Let's Get Back to Work

Today I marched in front of SAG headquarters to support the Let's Get Back to Work rally. Basically, it was a rally of crew people who would prefer that SAG not strike. Or at least, that the SAG leadership maybe pick up the pace a tad and resolve some of the inner squabbling.

I'm really not that political, but reading about SAG's internecine fighting is a little shocking. Sometimes, really shocking (update: sometimes really, really shocking). When your union leadership is perennially incapable of holding meetings without Blagojevichian obscenity-laced tirades, maybe it's time to reassess.

Everyone wants the actors to get a fair deal. But there must be a better way for SAG to achieve its goals.

6 Things I learned at the SAG Rally:

*When you hold a rally, crazy people will show up *A person's craziness is directly correlative to their loudness *If you're at a rally, it's okay for people to walk up and start screaming at you *It's best not to reason with those people *Twenty out of twenty loud crazy people favor a SAG strike *The pro-SAG strikers honestly don't look like they do very much acting, anyway

Los Angeles Taco Trucks

Once upon a time, Los Angeles Taco Trucks ^[*] were simply "Roach Coaches" that unironically played La Cucaracha ("The Cockroach") when pulling up to the sidewalk. Then at some point, maybe 2005, Taco Trucks entered the ambit of the hipster palette.  This was the year great taco blogs emerged like LATaco.com and The Great Taco Hunt. Avid foodies began meticulously ranking and debated the merits of neighborhood Taco Trucks. Perhaps it was because hipster turf had encroached on Latin-American turf (i.e., Silverlake, Echo Park, and Downtown).  Or perhaps it was because Taco Trucks are about the only way to get fresh eats for under $2.  Or perhaps it was simply because the best taco trucks are so mind-bendingly amazing.  Regardless, Prometheus-style, a vanguard of bloggers, hipsters, and assorted trendsvestites have spread the good news to the rest of us.

Victory of the Taco Truck

The East Los Angeles Taco Trucks fought years of legislative battles. Considered a nuisance by non-mobile businesses who don't want their sidewalks blocked, Taco Trucks were required to move every hour or risk up to a $1,000 fine and/or six months in prison. Because of these laws, part of the fun of getting a great taco used to be finding the darn truck. Analogous to how the best clubs often have no sign out front. When you found a good truck, you really felt like you were in the know.

For years, various lobbies and city officials repeatedly tried to ban Taco Trucks altogether, as they are considered anti-competitive to sit-down restaurants that must pay rent, waitstaff, insurance, city taxes, etc. It wasn't until late 2008 that the bulk of these measures were voted down, allowing Taco Trucks to stay in one spot all night and generally exist with some semblance of brick-and-mortar detente.

Enter Kogi BBQ

A few weeks ago I tried Kogi BBQ, the new Korean Barbecue fusion Taco Truck. They serve a truly mind-blowing spicy barbecue chicken taco garnished with cilantro-green onion-lime relish and crushed sesame seeds. The Kimchi Quesadilla is an acquired taste; saltier than anchovies, it packs a mean punch. Their five dollar burritos are also a flavor explosion, spicy meats mixed with scrambled eggs, chopped onions and cilantro, romain and cabbage tossed in Korean chili-soy vinaigrette.

Slick Marketing

The brainchild of a Filipino restaurateur, Kogi follows the traditional model of a Taco Truck by traveling around town throughout the night. However, Kogi employs a top executive chef, is backed by a slick PR company, and regularly posts locations and updates to Twitter. There is something almost ouroborosian about a Taco Truck for hipsters, by hipsters. Kogi's already been covered by KCRW, K-CAL 9, and LA Weekly. They even have a fan page on Facebook. Kogi has only been around since November and the cat is already out of the bag.

If you want to try Kogi, be prepared to wait in line. I tried to go last Friday in the rain, in Silverlake. Jay and I planned it to the minute, arriving first in line at 5pm. The Kogi truck arrived an hour late, two blocks south of its announced location. When the hour-long line turned and sprinted south toward the arriving Taco Truck, I found my first place spot became the last place spot. People who arrived last got served first. Total time for Jay and I to get our Kogi tacos: two hours.

Los Angelinos have a near-Soviet level capacity for waiting in lines. But I have to admit, going to Kogi is like buying a taco at the DMV. And because the truck consistently shows up an hour late, there's really no way to outsmart the lines. Kogi reminds me of when I thought I discovered Cold Play, and eight months later they were all over Leno and Letterman. Try Kogi if you want to taste one of the most original tacos you'll ever eat in your life. But if you want fast service, no lines, and a truck that's always there when you need it, have a Suadero taco at Taco Zone on Alvarado.

