September 27, 2002 – 8:51 am ·
Experiencing the end of the week exhaustion/exhilaration. Among the new movies arriving today (for Tuesday’s release date) are The Scorpion King, Nine Queens, Brotherhood of the Wolf and one of the greatest movies ever, The Thin Man. William Powell and Myrna Loy strike the perfect balance between comedy and mystery in that one. And it’s long overdue for arrival on DVD. Of the others, the only film I’m truly excited about is Nine Queens, the preview for which was electrifying. Here’s hoping the movie lives up to that impression.
The preparations for the big move to LA are progressing. No line on a job. Noline on a place to live. But November first is a few days closer. I’d call that progress.
Been entering some more of the CPE Journal. Here’s the latest update. Kind of momentous, if you ask me:
:: CPE Journal Part 5 ::
Friday, April 8, 1994
It’s the slowest day of a slow-as-hell week. Andy’s in Hawaii. Laurie’s in Vegas. Teresa’s in DC. Cristy’s in Phoenix. Maher’s in Santa Barbara somewhere. Wanda is at lunch. Larry’s at lunch. Sue’s at lunch. Mary’s got the day off. Fred’s eating a peanut butter and cream cheese sandwich. He took a break long enough to come in and tell me that Kurt Cobain’s body was just discovered in his home (“that kid, from whats-it? That band? Nirvana. Blasted his face off with a shotgun.”) A suicide note lay nearby. Depressing. The phone hadn’t rung for an hour. Next time it rang, it was Mike calling from Emerald Video to confirm Kurt’s death.
September 24, 2002 – 8:22 am ·
Too busy to enter a proper notice today. It’s Tuesday. New Release Day. so I’ve got to scurry off to work and make sure the kiddies can get their hands on Murder By Numbers when we open our doors. in the meantime, here’s some more from the famous CPE Journal.
:: CPE Journal Part 4 ::
Monday, March 21st 1994
Things are breaking up a bit early here tonight. Fred Caruso’s jamarta (“a little of everything”) is in the oven, cooking for toight’s Oscar gathering at the house on the hill. I’m in charge of getting the wine. Maybe a state of fair drunkenness is what I should be aiming for tonight after last night’s road trip to Los Angeles. Melissa Briney, John Paul Lavezzo and I went to see The Hudsucker Proxy at the Century 14. Matt went with us, but I don’t know him well, and it seems I probably won’t need to. We had a good time, though conversation was difficult in the less-than-serene Hard rock Caf�.
New driving music is Smashing Pumpkins (“Cherub Rock” at full blast) Beck, Inspiral Carpets and Green Day. Dig made a lengthy return last week. ‘Nuff for now…
September 22, 2002 – 9:55 pm ·
Last night’s movie: 1 Giant Leap. I’m a sucker for the fusion of music and image, because often out of that synergy arises a powerful idea. It’s inspiration. It’s visual and auditory alchemy. And it can be a hell of a good time. I’ve championed films like Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi, and Ron Fricke’s Baraka for a lot of reasons, but I think they represent film at its most primal. They bear a message, there’s no question. but they involve the viewer by allowing him or her to bring a personal interpretation into the mix. There’s a message there, but the message is the medium. That is, the images and music themselves act upon us in ways go beyond their simple content.The best music videos achieve this sort of give and take. 1 Giant Leap is the brainchild of producers Duncan Bridgeman and Jamie Catto who have traveled throughout (most of) the world in search of ideas, cultures and notions about the human condition. they organized what they recorded into several chapters. 
Money, is one of them. And Sex. God. Masks. Death… They spoke to writers, to artists to thinkers, to religious figures, to shopkeepers, to CEOs. And they threaded the whole concept through a dense tapestry of music. The result is impressive glimpse of the world we live in, and more important, the people with whom we share it. We differ in many ways, but as this film shows us, we’re similar in more ways than we know. Watch it and learn..
September 19, 2002 – 9:24 pm ·
Splitting headache for some reason. Reaching for aspirin, now. Not enough caffeine today. That’s because I’m out of coffee. Which must be why I had such a hard time getting up this morning.Which must also be why I didn’t post anything in the AM. Movement towards L.A. continues, but not exactly in a quicksilver fashion. Originally, I thought I might find a job at a major film studio like Paramount or Warner Bros. working as CEO or president. But I’d scaled down my ambition. I was thinking vice president. Now that I’ve given the matter some thought, I’ve decided that mail room is the right step forward. Or temp agency (thanks Llyr!) No ideas presented themselves in this morning’s paper, unless I want to write a script about WorldCom.
