Out of Focus

COMPLETE McKEE FOR ALMOST FREE

Over at MBToolbox today, Claire Zulkey posted what's basically an outline of a chunk of Robert McKee's infamous "Story Seminar" (which she actually found here). Her premise was that McKee's seminar (which in my book went from localized film-community "fame" all the way to infamy with its dead-on representation in the brillian Adaptation) is so expensive (true) or may not come to a location near you often enough (if you're not in LA or NY -- somewhat true too), that this website which looks to have essentially published the entire syllabus was a way for you to experience some of the content for free.

Well, if you're willing to spend a little more than free but nowhere near $500, you're better off spending about $23.10 (that's the Amazon price) and buying McKee's book "Story." Hell, for even less you can hear McKee read the book-on-tape, in which case you basically are attending the seminar.

"Story," the book, is basically word-for-word his three day lecture (because it's way more lecture than seminar -- he doesn't respond well to questions except during the specific periods he dilineates for them). The only thing "Story" lacks is his detailed analysis of "Casablanca" (or whatever script he's teaching now) during which you follow along script to screen and he looks at the film from not just a screenwriting but also filmmaking perspective. OK, so maybe it also lacks some more recent films which he uses as examples of certain issues, but as somebody who has been to his "Story Structure" seminar, attended a "Genre Day" looking at "Thrillers" and read "Story" the book, I doubt that he's changed much of anything -- except for a few titles -- along the way.

I wrote an email to Claire about the above, and also mentioned the following, my own take on "Shecky McKee" as my friend likes to call him (because of the reptetitive and rehearsed schtick he includes in his seminars):

McKee is a pompous ass (as Adaptation also accurately depicted -- Brian Cox really nailed him) and I've always found it somewhat funny/interesting that McKee has embraced his presence in the film that he includes mention of it on all his advertising. Still, what he proffers can, in fact, be pretty valuable. Personally, I think any prospective screenwriter gets in trouble if he/she explicitly follows any one method or technique of writing, but what McKee does is boil it all down to an almost scientific foundation, and ultimately that analysis can be helpful especially once a writer finds his/her own methods and techniques to implement that foundation. I've always been fascinated, also, by how he is always able to take any film that might seem to contradict one of his main points regarding story structure and still find a way to fold it into his argument.

So if you've ever considered taking his seminar, I wouldn't exactly say don't. But if you've already read the book, you will experience a significant long-winded case of deja vu.

THE FIRST NEIGHBORHOOD DISAPPOINTMENT -- TILLIE'S OF BROOKLYN

Oh dear. I don't mean to get away from the whole entertainment thing so quickly again, but I have to vent just a wee bit. As I've mentioned (over-and-over-and-over), my apartment search and move was somewhat horrific. Now, I've been in my new apartment nearly a month, and I'm still not completely settled. My room is coming together ... slowly. The rest of the apartment is coming together ... about as slowly. As usual, certain annoyances (some minor, some major) started to make themselves apparent shortly after I moved in. Such as, you ask? Well, let's see. My closet, for example, which was added in a renovation a couple years ago, had a shelf and hanging rod that were about to collapse out of the drywall because virtually no anchors were used to secure it. Plus, the closet was given a sunken fake ceiling for apparently no reason -- about two feet lower than the rest of the apartment ceiling. Plus, a new building entry system was installed that mimics those of banks' ATM vestibules. You use a ket instead of a card, but it's a magnetized lock and there's an annoying beep that sounds not just when you buzz someone in but when you turn your key or press the interior button to get out. Oh yeah, and my room is directly over that door on the second floor. (I've actually almost stopped noticing.) Whenever I get the mail, the entire mailbox door comes off with the key and I have to replace it on the hinge when I lock it up. Plus, the apartment has Direct TV right now instead of cable which ... well, that's actually the subject of another post.