*[Back to post] Yes, I am choosing to capitalize Taco Truck throughout this post.

Great Books I Read in 2008

In 2008 I made yet another attempt to read 52 books in one year.  Again, I have fallen short, this time with 44.  However, this beats last year's attempt. In my defense, I read some doozies this year.  "Das Capital" isn't exactly a page turner, and you have to turn 1,300 of them.  Regardless, here are some books I read in 2008 that I think are worth a mention.

For 2009, I am particularly looking forward to fewer books about holocausts.  And more books under 1,000 pages.

The Communist Manifesto - Marx & Engels

Last year I read Harpo Marx and Groucho Marx.  This year, I switched to Karl.

"Working men of the world unite!"  Terrifying, and rigorously rhetorically effective.  Tremendous logical fallacies throughout.  Probably helps that the working men of Russia and Asia didn't have high school educations.

Notes From Underground - Dostoyevsky

Very ahead of its time!  The first literary anti-hero I can think of...  A century before Holden Caufield!

Riveting arguments on Free Will.  Very, very first person.  Forerunner of existential thought.  Memorable quotations and really ground-breaking in every way.

For Dostoyevsky, this is a quick read.  And well worth it.

Five Essays on Philosophy - Mao Tse-tung

A historically fascinating albeit nearly philosophically useless collection of essays.  Probably Mao's attempt to equal Lenin and Stalin in adding to the communist cannon.

"Where do correct ideas come from" was written three years before the Great Famine that killed 60 million Chinese through Mao's insipid agricultural policies.  Mao expounds on his philosophy of "Let 100 flowers bloom, let 100 points of view collide," while outlining how dissidents must be eliminated by the state.  Very eerie.

Almost all the logic of this book is confident but absurd, much like Marx.  The only interest I found is the symmetry between Yin/Yang Chinese philosophy and dialectical materialism, not that Mao was very explicit in this analogy.  A disturbing man. I Wake Up Screening - John Anderson and Laura Kim

Really a terrific source of information on the independent film market as told by the community of buyers, filmmakers, producer's reps, publicists, and press.

The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

WONDERFUL.  Swashbuckling, romance, betrayal, vengeance, smuggling, pirating, dueling - just great.  And with serious themes of God and Free Will.  A fantastic adventure story with a great main character trapped in impossible situations.  Tore through this book in just over 24 hours.  Brilliant dramatic situations - every chapter is a self-contained adventure, forcing you to turn every page.

Musicophilia - Oliver Sacks

Interesting info and anecdotes about music and the brain; basically, music is really good for you.  This is the psychiatrist who wrote "Awakenings" and "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat."

Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious - Sigmund Freud

The first 200 pages are like Aristotle's Poetics - dryly defining categories of wit.  Then, at page 200, it gets interesting.  Freud asserts that jokes occur in the unconscious from conscious stimuli just like dreams.  And therefore wit - in its puns and absurdity - speaks the language of dreams.  And is therefore a direct window into the unconscious.  Pretty impressive book.

The Painted Bird - Jerzy Kosinski

Devastating portrayal of the decay of human decency in WWII.  Gut-wrenching display of Polish peasant life in all its cruelty, bigotry, and superstition.  Makes it easy to understand how the holocaust happened.  Really gripping writing.  All that said, the story is more than a little fantastical, and of course is not the true autobiography Kosinski claimed it to be.  Still, eminently readable; a good (albeit disturbing and nihilistic) book.

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer

Virtuosic brilliance.  The narrative cleverness is absolutely breath-taking.  Safran Foer infuses every sentence with astonishing wit and sensitivity; this level of writing requires a high IQ indeed.  Safran Foer is easily one of my favorite novelists.

The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

Monte Cristo I much preferred, but this is still a great treat.  Making it all about the female villain was interesting and more cerebral, but prompted no big sword and gun battles at the finale.  Also, a surprising amount of lead characters kick the bucket.

I never actually saw the words "all for one and one for all" so that was confusing.  Fwiw, I was not reading a perfect translation.

Iron Jack - Johnny Rosenthal

This is a screenplay that sold this year for $1.25 against $2 million.  I mention it only because of all the million dollar scripts that have sold in recent years, this one really made me laugh.  The first act is truly inspired - as good as anything I've read.

Aspects of the Masculine - Carl Jung

Some neat, albeit heavy ideas.  For instance, the belief that women become more masculine as they age, while men become more feminine.  The trouble with this sort of dense reading is that six months later, I can only remember a few sentences about the book.

Walden - Thoreau

Some great moments of inspired prose.  Some fireworks close to the end.  A revolutionary and inspiring piece of work.  Like Moby Dick, many parts are pure naturalism.  But many passages are transcendent (Well, I guess, "transcendental"), even when he's simply describing the formation of bubbles in ice.

