moschus writes

Notorious Neighbor was telling us why his birthday party was much more sedate than certain individuals had hoped for.* An old friend of his, a highly prominent agent/lawyer type, hosted it at his house in Hancock Park. Shortly after NN got out of jail, this friend sat him down and made him go through the entire and very long guest list, making him justify each name and explain why he wanted that person at the party -- or in his life.

"He kept crossing names out," NN said, slashing at the air to demonstrate. "He'd say, 'Okay, this person is out of your life!...and this person is out of your life!"

In the past, this friend had always tried to advise him, look out for him, steer him clear of trouble, but NN had been too young and stupid to listen.

Now he was listening.

"No more [certain notorious blonde socialite]," NN said happily.

I said, "I thought you liked [notorious blonde socialite]**."

"I hate her."

"You've never said anything bad about her."

He shrugged. Before he went to jail, he would sometimes make comments about her, that she's smarter than people give her credit for and has an impressive memory for (phone) numbers. He's also said that she's a bad friend for any girl, ends up turning on or discounting her. And there are other stories, that involve being naughty on hotel balconies in Ibiza and yachts in St Tropez. At some point she must have decided that her association with him tarnishes her image -- I find this bemusing -- and has stated for the record several times that she does not and has never had any kind of relationship with him. There are videos that imply otherwise. (Nudity, yes. X-rated, no. So draw your own conclusions, if indeed your mind must go there....I'd rather stab needles in my eyes, but whatever.)

At any rate, NN is the only person I know who can start off conversations by saying not only "When I was kidnapped..." but now "When I was in jail..."



*It was a pleasant and sophisticated affair in the guy's backyard, DJ and bars and lights and couches and paved walkways and good-looking people, including a lot of gay men, including an ex-member of a very famous boyband who is surprisingly short in person. I also ran into a pretty blonde girl who looked familiar. She was not completely sober, and she kept twisting herself around NN to whisper at my friend and me, "I hate him. I do." Pointing at NN, who was oblivious to her, talking with other people, including me. "I hate him!" Then she'd walk away and he'd call out her name and she would instantly stop and wait for further direction and then reappear at his side: "I hate him." (She left the party with him.) Memory clicked: she'd been hanging out with NN the last night I saw him before he went to jail. She wasn't completely sober then, either, and she was acting kind of ditzy in the way some girls learn to do because they think other people think it's cute. NN didn't find it cute; he'd been annoyed and embarrassed by it, standing in his driveway and smoking and muttering, "I hate her. I hate her." For two people so clearly not fond of each other, they seem to spend a lot of time together.

** I've had two incidents where I was nearly run over by paparazzi. The first was on a sidewalk in Beverly Hills, by photographers backpedaling to snap photos of the socialite when she was a lot more in demand than she is right now.

The second was just last week, when I was stepping up the escalator at the mall in Century City. A pack of photographers came barreling down around me and I had to flatten myself against the side. I reached the top in time to hear someone say, "....the Beckhams." Since Mr Beckham is one of those people I would actually like to see in person and never have -- as opposed to people I don't give a damn about and so of course see all the time (like the blonde socialite) -- I strode across the walkway and looked down through the partition in time to see the back of a very familiar haircut and narrow body pass underneath. Photographers swarmed around, lifting cameras. Alas, it was the female of the species. The male, with all his bright intriguing plumage, had already gone.

At Maye Musk's 60th birthday bash in New York.

(rather long) quote o' the day:

[Lee} Martin himself has a directness that is often startling. At the end of our course, as the last workshop ended, he grew quiet. He said that if things in our lives went bad -- if trouble came -- it wouldn't be the worst thing for our writing. We were stunned.

Martin remembers the odd send-off as something he'd heard years before. "One of my teachers at Arkansas, John Clellon Holmes, told us on the last day of a workshop something like, 'Well, I hope all your lives go to hell.' I can't claim that these were his exact words, but in my memory that's what he said. So I often pass along a form of the same to my students. Life will test you, I tell them. It will test you as a writer, and it will test you as a person. The two are never separate."

This was, I realized later, a telegram to our older selves, deliverable in the sleepless nights that follow coarser days. It was directing us toward our own dark corners, where the real stories might lie.

