Rathan Krueger's Blog, page 2

Joining the Party, Or How I Wrote My Romance Novel: Part I

Writing a novel is like building a mountain as you climb it.

The base of “Like Red on a Rose” began after realizing it wasn’t the right time to make my film, “Shadows of Love”. It’s a bizarre film, about a corpse photographer and a lonely heiress whose love is as meaningful as it is complex. To be a nobody director who wanted a stack of cash to make something with no less than four dance sequences and ended with the bloodiest way to say “I love you” was hard at any time. To be that when money people were afraid of ‘90s-indie originality? I didn’t give up on it, but a quote taped to my wall said it all: “When it’s obvious that the goals cannot be reached, don’t adjust the goals, adjust the action steps.” So I did.

With my adjustment was a longstanding need to write a novel. I tried many times over the years. Most died in the planning stage; the survivors died in the middle of the first chapter. Connecting the two happened quickly, then it was a matter of finding the right story to tell. I originally wanted Abrienda and Cullidina to share half a novel, then realized they worked best knowing only what was revealed in the eventual film. So the other half of the novel became the whole novel, about Abrienda’s boss, Rudella, and her practically-wife, Piri. They’re the only other characters in the film, and they’d only become better knowing more about them.

Despite how it seemed, building up Rudella and Piri had nothing to do with the extended universe fad, and everything to do with not letting “Shadows of Love” die. People were too concerned with shoehorning a massive cast into a piece of taffy that couldn’t be stretched far enough to sustain them, for no other reason than the Marvelous Competition and the money it raked in. And the arrogance of calling it a “universe”… The universe was bigger than anyone could imagine; people think their, at best, thousand or so characters could command something with more stars in it than grains of sand on all our beaches.

Anywho, finding the story for Rudella and Piri was also brisk. However, I didn’t want to tell a typical tale of them finding each other. Most romances had a will they/won’t they tension, and ended when they got together. I found that a boring and lazy way to storytell. Ask anyone and they’d tell you the most interesting part of a relationship is keeping it. They’d also tell you that they rarely see that in entertainment. Which was why I decided to tell the tale of Rudella and Piri before and after they got together.

The before came because I didn’t want to spend a novel writing about overcoming relationship problems, and because I liked the idea of seeing where the ladies came from, which made it easier to figure out what their baggage was. Baggage being important because I didn’t want whatever their problems became to be generic. I mean, I didn’t want to go out of my way to keep their problems from being generic, but I wanted to give them every opportunity to be unique. I also wanted to give them a happy ending since misery was my nature and it’d be a nice challenge. I wasn’t going to make it easy on them, though. They were going to earn every kiss and fuck.

I lived and died by notecards and corkboard. Some people could write without knowing where they ended up, but I needed a map. With that said, having a map didn’t mean following the same road as everyone else. People who’d read and watched what I’ve created would be surprised at how meticulously plotted they were despite how… improvisational they seemed. I knew from the start that I wanted to alternate twixt Rudella and Piri’s past, then they’d share chapters when they’re together. I knew how it’d end, too, though it was originally a Bowie lyric. Also, its title was “Such Great Heights”, which was a holdover from “Shadows of Love”. I changed film titles because “In the Heights” came out while I wrote, and I felt I needed the distance. “Shadows of Love” came from the first needledrop idea I had for an important scene, Four Tops’ “Standing in the Shadows of Love”. I ditched the ‘drop, but kept the title. As for “Like Red on a Rose”, that’s how well Rudella and Piri were together.

To Be Continued…

Blind and Bound

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Finishing a script takes a long time, and I’m glad to say that the one for my second film, COMING YOUR WAY, is done and doing the contest-and-festival thing. It’s much different that WAKE UP ALONE on many levels. For one, it’s funny. I didn’t sit back and say that I wanted to make a lighter film. Miasma is my currency. However, the subject made me choose laughter over depression. This story’s a bit convoluted, but it’s worth it.

COMING YOUR WAY was supposed to be my first film, originally called TURN THE STRANGE, and even had a 79-page script to show for it. The idea for it came to me when I thought about a blind woman guitarist starting a heavy metal band. The inclination for most creatives would be to make it dramatic and lean into the assumed struggles and pain blind people have. That didn’t interest me at all. I thought it’d be more interesting and fun to go the other way and make her story funny. Or rather, as funny as I’d allow myself to be. Emily wouldn’t be a self-pitying victim trying to survive, she’d be someone who doesn’t take herself seriously yet takes her work very seriously. I tend to come up with enough of an idea and tuck it away for later, but she wasn’t having any of that. What sold me was a moment of her saying “Wall.” before bumping into one. Her having such a level of comfort with her blindness that she’s not above playing the clown… how could anyone give that character up? I have to stress, before going on, that I in no way make fun of her blindness. The comedy comes from her as a character and those around her (like the funny stuff tends to), not from mocking her in bad taste and calling it a joke.

