Lights, Camera, Inaction!

Finally, something that actually ran in my friend's short lived, but well received d. magazine out of Red Bank, NJ. I had taken a stab at a screenplay (which stalled), but did manage to finish the article to good reviews. I'll get back to it... one of these days.

Amateur Screenplay Confidential

My Cinematic Battle with Procrastination

By Cecil B. Delayed

How the hell did that movie ever get made?!” How many of us have uttered that line after an ill-spent 2 hours and 10 bucks? My grandmother can write better crap than that (may she rest in peace). Hey, I can write better crap than that! Can’t I?

On the other hand, after seeing a great film with its gripping story, sweeping cinematography, engaging dialogue and memorable scenes, how could you not be inspired? This is how all movies should be - so tight, not a wasted frame. These are the kinds of movies I would write if I were a professional screenwriter - which, of course, I am not. I’m a graphic designing ad guy by trade. Yet, advertising is in the visual arts, isn't it? Even if it is a poor third cousin, twice removed from film.

I’ve always said (mostly to myself) that had I not gone to art school, film would have been my alternate career path - a less delusional version of George Costanza’s affinity for architecture and marine biology. In recent years, however, I’ve thought: “Why not me? I’m a pretty creative guy with a flair for words and pictures. Why should I let the title on my smartly designed business card hold me back?” This is the age of second acts and one-man brands. I know lots of people who have shifted gears & careers. A software selling neighbor dreamed of running a proper English Steakhouse (much to the horror of his vegetarian wife and daughter). He wound up buying a popular Italian restaurant. Tonight’s Special: Shepherd’s Pizza Pie. A former ad boss of mine started a local newspaper and mini publishing empire. I even know a photographer who started his own magazine, if you can believe that. So, why not me?

I started my plan slowly, methodically and covertly (besides my wife, you’re only the second to know). To educate myself about screenwriting I began buying used screenplay books (read cheap) on www.amazon.com. I can only dream that future hopefuls will one day buy my screenplay books for 76 cents, plus shipping. I ordered Good Will Hunting by Matt Damon & Ben Affleck, amateurs themselves at that time, and Swingers by Jon Favreau, also a beginner then. Compilations of screenplays by Ed Burns, Barry Levinson and John Sayles were both helpful and extra economical. I wanted to get some by the Coen brothers, but drew the line at a buck.

Next, I ordered books on “the craft” of screenwriting itself. The first had the shamelessly appealing title How to Write a Movie in 21 Days by Viki something. The title has long since proved false. However, I did take away two enlightening bits of information. One is that the main character, or star of my story, is me. Or in your case, you! I also learned that all the story ideas I had were based on some part of my life experience. How could it not? The second is that people write different types of stories (screenplays) at different stages of their lives. Consider the stories someone in their 20’s would write vs. someone in their 40’s, 60’s, and beyond. I imagined a tangled scene at Ye Old Screenwriters Home as people with blue hair and black fingers wrestled with ribbon on some ancient Olivetti.

Chris Keane’s How to Write a Selling Screenplay provided me the nuts & bolts of screenplay structure. This would prove very, make that painfully, important later on. I was surprised (not really) to learn how formulaic the whole process is. For starters, all movies are about problem solving in one way or another. Once you introduce your main character you should identify his or her problem or goal and what he or she will need to do to solve the problem or achieve the goal.

I mostly followed Keane's step by step advice on writing successful screenplays. First, I made a list of all the characters in my story. Then wrote the mini-treatment — a 4 page basic telling of the story using the standard three act format: setup, confrontation & resolution. This was followed by a brief description of the entire story's scenes called the scene breakdown. I learned about the various ways to open a movie. The first 10 pages are critical, as this is where you grab the viewer’s attention, introduce the main characters and establish a sense of time, location, genre and premise. So, with my head full of information and heart full of inspiration, I was ready to write.

And write I did! I shot out of the gate like a frantic, first-time screenwriter (or some less literal analogy). I was giddy as page after witty page flowed from my brain to my monitor. Time and page count just flew by. Maybe that 3 week screenplay scam wasn’t such a scam after all. What if I finish in two weeks? I could use the extra week to make edits and copies. Or better yet, shop for an agent and maybe even a tux. You never know.