--'Where The Real World Lies', Amos Magliocco, Poets & Writers

1.

Both Notorious Neighbor (N.N.) and Octavian called me out on my blog. This happened on separate occasions (although the two men are aware of each other, they don't exactly hang out, and I have yet to see them in the same place at the same time) over the same weekend. Octavian brought his younger -- as in twenty years younger -- sister by my house to introduce us; she's very smart and cool and my age and also a writer and working on what sounds like a fascinating novel that I can't wait to read. As the three of us chatted away in the living room -- what I like to call 'the grown up room' since it's the one room in our house that shows no evidence of children anywhere, except, of course, for the actual child who might be running around the coffee table at any given time -- Octavian oh-so-casually said something like, "So what's this I hear about this guy you have on your blog...what's his name, Octavius...Octavian.....?"

Octavian is a busy man. He is too busy to read blogs, or at least blogs like my blog (that aren't politically oriented), and so for the past year or so I've been writing about him in the happy if slightly shady knowledge that he had no idea what I was doing. I did realize that at some point the truth would surface: yes, Octavian, you have been turned into a character in the unfolding narrative of this thing they call my life. (Or at least my blog.)

"How did you find out?" I was genuinely curious.

"Tina told me about it."

This would be the same woman who asked me point blank: "Octavian is [insert true name here], right?"* To which I'd answered blithely, "Yes."

I looked off to the side, muttered a profanity aimed at Tina**, and Octavian laughed. I went into this little spiel -- I've used it on others, admittedly -- about how the character in my blog is both him and not-him. Or rather, it's him, but filtered through my perceptions and imagination and personal way of storytelling, so that the person on the page takes on its own shadowy existence and becomes separate from the actual person who inspired him. Which is one reason I use pseudonyms -- not just for the obvious reasons, but to underscore the gap between real life and written narrative, even one of nonfiction. I'm a storyteller, after all, not a journalist, and I need that gap: it gives me a place to play, and to rehearse characters for future novels.

Just before he went out our front door, Octavian paused and looked off to the side and said musingly, "That's all right. I know you like me, so I trust you won't write anything bad." And while that is true, it's also true that he hasn't actually given me anything bad to write about. For a wildly successful Hollywood producer with a 'notorious womanizer/toxic bachelor' reputation -- which I'd picked up about him long before I ever actually met him -- he leads a cleancut, family-oriented, responsible life. The man eats quinoa, for crying out loud. The most scandalous thing I have on him is that one night at a dinner party in Stockholm his gorgeous foreign pop-singer girlfriend-at-the-time stood up, made a drunken uncomfortable speech, and threw her purse at his head. It missed.

2

NN had a large raucous dinner party one Friday night. He'd brought his personal chef up from his estate in Mexico and was hosting dinners every night that week to celebrate his release from jail and reconnect with friends (the man has a lot of them). Way too many people showed up unexpectedly (including, uh, us) and the chef and staff were scrambling; the meal went on for hours and people were roaming around, talking, flirting, switching chairs, so that the place where you ate your entree was not where you had eaten your appetizer.

NN has known, if in the most abstract absent-minded kind of way, that I have a blog and sometimes mention him, but for some reason after all this time he'd finally been compelled to Google me and read about this person called, as he gleefully yelled across the long wide dining table custom-built for that particular space, "Notorious Neighbor!" ( Read more... )

Writing has stalled on the new book -- and this time it doesn't feel like a good kind of stalling, when I can feel my undermind mulling things over, preparing to send up new signals, new ideas that will make for a much better story. No, at this point my undermind is standing there with its arms crossed, tapping its foot, saying, "What the hell is wrong with you?" This feels like the kind of paralysis that comes with overthinking, overfreakingout....I need to let go of things and settle down into the pocket of the story, but I have to say, it's been hard to face that blank screen.

