I broke my camera at a mate’s wedding recently and I’m still in mourning. I know there are more advanced cameras out there but I’d grown very fond of my trusty point-and-shoot.
It’s slim size and quick start up speed made it ideal for candid moments, like this one, which is one of the first photos I snapped with it. While the boys argue over who missed the shot, Emily does a victory twirl.
Em scores a point
New years eve, Buenos Aires, 2009
I remember, you know, I started my career on “Sesame Street.” The very beginning of “Sesame Street.” The first year we did a test, in which we asked a bunch of 4-year-old black kids whether they would like to have one of two dolls. One was black and one was white. And the black children chose the white doll. After the show had been on the air for a year, they chose the black doll. Because just because they had seen themselves on this magic box, they had been validated in some way… there’s something about just seeing yourself up there that validates your existence.
Naomi Foner, screenwriter and director, speaking at the Los Angeles Times Sundance Women Directors’ Roundtable. Full transcript can be found here, it’s well worth a read.
My film Poppy is screening at St Kilda Film Festival in May, which is ace, not least because we shot the film there. It’s the festival’s 30th year, so if you’re in Melbourne be sure to check it out.
Kim Bodnia- my new favourite on-screen human, thanks to The Bridge.
At the end of last month I went to the National Screenwriters Conference run by the Australian Writers’ Guild at the Mornington Peninsula. I bumbled around the industry heavyweights and talked shop with some lovely emerging writers. It was a hectic and inspiring three days.
At one of the panels, Andrew Knight spoke about there being too much emphasis on the blank page as the enemy. You see platitudes to this effect all the time:
“just write, you can’t edit a blank page”
“don’t write it right, just write it – and then make it right later”
“write drunk, edit sober”
Et cetera.
I can understand how writers get paralysed at the beginning of a project and that a simple mantra might help motivate them to get them started. But what Knight was getting at is the importance of the planning stage. The thinking stage. The functional-imagining stage. How this is often sidelined by a compulsion to get words on the page.
“There’s a tremendous desire to write prematurely. The blank page is so intimidating that they’ll [the writer] lay down the railway tracks before they know their destination.”
Then I came back to Sydney and realised that I’m not always immune to this quantity-trumps-quality mentality. So often when I’m starting a script, a friend will ask how’s it going and my first impulse is to lie. I feel like I should have more words on the page than I do, and I get paranoid that saying, “I’ve done some good thinking,” will be interpreted as “I watched some hilarious cat videos on YouTube.”
Inevitably there comes a time when you just have to floor the accelerator- but I want to make sure I’ve taken a look at the map before I get behind the wheel.
Back when I was studying scriptwriting at university in 2006, I wrote a seven-minute screenplay about a projectionist who wanted to lace an interlock (one film print through multiple projectors). I had spent most of university working as a casual projectionist and cinema duty manager and one of the perks of the job (besides FREE MOVIES) was occasionally taking rellies and friends upstairs so they could see what my working environment was like.
I don’t recall a single person saying anything widely different from “Wow, I didn’t think it would be so big,” or “I just thought it was a tiny room with lots of buttons.” In other words, most people imagined the projectionist sat in a kind of recording booth-sized control center. They were really surprised to see that it was actually a long hallway with projectors taller than them dotted four along each wall.
Photo: Dave Farrell
The second most common reaction I got was people musing about Tyler Durden in Fight Club. (No, I never spliced genitals into a kids movie, but I do know someone who cut a few frames of boobs from an R-rated film into a Disney flick on his last shift: a fuck-you to the managers who presumably had to deal with the backlash.) It’s a humorous scene in Fight Club, but their depiction of the projectionist’s job seemed so different from the shifts I spent on my feet running from one projector to another. To me, reel-to reel systems and their “cigarette burn” cues seemed all too easy.
Imagine a multiplex with ten projectors. You have to cart the films around to each projector, lace them up, check the sound and vision at slides, then at trailers and then feature. In between all this there are films you have to break down from the platter onto 5-7 reels to be boxed and sent back to the distributor, and vice versa, reels that you have to make up in readiness for the next week. Often these reels come from the distributor backwards (ie. the ‘tail’ of the film is on the outside, not the inside) so you have to manually wind them onto another reel before you can continue building the film onto the platter. When there’s only one projectionist to do all this you are often literally run off your feet. And that’s when everything goes well.