No thanks.
Background noise: Etienne Overdijk & Fred Numf “Love is the Drug”
September 18, 2002 – 8:43 am ·
For your enjoyment, another segment of the CPE Journal…
::CPE Journal Part 3 ::
Tuesday, March 15th 1994
My days have been repetitive but not exactly boring. They usually consist of coming in at 9:08 AM (eight minutes late no matter what time I get up) making the coffee (6 1/2 scoops for 11 cups) and sitting down in front of the computer to look at, update, then ignore my list of things to do. I choke down a massive, horse-pill vitamin that has every imaginable healthy molecule couched within a tasteless, brown medium, then it’s on to the random errands. This day’s music tape is Suzanne Vega’s “Days of Open Hand” backed with the Charlatans’ “Between 10th and 11th.” I’ve just finished a three-day stint with Nirvana’s “In Utero” and Green day’s “Dookie”. Good for the psyche. Bad for the ears.
I picked up some blue-line prints for Maher today, dropped off a ninety-minute tape of a meeting Andy had with Tommy Lee Jones to be transcribed by ASAP Secretarial, did the Lazy Acres grub drive to 1475 and arranged somehow to meet Melissa Hernandez for lunch, a meal which was combined with a short drive to Milpas to pick up a tag for her cat’s collar.
Becca comes into town tonight…
September 16, 2002 – 9:35 am ·
:::From this morning’s writing journal:::
“New idea of the day inspired by a current headline:
THRILLER: A man, blinded in an accident, has his vision restored through artificial means (science, not crystals.) But the resulting hybrid provides far more than he bargained for. he can see an entire, sinister world that coexists with our own.
Anyway, that’s my toss-off idea for the day. It’s a ghost story. A cautionary tale about our ability to meddle with life, and our penchant for acting on that ability. I suppose it’s been done before, and I suppose it could be applied to all of the senses. Hearing and Sight are the best candidates, as the visible and the auditory are most easily manipulated in film. Hmm…perhaps not ALL the senses would work. You could turn the idea into a comedy by using the sense of taste…
COMEDY: A man, rendered tasteless by an accident, has his taste restored through artificial means. But the resulting hybrid proves to be a nightmare.He becomes ultra-sensitive to bad hairstyles, loud ties and mismatched socks. Tragically, he has a coronary while on vacation in Las Vegas.
Anyway, it’s an idea. The sense of touch provides some interesting ideas. What are the potential drawbacks of regaining the sense of touch after, say, being paralyzed? What are the thematic implications? Numbness to hypersensitivity. Apathy to emotion. So vision: can one have the use of one’s eyes and be totally “blind”? Of course. Woody Allen explored the themes of vision and blindness beautifully in Crimes and Misdemeanors. And what about hearing? The character of Henry Leyden in Black House is blind, but his hearing is so acute that he can discern the entire subtext of an overheard conversation without actually seeing the participants. The reverse of that? If one were deaf, could he or she develop a sense of vision far beyond normal? Does a deaf person learn to pick up visual cues beyond the ability of the average person? What is average? And for that matter, what is person? Who am I? Do I exist? Bye-bye.”
September 15, 2002 – 5:19 pm ·
I think this is going to be the theme of my next mix. The lyrics are contained in one of the trax I’ll be using (“Ruhe” by Schiller)
RUHE
Ruhe, das höchste Glück auf Erden, kommt sehr oft nur durch Einsamkeit in das Herz.
SILENCE/PEACE
Peace, the highest pleasure on earth, very often comes to the heart by loneliness only.
Actually, this translation might be better:
Silence, the greatest happiness on earth, only comes through loneliness at heart.
Or maybe a combination of the two. You work it out.
September 15, 2002 – 1:14 pm ·
Spent an inordinate amount of time working on jmt2k.com this morning. Adobe ImageReady can be maddening. Still trying to figure out just what the hell is going on with Netscape. And no actual writing getting done. Aside from this, anwyay. But as long as I’m here, might as well post the next installment of the CPE Journal. Two days’ worth, since one of ’em is so short…
::CPE Journal Part 2 ::
Friday, Feb 25th, 1994
Gotta get the mailbox.
