Capstone Week 11: Nightcap

It’s been a semester, alright.

I’ve done my full Capstone showing, now. Took me a long time to create the board, and a lot of rushing because I hadn’t kept close-enough company with the syllabus. I had to coordinate with a print shop to get my photograph-proof sent in on time, and I stood with my siblings-in-arms at one end of the Den and watched as people walked by and watched television.

Actually, I’m very happy with how everything turned out. When I made my board I designed it mostly for the benefit of the next semester’s kids, all of the Sophomores and Freshmen I’d never meet personally. And I’d expected, from the day I decided to adapt Blindsight, that I’d spend most of the showing loitering or talking about aliens with people, which is mostly what happened. It’s a niche sort of thing, and I appreciate the people who were into it enough to chat for a few minutes.

So. I’m graduating. I’ve finished the first big real-world project, the thing that’s supposed to challenge me in the same way a real creative endeavor will and push me those last few inches out of the nest. Really, I’m not sure how I feel. I’m happy that I’ve managed to accomplish so much, and I feel a lot better about my ability to manage lots of projects and responsibilities at once, but I’m also sad to go. It was wonderful writing these blog posts and doing snap-research through ILL and eventually letting my constraints and abilities direct me into the best assignment I could’ve chosen, and I even feel a kind of wistfulness for the act of hand-setting all of the margins in my script, but I’m finally setting out into the world-proper, and I’m not sure what I’m going to do.

Putting that aside, at least for now, I think this project was a pretty big success. I came in without huge expectations, and what I’ve left with isn’t flashy or overly exciting, but I got everything taken care of in the time provided, and I did it without too much help and in spite of my other responsibilities. I’m proud of my script for the work I had to put into it, the work I hope this blog’s been a good testament to. And whatever I wind up doing, I think I’ll be okay.

Cultural Attendance 5: The Latest Night in the Zone

This was the final event out of all the ones I’d fought to attend, after my panic at the idea of not making it to five total, and it was also the least eventful. The “Rampages” only got more subdued as time went on, or maybe it was just too cold for people to make the trip, or maybe the semester was just winding down. I’m surprised we haven’t had any snow by now.

But besides the music, it was mostly quiet conversation between small groups of friends. The woman at the door gave me one of those wristbands they always do (the kind that only come off with extreme force), and I had to explain to her that I was signing in to create some evidence that I’d come. I’m not sure how I expected to find that evidence later, but it made sense to me in the moment.

The last time I went to a Rampage, everyone had been grabbing Halloween candy early, and I’d shown up to vulture-peck over the remainder before I left. This time, there wasn’t very much to speak of, and although they were handing out desserts to everyone by the end of the night I showed up barely too late to get any. When I was finally about to leave, shortly before the Den closed up, I grabbed a little paper bowl, poured it full of M&Ms, put some tinfoil over it and cradled it like a secret parcel on my way out.

I stopped for a moment, actually, to witness the final moment of the final Late Night of my school career. Everyone gathered around in dress-up material around a big camera and had their picture taken, even the woman who’d sworn me onto the premises. They were all dressed in jokey political stuff, oversized buttons and red-and-blue Dr. Seuss hats, and they said something nice about Late Night instead of “cheese!” They assembled before I could join, and I was worried about setting my new treasure down and having to eat a real dinner at least as much as I was worried about intruding into a moment between all the organizers, so I smiled and waited for them to disperse. Turns out the camera would’ve put all of the pictures on a website anyway, so I’m glad I was tempted to stand away from it.

It was cold when I left. It had long since stopped being pleasant to take an evening hike back to my apartment, but the breeze wasn’t biting yet. I put the M&Ms on a little shelf between my couch and my kitchen, and I felt an odd sense of accomplishment at surviving and meeting all my requirements. I almost wish I had a picture of it to put up here.

Cultural Attendance 4: Film Festival

This was one the whole town rolled out the red carpet for, and I was a little shocked to see how much of the off-campus community came to see it. I put off some work to make it during the weekend, and I had to squeeze myself past six people to find one of the only empty seats in the theater. The next-oldest person in the room must’ve had ten years on me at least, and I tried not to be a nuisance or write notes too loudly.

