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:: 09.30.2003 ::
I don't know what's up with me and writing these days, we just haven't seemed to be getting along very well. Everything else is fine though . . . great, even!
Here are links to the scripts that I turned in for location filmmaking:
Robots Destroy the Future
Hades and Persephone
The second one was one of 12 out of 60+ scripts picked for development, so now I get to work on assembling a creative team and doing production design so I can pitch the project in a few weeks. If my pitch is one of the five accepted I'll get school money and support to direct the film over interterm. So there's still a long road ahead. Well, if my pitch isn't accepted, it will be a much shorter road, but still longer than it has been so far. There were some excellent scripts that weren't picked for development, so even getting to this point is quite an honor and an enormous opportunity. I sound like I'm writing a form letter here or something, but really: I'm excited to be doing this and hope I don't screw it up! This is all new territory for me.
New ground also recently covered: I ran a 5k "Race for the Cure," which was a breast cancer fundraiser. Contrary to what the title may make you think, those who ran the fastest were not rewareded with the cure for breast cancer, but we all had to pay in order to run, so the idea was to raise money so that other people can try to find the cure. I'm really not sure why we were running, it could have just as well been "Bake for the Cure" and we would have all paid money to bake pies or something, but I guess baking pies isn't as painful as running? I really don't know too much about baking pies, since the last one I helped make was a combination of two different recipies from the labels of two different boxes of processed foods, and the result was in fact not very pie-like, but it was fun and the result at least tasted good. So that's one thing you can say about pies and pie-like substances that you can't say about running -- they taste pretty yummy. Running, being a verb and not a noun is unable to be modified by an adjective like "yummy" but I tend to do that anyway, as in "eatting is yummy!" But I digress.
I was running with a bunch of other kids from the honors program at my school to support Pat See, who besides being the honors advisor is all in all a pretty awesome person and was diagnosed with breast cancer over the summer. She's gone through surgery and several rounds of chemo and should be back in the class room when the spring semester rolls around (Pat's not an easy lady to keep down, that's for sure!), and when I went with some friends to visit her at her house full of books she was cheerful and fun to be around. Also inspiring. So we were inspired to run the Race for the Cure, and wore signs and buttons that let everyone know that she was the reason why.
The race itself was incredible -- I heard there were about 25000 people there, which is more than the population of my hometown. If you want to do some math, every one of those people paid a 30 dollar registration fee, of which 75% went to breast cancer treatment and research. And some people even donated more! So yeah, there were a ton of people there, most of them wearing a sign in honor of someone they knew. There were big groups of firemen and police officers who ran together and yelled out those "right left right" marching songs, there was a 70 year old guy with a grey "ARMY" tee-shirt and a full-sized American flag in each hand (I passed him at the very end), there were moms and dads pushing strollers, there were highschool cheerleaders rah-rahing us on, boyscouts holding out paper cups of water for us to try to drink as we ran, all sorts of music -- live bands and also the radio (I couldn't help myself from singing along with "I will survive" about halfway through the race), and there was us, too, running for Pat. I ran with my good friends Lindsay and Melissa, who are "exercise is good for you" girls and were used to this sort of thing, but for me 5k is more than I have ever run at one time in my LIFE (as far as I can tell), so I was pretty proud that I was able to keep pace with them the whole time. Distance running is more of a mental thing that anything else I think, and I though I got tired, I kept telling myself that going a few more feet was not going to kill me, and certianly was less painful than what Pat has had to go through this summer.
So I made it! 28 minutes and 54 seconds, and at the end we got free water and granola bars, which were pretty dang good. So I guess in the end you CAN say that running is yummy!
:: Aaron Humphrey 2:07 PM ::
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:: 09.22.2003 ::
I saw a couple of new movies today. I enjoyed both of them, but I continue to think that movies are simply too long. Maybe I have a low attention span or something, but even though I was engaged in the characters the whole time, after about an hour I started thinking to myself, “so . . . how much is left?” Perhaps it’s because both of these movies were primarily character studies without too much plot to indicate how far we’ve come into them, I don’t know. Anyway, the movies!
1. Lost in Translation – Best new film I’ve seen since probably The Hulk (I liked that movie, ok?). It’s about a couple of Americans stuck in a Tokyo hotel. Sophia Coppola directed this, and she also did The Virgin Suicides, which I really liked. This film is a lot more conventional – none of the weird structural stuff that I dug in Suicides shows up here, but it’s also a lot funnier. Bill Murray is even better in this than he was in Rushmore. Scarlet Johanason (or something?) is the female lead and she’s also excellent. She’s got a really interesting voice. I suppose you could say the film is about confusion and alienation in a post-modern society, but when it comes down to it, it’s really about being stuck in a strange place with nothing to do. Somehow it makes loneliness look beautiful.
2. Anything Else – New Woody Allen movie, starring Jason Biggs (who I saw in the bathroom last spring when they were filming part of American Wedding at Chapman – he was washing his hands when I walked in and looked up, surprised. I thought his reaction was a little weird, and it wasn’t until I had turned the corner and was using “the facilities” that I realized who he was) as . . . Woody Allen, basically. Woody Allen also plays himself as his mentor. There is a lot of talking and a suitable amount of hijinx and then a lot more talking. Some of the stylistic choices just seemed a bit flat to me – what’s the point of seeing sentences being typed on a word processor that fills the entire screen? Don’t we have enough monologues and talking to the camera to serve that function? – but I do have to admit that I laughed out loud in a few places. Also, this movie is being billed as a romantic comedy, but there’s really nothing romantic about it. Well, unless you like depressing, fatalist romance.
