W2 - Wendy to the Second Power

This week Thanksgiving is at my house, mostly cooked by me, with some dishes from other members of my family. So I got what will be a family favorite movie on DVD to watch: UP. When I saw the movie this summer, I told my brother and mom they would love the dogs. I myself love little Jordan Nagai doing the voice of Russell. Such funny dialog and he's so perfect at it!

I also got the BBC TV DVD special edition of THE MIGHTY BOOSH. I'd watched most of the episodes on YouTube until BBC TV figured out they wanted to get American money too, and made everyone take down their clips. I don't think my family will remotely get into that series. I find the hermaphrodite merman Old Greg hysterical, but I realize you have to evolve with the show to even "get it."

Then, because I'm a Jane Austen completist, I got the 2005 PRIDE & PREJUDICE. Man, it's awful. Not so awful I wouldn't buy it, and I'm almost always intrigued by how Joe Wright films things (will remain permanently amazed at ATONEMENT). Mostly I'm a fan of Keira Knightley too, with her gorgeous face and upper class drawl.

But the adaptation just removes whole characters the plot needs, and makes over relationships elsewhere. The casting -- like Brenda Blevyn and Donald Southerland for the parents, the bland Jenna Malone as bad sister Lydia -- is sometimes crappy. And having the intensely sharp-minded and socially aware Eliza Bennett drop her jaw, roll her eyes and snort, then go carvorting off around town and field with no bonnet or gloves, it's awful. Keira looks drab, dull, and distractingly flat-chested. Then they end with her fingering the naked calf of Mr. Dorsey who's standing barefooted on their balcony. Yuck.

But now I haz that one too. For me, the perfection of the 1995 BBC series with the hot Colin Firth can never be equaled. I love how Sue Birtwhistle does period stuff!

Wow, this not-quite-kids' movie and not-quite-adult movie WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE has made $65 million+ at the box office as of this week. And it's sure to be a monster hit on DVD too. So, good on Spike Jonz for taking a chance with such an odd property.

The lead, an 8-10 year old actor named Max Records (they started filming in 2005) is precocious and perfect. His face, his furious energy, all just wonderful. The grimy wolf costume, just perfect. You see him on talk shows (he's 12 now) showing eerie calmness and a very deliberate way of talking. He's already acting adult-y. But in ths movie, he's a wild boy with all his emotions showing in his face. It's stunning, and surely an award-winning performance. The stories about filming talk about how affectionate and supportive Jonz was to get Max to be in the moment. And it worked!

Catherine Keener was a great mom. Loved the voice talent. You don't often think of a voice actor being filmed huffing and snorting. But James Gandolfini as the biggest, roughest, most emotionally torn of the monsters, acts through his nose too! Lauren Ambrose, Catherine O'Hara, Paul Dano, Forrest Whittaker, Chris Cooper... They played their parts totally straight. Yes, the monsters are stand-ins for the emotions in Max's developing ego-self. But in this, they're given long-standing beefs and gripes and affinities that influence the plot. There's a bull monster who never seems to talk, or play, and he's played by some no-name actor. Was never quite sure what he was supposed to represent.

Because, yes, the script was full of Jungian analysis and metaphors, with plot developments that come right out of the pages of Bruno Bettelheim fairytale analysis. Jonz and Dave Eggerton were working from a kid's book with 8 lines, after all. They did fine at having a family life set-up that gave Max angst to trouble him, home behavior that made him wanting to stay as a wolf-boy king of monsters appealing, incidents and complications in the monster world that resonated with his psyche. The triggering event, that makes Max realize he needs to return home, was too freaking blatant, so lost the magical spell, but most of the rest of it was well done.

I'm not a fan of muppet movies. They don't give me the required suspension of disbelief because I'm always aware of the puppet assembly and the puppeteer working the gears. That happened here, so I'm not saying it's 100% great. But the voice talents were so strong, that I teared up many times over the monsters' heartbreaks. So there you go.

You play you pay! I knew it would be a big hunk of money to go away to Hawaii for two weeks for the HWC and Retreat. And to sting even more, my employer made us use up vacation at the holidays and didn't let us accrue more until April started. So I had 3 days without pay in there too.