Adrianne was here in the AM. Apparently, while I was off getting Andy’s tux and picking up Danny Friedman’s tape from Greyhound there was a coffee catastrophe. So I spent forty minutes doing a coffee machine overhaul.
Monday, Feb 28th, 1994
There are some days when I spend less than an hour at the office. This was one of those days. The rest of the time I spent in my car or either at 1475 or the Miramar house. Terry Khan arrived today amid a bit of contractual confusion. I had to stock up on his provisions a bit. Glorious job, that. Even more so was the terminally fun task of washing the sheets on the two beds and remaking them afterwards. I just wanted to sit on the Oceanside and watch the waves argue with the shore. Not much chance in that, though. Gotta get up, jingle those keys. Get over to Staples so everybody can have their hanging file folders.
September 14, 2002 – 4:05 pm ·
What follows is the beginning of a sort of side-project associated with sixsquare.com . It’s a journal I kept during the period from Spring to Fall of 1994 while I was working as a Production Assistant for director Andrew Davis’s company, Chicago Pacific Entertainment. I had already been working there for a few months but I found I was doing far more than I could comfortably keep track of in my head. So I began this journal. It wasn’t supposed to be an amusing read, but time and distance has rendered the madness and the boredom something close to hilarious. And strangely romantic, too, which is very strange. Give it time. Many more installments to follow.
CPE Journal Part 1 ::: Thursday, Feb 24, 1994
Petty cash is very short for some reason and I’m having difficulty remembering what I bought or who I threw money at in the past couple weeks. That’s a good enough reason to invest in this little journal.
Anyway, I found the receipt ($104) from Smart & Final. But the moral of the story still holds…
Long run at the end of the day included looking at mailboxes, looking at mailbox stands, looking at motion sensor lights, looking at people driving by while I filled up my gas tank, etc. Picked up random office supplies at Office Mart. The guy with the hare lip was pretty offended by my presence. He did not want to help me, I guess. I had ten reams of paper to take to my car so he graciously said, “You can take that out in a couple of trips if you want to.”
“Thank you. Thank you so much for that incredibly kind offer.”
The girl at the front counter said goodbye to me three times.
September 14, 2002 – 9:50 am ·
How about that Nick Nolte? Geez! His mugshot is amazing. From the looks of him, the accompanying headline, “Actor Nolte Arrested for Drunk Driving” could have easily been, “Actor Nolte Survives Seven Hour Beating” or “Eight Bodies Found In Actor’s Trunk.” or “Nolte Reprises Role From 1986 Film.”
September 14, 2002 – 9:41 am ·
It�s a foggy Saturday morning. I�ve got the day to myself to do whatever I want. Primarily, that�s going to involve reading, writing and panicking, not in that order. Probably some watching in there as well. Last night�s movie was Can�t Buy Me Love, just recently released onto DVD for our nostalgic enjoyment. It�s really a terrible movie. It came out in 1987, well after a host of superior teen-flavored films had come and gone. Yet somehow, we love it, it endures. It remains a cult renter, especially in the college town video store where I spend much of my time. Why does it still work, while, for example Phil Joanou�s 3 O�clock High, which came out that same summer and had a similar high school setting and hangdog, nerdy protagonist (Casey Siemaszko), gets a little fainter with each passing year? I suspect that it�s because in spite of its crudities, it has a warm, beating heart. 3 O�clock High was a dazzling, technically whiz-bang movie, but all its kinetic ferocity was wrapped around a cold interior. To be fair, it was a different kind of film, a sort of common-man driven to extremes by the threat of a real face-pounding film, while CBML was never meant to be more than a Pygmalion-in-reverse sort of thing. Patrick Dempsey and Amanda Peterson are the main reasons the film is so watchable. And Courtney Gains. And Seth Green. And Dennis Dugan�Anyway, it was a fun trip down the proverbial memory lane.