At some point I stopped to breathe and realized that I had cranked out a whopping 35 pages! It wasn’t until I re-read those 35 action-packed pages that I noticed I had a problem. A BIG problem. Remember those first 10 pages that are supposed to set the stage? No stage! I got so enamored with backstory that I flew right past key story markers like the inciting incident. This is the big event or turning point that occurs about 15 minutes (or pages) into the script and kicks the story into gear. My inciting incident was nowhere in sight. At the rate I was going I’d have a 300 page, hernia inducing script yielding a 5 hour, insomnia inducing movie. Bad idea! Okay - rookie mistake, time to step back and see where my allegedly careful planning went screwy.

As you may have gleaned from this article, I have a tendency towards verbosity, verbal excess, rattling on. Screenplays need to be concise and so do I. They should start as close as possible to the current, key moment in the main character’s life. I knew what I had to do - go back and do some fundamental restructuring. No major gutting or slash job - just get to the point quicker, start the story later and sprinkle in backstory to help people connect the dots. Sounds like an objective, reasoned approach to a rather disappointing development. I’ll get right on it.

That was a year ago.

That fundamental restructuring thing was not as painless as I’d hoped. Rather than tackle things head on, I side-stepped the issue by continuing to write individual scenes - wonderful scenes I’d been seeing and hearing in my mind and was certain would make the final cut. But that so-called progress was just a mask for something more problematic. It turns out that, in addition to verbosity, I also have issues with procrastination. In fact (full disclosure/irony of ironies), it’s also what my screenplay is about - a gifted artist shoves his gift in a closet and lets procrastination rob himself, and the world, of something really special.

Where do I get these ideas?

*When not screenwriting, which is often, Cecil goes by the name of Joe Landi

Jarring Memories

Returning to my friend's folded magazine for a moment - I had read a good book by the very funny Bill Bryson called "The Life & Times of the Thunderbolt Kid". In it was a hilarious story about jars that I thought would make a great excerpt for the magazine. Never happened. Enjoy!

Jarring Memories
A juicy excerpt from
The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid
by Bill Bryson

Both of my parents had grown up during the Great Depression and neither of them threw anything away if they could possibly avoid it. My mother routinely washed and dried paper plates, and smoothed out for reuse spare aluminum foil. If you left a pea on your plate, it became part of a future meal. All our sugar came in little packets spirited out of restaurants in deep coat pockets, as did our jams, jellies, crackers (oyster and saltine), tartar sauces, some of our ketchup and butter, all of our napkins, and a very occasional ashtray; anything that came with a restaurant table really. One of the happiest moments in my parents life was when maple syrup started to be served in small disposable packets and they could add those to the household hoard.

Under the sink my mother kept an enormous collection of jars, including one known as the toity jar. “Toity” in our house was the term for a pee, and throughout my early years the toity jar was called into service whenever a need to leave the house inconveniently coincided with a sudden need by someone—and when I say “someone,” I mean of course the youngest child: me—to pee.

“Oh, you’ll have to go in the toity jar then,” my mother would say with just a hint of exasperation and a worried glance at the kitchen clock. It took me a long time to realize that the toity jar was not always—or even often—the same jar twice. Insofar as I thought about it at all, I suppose I guessed that the toity jar was routinely discarded and replaced with a fresh jar—we had hundreds after all.

So you may imagine my consternation, succeeded by varying degrees of dismay, when I went to the fridge one evening for a second helping of halved peaches and realized that we were all eating from a jar that had, only a few days before, held my urine. I recognized the jar at once because it had a Z-shaped strip of label adhering to it that uncannily recalled the mark of Zorro—a fact that I had cheerfully remarked upon as I had filled the jar with my precious bodily nectars, not that anyone had listened of course. Now here it was holding our dessert peaches. I couldn’t have been more surprised if I had just been handed a packet of photos showing my mother in flagrante with, let’s say, the guys at the gas station.

“Mom,” I said coming to the dining-room doorway and holding up my find, “this is the toity jar.” “No, honey,” she replied smoothly without looking up. “The toity jar’s a special jar.” “What’s the toity jar?” asked my father with an amused air, spooning peach into his mouth. “It’s the jar I toity in,” I explained. “And this is it.”

