Well.
This is going to be one awkward elevator ride.
Almost as bad as the time Richard Nixon and Kurt Cobain died within days of each other.
Xmas piece
Christmas comes to Santa Monica. (click for larger view)
Note: this piece was my Christmas Card for 1990.
The story is: God’s only begotten son, destined to be savior for all humankind, was born in a barn on the outskirts of Bethlehem on December 25, 4 B.C. The event was witnessed by three wise men who had traveled thousands of miles just to be there when it happened. The wise men brought gold and incense as gifts for the baby. The child was born in a barn because his parents could not get rooms at the inn. He grew up to be a political activist, philosopher, psychic healer, prognosticator, and finally ended up, they say, executed by the authorities for crimes against the state.
Now, we could go on about this all night. But to summarize: the child was not born December 25. This we know. The early Christians scheduled Christmas near the winter solstice to attract pagans to their religion, and to duck the Romans, who supposedly wouldn’t notice one more drunken feast going on during the last half of December. Setting aside, for the moment, the mountain of evidence that suggests Jesus never existed, or that he was actually someone else, or that he was a composite of a number of different historical personages, let’s just take it on faith (so to speak) that the rest of the gospels more or less reflect an accurate “history” of this interesting character.
The three wise men followed a star to Bethlehem. They were told that the child would be born there. They somehow got there seemingly within minutes of the blessed event. Angels appeared to shepherds that night, too, telling them that the Messiah was born that night in a barn. The Messiah, the Christ, the Savior, was named Jesus, although this was not at all a common Jewish name at that time or now. His birth seems to be connected to angels and rays of light and mysterious announcements and lights traveling in the sky. My first instinct, of course, is to suppose a UFO connection. But, until further proof exists of flying saucers, let’s suppose there is some rational explanation for all this activity.
Many years ago, I was driving through Ohio one Thanksgiving in the middle of the night and I looked up at a cloudless sky. I realized that the wise men had looked up at a similar sky, had most likely looked up at it night after night for months on their long trip to Bethlehem. Now, there is a sensation anyone can feel when looking up at a cloudless night sky. It’s a feeling of insignificance. The black heavens are spangled from edge to edge with ineffably beautiful points of light. Even with what we know about galaxies and atmospheric tricks of the light, the spectacle is so astounding the only correct response is silence. One cannot look into it too long; one will go insane. The wise men looked at this sky night after night for months and received a message: go to Bethlehem. The savior is born. Bring gifts. It could happen.
And so we now celebrate Christmas. We give gifts to our friends and family and loved ones, partly in imitation of the wise men, partly as a result of constant pressure from manufacturing and retail concerns. We watch TV specials, we eat rich foods, we get drunk, we celebrate love and friendship and the fact that we are alive. If we are able to, we donate money or food or shelter or time or toys or clothing to those who have strayed from the social order or who have gotten lost or fallen down and need help to get back up or for whom things have just not worked out right. Because we have been told that Jesus was born to humble circumstances and hey, you never know.
But what do we celebrate? The baby, if there was a baby, was not born December 25. The wise men, if there were wise men, followed what star? There is no record of such a star seen by anyone else. So perhaps they were insane, or psychic. There is evidence that suggests that Mary and Joseph were actually quite well-to-do, that Jesus really was born, if at all, as the king of the Jews, that the manger and the angels and the talking animals were all added to the story for dramatic impact dozens or hundreds of years later. Let’s face it, folks, from beginning to end, the story just doesn’t hold up any more, if it ever did.
Then what do we celebrate? We celebrate a lie. A story. A fiction. We celebrate the birth of a fiction. The birth of a story of a birth. The birth of what? Of our savior. Of humankind’s savior. We celebrate this story. And what is the message of this story? “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
This message is so astonishingly simple it seems ridiculous to have to put it into words. But look around, turn on the TV, pick up a newspaper, and you can see in an instant that people still don’t quite grasp this simple idea.
