clarkblog

METROPOLIS - THE DIRECTOR'S CUT?

Fritz Lang's Metropolis is a silent film masterpiece, one of the boldest visions of the future ever committed to celluloid. Even now, seventy-plus years after its release, the only other genre film that matches its visual impact is Ridley Scott's Blade Runner.

I didn't realize the masterpiece I've seen a dozen times or more is, in fact, a trimmed version of Lang's original cut. That's why my mind is still sizzling from yesterday's news that formerly lost reels from Metropolis have surfaced in Argentina.

For scholars, movie buffs and sci-fi fans, this is major news -- the equivalent of someone saying, "Hey, we just found the second and third panels of Da Vinci's Last Supper triptych!"

link via Greencine

GOODNIGHT MOON

 

Good news: you can download the script for Robert Heinlein's 1966 award-winning sci-fi novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, as adapted by Tim Minear (Firefly, Buffy).

Bad news: the fact that Minear isn't discouraging circulation of the script is a sure sign that this project -- this script, at least -- has gotten a "pass" from the studio and is dead in the water. Which is too bad because this is a good adaptation of a good novel. It doesn't push the envelope or re-invent the genre. It's just smart, sturdy science-fiction, and it's a pity we don't see more of this sort of thing from Hollywood.

 

I never was a big Heinlein fan. I didn't read his acclaimed juvenile novels until I was long out of my teens, though I can see how many come to Heinlein this way. I liked the pulp pacing of The Puppet Masters and Starship Troopers well enough, and some of his short stories knock it outta the park (like "The Roads Must Roll" and "By His Bootstraps"). But I found his "masterpiece," the much ballyhooed Stranger in a Strange Land, to be one huge pretentious bore. Moon, on the other hand, is a good, solid read told by a storyteller in high gear.

Minear expertly streamlines Heinlein's saga of a futuristic Moon-based rebellion. Yes, telling such an epic story in two hours requires the ditching of many plot points. Minear, to his credit, not only preserves the story's libertarian soul, he also keeps the characters' hopes and fears front and center. This story is funny and exciting and thought-provoking and, in places, genuinely touching.

If there's a better way to adapt this novel for the big screen, I can't imagine what it would be like. So why's this script been turned down? Maybe Minear's script is budgeted too high (though I can't imagine how you could downsize it and tell the story at all). Or maybe the producers just don't get Heinlein's story (in which case, why option the novel in the first place?).

Aspiring screenwriters can learn a lot from reading unproduced scripts. Shooting scripts written after a movie's been released are usually lifeless transcriptions that don't give you a feel for what really goes into screenwriting. For that alone, Minear's script is worth checking out. This is how specs and assignments are done. Minear's a great writer and I learned a lot from his economy of line and motion throughout.

As I read Moon, I couldn't help but picture Nathan Fillion in the lead role. Who would of course rock.

link via Whedonesque

JULY 1, 1945

Happy Birthday, Debbie.

You still rock.

100 YEARS AGO TODAY

On the morning of June 30, 1908, an object enters Earth's atmosphere and explodes over a forest in remote Russia.

The force of the blast flattens 80 million trees over an area of 830 square miles. Scientists later estimate the explosion to be 1000 times greater than the atomic bomb dropped over Hiroshima. For weeks, night skies around the world are bright enough to read by, due to dust thrown skyward by the blast.

The origin of the object has been debated ever since, with most scientists concluding this was a comet or asteroid. Differing minority opinions, however, run the gamut from a microscopic black hole to a chunk of antimatter to an alien spacecraft attempting an emergency landing.

This incident is known as the Tunguska Event.

THE WRONG GEORGE DIED THIS WEEK

This weekend SNL re-reruns its premiere episode from 1975 in memory of its host, the late great George Carlin. You also get Janis Ian, Andy Kaufman, and Billy Preston's amazing afro.

Over at WFMU's Beware of the Blog, there's a good list of Carlin video clips.

And here's the last interview Carlin did, just 9 days before he died:

I think of myself as a writer. First of all, I’m an entertainer; I’m in the vulgar arts. I travel around talking and saying things and entertaining, but it’s in service of my art and it’s informed by that. So I get to write for two destinations. The writing is what gives me the joy, especially editing myself for the page, and getting something ready to show to the editors, and then to have a first draft and get it back and work to fix it, I love reworking, I love editing, love love love revision, revision, revision, revision.