I just did my spreadsheet "expense" report for my 2009 tax file, and confirmed what I thought. This was the most expensive thing I've done for my writing career and personal development ever. Well, getting my BFA at the University of Texas cost more, but this was all concentrated into two weeks!

Lodging, food, travel, tours, conference fees. It came up to $4,800. When you add in the hit my paycheck took, it's closer to $6,000.

Wow. But worth it! What a cool opportunity!

And this explains why almost everybody else was a retired doctor or attorney writing the Great American Thriller. Or looking back over their hippie days to write a sexy memoir.

A long day of traveling yesterday -- got into the hotel's white stretch limo (!!) at 5:00 a.m. Hawaiian time. Lost the 5 hours I'd gained as I flew back to LAX then to Austin. Got onto the Super Shuttle, half the price of the direct taxi, which luckily dropped me off first. That was still getting me to my house at 12:25 a.m. though, Austin time. Then two hours to unpack, go through mail, get set up for the work day.

Then back to work 9:00 a.m. this morning. Very tired but I can handle for one day. However, how deflating to be back in the grind after the past several weeks of planning and going to Hawaii... I feel so low this morning!

More bummer real life stuff: the Austin Film Festival sent me notification CAN'T SAY NO, my comedy script, didn't make it to second round. I'm suprised because I did read scripts this year and it was certainly worthy of the top 10%.

And bummer real life: my novel manuscript I quickly assembled and sent to the Hawaii Writers Conference prose contest didn't even make top 10 finalists there. But it was firmly supernatural mystery, and those people they called to the stage were from the retreat, so I recognized their work from the "first page dread overhead" exercise and no one was genre at all. Well, the closest to genre were the two writers who retold Hawaiian myths, but not really close. The woman who won 1st place had a Korean mother's coming of (mature) age story. Congrats to them all; my manuscript did get some notice from readers, I think.

The Hawaii Writers Conference started early Friday morning, with incredible Hawaiian artists and scholars chanting, singing and dancing. Whoa! Very powerful, and I found that Kaumakaiwa and his family are from the Big Island and their chants and hulas are based on Pele and volcano-creation and lava, so are unusually visceral and powerful...!

Michael Arndt, screenwriter of LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE, did an incredible two-part course on movie endings: The Good, the Bad, the Insanely Great. He had clips and a really good analysis of warring value systems on three levels.

Liked hearing from Steve Fischer, a literary and Hollywood agent, and his perspective about what's going on in publishing and the movie biz. Long story short: Hollywood is offering low-ball deals and not honoring the "rates" that writers have worked themselves up to. It's like taking a big cut in salary now. Yeah, greedy.

Also went to lunch with screenwriter Diane Lake (FRIDA) who took me to task about what I had done or finished or promoted since last August in Cape Cod. She's very generously taken me on as a mentee --! I'll report to her, get advice... I had 4 ideas in my head, 2 scripts (from Margaret South's replotting), the supernatural mystery I began to enter the HWC contest, and a novel I'd started 5 years ago that had Hawaiian Kahuna magic in it. That last thing has gotten re-invigorated by being here, and also makes me wonder... So many times I've written a piece of fiction with a key element in it, only to have that element show up in my life powerfully within a few years. Hmmmm. More on that as I ponder! But Diane said to write the supernatural mystery RIGHT NOW because it has such market potential. And not to tell my pitch to too many people because it's so good. Yay! And useful to have one of the four ideas prioritized based on market stuff she knows better than me. Again, yay!

Today, just a final half-day and then I plan to take a tour to the north island side, and see Dole pineapples in the field too. Then back to the mainland and then to Austin by crack of dawn tomorrow.

I got a lot of good workshopping and structure from Margaret South, who analyzes scripts and novels using her Art of Story system. We've met twice a day on Saturday, Sunday and Monday. Today was our one-on-one sessions. I went to her with my need to structure a different love story for my HEAVEN & NELL screenplay. She helped me make some good streamlining decisions, move the conflict around so that my main character is Nell, not Lee the love interest or the town of Enoch. For Hollywood, simple is better, especially for a spec script from a beginner. (Even though I'm not a beginner because I've written 7 feature-length scripts already, but Hollywood will call me one because I don't have a job in the biz yet.)