In the story of Jesus, the protagonist brings this message to a populace for whom it was big news. And today we see that it is still big news.
December 25 (or thereabouts), back in the day, was the pagan holiday Saturnalia. Saturnalia was a solstice holiday. The days had been growing shorter and shorter, but around December 25 they finally started to get longer again. Saturnalia celebrated the rebirth of the sun, the confirmation that the sun would return. Saturnalia celebrated the fact that the sun had chosen to come around again for another year and bring spring and summer and autumn, and food and warmth and rainfall and trees and flowers and animals and another stab at life. It is now the day we celebrate this story of the birth of this baby Jesus, who, as the story is told, had an extraordinary career in religion, politics, medicine and philosophy, and whose message begins “Do unto others.” What we celebrate is a rebirth of that spirit, that spirit of Jesus, whether a lie, a half-truth or a hallucination, we celebrate this spirit of love and kindness, the sort of spirit that could cook up a turn of phrase so instantly comprehensible and so difficult topractice.
The shepherds, watching over their flocks, were told that the savior had been born. And I believe it, yes, that it is this spirit of love, compassion, tolerance, kindness, this spirit is the savior of humankind. We celebrate that we’ve made it another year, that we can still conceive of these ideals. That this spirit, it appears, has decided to drop by again and hang out for a bit, and give a hand to those of us who are slipping, and try to get us on the right track, or barring that, at least give us some good directions.
Quintet
Perhaps Robert Altman’s least-popular movie, it turns out it is neither as inscrutable nor as unwatchable as many have claimed. It falls amid several different genres, including Science Fiction, Futuristic Dystopia and Apocolyptic Fantasy. And it observes,in its own way, many of the conventions of those genres.
In a world overtaken by an ice age, Essex (Paul Newman) comes to The City with his pregnant woman-child mate. He’s looking for his brother. His brother is a professional gambler, making his living at a game called Quintet, which looks like a cross between chess, backgammon and Sorry! Since the world has ended and all, the only economy the City has is this game.
Brother welcomes Essex and Pregnant Woman-Child and the family sits down to a friendly game of Quintet as Essex goes out shopping for firewood. The game barely gets underway before an assassin rolls a pipe-bomb into the apartment, killing everyone, and the movie, like many Futuristic Dystopia movies, becomes a murder mystery. Essex must find out why his family has been killed, and his investigation of this peculiar game and the high stakes its champions play for form the rest of the narrative.
It’s sluggish, partly because the characters wear bulky costumes and must either trudge through snow or walk carefully, gingerly over frozen surfaces. It is occasionally heavy-handed, if not pretentious. But it is by no means baffling, inscrutable or even especially confusing. I know that doesn’t sound like an especially ringing endorsement; the movie does have its flaws. The stars, including several excellent actors, wear silly-looking sorts of retro-futurist medieval-renaissance outfits and talk in a stilted, elevated style of speech that doesn’t provide much of the celebrated Altmanesque multi-layered dialogue or sense of life and spontaneity. The game of Quintet is never explained except in the loosest, most metaphorical sense and there isn’t much pulse to the mystery-solving aspect of the narrative.
Altman is trying to say something about the importance of ritual to a culture and the ultimate price for clinging to that ritual. The game is supposed to be a metaphor for any number of cultural rituals, from religion to warfare to politics. I think.
The real star of the movie is the setting, which, like all of Altman’s work, has been given a great deal of attention and layers of detail. In thiscase (a short documentary included with the DVD explains), the crew was granted permission to shoot on the site of Expo ’67 in Montreal in the wintertime. They adapted the fairgrounds to their own purposes and then sprayed the whole thing down with water every day, creating incredible cascades of ice and snow that permeate every room of every set in the movie. The effect is stunning; it presents a claustrophobic, run-down, derelict, haunted, futuristic city you can truly believe is the last outpost of a dying race. Indoors and outdoors, in atriums or hotel rooms, ice and snow choke stairways and cascade from light fixtures and railings. This is no set with fake snow and plastic icicles — in every scene you see the actors’ breath. Altman fogs the camera with Vaseline to make it look like the whole movie is perhaps shot through a lens of ice.
