thousands of screaming spiderman fans, et moi.
3 miles.
I headed to the Mass Murderer Chic panel. Props: Cherie Buchheim (I believe she gave us the "True Crime" trading card set) was very well-informed. Drag: most people don't know the difference between mass murderers and serial killers. I mean, really.
I'll have to check these definitions, but...Mass murderer: someone who kills 3 or more people at the same time and place, usu. with some kind of automatic weapon (which makes killing lots of people within seconds that much easier). Generally this action is in response to some emotional crisis--losing one's job or spouse or more usually both within a short span of time.
Serial killer: someone who kills 3 or more people, one or two at a time, usu. to receive some sort of sexual gratification. Serial killers tend to use the same methods over and over again, in order to signal that this is their work. They also tend to kill the same type of person over and over again, although this is by no means universal.
I'm not sure what the whole "3" thing means--maybe that the killer is very dedicated. Maybe if you stop at 2 you're just a ordinary, run-of-the-mill killer (example: OJ Simpson).
The panel was on why we find these types of killers so fascinating. I would have appreciated a more in-depth discussion of how shows like Millenium and Profiler managed to make serial killers so goddamn boring, but we didn't go there.
I managed to meet up with Darin and Mike for the Disney presentation, in which trailers and making-of videos for Mighty Joe Young, A Bug's Life, and Tarzan were shown. The director of Mulan also spoke for a while, but we wanted him off stage so we could get to the stuff we hadn't seen yet.
A Bug's Life looks majorly cool--plus, Kevin Spacey plays the villain. Despite it being all about insects, I'm there.
Tarzan, which is still being drawn but evidently will be out next summer (?), looked pretty good too. All of the songs are being done by Phil Collins as incidental/background music--the movie isn't a musical, thank goodness (or the higher-ups at Disney, who have finally realized that if they don't have some incredible talent writing the music, they should just stop with the musical thing).
I accompanied Darin to James Robinson's presentation. Robinson does Leave It To Chance, one of my favorite comic books, which hasn't been coming out very frequently. Turns out the bottleneck is with the artist and colorist, who take a long time to do their thing, but Robinson wants to keep doing it. I certainly hope so.
He is a very busy boy, though, with screenplays (which Darin asked him about, for me) and a gazillion other comic books, like Starman and Justice Society of America.
I went back to the hotel, dropped some stuff off, and collected mail. Of course, I collected all this damn mail, and immediately let it pile up in my In Box (and other folders). It's going to take me forever to answer.
I headed back to the convention center to hear Kevin Williamson, the writer of Scream and creator of Dawson's Creek. I'm not a big Dawson's Creek fan--it's just a wee bit too arch and aware for my tastes, with teenagers who all talk exactly alike. But I'm for having more writer awareness in the Industry, and seeing how many people turned out to cheer Williamson on was great.
He showed slides from Killing Mrs. Tingle, his feature directing debut (taken from his own script about a bunch of teenagers who go ballistic on their teacher), and a rough-cut trailer for The Faculty (a sci-fi movie directed by Robert Rodriguez that looks to be Invasion of the Body Snatchers 90210, but I'll go anyhow).
He said he wished he'd had longer on the Scream 2 script (so do we, buddy), there is no Scream 3 script yet (so much for it coming out this December), and he's still actively involved in Dawson's Creek, which apparently is pretty much a hit for the WB.
I wasn't really expecting Kevin Williamson to be as geeky as he was. This guy is a nerd, albeit a film nerd rather than a computer nerd, but he'd fit in really, really well with the computer nerds I know. This is a great relief--you don't have to become instantaneously suave when they make the big time, I guess.
Of course, there's also the fact that he's a year older than I am (waaah), and at age 28 hadn't so much as written a screenplay yet, and his second screenplay was Scream, which got him a big agent. I can't decide whether this makes me feel like a loser or not.
I went back to the hotel, dressed in my new running outfit, and went for a 3-mile run down the harbor. I passed the Summer Pops concert crowd that filled the walkway and the Star of the Sea sailing ship. It was a cool evening, which made running easier.
I came back and found Darin and Mike had returned to the room. I showered and changed quickly and we tried to decide where to go to dinner. We were all beat and no one wanted to decide.
I thought, Fish and chips sounds very tasty right now, so I suggested we head back down to where I'd just been jogging and go to Anthony's Fish Grotto, a seafood restaurant on the harbor. There are three gradations of restaurant there: the take-out, the casual sit down, and the very fancy Star of the Sea restaurant (right next to the sailing ship, natch). We opted for the casual sit down and had a 45 minute wait. We didn't talk much, because we were all so incoherent from exhaustion.
Dinner (which was tasty) perked us up a little, but not very much--immediately after dinner Darin drove Mike back to Allison and Adam's, and I went to sleep.
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Copyright 1998 Diane Patterson
Send comments and questions to diane@spies.com