Other people in the group are also getting good advice. Whether they're taking it or not remains to be seen. Seems like the indicator for how much insight someone will accept is how much testosterone runs through their brain. This stuff is gold, but some of these guys... And I hear from some of the group critiques (which we don't do) in other classes that mini-rebellions are breaking out. Seems to me the issue is that people spend $$ and time to get here, so they're typically mature and opinionated people who can carve 1.5 weeks out of their lives, so they're pretty powerful. And successful. Some seem to expect to show up and have people throw bouquets to them for their every page or thought. Not so!

The daily general sessions are also being interesting. I got insights on ways to pitch from Sam(antha) Horn. Learned about thrillers and plotting from Gary Braver and Karin Slaughter. Got story beginnings from multiple people, including Diane Lake, who J4 and I workshopped with last August in Cape Cod. It is being interesting and fun!

Then today, I also had the morning off so I took a WONDERFUL tour to the misty valley area and saw Queen Emma's summer palace, a Pali lookout point, drove through rainforests and found a hidden waterfall and ancient petroglyph -- just right off the highway! So lovely...! Go here for the photos.

Seeing a woman-oriented movie like JULIE & JULIA on the opening weekend helps to impress Hollywood that not all movies have to be geared at the 14 year old boy. And the theater was pretty full on Friday afternoon, nice! Plus many of the people there were grandparents or parents being escorted by their adult children or grandchildren, which was sweet to see. You rarely see so many gray-haired people at a theater!

As almost everybody else who saw the movie and reviewed, I was blown away by the Meryl Streep performance of Julia Child. She emulated the voice, not as a mockery, but making it very human and part of a whole personality. I was enthralled with how it showed that Julia Child loved life, loved food, loved France! Streep was not gorgeous, but appropriately matronly in her look, too. But they were odd about Julia's immense height -- they didn't pull that off very consistently. She was 6'2" and towered over her beloved husband Paul in real life. As played by Stanley Tucci, sometimes Paul was close in height, then you'd see a medium shot where obviously Streep was on a box, etc.

The way that relationship was presented, with all its humor and sophistication, and unlikely sexiness, was wonderful, however! You just adored the both of them! The movie covers Julia's life, as written about in her memoir, My Life In France, which itself has poetic quotes from letters Paul wrote his brother, she wrote her penpal and sister, etc. It goes from her arrival in Paris when Paul is posted there to the moment she finally gets an acceptance for her cuisine-changing cookbook. More, more of Julia Child!

Because, as other reviewers have said, the Julie Powell part is not-so-much. One must applaud Powell's goal of cooking through a thick book of recipes in a year, which she accomplished. Some of the shots of the completed dishes make your mouth water! I like adorable Amy Adams in most things I see her in. But they kept wanting to make her schlubby in this, one assumes to make her normal and not star-quality. But they didn't write the character schlubby enough. As a result, her character arc is flat, and her whiny personality juxtaposition to Julia's makes her half of the scenes feel draggy.

And there's also the thing I theorize about: one reads blogs regularly for a different type of entertainment experience than you seek in the movie theater, where smiles are often literally nine feet long. A blog is a small, intimate experience. It lets you imagine you've worked out a basic friendship (with a stranger, part of the fantasy) and joined a community (of faceless people reading electronic flickers on a computer screen, but again, part of the fantasy). You come to the blogs you like daily or regularly because it's mostly familiar, and varies only enough to hold a small part of your attention. People don't arc very much in blogs; they just keep having the same types of experiences and reactions over and over again.

Translate that on the screen and it's not epic enough. Not enough at stake, not enough hell for the character to go through. If a writer can live through an experience and then type it up within 24 hours while checking LOLcats, it's not cinema worthy.


Update: There's a lot of spoilers in this article by L.A. Times writer Russ Parsons, but it also reveals sekrit stuff about the real connection between Julie and Julia. Don't read it until after you've seen the movie and wondered about that odd piece of info given at the end. You'll know what of I speak when you see the movie.

I did it, I did it, I completed all the script reading and critiques for Austin Film Festival on Friday night before midnight! Yay!