Das Capital - Karl Marx

Interesting from a historical perspective.  The vivid descriptions of the mistreatment of factory workers in the industrial revolution make it easier to understand why communism arose, and why it took the form that it did.

I was particularly intrigued by his idea of "fetishization of the commodity."  Only a commodity's function is relevant.  Helps explain why communists aren't much for aesthetics.

Nevertheless, all of Marx's economic assertions here are just wrong, wrong, wrong.  From his first premises (e.g., equating a commodity's value to the labor required to produce it), to the irrational math he derives from those first premises (I'm talking Wittgensteinian levels of post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacies).

His narrational voice is surprisingly whiny for an economic treatise, often resorting to ad hominem, and taking it at face value that anyone in power must be resented.  From page one, this book is a shell game of faulty reasoning.  It's too bad hundreds of millions of people went in for this stuff. The Last Tycoon - F. Scott Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald is one of my all time favorite authors.  In his defense, he died before he could finish The Last Tycoon.  If I knew people were going to run around publishing my unfinished drafts, I would probably die, too.

Shopgirl - Steve Martin

Clever.  Possibly the only piece of Steve Martin's entire oeuvre that I did not rabidly love.

Born Standing Up - Steve Martin

Read in one sitting.  Very fun and interesting.  It takes ten years to make an overnight success.

Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card

This has been recommended to me for years.  Zillions of people on Facebook list Ender's Game among their favorites.

Money - Martin Amis

Pretty much a masterpiece.  If I ever get OCD enough to compile a 100 best list for books, I will put this on it.

The anti-hero and subject matter are in the gutter, as with most Amis!  But Martin Amis's command of language is nothing short of astonishing.

The Kid Stays in the Picture - Robert Evans

Truly amazing life.  A very fun read.

Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut

Lots of neat ideas in a constantly evolving story.  Ultimately, for me the message of the book was a one-sided argument that religion is a joke and war is stupid, without really discussing alternatives, or real-world ramifications.  I think we all understand that war is bad; the interesting question is what do we do about it?

Nevertheless, an entertaining read.

The World's Worst Book - Justin Heimberg

My roommate Justin has written a slew of coffee-table comedy books that you can find in the humor section of Borders or Barnes and Noble.  They're all worth a read, starting with the "Would You Rather..." series.  Very clever stuff.

Save the Cat Goes to the Movies - Blake Snyder

Snyder has a lot of slap-yourself-on-the-forehead good ideas.  He's the kind of writer I would give anything to sit down and have a cup of coffee with.  But I'm going to come right out and say I have a beef with some of his readers.

The sort of people I shake hands with in creative meetings who've never read a story structure book in their lives - until they read Save The Cat - and now they think they're structure mavens.  It's the exact same species of disdain I have for adults who haven't finished a book since high school, and then start gushing to me about Harry Potter.  I think it's great that you read a book, but it doesn't make you Ravelstein.

Like any good theorist worth his salt, Snyder is standing on the shoulders of giants.  Joseph Campbell, Christopher Vogler, Syd Field, and Georges Polti leap to mind.  Also Carl Jung, Aristotle, Robert McKee, Terry Rossio & Ted Elliot, Michael Hauge, Lajos Egri, and Linda Seger.  Snyder is not the first story structure theorist to discuss these ideas and he won't be the last.

This is why I get annoyed when entertainment industry friends try to talk about "Blake Snyder's +/- midpoint," when Syd Field used that exact terminology thirty years ago.  It's like loving Chris Tucker and having no idea who Eddie Murphy is.  Note, my ire here is not directed at Blake Snyder - who has great new ideas - it's directed at many of his fans - who often don't.

I suppose the good news is that someone has finally written a story structure book that everyone will read.  And for that feat, Blake Snyder probably deserves his zillions of dollars!

Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand

The first 100 pages I absolutely loved - the battle between the competent people and the incompetent.  The idea of telling all the incompetent people to go shove it deeply appealed to me.  Like, cathartically so.  My relationship with this book in week one was borderline anaclitic.

The next 1,000 pages required a bit of effort (e.g., the palaverous 100 page John Galt speech).  On the whole, my libertarian side is deeply sympathetic to Ayn Rand's message.  But my understanding is that Fountainhead is the better piece of fiction.  It's on the list for 2009.

The Princess Bride - William Goldman  (Also Buttercup's Baby)

Really a delightful book.  There should be more books like this.  This is definitely one of my favorite books of the year.

Foundation - Isaac Asimov

Clever solutions to unsolvable situations; the only weak point for me is the story takes place over 300 years.  So everyone dies off every fifty pages and you have to learn all new characters.