Why TURN THE STRANGE? It sounded like a good idea at the time and I’m so glad I moved away from that clunker. Esoteria and laughs never mix for the right reasons. Why COMING YOUR WAY? It’s part of a Metallica lyric from my favorite song of theirs. Back to when it was 79 pages. When I finished it, I starting taking the most babiest (spell check knows “babiest?”) of baby steps while finishing up a script that I modified into a teleplay. I’m a big DOCTOR WHO fan and figured the best way to start getting on the show would be to do things for the BBC. They have a site where unknown writers can get gigs for them. WAKE UP ALONE almost ended up as a TV drama submission. Just as I was about to send it, I realized it’d make someone else very happy and I’d be jealous and regretful for the rest of my life. Like sending the woman of my dreams away to a stranger after she told me she’d date me, then getting invited to their wedding. So I kept May, put Emily away, then made May.

Deciding what to do as the next film, I began preparing something horror: THE HATE REMEDIES. Just as I was about to start arranging notes on cards, Emily started whispering again. My intention was to eventually give the script to someone and let ’em run with it… but I realized it’d make them very happy and I’d be jealous and regretful for the rest of my life. I also knew that if I didn’t work on her now, I’d be too far removed from who I needed to be to direct TURN THE STRANGE. Like trying to start a relationship with an ex, but you’re both too different from who you were to make it work. So I put the horror away (for now) and got ready to kick out the jams, motherfucker. But even though I was still the right person for the job, I’d changed since writing it and it was written as a first script. The first script gets the world’s attention, the second script keeps it. So I set out reworking it to fit me better… which made it balloon to 149 pages. It doesn’t feel long, though, and one person who read both told me that COMING YOUR WAY read faster than TURN THE STRANGE. Still blows my mind that a 149-page script is brisker than a 79-page one.

What changed? I made it more Chicagoland-centric, gave it a George Carlin bite, made it more lower-class instead of nebulously middle-class, and added things I needed to say about stuff. The existing characters are more defined, and I added new ones. The cast was basically the three-piece band, Emily’s friend, and nameless blobs. Now, the blobs are people, the band’s a quartet, and the fourth member has friends. Scenes got longer, a new scene came from a problem I gave Emily, and another new scene came from her new bandmate (a dominatrix drummer) and her chums. Every scene revolved around Emily ruling her band somehow, and I wanted to have a scene where everyone got to be people instead of musicians. Then I put it in a bar. Then I had them order a pizza. Then I thought it’d be cool if the scene took as long as a pizza took to cook. I explained the writing of that scene to people like I was writing a symphony. I knew it was gonna be a long scene, so I had to keep viewers from calling bullshit. I treated each character as an instrument in an orchestra. You don’t use all the instruments all the time, you get choosy. You don’t play the same tune for a half-hour, you create movements and nuance. I broke the scene down into cards, gave each card a set of characters, gave the characters things to say, then let ’em loose. Remember: the 149’er flew by better than the 79’er.

While COMING YOUR WAY is doing the circuits, I’m finding other ways to get eyes on it. And I have a film to show off instead of telling money people, “Trust me, I direct. Gimme cash.” There’s a lot of time doing nothing, though, so I’m writing a novel to keep busy. It’s been a few years since writing my first one, LIE, and doing it will be fun. It’ll be an anthology because I love the idea of not having to think up long character arcs, it’ll be horror because I love the genre, and it’ll have no dialogue because I love the challenge. Since it’ll be a dialogue-less anthology, I can have fun with how I’ll tell the stories. That’s the thing I’m looking forward to the most, really. Breaking the form. Just because novels have been written a certain way doesn’t mean all novels have to be written a certain way. The novel will also help me vent in the healthy way that making art does. There’s a lot to rage about these days, and I’d rather get ’em on pages than keep ’em inside. I’m the too excited to get to one story, in particular. Good thing it’ll be the novel’s last one. It’s, hopefully, my deepest excursion into nihilism I’ll do for a long time. But I’ll have so much to say that nihilism is the only answer for. Fitting that it’ll be titled after a Nine Inch Nails song.

A Slice of Life: Onto Newer Things

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Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends. Come inside, come inside.

Today, after about a month of brainstorming other aspects of it, I start focusing on creating the story of my next film. Since I don’t have much of anything to say about that, I’ll ramble about how and why I took so long to get working on the story for The Next Thing (a codename ’til I get the script copywritten). Long for me, anyway.

Swearing to an artist’s career of using mostly women, it’s very important for me to not make characters who are arbitrarily women. The only things that make them feminine are pronouns and them being played by actresses. I also love rich characters, rich storytelling, and worldbuilding. Because of those, I have pages and pages of notes about characters and where they exist. Many people forget that each movie could create a language specific to itself instead of just being a movie. Think of something made by David Lynch or Michel Gondry versus something typical. The medium is FAR more malleable than people think. For instance, The Next Thing will be a horror movie, but I’ll explain later why it won’t be what you expect.

Those pages of notes were written stream-of-consciousness, so it was a bit of snakes in the pet shop when it came to making sense of them before focused brainstorming.

[image error]Something interesting happened after that. I had a character who existed for one very intense scene… but I felt bad for whoever I’d cast for her because she’d be there for that and would be gone. So I decided to give the character more to do and she’s become one of my favorites in The Next Thing.

