Feeder Birds
One of my least-known side projects is a graphic novel I’ve been steadily working on for about five years now called Feeder Birds.
A while back, I had a house in upstate New York. There was a nice back porch (the “sun room”) where you could sit and read and watch wild animals gambol through the back yard, deer and squirrels and even the occasional bobcat.
We hung up a bird feeder, and over the course of a lazy weekend I would watch the birds at the feeder and draw little sketches of them.
The behavior of these birds shocked me. They weren’t friendly or chipper or pretty. They were mean, vicious, cutthroat bastards clearly descended from the dinosaurs. They fought amongst themselves over primacy of the feeder and brutally devoured everything in sight.
An idea started to slowly seep into my brain to tell a serious, complex gangster saga, but instead of making it about Italian Americans in Little Italy, do it with these birds at the feeder upstate.
And hereis some of our cast.
FROM TOP:
CARDINAL is the leader of the gang. Months back, he freed the feeder from the clutches of the evil Squirrel gang and was unanimously chosen as leader. Since then, he has discovered a way to ferment suet, which creates a substance he calls “Numbskull.” He trades Numbskull to the local sparrows (the sparrows are the “civilians”) in exchange for regular birdseed. The Numbskull trade is so successful that within months Cardinal controls every scrap of birdseed in the neighborhood. The power this affords him is a great pleasure, but it also carries with it much trouble and responsibility, some times too much for a simple bird to bear.
DOVEY is Cardinal’s wife. Dovey used to be married to Woody (a Woodpecker), a straight-arrow bug-eater and all-around nice guy. But Cardinal wanted her, so he took her. He had his two most vicious thugs go to her house, gouge out Woody’s eyes and peck him full of holes. Then he swooped in to “save” her, providing her with food and shelter, and a daily supply of Numbskull to calm her shattered nerves. Now she’s hooked on the stuff and unable to function without it.
FLICKER is Cardinal’s best friend from childhood. Capable of eating both bugs and seed, he’s not really a feeder bird. He doesn’t indulge in the brutal strongarm tactics of Cardinal’s gang, but nor does he turn his back on his friends. His complicated loyalties will eventually get him into deep trouble.
CHICK is Cardinal’s major enforcer. Not the smartest of birds, he has a quick temper and a foul mouth. He explodes at the slightest provocation and will take on a bird of any size.
TUFTY is a mere child. He worships the Feeder Birds for their style, high-living and strength. When he grows up, he wants to be a vicious thug just like them. His looks and ambition make him a valuable asset to the gang. He can get to places that others cannot and his loyalty to Cardinal is boundless.
JUNKO is a lesbian soldier, Chick’s second-in-command. She’s quite a bit smarter than Chick but no less efficient in her duties as an enforcer. Chick has carried a torch for Junko for quite some time, a fact that Junko has heretofore been blissfully unaware of.
COWBIRD is a psychopath. He’s not an enforcer, he’s a maniac. Unable to speak properly due to the seething rage he carries within his heart at all times, he merely waits trembling and twitching for the opportunity to once again unleash his fury upon whatever happens to be in his way at the moment.
STARLING is Cowbird’s minder and the only bird who can understand his twitching, growling murmurs. He is always at Cowbird’s side, ready to back him up in a fight and lend his muscle to the fray.
MR. GROSBEAK is the leader of a rival gang, the Finches, who have always ruled the adjoining neighborhood. Grosbeak does not desire warfare, but if Cardinal expands too far into his territory he will be forced into conflict. He is old, wise and completely amoral. He’s seen a dozen birds like Cardinal come and go and knows every trick in the book.
I’ve been developing these characters and their story off and on for 
r_sikoryak‘s Carousel slide shows. For the next presentation (Chapter 5, Part I — December 7, buy your tickets now!) I am taking the big jump into learning Photoshop. These images were drawn using a Wacom tablet, a device brand-new to me. They have almost none of the depth or nuance of my regual pencil-and-paper drawings, but one must start somewhere.
Fred and Louie live!