And besides, I don't want to vent about the apartment. I want to vent about Tillie's. I love Tillie's. It's located on DeKalb and Vanderbilt. It's one of the reasons I focused so much of my search on Ft. Greene and Clinton Hill. It's an relatively plain, simple, independent cafe that reminds me of places I grew-up with in San Francisco. It's obviously NOT Starbucks. And it also has free WiFi.

OH YEAH, THE GOTHAMS. SORRY, I FORGOT (SILLY IFP)

The Independent Feature Project was started back in 1979 to support independent filmmakers making no-budget films. Over the past 26 years, the IFP had grown into an important institution within the film community, quickly spawning a Los Angeles-based chapter in 1980 and eventually also expanding to Chicago, Seattle and Minneapolis. (There was also a Miami chapter, but it was shut down in May.) All of the individual local groups retained their own autonomy, and membership was actually purchased separately, yet they all were related and supported each other.

A couple years ago, the IFPs decided they wanted to become more unified, though, so they all changed their names ... sort of. New York, which had simply been IFP, became IFP/NY. LA, which went by IFP West became IFP/LA. And so on. But the dirty little secret (which I'm sure would be heavily disputed by those closely involved with IFP/NY, but not me, and as I've mentioned before, I've been a member of the New York chapter for years), a long time ago the Los Angeles chapter began to overshadow, at least publicly, New York. Independent film as an entity may, for all intents and purposes, still have been largely centered here, but its marketing and public shouts from the rooftops were coming from IFP/West.

The most notable example of this was the establishment of the IFP/West Independent Spirit Awards which were launched in 1984 as the "Friends of Independent Film Awards" and were then rechristened in 1986 with their current name. The purpose was to give independent film -- at the time still not widely recognized or celebrated during awards season -- its own version of the Oscars. (Is that true? Have the indies changed so much? Has classification of an indie always been a bit controversial. Well, in 1986, the Best Feature winner was Martin Scorsese's After Hours which had a $4.5 Million budget and was distributed by Warner Bros.) They were originally a relatively informal event -- a luncheon under a big tent. By the time I attended my first one (as a writer for the UCLA Daily Bruin) in 1993, they were still a relatively casual party, and the tent covered the parking lot at Raleigh Studios in Hollywood. When I moved to New York in 1996, they were still that way, and if you weren't in LA, you had no way of seeing them, although I do remember in 1997 or 1998 going to the Knitting Factory to watch a closed circuit feed with a bunch of other NY film industry geeks. Much has changed over the past decade, though. Now the Spirits have major sponsorship and air live on IFC. They used to then be reedited for broadcast on Bravo, but now Rainbow Media is keeping it in the family with the delayed version to air on AMC. The Spirit Awards are a big event in the film world now. All the major rags cover it; all the major indie players attend it; there's a long red carpet; and while it may all still take place under a tent, it's a much larger one on top of a beach in Santa Monica. The show is actually put on with slightly more production value and even cheesy (often lame) production numbers.

Oh yeah, and then the IFP/West or IFP/LA went and created the Los Angeles Film Festival going into (I believe) its 12th year when this June's event occurs. So basically, why is it that anyone was surprised when the leaders of IFP/LA decided they didn't want to be tethered to the New York mothership any longer, at least not formally. Sure there still seems to be some reciprocity here or there -- they each mention each other on their web pages, natch -- but why not come up with a craptastic acronym like FIND, rename yourself Film Independent and strike out on your own. Because really, what does IFP/NY have.

Well, IFP/NY actually has a lot; they just don't market themselves as well. And while the organization does, in fact, do a lot to help support local indie filmmakers, their events have always retained a slight dirty-stepchild feel compared to LA's. And the prime example is the IFP/NY's annual Gotham Awards, which happen tonight. (Yeah it took me a while to get here, but see? I do have a point.)

WHAT DO YOU MEAN SHE'S JEWISH?!?!?