Also, Asimov writes, "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent" about seven times.  I have never understood this quote.  Wouldn't violence be the first refuge of the incompetent?

Final Edits

We trimmed 2:14 of runtime from Act One, bringing our total movie down below 90 minutes.  And we spent a good deal of time remixing and syncing ADR with the delightful Corey Eccles. Complete with fresh titles, I think we've finally got the movie we can send to festivals.  Now it's time to take a well-earned break from The Last Hurrah.

Richie recording some new crowd walla-walla with Corey (above).

Many fun hours in the dub stage, but I think we're finally wrapped.

Industry Screening

Monday we had our first private screening of The Last Hurrah.  It was a big success! We showed the film in a screening room at Raleigh Studios to a group of industry friends.  I'm thrilled to report that 29 out of our 30 comment cards were definitively positive.

Reviewing the cards, we are going to go back in to remix and sync ADR, polish up our front titles, and trim some run time from Act One.  Our whole goal now is to make the first ten minutes of the film as accessible as possible to a festival screener.  It's this single-take concept that will either make people love our movie, or completely not understand it!

It was very gratifying to watch the movie in a live theater, and hear audience response.  And such a relief to hear laughter - in the places where we want to hear laughter!

Now it's back to work on completing the final version of the movie and getting it out to festivals.

Sound Mix - Third Time's the Charm

Okay, I've said it before, but this time I think the sound is finally, basically, complete. After bouncing around through several mixers, we are finally lucky enough to be working with the wonderful Corey Eccles on a state of the art dub stage.  She is bringing our sound up to a level of quality I didn't think was possible for our movie.

Recording a one take movie, mostly outdoors, we were saddled with all sorts of honking horns, airplane engines, police sirens, lav mic pops and static, boom mic distortion, and more than a few flubbed actor lines.  After going through several sound mixers, I thought we were simply going to have to live with these issues.  But Corey has been able to rapidly erase many if not most of these problems.  I am, frankly, astonished at the speed and quality of her work.

Perhaps sound is like a tightly sealed pickle jar, where several people need to have a go at it before the lid finally pops open.

I'll keep my fingers crossed until I get to spot the final output this week.  But I think we may finally have a completed movie on our hands.

And now it's a question of finding a festival for our premiere.

Color Timing

We have now entered one of the final steps of our movie, Color Timing (a.k.a. Color Grading, Color Correction).  For this phase, Chuck must alter and enhance the color of every frame of the movie, adjusting hue, saturation, and brightness to create the best possible visual quality for every scene. Here is Chuck hard at work on reel four...

Color Timing a One Take Movie

Color is extremely important to our movie, because we have no cuts.  The way we differentiate mood between scenes is largely by color and sound design.  We assign different color palettes for each scene location, particularly in the nighttime shots where we have better control of the lighting design.

The Importance of Color Timing

Prior to color timing, movies don't look like movies.  To give a sense of the importance of color timing, below is a deleted scene from The Italian Job.  Look how flat and overexposed the non-color timed footage is:

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZYt0YmaNL4]

Pretty amazing, right?  Now keep in mind The Italian Job had a $60 million budget, closing off downtown Los Angeles to shoot these scenes.  Nevertheless, non-color timed footage looks like it was shot at a backyard barbecue.

Here's another neat video I found that demonstrates the before/after effect of color timing:

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EiNTDnobBM]

Moving Closer

The Last Hurrah was shot in late afternoon, magic hour, and night.  So much of our original footage is grainy, low-contrast, and flat.  It is exhilarating to watch our footage come to life and blossom with color as we complete Color Timing.

Sound Mix

Mitch Lindskoog and I put in another six hours yesterday perfecting the sound mix.  We still have work remaining on the sound edit.  But we are nearing completion.  It is extremely satisfying to hear the movie coming into focus.

(Mitch in his native environment - with The Last Hurrah playing in the background)

We knew we would encounter challenges shooting in one take.  What we didn't anticipate is that the sound edit is the most challenging hurdle of all.  Our beleaguered sound team has to make sense of 16 lavalier and boom radio channels often distorted by static, production sounds, or even Spanish radio frequencies.

To further complicate matters, our sound designer's band is away on another 6 week European tour.  This is his third tour in 2008, and this has effected our desired schedule.

All this being said, I do believe sound is very close to completion.  The remaining focus will be on Jay to complete visual effects and titles, and Chuck to do color correction.  I cannot wait to have this movie in the can, and begin to submit it to festivals in earnest.