The kids are in bed, the spouse is away, so tonight would be a good night to write into the small hours (or at least the not-quite-as-big hours). I was always an owl type anyway.*


*My sister once observed that you can't help what you are -- either you're a night person or a morning person -- and someone who stays up all night to work and then sleeps past noon is being just as productive as someone who gets up more cheerily than blearily at 6 am. But morning people, she pointed out, "tend to feel morally superior." I'd have to agree. I'm not exempt from it myself. I am one of the nightbreed -- during college exams I was always greeting my housemate/best friend at 5 or 6 in the morning as I went to bed after hours of studying and she was just getting out of bed to begin hours of studying. Her GPA might have been higher than mine, but the fact that she could function at 7 am and I couldn't had absolutely nothing to do with it. I refuse to believe otherwise.

However, the other day I managed to make my private yoga class at Octavian's house -- he lives conveniently down the hill from me -- at 7 am, a half-hour earlier than usual (and believe me, that's a bloody big half-hour) because our teacher had to catch a plane to some kind of yoga-teacher guru camp in Vancouver. Afterwards I did indeed feel so righteous and superior that I recognized myself as a menace to society and told the people on Twitter to slap me. Which several of them did. Enthusiastically.

I am extremely glad for the success of PROM NIGHT because my friend Marc produced it. It was Marc's first major gig as producer and every time I see the poster in the theatres I remember the time I visited him on set.

The location was a gorgeous 1920s Spanish-y art deco kind of building that used to be a hotel off MacArthur Park (this was a week or so after the riots broke out at a pro-immigration rally in that neighborhood and the LAPD handled the situation with, shall we say, less than finesse). Marc led me through the ground floor and pointed to the elevator. It wasn't a real elevator. But it was so convincing that the first day on set people kept standing by its doors and waiting for them to open, not realizing they were already on the set.

I watched them film the scene during the dance when the teacher calls out the names of the candidates for prom king and queen....except several of the teenagers don't show up onstage, and the teacher repeats their names and looks bewildered. ("They've been killed," Marc explained to me, but since this is a slasher film I'd already kind of figured, and don't think it's much of a spoiler to say so).

Marc was confident the movie would be successful and laid out the reasons why. There hadn't been a PG-13 horror movie in a while, since Saw took the cycle back to the graphic R-rated violence and sadism of the movies cutely known as 'torture porn'. He also pointed out how the movie's storyline would appeal directly to teenage girls -- the fantasy element of a teacher so crazily and obsessively in love with a female student he won't let anything or anyone stand in his way (I imagine in real life this would be considerably less appealing, but so it goes) -- while teenage boys would go for the blood and gore and suspense. He didn't expect it to be well-reviewed, but he also knew reviews matter very little with a film like this. All in all, he thought the timing of Prom Night was perfect, and if you contrast the success of Night with a movie like The Ruins, which neatly removed the buzz from a director who (up until the receipts came in) had been considered hot property, Marc seems to have been right on the money.

Afterwards Marc and I had a conversation with a British crew member -- I think he was a gaffer, although I'm not even sure what a gaffer is, exactly -- who talked a little bit about working on the England-side production of Star Wars. They all thought George Lucas was nuts, he told me. They couldn't even begin to decipher the movie they were working on everyday*, it seemed so absurd and bizarre, and Lucas either wouldn't or couldn't ( Read more... )

...but I just put myself on twitter instead.

If I didn't have such tech-savvy friends, how long would I have remained oblivious to the whole twittering thing?

My guess is a very long freaking time.

A long excerpt from the sequel to BLOODANGEL -- LORD OF BONES, out July 1 -- is now up over here...it's the gold thing in the left corner you have to click on...

Please excuse me while I go watch Battlestar Galactica on Tivo...

John is my personal trainer. He's been my trainer ever since I arrived in LA -- so about five years now -- and somewhere along the line he morphed into my confidante/shrink, the way a good trainer tends to. He also makes an excellent emergency handyman.

I was debating the merits of personal trainers with history-professor-turned-real-estate-agent Margaret, who experimented with one of her own. "He showed me the routine with the weights and all that and I learned to do everything exactly the way I was supposed to. I would look at him and say, 'God, aren't you bored?' I would feel bad for him. And then I wondered, why the hell do I need him here anyway, to show me the stuff I've learned how to do? What am I paying him for, to just stand around and watch me? So I fired him."

"You fired him because you didn't need him anymore," I said.