FAILURE AND IMAGINATION

I'm not a fan of Harry Potter. At all. Which is weird, considering how much I like similar (and sometimes overlapping) genres like science-fiction and horror. Maybe this is just the universe's way of maintaining some sort of balance. Perhaps there has to be at least one person out there who doesn't take to fantasy. (I like the Lord of the Rings movies, but I never could make it through those books).

I do, however, admire J.K. Rowling for creating a cultural juggernaut out of nothing but imagination and a pad of paper. And for getting so many people excited about reading.

I also very much like her commencement address at Harvard, in which she dispenses wisdom like this:

It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all - in which case, you fail by default.

ROCKWELL RECONSIDERED

As a follow-up to yesteday's post, here's an interesting essay by D.B. Down on Norman Rockwell's socially-conscious artwork, which never received the acclaim of his more nostalgic Americana.

I used to dismiss Rockwell as technically impressive but emotionally vacant schmaltz. Suffice to say, in light of paintings like the one below, I'm rethinking my opinion.

June 21, 1964

James Chaney
Andrew Goodman
Michael Schwerner

(Above: "Mississippi" by Norman Rockwell)

INTELLIGENT DESIGNS

T-shirts from Teach the Controversy:

OVERNIGHT SUCCESS

Variety's annual list of 10 Screenwriters to Watch includes Drew Goddard (Cloverfield, Lost) and J. Michael Straczynski (The Changeling, Babylon 5).

ON YOUR MARK ...

Adam at Our Man in Los Angeles reports on the recent Scriptwriters Network TV Panel, which featured Jane Espenson. Also there: Amy Berg (The 4400), who recommends writing by The Timer:

In their room -- they don't have offices yet, so everyone spends all day in their writer's room, writing away. And they write/work/live & breathe the show for 48 minutes, and then on the dot they break for 12 minutes. And they can't talk about the show at all. Berg said she would stop in the middle of sentences, in the middle of a line of dialogue.

And when she came back, it was always refreshed. She said that they'd been working on the show for months now using this system, and she's never felt stressed. She's even started using it in her own writing.

STAN WINSTON, R.I.P.

Stan Winston, another dreamer taken too early from this world.

I never met this Academy Award-winning special effects maestro, but Stan did happen to read a script I wrote called Brood X. It was a Top 5 finalist in the ScreamFest LA screenplay competition a few years back. I didn't win the big prize, but a festival coordinator told me privately that Stan, one of the judges, really dug my script. Specifically, he sent word that he thought my monsters were cool as hell.

I can't tell you how much that thrilled me. The man who created the special effects for films such as Iron Man, The Terminator, Jurassic Park, and Predator, among many others ... this guy liked my monsters. I didn't need any prize beyond that right there. That said, this script has served me as a good industry calling card, with many requests coming specifically because of Winston's enthusiasm.

Here's James Cameron, confirming something I and many others sensed about Winston from afar: "He was a kid that never grew up, whose dreams were writ large on the screens of the world."

Winston had been battling multiple myeloma for years. He was 62.

 

HUNTING THE HUNTER

 

I'm excited to see this announcement for a new DVD release of Charles Laughton's chilling movie, The Night of the Hunter (1955). Apparently the September release date has been postponed, but since this upcoming DVD is being tauted as a Collector's Edition, I hope that means MGM will spend more time gathering some incredible bonus features (unlike their bare-bones DVD a few years ago).

James Agee adapted Davis Grubb's haunting novel of a murderous preacher (played by Robert Mitchum at his most charming and menacing) and the dark journey of two children who discover his secret. Laughton, in his only directorial effort, films the story as a dark and twisted fairy tale. It's a stark yet magical black-and-white realm that grows increasingly surreal and menacing.

If there's one bonus feature I'd love to see on this DVD, it's the acclaimed Robert Gitts documentary screened at UCLA in 2002, and detailed by F.X. Feeney here and by Leonard Maltin here. Laughton, who'd directed a lot of theater before his first and only film, ran his movie set like a play rehearsal and kept the camera rolling during extended takes. Gitts found Laughton's reels of this rare footage and edited from that a two hour-plus document of this dramatic master working with the movie's excellent cast.

This unreleased documentary is something of a Holy Grail of film documentaries. Laughton elicited some unforgettable performances from his actors. It would be a cryin' shame if MGM missed this opportunity to showcase what went on behind the scenes here. I'm not the only one thinking this. Here's an online petition at a Charles Laughton fansite.