Justice League part 2 — Green Lantern is a job
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Left to right: Alan Scott, Hal Jordan, Guy Gardner, John Stewart, Kyle Rayner, Arkkis Chummuck — all entirely different people.
I was in New York recently, having dinner after a show (as one does) with some friends. At the table were the Magazine Editor, the Famous Actor, the Rock Star and the Primatologist. Conversation turned to Justice League. (Conversation has, no doubt, been edited to be more self-serving.)
TODD. My son has turned me into a geek.
PRIMATOLOGIST. (apres spit-take) Turned you into one?!
TODD. Hey, before Sam started watching Justice League, I had never heard of Arkkis Chummuck. Now I know who Arkkis Chummuck is.
ACTOR. Who is Arkkis Chummuck?
TODD. Arkkis Chummuck is a Green Lantern that Hal Jordan was teamed up with for a while. Arkkis is from a planet of werewolf-looking creatures who practice cannabalism. And Hal Jordan kind of held Arkkis Chummuck at arm’s length, thinking that he was some kind of a savage for his cannibalistic ways. But as we get to know Arkkis and his culture, we come to learn that there are deep, spiritual aspects to their practices that Hal simply didn’t bother to think about because of Arkkis’s appearance and habits. So Hal —
EDITOR. Wait — what do you mean he’s “teamed up” with Arkkis Chummuck?
TODD. Hal Jordan is only one Green Lantern. The Green Lantern Corps, you see, is based on a planet called Oa, where the the Oans have the magic Power Battery, which happens to look like a green lantern. And that’s where the Green Lantern Corps is based. Hal Jordan is only one of, I think, 36,000 Green Lanterns, and each Green Lantern polices a certain zone of the universe. Hal Jordan was only the Green Lantern of the zone that includes Earth, since that’s where the intelligent life is in our sector of the universe. If you —
ROCK STAR. And who is the “Jon Stewart” guy?
TODD. He —
ACTOR. There’s a Green Lantern named Jon Stewart?!
TODD. He — yes, he spells it with the “h” —
EDITOR. I wonder if Jon Stewart named himself after —
TODD. John Stewart was an “angry black guy” living in Detroit in the late sixties, and Hal Jordan got teamed up with him —
PRIMATOLOGIST. Wait, why did Earth get two Green Lanterns?
TODD. John Stewart was being trained as Hal Jordan’s backup. And in the Justice League cartoon, John is still from a bad neighborhood in Detroit but they made him a marine —
ACTOR. Wait, so “Green Lantern” isn’t a guy —
TODD. No, although there is a Green Lantern named Guy Gardner, redhead with a bowl haircut who nobody likes —
ROCK STAR. And isn’t one like a cartoonist or something?
TODD. That’s Kyle Rayner —
ACTOR. — “Green Lantern” is a, an office. A position.
TODD. That’s exactly right. “Green Lantern” is a job. So when people say they don’t like Green Lantern, it’s like saying they don’t —
EDITOR. I had no idea —
PRIMATOLOGIST. Are there any female Green Lanterns?
TODD. Are there? Why, one of the most important Green Lanterns is Katma Tui, a dark-red-skinned alien who trained John Stewart —
ROCK STAR. But the whole thing with the, you know, the color yellow —
TODD. Ah, yes. But, according to one story, you see, the power ring is not vulnerable to the color yellow — rather, the Guardians merely tell Green Lantern that his ring has a flaw, because otherwise he would eventually be driven mad with power. But the important thing is, people, they — all these Green Lanterns are entirely different people. Hal Jordan is a test pilot and John Stewart is a marine and Kyle Rayner is a cartoonist and they’ve all been given this responsibility and they all respond differently to the job. It’s like the word “Policeman.” You have all kinds of different policemen and all kinds of different stories you can tell about policemen. You have Hill Street Blues and Dirty Harry. Or “Lawyer.” Or “Doctor.” So that’s why Green Lantern, a character I’d never even thought about, suddenly has become, I don’t know, vital and interesting to me, just that one twist — Batman is a guy, Superman is a guy, but Green Lantern is a job. And I think he’s the only one who is a job, I —
How I got that job
“any helpful suggestions? tips? ways to break into the business and the usual fodder?” — kornleaf
For those interested, here is the complete tale of how I went from nameless obscurity to b-list screenwriter.
