might say that mediocrity came back into its own with the advent of sound.
A.H.: I agree absolutely. In my opinion, that's true even today. In many of the films now being made, there is very little cinema: they are mostly what I call 'photographs of people talking.' When we tell a story in cinema, we should resort to dialogue only when it's impossible to do otherwise. I always try first to tell a story in the cinematic way, through a succession of shots and bits of film in between. It seems unfortunate that with the arrival of sound the motion picture, overnight, assumed a theatrical form. The mobility of the camera doesn't alter this fact. Even though the camera may move along the sidewalk, it's still theater. One results of this is the loss of cinematic style, and another is the loss of fantasy. In writing a screenplay, it is essential to separate clearly the dialogue from the visual elements and, whenever possible, to rely more on the visual than on the dialogue. Whichever way you choose to stage the action, your main concern is to hold the audience's full attention. Summing it up, one might say that the screen rectangle must be charged with emotion.
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Television Writing and Selling, circa 1957
I found this book at a used and rare bookstore in Toronto called Monkey’s Paw. I didn’t buy it then, but it stuck with me long enough that I tracked it down and bought it online. The first edition was published in 1954, the second in 1957.
Some of my favorite parts so far:
“The cliche devices of exposition… there are certain phrases which make the editor’s hackles...
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Los Angeles bans frisbee and football throwing on... →
spiegelman:
$1,000 fine.
Don’t worry, you can still apply for a permit.
This is good, because all my frisbees and footballs were getting soiled by dirty condoms and syringes anyway.
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