Anyone who’s worked as a projectionist will be familiar with the concept of “gremlins”. When things inexplicably go wrong; when it’s not human error but you can’t find a logical fault with the machinery, either. (At one cinema I worked at, on my first shift in the box the head projectionist explained to me in all seriousness: “Cinema five is cursed.”) The idea that things could just go wrong, no matter how adroit and conscientious a projectionist you were, is something that scared the crap outta me in that job.
I had anxiety dreams about film snaps and wrap-arounds – even the most experienced and relaxed projectionists had them. My good mate Dave (legendary projectionist, very resourceful and chilled out in a crisis) and I would swap projection nightmares during our half-hour overlap from day to night shift. I remember one of Dave’s nightmares was a huge wrap-around that he was trying to fix, except the customers from that session were spilling into the projection room, crowding around him like zombies, asking him what was taking so long? Why haven’t you fixed it?
Above: Every projectionist’s nightmare
In writing Poppy, I wanted to convey a sense of a day in the life of a multiplex projectionist. The anxiety, the pressure, the friendships made, the pride you feel in helping strangers experience a little joy for two hours. It’s technical, precise and beautiful. It’s intimate and yet you’re completely isolated.
I also wanted to capture what the multiplex projectionist job is like while it still exists. Or, existed. I actually don’t know how many cinemas still run 35mm projectors. When I watched Les Misérables over Christmas the vision cut out during ‘I Dreamed a Dream’ (projectors always pick the best time to shut down[1]). The sound soon followed and the cinema manager promptly came in and explained that the digital projectors “take a while to reboot”. We sat there for 25 minutes waiting for the machine to do its thing. I couldn’t help thinking that in my heyday, I could’ve fixed a film snap and have it back up and running in two minutes.
But now I’m getting really obnoxious nostalgic.
Photo: Dave Farrell
So… that script I wrote in 2006? The super talented Anna Jeffries came on board to direct and we shot it at the Aurora Cinema (formerly George Cinema) in St Kilda.
And it’s playing in Sydney this weekend! If you have an hour spare, Poppy will be screening at Flickerfest in the Best of Australian Shorts 1 category. It’s on at 6.45pm on Saturday and 4.30pm on Sunday. The quality of films to come out of the festival is always very high – so I doubt you’ll be disappointed. Plus, it’s right on Bondi Beach.
[1] The most famous shut-down I recall when I worked at a cinema was in the third installment of the Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. I wasn’t on shift for it but I heard about it from my colleagues, as well as a friend who was unlucky enough to be in that sold out, Boxing Day session. Frodo’s finally made it to Mordor, he’s holding the ring over the edge of the Mount Doom… the crowd’s on the edge of their seat… and boom – the film cuts to black. The problem turned out to be a fire in the garbage docks –when it’s serious the alarm overrides the projectors (and for good reason). But try explaining that to 800 people who can’t see or smell any smoke!
Even Frodo wanted his money back…
Poppy on twitter
Last Friday, Gawker published Lena Dunham’s proposal for her upcoming advice book, “Not That Kind of Girl.” After being contacted by Dunham’s legal counsel, Gawker removed the proposal but kept twelve selected quotes from it on their website, with snarky commentary following each one.
I won’t link to it but here’s an example:
“I’ve been in therapy since I was seven.”
Update: The quoted sentence is revelatory of Dunham’s character in that it provides evidence that she has been examining her own thoughts and desires analytically from an absurdly young age. It is also indicative of a nauseating and cloying precociousness that permeates the entire proposal.
What really gets my back up about this is how critical people are being over these unauthorised snippets of Dunham’s writing. This is not her book, people, these are quotes from a pitch document that were deliberately plucked to validate the scornful opinion of Dunham that the writer clearly already had.