"After they show you how to do a few things, the proper techniques and everything, aren't they just kind of useless?"

"How long ago did you fire him?"

"Three months."

"And how many times have you worked out since?"

"Zero times."

"And you fail to find a connection between these two pieces of information?"

She didn't answer.

John will bribe me with coffee when necessary, showing up at the house with a Starbucks or Coffee Bean. He suspects -- quite rightly -- that there are mornings when I would call and cancel....except I really want that damn Starbucks. Once in a while there's a pastry involved. He is not above handing me pieces of apple fritter while I warm up on the treadmill. One might consider this a rather mixed message. But when you live in a ruthless kind of town, you're forced to develop ruthless tactics.

The other morning we were hiking along a trail off Mulholland when I asked him, "So how fit are you, anyway?"

"Ah..." He looked sheepish. "I've been slacking off. The baby and all. Makes it hard to get to the gym."

"So on a scale of one to ten, ten being you at your fittest, what are you right now?" ( Read more... )

...There must be a word for a beautiful blonde woman who persuades you that doing shots of tequila is a good idea. Oh wait, there is: evil...

[Note: the above was written Sunday morning, intended as the opening of a blog entry that didn't actually materialize until Tuesday night.]

Finding something to wear to the Arabian Nights-themed party in Malibu turned out to be a neat little experience. I had a feeling that pretty much everybody would dress up for this thing and I wanted to hold my own -- I get competitive like that -- so called my lovely friend Jade to see if she wanted to head out and find some belly dancing gear. Jade's sense of style is one of the most memorable things about her: although she's in a position to spend her days at Neiman Marcus if she wants -- and sometimes she does -- she shows up in vintage cowboy boots she got off Ebay for twelve dollars and had retooled, or black satin 'handcuffs' she took apart to wear as matching bracelets, or snug black t-shirts emblazoned with anime characters. She showed up to a dinner one night in a striking cocktail minidress with a halter neckline and low back. Since I tend to like to wear such things, I asked her who the designer was; she told me how she bought it off the rack at the mall and then got it altered the way she wanted. So I figured Jade would not only be the perfect person to keep me company and give me style advice, but might want to pick up something herself (she bought a hip scarf and some incense).

So we went to this place here, right on the Venice boardwalk, not far from the spot where my friend John took my new author-photo shot. When the saleswoman showed me the rack of clothes that "professional belly dancers wear", I got hooked. I do not know what it says about me that I could be seized with such a compulsion to wear a silver coin-spangly bra top and matching hip scarf (over flared jeans), and assorted snake and slave bracelets and hoop earrings. I jingled-jangled when I moved. You could hear me coming from a mile away. It was cool.

We drove out to Malibu to the party, held at one of the houses sandwiched neatly between the Pacific Coast Highway and the beach.* Easily one of the most fun things I've been to in a while (the other would be the Deep Dish concert at the club Space in Miami -- I had no idea Deep Dish was that good). Not just the women but a lot of the men had dressed up -- and dressed well. There were hookah pipes set up on a table on the balcony overlooking the ocean, and drifts of apricot-scented smoke that I would smell in my hair the next day. The food was good and the alcohol was flowing and the professional dancers did their thing. The second performance was by a pair of bellydancing identical twins. Someone told me that they're the best and supposedly most well-known act of this kind in Los Angeles, but since I have had minimal exposure to the bellydancing underworld I cannot say if this is true. After that, the Arabian Nights music segued into cool stuff for the rest of us to dance to. I ran into Scott and Crystal -- she of the upcoming Anaconda sequels (also the tequila-pushing evil blonde). Crystal wore a short beaded skirt she'd picked up in Morocco and a gold lame draped halter. It occurred to me that she looked like Cleopatra if Cleopatra went clubbing at Studio 54. "You look like Cleopatra if Cleopatra went clubbing at Studio 54," I informed her. By the time E and I left, the party had thinned out to the hardcore revelers who were planning to end up in the hot tub.


