All my heroes are dead. Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, John Lennon, Steve Jobs and Prince. All. Dead.
But one person who is alive who I get a lot of creative courage from is Phoebe Waller-Bridge. That woman has creative ovaries of steel and so as this novel’s development begins to quicken in pace (at least for the time being) I ask myself, “What would Phoebe Waller-Bridge do? Would she go there? Yeah, of course she’d go there.”
So, whenever I come up with an issue I, myself, have about the scenario I’ve come up with, I now address it head on. I wallow in it. I say to the audience, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. But we’re going to talk about it so much that any worries you had about that possibility are eliminated.”
It’s wild how two things have really, really helped speed things up: establishment of a canon and pretty much totally flipping the script on some huge influences on this novel. A lot of problems have been fixed rather abruptly, so — for the time being –development is rushing full steam towards the end of the first act. I’m just letting my mind go down the rabbit hole of the most extreme possibilities to make a point about how fucked up the Trump Era is.
This helps the plot because it adds both drama and obstacles to the Hero and Heroine’s goals heading into towards the second act. A lot of avenues I had not really thought about have opened up and they’re organic to the concept and universe, so it’s really just a matter of free styling as I think up what would happen as part of the most obvious sequence of events.
The plot, characters and universe are getting far, far better because of this so, at a minimum, I feel cautiously optimistic that I won’t — at the very least– embarrassment myself.
By pretty much every metric a “normal” person would use on me, I’m a delusional weirdo currently living one of the more rural corners of a purple fly over state. That’s my reality.
So, as I proceed, keep in mind that I am well aware that I am probably just imagining things. It could all just be me jumping to huge conclusions. I’m using pretty prosaic datapoints and then weaving something out of the ordinary from them.
Anyway, I’ve been contacting a few well-known women the last few days for various reasons connected — and not connected — to the novel I’m developing. Jodi Kantor of the NYT gave me a polite one-line sentence email indicating that I wasn’t worth her time. That’s fair. I am going to exact my revenge, however, by doing everything in my power to have a character who’s professional life is greatly inspired by hers fall in love with a proxy me. Take that, successful investigative journalist!
Then someone obviously using a burner account on Instagram contacted me out of the blue tonight. Given that 99.99999999% of the time anyone who contacts me out of the blue on Instagram is either a troll or absolutely, completely insane, I blocked the account without even thinking about it. No point in wasting my time by engaging the person, whomever they may be.
But the event lingered in my mind. I have an extremely over-active imagination and I started to muse that it might be someone famous who wanted to talk to me, but just not via their official account. The rest of this bit of the post is more about me weighing what famous woman thinks about when contacting someone like me than any notion that that is at all what was going on.
I guess if you were a famous woman intrigued by a weirdo like me and you wanted to contact me you would check out my Instagram and then maybe setup a burner account simply to chat for a moment? Why they wouldn’t be willing say hey with their real account eludes me. But I don’t think that’s what happened. It was probably just my usual insane people trying to bother me. Shrug.
I’m enjoying developing my novel a great deal. But there are times when I wince at how much a movie wants to pop out of it like an alien xenomorph. A lot of the scenes are very visual and require you know songs for them to make the most sense. And, yet, given that I can only use song titles for IP reasons, I have to pick songs whose titles sum up what the songs are about as well as their mood.
Most of these songs, of course, are so well known that even the most clueless reader has at least vaguely heard of them. One thing I know is I really have to explain why my heroine would listen to the music she listens to. The average young person today listens to a very specific type of music that a lot of older people such as myself simply have never heard.
Luckily, however, the novel is set in the immediate past AND I’ve managed to come up with a reasonable explanation for why my heroine would listen to the type of music I need her to listen to. But the issue of how people will know in real terms how a song I want in their mind would play in the context of the scene is something that eats away at me. It would be solved very easily if I was writing a screenplay. But I don’t want to do that right now. I want to write a novel. I just am a very music-oriented person and I’ve structured the entire novel from the ground up so that pop rock music that I know a lot about is a crucial aspect of its universe.