Since I already have the tribe on my mind today, it seems only natural that this unbeknownst to me news should hit especially powerfully. On Monday I posted at Gothamist about the "Evening with Woody Allen" at Lincoln Center during which Allen would apparently sit for a Q&A and audience members (for between $30-100 a pop) could see an advance screening of his latest film Match Point. Not know what I was watching the first time I saw the trailer, I was shocked by the trailer because this film certainly looks little like much (if anything) we've seen previously from Woody.

Well, I didn't get to the Lincoln Center event, but Gawker did, and while I found their reportage on the event interesting, it's the "Update" that really struck a chord:

It would seem that Scarlett Johansson’s mother is Jewish, which of course makes her Jewish, which means that there is a Jew in the cast. Who knew.

Not I, for sure. In fact I'm still trying to wrap my head around the idea that Scarlett Johannson is Jewish?!? But can I ask the other male heterosexual members of my faith (Ashkenazi or Sephardic?), does hearing that a certain incredibly attractive and sexy woman -- and, notable acting talent aside, Ms. Scarlett somehow becomes a wee bit hotter in every film -- is Jewish somehow make her even more attractive? Is it this family inbred thing about marrying Jewish that does it? Or am I all alone here. I mean sure, I didn't know that Rachel Weisz was Jewish when I first fell in love upon "meeting" her while she was sunbathing nude in the Tuscan countryside in Stealing Beauty, but ah how she rose higher through my ranks upon discovering her heritage.

Or the two big crushes of my late teens, through college and even on to today? Crazy Winona Ryder who had my heart thanks to the triumvirate of Beetlejuice, 1969 and especially Heathers.

Or my all time great unrequited Hollywood crush, Brooklyn-dweller Jennifer Connelly. The vastly underrated Some Girls had me hooked. Her own nude sunbathing scenes in The Hot Spot saved that crapfest in my then-18-year-old eyes. And as John Hughes was discovering he no longer had it in him to make a good teen comedy, the image of her enticing Dermot Mulroney while riding that mechanical hobby horse always made Career Opportunities almost worthwhile. Then came what was supposed to be her starmaking turn in The Rocketeer, and as the main film writer for the UCLA Daily Bruin, I somehow found myself waiting in a suite room at the Bel Age Hotel for my one-on-one interview with none other than the only J.C. this Jewish 19 year old from San Francisco cared about. Oh no ... there's no good story here. I never had any misconceptions of wowing or wooing the stunning Hollywood starlet (who at the time was rumored to be secretly engaged to Rocketeer co-star Bill Campbell). But was I nervous? Sure. Did we have a pleasant enough conversation? Yeah. In fact, I remember her seeming incredibly down-to-earth and very nice. Have I ever wished I was now Paul Bettany? Damn straight. Oh yeah ... and all that time, I never even knew that she, too, was fucking Jewish!

Oh, and by the way ... just while I'm being all sexed-up male and everything, as sexy as Jewess Johannson looks in Match Point, lets not ignore her gentile counterpart Emily Mortimer who is deceptively stunning as hell. If you've seen Young Adam, you'll know what I mean, as she reveals herself in two scenes with co-star Ewan McGregor (neither of the two particularly pretty story-wise). If you haven't seen it and are curious ... uhm ... I'm actually not a fan of recommending lechery but ....

OK ... I apologize. I think I need a shower!

OH YAY! IT'S TIME TO START OBSESSING OVER NOMINEES

The newly renamed Film Independent (formerly IFP/LA, recently split-off from the rest of IFP and decided to show its independence by creating the incredibly stupid acronym FIND -- Film INDependent) announced its nominations for the 2006 Independent Spirit Awards today, and while the qualification of movie for consideration as an "independent" film is always a bit dubious leaving many people questioning, "Why this and not that?" I must admit that at first glance I don't have too many quibbles. Granted, I have yet to see Brokeback Mountain or the feature film directing debut of Tommy Lee Jones, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (two of the five Best Feature nominees); I personally found Capote a bit of a bore (apart from Philip Seymour Hoffman's brilliant performance) and very sloppily directed, which is probably why Bennett Miller was not honored; but The Squid and the Whale and Good Night, and Good Luck, which round-out the category, are two of my favorites this year.