Turned in my last checked-out and read scripts yesterday after the Austin Screenwriters Group meeting. And that's another big ol' burden off my back!

• Project #1: Complete rewrite of CAN'T SAY NO and submit to AFF and other script contests - DONE
  
• Project #2: Coordinate a one-day writers workshop with script guru Michael Hauge - DONE
  
• Project #3: Read/judge scripts for AFF and get the Producer's Pass - DONE
  
• Project #4: Write a first chapter and do a synopsis for the Hawaii Writers Conference contest of the supernatural mystery I thought of last year: PINKY BLACK AND THE BITERS.

Yes, I do these to myself, but it's in the arena where I am ambitious. Not so ambitious at my dayjob. I believe in giving value for my paycheck. I believe in learning new things and taking on challenges for personal growth. So I do find growth in my dayjobs.

The summer projects of 2009 were mostly about giving myself opportunities in where I hope to transition to full-time someday: being a writer / screenwriter / story developer.

J4 and I got together for dinner at the new Corazon, which is where Castle Hill used to be on 5th Street. Same owners, now a Tex-Mex or Interior Mexican menu. I have to say: mehhh. When you can score delicious enchiladas or carne asada meals (that's what we had) for $6-8 at various places in town, going here to get only-okay meals for $16-18? Didn't impress me. Mexican cuisine is not the way to go when you're trying to be upscale. Especially if you're not adding the exotic dishes.

However, the coconut cream tart with brulee bananas was tasty and unusual! And having a sit-down, talkfest with J4 always hits the spot!

LeslieC's birthday was way at the beginning of July, but she's mostly in Boerne doing an extensive health and cleansing system, then is often feeling puny and not able to find places that accommodate her restricted diet when she is in town. But we decided to go out Friday night to Eddie V's Edgewater Grill anyway, as part of my treat. Poor thing; she ate half her seabass and a few bites of salad, then got ill. I snarfed up my lemon-parmesan sole and the side veggies we got to share. And also her special birthday dessert of strawberries and raspberries! She couldn't eat it, and I wanted it to look appreciated. Yeah, so I was full but threw myself on the grenade and ate several bites -- ! This place always has top service (one of the most expensive places to eat in Austin; they should!) but Friday night they were extra-extra-solicitous. Assume that's a function of the economy; they weren't crazy busy at 8pm like usual either.

Then later, we hung out at her house with her two kitty boys, and she opened the 7-8 gifts I had for her. That's our celebratory ritual; many lovely gifts at birthdays and Christmas. I'd chosen as a theme "body care" gifts, and it worked. Especially the Andrew Weil bath spa set.

Yesterday, we had our monthly Austin Cats (Blake Snyder SAVE THE CAT group of Austin) meeting, and Melody made a Paula Deen dish called "chicken bog." Lots of rice, sausage and chicken. And spicy! Here's a photo of the group that day. We're moving from Melody's home to a public library meeting room, so I brought her flowers to thank her.


Blake Snyder Workgroup for Screenwriters in Austin. At this meeting (L to R): Stephanie Harrison, me, Alan Barber, Melody Lopez, Al Rodriguez

Then I drove through the 104-degree weather to Shady Grove, which was weirdly super busy on such a hot day. I looked at the people in the outdoor patios eating and wondered, WTF? Our group of Writergrrls lunched inside, in the AC. Can't say much good about the nachos I shared with JenniferM because they were Tex-Mex as interpreted by yo' white trash auntie. Really; sweet corn and sweet relish and American cheese?! But the discussions were wonderful!

JenniferM's book was recently reviewed wonderfully on the Huffington Post. Robin A+'s new editor sent out queries on her mystery novel to 10 publishers, and 9 of them wanted the full manuscript! I passed around my flyer from the Hawaii Writers Conference & Retreat coming up in 4 weeks. Once again, when I brought up a Writergrrl field trip to Glastonbury, eyes lit up! Anyway, lots of good successes in the group lately!

Ooh, one of the guys who took the Michael Hauge Story Mastery workshop with me found a good page on Mike's site that lays out his screenplay structure and gives examples from good scripts.

http://www.screenplaymastery.com/structure.htm