In 1988 I was an occasionally-produced playwright living in Brooklyn. I knew that I would never be taken seriously as a playwright unless I got produced in Manhattan somewhere. But how, I wondered, could I let theater people in Manhattan know about my work? I had no money and I knew no one.
I thought, okay: what I need is a kind of theatrical work that requires no sets, no light cues, no sound cues, no director, no producer and no actors.
Given those restrictions, I chose monologues. I had a number of monologues I’d written as audition pieces for actor friends in Brooklyn and I pulled a few more from the stack of unproduced plays I had sitting around. The pieces, for whatever reason, usually involved a character describing some traumatic urban event.
At that time there were a number of theaters and “performance spaces” south of 14th Street, including Home, Funambules (later Nada), Gusto House, Dixon Place and the Knitting Factory. All of these spaces had late-night “variety shows,” where almost anyone could perform for five minutes. Pretty much all you’d have to do is come to one of the evenings, find out who was in charge of booking them, and ask to be put on the list for the next week. Sometimes the person in charge would ask you to submit material but very rarely was I denied a booking because of that. It was five minutes of time during a late-night show, what was at stake?
So I got on at Dixon Place and Funambules. I chose strong pieces that were guaranteed to get a reaction, often with me performing with as much force and intensity as I could muster. The important thing was that I wanted to be clear. I didn’t want anyone in the audience to wonder what was going on; I made sure that, whatever else happened, whether they loved it or hated it, I had their attention for five minutes. They might like the piece or they might hate it, but they weren’t going to be unclear on what I was saying.
The audience for these shows was usually other performance artists and theater folk, so it wasn’t long before word spread that I was worth watching for five minutes and I had little trouble getting booked on the rest of the downtown circuit. Within a year I was getting my own solo late-night shows, where I would perform an hour or so of these monologues.
A small sample of the dozens of flyers I made to advertise my solo shows, and the professionally-made program for my off-Broadway solo show.
One of my first solo shows was at Home, and went very well. After the show, the artistic director of the space congratulated me and asked me if I had any plays that I thought would be good for the space.
And yes, I did. I had a play I had just finished that afternoon, One Neck, about a serial killer who crashes a Long Island dinner party. I handed the script for One Neck to the guy and before long (if you count 3 years as “before long”) One Neck was produced off-Broadway.
Three cards for different presentations of One Neck. The first featured both James Urbaniak and Steven Rattazzi, the second featured future-Emmy-winner Camryn Manheim and the off-Broadway production featured future Tony-and-Emmy-winner Allison Janney.
One Neck was not a huge financial success but it was popular enough and well-reviewed enough to get a little attention from movie people. A producer asked me to adapt it into a screenplay, which went nowhere for a long time, except that it eventually ended up on the desk of another movie producer, who asked me to work on a screenplay he had, a romantic comedy set in the Hamptons. I had never written a romantic comedy before, but as long as someone was asking me to write a screenplay I was happy to be paid to learn.
I wrote many drafts of that romantic comedy script and when the producer felt it was done, he sent if off to CAA. CAA brought it to the attention of one Warren Beatty, who decided, out of the blue, to make it his next movie.
Now then, remember, I was still an obscure, downtown playwright in New York. The fact that Warren Beatty was interested in my script made me news in the world of script sales in Hollywood.
