Cold Fingers

I called Linda last night and we talked about the logline for my movie that I had sent her. She asked me, "Why didn't you just say that in class?"

If I knew that...

I know why, of course. I'm afraid that it sounds stupid, it sounds lame, it sounds like a movie no one would ever want to see. I am afraid of other people's judgements of my work. As somebody once put it, I have a theistic model of the world: there is a God, and He is judging. This is a real bummer for an atheist, I'll have you know, but once the Catholic Church gets her cold fingers around your heart I guess there's no letting go.

She said, "I printed out your logline and you are going to read it in next week's class."

I said I was going to call Len today -- that was in fact the plan for yesterday but I called Linda instead -- and I would tell her what he said after we talked.

We also discussed Linda's movie (which will be great stuff, if for no other reason that to ruin a couple of our closely held beliefs about the nature of slavery in Colonial America) and then the movies of others in the class.

She also told me about something she'd run across at her internship at a production company. Something that made me very, very angry. Every year USC sends out the Script List, which is (we had thought) a list of the graduating graduate students' thesis scripts: loglines and titles. This is a list that gets looked at, so you want to be on it.

Linda got the list from the company and discovered that not only were the graduate students' scripts on it, but the graduating seniors' scripts and a script from someone who works in the Screenwriting department office.

Oh gee, why don't we just ask everyone walking by on the street to put their loglines on this? (But not the first-year graduate students' scripts, even though we all had to have one.)

Along with the list was a letter from John Furia, head of the Screenwriting department (and the undergraduate Filmic Writing program is his baby, which explains quite a lot), in which he says that age or program is no indicator of the quality of the script.

What a guy.

I remain convinced that he's trying to kill the graduate program and only cares about the undergraduates. It pisses me off. And for all he keeps his door open, I don't think he listens.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

Yesterday I wrote out the beat sheet for my movie and had to keep telling myself that every idea looks like crap at this stage. As Len put it, you're playing with your shit in public.