As I was putting together my villainess, I remembered something I read about lady killers in horror movies. They don’t get the same range to be evil as fellas and tend to have a sympathetic edge instead of being pure evil. I saw that I was falling into that trap with mine. She originally did what she was doing out of a sense of longing, but now she’s an unrepentant psychopath. The Next Thing is much better for it, too, and whichever actress gets to play her will have a special kind of fun. I’m not making her do things for the sake of them and using her psychopathy as a reason to be random as fuck, though. Everything she does has meaning, just not empathy. Think Heath Ledger’s Joker, not Jack Nicholson’s.

Being a director with one film under his belt (but WHAT a film!) and knowing how odd it will be, I understood that I had to start thinking of how to sell The Next Thing while I was preparing it. Not making it cater to a wide audience, but knowing how to present it to them and the money people. They love simplicity, so I boiled everything down into two references:

I’d see that. Twice.

In taking inspiration, I stayed away from horror movies: just because I was making one didn’t mean that I needed to take from them. I felt that throwing things into the soup that aren’t the usual suspects would make a much more interesting and richer meal. The horror’s gonna take care of itself (and how!), so it was important to me to explore other things. I noticed that I was gravitating towards movies about bands, for some reason. Maybe the group setting? I also read Patty Schemel’s autobiography, “Hit So Hard.” She talked about being an addict while being a drummer. The big “ah HA” moment came while rewatching THE DOORS.

I mentioned earlier that I didn’t want to make a typical horror movie. I love American horror movies and splatterpunk, but I’m not at all interested in the tropes of them. Guillermo del Toro said the same thing about his films, but I didn’t understand what he meant ’til The Next Thing. American horror movies and international horror movies are so different because the latter has a broader sense of what counts. Very few Americans would consider David Lynch a horror director (including himself), but his work is so horrific. That’s partly because Americans tend to not bother pushing the genre outward, and their work that does gets co-opted by the intelligentsia who rattles off a series of adjectives to beat the genre unconscious with. See: GET OUT and SHAPE OF WATER.

So, back to THE DOORS. Every time I watch it, I’m amazed at the tempo. This time, I thought that I never saw a horror movie like that. Before I started brainstorming for The Next Thing, I couldn’t decide whether I wanted it to be long or short. If it was short, it’d be a great punch in the face to the audience. If it was long, it’d be the slow knife into their hearts. When character stuff kept coming, I realized that it’d be such a disservice to the characters if I blitzed through everything. THE DOORS was the push towards madness I needed.

If I could make the BOOGIE NIGHTS of horror, I’d be fine with that.

Greetings and Glory

Rathan Krueger here, welcoming you to the start of a beautiful relationship twixt the entertainment industry and me. It and I won’t always agree, and there will be dark times… but that’s what a healthy relationship should be about. Ups, downs, all-arounds, and surprises.

On other parts of the site, you’ll be able to catch me flirting with short films and going on the first date that is WAKE UP ALONE. “Preludes to WAKE UP ALONE” will take you to three world-expanding short films about the feature; “Slivers” has two short films I made last year (about two friends hanging out, and about an alliterative lovesick lady); “2,000 Year Diary” contains what passes for an autobio. Subscribe to my mailing list and find me on Twitter (@DarknessOpera) to find out if I get kissed after dinner.

The Poetics of May

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At the start of last month, I started a new creative exercise. The day before, I write three words, all stream-of-consciousness. The next day, I force myself to write a poem about them, then leave three new words for the morrow. It’s been an interesting and challenging thing that I’m continuing this month. Keeps me creatively fit as well as prepares me for the day a decade or so from now when I add being a musician to my renaissance list. I was also inspired slightly by Emily Dickinson and her absurd pile of poetry. Here are some of my favorites.

May 6th, 2017 (mistreatment, locomotive, stars)

The engine grinds them

Sinews and gristle snag and snap twixt the gears

Atomized blood a steady cloud

The squeal comes from voices, not brakes

The flames of combustion

Fanned by adoring hearts

All for a magazine cover

May 8th, 2017 (tape, repetition, clouds)

Rhapsody on strips

Unbelievably high on currents

Noticed only by aviary beasts

Rooted in their confusion

Utmost and plentiful

Nature despises the laboratory

Rushing past abominations

Undulating through condensations

Nary one makes it alive

May 11th, 2017 (breasts, graphite, Spain)

Nights of nuclear paint under ultraviolet light

Swimming with sweat, sex, and sounds of the vox populi

Ibiza reigns and rains with no trace of soudade

Her endowments glow bare and bright, and I am grateful

I woke to her number near a pencil, not the stairs

May 20th, 2017 (blood, clay, apathy)

As you mold coldly twixt my fingertips

I notice you are the only feeling

That exists about me

The sanguine flow within

Stiff as you in contradiction

If only it went beyond hyperbole

I finish and we look the clown

May 22nd, 2017 (upside-down, clitoris, jagged line)

A thousand threads

Pierce through the dark

Suspending barriers

Decorated with chevrons

A giggle of wind

Makes millions of threads soar inverted

Lighting the way for a break in time

To your tangled plain

And tender hill

May 24th, 2017 (fire, disappointment, sane)