An executive at Dreamworks, Nina Jacobson, read my script (which eventually became the one of the biggest mega-bombs of all time, Town and Country, without my name on it) and asked to meet with me when she was in New York talking to new writers. I pitched her an idea for a movie about a cat that saves the world from a nuclear disaster (“Die Hard with a cat” was my four-word headline pitch) and while she didn’t buy that idea, she was amused enough to offer me a job working on what she described as “an animated film about talking ants.” The ant movie was, apparently, a low-enough priority for the studio that they were willing to take a chance on a writer who had never had a movie produced before.
There are two lessons to be learned here.
The first is, produce yourself. Make something and get it out there, any way you can. The advent of the internet makes this easier than ever. You can work from your own home for free.
The second is, an agent will not necessarily help you. While I did get an agent as a result of One Neck‘s success, everything that happened in this story happened in spite of, not because of that agent’s work on my behalf.
The Birds
Tippi Hedren plays Melanie Daniels, who is the heiress to a San Francisco newspaper fortune (that is to say, she’s Patty Hearst, ten years too early). Melanie lives by her own rules. She skips and saunters through life, plays tricks on squares, travels the world, has adventures, aggresively pursues men and drives a fast car.
She meets Mitch, who is a lawyer and presumptive model of manhood. Mitch disapproves of Melanie, whom he sees as an annoying menace who deserves to be taken down a notch.
Melanie decides to pursue Mitch, for reasons that remain unclear. Is she interested in him sexually? Does she want to “teach him a lesson” somehow, reassert her upper-class authority? In any case, she decides to play a mild trick on him and is willing to traipse out to his mother’s house in Bodega Bay to do it.
Bodega Bay is, in the world of this movie, “the sticks,” and Melanie is clearly out of her element there. The nicest reaction she gets from showing up in her fur, her silver sports car and her French roll is that the elderly storekeeper is befuddled and amused by her. Everyone else clearly hates her. Annie the schoolteacher is plainly jealous of her (she was once Mitch’s girlfriend and has followed him to Bodega Bay herself, abandoning city life, her boho background and sexual fulfillment in order to, literally, take care of his little sister) and Mitch’s mother acts as though she’d like to pound nails into the back of Melanie’s head.
Mitch doesn’t approve of her, Annie doesn’t approve of her, Mom doesn’t approve of her, the whole town doesn’t approve of her. In the local restaurant, even the old lesbian ornithologist and the crusty old fisherman, two marginal characters who you would think would have had their share of disapproval from locals over the years, don’t approve of her. The middle-aged mother trying to protect her kids strongly disapproves of her, even though she’s in a housecoat, in a restaurant, with her two kids, in the middle of the afternoon, on a school day (what was she doing in the restaurant? Was she running away, taking the kids away from a drunken, abusive father? That would at least explain her high-strung personality). Apparently, no matter who you are and what your background is, everyone agrees that the worst thing in the world is a carefree monied blonde.
Why does everyone store up their resentment for Melanie? Mitch’s mom Lydia, a real piece of work, is a controlling, overprotective, emasculating bitch but no one resents her. Mitch defends gangsters and strings the simmering, resentful Annie along for years but no one resents him (Annie literally dies protecting Mitch’s little sister and Mitch doesn’t even think to drag her body in from the street).
About halfway through the movie, birds start attacking. It’s almost like the town’s resentment and fury against Melanie, the “bad vibes” she causes, reaches a point where the vibes themselves drive the birds insane. And if the birds attacked Melanie and only Melanie, you get the feeling that would suit everyone fine. But they don’t, they attack everyone equally. The storm of resentment breaks and everyone gets caught in it.
I’m watching this movie and Tippi Hedren keeps reminding me of different people. “The Hitchcock Blonde” is such a cliche at this point it’s hard to pinpoint exactly who she reminds me of. She looks like Grace Kelly, which makes sense, and she looks like Melanie Griffith, which also makes sense (as she’s her mother, after all). (Brian DePalma, of course, cast Melanie Griffith as a kind of gutter-version of the Hitchcock Blonde in Body Double.) She looks like Sharon Stone, who was the definitive post-Hitchcock Hitchcock Blonde in Basic Instinct, she looks like Naomi Watts, who played a version of the part in Mulholland Drive, and she looks like Anne Heche, who played the Hitchcock Blonde part in the remake of Psycho.
