The Bentfootes
Here’s a real rarity for the pages of this blog: notes from an actual film shoot.
The Bentfootes is a “mockumentary” about a fictional American family who, for the past 200 years, has toiled in the margins of American dance, all to no avail.
Why to no avail? Well, because each generation of Bentfootes, for one reason or another, just hasn’t gotten the breaks. Sometimes it’s lack of talent, sometimes it’s being ahead of the times, sometimes it’s cruel twists of fate, sometimes it’s over-reaching. And sometimes it’s because you get hit by a bus.
The Bentfootes was conceived as a dance piece by Kriota Willberg (Mrs. R. Sikoryak), and is now being expanded into a feature-length film, written and directed by yours truly (
toddalcott), with a piece of animation by r_sikoryak and starring none other than James urbaniak, with a cameo appearance by Gary “gazblow” Schwartz. It’s a regular Livejournal lovefest!
Mr. Urbaniak plays Jim Raritan, the “producer” of the movie you’re watching and the boyfriend of Susan Bentfoote, the “last Bentfoote,” whose tragic death is the catalyst for Jim to make a documentary about Susan and her family. It’s a funny, bittersweet meditation on art, life, and what it takes to “make it” in American culture.
Today’s work consisted of: watching the music documentary Dig!, in order to remind ourselves just how patchy a movie can be technically and still get by on story and content, and watching a rehearsal of two of the dances to get some ideas for camera placement and how many different takes we’re going to have to do for each dance to cover all the action.
Our schedule is very tight and our budget is, well, nonexistent. We’re shooting James’s days starting on Saturday, and the big crowd scenes where we need everybody in one spot at one time next Wednesday. That is, unless James has to shoot an episode of “Kidnapped” that day, in which case I will simply blow my head off and not worry about the movie any more.
Wish us luck!
In projector news, the store I ordered the bulb from said that it would take a week for the new bulb to come in. That was over two weeks ago, and now I’m in New York for two weeks shooting this movie. So it will be quite some time before I am reunited with my beloved projector. But I shall my hands quite fulll with this no-budget film shoot.
Anything Else revisted, incredibly
Christina Ricci has seen the future. Or maybe the past. It’s a little confusing.
LJer dougo has sent this utterly flabbergasting piece of analysis.
For those of you unable or unwilling to click on the link, I’m going to repeat the gist of the information here anyway, just because I think that it will be a healthy exercise for me to do so, that I might slowly get myself used to this idea.
A while back, I typed up this little piece on Woody Allen’s Anything Else, referring to it as “Woody Allen’s low point.” Normally I find that when I don’t like a great director’s movie, it’s because there was some other level to it that I couldn’t appreciate, but Anything Else is one of those movies where you’ve really, really got to be a glutton for punishment to have to want to watch it again, because there honestly doesn’t seem to be anything going on under the lame, disorganized comedy you’re watching.
Well, it turns out that dougo has discovered that there may, in fact, be something else going on under that lame, disorganized comedy. Namely, a (work with me here) time travel comedy, wherein Woody Allen plays the older version of himself (Jason Biggs), who comes back in time to save his younger self from following his own life’s path. Now, suddenly, the ending, which doesn’t work on any level as is, starts to take on a whole new comic dimension. (In the movie, Woody tells Jason to join him on a new job in LA, then panics at the last minute and says that he can’t go because, of all things, he’s shot a police officer and is on the lam. It makes a whole lot more sense, and is funnier, if, for some reason, Woody’s time machine is failing and he ducks out on Jason in order to get back to his own time. Christ, the movie almost becomes Back to the Future.) (It would also make sense that Jason Bigg’s character is actually from the 1950s, which would explain his love of torchy jazz and his anachronistic attitudes about present-day NYC.) (Jesus, now that I think about it, maybe there was a third part of the movie, all about Jason’s life in the 1950s, which he escaped in order to get to what is now our present. Then his future self comes back to rescue him from the 2000s. Now that would have been some kick-ass movie!)