“Billy toities in a jar?” said my father, with very slight difficulty, as he was no longer eating the peach half he had just taken in, but resting it on his tongue pending receipt of further information concerning its recent history.“Just occasionally,” my mother said.

My father’s mystification was now near total, but his mouth was so full of unswallowed peach juice that he could not meaningfully speak. He asked, I believe, why I didn’t go upstairs to the bathroom like a normal person. It was a fair question in the circumstances.“Well, sometimes we’re in a hurry,” my mother went on, a touch uncomfortably. “So I keep a jar under the sink— a special jar.” I reappeared from the fridge, cradling more jars—as many as I could carry. “I’m pretty sure I’ve used all these, too,” I announced.

“That can’t be right,” my mother said, but there was kind of a question mark hanging off the edge of it. Then she added, perhaps a touch self-destructively: “Anyway, I always rinse all jars thoroughly before reuse.”

My father rose and walked to the kitchen, inclined over the waste bin, and allowed the peach half to fall into it, along with about half a liter of goo. “Perhaps a toity jar’s not a good idea,” he suggested.

So that was the end of the toity jar; though it worked out for the best, as these things often do. After that, all my mother had to do was mention that she had something good in a jar in the fridge and my father would get a sudden urge to take us to Bishop’s, a cafeteria downtown, which was the best possible outcome, for Bishop’s was the finest restaurant that ever existed.

While "Thunderbolt Kid" is a good book, "A Walk in the Woods" is even better. It's the story of Bill, with his great friend Katz, and their game attempt to walk the 2000+ miles of the Appalachian trail. You'll learn a lot and laugh a lot. You may or may not be tempted to hike after reading.

Shower Power!

This was a piece written for a good friend's magazine, which unfortunately went belly up before the latest issue published, so I thought I'd share it here.

Lather. Rinse. Retreat!

An admitted shower head comes clean

by Joe Landi

Apparently, I do some of my best thinking naked. Or more specifically, in the shower. I realized this the other day when, for the umpteenth time, I just couldn’t remember if I had shampooed my hair or not. Was this short-term memory loss, or the onslaught of dementia? Possibly. But the likely reality was that my mind had simply been freed to wander, deep in thought. Kind of like the way a dozen or more exits can pass on the Parkway and you don’t remember a blessed thing. Yet somehow, managed to drive the vehicle without causing a 50 car pileup. (“Not today Mr.“TV- News Chopper-Cam Guy!”)

So what is it about the shower that inspires such profound and prolific thought? Is it the steady pulse of the hot water (cool if you’re reading this in August) that transports me back to an embryonic fluid-filled, white-tiled womb? (which could use a serious scrubbing, by the way) Maybe it’s the serene sense of sanctuary and solitude that allows the body, and the mind, to truly relax, to drift off, yet be totally in tune to a deep inner-self. I’ve never dabbled in any meditation techniques, or mind-altering drugs, but something tells me they all get you to that “peaceful, easy feeling” Glenn Frey was yammering about.

Some may wonder if it has to be a shower as opposed to a bath. I’m not a bath guy, so I’ll leave that up to you (Bathists). As a kid, the move out of the tub and into the shower (same place) was like a right of passage, and I haven’t looked back. Seeing my mother bathe my younger brothers in the kitchen sink didn’t help either. More recently, a wacky sitcom neighbor described his bathing experience as “sitting in a tepid pool of his own filth.” That seems about right. You’re also on your own when it comes to steamrooms, saunas, hot tubs, jacuzzi’s, and similar relics of the 70’s.

So how is this stress-reducing, awareness-raising, zen-like state achieved? My timeline goes something like this: The first 5 minutes involve getting the obligatory tasks of shampooing, body washing, etc. out of the way. Then, I literally turn my back and let my troubles, cares, and Suave (for Men) suds drizzle down the drain. I’m standing there, eyes closed, elbows at my side, fingertips gently grasping the back of my neck. My mind is pretty much empty. I attribute this not only to what’s going on in the shower (not much at this point), but also what isn’t.

This cocoon of consciousness is completely cut off from the clutter and chaos of the outside world. No kids, no spouses, no neighbors, no clients, no computers, no TV, no email, no deadlines, no phones, no i-pods, no bills, no house repairs, no leaf blowers, no lawn mowers, no cars making funny/costly sounds, no pets, no debts, no nothing. Just you and your naked self.