*These houses fit so closely together they look like an unending wall winding along the edge of PCH through the main part of the village of Malibu. They also look small -- but aren't, since they extend out and down along the beach. People rent them for twenty, thirty, forty-plus thousand dollars/month in the summers, and sometimes for the sole purpose of staging parties that promote this thing or that thing and give away lots of cool expensive stuff to famous young people who don't need it and can easily afford to buy it. Enough of the neighbors finally complained about these parties that holding them in that area is now illegal. Lindsey and Paris will just have to deal.

After enduring some drama and enjoying some diversions -- thoroughly enjoying some diversions -- it is time, say I, to swing back into boring productive writer mode.

I am determined.

I am resolute.

I hold a reshaped vision of the work-in-progress in my head, and I can practically taste the satisfaction of a draft made complete.

Then along comes Octavius and a 7:30 am yoga class with a private instructor in a room that opens out onto his lush green sprawl of Bel Air property. The yoga is productive enough, and I'll be damned if Octavius isn't turning into something of a good influence on me as well as a good friend. One of his striking qualities is how, amid the temptations on offer to an attractive and successful film producer, Octavius lives a moderate lifestyle. I've never seen him drink much and although he's social and gregarious and often at the clubs -- I learned about the newest hotspot Foxtail when he texted me from there on its opening night -- he heads home well before closing time. And this is a town where the clubs shut down at 2 am (when people who want to stay merry regroup at houses in the hills). I've noticed the same kind of discipline in other ex-dancers, plus from what I can tell Octavius still nourishes some naked fiery ambition in his core.* Ambition and hedonism form an uneasy relationship with one another. You can't exactly conquer the world when you're sleeping it off all day, or have to crawl over so many naked bodies to get to your Blackberry that you decide it's just not worth the journey.

After a quick update on his romantic life -- which has a decidedly international feel, whether it's a French actress or Swedish pop singer or Israeli honey whose profession I do not yet know-- he invited my husband and me to a party in Malibu tomorrow night. Later he had his assistant -- one of his assistants -- email the details. The party has a theme. It is an Arabian Nights theme. This raises an interesting** question: how does one retain one's sense of buckling down for serious work when suddenly and unexpectedly obliged to put together an outfit involving harem pants?

Or when confronting the realization that one already owns a pair of harem pants in case of just such an emergency?






* or has some Bel Air-sized bills to pay. Which is basically the same thing.

** maybe not so interesting

E and I met up with Octavian and discussed E's recent weekend out on Necker Island for a global-warming conference with people including Blair and Branson, whom E got pictured with in a news story about the thing. This was E's I'm-thinking-about-a-rocket-problem stance, which makes me pretty sure that he had just gotten some kind of bothersome work-related email, and was clearly oblivious to the fact that a picture was being taken at all. This is also the reason I get suck a kick out of it -- the spouse the camera caught is the exact spouse I encountered, say, last night en route to the bathroom, standing in the hallway frowning with his arms folded.

I've been to Necker once before -- for the Google wedding -- and I've met Branson a couple of times and been charmed by his strapping blond sons, particularly the youngest, who a) has one of the coolest tattoos I've ever seen* and b) told me a little bit about the problems and pitfalls of dating some kind of princess. I had the distinct sense, during that particular conversation, of two worlds colliding -- my own smalltown origins and upbringing amid an environment where you were encouraged to dream big...sort of...as long as you remain 'realistic' and don't set yourself up for too much disappointment* -- running into this other, international jet-setting existence where part your birthright is to regard things like royalty and space as two more corners of your playground. ( Read more... )

The other night, I had plans to check out either Goa (big dance club) or Foxtail (the hot new club) so of course ended up at Villa, because that's just how it goes. Stephanie was there, looking particularly luscious in a lowcut minidress. "Where," I said, "are the jeans and white tank top?" Which is her customary club outfit. This girl is no fool. When you look like Stephanie -- fresh lovely face and flat stomach and large breasts and long blonde hair -- you can set yourself apart not just through knockout looks but the implication that, among the stylized and overstylized outfits that fill these kinds of places, you don't even have to try.