Now, ordinarily I would file this under “people with too much time on their hands” but, well, I guess I’m one of those people, because, the fact is, there is something of a precedent for Woody Allen movies starting out much more “experimental” than they finish up. Woody lore is rife with alternate endings, scrapped productions, replaced cast-members and and even completely re-done movies. Annie Hall was, they say, originally a three-hour movie about a man’s inability to experience pleasure, and contained a substantial murder mystery. And was actually shot that way, and became the Academy-Award-winning classic only in the cutting room. (And the murder-mystery part was later re-made as Manhattan Murder Mystery.)
Also, Woody has always been playful with genre devices whenever his narrative needs a goose. Just a casual perusal of his titles comes up with deft employment of ghosts, time travel, flying saucers, fairies, voodoo, spiritual displacement, The Gods and magic (especially the “Chinese Box” trick, which comes up at least four times in his work, and which he uses again in the upcoming Scoop [which looks wonderful, by the way]) (And let’s not forget, before Woody was a comedian, he was a magician.)
It makes perfect sense that Anything Goes might feature a character from the future, and it also makes perfect sense that Woody would decide it didn’t work and cut it out of the movie at the last minute, leaving behind, yes, another romantic comedy, although one a far cry from Annie Hall. And the only people who might know about it are the actors in the scenes cut out and the crew who shot them, and they could easily be sworn to secrecy. He works with the same crew members for decades sometimes, they wouldn’t say anything (not that anyone would ask), and even an actor as grouchy as Sam Shepard becomes tight-lipped and stoic when asked why they were cut out of Woody Allen movies. So who knows?
Character Design, part II: The Comics
What is it? What makes these two guys so bewitching? Is it their trenchcoats? Is it their grace and skill? Their evident cool in the face of extreme danger? Their animal-like nature?
Or is it the talent of the artists, the quality of the line, the starkness of the lighting, the mastery of the shading? Is it that both figures, although hefty with three-dimensional weight and mass, also paradoxically border upon complete abstraction, a collection of shapes and shadows?
In my daily life I have no interest in thugs or demons and my idea of a personal hero is someone like Thurston Moore, but these two big lugs consistently make me want to stop what I’m doing, take a load off and look at some comic books.
Venture Bros: Hate Floats
1. Great title, and illustrative. The characters are separated and teamed with enemies and strangers, and find unlikely alliances due to the only thing they share: a desire to destroy their enemies.
2. High level of carnage. Could be the bloodiest so far. Last week’s episode with the fourteen deaths was hysterical, but this was almost like real violence. Truly disturbing. I’ve never seen an eyeball out of its socket, animated, much less see a “point-of-view” shot of the same thing.
3. Any TV show that includes perverse references to Superman, Turk 182 and “Winged Victory” can’t be all bad.
4. Rusty buys Dean a speed-suit. It’s red. And it didn’t occur to me until they were half-way through their purchase that Dr. Venture’s suit was once red too, but he’s worn it every day of his life since he bought it as a teenager. Now it’s faded to what my old apartment building decorator called “Desert Rose.”
5. Terrific episode-long piece of sustained action. Really, everything cuts together beautifully. It’s not just funny, it’s also genuinely exciting.
6. The most important thing, the show is completely transforming itself. Last season, a good deal of the humor was the humor of disappointment, where they set up the action cliche and then deflate it by having something mundane happen. Here, they set up the action cliche and then turn it on its head, pump it up, twist it inside out, increase the tempo and turn it into something that manages to be both parody and the real thing at the same time.
7. The sustained narrative. I cannot stress how different it makes everything.
Contest!*
Favorite / Least favorite character designs.
I’ll go first.
I don’t know why, but I find this character endlessly appealing. Best-designed character on animated television today. Not even the other characters on the same show stack up, with the possilbe exception of a couple of the villains.
There were Kim Possible dolls in the stores for a while, but I thought they blew it; they gave her real hair, which seems beside the point to me. The point of her hair seems to be that it remains in its solid Jennifer-Aniston wave, not that you could imagine running a comb through it.