For fans of Frank and Louie (the cat pictured a couple of posts back), we now have live video. Go Frank and Louie!
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
Spoiler alert.
There is a guy. He has a friend. They both like the same girl.
There is a man who calls himself Dr. Caligari. He has a carnival act, what he calls a “somnambulist.”
Dr. C is mistreated by an impatient clerk.
The clerk is found stabbed to death in his bed. This upsets the citizenry.
The guy and his friend go to the carnival and see Dr. C and his somnambulist, whose name is Cesare.
Cesare, played by Conrad Veidt, has a thin, weird, unsettling, urbaniak-style creepiness about him. He sleeps in a coffin, the “cabinet” of the title. (For unrivalled creepiness, check him out in The Man Who Laughs, where he inspired the Batman folks to create The Joker.)
Dr. C says that Cesare can tell the future. The guy’s friend steps forward and says, with a laugh, “How long will I live?” Cesare stares at him with his Urbaniak glare and says “’til break of day.”
That night, Dr. C sends the sleepwalking Cesare out into the night to murder the guy’s friend in his bed. He does so. This upsets the citizenry.
The guy now has the girl, but she’s upset because the friend has been stabbed to death in his bed. Her father, sensitive to this type of thing, goes to investigate the doctor and his somnambulist. The father goes out to the fairgrounds and finds that a dummy rests in Cesare’s coffin.
Cesare, at that moment, has gone to the girl’s house to kill her. He is startled in his efforts by some local citizenry, who chase him through town (shades of Fritz Lang’s M).*
The guy goes chasing after Dr. C and follows him to an insane asylum. The staff of the asylum grab the guy, who is hysterical. He insists that the man responsible for the death of his friend and the abduction of his fiancee is in their asylum. The orderlies take the guy to the head doctor, who turns out to be — yes, Dr. Caligari.
The guy waits until the doctor is out of his office, then ransacks his files until he finds the proof that he is behind the mysterious murders in town. It seems that this doctor, inspired by an Italian man named Dr. Caligari, decided to perform an experiment on a cataleptic, to see if he could get a sleeping man to do things he would not do when awake. Once he had done so, it appears that the doctor got a little carried away, getting poor Cesare to kill just about anyone who inconvenienced the doctor.
The guy, burning with righteous fury, accuses the doctor, who denies everything until the body of the dead Cesare, who has apparently collapsed in a field outside of town, is brought in. At this point, the doctor also collapses, in grief, and spills the beans about his psychiactric misdeeds. He is bound in a strait-jacket and carted off to one of his own cells.
All well and good. But then, in a Donald Kaufman-esque twist ending, we PULL BACK TO REVEAL that this tale is being told to us by the guy, who, for some reason, STILL LIVES AT THE INSANE ASYLUM. We come to find that his fiancee is there, and Cesare too, and that they’re all quite stark raving mad. So apparently none of this involving tale is true.
In addition to the twist ending (or as M. Night Shamalyan calls them the “paradigm shift”), there’s the matter of the sets.
They are deliberately weird, fake, flat, hand-made, crazy, unsettling and bizarre. Unlike anything that’s been done before or since, I don’t know why. And at first you’re like “What’s with the sets?” But then, when the twist ending comes, you say “Oh, I see, because the narrator is crazy.” Frankly, I don’t know why this experiment has never been repeated. Only recently, with movies like Sin City and A Scanner Darkly has this kind of heavily stylized, deliberate artificiality found its way into a mainstream feature. Correct me if I’m wrong.
And, of course, I’m thinking about a remake.
The thing I like best about the movie, aside from the visionary sets and the ahead-of-its-time narrative, is the film’s ideas about guilt. Dr. C has found a way to commit evil acts with a clean conscience — he’s not the one killing people, Cesare is. Cesare, on the other hand, also feels no guilt because he doesn’t even know that he’s killing anyone. People die, citizenry is hysterical, and no one has to pay a penalty. No one is guilty. No wonder the protagonist has gone insane.
*smarty-pant film students will recall that Lang was first asked to direct Caligari.