Now I am a happily married woman. Which means I like to live vicariously through Stephanie, because that way I get to have, say, a wild affair with a tall gorgeous actor from one of the most popular TV shows around (she got him shortly after his high-profile actress girlfriend dumped him for an actor even taller and more successful than he is, so he was deliciously vulnerable...and knew it). So as we settled at a table in the highly coveted downstairs area but tucked behind the entrance, which means it's drafty and kind of hidden and an excellent place to put the non-famous people, I checked in with Stephanie to see whom I might be sleeping with now (unfortunately for me, Stephanie is what you would call 'a nice girl', who just happened to get trapped in the body of a very very bad one). ( Read more... )

There comes a time as you get older when you're able to accept certain truths. When you find your husband and his good friend/houseguest playing video games on the computers in the den, and they say they'd like to go out for lunch, and once upon a time you would have believed them, except now you know enough to take this to mean, We would like to play video games all day, although in a kinder, gentler world this would not be so, and we would make a merry foursome at lunch and talk about meaningful things and revel in the warmth of our friendships, but as it is we will say whatever we need to say to make you go away so we can continue to play these video games and what was it you said again? What? I couldn't hear you over the sound of my BFG blasting away these mutant Nazi alien monster zombies...

So you poach some eggs and assemble your version of egg mcmuffin sandwiches and leave a plate of them beside the computers, because you have the feeling that your husband and friend would gnaw their own flesh rather than break from their playing to go scrounge for something so silly as food, and you would prefer for them not to do that, and take your husband's good friend's wife out for the lunch that your men can barely remember pretending to agree to want to go to.

Happy cult of the bunny, everybody.

1

I really thought that once I finished Lord of Bones I would plunge back into the writing of a novel-in-progress called Shadow Hill or The Decadents (haven't decided on title yet). As it turns out, not so much. But I'm thinking about the book constantly, and I can feel it subtly turning and shifting in my head into something more richly textured, more deeply sensual, its characters and storyworld more astutely observed. I've been reading even more than usual, partly because reading is what motivates me to write and keeps me writing, partly because I'm always searching out new ways of exploring a narrative, and partly for the pleasure that drove me into this ridiculous business in the first place.

The pleasure principle is a powerful thing.

I've been kicking around a bit of screenwriting. Screenwriting ambitions are for me what the mafia was for Michael Corleone-- "Every time I think I'm out, they suck me back in!" There are even more reasons not to be a screenwriter, it seems to me, than there are not to be a novelist. At least with the latter you get the satisfaction of a final product that is full and complete and singularly your own.

2

It was truly heartening to see Notorious Neighbor's house ablaze with lights after eleven months of silence and darkness, the gate opening only for an assistant or gardener or friend/relative checking up on the place and keeping it afloat. Eleven months. For some reason I had it in my head that it had been six.

He looked good. Lean and bright-eyed and healthy. "I like the longer hair," I said.

"Thanks. I'm keeping it like this."

He's going through a period of adjustment. His world has been so small for so long, with such a stunning drop in lifestyle alone. People expected that he'd pick up the party right where he left it, but it's enough for him these days just to wander his luxurious house. He feels more comfortable inside the walls. He'll be throwing a big party, he declared, but not quite yet. We're invited.

I don't know how the hell he got through eleven months for what was originally supposed to be a two-week sentence for contempt of court, and I'm not sure he does either. "No one goes to jail for civil court!" he pointed out, as we ranged ourselves along his impressive new couch.*

"But if anyone could," I said, "it was bound to be you."

"I was in there with murderers. Guys who'd be all, Yeah, I'm in here 'cause I got pissed at my wife 'cause she smoked all my crack so I killed her. And I'd be like, Get away from me-- " He swatted the air as if at a fly. "Just get the fuck away. A lot of those people are just -- the dregs of humanity. Waste of space. Like, someone should just push delete."

He estimated that ninety-five percent of prisoners were in there for drug-related crimes. He talked about ( Read more... )

1

Octavius showed up at brunch with a blonde actress from Paris who is roughly half his age. This is not unusual for him. She and I then proceeded to have the kind of conversation you can only have in LA. She described her role in The Hills Have Eyes 2: "I am in the beginning of the film. I am a breeder. The mutants took me and raped me so I give birth and die. It's horrible, horrible." She is not expecting an Oscar nomination. She described her role in the upcoming Starship Troopers 3: "I run after Casper [Van Diem] a lot. I raise my hand and yell, 'You forgot...[fill in blank]!'"