I’d made it to one of the more broken-up showings of short films, reasoning that there were better odds of my enjoying them than an all-or-nothing feature. I think it was the right decision, too, because the short timespan kept everything informative and beautiful without allowing for any dragging. The films I saw covered a lot of ground and a lot of causes, including bird migrations, dams that need to be opened, using genetics to reinvigorate the redwood tree, and undetonated mines with coral reefs growing over them.

I have to wonder if the other people there had just come so they could be told about how many problems there are with the environment, and how many donated to any of the filmmakers (every one of them was asking for money, because the festival was about raising awareness of problems more than celebrating nature). I remember them all as being townies, because they looked older and relatively affluent, but I know some of them must have come a ways to see the festival. It feels weird to think that my homestead gets chosen as a host for these sorts of events.

The best part of the afternoon, though, was the movie about cicadas, which had no experts, no voiceovers, and not too much information about them except for some text about their life cycles. It was completely beautiful, the kind of thing I might’ve expected to see on the Discovery channel when I was a kid, and full of swarms of bugs which would’ve looked completely disgusting otherwise. I never realized before then that cicadas don’t have any survival mechanisms beyond their sheer numbers, or how their metamorphoses can go wrong, or how their offspring get back beneath the ground. (When I was a kid, I assumed they were just sleeping and came up for air every seventeen years.)  

On the whole, it was a pretty cramped affair, but it offered a wider view of the world, and I always appreciate that. I didn’t know what to expect when I went in, but I know now that the people most invested in protecting and preserving nature are also the people who most appreciate its beauty, and I’m all for handing them film cameras more often.

Cultural Attendance 3: A Later Night in the Zone

One of the defining factors of “Rampages” is that they didn’t seem to take place in the bowling-alley pool-table section of the Rams’ Den. I don’t blame them for that, really. I can’t remember the last time I went there, even though it was such a selling point in that first tour of the buildings so long, long ago. I mean, what college student needs a pass to go bowling every week?

Then again, there’s never been much partying around here outside of the outskirt quarantine of the Town Run. That’s one of the things I do regret about choosing this place over something bigger. A party school might’ve made me miserable, but at least it would’ve been more hedonistic about it. Ending my teenaged years by being all contemplative strikes me now as a massively wasted opportunity.

That night was interesting to me because it was the first time I’d seen performers in the cafeteria section of Ram’s Den and not the ballroom, and I’d been expecting the same party music and strobelights as always. (The fact that they were giving out spaghetti and not nachos should’ve also set the mood.) And on the whole, they were both decent. I sat at the nearest open seat, and the other people at the table didn’t pay much mind to me, and I laughed when I felt it was earned and played with the garlic bread for the rest of the time.

Really, the hypnotist was the flashier part of the two, and he’d delayed coming on for some reason, maybe nerves. When he did, he used the same techniques as last year’s mind-controller, but got a wider audience reaction. I should mention I’ve done some research into hypnosis-culture, and I’ve decided stage-hypnotism doesn’t work (or seem to work) very well unless you get the audience extremely into it. Making a fool of people is one way to excite a crowd, but if you’re going to target a bunch of university kids the best path is sexuality - provocative dancing, a tame form of exhibitionism, a suggestion of power over the wants and likes of others, etc.

(Even the most preliminary look at hypnosis’ enthusiasts makes it obvious that fetishism goes hand-in-hand with it. And judging by the art in these communities, the technicolor snake-eyes of The Jungle Book VHS have affected a truly disturbing number of psyches.)

In the midst of all of it, one of the girls called up as entertainment for being so well-hypnotized was sent out with the rest to protect audience-members, and she sat down with her arms around me. At the speaker’s command she said something nice about me (I don’t remember what, only that it took her a minute and wasn’t very convincing), and then we pretended to be on a rollercoaster together before she departed to go do something else. I’m sure she developed a kind of half-fame from the rest of the performance, even if it only extended to the rest of that night. It takes a lot of courage to put yourself out there even with mind-control for an excuse, unless you really are that susceptible.

