well, except for long stretches of the movie.
The quote of the day:
"Let's hear it for Trinket!"
I was going to get up at some godawful hour to start going to the conference, because in their infinite wisdom the organizers decided to start sessions at 8am I parsed a clue shortly before dropping into bed, given that it was 2am, and decided to blow off the first panel and go to the second one.
I went down to the Driskill restaurant for breakfast and decided on oatmeal, which would provide me with the roughage I never seem to get on these trips. The Driskill seemed to blow everything about this breakfast, from seating me in eastern Siberia (given there was no one else in the restaurant) to oatmeal that chewy and solid. I didn't have enough time to complain, but it was not good. Particularly after my amazing hotel restaurant experience in Washington DC.
I made it to the 10am panel, which was Plot Outlining with Pat Duncan. I might not have gone, because the topic sounded kind of amateurish, but he'd been such a good speaker I decided I'd learn something and I did. I liked his methods of laying stuff out on a page: he draws an arc arching upwards and puts two X's on it, marking the ends of Act I and II:
He only includes the key scenes, the barest skeleton of the story, to see where the scenes lie.
Once he lays out the general plotting of the story this way, he lays the characters arcs underneath, to make sure that they have arcs:
The second line there is for a character, such as the son in Mr. Holland's Opus, who was introduced late.
One thing he kept saying over and over again was, "This is what works for me. You have to find what works for you. And it'll probably take you several screenplays (like 6 or 7) to find what works for you." Duncan writes 5 to 6 screenplays a year. Reminding us over and over again that we have to write a lot of screenplays even before we'll know what we're doing was a mantra with him, as if he were trying to get through everyone's head that you aren't done after 1 or after 2: you have a long road to hoe.
I'd bought a ticket to the Awards Luncheon before I found out that everyone I knew at the conference wasn't going. Well, almost everyone: Greg Beal, the guy who runs the Nicholl Fellowship for the Academy was going, and so was Derek. The three of us decided to bag on riding on the buses taking people over to the luncheon and we walked over.
The luncheon was held at La Zona Rosa restaurant, which was about as far from the hotel as Katz's Deli had been the night before. La Zona Rosa is this cavernous restaurant (that doesn't look that large from the street) in which 60+ tables for 10 had been set up. I was at table 44 and Derek at table 48; we decided to crash a table together.
Turned out it didn't matter what table we were at (and we were about as far from the stage as we could get): there was no sound system, so if you weren't at one of the 5 front tables, you couldn't hear a thing said at the podium. This led to a lot of smart-assness at our table, including Today's Quote of the Day. What we'd hear would be something akin to the grownup in an old Peanuts cartoon, which always had rising inflection as though what the speaker was saying was supposed to excite us. Derek would imitate the sound and make as though he were introducing strippers.
Plus, the food was mediocre--chicken, vegetables, spicy mashed potatoes, and cheesecake.
Unless I'm a finalist next time, I ain't going, even though Derek and I were cracking one another up with all sorts of gossip and off-the-wall comments.
I went to the panel on Settings in the screenplay, and after about 15 minutes I gave it up: not only was the room packed, but the sound system wasn't working well (natch) and every time someone went in or out of the room the door made this prolonged squea-squea-squea-squeak noise. It was a form of Chinese water torture and I couldn't put up with it any more, so I left.
I went and got some coffee at Starbucks before coming back and deciding to sit in on the panel "Breaking into Cable." I wasn't particularly interested in the subject--I figure that breaking into cable is much like breaking into any other aspect--but the panelists (a writer for Rugrats, an exec with HBO) were knowledgeable and I enjoyed hearing anecdotes about what they did.
That is, by the way, the reason to go to this conference: the anecdotes. I don't think I'm going to learn anything here. Here's a crash course that tells you everything you need to know about making it as a screenwriter:
- Write what you want to write, not what you think the market wants.
- All producers want are great scripts that well-written and have intriguing characters.
- Act like an adult. Be polite.
- Write something original. Make your work stand out.
- Almost everything everyone tells you is wrong at some time.
There. Go and be successful.
After the Cable panel came the Crime and Thrillers panel, which had Brian Helgeland (LA Confidential, Conspiracy Theory, The Postman--Brian had a productive year last year), Andrew Kevin Walker (Seven and the upcoming 8mm), and Jim McManus, a filmmaker and screenwriter who had 2 films in the Austin Film Festival, La Cucaracha and The Big Empty.