You may take purchase

Of finer banalities

But make no mistake

You play in a holocaust of vanity

Each singeing lick

A memento of mischance and apathy

As you make your bedlam

As you fade away

May 25th, 2017 (silence, wires, grain)

The world is chaos and phlem

Tangled in pulsing currents of now

Sent to the mill to be pulverized into acceptance

‘Til the quietness of your still heart reigns

May 28th, 2017 (addiction, chainsaw, well)

Screeching down mildewed walls of stone

Brick by brick, descending into cylindrical darkness

But for the sparking interruptions

Deeper and deeper I sink

Regretfully… greedily

‘Til the water blankets me

However, serenity loves a taunt

Thus I’m denied my final splash

Still I fall, still I reach, still I fall

May 31st, 2017 (Pocky, slide, thunderstorm)

The tumultuous sky spits upon us

And lashes out with forked tongues

Onto those conductors electric

Some unfortunate ones are planted in playgrounds

Ladders attached for clamoring hands

Leading to plummeting surfaces

And woodchips crackling undertow

A sated child watches

As they nibble on Japanese delights

The Pre-Pre-Production Come Along of February and March

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This and last month have been mostly about gathering info and such I’ll need to pull the trigger on getting investors and their attention. It occurred to me that it would be better for me to have a professional bank account for investors as opposed to just a personal one, and that I should have it before asking them for money. “Look at this established bit of fiscal responsibility waiting for your patronage!” vs “Yeah, it’s going to my bank account… but you can trust me. Really.” Because of that, I didn’t get to tackle much of anything on my checklist.

But I do own a film production company now. I meant to do it a lot sooner (like, when I started this blog), but life kept getting in the way and I wasn’t ready. Professionally or privately. Thanks to creative opportunities that’ve happened since, including everything that Leonardo Fallucca of Artigianale Films has done, I can finally go about building my empire (or at least a fiefdom) wholeheartedly.

How does one go about creating a production company? First, you have to figure out the kind of business it is. There are many, and the lucky one is an LLC, a Limited Liability Company. Look it up, kids. Once you figure that out, you go to a bank that isn’t Bank of America (lest we forget the banking crisis) and find out what you’ll need to open an account for your LLC. The manager will be kind and give you a list. For me, it said that I had to get $100 to open an account, an operating agreement, an EIN number, and one of three things. The one-of-three ended up being one not listed because I didn’t have an LLC yet, an LLC Article of Organization (something for the state). The agreement is basically a declaration of what your business is, and the EIN number is something for the IRS. Both are free and left me feeling good about getting things done. Until the Article. I thought I only had to spend $50 in addition to the $100 because that’s how much one of the three things costed (I chose the Certificate of Assumed Name). But, like I said, the three only applied to opening an account after getting an Article of Organization. I thought that if the Certificate only cost $50, surely the Article couldn’t cost much more.

The universe loves a good joke.

Six hundred dollars. Actually, it was five hundred but the extra Benjamin was a fee I couldn’t get rid of to get my application processed in 24 hours. But wait, there’s more. After looking a few pages ahead, I saw that I also needed a designated agent (a go-to lawyer, basically) who cost $107. And THEN I found out that I had to pay a 2.5% tax on the $600. Y’know, to suck the threading outta the poor bastard that’s my dying wallet. After crying in my beer for a few minutes, I saw the whole process as me asking myself “Are you sure?” Most people would’ve quit after finding out that they needed the fucking $50. To go beyond that and pay whatever the price is meant that you were committing in a big way and that you should be able to laugh off whatever hurdles pop up. Almost a thousand dollars later, I answered: “Fuck yeah.” What’s a few hundred bucks in the face of a lifetime of artistic fulfillment, anyway?

Earlier this week, I became the sole owner of Darkness Opera LLC. Even made a new logo, as you can see in the header.

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I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tortured myself over the years with this design. It was originally much more ornate. The D looked like a decal on the most Gothic wrought-iron fence that ever existed, and the O was a full moon peeking from behind a few clouds (moon imagery was the only thing to survive it all). No katakana (the Japanese symbols under the line). Then I came up with a bunch of designs that resembled late-90s Goth rock album art, one of which was the header here for the longest time. A few days ago, the design up top suddenly came to me and, with the help of a freeware picture editor (Paint.net), I made it. The English font is something that John Carpenter uses a lot in his credits (Albertus). The katakana is a phonetic spelling of the name. In Japanese, a sounds like “ah”, e sounds like “eh”, and o sounds like “owe”. Because of that, I wrote it “da-ku-ne-su-a-pe-ra” instead of “da-ku-ne-su-o-pe-ra”. Subtitle fans might be able to sympathize, but one of the things that takes me out of anime or a Japanese film is when they say an English word how it’s spelled instead of how it’s said (like “opera”). Anywho. The katakana dashes have meaning. They tell you to stress the symbol preceding it. We’d say “DARKness OperA”, and I wanted to reflect that. So it’s “DA-ku-ne-su-A-pe-RA”. Why Japanese? Three reasons. One: Japan’s been a big part of my creative life. Two: I love bilingual anime titles. Three: it makes the logo more worldly. I had to add the quotation mark over “da” and the o over “pe” because the katakana font I used didn’t have them.