Web Site

I created the web images this week, flexing my wimpy Photoshop muscles. I also rewrote all the actor and crew bios, and prepared all the material for the web site. Faith, our web developer, is really together. I showed her my design for the web site and it sounds like she can make it happen. I love having a strong team.

Here is Faith's first mock-up of the web layout. I love simple, clean design.

Set Photography

This is Carolyn, our set photographer. It so happens, she's dating the editor, Jay. So we seem to have an unusually high number of editor photos.

I compiled all the set photography this weekend. This means sorting through roughly 800 photos from four different photographers, adding captions and credits of the best 100 for the distributor package, and then choosing 20 images for the web site. I wish I had an odometer to show me how many hours I've spent on The Last Hurrah.

On second thought, I really don't.

Musician Agreements

Getting permission to use a single song in the movie may require negotiating and signing six different contracts.  The Masters contract, the Synchronization rights, the composer's contract, the label's contract, the publisher's contract, and the performer's contract. I generated 120 musician contracts in December, and I have signatures for 70% so far. People have asked me if it's hard to direct a movie.  I tell them directing is nothing compared to producing.  Writing and directing comprise about 2% of the time I have spent on The Last Hurrah.  Everything else I do is producing.

As far as wrangling musicians to sign their agreements, I'm very glad to have Adam Boardman to help me chase down a few folks.

I'm thrilled to be using Sugarman 3 in the soundtrack. I've been such a big fan of them for so many years, and it is wild to talk to Neal Sugarman on the phone and get his thumbs up for the movie!

Malibu

I got many, many things off the to-do list this week. Measurable progress. Minor physical and emotional exhaustion. Chuck says I'm pushing too hard and need to give myself some distance. So I forced myself to take the morning off. I drove to Malibu, which is a different world from Silverlake. I sat in the sand and watched pelicans and dolphins. I read Notes from Underground and just stared at the Pacific. Finishing this movie, there are so many emotional highs and lows that each week feels like a month. I can dig it, but it is nice to take a day off.

ADR

Had a really fun ADR session today with Randy Wayne. Randy is this guy:

Randy plays "Dogbowl," a hyper character with ADD who is in constant motion. To add depth to the sound design, Jeff and I recorded a lot of extra dialog for Randy that we can pepper throughout the movie. So any time there is a break in conversation, Dogbowl can be heard screaming something in the background.

Practical ADR

Remember that we filmed The Last Hurrah all the way through from start to finish, each day of our shoot. This means that if an actor flubbed a line 34 minutes in, we didn't yell cut and start over at the beginning. We just kept rolling. This makes ADR especially important for this movie!

Randy's was a fun ADR session because it involved a lot of improv. But several of the actors needed more meticulous ADR because their lav mics on set had too many pops and cracks. In these situations, the actor stands in a sound booth watching film footage on a monitor, and gets recorded saying the same lines over and over until the ADR recordist gets a usable take. Actors must match the pitch, rhythm, and characterization of lines they spoke six months ago. It's hard work!

Put on some head phones, lock yourself in a closet, and read each sentence of this blog post, out loud, fifteen times in a row. Now do that for four hours. And you will begin to get a sense of how an ADR session works.

ADR for the Director

My background is in sketch comedy. Sketch comedians are a neurotic breed who will eagerly invest hours perfecting the rhythm, nuance, and timing of three minute comedy sketches that will probably only be performed on stage once.

With our extremely limited rehearsal time for The Last Hurrah, there was barely enough time to memorize lines, let alone perfect comedic timing. Going into post production, there were about forty lines in the movie whose pace and comedic delivery I was not satisfied with. ADR is giving Jeff and me a second chance to let the actors perfect their comedic performances.

The Weird Part About ADR

Maybe it's because our actors are hilarious, or because there's a lack of oxygen in the recording studio, or because you get punchy after hours in a windowless room...but ADR is hysterical after a while. Every one of our actors had me cracking up - recording themselves doing funny voices and saying ridiculous things.  I'm surprised to discover that ADR is one of the most fun parts of the process, with the added bonus that I get to spend time with our actors again.

Foley

We spent about six hours recording foley today. I love working with the sound team. There is nothing like five guys on four computers in one room working toward one goal. Foley is ridiculously fun. To give a taste, we need to Foley the sound of a very inebriated character peeing in the shower.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but people are used to the sound of urination in a toilet...which loudly resonates in a bowl full of water. By contrast, micturition on flat shower tile sounds high-pitched and wimpy - it doesn't sound believable. Engineering this sound may require a creative mix of noises that have nothing to do with either showers or urination.

I have to stress that the shower-pee sound is really important to the character. The audience must understand that this gentleman is so shnookered, so unbelievably plastered, that he walked past a perfectly good toilet to pee in the shower instead. Before today, I never fully appreciated how many potential laughs in a movie are the work of the sound designer.