"Best First Feature" is also, usually, a pretty interesting field, and this year is no exception. With Crash and indie darling Miranda July's Me and You and Everyone We Know leading the pack, I still need to see Thumbsucker and Lackawanna Blues, although the presence of both the 52 year-old Paul Haggis and the 51-year-old George C. Wolfe in the "Best First Feature" category seems a bit odd even if it's technically true. Then there's Tribeca Film Festival favorite Transamerica which I'm actually finally seeing in just a few hours. I wasn't such a huge proponent of neither Crash nor Me and You. I liked a lot about each film, but I also found much lacking. I don't want to root against them without having seen the other three, but I hope their respective notoriety don't make either of them a total shoe-in.

All of this is off-the-cuff, and I haven't had a chance to really think about what might be missing -- I'll have to come back to that -- but I can highlight a few nominations, other than Squid and Good Night (as well as the respective directing nods to Noah Baumbach and George Clooney) that make me especially excited. (As I have still not seen plenty of the nominees, these aren't any kind of actual selections; just nominations of which I wholeheartedly approve):

WHEN THE MOVIE IS BETTER THAN THE BOOK: SHOPGIRL

I've alluded to my fascination with the subject of movie adaptations before. Whether it's book-to-screen, stage-to-screen, even video game-to-screen, the very nature of trying to take a premise or story from one medium and successfully translate it to another is one of the most difficult hurdles in filmmaking, and the fact of the matter is, most people don't do it very well. I find the problem to be a misconception with the idea of being "faithful" to the source material. Too many people get confused between remaining "faithful" and being "literal" -- two completely different ideas. Chris Columbus, for example, has managed to thoroughly mangle two Harry Potters and one Rent in large part due to being quite "literal" but managing to miss the majority of what made any of those original works interesting and soulful in the least.

But actually, this preamble is a subject for another post. As I've mentioned in the past, I've done a lot of work on adaptation. In a "Film & Literature" class at NYU some years ago, we were required to write two major papers: the first involved reading a novel before seeing its movie offspring and the second was based on doing the reverse. I've always had a preference for the former: generally if a movie is coming out and it's based on a book which I'm interested in reading, I'll hold-off seeing the movie until after finishing the book. This has often led to me completely missing the theatrical release of certain films. (I've become more lenient with my little rule this year due to a few different circumstances.) Personally, I've always found that a well-made movie can still enchant and surprise me even if I have read the script but the same is not necessarily true if I've seen another person's visual interpretation of the source material before creating my own literary-induced world in my head. I think this is somewhat normal: at the most basic level, once you've seen (or even heard about) a known actor playing a certain role, you start to picture that person while reading the book and you lose a little something of the interactive magic inherently created from simply reading.

And then came Steve Martin's "Shopgirl". I bought the book a while ago but hadn't read it. The movie came out to mixed and unenthusiastic reviews, but I've always been a fan of Martin and I also love Claire Danes and Jason Schwartzman. Besides, I always like to see everything anyway. So when a friend suggested we go see it during the coming weekend, I figured I better get cracking on the novel. Or rather, the novella, since thanks to its roughly 130 page length, that's how it has most often been described. I didn't get very far into those 130 pages, however, before I found myself disliking it immensely.

THE CHOSEN CHOSEN PEOPLE?

So this is a bit random, but a friend of mine just IMed me to tell me that he was trying to make plans with a friend for Thursday of this week when she told him that she was going to this lecture: "Jews, Genes and Intelligence". It carries the subhead: "Fact or Fiction? Ashkenazi Genes Produce Higher Intelligence."