I was gonna put a full moon in the center, but that would’ve pushed the Japan of it all into laughable territory. But I wanted to keep the moon in there somehow. Then I made it a crescent, which works on a few levels. It looks like a sinister smile. Like horns. Like a necklace. And the moon is a symbol for femininity, which is fitting since I plan on working predominantly with female characters. The logo as a whole is meant to catch your eye as quickly as possible. There are a fuckton of people begging for your attention, and I feel that my logo does it in an elegant way. The color combination’s great, the katakana helps out a lot, but I think the biggest grab is the crescent. Not many people– I don’t think anyone uses it as part of their logo, so it being a rarity is awesome and precious. And as an enthusiast of t-shirts with graphics, it’ll look great plastered across chests.

Why “Darkness Opera”? I wanted to tell dark stories on a grand scale, and operas can be serious or funny which allows me to paint with as many brushes as I want.

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This is something I created for the Service Industry Podcast shortly after I made my logo. They didn’t ask for it, and I would’ve been more than ok if they told me to fuck off. I was still feeling a creative buzz and walked it off with the design. I originally wanted to do something on a lacquered mahogany board since lots of bars are made with that. However, Paint.net being free means that it isn’t as capable as Photoshop. I didn’t wanna attempt to go down a creative road I knew would lead to a craggy dead end. I knew that I would’ve tried a few experiments with the mahogany, and I didn’t wanna get bum-rushed by disappointment. The idea of beer bottlecaps came to me, then the idea of tilt-shifting. I turned the saturation way down so the text could stand out without clashing. The biggest pain, because of Paint.net’s restrictions, was the font. I didn’t have many options, but it looked too bland to leave it alone. So I did a gradient paint job and added some grain to make it look fizzy. “Confidential” looks like a Van Halen album cover, and that’s alright with me. It still looked a little dead, but the closed sign changed that.

Well, enough rambling. Back to being a director.

The Pre-Pre-Production Come-Along of January

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Last month was a bit of a preparedness overkill, knowing that making WAKE UP ALONE is gonna be as much of a one-man show as possible. After taking care of The Most Important Part of Filmmaking, copyrighting the script, I made a list of things to do each month leading to the first day of filming (Mayday). January was dedicated to:

Looking into the average cost of locations, crew, and equipment
Checking The Knife’s “Marble House” for availability
Forming a producer list and sending inquiry letters
Building a budget
Storyboarding
Making a style guide [got bumped from February]

Everything got handled except for two things. I didn’t check the Knife song because I wanted it to run through the ending credits… but there wouldn’t be enough people in the credits to use the whole song. The whole song was important because of the idea I had for the credits needed all five minutes and eighteen seconds of it. WAKE UP ALONE isn’t gonna be the only film I make and I highly doubt that I’m gonna forget that ending, so it’s not a big deal. Plan B was for me to make a song, and I have an idea of what to create. The other thing that didn’t get handled was storyboarding, partially because I wanna lock a location before settling into visuals and partially because storyboard notebooks for the 2.35:1 format are expensive for me right now. “Buy a 1.85:1 notebook and draw matte boxes, dummy.” I said expensive for me right now. Once the money starts coming in and I lock a location, I’ll bite the bullet and buy what I need.

Something I’ve learned this year is that the world wants you to succeed, yet is indifferent to whether you do or not. It offers you SO many avenues to do whatever you need, but it’s up to you to take advantage or not. I raided producers’ info for query letters all month with IMDbPro’s free trial, for instance. I’ve found so many great sites that talk about average costs and making budget sheets, and Maureen A. Ryan’s PRODUCER TO PRODUCER has quickly proved invaluable. Spending years absorbing filmmaking info from DVDs, Blu-rays, YouTube, Vimeo, and books, the one person I’ve heard the least from is the producer. Ms. Ryan’s book tears down that wall for the indie producer. Or the indie writer-director-editor-producer. However, there’s an aspect of producing that I dislike. Ms. Ryan’s book goes into detail about how to write a proposal for investors, and I loathed the part where I had to break down WAKE UP ALONE into an economic statement. Not planning the budget (I liked that a lot), describing my film as a product and doing a fucking fantastic job of it. Art is resistance, but it is also commerce.

Making the style guide is one of the most fun parts of this. A style guide is making a folder of pictures that represent clothes, hairstyles, make-up, locations, and cinematography choices for the film. I do NOT want a shitty-looking film just because it has a micro-budget. I’m as far from the mumblecore movement as one can get. Closer to bargain-basement Rococo. Some might feel that it restricts the creative process, but I’d rather everyone know what I want than wasting time trying to figure things out. I’m open to further discovering styles and such, but I also have a very stable foundation for them.

This month has a lot going for it, so I better get to it. There’s a BIG gamble that I’ve been dragging my feet about taking because of the attention, good and bad, it’ll bring. Fortune favors the bold and all that jazz…

Like the Boomerang That Won’t Quit

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I’m making a film! This year! May! What does the pic up top of the dearly departed have to do with it? Lots, but not at all in the way you’re thinking.