I mentioned another gorgeous actress I met a couple of weeks ago, when E and I went out with Jade and Jason and Ryan and Joanna and Scott and Scott's female friend, who had been known among us up to that point as "the hot blonde from Anaconda." As in, someone -- Ryan -- might say: "We're having a dinner thing at our place and Scott might be dropping by with the hot blonde from Anaconda." Or: "We've got a car* for tonight, if you want to come with us and Jade and Jason and the hot blonde from Anaconda."

She introduced herself as Crystal. "I'm glad that now you have a name," I told her after we'd girl-bonded after a drink. Or two. "Because for the last few weeks you've just been this elusive hot blonde from Anaconda."

She's actually in the sequels Anaconda 2 and 3. (Or is it Anaconda 3 and 4? I get confused.) "I'm the one who survives," she says.

"You're like the Final Girl!"

"I'm the Final Girl."

"I've never met a Final Girl before." I was plum delighted. Although there is, of course, a downside: it means I still haven't met anyone who's been eaten by a giant snake.

2

Notorious Neighbor has returned to the neighborhood. For those of you who have only joined us in the last six months or so, NN is a larger-than-life character who lives next door to us and is either very loathed or very admired, depending on what demographic you fall into. (I loathed him for years. Then I met him. I am still coming to grips with this. He inspired several blog entries.) He went to jail last spring for what was supposed to be a few weeks but stretched into much longer than that, due to the bizarrely labyrinthine multi-state morass of a legal situation he got himself into. He called me from the slammer a few months ago (another blog entry) and again a few days ago. The latter time I wasn't able to take the call. His assistant told me they'd try to reach me over the weekend, but they did not, leaving me curious as to why he'd called at all. Until friends started circulating emails with links to gossip blogs and even a TMZ video documenting his release from the coop and his flight home.

I haven't seen him yet but expect to shortly. I predict two things:

a) He will talk a lot.

b) I will be entertained.



* polite code for 'limo'

I give unto you, for your private pontification, my quotes o' the day:



From an article about Gary Gygax in Slate:


Yes, we all knew, deep inside, that D&D wasn't cool. Being able to say, "I cast a Level 3 lightning bolt at the basilisk while averting my eyes so I don't turn to stone" doesn't have the social pull of "I know a guy who will buy us some alcohol."



From an interview with self-publishing dynamo Ken Wohlrob in
bookslut:

Q:Who are the Blacksmiths For Literary Progress? What do they do, and how are you involved?

A:The Blacksmiths For Literary Progress is a literary insurgency group of dedicated practitioners who believe in two things: good literature and a well-shod horse. We have hammers, we have anvils, and we are coming to your home. Like all literary insurgency groups we focus our energies where it counts: on not actually writing anything. But we have plenty of meetings. We don’t have any secret signs or anything weird like that, but if you spot us together you will notice a slight collective facial tick.

So I thought I'd make a blog entry out of a question Dave asked me in the comments section of an earlier entry, re: how this town is starved for scripts that the powers-that-be that make movies (or get movies made) can fall in love with, get wildly excited about:


If that is what they want - and they are afloat in an OCEAN of scripts, why is it that they bemoan having nothing new, and then put out crappy down-to-the-lowest-common-denominator schlock films one after another, remake every movie that does not require or deserve a remake and flood the theaters with ... the same thing over and over?



Oh gods, I could go on about this, and I probably will [edited later to add: ...and I see that I did]. Off the top of my head, and of course this is just my opinion.

In general, the system is broken and needs to be reinvented. The people I've met and know in the film industry -- the suits as well as the writers -- are actually very smart, often charismatic, very much in love with what they do (and also a bit bitter and disillusioned themselves -- to quote one, "Oh, it's a terrible business, terrible") but the whole process of developing, making and marketing a film has become such a huge sprawling complicated obscene and obscenely expensive machine that odds are at some point something will break -- and it does. Which is not to say that other people involved with that machine aren't simply idiots themselves; of course they are. But I haven't met them, or at least talked with them enough to know that I did meet them. Or maybe I'm just in denial. It wouldn't be the first time.