Cultural Attendance 2: Suicide Squad

Isn’t it strange how the college zeitgeist seems to pick a favorite movie around once a semester? A little while back it was Toy Story 3, two semesters ago I think it was possibly Pitch Perfect 2, and in my final days as a Junior it was very clearly Deadpool. However quickly the fashions change it’s very nice of the Program Board to pull out the projectors every so often and play a couple DVDs of the recent hits. I still remember lugging my sleeping bag to the giant empty square of grass by the Ram’s Den and sitting on the outskirts of the assembled to watch the Next Big Thing. 

This year, though, they put it in the Storer Ballroom, and it was Suicide Squad, the movie that echoed in the dozens of Harley Quinns that came to my door on Halloween. I made to the Den through the cold after putting off a movie night with my friends, and felt a little disappointed about not bringing any snacks when I learned they didn’t have any popcorn. It was a pretty packed affair, though, and I had to insinuate myself into the middle of a row in order to see anything. The movie itself was... well, actually okay.

I don’t have a great relationship with superhero movies, or with superhero anything. I’d say they’re just not my speed, but that’s not really true - I love stories like All-Star Superman, J.G. McCrae’s Worm and JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, the thoughtful kind that uses imagination and far-out ideas to showcase the triumph of the human spirit. Because of that, the average superhero story always feels more to me like a soap opera or a WWE match than a piece of wondrous fantasy, the kind of thing people watch to see Robert Downey Jr. punch nondescript evil minions, instead of something they go to for an intellectual challenge.

So after seeing Thor, and then Age of Ultron to confirm that I wasn’t being unfair, I just gave up on the genre. And when I was drawn in by the promise of a passing grade for my Capstone, I was surprised to find that Suicide Squad wasn’t that bad. The story’s a little confused about its own progression, the reveals are pretty tacky and it has the same problems with credible threats as every other popular superhero teamup in history, but it was really strongly edited, the characters were introduced very well given the time constraints, the effects were lovely and there was even some good humor.

You know, ever since I was in high school, I wanted to run a movie theater. Or just work in one. Maybe a small one, like the opera-house a block down from my apartment, or an arthouse place by the beach somewhere, or maybe something bigger and more exciting where homeless people would come to sleep at night. They all have a special atmosphere to them that I’ve always found really heady, and from childhood it’s driven my appreciation for film further than many other media. Video games are what you do when you’re bored, books are what you do when teachers keep talking about things you already know, television is what you do when you just get home, but movies are what you actively go out to experience, in their own little popcorn-microcosm.

So even if the movies aren’t always the best, I have to say I’ve appreciated the chance to experience that in a town where the theater’s mostly for concert performances.

Cultural Attendance: A Late Night in the Zone

For some reason I thought I’d have to just collect tokens of going to these events and then bring them with me to some post-showing meeting to exchange for a grade. I still have the torn-up wristbands and promotional fliers, but I only recently realized that the writing was the important thing.

I remember, and it now feels pretty distant as I stand poised to jump into the world-at-large, that I was frustrated by how few of these events I could get to. My school schedule, my newfound apartment and my twenty hours of frycook duty were all constantly conspiring to keep me out anything interesting, especially really cool stuff like the New York trip. So these aren’t the most exciting uses of my time, but my time was on a very strict budget, and they’re the best I could manage.

The first was a Late Night in the Zone, although they’ve started calling them “Rampages” this year, and it was during a bingo game. My roommate and I crashed it to get some protein - Chick-fil-A was catering - and watch the proceedings. It was pretty straightforward as Bingo went, although they had some of those exotic challenges that always impressed me with how much fun they could wring out of a grid of randomized numbers. I’m not sure I stuck around long enough to see people win any of the really huge prizes, but I think somebody got a basket full of popcorn and DVDs.

At one point, a young, lost-looking teenager in an Undertale shirt hovered around me and my companion. I still remember him, although I never saw him again. I think he wanted to approach us, but he didn’t know how.

And to be honest, the part of the whole night I remember most is when I was about to leave and I came across a Freshman who was looking to make friends with people. He seemed like the sort of person you’d find hanging out in a comic shop, and he complained that when his dad came to visit earlier that day they’d run out of space in his minifridge for the leftover pizza. I felt an impulse, then, to grab him by the shoulders and shake him and impart all of my knowledge, to reveal that no, really, I know I might look like I just got out of high school but I’m a Senior and you should heed my advice, but I just nodded, and left feeling old.