Sound Design

Every sound in a movie is built by a sound designer. Often, the only sound being recorded on set is the actor's voices. And even then, the actors are often re-recorded in a carefully controlled studio during post-production. The Last Hurrah was filmed at a house party with as many as 50 dancing, partying extras. But the party was completely silent except for the two or three actors on camera. The extras who appear to be conversing in the background are lip-synching. And the dancers moving to the music are miming.

Movie Magic

Watch closely the next time you see a dance club in a movie or TV show. The dancers in the background probably aren't dancing to the beat. In fact, the dancers may all be moving to completely separate beats.

Notice how lead actors are able to speak in conversational voices during a crowded night club scene. Why aren't they screaming into each other's ears?

Crowd noise and music are created in post production. The editor has no way to cut together a sequence if there is real music recorded in the background. Every dog bark, every cricket chirp - it's all carefully recorded and controlled by the sound designer.

Sound Designer's Job

Our Sound Designer Jeff loves to think big picture. In one sense, Jeff's job is very similar to Chuck's (Cinematographer) and Shane's (Production Designer). To make a one take movie feel as if it's divided into separate scenes. To give each area of the party its own distinct mood by assigning noises and environments to different areas of our blocking charts.

Another part of Jeff's job is to make the audience listen very carefully to our dialog. Our movie does not have big sex scenes, car chases, or explosions. We need a quiet and delicate sound design that will pull the audience into the party and make them listen to all the voices around them.

This is a finesse job. The crinkle of red beer cups. The clink of beer bottles. The sound of ice dropping into a glass. These delicate noises tune the audience's ears to listen, as opposed to deafening everyone with a loud score and violent explosions.

The Era of Sound Design

Thanks to incredible movies like "No Country For Old Men," Sound Designers are finally getting the attention they deserve. Someone told me (I tried googling and can't verify this statistic) that two-thirds of the Academy Award winners for Best Picture also win for best Sound Editing or Sound Mixing. I can certainly believe it.

A statistic I can verify is that since 1950, two-thirds of the Best Picture winners also win one of the two Best Screenplay awards. This makes sense to me, too...

Composer

The wonderfully talented Dominic Mazzoni has signed on to be our composer for The Last Hurrah. And I am absolutely thrilled. Jay (editor) and I went to college with Dominic and have always known him as a great jazz composer. After school Dominic got a second degree, worked at JPL as a geologist, created the Audacity sound editing software, and now works for Google.

Scoring The Last Hurrah

I always envisioned The Last Hurrah to be a sort of Woody Allen movie for Generation Y. Like if Woody Allen were 25 and could somehow stand to live in Los Angeles. This is what I was aiming for anyway.

I love jazz. When I lived in Manhattan, I kept my food budget down to an insane twenty dollars a week (you don't believe me but this is true) so I could spend every free dollar I had going to The Vanguard, Birdland, The Blue Note, Iridium, Fez, St. Nicks, and of course, Smalls.

Jay and I scored a lot of Grant Green into The Last Hurrah's temp mix to simulate the lighthearted feel of a Woody Allen movie. I had a lot of discussion with the producers about whether jazz would be thematically appropriate for a movie about 20-something hipsters. In the end, I found that when we scored the movie with rock-and-roll it felt more like American Pie than Annie Hall. Jazz and comedy just go together like tomatoes and basil.

Dominic's Role

I didn't even attempt to negotiate with Blue Note for use of their musicians. Especially when we have a wunderkind like Dominic Mazzoni in our corner. He is amazing to work with.

To give a taste, Dominic composed the opening credit music as a jazz trio. And then brought back the same theme as a piano solo for the final scene in the movie. I love the bookends!

Scheduling

To give a sense of the complexity of post-production, here is my to-do list for this weekend... Jon's Action List Saturday, January 5 - Sunday January 6

 
• *Randy thumbs up for ADR
• *Ravi thumbs up for ADR
• *Jeff's thumbs up on Susan/Lex for ADR
• *Jeff's thumbs up for additional Indira sound files
• *Jay to deliver Jeff sound files for Dogbowl end credits
• *Jay to deliver Jeff sound files for pre-credits and credits
• *Jay to deliver Reel 1 footage to Chuck for Color Correction
• *Jay to temp new Afghanistan music
• *Jay complete Lex and Ritalin After Effects
• *Adam Music update
• *Chuck/Jon/Jeff discuss Color Correction
• *Chuck/Jon exchange bank cards
• *Chuck research/complete Brand Image
• *Chuck sign Peter's release
• *Chuck $62 check to TLH, LLC
• *Peter $207 check to TLH, LLC
• *Jon $888 check to TLH, LLC
• *Jon write Composer contract when Dom gives song titles
• *Jon complete Richie's extra list
• *Jon raise more money
• *Foley Prop Gathering for Tuesday
• *Lunch and Sound meeting tomorrow 12pm
• *Richie Rotoscoping Update
• *Richie/Lisa to sign New Epic Transfer
• *Richie Festival Calendar
• *Richie writes Deal Memos for Lisa (get signed) and Jay and Jeff
• *Richie Tribeca Cost?
• *Dominic to deliver music files, new drum beat, song titles
• *Investors to sign and fax LLC Operating Agreement, Subscription, and Promissory Note