1) It's an extraordinarily difficult business, very expensive and very difficult to turn a profit, now that so many people (movie stars) now demand a cut of the gross, and that certain salaries (movie stars) have ballooned beyond all sense and reason. (I think as writers we kind of understand this in a vague abstract sense, but in my experience writers just make really lousy business people and I'm not sure we understand this enough). This is one reason why the studios were being so stingy with the writers -- under the current system, at the end of the day there just isn't much money left to share with them, and as we know the writers are always the ones who get screwed (see previous note about lousy business sense). So the industry reacts by becoming more and more conservative -- you risk your job & your future every time you make the high-profile, multimillion-dollar, diaster-prone decision to greenlight a film. People have become so scared and risk-averse they will greenlight only the things that seem even remotely guaranteed to make money, because they're connected to something that's already made money in the past. Foolproof? Hardly. But they're clutching at straws.

Add to this that the movies regarded as intelligent adult well-made entertainments -- The Kite Runner, for example -- don't make money. You could argue that it's because a film like that was not distributed or marketed properly, that the right word did not quite get out to the right audience in time. (So thank god for the Oscars and other awards -- people may complain, and they do, that they only award the boring films that nobody sees, or the wrong films, or whatever, but if it wasn't for those awards ( Read more... )

Last week E and I were invited to a gathering at Mike's house. Because Mike (pseudonym. or not. you be the judge) is a friend of a friend -- more specifically, a friend of Octavius -- I had a suspicion he'd be highly Google-able. So by the time we showed up on his doorstep I at least knew which studio he co-founded and used to lead and which studio he heads up now. He came out with a memoir a few years ago, lamenting about how Hollywood went from being run by a few cool guys in the '70s to the massive corporate entity of today. But I wouldn't learn this until the end of the evening when I found the hardcover with his name on the spine in his floor-to-ceiling, impressively filled bookcase.

E and I arrived in the Tesla Roadster, which incited a lot of interest from the group and had people trooping out of the living room through the hall and foyer into the cool dark air to take a look. During dinner I had an animated conversation with the woman on my right, who turned out to be a screenwriter. She had just finished a script about a popular and controversial female literary figure. The script, she told me, "wasn't even supposed to go out* yet" when a copy passed through the hands of someone who knows this other someone who slipped it to a certain young A-list actress who had her agent call up and yell, "This is fantastic and perfect for her and we love it and why the hell didn't you immediately give this to us, why didn't we already have this????"

After dinner we returned to the living room, except the place had changed. A movie screen took up the far wall and I finally noticed ( Read more... )

In order to research my work-in-progress (which will be called either SHADOW HILL or THE DECADENTS), I sat in on a story meeting at my friend Octavius's production company (there was talk of he and I doing a yoga class beforehand, but no way in hell could I get up that early. The spirit is willing, yet the flesh is so weak...)

It was interesting not just for the sake of the WIP (which I now have to rethink a bit) but also to see writers and writing discussed from the kind of business perspective we're usually so insulated from, sealed away in our bedrooms and offices and local branches of Starbucks (or in my case, a friend's guesthouse) and often to our distinct disadvantage.

The first item up for discussion was a newly revised screenplay that Octavius declared "worse than the previous draft. It's kind of a mess. It made me wonder why we were even looking at this project in the first place.*" As one of his --assistants? development people? -- described her interactions with the writer ("He is difficult"), I sensed what had happened: the writer didn't take their notes all that seriously, rushed through the revision grafting on the changes without considering what those changes were supposed to accomplish in the first place (I did something similar as an undergrad and got slammed for it, one of the best writing lessons I've ever received about how to approach both constructive criticism and the process of revision itself). Octavius and crew wanted the bad guy of the piece to be more fully developed. Instead, the added dialogue "only makes him seem like more of an asshole", which was not the development they had in mind ("we already know he's an asshole"). They discussed his other screenplay, noted his weakness with characterization in general and declared him "pretty much a B-movie action writer". Ouch. They agreed to schedule another meeting with the dude to see if the project could be saved, but no one looked optimistic. ( Read more... )