He’s finishing his first semester now, which probably taught him most of what I was going to say anyway. Let the young come of age on their own time.

Capstone Week 10: The Great Dialogue Lull

Cover art of the re-released edition.

I’ve been spending my time, outside of schoolwork, workwork and Halloween prep, converting all of the dialogue in my episode 1 demarcation of the book into proper script-dialogue and plotting out the scenes. I don’t have much else to report at this point, I haven’t had much time to give the new material I’ve been handed the reading it deserves, and although my final ILL book arrived it might as well have been lost in transit for all the help it contains.

I have noticed I’ve become better at understanding screenplays, though, especially in their structure. One of my classes is a creative writing workshop, and when one of the other students gave us all a screenplay to review, I realized that the big problem with it was that the conflict didn’t follow after the introduction of the characters, and if that were fixed everything else would fall into place. In a fit of rare luck, I was able to explain this to the writer and how they could straighten the backbone of the script so that the beginning and end were the same but the driving force of the story was constant, and they were so impressed they took notes for the sake of editor-chiropracty.

It wasn’t until then, seeing their reaction, that I appreciated how much I’ve learned in the last few weeks, and how much I’ve retained on top of that. When I graduate I’m going to have to do all of my learning this way, and it’s been an encouraging dip into autodidactery.

Better updates forthcoming, once the uninteresting writerly bits have been properly tended.

Capstone Week 9: Treatment, Outline, Prep Stages

I don't have much to report now that the original research is over, although I spoke with Jason and he gave me a big list of work on selling scripts to companies and getting them produced in the real world that I'm going to shuffle through in the next couple weeks as I hammer out the actual script. I've reread the whole book now, and written out a full shorthand treatment of every scene in it, which I've used to cut the whole thing into four episodes. Taking some of what I've learned, I've already planned to throw a couple characters and a C-plot out of the narrative entirely, but my current adaptational philosophy is that I'm only chopping out the things that a fan wouldn't really miss.

The story itself divides pretty nicely between the four either way, especially when I've reordered a B-plot to play out alongside the main events. I never appreciated how good Peter Watts was at cliffhangers and high tension until I had to sit in his chair and poke at his creations so closely. I think this will do well with the main character as a narrator, too, and I'm hoping to preserve a few of my favorite passages in the book because the dialogue and prose are wonderful.

Here are some of my favorite sections from the online version:

Capstone Week 8: An End to Research

I’ve received The Art of Adaptation: Turning Fact and Fiction into film and Talk the Talk, which I believe rounds out my research for this project. (Continuing the trend of perceived passive-aggression from the interlibrarians, I can’t help but notice that Art is due at the 1st of next month and Talk is due at the end. Was there a typo, or are they actively messing with me?)

But now that my preparatory work’s been finished, I’m trying to empty out my schedule for the actual scriptwriting. I’ve asked to have my work hours cut down, I’m trying to vanquish all of my lesser homework assignments, and I’m going to see my advisor this week with an outline of the novel and how I want the structure of the script to play out. To be honest I feel a little daunted by this, because it involves parsing an entire novel of text, and my computer won’t run Final Draft.

As for my one remaining book, Weaver’s Return of the B Science Fiction and Horror Heroes, I’m afraid it’s wound up being a very thick celebration of individual directors, and doesn’t have much to say about writing or the SF film at all. Thankfully, The Art of Adaptation and Talk the Talk are much more illuminating. Here’s my exegesis:

Talk the Talk surprised me by being a workbook, mostly concerned with exercises and in large friendly print. It’s a book that prefaces its physics metaphors with reassurances, in case the reader cringes away in fear, and most of its spoils were in the introductions to its twenty brief chapters. Penniston sees human interaction on the screen and off as the interplay of “high status players” and “low status players” (51), people who have different positions on different totem-poles and adjust their behavior to each other. Writing believable dialogue is a matter of combining these things; “A good line of dialogue manifests the sum of all forces ... acting on a character at a particular moment.” (125), and at times that means giving them a certain amount of complicated situations to tackle.