Go sign it. Or I'll have to tell ya that little story about right-hand/left-hand ...

ALGIS BUDRYS, R.I.P.

Some sad news to report: noted science-fiction author and editor Algis Budrys died this week after an illness.

Here's the obituary from the Science Fiction Writers of America, and another one from Locus (plus their brief interview with Budrys from 1997).

AJ, as he was called, taught at the Clarion Workshop in Science Fiction and Fantasy, which I attended in 1984. He was a truly great writing teacher (and I've had many) with an unparalleled grasp of narrative structure.

AJ was one of the nicest people you could ever know. Students were always invited to share meals with the burly, sweet man where he'd entertain us with one amazing story after another. One night he recalled vividly how, as a child, he'd watched Adolf Hitler and his troops parade through his Lithuanian hometown. And he still chuckled over drinking bouts with a very young L. Ron Hubbard. AJ was one of many pulp-era writers who, while out drinking with the bombastic Hubbard, witnessed the man's famous boast that he would one day invent his own religion and make a million bucks.

(AJ never held it against Hubbard when that bet paid off, and spent years in charge of the Scientology-sponsored Writers of the Future contest and workshop. While no advocate of the obviously faux religion, Budrys did admonish those who used Scientology as basis for denying Hubbard his place in the genre pantheon.)

AJ was never a "household" sci-fi name like Asimov or Clarke, but in memorable books like Rogue Moon, Who?, and Michaelmas, he displayed an undeniable mastery of the genre. Re-reading his work is like a master class in creative writing. I see so much of what he taught right there on the page. I also see his spirit.

AJ Budrys spent his life telling good stories and helping countless writers like myself be better storytellers.

Thanks for all that and more, AJ. We miss you.

KARMA ALL AROUND

Arianna Huffington sums up last week with a perspective that makes me feel absolutely wonderful:

It was quite a week. Barack Obama became the Democratic nominee -- rousingly endorsed by Hillary Clinton. Oil hit an all-time high; Bush's approval rating hit an all-time personal low. McCain hammered Obama for being willing to meet with our enemies on the same day a new poll showed 67 percent of the public agrees with Obama. A Senate report re-re-re-confirmed that the Bush administration led us into war under false pretenses. Tom DeLay proved he hasn't lost a step -- or gained an IQ point -- calling Obama "a Marxist." Bill Clinton erupted. Again. My good buddy Al Franken moved another step closer to the U.S. Senate. And the Hummer hit a dead-end. GM killed the electric car; soaring gas prices killed the Hummer. Karma all around.

LOADED IN MY ELECTRON GUN

Breaking Bad, Season 1

The Venture Bros., Season 3

The Assassination of Jesse James
by the Coward Robert Ford

OBAMA!

It's official: Illinois Senator Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee for President of the United States.

Give to his campaign here.

It's long past time to start turning this country around. The catastrophic policies of George W. Bush don't deserve a third term.

EN WHY CEE

Times Square @ midnight
  Central Park, near Columbus Circle
  Bluegrass Jam at Off the Wagon, Greenwich Village
  Central Park from the Rooftop Garden at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
  Just before an afternoon rainstorm at Union Square
  9/11 kitsch at a Times Square tourist trap
  Free drink coupons and other nourishment on Virgin America, flying west at 34,000 feet

JIMMY STEWART WITH AN AXE

Here's a Chicago Magazine interview with playwright/actor Tracy Letts, who won this year's Pulitzer Prize for Drama with his incredible play, August: Osage County.

"My mother has a perverse sense of humor ... She picked me up from school once when I was a little kid. Normally my dad picked me up. And I get in the car and I say, ‘Where's Dad?' She says, ‘Honey, I don't know how to tell you this. Your father and I have separated. People love each other, but then they grow apart and your father and I have decided to get a divorce.' I'm probably eight years old. Well, of course, I immediately start welling up. She jabs me in the ribs and says, ‘Just kiddin'!'"

I'll have more to say about August: Osage County in a few days. My brain's been popping like bacon in a skillet ever since I saw it last week.

CLARKBLOG IS THREE

Clarkblog is three years old. That's more than 700 posts, 500+ comments, and over 100,000 hits, most of them intentional. With these stats in hand, Clarkblog has officially outlived 99.9999999 percent of all blogs on the planet. Or, um, something like that.

To celebrate, I'm unhooking the blog from its Internet pipes and taking it to New York City. We'll be back in June.