Moby-Dick, the movie, sort of
As any sentient English-reading American knows, Moby-Dick is the greatest novel ever written. It begs to be made into a great feature film.
It, so far, has not.
In 1930, they shot a version with John Barrymore where Ahab kills the whale and is happily re-united with his patient, long-suffering wife. In 1956, John Huston shot the most famous version with considerable cinematic flair but with Gregory Peck tragically miscast as Ahab. By 1998, there was a TV-movie version with Patrick Stewart as Ahab, which I have not seen, but which was made for TV.
As I’ve noted before, there’s something about great literature that resists film, no matter how “cinematic” the literature seems to be. The Godfather is a great movie from a pulpy page-turner. So are Jaws and Silence of the Lambs and Gone With the Wind. The Great Gatsy, however, I think is doomed to ever-diminishing returns.
Moby-Dick is doomed, I think, for four reasons.
1. It’s period, which makes it expensive
2. It’s about whaling, and 19th-century whaling at that, which no one cares about
3. It’s based on a work of “famous literature,” which makes people want to go see Pirates of the Carribean 2: Dead Man’s Chest instead
4. It’s called Moby-Dick
Now then. What does make Moby-Dick a great idea for a movie?
1. Deathless, universal themes of leadership, manhood, adventure, madness, obsession
2. A terrific, flawless, inexorable plot
3. Indelible, time-tested characters
So, to make Moby-Dick into a movie, the thought occurs to me, as it does to any screenwriter, “Well, let’s just stick with the stuff that works and throw out the rest.”
That is to say, keep those themes, keep those characters, keep that plot, but throw out the title, the reputation, the period setting, and most important, the whaling.
What is the plot of Moby-Dick? The plot of Moby-Dick is that a crazy, obsessive leader goes “off the res” and gets the men in his care tangled up in a dangerous mission of revenge that can only end in death and ruin.
The first person who springs to mind, of course, is George W. Bush. But no one is going to develop that movie any time soon.
It could be almost anything. It could be thieves, it could be spies, it could be an office, it could be a school, it could be merceneries.
So here’s the question: what is the 21st-century equivalent to 19th-century whaling?
Ahab is a crazy captain, but his employers let him be crazy because he produces results. Christ, isn’t that the protagonist of every police drama made in the past 40 years? And that would make Ishmael the rookie cop who gets drawn into the shady side of undercover work. The cliches write themselves!
But Ahab is not in the employ of the government, he is in the employ of the investors of The Pequod. Part of the drama of Moby-Dick is that Ahab isn’t just fulfilling a personal vendetta, it’s that he’s doing it with someone else’s ship and with men who don’t share his sense of outrage and vengeance. The voyage of the Pequod is a commercial venture. Ahab is not only asking his men to give up their lives, he’s asking them to give up their stake in a lucrative commercial venture.
Whaling, as Melville describes it, is a hugely profitable but also derided profession. Even in 1851, apparently, whaling was seen as a necessary but ugly economic truth. One might use whaling products every day, but one did not wish to hang out with whalers. Whaling was seen as an adventurous, dangerous but low-class thing to do with one’s life.
So who are today’s whalers? Our mercenaries in Iraq seem to be a good point of comparison. But maybe it’s someone in the drilling or mining profession instead. Maybe it’s drug-runners, maybe its firefighters, maybe it’s paramedics, maybe it’s cops after all.
Or maybe it’s a heist movie. If Danny Ocean took Elliott Gould’s money for the casino job and then said to Matt Damon and his crew, “You know, I’ve got a better idea, let’s rob Fort Knox instead,” is that Moby-Dick?
But the gold in Fort Knox is dead. It’s a metal, it’s not alive. Moby-Dick, the great white whale, is alive, natural, unplaceable and unknowable. Ahab is asking his crew to join him in a mission to know the unknowable. And that makes it tricky.
Bentfootes wrap-up
This photo has nothing to do with today’s entry. But it looks cool. It’s a real cat!
