True Hollywood Stories: the Stranger in the Room
The producer calls the writer, says "I’ve got this fantastic property I want to develop." The writer says "Oh I love that property, by all means let’s do this." The producer and the writer have a series of meetings where they talk about what would make a good movie based on this property. The writer has ideas, the producer also has ideas, they work together to come to an agreement of what the movie should be. When they feel like they’ve got a firm handle on the idea, they call up the studio people and set up a meeting.
Sam’s Freighter
Click to enlarge.
Allow me a moment of paternal pride in the presentation of my son Sam’s "Freighter" painting and poem.
They were created as part of a class project studying "the harbor." The "harbor project" involved building a room-sized harbor out of wooden blocks, which each child building his or her own model boat — ferries, freighters, tugboats, fishing boats, pleasure craft, ocean liners — and then operating that boat within the "real world" of harbor commerce — for instance, Sam would collect money from exporters to haul cargo to Hawaii, and would pay a fee to the tugboat who took him out of the harbor and into the ocean, and also to the child who operated the dock in Hawaii, and so forth. It was pretty freakin’ awesome (each child also built their own fully-functioning lighthouse), but for me his evocative, vivid, carefully rendered painting of the freighter disaster was the high point of the show. Where most of the kids were content to present their subjects in a straightforward, "documentary" way ("I am a buoy, I keep the ships from running aground," etc) Sam both placed his subject into a narrative, and further, decided to make the narrative a disaster story, in the tradition of the disaster songs of the early 20th century, such as "The Ship Titanic" ("it was sad when the great ship went down").
Movie Night with Urbaniak: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
urbaniak and I are in the middle of a little John Ford – John Wayne retrospective. Last Thursday we watched The Searchers (because it’s out now on a spectacular blu-ray transfer) and tonight it was The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. (We’ve just finished a little "30s Gangster Movie" retrospective, having watched Scarface, The Roaring Twenties and Little Caesar all in a row, with The Public Enemy still waiting in its shrinkwrap.)
Family Movie Night: Spinout
We’ve been having Family Movie Nights on weekends here at chez Alcott. Last weekend it was The Sound of Music, last night it was Monsters, Inc. (which deserves its own in-depth analysis for its ingenious plotting alone), and tonight, for some reason, the kids requested the 1966 Elvis Presley vehicle Spinout.