Extra! Extra!

After weeks of ignoring my blog and using it only to promote the work of friends, finally I have something of my own to promote! Right Jab, Left Hook is the heretofore mysterious webseries I’ve been concocting with Venture Bros-star-political-blog-obsessive James . It peels back the shiny facade of the political blogosphere to reveal the squirming pink egos raging beneath.

And we’re shooting the pilot next week! More to the point, we need extras! If you live in the Los Angeles area, and your corporeal self shows up on digital video, we want you in this pilot! The pilot takes place at the launch party for the titular website, and so we need people to be at that party. And, just like a real party, there will be a lot of standing around and awkward conversation!

From the call put out by our extraordinary producer Holly Golden:

PARTY GUESTS IN COCKTAIL ATTIRE NEEDED for web series pilot shooting in Culver City May 18, 19 and 20.

PLEASE REPLY ASAP W/ PHOTO AND AVAILABILITY TO HOLLY GOLDEN at hollygolden1@gmail.com.

I thank you for your attention.

Snake ‘n’ Bacon lives!

In the seemingly non-stop parade of Alcott-friend projects blasting out into the cultural marketplace at the moment, Michael Kupperman‘s Snake ‘n’ Bacon TV show debuts, tonight, at the home of The Venture Bros, [adult swim]. Starring yet another friend-of-Alcott James as the titular Bacon. All readers of this journal are commanded to attend. It is, in the [adult swim] tradition, 11 minutes of nonstop surreal weirdness, straight from the mind of Michael Kupperman, one of America’s greatest living cartoonists.

Millionaire does Costello

My heart leaped into my mouth when I discovered that old friend sometime collaborator Tony Millionaire has created the cover for the new Elvis Costello album. Finally, two of my favorite living artists united.

Nota Bene

My deepest apologies for bringing this journal to an unplanned screeching halt. I have been deeply enmeshed in creating the pilot for the webseries I’ve been putting together with Mr. James . The difference between Urbaniak and myself is that I’ve temporarily abandoned blogging altogether (while developing a webseries about, er, blogging) while Urbaniak has merely moved his operations over to Facebook and Twitter, two forms of entertainment I find difficult to grasp.

However! Regardless of my temporary non-blogging status, I would be remiss if I did not direct my readers attention to another webseries (all the cool kids are doing them now) by Friend of Wadpaw and lj-er , whose real name is (I’m not telling tales out of school here) Gary Schwartz. Gary and I go way back in Olde Neue Yorke Towne, where we use to direct each other’s work, hang out together and collaborate on the odd screenplay or two. Now Gary’s created his own webseries, Money in the Bank, about a bunch of amoral folks in the financial sector (are there other kinds?) who scheme to swipe some money from somebody. Will their plan work? I sure hope so, I hate it when the plans of amoral folks in the financial sector go poorly. I will say this bunch of crooks is off to a great start — one is an ex-prostitute, one is a bitter middle-management type, and one is a woman trapped in a loveless marriage, and they all seem to hate each other. What could possibly go wrong? Mr. Schwartz’s trademark jaded cynicism and bitter misanthropy runs rampant throughout, and the plot unfolds in a kind of mosaic style, with each episode not-quite-following the one before. The impression is less soap opera and more dark comedy. My favorite episode so far is #3, "The Miscarriages," which mercilessly dissects a woman’s failure to conceive a child in stark, unsentimental cinematic terms.

Also note: Firefox does not recognize "webseries" as a word, which certainly must reveal something about something somewhere.

Night owls unite

For 35 years or so, I’ve been a night owl. I do my best thinking at night, after all distractions are gone, the stores are all closed, the phone has stopped ringing and the streets are empty.

As my profession is "writer," it did not become a problem until recently, when I was expected to attend school functions for my children and morning pitch meetings for my work. Someone will mention a morning event I’ll need to be at, and I’ll say "Well, that’s a little early for me because I work at night," and the person will subtly recoil as though they have suddenly noticed that I’m a vampire.

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Programming note

Weeds have begun to sprout in the corners of this blog as I attend to other matters — mostly, other blogging. This "other blogging" I’ve been doing is top-secret – related webseries stuff, which will be trumpeted loudly from every promontory the moment we have something decent to show you fine people.

In movie-viewing news, the Bollywood-related project I was working on came a cropper, so I haven’t needed to become an expert in Bollywood musicals after all, although I did set aside three hours or so to view Devdas, a period romance (a sort of Indian Wuthering Heights) starring Shahrukh Khan and Aishwarya Rai, based on a classic novella which has, apparently, been filmed no less than 11 times, twice in this decade alone. Take that, An Affair to Remember!

I know Devdas was not on any of the lists that my kind and attentive readers sent me — rather, it was the recommendation of my local video-store clerk. The conversation went something like this:

Me: Hi, do you have a Bollywood section?
Clerk: Um, not really. (To be fair, this particular video store doesn’t have an anything "section," they just have heaps of empty DVD cases sitting around — you kind of have to know what you’re looking for when you go in — an excellent selection, just not at all walk-in friendly.) What are you looking for?
Me: Well, um, I’m not really sure. I just kind of have a need to familiarize myself with the genre.
Clerk: (grabs a DVD of Devdas off the shelf) Well, this was popular.
Me: (scrutinizing DVD) Um, do you have a copy of Sholay? (That is, a movie that was recommended to me by Indian Scriptwriter.)
Clerk: Um, yeah, but, that’s like, old.
Me: Um —
Clerk. I mean, that would be like if you wanted to learn about American movies by watching something like, you know, On the Waterfront.
Me: (the downside of this eludes me) Um, yeah — okay — can I take it anyway?
Clerk: Um, if you want.

Anyway, I have no idea if Devdas is a shining example of Bollywood cinema or not, but it’s certainly a head-turning spectacle. It features what I was expecting from "a Bollywood movie," ie: a slightly giddy style of overacting, beautiful women paired with goofy-looking men, grand emotions set against luxurious, stylized backgrounds and spectacular production numbers with cultural signifiers that feel peculiar to westerners. I had planned to write a whole big thing about my first foray in Bollywood but the project I was doing it for fell apart too quickly for me to articulate my thoughts.

Instead, I have turned to Bergman, viewing not only the aforementioned Thirst but also Persona, Shame and The Passion of Anna, and looking forward to tackling Cries and Whispers in the near future. Persona I intend to dissect scene by scene in a "Favorite Screenplays" piece.

When Hollywood folk ask me what I’ve been doing with myself (that is, when I’m not working on projects for them), and I respond with "I’ve been watching a lot of Bergman," they always look at me with a furrowed brow, as though I might soon require psychiactric care.

Apologies

I have crossed over to the other side of the footlights for a few days, shooting some bits and pieces of a new webseries concocted by Mr. James urbaniak and myself. There was not only food, but nudity. The results will soon be found on a computer near you — perhaps even the one right now on your lap!  Normal blogging will resume soon.

Recent movies viewed: The Public Enemy, Kung Fu Panda, Eraserhead.