July 16, 2010 03:45American Blender

Every time a celebrity dies, the movie-night crowd knows to brace themselves for something from their filmography -- assuming it was someone connected in some way, shape or form to the movie biz. I hate being predictable like that, but I just have to face facts. I'm a star-fucker necrophile, and I'm not likely to change my ways at this stage of the game. Despite my pathological determination to expose the Wednesday night guinea pigs to forgotten B-movies every time some obscure cult actor kicks off (Vampira, anyone?), I make no apologies for this past Wednesday.

Comic book author/legend Harvey Pekar died this week. And I always felt he was something of a kindred spirit. Not because we had both been at San Diego at the same time, hawking our independent-comic publications, or because we're both cynical depressives who married our own groupies. But because Paul Giamatti played Harvey in the movie adaptation of American Splendor and everyone says I look like Paul Giamatti. Paul looked a lot like Harvey in the movie, so I guess that means I kinda look like Harvey Pekar by one degree of separation. Lucky me, I know.

So obviously I had to run American Splendor on Wednesday. Now that that's out of the way, I figure next Wednesday I can run another biopic -- something like The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Because I totally look like Brad Pitt too. I swear, it's like looking in a mirror. A broken mirror covered with toothpaste spittle in a steamy bathroom.

July 03, 2010 12:19Stupid Planet Broke My Phone

Says Canada, "Hey, did you feel the earthquake we had last week? It rattled my windows and made one of the paintings on my wall slightly crooked. They say it was a 5.0 on the Richter scale. It was really scary."

Replies Haiti, "Fuck you."

More annoying than the excited buzz about the earthquake a few of us in our sparsely populated country actually felt, was the fact that my phone line went dead for half an hour afterwards. When it came back, there was static on the line that got worse and worse until, nearly a full week later, I had to call up Bell and speak to a very nice computer who dispatched a technician to come and fix it. And by fix it, I mean replace everything, because the earthquake had rattled some shoddy workmanship loose, drawing attention to the fact that the whole thing was held together with tissue and spit.

And speaking of shoddy workmanship, it left me kind of surprised there was no actual measurable damage to Montreal's mafia-built infrastructure. Usually it needs little to no encouragement to fall down, particularly when people are standing under it. Looking at it funny, or sneezing within ten city blocks of it usually suffices. I guess it goes to show that, as seismic events go, this one was a bit of a non-starter. The technician who fixed my phone line didn't even know we'd had an earthquake the week before, and looked vaguely confused when asked if he'd done any other earthquake-related repairs lately.

While Montrealers went about their post-earthquake business in that je-ne-give-a-shit-pas sort of way, either failing to notice the shaking at all, or assuming it was the people in the next apartment over having vigorous French-Canadian sex, Toronto, true to form, panicked. Entire office buildings were evacuated just in case there was any real danger of someone spilling their coffee. This is the same city that calls the military when it snows. Snows in Canada. Really. Not a joke. The entire rest of the country still points and laughs about that one. Oh Toronto, you know we only tease you because we all hate you so very very much...

Anyway, yeah. Earthquake. No big deal. Phone line fixed. No charge because it was all outside stuff. But if you tried to call with a big job offer last week and all you heard was static, do call back soon. Eyestrain Productions wasn't disinterested, merely broken.

June 26, 2010 06:36Cinema History Bursts Onto The Scene (And All Over Your Face)

You'd think it would be easier to find a cumshot on the web.

I mean, really, all you need are opposable thumbs to work a mouse and keyboard, and any search engine. But I guess it gets tougher when you're looking for one particular cumshot that dates back to 1929 and doesn't involve Peter North. Sure, Mr. North has been in the business a long time, but not quite that long.

I've been having meetings about one of my feature-length scripts again. It's one that's peppered with film references. Normally I hate when movies do that, but this particular script is about a trio of film geeks, so it's kind of hard to avoid the shop talk. I figure if I'm obliged to include self-referential movie-buff jargon, I'm going to make it as obscure as humanly possible. There's nothing worse than when a movie has its characters talk about film and all they can reference is fucking Star Wars.

One bit of dialogue in my script dredges up the memory of Soviet propagandist Sergei Eistenstein and his communist-cheerleading feature, The General Line AKA The Old and the New from 1929. In one particularly inspiring moment, Russian peasants are introduced to the wonders of the modern world as an industrial creamer accomplishes, in short order, what used to take them hours of backbreaking labour. It's a glorious moment, and they all beam in delight, confident that the revolution marches on and will deliver all sorts of efficiency miracles in the years to come. Surely if mother Russian can produce this much cream this quickly, communism will prevail in the international struggle of ideologies and all will be well in the world. Oh, and they're also really happy because they've just invented the cumshot.

