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Nov132007

The Hollywood Writers Strike Explained

Courtesy of John Rogers, a concise, easy-to-follow, and surprisingly entertaining explanation of why all your favorite shows are drifting into re-runs:

And in case you’re wondering, yes, I support the WGA wholeheartedly in this matter. Writers don’t typically get a lot of recognition or respect in the film and television industry, but they are, to my mind, the most important part of the process. If somebody doesn’t write the story to begin with, the guy in the jodhpurs and riding boots has nothing to direct, and the “talent” have nothing to say. It’s that simple. And in a business as flush as Hollywood, to say there isn’t enough money to go around is disingenuous at best. The vast majority of WGA members really don’t make much money for their efforts, and if they’re trying to survive purely on screenwriting, their income is likely to be pretty sporadic. In my book, they deserve their modest cut of the residuals pie a lot more than the suits deserve another Gulfstream…

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Nov122007

Monday Morning Net Crap

72% Movie Freak
Odd… I anticipated a higher score than this. I thought perhaps my score was lower than expected because the game is predicated on gender and I’ve missed the boat on a lot of traditional “guy” films. However, when I took the “girl” quiz, I did even worse:
55% Movie Freak
Just goes to show that even a person who lives and breathes this stuff can still have gaps in the old knowledge base, I guess.

Hat tip to Samurai Frog for this one…

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Nov112007

Leaves

I’ve heard it said that women don’t remember the pain of childbirth, not really, because that’s the only way they’d ever be willing to go through it again.

Raking up autumn leaves is kind of like that. Oh, I like the raking part well enough. It’s what comes after, the scooping them into garbage bags so you can haul them away, that’s really tedious. I never remember from year to year how sucky that part of the process is.

Oh, well… it was still a gorgeous day and good to be outside.

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Nov102007

Drive-By Blogging 6: Working for the Weekend

It’s a beautiful, sunshiney afternoon here in the SLC, with blue skies and temperatures in the high 60s, probably for the last time this year before winter’s cold, clammy hand closes its skeletal fingers around the valley (how’s that for an image of impending gloom?). I should be outside, making myself some vitamin D and raking up my leaves before tomorrow’s rain turns them into heavy, sodden mush. So what am I doing? I’m surfing the web, naturally… life in the 21st century. Sigh.
Can’t help it, though… I keep finding interesting stuff that leads me deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole. So, just in case you, too, are not playing outside like the good kids ought to be, here’s a special Saturday edition of Drive-By Blogging linkage:

Continue Reading…

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Nov092007

Joss on Writing

Joss Whedon, the revered creator of the cult-fave TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Firefly, has been venting online about the way some in the press describe the ongoing writer’s strike out in Hollywood. His comments are worth reading in their entirety, but I like the way he describes the act and art of writing (something I am not entirely unfamiliar with myself…):

Writing is largely not considered work. Art in general is not considered work. Work is a thing you physically labor at, or at the very least, hate. Art is fun. (And Hollywood writers are overpaid, scarf-wearing dainties.) It’s an easy argument to make. And a hard one to dispute.

 

…Writing is enjoyable and ephemeral. And it’s hard work.

 

It’s always hard. Not just dealing with obtuse, intrusive studio execs, temperamental stars and family-prohibiting hours. Those are producer issues as much as anything else. Not just trying to get your first script sold, or seen, or finished, when nobody around believes you can/will/should… the ACT of writing is hard. When Buffy was flowing at its flowingest, David Greenwalt [Ed. note: Greenwalt was a writer and producer on Buffy] used to turn to me at some point during every torturous story-breaking session and say “Why is it still hard? When do we just get to be good at it?” I’ll only bore you with one theory: because every good story needs to be completely personal (so there are no guidelines) and completely universal (so it’s all been done). It’s just never simple.

 

It’s necessary, though. We’re talking about story-telling, the most basic human need. Food? That’s an animal need. Shelter? That’s a luxury item that leads to social grouping, which leads directly to fancy scarves. But human awareness is all about story-telling. The selective narrative of your memory. The story of why the Sky Bully throws lightning at you. From the first, stories, even unspoken, separated us from the other, cooler beasts. And now we’re talking about the stories that define our nation’s popular culture – a huge part of its identity. These are the people that think those up. Working writers.

“Human awareness is all about story-telling.” Nice.