But anyway. I going to try to flesh out my scene summary as much as I can this weekend. I’m shooting for no later than sometime in January to start writing in earnest again. I have a lot of momentum and love the characters, plot, and universe. I just have to live up to my own pretty brutal expectations. Even then, I’m a lot better storyteller than writer.
I’m of the opinion that a great modern story has to ignore any sort of overt political agenda and simply entertain the audience. Given how existentially political the novel I’m writing is, this causes me a lot of consternation. But my primary goal is write an adult tentpole story. Things blow up. Shit burns down. A little sex happens. And so on.
But let’s go through some movies I’ve seen recently and why I hated them.
Booksmart I walked out of this movie just between the time Beanie Feldstein’s character started screeching about lesbian sexual actives and when I learned what the “hero’s journey” was going to be. I had only gone to see the movie because I felt shamed by a combination of Entertainment Tonight, E! Network and the center-Left Twitter echo chamber. I knew going into the movie that I was NOT the audience, but I went anyway so I would not feel bad. Turns out, I wasn’t, in fact, the audience. I wanted a modern-day Heathers. I got a woke movie that I felt insulted me on a basic, existential level. There were plenty of ways to express the same political agenda on the sly without insulting me and people like me. I felt the acting lacking in general. I also felt the movie was a bit too cute by half. And it seemed produced by identity politics bean counters who felt rather smug that the had managed to make the girl who would otherwise be hot, not be hot.
The Joker On the other end of the political spectrum, I bounced pretty quick with this movie, too. I hated this movie. Loathed it. It just seemed too anti-woke. It was a pretty loud dog whistle for incels who feel like they’re so smart that no one else “gets” their jokes. Ugh. Just tell me a good story. Don’t produce a movie that has as the core of its marketing campaign the fear that some crazy incel is going to murder people because of the movie. I see The Joker as just as a bad as Booksmart. Why can’t I just get a well produced movie that may have an agenda, but is, like, actually good? I mean, Network, Deliverance, Taxi Driver, The Dear Hunter, all are very powerful movies with political messages that don’t overshadow basic things like plot and character.
Hustlers This was probably one of the better movies I’ve seen recently and I still walked out of it about 2/3rds of the way through. When it dawned on me that J.Lo’s ass cheeks were simply a ruse to get my butt in a dark theatre and that there would be no positive male characters, I bounced. But the movie itself was very strong did a great job of telling its story. I didn’t see the whole movie, so maybe this is a dumb question, but, how come there wasn’t more lesbian action in the movie? It’s implied in a whisper, but this is 2019. I think audiences can handle the two main female characters having a dimly lit naked romp in bed.
Charlie’s Angels This movie needed to be darker and have more sex in it. Since only old farts like me care about the franchise, I think Elizabeth Banks should have done a Buffy The Vampire Slayer and made her version of this otherwise campy movie far more adult. Put a lot more John Wick and Hustlers in it. Make it a gritty — if a bit campy — action packed movie with sex-positive portrayals of female sexual agency. This whole business of having an out-of-nowhere montage of young women running around with big smiles on their faces made no sense to me. It was a real, “What the what?” moment. If she’d done as I suggested, a lot of middle-aged couples would have really enjoyed the movie. It might not have been the hit everyone had hoped for, but it would not have been a flop. Needed far stronger actresses, however, to pull it off. Though I really did like Kristen Stewart.
Anyway, I am extremely brutal with movies I go to see and if I walk out of it, the producers shouldn’t take it too seriously or personally. I often have a drink before I go see a movie and I bounce because I just don’t feel like the movie has any more to give. Also, I sometimes have an ah-ha experience because of the movie and I leave because I’d rather be home developing my novel.
Hollywood ‘It Girl’ Zoey Deutch / Imagine courtesy of Google Images
by Shelton Bumgarner @bumgarls
I saw Zoey Deutch in Zombieland 2 the other day and was really impressed with her acting chops. A star is born, if you will. But let’s speculate on her possible career track.
