Our honeymoon was a spectacular and rather spontaneous
road-trip up the Pacific coast that almost crossed into Canada except the money
ran out and we beat it back home in a single marathon drive praying we’d make
it and running on fumes. But before the
coffers went from crinkle to jingle, we spent a few days walking the entire
city of Seattle, which closes promptly at four p.m., and stopped in at the
Seattle International Film Festival. Didn’t even know
it was going on until we got there, and how perfect for a pair of flick-philes? We shocked the Canadian-adjacent by tipping
for our frothy coffees and sat down for an epic viewing session that included
Ulysses Gaze.
If you find yourself facing the end of your life, consider
spending your remaining time watching Ulysses’s Gaze. It will be the longest four and a half hours you’ve ever
experienced. Feel free to drink loads
of frothy coffee, too, for while the filmmaker provides about a half-dozen
perfectly satisfying endings, the film truly goes on forever. You can escape for a potty break or a scone
or what have you without missing any action whatsoever. When you hit the melancholic journey by
barge with the huge stone head of Lenin, you have oodles of time to step away
and come right back to enjoy (believe it or not) at least a quarter hour of
slightly different angles of that same rocky noggin. We didn’t know that at the time. We don't usually walk out on movies, no matter how bad. They’re not easy to make and almost always have some redeeming
quality somewhere. So though we
squirmed miserably after drinking (apparently) way too many coffees, we
concluded they had to still be filming Ulysses’s Gaze and simply streaming the
raw footage into the theater as we sat and suffered. (It did feel that unedited at the time.)
I don’t mention the flick to bash it to bits. As I said, if you have only four hours,
that’s one way to really stretch ‘em out!
But it’s an object lesson in failing to do the work of creative
production, what some call “killing your babies.” When you get too precious about your film or your writing or your
cartoon or whatever, you lose objectivity.
The result can be “creative masturbation,” which sounds a lot racier than what it is. Remember
in Meet Joe Black when the young couple who just met over coffee part ways and
look back at each other something like seventeen times? At some point, it’s just too much. SPOILER ALERT—just run Brad Pitt over with
the car already, the scene ended six minutes ago! You know that feeling.
Maybe you’re reading a novel or watching a movie like A.I.—over
and over you get that
sense of natural resolution but the yarn spins on and, when it's a
movie, 100 minutes of awesome become a 260 minute exercise in bladder
control.
This comes to mind because I did indeed find ten minutes to
commit to one of Pilar Alessandra’s Take Ten exercises. I have to say, I like the book so far (I’m
up to page 8 now!), I love the idea that it’s possible to crank out a sound screenplay
working ten minutes at a time, but the key to Pilar’s book and prompting
questions is, as is often the case, the hardest part of creating anything: making decisions and sticking to them. It isn’t difficult to write a
screenplay. What’s beat-your-head-against-the-
And maybe just a
skosh mentally ill as I read that back over…
One tight screenplay detailed enough to surprise and stand
out and structured with the precision of a Swiss watch—that’s the goal, that’s
what gets budgets and green-lights and movie-goers to open their wallets and
fork over that especially-hard-earned cash.
And it’s really f-ing hard to do.
Deciding is easy.
Being creative is easy. But committing
to it, knowing when to leave it alone—for me, that’s the toughest part
of writing anything. The curse of spec-writing
is the soft deadline—self-defined and too often lenient. The second best part of working for hire (just under getting a
paycheck on delivery) is never having to let go of a project because the Suits
who cut the checks rip it right out of your hands. Then it’s on to editors or publishers or studios or directors or
production companies to torture themselves with how to cut sixty-eight shots of
circling Lenin’s head by helicopter. Seriously, pick two and move on!
So, Take-Ten exercise one--focused on the main character (Pilar calls it the MC--already sparing me a big stalling habit I have of obsessing about names--I've wasted days worth of valuable writing time trying to name a character that needed, let's face it, a great deal of work on a few other little areas, like the plot) and the basic points--what's the problem and what's MC do about it. Amazing how sticking to the basics and just focusing for ten minutes can really help you cut the hooey and get to work.
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