Early-Summer of last year, I decided that I finally had enough experience behind and around the camera to make my first film (). There have been a few false starts over the years, and even a start that came up shorter than I wanted it to because I wasn’t quite ready to wield the camera long-term. I don’t have a problem with waiting ’til I’m ready for something. I could’ve made films ten years ago because I had a strong visual sense and knew I could show a good story. But I couldn’t tell a good story yet. The only reason I wanted to be a director is because I could write scripts for me, and my writing didn’t match quality the pictures I could make. So I chose to focus on making it easier for me to make characters more defined as well as make better dialogue. Somewhere around there, I realized that although I enjoy a good plot-driven tale and could easily write more than a few, my home was with character pieces. It’s much more interesting for me to see people deal with each other instead of giving them something to do. Then I found women more enjoyable to write than men and never looked back.

I knew that I wanted my first film to be a generational snapshot (like Easy Rider or Clerks). There hadn’t been one for my ilk yet, and I knew that it’s bound to happen sooner than later. I’d rather be part of the “sooner” crowd, so it was a matter of finding out what about my generation I wanted to say. As I think about what I wrote, I feel that I’ve said enough but I’ve left out a lot. Maybe next time. Isolation was the thing that caught my attention the most, so I followed that train of thought. The ending is one of the first things I think up no matter what story I tell. It’s something I realized recently, wished I knew a lot sooner, and was grateful for knowing at all. Lucky, lucky me, what ended up being Wake Up Alone had an ending that came to me briskly. I wanted it to start with drama and end with horror, and the ending didn’t disappoint. Why is the end so important to me? It gives me something to work towards and earn. You’re not gonna be able to figure out how it ends, but you’ll also see that it couldn’t have ended any other way.

And now, we get to Ms. Winehouse. In the early planning stage, I quickly latched onto naming the main character after her and titling the film after a song that felt right. So Amy became the star of Wake Up Alone. I changed her name to May because of a subtle(?) joke involving her name and the names of two other characters. But the Winehouse goes deeper because the film, in a way, is a nod to the “Rehab” lyric, “I just, oh, I just need a friend”. There are a few other big and little nods to her, but I’ll let the film show you them.

After lots of thinking and planning and writing, I finally finished Wake Up Alone… and it clocked in at 63 pages, I think. My intent was to get some producers interested, and no one’s gonna read a script that’s around 60 pages. That’s basically a short film, in their eyes, and they don’t make money. I decided to put it away for a little while so I could look at it with fresher eyes and see how I could add more pages. I was worried about doing that because it’s such a tight script. Every line lead to the next, so to add anything new could’ve fucked everything up. While I was distracting myself, I reread Mick Rock’s excellent Metallica biography, Enter Night, and read a Tweet that changed the rest of my year.

While reading the book, the idea of a blind woman starting a Heavy Metal band came to me. As I kept reading, the idea started to congeal. I was gonna resign it to my idea notebook and come back to it later, then I saw her bump into a wall and say “Wall.” just before she did it and knew I had to write her story double-quick. How could I ignore a blind woman Metal guitarist who’s comfortable enough with her handicap to knowingly bump into a wall? I’m not at all someone who’s constantly writing scripts. If I’m writing it, I intend on directing it soon. Or at least doing something with it. Then I read a Tweet from BBC’s Writers Room, a site the channel has that fosters writers (more things should do this). It said that it would be accepting unsolicited, one-hour, dramatic scripts in December. I was glad and worried at the same time. I’d been waiting for that, but didn’t have any ideas. Then I remembered my blind guitarist. Writing her was more instinctual, and I quickly found out that I wasn’t interested in writing a dramatic story about her. It was more interesting to write something lighthearted because anyone could do the “woe is me” tale about a blind woman trying to do something. Not many would not let her handicap get in the way. Fewer would make her a leader. But the BBC thing would want a dramatic script. Then I realized I could give them Wake Up Alone since it was around 60 pages and make Turn the Strange my first film.

If I could go on a tangent, I’d like to talk about how Doctor Who, Wonder Woman, and Supergirl allowed Wake Up Alone and Turn the Strange exist the way that they do. I’m a huge fan of the Sturm und Drang. The bleaker the story, the better. However, those three characters injected something in my storytelling palette that I wouldn’t have put on my own: the dreaded c-word, “compassion”. I didn’t know it was there, but I also didn’t try to get rid of it when I looked back. Wake Up Alone is about three women, and two of them fit quite well in my house of malaise. The third, though, is definitely a by-product of the Gallifreyan, the Amazonian, and the Kryptonian. She might’ve popped up a few years ago, but she would’ve been someone the film made fun of. Instead, she’s an integral part of the tale and as fucked-up and bleak as the ending is, it’s also full of compassion. And I wouldn’t have bothered with Turn the Strange’s blind Emily if I wasn’t such a geek. My storytelling hasn’t changed completely because compassion was added. What’s happened is now I have an opportunity to create richer stories. I also get to see me war against compassion with nihilism. Should be fun.

