EXTRA CRITICUM

An Oldie But Goodie for Playwrights and Screenwriters

I'm embarrassed to have to say I forget which teacher first taught me this old trick. If you're out there and reading this, please forgive me for not giving credit where credit is due. But this is a tried and true little exercise every writer of scripts ought to do every few years just to be sure we're firing with all pistons, as they say.

Take two pages of one of your plays or screenplays and print them out. Now white out all the character names. 

Serendipity and Meryl Streep at the Quad Cinema

On Tuesday afternoon, my plan was to take my Mom to see Claude Berri's THE TWO OF US at the Quad Cinema. About an hour before we headed out I learned that -- oops! -- in a last-minute scheduling change, that time slot would be filled instead with a screening of Ai Weiwei's Oscar-nominated doc, HUMAN FLOW. The film interested us both just as much so we grabbed our coats and headed the two blocks to the Quad.

I was surprised to see a big crowd filling the lobby of the tiny multiplex at 4PM on a Tuesday and apprehensively asked if there were two tickets available. There were. We went in, grabbed our seats and waited as virtually every seat in the theatre (70 total?) was slowly filled. 

The Quad's programming director walked down to the front of the theatre. As he did so, I realized that there was probably going to be a Q&A and I briefly recalled the time in 1999 when I had been called to the front of one of the Quad's screens to introduce my film, ALL THE RAGE. I remember still what I said that night. The film had already screened at dozens of film festivals across the globe and throughout the U.S. but that screening at the Quad would be its New York Premiere. And I made a joke about my delight at finally getting the opportunity to screen my film in "the center of the universe."

"We have a great honor this afternoon that the filmmaker, Ai Weiwei is here to introduce his film. And..." And he paused and cleared his throat for dramatic effect. "And I can hardly believe I'm saying this but to introduce Weiwei we have three-time Oscar-winner Meryl Streep."

STREET THEATRE: Oh Mr. Albee, Aren't we all just hanging by a thread?

Something strange happened yesterday at the Quad Cinema on 13th Street. I'd taken Mom to an early-evening screening of the filmed version of Edward Albee's A DELICATE BALANCE. If you haven't seen the film, it's a rare treat. And if you know the play, there are some interesting adjustments. But more or less, Albee, who wrote the screenplay himself, stuck pretty close to the original.

In any event, Mom and I had just thoroughly loved it. It was such fun to just sort of bathe in Mr. Albee's acerbic wit, lines that make you laugh and shudder all at once. I was so glad to have the Quad Cinema so close to home.

About 5 min. into the film, a guy who had been sitting right behind me, slithered around and past our row and into a seat in the row just in front of us. At 5PM on a Thursday it was a sparsely filled house. I wondered for the briefest of moments whether he was moving to get away from us but neither I nor my Mom are particularly tall, so I dismissed the thought and forgot about him.

As the lights came up slowly as Mom and I watched the credits roll, I heard him speaking very loudly.

The Wolfpack Game

This is not a review of the documentary The Wolfpack. But I will say it’s excellent and you should see it. Seriously, go see it. But no, instead of reviewing it I’d like to pose a question inspired by the film.

Death on the Tracks. What a Railway Accident Can Teach Us About Filmmaking

Recent news of the criminal prosecution and sentencing to two years in prison of film director Randall Miller in the death of camera assistant Sarah Jones on an indie film shoot in Georgia has been stuck in my brain like glue. They were shooting a scene on tracks used by freight trains. They weren't permitted. And the freight train just came up too quickly. It crashed into a truck bed, debris from which flew into the crew, killing Sarah Jones.

See, it wasn't so long ago that I was leading my own skeleton crew through the fields and back roads of Omaha on a 3-day shoot of a scene in We Pedal Uphill, the culmination of which was a 2 min. sequence featuring a parked truck on the railroad tracks, a bottle of champagne and enough dirty doings to keep us all up at night.

Here's what I remember about our shoot. I'm not sure we got a permit. But we did check in with the local film commission and they provided us with details of the freight train schedules for our particular crossing so we knew when the next train was scheduled to come by and planned accordingly. But that scene took more than an hour to shoot, even on our shoestring budget so you can imagine how much time it might eat up on a bigger production. We needed our moment to be the edge of dusk so we really couldn't afford to draw it out much anyway.

