I love Wes Anderson’s films. The short film “prologue” to his newest, The Darjeeling Ltd., is available on iTunes for free for a limited time:
Haven’t watched it yet; downloading now.
Unrelated: if you’re in the mood for comedy I’ll be playing with the Bastards tonight (Cantab Lounge, Central Square Cambridge) and with Code Duello at the Lowell Comedy Festival.
Saturday night I became paranoid about how much precious Wasteland footage I didn’t have duplicate copies of. The raw footage will be on tape for all time, but countless hours have already gone into cutting, splicing, and massaging rough cuts in Premiere. Well, fuck me for trying to do the right thing—I left Norton Systemworks to make a backup copy of my video directory overnight, and when I woke up, my computer was irreparably frozen. After several hours of teeth grinding, praying, cursing, and hot angry tears, I unplugged the drive with the Video, reformatted C:, and installed WinXP fresh.
At some point in the afternoon, Haas came to our apartment to film another sketch. We bagged it, and I think (hope) I acted well—I honestly don’t remember much of the shoot, my mind furiously churning through data recovery options instead of learning my lines. No matter how good the sketch turns out I will inevitably be disappointed with my performance for this very reason, a double-shame since it’s one of the few Wasteland video sketches in which I act.
The filming done, I returned to my sputtering machine. With some BIOS-level tweakage I was able to isolate the corrupted drive in such a way that WinXP doesn’t crash while attempting to detect it in boot. A glimmer of hope? I called TechFusion, a local data recovery service who frequently underwrites on WBUR. I should’ve known that if they can afford to underwrite on WBUR, I can’t afford their services. $90 for diagnosis? An estimated $500-2,500 for recovery? And they market themselves towards students? More like TechFuckYousion. (Burrrn)
I Googled some freeware data recovery applications. All failed, either by locking or causing the BSOD-reboot. Then I tried a demo of this little program which not only revealed to me my directories—pinned beneath layers of corruption—but promised me that the files could be recovered by the full version. $70 < $500; done.
I've been able to retrieve everything from the corrupted drive that is truly irreplaceable: photos and Premiere project files. I also rescued my music collection. However, Premiere project files aren't terribly useful without the raw AVI footage on which they are layered. So far Nucleus's Kernel software has locked each time I tried to recover a larger file, such as the AVIs. I have more digging to do tonight, but it may be that my final two options are:
I’ve been writing almost exclusively about the experience of a producer on The Wasteland, which gives me a particular myopia when it comes to what’s “new” and “interesting” in the project. Today our director forwarded me a document so befuddling that I need to share it:
What ramblings are these? To whom do these arcane instructions belong?
Why, they’re our choreographer’s, of course—I forgot we had a choreographer. The lovely Katie Proulx has choreographed a dance for a filmed bit called “The Sundress.” I’ve been completely uninvolved in the development/rehearsal/planning of this particular bit, so it’s always delightful to see the hard work of others manifesting in such a real, immediate way.
While on the subject of hard workers, I need to give big acks1 to Joy Adams, our costume designer, who is currently slaving over some of our more fantastical costumes. We’ve also got a slew of musicians working on our musical numbers, an awesome Stage/Production Manager hammering out logistics and recruiting several ASMs, we’ve got people at ImprovBoston working to publicize our show, and the list goes on and on. Their names and titles are better organized here!
Our community is great. I can’t wait to see all this “bounce around.”
1. My hip new slang for acknowledgments.
It’s been a full week for the Wasteland team. We had three major victories over the weekend:
The third item is a bittersweet victory. We had, as of last week, multiple sketches in multiple locations being filmed on every day of every weekend in September, with the promise of still more to do in October. This is in addition to our weekly rehearsals for the stage material. As I wrote in a previous entry, I think this ambitious schedule was attainable—but it wasn’t ideal, especially as our cast is swept up in the tide of “major life events” that is always heralded by the coming of the fall. In our eight-person writer/actor team, we’ve got two people getting married, two people recently engaged, and a person just married. If I were to also list nonmarital conflicts, the list would merit its own post. Instead, I can summarize the producers’ decision thusly: our cast needs to be focused, energized, and having fun more than we need to create 150 perfectly-shot comedy gems.
We lost a cast member and some good material, but the show rolls onward, gaining momentum. This weekend’s shoot, which I can summarize thusly:
was a whole bundle of fun. As we end the stressful task of writing, revising, and structuring our seven hours of material, the horizon is filled with fun shoots, fun rehearsals, and the more fun task of bringing our work to life (via more work). I think our decision to cut some of our more excessively complicated material will pay off when we open in two months and the cast is alive enough to do the bits justice.
In related news, I recently had to end my full-time commitment to The Uncommonwealth, a sketch group formed in just January of this year. The group had a lot of talented writers and performers involved, and we even pumped out a fair amount of material in our first six months. Unfortunately, as the months flew by, many members of the group (myself included) found themselves spread too thin, and the demands of filming all but the simplest of sketches were too much for us. We shat out, like, fifty scripts in the first two months, then got bogged down in the logistics of prioritizing and filming everybody’s work for the next six. There’s some good stuff on TUC’s site, but I’m afraid that might be all she (we) wrote, pending a total recast. No regrets, no hard feelings, always the option of restarting something in the future. But for now, The Uncommonwealth‘s primary function in my life is a great learning experience, if not an outright cautionary tale.
The difficulty of managing—or committing to—an ambitious film team is not to be underestimated. Especially if you are in a community of improvisors, who take for granted the immediate satisfaction and fast turnaround time of weekly shows, weekly bombs, weekly laughs. Film is, honestly, only 10% fun—but the payoffs are more substantial than the disposable, transient giggles in an improv show. The Wasteland, mercifully, has an end date of December 14th. With a solid, clear goal of doing the show in Nov/Dec, our cast and directors and crew are more able to commit—and follow through on—some very demanding shooting schedules. Much of the post-production work falls on the shoulders of the directors, and our one tech/fx wizard, since we don’t have dedicated editors. With the helmers editing 24/7 and the cast rehearsing or shooting for 3-6 hours per week, it’s a damn good thing we have a definite open date.
It’s been a tumultuous month. As this one perpetually-shifting project continues to eat my life, all the other little projects are falling by the wayside. Uncommonwealth is done, I’m on hiatus from Rondo, my writing is begging to be touched, and I’m only doing one Mainstage show in the foreseeable future….
I just had this cute little metaphor about the coming of autumn coinciding with the falling-off of old commitments, like leaves off a tree or some bullshit. I’ll be honest—I’m not in a very poetic mood, and I have miles to go before I sleep.
The esteemed Eric Pope and I are currently brainstorming a new verb to describe a common phenomenon amongst aspiring screenwriters (which, to my knowledge, doesn’t have its own slang term yet):
_______ : -verb (used without object)
To experience the inevitable but crushing sadness caused by discovery that your brilliant, original spec script is undeniably similar to a Hollywood project that just moved into production.
Here are some of the verbs we’ve bandied about:
Surely you have more ideas….
(For Pope, he was ______ by I Sell the Dead.
I was ______ upon learning of Adventureland‘s existence.)
I'm a full-time student in USC's Stark Producing Program, class of '12.
Code Duello joined the UCB TourCo and is available for national bookings.
Syndicate
This is me in Peru. I am very interesting.
Click a photo to enlarge or visit my Flickr collection.
This is me in one of my comedy shows. Won't you come to the next one?