Yeah, I liked Lost in Translation better. Also, I wrote some scripts of my own for short (yay!) films. I’ll probably be posting them up here at some point, I feel really good about them.
:: Aaron Humphrey 2:09 AM reply [+] ::
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:: 09.10.2003 ::
Intersection. Wait for the little red hand to disappear on the crosswalk light and then push off hard and fast into the street past the Explorers and Escorts already lining up at the stoplight. The asfault of the street is darker than the concrete of the sidewalk and rises before it falls, like a hill you only notice on a skateboard. Kick off twice to get to the middle of the street, side by side with the roaring cross traffic, then once more in the center, at the top, and ride the rest of the way down, then up again sharply onto the smoother sidewalk and you’re sailing again.
It’s sometime after seven on Friday night and Tustin Avenue has everything you need, trust me. It’s my inaugural trip to Tustin tonight, first one of the fall. I’ve been wanting to decorate my room with posters and pictures of my family and my girlfriend and so I am in the market push-pins or sticky-tack or both. If Christina were here with her bike we’d be enroute to Rite-Aide, but she’s moved into an apartment, so I’m going solo, and though that doesn’t mean I’m lost, it does mean I forgot which way to turn down the Everything Avenue. So I’m just on the lookout. You see things on a bike you don’t see in a car: the moon in the milky blue sky above telephone wires strung between poles like an empty music staff; a trio of young men lugging five boxes of Corona between them across the parking lot. And stores and stores and stores. No different really, then a marketplace in any period drama and I have the sense of being a visitor in my own time.
:: Aaron Humphrey 12:18 AM reply [+] ::
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:: 09.03.2003 ::
I am hungry, all alone in the world without a hamburger. Actually, unless it was a really really good hamburger I probably wouldn’t eat it. And to be honest I have a lot of candy sitting next to me on my desk, but I’m saving it for later. I’m just going to go to bed soon and then I won’t be hungry any more. That’s my theory at least.
See, you know I'm back in college because I'm writing about my eating habits again.
I have been writing about other things though, but very few of them have to do with school or classes. Just finished the first draft of a robot screenplay that I’m excited about . . . and actually, there’s a lot of food in it. I think I have the characters eating something in just about every other scene, even though it make no difference in the plot. I just like to have my characters stand around and drink juice boxes I guess.
I've been approaching a lot of my friends, screenplay in hand, and waving it in their faces until they agree to sit down and read it. So far everyone seems to like it pretty well and the criticisms have been pretty minor, though useful.
A couple of my film student friends think that it's too short, though; they say everything happens too quickly and I need more time to develop my characters and themes, etc.
Maybe I'm crazy, maybe I'll change my mind about this later, but right now I think they're wrong.
I don't want to pad out my story with bits of character development -- if everyone does their job right (including me) you should be able to get a handle on the characters by what happens to them and how they react to it. Audiences are smart; all it takes is a shot and a reaction shot for them to understand relationships, emotions, subtext and atmosphere et al! There’s no reason to have them stand around a golf course talking about what happened to them in high school. You shouldn’t have to explain your characters.
I also don’t want to go into depth on the “themes” of the movie – I could tell you what the themes are right now and it would just be words – maybe they’d ring true to you or maybe they wouldn’t – but they’d hardly make you feel or believe anything. That’s the real challenge with film and with fiction, to make a point without ever saying what the point is; it’s like magic. Like the characters in the movie, the theme should reveal itself; I shouldn’t have to point it out to you. If I DO have to point it out to you, I’ve made a bad movie.
I don’t want to create characters or settings or plot points or thematic elements that are going to go over an idea or point already expressed, or are not essential to the main theme or story. I mean, what’s the point?
Furthermore, I don’t want my movie to be long. Long movies are first of all expensive and time-consuming. Second of all, if you’re going to spend your time cooped up in a dark room watching processed images flash across a blank screen on my account, I do not want to waste your time. To me two hours just seems way to long to be passively fed fantasy, which is what happens most of the time you watch a feature film. If the film is eye-opening or intellectually engaging, then ok. But otherwise, why aren’t you out playing Frisbee or reading a book or something? Why tell a story in 120 minutes when you can strip it down and say everything important in 12 minutes? It has nothing to do with attention span. It’s about using time wisely.
I’m just really enthralled with the idea of short films as a medium, and it seems like they haven’t really been taken seriously since the days of serial shorts in the ‘30s. But I’m going to see what I can do. Here’s to brevity!
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There are some guys freestyle rapping right outside my window. It’s completely awesome.
:: Aaron Humphrey 1:02 PM reply [+] ::
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:: 08.26.2003 ::
Most of what I left in California got stored under in a triangular cubbyhole dubbed “The Cave” under the stairs in the house Ed and Grant moved into once school was over. My bags from the flight back were still sitting in the hallway when I opened the door and found my skateboard buried under a sleeping bag and a shopping bag and even though there were people there to talk to, my mind was already out the door and my body soon had to follow.
And so it happened that within an hour of landing in Orange County I was back on my skateboard, hanging loose and floppy from the ground up as the familiar pavement cracks and frontyard palm trees flowed out before me, painted wide and bright by the uninhibited sun. Before I remembered to wonder if I had forgotten anything, I’d already pushed off from the concrete and was sailing through the streets as if I’d never left, knees bent, arms hanging limp. Self-propelled.
:: Aaron Humphrey 2:05 PM reply [+] ::
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