I often bring up character design when discussing animation and my wife starts looking at me like I’m speaking Chinese. In some recess of her psyche, there is no “character design,” there’s just what people look like. And yet, to pick only one tiny example, I would say that a good reason for the relative success of A Bug’s Life over Antz was purely character design. Theirs were friendly and fun-looking, ours were comparatively “adult,” sophisticated and even a little creepy-looking.
The bottom line for character design, for me, is “when I look at this character, do I want to know more about them, or less?”
Case in point.
My other favorite, Sally Impossible, I could not find of image of online.
Hmm — Kim Possible, Sally Impossible? More than coincidence?
Animators: no fair nominating your own creations.
*not a contest
My Superman
Because I was up for this gig. Along with ten thousand other writers, I’m sure. Jiminy, thing was in development for 19 years, they must have asked everyone on the planet at least once.
Anyway, I never got to the pitch stage (wait a minute, I wasn’t up for this gig after all — I was up for Batman vs. Superman — so this idea never would have worked anyway –)
Anyway, I had this idea. And now that the official WB/DC approved movie is out, I know that they’ll never do my idea. But I still think it’s a great idea and here I share it with you.
The executive I spoke with at WB was interested, of course, in “re-inventing” Superman. So I set my mind to that task and came up with this.
WHAT DOES SUPERMAN KNOW ABOUT HIMSELF? Superman knows that he is the Last Son of Krypton. He knows that his father, Jor-El, was a scientist who predicted that Krypton would explode, and that Jor-El stuck him in a rocket-ship and sent him to Earth where he could be safe. More than safe, actually. Jor-El did all this because he loved him so much.
HOW DOES SUPERMAN KNOW ALL THIS? Well, in the 1978 picture, young Clark finds a glowing green crystal in the barn and takes it, logically enough, to the Arctic, where he throws it in the water and it grows into a crystal palace. And Jor-El comes on in a hologram projector thing and tells young Clark about all this.
Okay. Here’s the pitch. What if — oh, how screenwriters love sentences that begin with “What if — “
WHAT IF JOR-EL IS LYING? What if everything that Jor-El puts in his message to Clark is a lie? What if Kal-El is not the last son of Krypton, what if Jor-El was not a scientist, what if Krypton did not explode, what if Jor-El isn’t even Superman’s father?
Well, why would he lie to young Clark like that? Because Jor-El killed Superman’s father. Because Superman’s father was the Wise and Good King of Krypton, and Jor-El killed him, and put his son in a rocket-ship and sent him off to God knows where, and put this message in the green crystal tucked inside the blanket on the rocket-ship so that Kal-El would never come looking for him. He put on this act of being such a kind father, such a loving father, all so that dumb little Kal-El would never think to go back home, looking for Krypton, to find that Jor-El is, in fact, an evil usurper who is running the planet into the ground.
Which, in fact, is what has occurred. Jor-El, like our own president Bush, is an evil, greedy dictator, always using up more, more, more. And he’s been gradually taking over other planets, spreading his evil all over the galaxy. He’s got an army millions of soldiers strong, always expanding his influence, Rome-like, across the universe.
And now he’s gotten to Earth.
And Superman finds out (somehow) that Jor-El is still alive. He intercepts a space-telegram or something. And he goes out to the moon or something to meet up with his beloved Daddy and there’s Jor-El with a whole army of soldiers, and THEY’RE ALL SUPER. And they fight Superman on the moon, grab him, shove him down, ram a piece of Kryptonite into his mouth and take off for Earth, to kill everyone on the planet and turn it into another Kryptonian outpost.
And Superman has to do something about that. Because he finally realizes, after a lifetime of misplaced, mopey homesickness, that he’s not a Kryptonian. He’s an Earthling.
It’s The Chalk Circle all over again.
Anyway, so that was my idea. When the Bryan Singer picture got greenlit, I knew it was dead, but I brought it up to a friend at DC once because I thought it would make a good “Elseworlds” series. His eyebrows shot up to a fair distance above his head when I got to the big twist, but he said it went “too far” in re-writing the Superman ethos and that they weren’t doing the “Elseworlds” stories any more.
So there you have it. I have another story that involves Batman, Superman and a surprise twist, but maybe I’ll save that for the next issue of Bizarro.