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Nov082007

A Purely Rhetorical Question…

How many Star Wars t-shirts can a grown man own before it starts to become sad and lame? I’ve been doing a little online window shopping this afternoon and, well, I’m just asking…

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Nov072007

Halloween Meme

I’m a little late with this Halloween meme (ganked from Jaquandor), but I was out of town last week, and Halloween is my favorite holiday, so I’d appreciate it if you bear with me…

Continue Reading…

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Nov072007

The End of Pop Culture?

So, I’ve been thinking all day about that Starfighter video game, specifically about how truly weird it is that somebody bothered to make one and that people — at least a few people — are moved to talk about it here in the year 2007, some 23 years down the road from the movie’s release.

Look at this way: the guys who made that game, the bloggers who’ve posted about it, and the people who read those blogs are all using technologies that would’ve sounded almost as science-fictiony back in 1984, the year The Last Starfighter was released, as the idea of aliens recruiting Earth kids to fight in interstellar wars, which is that movie’s premise. The Internet is arguably one of the most revolutionary gadgets our species has ever come up with, and what do we mostly use it for? Besides distributing pictures of naked girls, I mean? To commemorate, reproduce, disseminate, and obsess over pop-cultural artifacts that are two or three decades old. In other words, we’re using this very futuristic tech to talk about stuff from the past. Does that strike anyone else as weird?

I’ve been gradually formulating an idea over the past several months, largely in response to all the recent remakes of movies that I loved as a kid, that popular culture seems to have frozen — some would probably say “stagnated” — somewhere around the end of the 1980s. Oh, sure, a lot of original work is still being produced, but the stuff that really gets people talking all stems from a roughly 25-year period — let’s say 1966-1989 — that ended a generation ago.

Continue Reading…

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Nov062007

Way Far Down the Geeky Rabbit Hole

Greetings, Starfighter!

This one took a little effort, but you kids are worth it: earlier this afternoon, my buddy Dave sent me a link to a short blog entry which reads as follows:

If you’re a child of the 1980s, you’re no doubt well aware of the movie The Last Starfighter, the fantasy epic about a videogame lovin’ kid in a trailer park who’s recruited by aliens as a gunner an intergalactic battle. I mean, based on that short description alone how can you not think the movie is awesome? The only problem is that the Last Starfighter game was never actually released. As crazy as it is, Atari developed the game but never released it for some reason. Talk about not following through on capitalizing on ancillary markets and product tie-ins.

 

Well, 23 years later the game has finally seen the light of day. Sure, its tech specs are less than impressive at this point, but you can’t beat the nostalgia value. It was custom-built into a cabinet that looks exactly like the one from the movie, but if you want to try it in the comfort of your own home you can now download the game as a simple exe file. Who knows, maybe you’ll be recruited if you try it out and are good enough.

Hmm, thinks I, this is intriguing. I remember liking The Last Starfighter back in the day. I would’ve been about 14 when it came out, and it was a perfect little piece of summertime adolescent wish fulfillment; what disaffected teen hasn’t dreamed of discovering they have some remarkable talent that will enable them to save the day? Or, in the case of Alex Rogan, the protagonist of TLS, the universe? The summer of ’84 was also the golden age of my interest in video gaming, so naturally I thought it be totally awesome to play a for-real arcade game just like the one in the flick. And now someone has finally made such a game? Awesome! Where do I click for more information? I tried here, the link referenced in the blog entry I quote above. Nope, not the source of this story, just another blog:

Who didn’t walk out of The Last Starfighter — yep, the Lance Guest movie from the ’80s — hoping to find a Starfighter game in the arcade? Sadly, the game was never produced. But some guys over at Rogue Synapse recreated a playable version of the actual game from the movie — it’s a free download — and offer drawings of the movie-prop game cabinet. Add a little MAME ingenuity and you’ve got yourself the arcade you dreamed of as a kid. (Just don’t leave me behind if Centauri comes for you first.)

Okay, now we’re getting somewhere, a destination at last… and I’ll be darned if the screen caps of the game these guys have cooked up don’t look just like what I remember from the movie. Very impressive indeed… personally, I can’t imagine having enough dedication to any movie to spend the time and effort needed to develop a game, let alone build a cabinet to house it, but I am utterly blown away that someone out there has. It’s so easy to imagine myself walking up to this thing in the middle of a dark, cacophonous room that smells of sweat and ozone, a heavy wad of quarters dragging my pants pocket all out of shape, only moments away from becoming the hero of the story behind the screen, and in my own mind… sometimes I really miss being 14.

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