are ye wit' me, lads?
So, last night, Pooks and I rode up the elevator together. She said I should call when I woke up and then we could do the Blue Ceremony. She wouldn't call, because she knew she'd be up way earlier than I would be.
Needless to say, Pooks called me in the morning and woke me up. I lied and said I was awake. Which was kind of true: I had been waking up on and off all morning.
(Pooks told me her own wake-up story: since Mary had to get to the airport early, she had asked for a wake-up call at 7:30. The phone rang at 7 and Mary answered it. After a few seconds she said, "Who is this?" Then: "I'm going to call my lawyer." Shortly thereafter, Ruth and Mary then said over and over again, "It's for you," "It's for you," "It's for you."
(Finally Pooks realized the phone was for her and took the phone. Her husband said, "How many women are staying in that room?" It turned out he had greeted Ruth with, "How's the woman I should have been sleeping with?")
I dropped out of bed, got dressed quickly, and headed downstairs with my contribution to the Blue Ceremony. Several of the people I knew at the conference--in fact, nearly all of them--had done the Ceremony the night before, but Pooks wanted to include me too, so we were doing it again.
What, you ask yourself (and by extension, ask me), is a Blue Ceremony?
Well, it's a homegrown kind of thing. Remember in Braveheart when Mel's getting ready to go into battle? He paints himself blue.
Well, Pooks (I think) adapted this into "Paint yourself blue" as a cry for going into battle, whether it be sending your scripts out or dealing with an agent or what have you.
This evolved into "Think blue thoughts" and eventually, of course, doing blue things. When intersected with the well-known power of the full moon, doing blue things becomes a Blue Ceremony.
(Actually, I have no idea how this all came about. I made half of that up as I went along.)
The full moon was actually on the Monday after the conference, so we had to pretend--we're writers, after all--it was a full moon, and everybody brought something blue to raise the mojo. We had blue candies (M&Ms, gumdrops), blue sports drink, blue glasses to drink the blue sports drink, blue facial mask, blue fingernail polish...
(I, of course, brought the Blueboy magazine. For those who don't know what that is, it's a gay men's magazine that shows why women's porn is, shall we say, flaccid. The problem with Blueboy for me, and for those I showed it to is that the models are all Twinkies--extremely young-looking men. Not interesting. We want real men.)
I went downstairs to the room where Pooks, Ruth, and Mary had been having an extended sleepover and arrived just as Mary was leaving. I gave her a hug and then got down to business wtih Pooks and Mary: I painted my toenails blue as Pooks and Ruth checked out the Blueboy. "Euwww" was the usual comment, followed every so often by an "Oh my God."
Then we poured extremely small amounts of the blue sports drink into the blue glasses. Pooks made an extremely touching toast--something to the effect of "May we all sell in the next year and remain friends forever!"--and then we all drank really, really quickly. (As Pooks pointed out, sports drink smells like sweat because it's replacing sweat.)
I hugged them goodbye and then ran upstairs to go shower. I hoped that Pooks and Ruth didn't notice how I smelled.
Then I ran over to Starbucks and got coffee before the first session, which on Sunday began at 9:45. The only reasonable starting time of the conference.
The first session of the day was on pitching. Actually, it was the second pitching session of the conference; the first one had been on Saturday. Pooks attended part of that one, and she said it was great--Andrew Marlowe (Air Force One and the upcoming End of Days (with Ah-nuld) and The Hollow Man for Paul Verhoeven) evidently did a pitching demonstration, and Andrew evidently gives killer pitches. He's been paid a million dollars for a pitch, so he knows what he's doing. I would have loved to have seen that. Sigh.
During this first panel, a guy stood up and said, "Is it okay to bring notes into a pitch meeting?" The panelists shrugged and said, yeah, that was probably okay.
Then the guy says, "Can I try out my pitch?" And he stands there and reads, in a flat, droning voice, a very long synopsis of his story.
(As Pooks told me this, I could only imagine the fury that ran through the crowd, having to listen to this. This is the ultimate in the self-absorbed gesture at a conference--I can understand wanting to get feedback on your pitch, but not at the expense of everyone else's time.)
At the end, there was dead silence. Then Andrew Marlowe said, "That took guts. Especially in this crowd."
But I missed this session. I went to Sunday's session, which had Larry Wright (The Siege, due out soon) and Bob Pool (Outbreak, The Big Town). They did not demonstrate pitching, but they had overall advice and some hilarious anecdotes.
And you know what? That same guy stood up and did another long, droning pitch. This time the panelists were a little more taken aback and not quite as supportive. His idea was vague and uncommercial, and no one was going to touch it after the similarly-themed Rosewood.
