Have we met our match in inventing our own assassins? Is it part of our evolutionary, technical DNA, to foster devices that intend to kill us? Have we have created a death wish covenant with technology?
Continue reading → Android Assassins: Inventing the Death Wish
The Eliot Spitzer Hooker Psychodrama playing out in the mainstream media has reminded me of other examples of a SuperGenius father and a cursed son.
Continue reading → Spitzer Knew the Evolutionarily Inevitable
The nature of the director in any form — movies, television, stage, radio — is to serve the spirit of the script.
A director is not the master of the script — the director must be a slave to the written word in order to understand the greater purpose of the writing.
Many directors believe they are co-authors of a work and that is wrong.
Weak authors create strong directors and that wrongful power dyad is always terrible for the script.
A script is not a blueprint or an architectural dream.
A script is the bones, sinew, muscle, heart and being of any project.
For anyone other than the author to change the work in situ or to re-arrange established ideas on the page is to threaten the very core of the project that risks creating the common and the ordinary failure that reeks in the marketplace and is immediately forgotten by those in the audience who writhe and yearn for meaning in their escape into entertainment.
The Writer’s Guild strike is over after a measly 100 days.
What was gained? If you strike, you don’t strike to win parity or a cast off breadcrumb. You strike to win big. You strike to take the ball back. Did the WGA win big? No.
Some believe the strike cost $2 billion dollars to the Hollywood economy in lost production, catering closures, florists dying, valets being laid-off, hotels churning empty rooms, restaurant workers waiting on nobodies and costume-houses going dark.
The WGA gobbled up a breadcrumb concession on payments from online entertainment. That’s it.
On December 7, 2007, the Guild was rightfully demanding the unionization of Animation writers and Reality show writers as well as the right to Sympathy Strike. On February 11, 2008 — when the strike ended — they won none of those demands.
The Writers Guild was whupped by the producers, and in the bloodletting, thousands of people lost their jobs, a few lost their homes, and everyone lost their respect for a Writers Guild strike that turned out, in the end, to be spineless and pointless.
The actor plays a unique role in society by bringing light and meaning to the relationship between the human and the ethereal.
The actor’s role is not to define life, but to interpret it through the blood and muscle of their bodies.
The actor is the heart of us, the beating of us, the rhythm of life within us all.
Without the actor in society, we crumble into our selfish selves and whine away the opportunities for insight into what made us thrive in the past while decaying in the now.
Heath Ledger is dead at 28. If he were not famous — would he deserve the celebrity mega-media coverage being blanketed upon us in the wake of his wake?
Continue reading → After Heath Ledger: Does Celebrity Kill You?
Many years ago I was considering getting an advanced degree in screenwriting at UCLA.
I was invited to sit in on a class and I was glad I did because it was during that visit I realized UCLA was not the right place for me.
Continue reading → The Lesson of the UCLA Screenwriting Gnome
Why do all mainstream horror movies require the killing of disposable women? They are usually bare-breasted, open-mouthed and clumsily helpless and they always meet their end with blood-curdling screams.
We have wondered here in the past about the cultural constrictions we press into skin color, and a related and deeper issue is one of darker skin — Black skin in particular — and how it is socially demonized by negative, historical, intellectual and emotional touchstones associated with “Blackness.”
There is a Writers Guild strike that is currently and deliciously finally meting out justice to producers who do not value the written word despite their phony, opposite, claims, and I fully support the strike and the effort for writers — the instigators of original inspiration and creation — to get their fair share of future DVD and online entertainment profits.
Fight to the death. Let the producers find their bloody end.
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