That’s when things really start to flow. It usually starts soft and slow. Maybe the bud of an old idea long buried in the backyard of your brain springs to mind. Or maybe something new in your life proudly makes itself known. Sometimes ideas are practical, like finally finding the perfect way to celebrate your parents golden wedding anniversary that in no way involves semi-frozen shrimp, or ziti in aluminum pans perched over flaming Sterno cans.

Other thinking can be more personal. The words to a new song you never knew you had in you, suddenly emerge. And you’re not even a songwriter, at least you hadn’t been. Or it could be an idea for a short story, a play, or novel (or magazine article) that starts writing itself, right there. You’re just adding water to a warm, fertile environment and letting your ideas sprout and flourish. Like a greenhouse for your grey matter.

Try not to guide or steer the process. The thing to do is just let it come. With so many ideas swirling about, you’ll want to collect every one. Short of a waterproof whiteboard, this may not be practical or necessary or even desirable. I’ve gotten up to write down middle of the night flashes of brilliance, only to find them rather pale in the light of day. Any truly inspired ideas will wait till you towel off. And ideas that you miss may reappear or be replaced by new and better ones the following day.

Tomorrow’s Forecast: 100% chance of a shower. Enjoy!

*In the interest of the environment, I should state here that I am conscious of excess water usage. It can be hard to turn those knobs and tear away from the “hot towel out of the dryer” feeling a shower wraps you in. What can feel like an hours-long indulgence, should actually take no longer than 10 to 15 minutes. I relieve some guilt by recycling, scooping my dog’s business, or passing on that plastic bag for my next purchase of Suave (for Men) / Tilex / Irish Spring.

Battle of the Giant Jesus's

"In this corner... from Rio de Janeiro,... standing 125 feet tall is... Christ the Redeemer! And the challenger... from Swiebodzin, Poland,... at a sky-scraping 167 feet... is the challenger... and new champion,... Christ the King!"

I never expected to have even one religious blog posting, no less two (consecutive). During my crucifix web search, I did come across (are puns a sin?) images of these two jumbo Jesus statues. I'm familiar with the one in Rio, but the Polish one was new to me. I believe it was finished in November of last year. I didn't include them because, while impressive, they were clearly statues and not crucifixes.

I'll confess here that I have a weakness for oversized objects like the giant shoe or boot hanging outside Ye Olde Shoe Shop, or the local Optician who's created quite a big spectacle(s) outside his establishment. I personally own a five foot, #2 pencil and a big pair of brass scissors (for the occasional ribbon cutting). This is starting to sound like another posting altogether, so I'll just leave you with these pics.

Christ the Redeemer

Christ the KIng

Crucifixation

It's amazing what you think about in church. This past Palm Sunday as the well intentioned, but lengthy service dragged on, I couldn't help but be envious of the napping 5 year old sprawled out in the pew in front me. Kneel, sit, stand, snooze? I can't imagine the Pope finding that kosher anytime soon. As I struggled to maintain focus, my attention drifted from the sermon, to the singing, to backs of heads, to stained glass, to crying babies, to light fixtures, and so on. I eventually zeroed in on the altar and the large crucifix as its focal point. Having done my share of parish hopping/sampling over the years, I started thinking about the various artistic interpretations of this hallowed symbol over time and over the world. The cross seems like a form ripe for creativity. While I may have personally only seen a few dozen, there must be thousands or millions out there. From mini to massive, realistic to abstract, sacred to sacrilegious. Here's a quick sampling I found online.

Brand New Day!

This being my first posting, I'd like to welcome you and, more importantly, myself to the world of blogging (not to mention - the 21st century). I've been on the periphery for quite awhile now, not quite sure if this was a pond I'd want to swim in. There's a lot of self-indulgent crap out there, so why not one more. Not sure what I have in mind for it. I'm guessing it could be a place to share all things creative. Stuff I'm working on, stuff I've stumbled across - online, on land, wherever. At the moment, I don't see a way to upload/attach any images, but I guess I'll figure that out. The important thing is that spring is here, and so is my blog.