There's a rumor I've read that WGN is going to begin showing all of the series Wiseguy after the Olympics. Can anyone out there confirm or deny? I didn't see anything about it on WGN's homepage. My cable system doesn't offer WGN any more. This is a strictly need-to-know operation, people -- I need to know. Send me any info you have.
In related news: there are just not enough pix of Kevin Spacey on the Web.
I can't wait until this obsessive state passes. It will...but probably not before I'm arrested for stalking.
I got a reprieve for lunch today. Handled in typical fashion too. (I say typical not because I am cold and unfeeling, which you might think after hearing his excuse, but because with this friend -- I'll call him Amytal -- it's always something. There have been some real doozies of excuses in the past, and over the years I've come to think of him as unreliable.) I got a phone call this morning from Amytal saying that he was still in Arizona and his grandmother's funeral was today and he just remembered we were supposed to have lunch -- he won't make it; can he give me a call when he gets back to town?
Oh sure, no problem.
Let's see: there's this week, which is already full up.
There's next week: kind of busy.
There's the week after that: I suspect it's going to be very busy, because...
The week after that, I'm in Los Angeles. I'm not sweating whether or not we see each other. I haven't seen him for over a year now; what difference can a year or two more make?
In less than three weeks I'm going to be living in LA. My life is flashing before my eyes. I know it's going to be exciting and I'm going to do lots of new things and meet lots of people. But I'm also scared silly. I haven't lived outside the Bay Area for twenty years.
In fact, it was twenty years ago August that my family moved to California. It took me quite a while to think of myself as a Californian. Of course, to me being a Californian means being open-minded, living in a pluralistic society, being cutting-edge. What it evidently means today is being xenophobic and poor and barely educated.
I have to stop thinking about this and go do two things: find something to eat and get ready to meet with the film prof this afternoon. I haven't been eating much lately: yesterday I had a falafel pita in the late afternoon and a small dinner salad at 10pm. Darin and CJ had finally gotten off work and were having dinner, and I had a salad to be polite. It was rough going finishing it -- my stomach is not a happy camper these days.
Even chocolate has lost its appeal: a neat trick.
(The mouse in my throat is back too -- I'd better call to find out the results of my blood test.)
After writing the first half of this I went over to Coffee Society and began scribbling out ideas for the conference with my film prof. As you may recall, we met last Thursday to discuss my vague and unformed ideas for a short film; he recommended I watch Alphaville, which I did (hated it). I did no further work on my story idea until today. Sheer procrastination on my part. I had also thought that perhaps lunch with Amytal might just "happen" to cause me to miss the meeting with the prof, but as lunch got cancelled first, I had no excuse on the ready.
So I sat down and considered the original idea -- a slightly futuristic story about a world in which everyone gets to produce and publish their own art. Hmmm. It wasn't working. I scrapped it. I also scrapped the idea of doing anything science-fiction, at least for right now, because I am of the school that says if you're going to do SF, do it for a reason. Not just to dress up a boring story in sexy clothing. (Using an SF setting for commentary on a contemporary problem is, of course, not only acceptable but required.)
I wanted to do a straight-forward, plot-driven story involving as few characters as possible. I have a tendency to get baroque in my stories; it's a character trait I want to control, not excise. Anyhow. I wrote on a piece of paper the names of the three main characters:
The basic idea. Very basic. I mean, have you seen this plot before? (I thought so.) Now I wanted to flesh the story out a little, give it some rhythm. To do this, I used an outline given to me by my writing teacher Floyd Salas when I took his Novel Writing class at Foothill:
Several students complained that this outline was too formulaic and they didn't want to be constrained by boring, out-moded patterns. (Had Pulp Fiction come out when I was taking this class, I know I would have heard a similar whine, as I did in almost every film class: "But Tarantino doesn't do that...") Well, it's a funny thing about this pattern: it's worked continuously since Aristotle first hacked out the first theory of dramatics. Rising action culminating in a climax works for readers just as well as it does for lovers.
I filled in all the blanks -- complete with plot twists involving Park,Stella, and Cam -- and had a much better sense of the story. I don't know the characters yet, and let me tell you, when I start writing, the characters sit up and do whatever the hell they want to anyway. But I had an actual plot, one that went somewhere, and one that (for me, at any rate) said something.
I went to meet with El Prof (Zaki Lisha, for those of you familiar with De Anza's Film Dept. -- Zaki is head of the department and a really great guy) and discussed what I'd come up with. He liked my twists and turns, my take on the criminal-as-hero motif --
(A slight digression here: has it bothered anyone else in the Star Wars trilogy that we're supposed to root for the Rebels without knowing exactly what kind of system they plan on putting in place after defeating the Empire? Does it bother anyone else that the chief defender of the Republic is Princess Leia?)
-- and the tightness of my plot. Whee ha. Success.
Zaki suggested a couple of possible plot elements that I could include, and he mentioned several important (for the audience) features that I needed to think about, such as getting the three characters together as early as possible, so that the audience sees how they interact. Some of his suggestions I'll think about, some aren't appropriate for the story I want to tell.
Story conferences are so much fun.
I've now gone from come-up-with-something-to-satisfy-the-requirements to I-want-to-see-where-this-story-goes. I'm probably going to work on a first draft of a treatment of this story as my final paper for this class.
That's what I've been up to, fiction-wise. I hope you all have a good writing day too.
I just saw a commercial for Olympic Gymnast Barbie -- don't the boys at Mattel know that with a chest like that Barbie could never compete in a gymnastics competition?