September 13, 2002 – 9:42 am ·
Last night’s film was the Japanese horror film, Ring. I wanted to check it out before the Dreamworks remake comes out later this year. It’s standard practice in efforts like this for Americans to run roughshod over the charm and effectiveness of the original work (eg. Vanilla Sky vs. Abre Los Ojos; The Vanishing) so I felt it was important to catch the original before seeing what Ehren Kruger has penned for SKG. The DVD is not yet available in the US (thought I’m certain that will change soon) so I had to borrow it from a friend. The film is a serious trip. It’s a ghost story of sorts, whose plot revolves around a series of unexplained deaths. All of the deceased have one thing in common–they’ve all watched a bizarre videotape within the previous seven days. The protagonist, a plucky newspaper reporter, gets her hands on that tape and watches it. Sure enough, she receives a warning that she, herself. will die in seven days. This makes her not so plucky, and what follows is a gripping race against time as she and her ex-husband try to unlock the secrets of the tape. Neat stuff. The remake, due out soon, stars Naomi Watts and Amber Tamblyn (who I think is the daughter of Russ “Dr. Jacobi” Tamblyn.)
Keep an eye out for this one.
September 12, 2002 – 8:51 am ·
Kim Hunter is dead. So is Katrin Cartlidge. Hunter played “Stella!” in A Streetcar Named Desire. Katrin Cartlidge was a Mike Leigh regular. The last film I saw her in was No Man’s Land (which beat out Amelie for best foreign film last year because before casting its vote, the Academy had been smoking crack en masse.) She played the gutsy British journalist. She was rather young. Add these two to J. Lee Thompson (who directed The Guns of Navarone, among other things) and you’ve got your troika.
No time to get into the script ideas this morning, just because I slept past seven. That’s bordering on LATE for me. But the night before I couldn’t fall asleep until 5:15 for some reason, so I suppose that’s understandable.
September 12, 2002 – 8:48 am ·
It�s my first day back at a keyboard after returning from the mountains a week and a half ago. It�s my first day thinking anything at all in the form of the typewritten word. I�ve been afraid to begin writing. he old demon of self-doubt, I suspect. I�m ready, I think, to begin the process. So here I am, typing. George Bush is doing his little puppet dance in the background. After all, it�s September 12th. Time to begin new things. Celebrate life. Celebrate freedom. Celebrate corporate rule. So I write. I�m faced with all these new developments. I�m procrastinating in the resume department. I need to find a job. I haven�t even drafted the ol� resume yet. I haven�t actually created one since 1993. So I have much to add to it.
I had apocalyptic dreams last night. Bombs had begun falling on San Luis Obispo. I knew that they weren�t warheads. I think I knew that because my flesh was peeling from my body in fat, translucent curls. But it was frightening nonetheless so I tore myself up from the clutches of the dream, mumbled a few nonsensical syllables and dropped back into a dream about colored pencils. Perhaps that came about after watching two documentaries in a row last night about the events of last year. I caught the HBO doc, �In Memoriam� and the TLC doc, �Anatomy of the Collapse.� Kind of o.d.-ing on the 9-11 collections. I have no television, so the only real coverage I saw of the event was last year when it actually happened. After they were over I had to shake off a clingy depression, so I fired up the turntables for an hour or so.
Anyway, that was that. I�m thinking hard about two major things right now. Just two? I want to catalogue the new script ideas and get some thoughts arranged on just what I want to start writing. The other, of course, is that damned resume. It�s not that the resume itself is hard, it�s the implication behind it that is hard. I hate trying to sell myself. Maybe that�s because as a professional resume, it�s lacking something. Hmm�what could that be. A job history? I dunno. But maybe the fear comes from the uncertainty of the future.
Background noise: Miles Davis, Bitches Brew
September 11, 2002 – 4:46 pm ·
Welcome.
This is the beginning. I was going to do this on my own but I thought I’d let the jovial expertise of Blogger.com help out at first. I’ve used one of their templates to get things going. Changes will happen as I see fit. In a month or two, this place will be something completely different. So stay tuned.
Why a blog? Perhaps I’m jumping on a bandwagon. Perhaps I’m tired of keeping my big ideas to myself. Perhaps all this worldwide blogging has been leading up to this moment, this singular defining kick-off that promises to change the world. Thanks everyone. Let’s get this show on the road.
I can’t predict what sort of nonsense you’ll see here, but I promise you, it’ll show up on occasion. So keep in touch.