Great Books I Read in 2007

Taking a big cue from the over-achieving Aaron Swarz, I decided to post my favorite books from 2007. It would be nice to read 52 books a year, but I fell short with 37, possibly due to directing and producing a movie. What follows is an unranked list of books I loved. I hope this list doesn't out me as a philistine; while I read some literature in 2007 (Flaubert, Dante, Henry Miller, Gabriel Garcia Marquez*, Jorge Amado) these literati did not ring my bells enough to make the all important Stokes' 2007 list.

The Hero With 1,000 Faces - Joseph Campbell

Reread. Myth as social-psychoanalysis. The advent of the monomyth. And the belief that denial of the ego and realization of the whole is the central enlightenment of all religions. A must read.

The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler

GREAT!!! The first half is sensational; halfway through the story seems to resolve and loses some momentum...plus the cleverness of the dialog and description seems to fall off a tad. Still, the opening half is absolutely pitch perfect and carries the whole story; an amazing novel.

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim - David Sedaris

Wonderful; possibly his best - the story about SinterKlausen is laugh out loud funny.

Blink of an Eye - Walter Murch

The legendary editor. Very readable book on film theory. A central idea is that for an audience, editing is blinking. Understanding when humans tend to blink helps inform what will feel natural in timing your edits.

One of the most under appreciated areas of "movie magic" is good editing.  The best editing is often invisible.  Poor editing reminds you that you are watching film, and pulls you out of the story.

From Reel to Deal - Dov S-S Simens

Wow, what a great book, and written from an incredibly likable voice. Really a tremendous source of great information about independent film.

The Areas of My Expertise - John Hodgeman

Every few pages I stop and think, "how did he think of that?"  I'm glad for this book's success.

Antigone - Sophocles

Some great, great, Shakespeare-level speeches; particularly from Antigone and Haimon. Not sure it would translate well to modern theater without major revision - but it's a pleasure to read.  Here's a taste: "Leave me alone with my hopeless scheme; I'm ready to suffer for it and to die.  Let me.  No suffering could be so terrible as to die for nothing."  Boo-yah!

Trouble is my Business / Finger Man / Goldfish / Red Wind - Raymond Chandler

Great, Great, Great, Great.

The Maltese Falcon - Dashiell Hammett

The last scene is remarkably good, particularly when he finally has it out with the treacherous femme-fatale. This is enjoyable writing, the height of craft.

Medieval Europe; A Short History - C. Warren Hollister

Basically making the point that the middle ages weren't the "dark ages" but a continual evolution from the ancient to the modern, giving rise to legal, constitutional, nationalistic, scientific, architectural, and technological innovations.

No Country For Old Men - Cormac McCarthy

The first 2/3rds are brilliant; witty characters with wonderfully colloquial dialog.  The last 3rd of the book is the long, moralistic ramblings of an old man.

I found the tone of the movie to be remarkably faithful to the book. However, because the movie obeyed classic three act structure, and kept the denouement short and sweet, the film ending felt more satisfying than the novel.

Farewell, My Lovely - Raymond Chandler

Just Great, Great, Great. It's just incredible writing, regardless of genre. As poetically beautiful as Proust or Shakespeare.

World War Z - Max Brooks

Really wonderful. It captured my imagination - how to stave off a Zombie attack. It's so realistic and stunningly well-researched.  I agree with the author's politics. Perhaps best of all, it successfully tells a compelling story while abandoning classic structure. Really great literature.

Harpo Speaks! - Harpo Marx

Amazing autobiography. A reminder of how to live and how to be and an amazing snapshot of American history. Probably the most important book I read all year.

Screenplays I liked

*Bim-Bam-Baby Screenplay by Jeremy Catalino

A strong lead character with funny lines.

*The Bucketlist Screenplay by Justin Zackham

A powerful story about death and the meaning of life.