As a Jew of Ashkenazi descent should I feel like an idiot for not having any awareness that this potential subject of conversation even existed? Or does my lack of knowledge in this instance (and plenty of others, I'm sure) just go to prove the "fiction" side of the argument. And really, which group of Jews would you consider more intelligent: the ones who decided to leave in cold, dank, often grey and ice-covered Eastern Europe or the ones who settled and stayed in more tropical areas like the Mediterranean and the middle-east? Plus, if Ashkenazi Jews are so smart, why does our cuisine basically suck relative to what the Sephardim can cook up?

Do you think the lecture will cover any of these topics? I don't know if I have the patience to find out, but if you go, let me know.

AND WE'RE BACK: YESTERDAY IS AS GOOD A REASON AS ANY TO STAY HOME TONIGHT

I have no idea why HBO Films never gave Yesterday any sort of real theatrical distribution or why they've essentially buried its cable network premiere on a Monday night, post-Thanksgiving. If you have HBO and you're not sure what you're doing tonight, stay home and at 9 PM watch this incredibly powerful, moving and intense film that looks at AIDS in Africa from a perspective most Americans likely never consider. I saw the film earlier this year because it received nominations for Best Foreign Language Feature for the IFP Spirit Awards. (I wrote briefly about it here -- scroll down to "Best Foreign Film." The only reason it didn't receive my top vote is because it was competing with Pedro Almodovar's brilliant Bad Education.) In fact, it also was nominated for a Best Foreign Film Oscar. It won neither with the good but vastly overrated The Sea Inside taking both (as well as the Golden Globe).

Yesterday is a movie that should be required viewing, especially for those of us who live in what ultimately is the very isolated (and often selfish) United States. The Constant Gardner (one of my favorite films so far of 2005) is a good examination of how the pharmaceutical drug industry takes advantage of poverty-stricken African countries, but in Yesterday we see how other parts of Africa are completely ignored. The film tells the story of a woman named Yesterday who lives with her young daughter in a Zulu village with no electricity or running water. When she develops a cough, she has to walk many miles to the nearest village with a clinic. The lines to see the doctor -- who is only there once a week -- are so long that by late morning, people are turned away, as is Yesterday, having to wait another week and make the long journey back from her village only to potentially get turned away again. Yesterday's husband, meanwhile, is working in Johannesburg simply trying to get by and sending what money he can home.

When Yesterday finally gets to see a doctor, she learns that she's HIV positive. She travels to see and tell her husband who of course takes the very reasonable stance of blaming and beating her. Of course, he has it too -- she contracted it from him -- and eventually is lucky that his wife's nature is much kinder than his. The family is someone shunned by the rest of the otherwise very friendly village, but these are people who don't know or can't learn about this disease the way many of us have been educated by it. Yesterday is determined, however, to send her young daughter to school and get an education, and she won't allow herself to succumb to the disease until that has happened. There isn't the money to put all the victims of HIV and AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa on anti-retrovirals. In a Zulu village with no nearby hospitals, there is no "living with HIV," even in the modern day. It is still a death sentence.

Choire Sicha's NY Observer piece "Chitty Chitty Bang, Rent" (UPDATED: "archival link" here, per Choire.) takes a look at how now only did the AIDS crisis in this country not really end in the late-90s but also how Rent, especially in its new movie incarnation (which believe me, that rant is on its way this week for sure!), completely distorts and rewrites the history of people afflicted with HIV and AIDS at the time. It's a fantastic article, but in this great big world of ours, it's still just a microcosm; it's really just the experience in our own backyard. Yesterday, thanks to its beautiful, never overdone, preachy or overdramatic filmmaking, gives us a look at the world on the other side of the tracks. It would be horrifying one if not for the fact that at the end of the day, as sad and tragic as it is, Yesterday proves to be such a sympathetic character of strength and love that in its own way, the outcome provides a sense of hope, that maybe the next generation will be able to learn and advance and help make their corner of the world a little better. Of course, chances are they won't be able to without the help of countries like ours, and the awareness that a great, meaningful and entertaining film like Yesterday can bring to this issue should be given more support and a larger platform.