Or so my lead character postulates in his interpretation of the scene that just happens to mirror my own. Sergei Eistenstein films are somewhat unwatchable by today's standards. Barring the battle in Alexander Nevsky, or the uber-famous Odessa Steps sequence from The Battleship Potemkin, Eistenstein's work has become an historical footnote from a failed political system. It's old, it's dusty, and it's every bit as heavy-handed as the communist ideals it so loudly (in a silent-film sort of way) endorses. Nevertheless, his contribution to cinema was enormous. Just like some of the other early film pioneers who made movies in support of some really reprehensible ideas (D.W. Griffith, Leni Riefenstahl), he somehow managed to help create the basic vocabulary of film despite being on the wrong side of the social-engineering fence. Much of what he and a select few of his contemporaries invented in their movies is part of what we now consider basic elements of how to tell a story with moving pictures. Someone had to come up with these shots, these compositions, these cuts we all take for granted now. Eisenstein was one of the first great director innovators and his contribution to film as an art form cannot be underestimated.

And he created the cumshot. No, really.

Porn is as old as cinema itself. In fact, one of the very first motion pictures, The Kiss, was considered pretty pornographic back in the Victorian era. It didn't take long for people with cameras to start pointing them at naked people getting it on, but the idea of going all the way and showing ejaculation as part of projected erotica took a while longer to get around to. Leave it then, to Eistenstein, to invent what would become the porn industry's "money shot" -- not in a sex film, but in an industrial communist propaganda film. Genius!

Watch this Youtube clip if you doubt me. Eisenstein was so forward-thinking, he not only invented the cumshot, he anticipated the bukkake film.

May 31, 2010 23:02Fund This!

Here we are, at the end of another month, with nothing but a pathetic token blog entry to show for it.

Ah, there's so much more happening, so much news to report or comment on. I guess it will have to wait, since I'll be spending tonight writing more funding-support material to tell bureaucrats what's in a screenplay they would rather read about than actually read.

I'll just keep it simple and sign off saying, "Boy, I regret getting into that gunfight with Gary Coleman the last time I played Postal. Somehow, I feel responsible.

Eat hot lead, Willis!

April 30, 2010 18:33Clear

I have reached a state of clear. And not in that creepy Church of Scientology sort of way.

The last eight months of my life have been non-stop work and contractual obligations. After writing nine more episodes of Kid vs. Kat, a feature film treatment, two Telefilm applications, and a not-so-short short story, I'm finally past all my deadlines.

Now, at last, I have time to comment about the pressing issues of the day. To think of all the Earth-shattering world events that have passed this blog by without so much as a single snarky cheap shot from me. Like Larry King Live's 25th Anniversary coinciding with Larry King's 25th divorce. Or Lindsay Lohan's exploding cocaine shoes. Or Sandra Bullock's black baby that she just adopted from Madonna. Oh well, I'm sure there are plenty of celebrity deaths and shitstorms yet to come this year. I'll just have to console myself with that happy thought.

March 10, 2010 16:10Touched By A Corey

Snort! Huh…wha? Did I miss something?

Oh right, it was Oscar weekend. Usually I look forward to the Oscars like Christmas, but this year the ceremony was so boring I fell into a coma sometime in the back half. Probably during one of the segments where a bunch of non-nominated actors get up and directly address the nominees and tell them how much they complete them and shit. My synapses back fired and my brain shut down, throwing me into a merciful stupor I've only recently awakened from. Which is a good thing because, as I understand it, they're now handing out Oscars to people for playing a sassy southern belle who gives people whut-fer. I remember, the last ten thousand times I saw that role in a movie, thinking they should totally dispense Oscars for it. That way, every woman in Hollywood could get one. And even some of the men.

I guess the real fallout from Sunday is that everyone still has their tits in a knot over the exclusion of Farrah Fawcett from the Oscar obituary death knell. Each year they always seem to skip two or three people, claiming time constraints. Right. Because there was no way to trim that virtually endless show by three seconds so they could slip Farrah into the montage. They already had to shave three indispensable seconds off of one of the interpretive dance numbers so they could include Michael Jackson. I'll buy their argument that Farrah was more of a TV actress rather than a movie person, but then where the fuck was Dan O'Bannon, you Academy weasels? You include a publicist and a writer for Variety, but you skip the guy who wrote Alien and gave the world Return of the Living Dead, the first ever zombie comedy? Just remember, there would be no Alien franchise, no Zombieland, no Shaun of the Dead without the work of the master.

Queuing up to be the next dead celebrity snubbed at the Academy Awards is Corey Haim. They say it was drugs but I suspect that, like me, he watched the Oscars and then failed to come out of his resulting boredom-induced coma. Hmm, yeah. That's a distinct possibility. Maybe we should look into… Nah, fuck it, it was drugs.

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