The panelists offered the worst case scenario: "They buy it. Then you have to write it."
You should know the difference between a premise (an enabling assumption that creates a conflict that leads to the action of your movie) and a notion (a general idea). For example, the notion "A woman in the CIA" led to the premise for The Siege: "The CIA and the FBI have a turf war over dealing with domestic terrorism."
And there was general advice: Know your genre. Know what the primary axis of conflict is in the story. And don't tell good stories to someone you don't know.
Larry Wright told the funniest story about dealing with Lynda Obst. They were late to a meeting with Warners, so Obst drives like a madwoman down the freeway, smoking a joint and talking on the phone, and she says, "Tell me the story." Wright, taken aback, starts pitching it to her. In the middle of his pitch, her phone in her purse in the backseat rings; Obst opens her door, reaches around behind her to the backseat, gets the phone, and starts talking on that. Meanwhile, Wright is pitching this whole while, and Obst keeps saying, No, no, that's not working. So Wright starts rearranging the pitch in the car, and the one he came up while trying to get and keep Obst's attention is the one he pitched and sold at the studio at the meeting.
These are the kinds of situations you have to be ready for, I guess.
After Pitching came Endings. A fitting closing session for the conference. The panelists were Jeremy Pikser, Fred Miller, Tim McCandless, and Lamont Johnson.
I'll give you the 411, because it wasn't a thrilling panel: the Killer Ending satisfies the initial problem. Simple enough?
The trick is, you have to have a satisfying ending to get any money to make a movie. Of course, every panelist told a story about working on a film that had its ending changed radically during production.
I ran into Derek in the lobby after the Endings panel and invited him to brunch with us at La Fonda San Miguel. I invited a whole bunch of people; Derek was the only one who said yes.
Fools.
In case you don't know, La Fonda San Miguel is a kick-ass Mexican restaurant in Austin. I'm not even sure "Mexican restaurant" is a fair description: "purveyor of haute Mexican cuisine" might be closer. When Darin and I knew we were going to Austin, we had no idea what we'd be doing, except we were definitely going to Sunday brunch at La Fonda San Miguel.
La Fonda San Miguel's Sunday brunch rocks. The chef prepares a number of traditional and nouveau Mexican entrees, cold side dishes, hot side dishes, and desserts. This time the entrees were two kinds of slow-cooked pork (one very nicely spiced), chicken in pumpkin sauce, chicken mole, and chicken in a white sesame sauce with olives. There was a corn pie and a tortilla pie and rice with plantains. It was wonderful.
Darin's friend Paul, with whom we'd had barbecue the first night, joined us at the restaurant. We discussed film and textbooks (Paul works as a foreign languages editor for Holt Rinehart Winston, a textbook publisher; he also teaches Spanish at the community college). Paul told us about the number of restrictions publishers have on them, mandated by states, particularly the large states, particularly...California. Evidently California mandates what you can and can't show in a textbook, like you can't show kids wearing baseball caps in the classroom.
Of course, there is a Science textbook named Texas Science, which frightens me, let me tell you.
Paul said the textbook writers are throwing fits over how to explain what's going on in Washington right now.
I suggested putting it in Spanish. That way, more kids would have incentive to study a foreign language.
We dropped Derek off at the Driskill, then stopped for coffee with Paul at Austin Java. The coffee didn't help Darin or me perk up--we were both exhausted. So we bid Paul adieu and drove to the airport to drop off the car and check in for our 5:20 flight.
Of course, it didn't leave until 8pm.
American Airlines got all screwed up: planes coming in late, planes coming in at the wrong gates, planes not coming in at all. Every single seat was taken on our flight, once it arrived. Every seat taken...and the plane ovens were broken, so there was no meal on the flight. After it had been delayed for two hours. People were really cheery about that.
Interesting factoid: Andrew Kevin Walker and his ladyfriend were sitting across the aisle from Darin and me on the plane. I wanted to say hi and thank him for being such a great speaker, but he fell asleep and I doubted he would have appreciated my interrupting him, so I left him be.
I'd arranged for a car to pick us up at the airport, and somehow we lucked out, in the middle of arriving 2 hours later than planned and in the midst of a late Sunday night free-for-all at LAX: the car company sent a white stretch limo instead of the usual Lincoln Town Car. I got in it and lay down on one of the couches all the way back home.
Kind of a nice Hollywood wrap-up to the weekend.
|
|
|
|
Copyright 1998 Diane Patterson
Send comments and questions to diane@spies.com