omorrow, the fall semester for the Stark program begins with a day-long orientation. I am told that I may not come up for air until several weeks later. This is a fine thing; everybody I’ve met associated with the program is awesome, and I’m psyched to kick ass with my classmates. A few items before I’m sucked in:
Brian Perry did a fun little “exit interview” with Sarah and I for New York comedy blog The Apiary. You can read it here.
I am already craving my favorite fall beer, Southern Tier’s Imperial Pumking. If you see this bottle, you’d be a fool not to buy it:
In between trips to Ikea, a grueling series of DMV visits, and some light city exploration, I managed to finish another draft of “His Tainted Legacy,” the spec pilot I’ve been writing for a while. It’s out to some of my trusty readers, and if you’d like to read it as well, let me know—I’m always eager for feedback and impressions.
ast Monday was the “Best of Boston” screening of the 48Hour Film Project, where the Audience Award-winners and judges’ favorites are shown together on the big screen one last time. Then the awards are handed out. My friends… Team ALBATROSS! walked away with an embarrassment of honors…
BEST FILM, BOSTON 2010
BEST ENSEMBLE ACTING
BEST WRITING: NEIL REYNOLDS AND ALBATROSS
BEST DIRECTING: NEIL REYNOLDS AND JASON HAAS
BEST ACTRESS: KATIE LEEMAN
BEST ACTOR: PATRICK FRENCH
BEST EDITING: SASHA GOLDBERG
BEST ORIGINAL SCORE: WILLIE CONRAD
BEST USE OF CHARACTER
... and our venerable AUDIENCE AWARD.
The winner:
I am immensely proud to have led such a talented team through this cavalcade of distinctions. Team ALBATROSS!‘s accomplishments are rendered even more spectacular by the fierce competition from some very talented Boston filmmakers. Among my favorites from the screening (that I can find online):
Congratulations one and all!
p.s. Does anybody know the origins of the “official selection” fronds that adorn every DVD box ever made?
or the last four years I’ve participated in the 48 Hour Film Project, an international filmmaking competition wherein teams compete within their city to make a short film in 48 hours, after drawing their film genre out of a hat and being given specific parameters that must be included in the final product. This year, the team I formed, ALBATROSS!, drew a particularly tricky genre: “Musical or Western.” We chose Western.
For a Few Flowers More: As the internet becomes our new frontier, a man from a simpler time must defend his virtual property the old-fashioned way.
In addition to the genre, we had to include a character named Wilma or Winston Weatherby (a gardner), a scale, and the line of dialog “You win some, you lose some.”
To say that I am immensely proud of my team and what we accomplished in such a short time frame would be an understatement of epic understatedness. Whether or not this film is recognized in the competition, it represents a momentous leap forward in the quality of our shooting, editing, scoring, and storytelling. Congratulations to all the 48Hour filmmakers—every year I’m blown away by the creativity that panic inspires.
arch has been an overwhelming month. I spent most of February obsessing over the particulars of my graduate/film school applications, which I finished back in October and then forced out of my mind. But not for long, of course—as snow melted and winter receded, notification-deadlines began to loom, and by late February every day felt like waiting for the results of an MRI. I remained cautiously optimistic, but only just.
Earlier this month I was offered a place in the Peter Stark Producing Program at USC. I accepted on the spot; it was and is my first choice program, an intensive immersion in the art and business of the film industry that seems to implicitly reject the notion that “artistic” and “commercial” projects exist in different spheres. Unfortunately I can’t talk too intelligently about the curriculum, beyond what I’ve read, which is half-fact, half-pitch.
I don’t begrudge any program its bragging rights—stellar reputation is what drew me there in the first place. The little legends are awesome, too—I love the anecdote about a Starkie throwing a chair in a passion-fueled dispute. (“There’s your Felliniesque!” I imagine him screaming.) Still more impressive is whatever the other guy said to provoke the chair-tossing. Apparently I have four months to hone my dodging skills.
THIS IS HOW MOVIES ARE MADE!