If you miss it tonight on HBO, it will of course be available on HBO On Demand for some period of time. Make sure not to miss it.

ACTS OF CATHARSIS: PART IV -- MY INCARCERATED LANDLADY (THE FINAL STORY)

We'll be returning to regularly unscheduled programming any second now, but as I continue to vomit out all my apartment/neighborhood/moving experiences, there's one other thing I want to share that I haven't figured out how or where it might otherwise fit. I mentioned it before back in March, in passing. It has to do with my first NYC apartment, the small East Village studio that I subletted from a woman who it turned out (unbeknownst to me most of the time I lived there) was awaiting trial and then in jail in Virginia for attempted murder of her husband. Now ultimately, this woman's predicament had absolutely no effect on my living situation. Sure, I sent my rent checks and payment for any bills to her via a "General Delivery" address in Virginia, and she paid the rent and the NYNEX (yeah, this is back in the day!) and the ConEd. No disconnect or shut-off or eviction notices ever arrived, and I stayed in the place for nearly two years.

So how did I find myself in this bizarre situation you ask? (Or not, but go with me for a sec.) Well, as I mentioned before, the end of September through October 1996 proved to be what I consider one of the luckiest months-plus in my life where a lot of things just fell into place. One was this lovely living situation. I had just gotten the job at HBO NYC Productions and was going to be starting in about a week-and-a-half. It was my last week working at the small talent agency in Beverly Hills where I had spent the previous three years of my life recovering from a short-termed career as an entertainment journalist permanently residing on the junket circuit. One day, a female client from New York arrived. We had always represented her, but in all my time at the agency, I had never spoken to her. She hadn't really been doing so much work with us as she was focusing on theater in New York. But now she had come out to LA to try to get some film and TV meetings. I went to introduce myself saying, "Hi, I'm Aaron. I'm Susan's senior assistant, but Friday's my last day." The expected conversaion ensued:

ACTS OF CATHARSIS: PART III -- WELCOME TO BROOKLYN

Neighborhoods and I have strange relationships. Generally, as soon as I leave a 'hood, everything I wished had been there while living there seems to soon arrive. I moved to New York and lived in the East Village (on E. 3rd St. between 1st & 2nd Aves.) during the height of EV gentrification, before south of Houston LES became desirable. All I ever wanted was a good cafe to sit and read and write. They started appearing about a year after I moved west. Now there are two within about 50 yards of my old building. My next apartment on Christopher St. a block from the river was nice, but the neighborhood at the time was still slightly rough, the Meat Packing district was still a couple years away of hitting its beyond trendy stride, and Hudson River Park was still in the planning stages. The Christopher Street Pier, now a mecca upon which I could see myself sitting staring at the sunset over New Jersey often, was still a place to shoot-up or get blown, more reminiscent of the world of Cruising than grass malls and rollerblades.

When I moved to 83rd Street, nothing excited me more than the fact that there was a cafe next door to the east and a movie theater around the corner to the west. Who could have guessed that I would find both so annoying -- Cafe Lalo is too crowded and too touristy, and the Loews 84th has too many audience members who think of movies as an interactive experience -- that I would rarely go to either.

Two weeks ago, though, I received a particularly warm welcome to my new neighborhood in Brooklyn, one that instantly made me wonder if every move to a new city (if not a new neighborhood) would provide me with a unique encounter. (Oh sure, Brooklyn is New York City, but it's its own city too. In fact, as someone who grew-up in San Francisco, one of the few places in this country -- I believe -- that is both its own city and county with no other towns/cities within its county limits, I've often wondered exactly how NYC could be made up of five counties whereas normally a county is made up of multiple towns. But, as usual, I digress ...)

As I've mentioned before, my move to New York in 1996 took a long time to happen very quickly. I had looked for a job for a year, but it wasn't really until I stopped looking and came here on an unrelated visit that I found something. Suddenly, a month later I had moved. I