I was really surprised by Andrew Kevin Walker, who I expected to be really, really strange, given the movies he's written. He's not. At least, he's not any stranger than a clerk at a Tower Records store (and a good deal more normal than most of them): late 20s, unruly hair, loose clothes, affable. He had several very funny lines, such as
The term film noir is overused...or used to describe anything with Venetian blinds.[The screenplay for Seven] sold and it sold for a lot more money than I made at Tower Records.
On preparing the audience for the tone of a film, using the Gluttony murder from Seven as an example: You don't see it and think, Oh, the ending might be weird.
I didn't think, I can't wait to make a giant spec sale on this snuff film movie [8mm].
He also ended up getting as many questions as Brian Helgeland, which surprised me, because Helgeland made such a splash last year (including, of course, winning the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay).
I thought the funniest thing he said was about the rise of the incredibly brilliant serial killer in movies, which is totally a crock because they're just not that brilliant in real life. He said, "We need a serial killer who's really stupid, but the police keep interpreting the clues as this intricate game." I kept hoping this would give me a story idea, but it didn't. It still cracks me up though.
Darin and I had been mildly disappointed by our visit to the Salt Lick--it was good, but we wanted great barbeque, so we headed over to County Line, which was just as fantastic as we remembered it. One of the best things about County Line is their service--always filling up the water, checking to see if we need anything, and (most important, for me) taking the plates away as soon as I don't want them in front of me.
Back at the hotel, Pooks reported the news that the conference had holed up all the panelists for the conference across the street at the Omni, which is why we never saw them at the hotel. So Pooks, Ruth, Darin, and I went over to the Omni to see if the writers were in the bar there. They weren't. In fact, there was some kind of black-tie party going on at the Omni, and we weren't going to be able to crash.
So Ruth, Darin, and I swung by the movie theater, because Affliction was scheduled for 10pm. Due to poor scheduling or the Sandra Bullock party running late or something, Paul Schrader's Affliction started at 11, not 10, as planned. I'm sure if I'd said, "Hey, let's bag this," Darin would have agreed, but I wanted to see it, so Darin bought a ticket before heading back to the Driskill. Darin and I headed up to the room; I have no idea what happened to Ruth, but I didn't see here again that evening.
We went to the theater at 10:30. Paul Schrader talked to the audience for 15 minutes before the movie started. One of the things he said was that he'd like to do the Q&A in the bar at the hotel after the movie, since it would be 1am by that point.
So, the movie started. During the credits--a series of static shots of snow-covered houses in Vermont or New Hampshire or someplace like that--I thought, Uh oh. Boring credits. More than boring: they don't give me any feel for the movie to come, except "slow" and "pointless."
(That is, by the way, the point of the modern credit sequence: to tell you what kind of film you're about to see. Is it light and frothy? Filled with moody shots of a skyline? Old-fashioned?)
The initial shot is a car with its headlights on driving down a snow-covered road at twilight, with a very long voiceover by Willem Dafoe. Midway through the voiceover I realized I had no idea what he was talking about, and it wasn't because it was late and I was tired--it was because the voiceover was long, ponderous, and (ultimately) pointless.
The movie went rapidly downhill from there.
Thirty minutes into this masterwork, I turned to Darin and said, "Any time you want to go is fine by me."
We ended up staying for the whole thing, more out of sheer force of will than anything else. This is not a good movie. It was annoying, dull, and pointless, and (worst of all coming from Paul Schrader) it didn't have a story.
(As I write this, I still can't get over that.)
I kept waiting for the story to start and it never did. It's pretty much about a loser who slides down a steep and unrelenting slope for two hours of my life. Affliction is based on a novel by Russell Banks, who also wrote the novel The Sweet Hereafter--if the novel is anything like this movie, I'm never reading the novel.
The ostensible point of this movie is that men are trapped by their worst natures. At least, I think that was supposed to be the point. It was tough to tell in the dull scenes with characters we're loathing with dialogue that was so unbelievably on-the-nose I couldn't believe Paul "Subtext is everything" Schrader wrote it.
Oh, here's a quote about the movie from Entertainment Weekly from Paul Schrader:
(The movie) tells the story of a small-town sheriff (Nolte) who investigates a hunting death that looks suspicious. "But there is no murder, and he's going crazy," says Schrader (American Gigolo). "I love leading an audience through shallow waters and then having the bottom drop out."
I wish the movie had been as interesting as the one described in that quote. That's a movie I'd recommend to you. Flee from this one.
I guess I'm the most annoyed because Paul Schrader complained endlessly in the hotel bar about how he can't get distribution on his movie. Well, I'm not surprised. He's a good writer (though not in this instance) who wants to be a director, but he's a mediocre director--the performances in Affliction were passable at best, and many of them were awful.
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Copyright 1998 Diane Patterson
Send comments and questions to diane@spies.com