*Flamers - Alexander Payne & Jim Taylor - aka "I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry"

This script's concept and structure are great. There are almost no jokes on the page, but it doesn't seem to matter. The characters and situations completely drive the story, creating all the textbook required tension. They are forced down this path - every step seems inexorable. The pages turn themselves on the strength of the story and its conflicts.

Good Will Hunting - Matt Damon and Ben Affleck

Read the original screenplay; it's very good. There are many extra scenes not in the movie and probably not necessary; however every scene is a great scene - with a clever beginning, middle, and end. Some great dramatic writing.

It continues to be a great mystery in Hollywood how these guys wrote one script, won the Academy Award for best screenplay, and then never wrote again. How is this even possible? I've heard rumors around town about the writing credits on this movie... What is the explanation?

*Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "100 Years of Solitude" or "Love in the Time of Cholera" are among my absolute favorites. But this year I read "Autumn of the Patriarch." It was intriguing because each sentence lasts forty pages and switches POV multiple times. But it may be an example of experimentation sacrificing story rather than supporting it.

Jay Trautman

Jay Trautman has been one of my strongest mentors throughout The Last Hurrah.  Ostensibly, Jay is our editor.  But he's also attended every single production meeting, and is responsible for hiring our excellent sound department on set.  On top of that, he brought on Jeff Byron for post production.

Jay doesn't treat The Last Hurrah like a job.  He treats it like a creative project - like being in a band.  I find myself seeking his feedback on everything from story notes to budget questions.  When I couldn't figure out a two-shot with Steve and Will on set, it was Jay who pulled out Masculin-Feminin to convey how two shots are sometimes superfluous.

To convey the scope of Jay's creative influence on the movie, Jay is largely responsible for turning me on to the local Silverlake punk bands who will be populating our soundtrack.

(Adam Harr, Jay Trautman, and Yours Truly)

You might wonder, how much work does an editor do on a one-take movie?  A tremendous amount.  We have some extremely tricky special effects sequences that are taking months to design.  We also have so many people to coordinate with for color, picture, and sound editing.  And we have not yet worked on cutting a trailer and making of.  It's a decent amount of work.

Music

Set at a house party, The Last Hurrah has wall-to-wall music. Forty-one separate music cues! The Mae Shi

My friend and editor, Jay Trautman, has turned me onto a lot of local Silver Lake and Los Feliz punk bands. Underground groups that play The Smell or Spaceland. There are some real gems.

Jay - our one-take editor - also "edited" this one-take music video for The Mae Shi. They are a local pop-punk band.  It sounds like we may get to use their music in our movie!

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUKAcKKQns4&rel=1]

Getting Great Musicians

I am so thrilled to be working with musicians I have admired for years. You spend years playing their CDs in your car on the way to work, and never dream you'll one day be calling them on the phone telling them about your movie. I am completely stoked to be including music from amazing musicians like Adam Daniel, Sugarman 3, and Typical Cats.

Working with Friends

It's also a great feeling to be using music from my buddies. Libbie Schrader is a really talented singer songwriter who was in my college a cappella group. Kelly Perine, of Birthday Suit, was in my college improv group. And rapper "DW" is none other than David Wachs - one of the stars of The Last Hurrah.

Music We Can't Use

There are musicians I love who I have not been able to get permission from. Earlimart, M83, The Airborne Toxic Event, Tandemoro, and Spoon. Well, I didn't expect everyone to say yes. No matter how "indy" a band is - their labels are in the business of making money.

What surprises me is when the unsigned bands don't return my calls. That's not good business sense, in my opinion. But it's fine - we want our musicians to be as enthusiastic about us as we are about them.

Finding the Right Fit

It is amazing how hard it is to fit a song to a scene. I estimate I listen to twenty songs for every one song that makes it into a temp session. The process is fun, but unbelievably time consuming. I don't know what music supervisors did before MySpace.

Bands under my magnifying glass include:

Geggy Tah, Division Day, Meiko, Nasoj Thing, The Kax, Alison Block, Nous Non Plus, Tigers Can Bite You, The Deadly Syndrome, The Transmissions, Thinking Aloud, The Shark That Ate My Friend, The Henry Clay People, Gabe Mann, The Airborne Toxic Event, The Monolators, Castle Door, The Happy Hollows, Eagle and Talon, The Primos, Thailand, The Eulogies, Andy Frasco, Blood Arm, Die Rockers Die, Totally Radd, Bang Sugar Bang, Spindrift, Kind Hearts and Coronets, Health, Prefuse 73, Bizart, Radars to the Sky, Eskimo Hunter, Ferraby Lionheart, One Trick Pony, Matt Nathanson, Porterville, You Me and Iowa, Kissing Tigers, 8bit, Mezklah, I Make This Sound, and Lo-Fi Sugar...