Then it all snaps into focus: Tippi Hedren is a dead ringer for Paris Hilton. Suddenly the movie makes sense. Thirty years before the fact, Alfred Hitchcock made a movie about the world-wide hatred of Paris Hilton. You might say that, since Paris Hilton did not yet exist, Hitchcock had to invent her. Substitute “jumping into that fountain in Rome naked” with “having sex on video on the internet” and the parallel becomes complete.
The Birds is about the destruction of the Hitchcock Blonde. Everyone hates her, so she must be destroyed. So we watch as Melanie is turned from a sassy, carefree gadabout to a quivering, crippled catatonic. Along the way, we see her turned into a compliant girlfriend, a handy housewife, damsel-in-distress and caring mother-figure. Finally she is attacked, alone and directly, and reduced to nothingness, a victim, a thing to be rescued by man-man Mitch, without personality or point-of-view.
Many complain that the movie ends too abruptly, but if you look at the narrative this way, it ends exactly where it should; the Blonde is destroyed, the narrative is complete. After the birds violently attack Melanie in the bedroom (!), they don’t do a thing to Mitch (apart from a few warning pecks) as he walks to the garage and gets out the car. The birds have what they want; they’ve destroyed the Hitchcock Blonde and they’re willing to sit by and patiently watch as she gets driven out of town. Melanie has a small cut on her forehead but Mom Lydia wraps her entire head in gauze, covering up her blonde hair and making her look more like a cripple. As a final symbolic act, the sportscar she came to town in, representing her wealth and independence, is commandeered by Mitch, new head of the family, to drive her away.
(And Tippi Hedren named her daughter after this character!)
Note to Universal: this movie is sorely in need of restoration. The DVD transfer is substandard by today’s measure and the extensive special-effects work has aged terribly. There’s nothing to be done about the occasional phony-baloney painted backdrops, but not only does the traveling matte look work look awful, the bird-attack scenes with their multiple film-element layers have deteriorated to a disastrous degree.
The Long Goodbye
First of all, look at these images.
The first three are different poster designs from the original release of the movie (the second one, which you may not be able to see well, is drawn by Jack Davis, is styled as a Mad Magazine parody splash-panel, and can be viewed larger here. ). Presumably, MGM owns the rights to the first three images. Yet they chose the utterly anonymous, point-of-viewless, unemphatic final image for their current DVD release. (Note: for the DVD cover, they Photoshopped a gun into the character’s hand so we would know this is a detective movie). The mind reels.
Many questions flit through my mind while watching this movie, some of which relate to the above posters.
Is this a parody? The Jack Davis poster seems to want to sell it that way. “Come see this movie, it’s a self-conscious take-off on old-timey detective stories!” But the movie doesn’t feel like parody to me, or even a comedy. It feels very much of its time and place, but it seems structured very much like a detective movie to me.
Is Elliot Gould parodying Phillip Marlowe, or merely updating him, translating him, as it were, for a new generation? The only thing I can tell for sure is that he’s not imitating Humphrey Bogart, which would have been the exact wrong thing to do in any case. But who is Phillip Marlowe in the novel (which I have not read)? Does he wander around LA with a fuzzy, jazzy interior monologue running, acting like a dissolute smartass so that people won’t know how smart and moral he is? (This performance really sticks with me, and matches the rhythms of LA so well that it’s hard not to hear him muttering his off-kilter, offhand observations as I drive around.)
I’ve read many people talk about how Gould’s Marlowe is an anachronism, how he’s this forties guy wandering around confused in a 70s LA, but he doesn’t feel anachronistic to me. He’s in a strange position because he’s not an aging hippie and he’s not an uptight businessman, he’s somewhere in between. Outwardly he judges no one (“It’s okay with me” is his comment on every fresh indignity he encounters) but inwardly he’s keeping notes, making connections and, when push comes to shove, judging quite harshly indeed. Isn’t that Phillip Marlowe?