The person she current most resembles is Isla Fisher. Fisher stole every scene she was in when she appeared in The Wedding Crashers and that pretty much has been the basis of her career to date. But, really, Fisher hasn’t done much since that movie. She’s appeared in the occasional romcom now and then, but she’s apparently been more busy being Mrs. Sacha Baron Cohen than having any serious movie career. So, in a sense, that’s definitely a possibly for Deutch. She could land her a powerful Hollywood man, pop out some kids and otherwise coast.
I’d like to think she might aim higher. In fact, to cement her career, I would recommend a Wedding Crashers type movie. That would be ideal for Deutch. Something a bit raunchy that would give take her to the next level. Ideally, she would befriend Phoebe Waller-Bridge and the two would do a film together with Waller-Bridge writing the screenplay. While I know the more “woke” amongst us poo-poo the manic pixie dream girl trope, if Deutch could wease her way into the next Charlie Kaufman joint, she could really light the screen on fire. I think they’re talk of a new Back To The Future movie, maybe she could shoe-horn herself into that movie given her mother’s connection to the franchise. Or maybe Ghostbusters 3?
Anyway, if she REALLY wanted to aim high, she might look for a YA franchise in development to helm. She might go the Jennifer Lawrence route if she managed to pull that off. Hollywood can be so dumb when casting talented young actresses. Too often they want to them to simply be one-dimensional romantic support for some young up-and-coming actor, or even worse, the love interest for some dusty old dude. I guess a lot what happens next with her career depends on luck and her agent.
Who knows. We’ll probably be a fascist dystopia before too long, anyway.
Zoey Deutch’s character in Zombieland 2 made a big impression on me. Something about it initially came off as annoying but the more I thought about it, the more I realized it was a star turn. This feeling only began to sink in more when I realized she was Lea Thompson’s daughter!
Holy shit!
Then I thought back to the scene where she hooks up with Jesse Eisenberg’s character. Something about it seemed like a homage. Then I realized that she had to be giving a subtle hat-tip to her mom’s scene in Back To The Future where she creeps on Michael J. Fox and talks about where “Calvin’s” pants are — on her hope chest.
I’m growing impressed with New Hollywood. Both Deutch and Margret Qualley are bringing the heat. I just wish someone would cast Eva Victor in something. She’s got star quality as well and she’s being underused doing Twitter videos.
I’m all for dark, gritty movies. They’re great. I love them. But I have a problem with art coming from either the Left or the Right that is so drunk with its efforts to “message the base,” if you will, the producers lose sight of the goal — giving an audience a great story.
It’s because of this that I keep walking out of movies. On the Left I walked out of Olivia Wilde’s Booksmart. On the Right I just walked out of The Joker. I found both of them problematic to such an extent that I bounced. Booksmart was a self-parody of “woke” art. The Joker, meanwhile, was problematic because it seemed like a dog whistle to every incel within shouting distance. It made me very unhappy. So unhappy I couldn’t finish it. I barely got to the inciting incident.
But I will say the preview for Richard Jewell was worth the price of admission to The Joker. The movie looks promising as much for the liberal monkey show Clint Eastwood has assembled for his cast than anything else. I mean, what the what? What is Olivia Wilde doing knowingly playing into the worst stereotypes that people like Eastwood have about people like her. Surreal. I mean, maybe the movie isn’t what I think it is, but it sure does seem to be persecution porn for MAGA mouth breathers.
I think what’s problematic about these films is not even the films themselves — it’s fucking Trump. Trump’s such a divisive figure that he casts a very large, very dark shadow over pop culture. We’re reaching the point where a lot of influential movie producers are greenlighting movies that validate their own political views. This does not bode well for the future of Hollywood.
But who knows. The novel I’m writing fancies itself something of “pox on both your houses” allegorical tale. Yet I am also going way, way, way, WAY out of my way to ensure everyone — regardless of political affiliation — gets to have a good time. Even the MAGA people who I pick on by proxy will at least get to enjoy themselves as they hate read it.
And the perfect person to helm this franchise is Phoebe Waller-Bridge. She’s perfect. She could really bring something unique to the role. It could be a very modern female-driven franchise if you got the right people behind it.
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