While I’m a fan of Dunham’s work I can respect that a lot of people aren’t. That’s completely okay. Her films, TV series and essays aren’t to everyone’s tastes. But we shouldn’t be judging her unfinished work.
The book isn’t done yet. Get it? Let Dunham write it, re-write it, get notes back, re-write it, get more notes, re-write, re-write, have a break (down) for two weeks, have a fresh read, re-write, re-write, re-write and when it’s published- go to town. Rip it to shreds, whatever. Dissing quotes from a development document is like walking around a construction site and then telling people that the house is going to be a piece of shit and the builders are hacks. Ah, no. They haven’t finished building the bloody house yet. Critiquing a work-in-progress is pointless, unfair and extremely counterproductive for professional writers.
Screenwriters John August and Craig Mazin discussed this issue in one their excellent Scriptnotes podcasts. Here’s Mazin on why this behaviour is anti-writer:
“We have drafts for a reason. You cannot write a final draft first. Anyone who actually writes for a living, who understands what writing, or painting, or writing a song, or sculpting something knows what I mean when I say: it’s not done. We’re working — ING — on it. So if you put it on the internet like it’s done and review it like it’s done, you are hurting something that was not meant to be read or seen.”
The Gawker piece and the ensuing criticism of Dunham’s writing might seem harmless, but this kind of unauthorised publishing and critique can have negative implications for working writers. Random House have been stung, they won’t want any more leaks, so I’m guessing Dunham will have to agree not to show her manuscript to anyone- not her agent, not her most trusted mentors and friends. Essentially a normal stage of the development process gets put into lockdown.
Writing is not like turning on a tap. It’s fucking hard work and it doesn’t come out perfectly the first time. A pitch document is not a final product, and taking quotes out of context in order to destroy a writer is just plain low.
I could easily flip through a book and find a sentence that sounds lame out of context.
“The thing about dead people is that they look really dead.”
“The first time someone hit me up for a cigarette I was twenty years old and had been smoking for all of two days.”
Individually, are these sentences insightful pieces of writing? Are they painting a concept in a way that you’ve never thought of before? Are they describing feelings that you’ve never been able to articulate? Probably not. The extracts are from David Sedaris’s ‘When You Are Engulfed in Flames.” Reading Sedaris in the normal way (ie. a finished chapter that he’s chosen to publish) makes me belly-laugh; reading these isolated quotes doesn’t. But they’re not intended to be read in isolation.
Back to the Gawker piece for a second. The writer also decided to calculate a per-page price for what Dunham’s proposal was worth as if to say: this is what Dunham is being paid $56,000 a page for.
Yeah, no.
It wasn’t just the proposal that got Dunham got a 3.7 million dollar book deal. She got it off the strength of her past work, her fan base and because she has a unique and powerful voice.
Do you think fans of Girls (the series she created, wrote, starred in and directed) have read the quotes and thought, “This writing is terrible, I’m so not going to buy her book”? No effing way. They’re going to buy the book that Lena Dunham wrote because Lena Fucking Dunham wrote it.
There’s a famous Hemingway quote about re-writing that I think is pertinent here. It’s from an interview he gave in 1956:
Interviewer: How much rewriting do you do?
Hemingway: It depends. I rewrote the ending of Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, 39 times before I was satisfied.
Interviewer: Was there some technical problem there? What was it that had stumped you?
Hemingway: Getting the words right.
Let Dunham get her words right. (Don’t judge a book by it’s leaked contents.)
Voluntarily humiliating myself in public, this Thursday night!
http://sydney.concreteplayground.com.au/event/87460/late-night-library.htm
Writing for a new show at the moment and it doesn’t leave much time to blog. (Not complaining, that’s just the sitch.) I’d like to share some thoughts on seeing radiohead (twice) this week in Sydney, but this photo will have to suffice… for now.
Heartbreak High rates as one of my all-time favourite TV shows. You know a program means something to you when listening to the opening titles music gives you shivers!
I wrote a piece for AACTA’s Why I Adore blog devoted to the students and teachers of Hartley High/Hartley Heights. Check it out, here. (Yes, Drazic gets a mention.)