For that matter, did “Phillip Marlowe” ever really exist? Or anyone like him? The character that Chandler’s audience read, and Bogart played, did that make total sense to readers and audiences of the time, or was he a fantastic concoction even then, like James Bond in the 60s, Shaft in the 70s (or Columbo for that matter), Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the 00s?
In many ways, it seems like this movie is the missing link between The Big Sleep and The Big Lebowski. A lot of the same characters from Lebowski are here, and The Dude in many ways seems like the logical extension of Gould’s work. I wonder if, given 30 years time or so, Lebowski will seem less like a parody and more like an unconventional-conventional detective story as well.
Casting notes: seeing Sterling Hayden in a beard playing the alcoholic, washed-up writer reminds me that he was originally cast as Quint in Jaws. His performance here gives a tantalizing glimpse of what that might have been like. And a young man named Arnold Schwarzeneggar plays a nameless thug working for Jackie Treehorn Marty Augustine.
Monsters
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I sense a pattern here.
The history of classic movie monsters seem to progress from creatures who are recognizably human to creatures that seem to be at least part human to creatures that are demonstrably not (I suppose it’s not a coincidence that Mr. Ridley Scott’s movie was called Alien). Then it rebounds again as creatures like Jason and Michael Myers and Freddy Krueger come along. And little Sadako of course.
As part of a project I’m working on, I’m thinking about classic monsters and why they work, why they are scary. Is it lack of human form, as in Alien? Or perversion of recognizable form, as in The Thing? Lack of humanity seems to be a constant, but what exactly freaks us out about the physical form of these creatures? Is it teeth, is it tentacles, is it claws, is it their eyes, or lack of them?
Tell me, if you will, what was the first, or latest, physical manifestation of horror that completely freaked you out, and what was it about it that did it?
Statement
My heartfelt thanks to Mr. JAMES URBANIAK and Ms. NINA HELLMAN helping out last night at CAROUSEL for the presentation of the new chapter of FEEDER BIRDS, and to Mr. R. SIKORYAK for continuing to encourage me to pursue this seemingly foolish endeavor. The show went quite well, and swiftly, with much laughter and insights from all the folks presenting things.
I myself don’t perform much in public any more so it was especially gratifying to have complete strangers come up to me after the show to tell me they liked the piece.
The Bentfootes, while not exactly finished, is in a much more polished, presentable shape than it was two weeks ago, as well as being 10 minutes shorter and at least 10 percent funnier. We had some (very) small screenings for friends, and Venture Bros fans would have delighted to watch JAMES “DOC VENTURE” URBANIAK and STEVEN “DR. ORPHEUS” RATTAZZI playing a giddy, slap-happy version of Ebert and Roeper on our editor’s living room couch.
The editor of The Bentfootes, by the way, is a hugely talented young man named CONNOR KALISTA. Remember that name; this time next year I won’t be able to afford him.
For those of you who could not attend Carousel, here are some of my favorite panels from last night’s chapter. As you can see, I enjoy drawing foliage.
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I am in New York City, finishing the editing of The Bentfootes. My laptop made one too many trans-continental trips and has died, so blogging will be light for the next week.
HOWEVER
For those of you who happen to be in New York right now, I will be making a rare public ap presenting a chapter of my graphic-novel in progress
FEEDER BIRDS as part of
R. SIKORYAK‘s
CAROUSEL slide-show entertainment event thing.
The lovely and talented actors
JAMES URBANIAK and
NINA HELLMAN
will provide the voices of cartoon birds for the evening.
The big show happens on
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 7
(a date that will live in infamy)
at
8pm
at
DIXON PLACE
258 BOWERY
on the island of Manhattan
Attendance is mandatory!
I thank you for your attention.