But this news of the accident in Georgia has me doing a good deal of soul-searching about just how easy it is to succumb to the temptation to cut corners, especially when working in the low-budget arena. I like to think I didn't put my actors or crew at risk but can I be so sure? We took the precautions we felt were prudent at the time while still managing to squeak out a feature film for thousands, rather than millions. And lucky for us, no one got hurt or killed. 

But I am reminded of another film I worked on years before that one where lines of safety were far more blurry.

Pet Peeve - A Haiku

Foreign film trailers

No dialogue, no subtitles

Who are they fooling?

Sagrada: The Mystery of Creation - A Film Review

Would you like to contemplate time, continuity, community, creativity, and spirituality while seeing beautiful images of an architectural marvel? If yes, have I got a film for you: Sagrada: The Mystery of Creation, directed by Stefan Haupt.

The Overnighters: Hope and Shame for America

Just saw Jesse Moss' arresting documentary, The Overnighters in a screening room the size of my livingroom at IFC Center on Sixth Avenue. If there's a movie that captures this moment in American history -- the tearing apart at the seams of our social fabric -- it is The Overnighters. Through the microcosm of the city of Williston, North Dakota, which is undergoing a kind of Frack Rush the likes of which this country hasn't seen since the days of the California Gold Rush the film can be seen as a portrait of America. In case you hadn't heard: The Dakotas are booming thanks to fracking and one of the results is an influx of men seeking work in the oil fields. 

My Late Night Cinematheque

Movies are the easiest art form to catch up on. If I decide I want to read one of the many classics I’ve neglected (Moby Dick, Remembrance of Things Past, etc.), it’s a pretty major commitment. Even at the rate I read, we’re talking about a couple of weeks. On the other hand, if you want to see what the fuss is about this Ozu guy that all the cinemaphiles always yammer on about, you’re about ninety minutes away from knowledge.

Well, you are now. Thanks to Netflix. We all like to wring our hands about how technology has de-humanized us, but that’s only because some of the miracles it has brought now seem utterly mundane. If you had told any film student up to 1990 about Netflix – how you could basically have the entire history of cinema delivered to your door (often letterboxed, digitally re-mastered, and with commentary) for about $15 a month, their head would have exploded. Yet this is how we live now. We’ve come to expect it. We’re even annoyed that we have to wait a few days for those non-streamable titles to appear at our door. 

 

Gravity: Haiku Review

That which keeps us down

Forces us to stand up tall

Face tilted skyward

My First Movie

It's hard to believe that in the last 25 years of being an actor (not counting being cast as one of the eight maids a-milking in kindergarten), I've never really spoken on film.

Sure, I've done the requisite extra work - suffering through a meal-free day and night at Yankee Stadium for Anger Management, and appearing as a blurry dot on the Columbia University campus for Hitch - as well as commercial work for MTV and lots of hosting work for QVC, but if you ever wanted to see me perform a role, really act as someone other than myself, you'd have to come see me in a theater.

That is, until now.

Letting Go: The Last Picture Show and Me

Here's my favorite scene from one of my favorite films, The Last Picture Show.

 

Apocalypse, Now? Serenity Now! A Clip

Apocalypse, Now!

The other night I was on the subway, on the way to meet with filmmaker Peter Olsen, who is directing a jaw-droppingly beautiful documentary The Singing Wilderness about nature writer Sigurd Olson, when a man of about thirty-five sat next to me. He put his earbuds in, took out his portable Playstation, and began playing some first person, military shoot ‘em up game. (I’m not a gamer at all.) I looked at the tiny monitor as his digital self found cover behind walls and blasted away at his digital nemesis.

Meanwhile on Filmmaker Magazine: The Up Films

Michael Apted's Up films are a great inspiration on my work. When I heard that the latest in the series (56 Up) was coming out this year, I had a brainstorm. What would it be like to watch all of those films (total running time, 13 hours) in 24 hours? I pitched the idea to Filmmaker Magazine and they liked it. 

Permission to Cry

I saw Les Misérables this afternoon, and I bawled my eyes out.

But it wasn't because the film version of the famous stage musical was that good.

And I don't think it was because the characters in it were all that miserable.

There's something about seeing another person crying that makes us in the audience want to cry, like the contagion of yawns or bathroom breaks.