The most important line is at the very beginning, though, and I already knew it but had never heard someone write it so wonderfully: “People do not talk in prose” (4). This is the problem I’ve found in all sorts of amateur work, my own included, and it’s part of what makes my own writing so opaque and obscure; I feel like if my characters ever actually exposited something I’d be breaking the audience’s trust. Of course that’s silly, but it’s that kind of rigid near-superstition that defines a style.

Apart from that, my favorite part of the book was something I’d never considered before, and which makes the whole practice of writing characters a lot clearer to me: “To control your plot, do not try to control your characters. Instead, try to control the balance of forces acting on your characters. If you do this deftly, the characters will maneuver completely on their own. It’s as if you are playing one of those marble-in-a-maze games: If you tilt the toy in the right direction, the marble will move where you want it to go (without you ever having to touch it)” (176). Being the shadowy director of character-fates has always appealed to me, but thinking of it that literally had never occured to me.

Of course, with someone else’s characters this isn’t the most useful advice. The Art of Adaptation includes a section on lowering the number of characters in the story, but the full cast of Blindsight numbers less than ten people if I remember correctly, so melting them into composites feels a little pointless. The book as a whole is much more useful, and broadly interested in finding new ways to adapt plays, books, real events and older movies into modern film. Some of this involves things I’ve already read about, like the three-act structure and A and B-plots, but there was a special depth here, the kind that pointed out that a “B story also has a three-act structure” (90) and made me stop and think for a minute.

“Have you ever noticed,” Seger asks, “that a book may take fifty or one hundred pages to give you the information that you get in three minutes of film?” (16). This is something I’ve become more aware of in the last few weeks, especially as an argument for the moral righteousness of fanfiction; a story about an original character needs to establish who they are and why the reader should care before it can do anything interesting, while a story about Batman can cut to the action immediately. In film, everything can be done in parallel, and I want to use that to cut out what exposition lingers in the novel. (Although, to be fair to Watts, the book doesn’t really care about the mechanics of the spaceship when it can deal with psychology.)

There’s some useful advice on filling time and writing material that the original author didn’t include, on the logic that “[some] scenes are implied when a character briefly mentions a friend, or some incident from childhood, or simply says she or he had a bad day at work. All of these memories can be made into scenes” (102). I would jump at the opportunity to work with this and turn some of the narrator-protagonist’s memories into their own plot, but then I remembered that a good chunk of the novel is devoted to a B-plot of flashbacks into his failing relationship anyway. I’m not sure I really want to include that, or whether or not I’d have to change it considering both it and the main plot end poorly for everyone.

Works Cited

Seger, L. (2011). The art of adaptation: Turning fact and fiction into film. Macmillan. Chicago

Penniston, P. (2010). Talk the Talk: A Dialogue Workshop for Scriptwriters. Michael Wiese Productions.

Art, Copy, Rhetoric and Entertainment

Art and Copy was an interesting change of pace from The Persuaders, especially in theme. It’s not as objective, in that it doesn’t really care about bringing in people who dislike the industry, but as an attempt to justify that industry that makes perfect sense. And the enthusiasm of the interviewees is really contagious, especially considering that advertisers as a whole are generally seen as unpalatable, irritating people.

A lot of the descriptions of advertising done well reminded me of other, more down-to-earth communicators, like historical criers, newspaper boys, bards and jesters. These people could be just as annoying as any YouTube advertisement, but it was taken for granted that any of them who irritated people were just bad at their jobs. No one blames comedians if an awful open-mic act bombs, and the same goes for any other art-form people take seriously. There’s at least a leg to stand on here if you’re an avowed anticonsumerist, and I think the implication toward the end that if the public space isn’t taken up by advertising it’ll be taken up by anti-government rhetoric is a really silly dismissal of communism, but for the average person complaining about the ten-second wait on a YouTube video, the problem isn’t that they’re being sold something but that there’s no charm or excitement in the pitch.

The idea that “We are in the art business when we do it well” deserves to be a maxim for most crafts, really. When I heard that, I realized that I’d never thought of a well-made movie trailer as an advertisement, and I actively enjoyed many more than the films they represented. They’re still trying to sell something to me, but I agree that it’s worth selling.