Anyway, back to March. It’s about to end, you know. And then it will be April, and then it will be May, and then, in June, Sarah and I will be enjoying our final days as Boston-Cambridge residents. For me, it will have been just under seven years—for Sarah, closer to ten. A friendly reminder that time flies, which is itself a friendly way of saying, life is too fucking short. Our relocation is no trivial thing—in addition to the logistical and financial burdens, we’ll be leaving behind our community of friends, family, and artistic collaborators, just trusting that in LA we’ll find new opportunities and awesome people, and that eventually we’ll find the money to visit old friends. Anxiety? We have it in spades. But we’re not complaining. It’s exciting, it’s a priviledge, it’s a challenge, it’s the next chapter in the great adventure we promised each other when we married.
Onward, friends! Come, collaborators! Adventure awaits us all.
ut what after all is one night? A short space, especially when the darkness dims so soon, and so soon a bird sings, a cock crows, or a faint green quickens, like a turning leaf, in the hollow of the wave. Night, however, succeeds to night. The winter holds a pack of them in store and deals them equally, evenly, with indefatigable fingers. They lengthen; they darken. Some of them hold aloft clear planets, plates of brightness.
“The autumn trees, ravaged as they are, take on the flash of tattered flags kindling in the gloom of cool cathedral caves where gold letters on marble pages describe death in battle and how bones bleach and burn far away in Indian sands. The autumn trees gleam in the yellow moonlight, in the light of harvest moons, the light which mellows the energy of labour, and smooths the stubble, and brings the wave lapping blue to the shore.
“It seemed now as if, touched by human penitence and all its toil, divine goodness had parted the curtain and displayed behind it, single, distinct, the hare erect; the wave falling; the boat rocking; which, did we deserve them, should be ours always. But alas, divine goodness, twitching the cord, draws the curtain; it does not please him; he covers his treasures in a drench of hail, and so breaks them, so confuses them that it seems impossible that their calm should ever return or that we should ever compose from their fragments a perfect whole or read in the littered pieces the clear words of truth. For our penitence deserves a glimpse only; our toil respite only.
“The nights now are full of wind and destruction; the trees plunge and bend and their leaves fly helter skelter until the lawn is plastered with them and they lie packed in gutters and choke rain pipes and scatter damp paths. Also the sea tosses itself and breaks itself, and should any sleeper fancying that he might find on the beach an answer to his doubts, a sharer of his solitude, throw off his bedclothes and go down by himself to walk on the sand, no image with semblance of serving and divine promptitude comes readily to hand bringing the night to order and making the world reflect the compass of the soul. The hand dwindles in his hand; the voice bellows in his ear. Almost it would appear that it is useless in such confusion to ask the night those questions as to what, and why, and wherefore, which tempt the sleeper from his bed to seek an answer.”
omorrow, the fall semester for the Stark program begins with a day-long orientation. I am told that I may not come up for air until several weeks later. This is a fine thing; everybody I’ve met associated with the program is awesome, and I’m psyched to kick ass with my classmates. A few items before I’m sucked in:
ast Monday was the “Best of Boston” screening of the 48Hour Film Project, where the Audience Award-winners and judges’ favorites are shown together on the big screen one last time. Then the awards are handed out. My friends… Team ALBATROSS! walked away with an embarrassment of honors…
or the last four years I’ve participated in the 48 Hour Film Project, an international filmmaking competition wherein teams compete within their city to make a short film in 48 hours, after drawing their film genre out of a hat and being given specific parameters that must be included in the final product. This year, the team I formed, ALBATROSS!, drew a particularly tricky genre: “Musical or Western.” We chose Western.
arch has been an overwhelming month. I spent most of February obsessing over the particulars of my graduate/film school applications, which I finished back in October and then forced out of my mind. But not for long, of course—as snow melted and winter receded, notification-deadlines began to loom, and by late February every day felt like waiting for the results of an MRI. I remained cautiously optimistic, but only just.
ut what after all is one night? A short space, especially when the darkness dims so soon, and so soon a bird sings, a cock crows, or a faint green quickens, like a turning leaf, in the hollow of the wave. Night, however, succeeds to night. The winter holds a pack of them in store and deals them equally, evenly, with indefatigable fingers. They lengthen; they darken. Some of them hold aloft clear planets, plates of brightness.
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