I am back in my basement in Santa Monica. My plane barely skittered out of JFK ahead of a bank of thunderstorms. My colleague and co-director Kriota Willberg was not so lucky; she was to have taught a workshop in Toronto this weekend and instead spent $200 going to and from the airport in taxis, only to learn that her flight was cancelled due to the weather conditions.
I fear that this sort of occurrence will become more occurrent as the global-warming thing asserts itself.
In any event, The Bentfootes is in the can. Thursday morning was the last chance we had to work with Mr. Urbaniak, who, in contravention of earlier days, showed up not drunk but hopped up on goofballs. He was so manic and out-of-control that we had to speed up the camera in the hopes of his performance looking “normal” when we slow it down and loop it. We shot six scenes in forty-five minutes, with Mr. U rushing from set to set, not even stopping for lighting or to make sure the other performers were in place.
Gary “gazblow” Schwartz came for his cameo, and since he’s a bigger guy we put Mr. Urbaniak in a corner and had Mr. Schwartz block his way to the door, and thus pinioned Mr. Urbaniak was able to deliver something like a real performance.
Friday, Mr. U was supposed to shoot another day on “Kidnapped” but apparently his William-Burroughs-level of drug consumption got him sent home from that project for the weekend, so we got to shoot a scene where Mr. U has a friendly conversation with some dancers. Because Urbaniak is who he is, the scene developed into a paranoid shouting match.
We tried to get the orange tape-on-a-stick to do the scene instead, but its agent would not return our phone calls.
Obviously, still no projector bulb. But I have Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz playing in my head, if that counts.
Ankle-deep in Bentfoote-land
My apologies to my faithful readers, I have been ensconced in the Jack H. Skirball Theater shooting the dance sequences for The Bentfootes. James Urbaniak has been “unwell” and unable to attend the shoot up ’til now, so we need to shoot around him. In his place, a PA has been holding a stick with a piece of orange day-glo tape at the end. Mr. Urbaniak will be digitally composited in later.
For those interested in the history of this unique and bizarre project, factoids and whatnot may be found here.
Be back soon!
The Venture Bros: Escape to the House of Mummies, Part II
The boys continue to warp and shatter the structures and expectations of form. It was funny enough that they put a fake “previously on The Venture Bros.” at the top of the show, but then they put a fake “next week on The Venture Bros.” at the end. So we’re apparently watching the second act of a three-part episode, what would in normal circumstances be released on DVD as The Venture Bros. Movie.
What makes this monkeying with structure great, of course, is the way it frees up the writers’ creativity. Why bother explaining how the boys got into the room with the spikes, or how Dean’s head got removed, or how Edgar Allen Poe got roped into this mess — that was all explained in Part I. And how will they get away from the bad guys, what will happen to the second Brock, how will Dean’s head get put back, all that will be explained in Part III. Right now, we’ve got the tumultuous, everything-in-motion Part II.
Of course, all that motion and calamity is the “B-story” this week. In the foreground is Rusty’s childish contest with Dr. Orpheus. The science/religion conflict that sparked in Episode 1 explodes into flames here, continuing Season 2’s theme of taking background ideas from Season 1 and making them the foreground here. Rusty abandons his family and tortures his friends, Dr. Orpheus fools his daughter and puts her into a coma, all for the sake of this contest. The goal of the contest? “Who can be the smallest,” of course, again, making the metaphoric literal. And when they both lose, they only do so because they both win! They’re both the smallest men!
And while it’s true that Orpheus is a know-it-all, I too felt the urge to correct the deity when he made the mistake of confusing Argos and Cerberus.
I once wrote for a comedy show, and the sketches for the show were developed as though the show were taking place in the late nineteenth century and were being written for the vaudeville stage. The producers insisted that each sketch must have a premise, development of the premise, a satisfying conclusion to the premise (called “the payoff”) and then a final “switcheroo” that they called “The Button.” This strict adherence to 100-year-old comedy rules helped ensure that every idea the writers had would eventually be turned from something everyone thought was funny to something no one thought was funny. After a few weeks of observing just how deadening this process was, I raised my hand in a meeting and said “I’m sorry, didn’t Monty Python prove, twenty-fiveyears ago, that you don’t need any of this crap? Why can’t we just think of funny ideas, keep them going for as long as they’re funny, then cut away when they’re not funny any more? Won’t that make the show fresher, more unpredictable, cut out all this dead time, and keep all the sketches from feeling exactly alike?”