So. Back to Turn the Strange. I wrote it and had a great time and accepted that Wake Up Alone was gonna be made by someone else. Then I started location-scouting (finding places to make a film) and making a style guide (a portfolio that shows ideas of clothes and things as well as cinematography). Metallica’s new album came out the day I was location-scouting, so that was a particularly fun and karmic time. Then December hit and the BBC started taking scripts. Two funny things happened. I realized that sending Wake Up Alone to them would’ve been like spending time getting to know a woman who was really into me, telling her that she should date a stranger when she’s ready to go on a date, and think “They sure look great together. Wait a minute…” The other thing that happened was, unlike other script things they had, the BBC was only accepting scripts from the UK. Thus, my decision was made on two fronts: Wake Up Alone is mine. But I also had Turn the Strange. After moping for a few minutes, I told myself that I now have a second film script already ready and felt groovy. Well, there was another script idea, but that’s for another blog.

I now had my original problem with May and friends: how the fuck was I gonna pump the page count up without making the script bloated? I hate deleted scenes. If there was more attention paid to the script, those scenes would’ve been taken out and not wasted lots of time and money. So if I was gonna add more scenes, I had to be sure that they HAD to be there. One of the characters is damn verbose, so I wanted to try avoiding her scenes because they’re exhausting to write. Her scenes were the ones that would’ve suffered the most from adding, anyway. Because I walked away from the BBC thing, I got to make things more adult, which was nice. Those lines of thought made me develop scenes that I wanted to kick myself for not think of initially, but I’m glad I found them at all. Then 63 pages became 75, and things were groovy.

Starting today, I get the gears going for Wake Up Alone on the intense road to get behind the camera on May 1st. I’ve got a schedule set up, so it’s just a matter of tenacity and ingenuity. I’ll update when I can, so I’ll see you when I have more to say.

TURN THE STRANGE – An Excerpt

I’ve been pretty busy lately, and I wanted to show you a few pages of a script I finished recently. It’s about Emily, a woman guitarist who’s trying to start a Heavy Metal band with a handicap she won’t allow to get in her way. I had a lot of fun writing it, she’s a lot of fun, and I hope you have a lot of fun reading her.

FADE IN:

INT. EMILY’S BEDROOM – MORNING

An old alarm clock goes off, glass absent from its face,

ringing its bells like a caffeinated woodpecker. The woman

it’s trying its best to win the attention of currently has

her head buried under a pillow. A feeble attempt to stop the

day. She eventually gives up and tosses the pillow at the

clamor. Or rather, tries to. She overestimates how far the

clock is by a few feet. She then lets out a defeated sigh

and sits up.

EMILY VERDA’S hair sticks up at all sorts of angles,

compliments of sleep. She sits on the edge of her bed, hands

on thighs, wearing a simple spaghetti-string top and pajama

pants. After slapping her legs rhythmically, she almost

immediately switches from being exhausted to being wide

awake, then turns off the alarm.

EMILY

You’re gonna get them today.

INT. EMILY’S BATHROOM – MOMENTS LATER

EMILY brushes her teeth while humming the same four notes

over and over. Faster, slower, higher, lower. The fingers on

her free hand, black nail polish chipped, rap upon the

mirror at the same tempo changes. Her eyes in the mirror are

unfocused, yet there’s still thought behind them.

She locks onto a particular tempo, repeating it twice, then

smirks before she spits into the sink.

INT. EMILY’S BEDROOM – MOMENTS LATER

A proper view of the BEDROOM shows amazing organization

skills. Apart from the pillow slumped in the corner and the

messy bed, everything is exceptionally neat and tidy. Three

other stand-out features are the lack of closet doors, of an

entrance door, and of any mirror. Just outside the doorway

is an astroturf rug.

At the closet and in a terrycloth robe, EMILY chooses

something to wear for the day. Her hair is now combed flat,

and her lips are painted black. She quickly flicks through

hung shirts, pants, t-shirts, skirts, and dresses, giving

some a stroke or two before passing them up.

She goes to a window and opens it. She then licks a palm and

sticks into the world…

EMILY

Pants and a button-up.

…then gets what she needs while wiping her hand on her

robe.

INT. EMILY’S KITCHEN – MOMENTS LATER

EMILY sits on the counter, twixt the sink and toaster, as

she tosses the last bit of one waffle in her mouth. A laptop

sits on the table. She then snatches another waffle from the

toaster. She tears off pieces and eats them, avoiding her

lipstick. While this is going on, she hums the melody she

came up with in the BATHROOM while tapping her bootheels on

the cabinet.

Until she almost chokes on a waffle bit.

She tosses what’s left of the breakfast pastry in the

garbage, in a fit of betrayal, then briskly washes her hands

in the sink. Her boots make the plastic mat on the floor

click and pop.

INT. EMILY’S LIVING ROOM – MOMENTS LATER

Sliding on her armor, a well-loved frock coat, EMILY

prepares to leave her apartment. Next, she tucks a pocket

recorder and a flipphone inside the coat. By the door is a

beaten-up guitar case ready to be slung over her shoulder

like a sword. On a short bookcase is her helmet by way of a

top hat and sunglasses. Both are vertically-striped black

and white, with the hat having a bit more business. The

black stripes are felt, the white are like silk, and a ring

dangles from the brim. A finger can easily fit through it,

which she does as she positions the hat so that the ring

hangs over her left ear.