A perfect example of a trailer whose movie cannot possibly be as good.

That said, I don’t think I’d want to live in a world of extremely charming, well-made advertisements. There’s something scary about the idea that “It’s like you’re in water. It’s around you, it’s going to happen to you”, and a world of friendly, entertaining material selling me things I don’t need sounds like the worst kind of overstimulating chaos. I appreciate the existence of terrible ads, the ones that exist to fill up webpage sidebars or hold up my videos, if only because they remind me to be skeptical of the things I see. There’s a reason, after all, that “trying to sell you something” is a negative description.

Capstone Week 7: I Am Legend and Scene Setters

My latest loan-books haven’t arrived yet, including Talk the Talk, but I’ve managed to find an e-book of Film Adaptation and Its Discontents. I’ve realized I’m almost through my list of research materials, maybe already finished with it, and I have no idea where the time’s gone. I do think I’ve learned the state of thought on adaptation, and the basics of the technique, although there are probably more specific approaches I’m failing to notice.

I also, incidentally, watched I Am Legend this week, and my roommate was incensed enough by its state as a bad adaptation that he made me watch The Last Man on Earth, the ‘60s Vincent Price adaptation of the same novel. From watching both and talking them over with him, I’m sure that The Last Man is a much more faithful adaptation, but I like Will Smith’s hunting-deer-in-the-city version, and I think Price’s is very silly and nestled in the pulp tradition. And the original ending of I Am Legend, I learned as a kid, was replaced after it sunk with test audiences - no longer would the twist be that the monsters were also people and they considered the protagonist to be the boogeyman (hence the title), but that the main character sacrificed himself to save aaall humanity and became a legend.

I’ve learned that sometimes bad adaptation choices, the kind that stamp on the important points and key meanings of the story instead of the supporting details and moving parts of it, aren’t really in the writer’s hands at all.

I can't look at this without thinking about The Flintstones.

Moving onto the book, most of the chapters are about specific works or kinds of work, like “The Word Made Film” (Passion of the Christ) or “Entry-Level Dickens”. The most important chapter, in my survey, has been “The Adapter as Auteur”, in that it has a philosophy no other books seem to. The idea of the chapter, quickly, is that there have historically been auteurs and “metteurs-en-scène” (236), the people who merely create the scenes based on the literary work of other people, taking all of the meaning built by others and ushering it forth in a slightly different form. This was a distinction in the early days of French cinema that applied to directors more than screenwriters, but the idea of adaptation-as-beneath-us still underlied it.

Yet, Leitch points out, we don't really think of Hitchcock as an adapter, even though "Among his fourteen films before his breakout thriller The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), only two—The Ring (1927) and Champagne (1928)—were based on original screenplays" (237). Hitchcock isn't regarded as a hack writer or someone who merely sets the scene for an already-determined story, and he's not alone in that. Adaptation involves in it the opportunity to put something of yourself into the finished product, and ironically, if you don't, people will be more likely to think you're slacking off. After all, anyone can transcribe stuff that's already written, right?

Interestingly, for Leitch this conflict extends past the audience and into the adapter's relationship with the author, and he brings up Kubrick to show that his rise to prominence was influenced by his "increasingly skilled infighting [on] ... Spartacus (1960), Lolita (1962), and Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)." (240) More than that, Kubrick had found a style of adaptation that he stuck to consistently, in which all of the works he turned into film became part of a recognizable strain, and were translated not just into movies but into Kubrick movies.

It never occurred to me to think of it that way, but if I could figure out how to make something into a Johnson movie, I think I'd be golden. I'm pretty sure that only comes with experience in the form, though.

Speaking of that, I realized I've never shown a picture of an alien from Blindsight, so here's a stuffed one someone made on DeviantART:

For once, a monster that's Lovecraftian because of its personality and internal workings more than its startle factor without giving up any of the tentacled space-terror. Who says there's no such thing as a happy middle?

Work Cited

Leitch, T. (2009). Film adaptation and its discontents: from Gone with the Wind to The Passion of the Christ. JHU Press.