It was questions like this that have kept me from working in television comedy for the past ten years.
So it’s good to see The Venture Bros., in its second season, being so voracious in its appetite to expand the boundaries of the possible in television.
The Bentfootes, day two
A long day, set in the apartment of r_sikoryak and his wife Kriota Willberg, creator of The Bentfootes.
Mr. Urbaniak showed up sober this time, but soon was seen pouring some mysterious liquid into his “morning coffee” from a ceramic jug marked “X X X.” We had nine pages of dramatic scenes to shoot but he simply couldn’t concentrate on the actor he was performing opposite and instead kept wandering off his mark to grab some more Dunkin Donuts “Munchkins” from craft services. Finally we had to simply write the other actor out of the scenes and strap Mr. Urbaniak down to a chair, turning all the scenes into a long monologue.
We had 60-minute tapes in our digital cameras, and we just pointed the lens at our lead and kept rolling. He was angry at first at being strapped to the chair and started swearing, yelling and shouting the most alarming imprecations. The demon alcohol was coursing through his veins and we got it all on tape as he went from outraged to pathetic to finally weeping openly, calling for his “mommy.” That took from 10 until 2, giving us four hours of random shouts, curses, animal noises and rueful sobbing to somehow turn into nine pages of snappy dialogue and action. It was real, but was it art?
After lunch, we untied Mr. Urbaniak, who was now sober and seemingly ready to work. We got a couple of takes of a scene where he must stand at a table, but standing became too much for him and all subsequent takes had to be with him sitting down. Because he is incapable of memorization, his dialogue was taped to the forehead of the actor opposite him. He insisted that that is the way “Brando” did it, and then produced a clipping from the New York Post where a critic referred to him as “the nerd Brando.” (this is true, I swear, he never stops talking about it.)
Soon, a kind of tiredness had washed over Urbaniak to the point where he could no longer remain at the table and the scenes had to be moved to a couch. He asked if perhaps he could do all his scenes lying down, with the rest of the set tilted on its side to make it look like he was “really” sitting up, but we had neither the budget nor time to do that today.
We borrowed a cattle prod from Mr. Urbaniak’s security team and used it to “wake him up” just before a take. Our lovely and talented DP Melissa G. would say “rolling” and I would crouch near Mr. U as he dozed off. I would thengesture to Melissa, who would whisper “action” and I would jab Mr. U harshly with the prod, thereby getting him through another take before he started tilting forward again in a manner to indicate a strong desire to sleep.
Finally, he was incapable of delivering any dialogue at all and all his dialogue had to be given to another actor, who had to do the scene by herself with Mr. U slumped against an apple box in her eyeline. We changed the dialogue so that lines that used to be Mr. U’s, like “You killed my mother!” and “Give me all you got!” were instead the other actor saying “You may think I killed your mother, but in fact I did not” and “I suppose you now want me to give you all I’ve got; well, you have another think coming.”
Squid, who was running sound and serving as clapper/loader today, finally stomped off the set when Mr. Urbaniak dumped a hot cup of coffee on his head during one of his slumpings. Now my evening will be spent trying to coax him back to the production.
Attention, Venture Bros. fans
You will, in all likelihood, enjoy Mike Mignola’s The Amazing Screw-On Head.
The Bentfootes, day 1
Mr. Urbaniak relaxes during the shoot with an admirer.
The crew was ready, the cast members were in place, the atmosphere was electric. It was our first day, shooting a brand new movie! Somehow, news of our humble location had shot across the world on the internet, and scores of the teen girls I like to call “Jimmers” were already camped out outside the doors of the studio. Why don’t these fresh-faced, nubile young ladies have boyfriends? Or school? Or parents?
