A New Game: Screenwriterland!
As screenwriters, we all play this game: the constant back and forth between making a career and making rent. Any writer knows that the obstacles, power-ups, and twisty turns of fate are all part of the landscape–land an agent one day, lose her the next day. That’s how this industry works, and well, if it’s a game already, let’s lay out the ground rules. 1) Everyone gets a turn to spin. 2) Money is limited to whatever you can find in your savings and what…
Movies and Memory
It’s funny how I care more about the study of history some two years after majoring in it. But now it’s the kind I stumble upon, the detective history, which fascinates me. For example, long before e-books, and back even before the days before barcodes came to libraries, books had to be checked out by hand, usually by a librarian with a big black stamp. I picked up LA local John Fante’s Full of Life from the library the other week, and was happy to…
My Movie Clichés
There are certain movie clichés that always take me out of the viewing experience. I have griped with friends about characters who brush their teeth in five seconds when it should take two minutes (Mr. and Mrs. Smith), solve a mysterious pandemic in ten whole minutes (Outbreak), or whose cell phones lose reception at the end of act one (Almost Every Thriller Since 1995). Here is one of my least favorite: Whenever a movie character reads a letter, email, or IM, we hear the writer’s…
So Long to the Stripes
The White Stripes (1997-2011) It wasn’t love at first listen. At the end of freshman year of high school my friend David made a mix CD for me with some White Stripes songs tacked to the end. I was more into Elvis and the Beatles and the Doors and other classic rock stuff and didn’t really care for the discordant Iggy Pop noise at the end of the mix. It was too rough, too loud. Of course, the Stripes had a way of finding me….
Two Bookstores
Los Angeles has just about everything, but it doesn’t have that many great bookstores. Sure, there’s Book Soup in West Hollywood, and out in Pasadena there is Vroman’s. But if you live in West LA like me you’re hard pressed to find anything more than a storefront in a strip mall or a Barnes & Noble. I could rattle off a couple of independent video stores I like that are mere walking distance from my apartment, but as for books, forget it. It may be…
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