1. 3 days ago 

   Beautiful.

2. 1 week ago 

   Heard about the guy who fell off a skyscraper? On his way down past each floor, he kept saying to reassure himself, “So far so good… so far so good… so far so good.” How you fall doesn’t matter. It’s how you land.

3. Notes: 1 / 1 week ago 
   

   How I feel after finishing a book.

    
4. 2 weeks ago 

   405 basement jam session.

5. 2 weeks ago 
   

   So for some strange reason the first thing I did this morning was put on the Cage’d out punching bearThe Wicker Man. This picture sums up my feelings of this movie for which its shipping cost more than its DVD.

    
6. 2 weeks ago 

   Projects I’ll eventually never make

   The other day I was reading that André Benjamin was planning on shooting his Jimi Hendrix biopic at the end of the month. This is good and bad news to me. Good because André is a brilliant choice to play Hendrix for more reasons than he could look like him with a little make up. He also has the same connection with music Jimi had. Something more than a means of income and more of a spiritual connection. Bad because, well, I wanted to make that movie. From that I thought of stories and movies I have stored away in my journal with little storyboards and bullet points. They are things that are always present “just in case I get that lucky.” But when I hear a project is moving forward that I wanted to do it’s disheartening, even though the reality is I’ll never be able to make them. In a way, it represents the reality that I want to keep ignoring and as those projects are slowly taken away from me I get more depressed that my passion is an extremely difficult thing to keep holding on to…

   However, all depressing notions aside, creativity rules all and it got me thinking, what are some projects I have stored away and how would I approach them? So I went back through my production notebooks, the only personal written material I don’t burn, and pooled the ideas I had. I understand that a lot of it has holes and some may sound far from original but they’re made to be worked on and maybe someone can appreciate them for what they are. Here they are in no particular order:

   • Are You Experienced?: This is the Jimi Hendrix biopic. There would be no music at all except for what he plays while both developing his songs and playing live. Stretches of the narrative would break in to shades of fantastical reality. For example, the sky at his Monterey performance would look like a time laps night sky with stars tilting and shifting while the auditorium, the stage, and the people in them are moving at normal speed all throughout cuts. Setting his guitar on fire would be shot in a way that looked as if Hendrix was manipulating the fire to spread slowly down each string before taking the entire instrument. Drug trips would incorporate the pop art of its time, as in the cartoon flowers blossoming out of focus and slightly out of frame combined with the color palate of a Warhol canvas.
   • Student Body: Yes, I want to make a teen movie. In almost every one from The Breakfast Club to Superbad school kids are always seen finding who they are and embracing it. It’s an important part of life that hits most in that time period and it is a great theme to use and express in not only film but every sort of art. I went through that. And that’s what annoys me. I discovered who I was in High School and I hated it. I was the black sheep in a family of doctors and “professions for the real world.” I wanted to anything to not be the person I came to I’d be. That’s what I want to see and shoot. A group of close friends toward the end of high school who discover who they are, most of which decide to end their life than go on with who they are. While I was in school a kid shot himself in the temple in front of a porch full of his friends after they viewed his threats as a joke. He died two days before being handed his diploma. That’s the reality. Not freeze frames on football fields. It’d be shot with its first frame in black and white and the last in high contrast color and everything in between a gradual shift from start to end with cinematography adapting to the color palate.
   • The Eagle and the Snake: My epic. Every time I hear about the circumstances in which the Aztec’s met the Spaniards I’m floored. The natives predicted on a specific month a god with four legs would appear at their shores (their culture was not familiar with horses in anyway). The Explorers told themselves, ‘Where we see an eagle eating a snake, we shall establish ourselves.’ The Spanish saw the eagle when and where the Aztec’s predicted to see the “gods”. This led to one of humanities best examples of getting screwed over. The Spanish took the gold offered and assumed the role of Gods while they abused the privileges the Aztec’s gave them. By the time the Aztec’s noticed the Spaniards were far from Gods and started to fight them off the damage was already done. Their gold was stolen, their resources were reduced to near nothing, their faith was shattered, and their women were raped creating the first Mexicans. It goes without saying, my heritage greatly influenced my investment in this story. The Spaniards would be shot with flat space and hard angles within the frame while the Aztecs are shot with deep space and organic shapes within frame. Everything would be used with 65mm film, both intimate conversations and large fight sequences.
   • Carnie: Character piece. It follows a traveling circus that sets up at the edges of small towns. Each “freak” has a trait that is a reflection of human fear and is seen in the way they act and communicate. For example, The Bearded Lady shows the fear of being emasculated, The Conjoined Twins reflect the fear of not being an individual, The Giant is the fear of growing responsibilities, etc. More importantly, they are all individuals the audience cares for regardless of their physical deformities. What’s shocking isn’t their looks, but how they are treated by “normals” which will of course be a huge challenge to write. It would be self referential, including occasional glances at the camera, The Ring Master directly addressing the audience, and exploiting the fragility of film by using 70% 16mm, 20% 8mm, and 10% 35mm film stock. I refuse to see Freaks for this reason. I don’t want that film to influence this narrative.
   • Stray Meal: Set in turn of the century London, England. We follow a police officer in pursuit of a wicked man. This man wears a long black coat, a broken top hat,  carries a wool sack and a black umbrella ripped with holes. He parades the streets at night to find children wondering alone. He shoves them in his sack and the more he gets, the more it expands rather than tearing. When he encounters the police he uses the same sack filled with children to bludgeon his opposition. If that’s not enough, he throws out a powdered drug in the face of his enemies which lead them to go insane. If all else fails, he opens his umbrella and a gush of wind picks him up in Mary Poppins manner to lift him to his hide out where the children are skinned, made into mannequin puppets, and have their organs ate. Our police officer befriends a street hooker who survived her capture when younger and set off the kill this monster. Every character is unique in style and can be recognized by silhouette alone. This is all done as a stop motion animation, just with a whole lot more blood than the typical stop motion animation.
   • World Destruction Colors Trilogy: I love the Three Colors Trilogy and would want to make my own, only about the destruction of the world and one released every five years. The first one would be a Rebellion movie with its thematic color to be Red. A group of people start a revaluation to bring down a corporate governed economy. The leader, who’s reluctant to have his image used as a flag of change just as corporations use typography to identify a brand, discovers human clones are being engineer by the corporations to out source slaves. This wouldn’t be as big of a problem had it not been for the fact that woman are being held in prison like buildings to carry and birth the clones. This is made public and citizens form factions against corporate owned military groups whose purpose is to “keep the peace.” Fights happen in streets and citizens are clearly going to win before the clones are desperately modified as weapons which goes awry when they start to zombify and infect others. Our rebel ‘leader’ is symbolically sacrificed before her closest friend is given the task of keeping people together as the world is over run by zombies. Five years later, literally, he is still alive in the next segment whose thematic color is Green. Little amount of zombies are actually seen outside of shadows and body parts. What’s important is the feeling of an inescapable threat. He is reduced to just another survivor since the citizens couldn’t accept their leaders death and replacement, things people he encounters remember him by to his embarrassment. He finds out the corporations are rising again and goes to the undead filled buildings where they used to be run. Him and another person communicating to him from an underground safe house discover corporations are controlling the zombie out break and its direction. His conclusion is to start the world over again from scratch. He hacks the corporate computers and launch the nukes they have and destroys the surface, including himself. His confidant rises from the bunker to a world in ashes. Another literal five years and our post-apocalyptic world is colored with Yellow. The confidant is still alive, traveling alone, trying not to start fights in a world with broken morals, and picking off remaining zombies. The skyline consists of broken buildings and crumbling highways.  Not until a rather aimless first half that reflects the state of the world she realizes the only way to ensure human survival is to establish strong communities funded on a trust of one another. After fending off thugs on motorcycles and murderers in gas masks she builds a small community, the first to be recalled by anyone, and they simply live as hunter/gatherers.
   • Survivor: My favorite book. I’d love to turn this twisted tale told by an airplane black box recorder into a visual piece. The characters are original, the narrative is witty, and the Super Bowl is ruined. What’s not to love. The book ends on page 0 as opposed to 289 and starts on chapter 47 and ends at 1. It starts with the plane crash. As such, time is distorted throughout the movie. When things happen isn’t important and is intentionally left ambiguous. What is important is that it happened before our character dies. It was slated for production mid-2001 but a certain historical event also involving crashed planes saw to its demise. Time passes. This story can be told visually.
   • A Fast and Furious: Hate me for it. They have no artistic merit. Evaluating them is pointless. They are my guilty pleasure. I want to make one. No digital effects. All car stunts are done practically. Finally a return to a real sense of speed and danger in full traffic races. My story involves organ trafficking. Ensemble cast returns, each character getting killed off with timed precision patterns in editing. Deal with it.
   • Silent Hill: Buy movie rights so a movie is never made out of it.

   So… There they are. I want to know which ones sound good. Which sound terrible. Most of all if there are any projects you view similarly in that you’ve built on them for a while regardless of whether or not you’ll actually be able to make it. Or maybe I’m just crazy as I expected.

7. 2 weeks ago 
   

   This pretty much states the dangers of where film stock is heading.

    
8. Notes: 1 / 2 weeks ago 

   Penguin Prison in epic mode and Miike Snow straight out of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

9. Notes: 316 / 2 weeks ago  from criterioncollection
   

   criterioncollection:

   David Fincher’s brief cameo in BEING JOHN MALKOVICH.

   ^—— this man….

    
10. 3 weeks ago 
    

    Taming Light: Stanley Kubrick by Martin Ansin

    Ok, now do one for my favorite directors.

     

'I make the revolution; therefore, I exist.' ~ A Mexican

My life. My times.
Witness my rise to Nirvana or my plummet to Homelessness. Most likely a trek to the worst parts of the emotional being. Either way, enjoy.
~ Hash Williams

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