Everyone was riding a high that only months of preparation and keen understanding of the script can bring. The only thing missing was our star.
His call time was seven am. Seven came and went, and then seven-thirty, eight and nine, then ten. I paced the floor of the studio and worked out the camera moves for the umpteenth time. Squid, our DP, and his crew were starting to get testy with me. They were champing at the bit, ready to shoot.
At 10:30, a roar went up from outside. The cast and crew rushed to the windows to see a huge crush of humanity swarming over the hood and roof of Mr. Urbaniak’s custom-built Hummer, 32 feet long and featuring a wet bar, a sauna and a hot tub. Mr. Urbaniak had tried to get me to go “cruising” with him one night in this vehicle, but I had just seen Al Gore’s movie the night before and could not bring myself to get into this behemoth. It was a lucky thing, as that was the evening that a twelve-year-old girl almost drowned in the hot-tub (she was not the only one in hot water that night).
Studio security, using cattle-prods and machine guns (rubber bullets only! My contract insists upon no fatalities to fans!) cleared a path through the Jimmers from the Hummer to the studio doors. After that, of course, he had to make it through the studio itself and all the hangers-on and sycophants that naturally cling to a star in the middle of a meteoric rise.
He got up to our studio around 11:00am. His subdued demeanor and unwillingness to take off his dark glasses made me fear the worst: he had shown up drunk once again, if not worse.
He staggered over to the craft services table and collapsed. A melon ball, lodged in his ear, had to be extracted with a plastic spoon.
This was an inauspicious beginning indeed to our seven-day shoot.
The scene was a simple one. Mr. Urbaniak (we named hischaracter “Jim” to make it less confusing for our lead) had to simply watch a pair of dancers run through a routine. No acting required. We found a chair for Mr. U to sit in and blocked out the rehearsal. Barely able to keep his head upright, and certainly unable to discern the dancers, who were over ten feet away, a PA held a stick with bright day-glow orange tape attached to guide the star as to where to direct his attention (the PA will need to be removed digitally later).
Now we were running over six hours late and we didn’t yet have a take in the can. Mr. Urbaniak was incapable of remaining upright, even when harnessed to the chair, and insisted on holding a huge prop “martini glass” because he thought it was “funny.” (“It’s a comedy, right? Then LET’S BE FUNNY!” is his motto.)
We ran through a total of sixty takes as the sun set and Mr. Urbaniak slumped further and further down in his seat. When a large rope of drool began to make its way to the floor, I knew it was time for medical intervention. A couple of shots later and our star’s arms starting moving again without the aid of what I call “Muppet sticks”.
That’s when the trouble really began. Although the script merely calls for “Jim” to sit and watch the dance, Mr. U could not restrain himself. Pacino-like, he ignored his blocking and text (or lack of it) and launched himself into the scene. Normally I encourage ideas from my actors, but this was utterly contradictory to the intent of the scene. First he started pestering the actress playing the choreographer, then he started “giving notes” on the dancer’s performance. This wouldn’t have been so bad, but for some reason his “notes” all revolved around whether or not the dancer’s nipples were “visible” enough for his liking in the cold room.
Everyone was getting a little testy, but I kept the camera rolling, hoping that something, anything, might be salvaged from the day’s shoot.
Mr. U then grabbed the dancer and, well, let’s say he “did something inappropriate” that involved touching what I like to call “her breasts.”
The choreographer, outraged by this breach of etiquette, had had enough. Star or no star, she would not stand idly by and chuckle at the brutish antics of Mr. U. She took him aside, where an argument quickly developed. I caught the whole screaming match on film, and it’s good that I did, as that was it for Mr. Urbaniak today. He stomped off the set and headed off into the night with a Jimmer.
So, Day 1 was exciting, but of course now I’m going to have to stay up all night to revise the script. Mr. Urbaniak is the star and lead, and now the story must be changed to keep up with his destructive whims.
Of course I could fight him, but then someone else would be directing this turkey.