Ready to face the day, she grabs one last thing: her folding

cane.

EXT. STREETS – MOMENTS LATER

EMILY walks with a little pep in her step as her cane goes

TAK-TAK-TAK-TAK, making sure that she doesn’t bump into

anyone (while not really caring if she does).

She points a twirling finger in the camera’s general

direction as she taks and trots along.

EMILY

‘Ello, dear viewer. Emily’s my name

and I was put on this planet for

two reasons: shredding guitars and

bumping into furniture. If the cane

didn’t give the game away, I’m a

bit blind. Don’t feel sorry for me,

though. You’re the ones who have to

see the state the world’s in.

She takes her finger away and continues walking to…

INT. QUEST CAFE – MOMENTS LATER

The bell over the door DINGS as EMILY enters. After folding

her cane, she approaches the register while getting her credit card.

At the counter, a clerk waits with a mug full

of the hot stuff.

CLERK

Ms. Verda! We ran out of white

chocolate last night, but we have a

nice–

EMILY stops in her tracks, flicks straight her cane, and

doffs her hat.

EMILY

I bid thee good day.

CLERK

Just kidding, just kidding!

EMILY

Don’t toy with my heart today.

EMILY folds her cane and continues her morning routine

towards her white chocolate mocha topped with whipped cream

and coconut sprinkles.

CLERK

I’m a wage slave, I have to get as

much harmless fun as I can to pass

the 9-5.

EMILY

And normally, I’d understand. Nay,

I’d encourage. But I need all my

strength for later.

EMILY swipes her card and enters her PIN as the CLERK

extends the mug.

CLERK

Oh? Why? Oh yeah, you’re still

doing those auditions. How long

have you been holding them?

EMILY

Doesn’t matter.

EMILY takes the mug and her receipt.

EMILY

(cont’d)

I’m gonna get them today.

CLERK

How many are you meeting?

EMILY

Two, but two’s all I need. Thanks

for letting me post my ad here.

That’s how they found me.

CLERK

Ah, no problem.

EMILY

Kayley and Leslie. Gonna have a

chick band.

CLERK

You just be sure to play your

second gig here.

EMILY

“Second”?

CLERK

Who’s ever great their first time

out?

EMILY

Har har har. I was gonna leave a

tip, but now…

CLERK

You can’t tip plastic. Besides, you

already swiped your card.

EMILY

Maybe I was gonna get a few

macaroons.

CLERK

Were you?

EMILY starts to step away as she sips her coffee, then turns

back to the CLERK.

EMILY

Do you know Kayley and Leslie? All

I have are texts that my phone

reads aloud.

CLERK

I only know you because you’re a

creature of habit and this place is

lucky enough to be within sniffing

distance of your apartment.

EMILY

Heh, too true, too true.

EMILY continues to an empty booth, but not before…

CLERK

Good luck today, Emily. Really.

She gestures a salute with her mug, then sits. She then

takes a big gulp, points a circling finger towards the

camera, and sets her mug down with a big whipped cream

moustache on her face.

EMILY

I know what you’re thinking, but

chick bands rock. No, you’re

thinking that other thing and, yes,

I know it’s there. No, no, you’re

thinking that OTHER other thing,

and we’ll never know if Neo

would’ve knocked over that vase.

It’s best to just let it go, I’ve

lost far too much hair over that.

Roy Orbison and José Feliciano.

Drawing blanks? I’m drawing

circles. They’re two of the best

guitarists to have ever lived. They

also found that blindness didn’t

take away frets and chords. Herman

Li is a beast with a guitar THAT HE

PLAYS WITH THE WRONG HAND, just

like Hendrix! So my heritage has

that covered because we all come

from the same womb. Joan Jett,

Bonnie Raitt, Joni Mitchell, Nancy

Wilson.

She brushes the dairy facial hair off with her finger, then

eats it with a grin.

The Royal Nothing

The court is dead

It lies to itself as well as us

Says that it is merely dying

Few things are as pathetic

As unaccepting corpses

The court is dead

And we accept its lies

Yearning is childish fancy

A wish is a desolate prayer to illusion

Hopes are for the broken

While you sleep, dreams are the poison-drip into your ear

Orgies swirl in the town square of abberation

For there is comfort in letting go

Of all responsibility to the future

And laying blame on The Other

“Their fault, never mine. Never mind”

As an outlier, I only hear the moans

Catch the scent on the wind

I have wanted neither to glimpse or participate

Yet that does not mean

The bacchanalia has no sway

I have my distractions

Staying me from my rusted crown

Though I approach it head held high

My eyes are my great betrayer

Yet I need them, lest I walk in bigger circles

Trinkets my almost-kingdom could afford by the moundful

I desperately clamor for enough to barely fit in my palm

A junkie to its fix

Out of space, out of taste

Ardor that will flow like the treacherous hurricane

I look for in swamps

The drought-stricken lovefool

In an unworthy place for either them or their intended

They aren’t enough to destroy me

But they do make the crowned road longer

And corrosion loves time

Still, one could wipe the grime away

If they quicken their pace

Or, let the deceitful, rotting court

Take it all, kingdom and square

Varnish or vanish

Such is life