The Real Deal

I saw the British Film The Deal the other day. The film depicts the relationship between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown during the Thatcher and Major eras of British politics. It was written by Peter Morgan (pictured here) who also wrote The Queen, The Last King of Scotland – about Idi Amin- and the play Frost/Nixon- which is being adapted into a film as well.

What interests me about Morgan is how he mines real events and real characters to create his drama. In a profile in the New Yorker a few months ago he said what interests him is not so much history, but “narratives in which real public figures are thrown into unlikely relationships.” John Lahr reported, “as a storyteller, Morgan is drawn to volatile, ambiguous antagaonists, ” and how ambition interests him “because it’s sure fire indicator of damage.” I wish my students could de-construct and define their work as well.

Peter Morgan came to screenwriting after a bout of stagefright stalled his acting career and I think he is a good example of how there are many different avenues into the film business. Yet, what impresses me the most about his work is how he is so certain of the types of stories that appeal to him. He has found his milieu and knows how to best mine it. I look forward to seeing his next project.

PeterH

More on interns

I am not done with this internship idea yet so hold on.

Another former MBC intern is my friend Jay Smith. Jay came to the museum as a college senior at Indiana University. At school he was a TV major and had a clear plan on how to get a job in the business. His first step was to get an internship at the museum.

The museum internship was critical to Jay’s overall plan because MBC president Brice DuMont was also a correspondent and producer at Chicago’s PBS affiliate WTTW. Jay knew that if he got in good with Bruce he would have a better shot at getting one of WTTW’s paid internships after graduation the following year.

Sure enough his plan worked. He parlayed his free MBC intenship to a paid internship the next summer. When that internship expired WTTW hired him full time on their flagship news program, Chicago Tonight. 18 years later he is going strong and is now the managing producer of that program. Over these 18 years he has also written and produced many other programs and documentaries for WTTW, but it all started with a vision he had while in college on the steps he needed to take to get the job he wanted.

So, like former intern Dan in my previous post, this too comes full circle. When I got my Flashpoint job I told Jay he needed to do a piece on the school- the first new college in Chicago in 40 years. He said he would when the time was right. The time was right this past Tuesday. Mayor Daley did the official ribbon cutting at Flashpoint and that evening on Chicago Tonight there was a piece on Flashpoint Academy and brief snippet of the dumb filmmaker. A quid pro quo of sorts.

PeterH

Interns

A few weeks ago I wrote about my internship at a TV station and how valuable it was to my professional development. Today I want to talk about the farther reaching value interns can have.

I have said many times that before my Flashpoint gig I have had only one “real” job and that was from 1987-1989 when I worked for the Museum of Broadcast Communications (MBC). At the museum we were lucky enough to have several good interns and many of us remain friends to this day.

Our first intern was Dan Lerner. Hard to believe it now, but he was a senior in high school when we met. Your classic over achiever,Dan was writing for the ACLU newsletter and looking to get his foot in any door when he showed up at the museum. Frankly, I don’t remember what he did- he probably watched a lot of old TV and recorded it into our archives. Mostly we talked sports- such great conversations as who would you rather have in centerfield Kirby Puckett or Dale Murphy (years later Dan finally agreed with me about Kirby Puckett.) Dan was a good guy and worked hard and we liked having him around.

The night before he went off to college Mike Mertz, MBC archivist, and I took Dan out on the town and said goodbye. (Out on the town in this case means we grabbed a pizza and went to the batting cages. C’mon the museum only paid me $7.25 and hour and only so much town can be had for that kind of coin.)

Dan and I have remained friends over the years. Today he is a political consultant and filmmaker. I am helping produce his film (four years+ in the making) about rock-a-billy legend Sleepy LaBeef. This weekend Sleepy is performing with lots of other stars at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in a concert for Jerry Lee Lewis. Dan will be there, cameras rolling, getting the show and hopefully nabbing interviews with Kris Kristofferson (who saw Sleepy during his college days at Columbia University), Chrissy Hynde and others.

My point with this post is that the benefits of internships work both directions. 20 years ago Dan was a real help to us at the museum and today I get to reciprocate by helping him with his film. Though he has done all the heavy lifting on the film I will get a nice credit and more importantly feel we have come full circle from his days as our intern.

Tomorrow another intern story.

PeterH

Days of Wine and Roses

I often have a problem watching films about addiction and recovery. Even in the best ones there seems to be some sort of artificiality I can not get past. In The Days of Wine and Roses Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick are great, but there comes a point in the film where it gets preachy and we can see the ending coming 45 minutes in advance. Worse, to me, is Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend. Milland set the standard for the bad drunk, but the D.T. scene is laughable- did they spend any money on that fake bat attack? Yet, the film won Oscars and for years was the touchstone for films about alcoholism.

Films just about addiction are no good. I like Leaving Las Vegas and really appreciate the director Mike Figgis, but I don’t need to see Nicolas Cage drink himself to death. I get it already. The typical film is this: I am a junkie, it’s fun for a while, it gets out of control, I leave a wake of destruction- physical and emotional- in my path, then I die miserably. In other words see Keith Moon, Jimi Hendrix, Sid Vicious, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, ad. nausea.

Films just about recovery are perhaps worse because we see none of the fun and we get preached at for two hours. These films actually make me want to drink. More. Right there in the theater. Where is the Martini concession? Is there a Pinot Noir vendor anywhere?

Take a pass on Clean and Sober (though I like Michael Keaton) and especially When a Man Loves a Woman a Meg Ryan/Andy Garcia film. A good idea by Al Franken gone bad through a series of unfortunate filmmaking events. (No one knew the film they were trying to make.) A far superior film written by the same Al Franken is Stuart Saves His Family. Franken knows something about alcoholic families and co-dependency and Stuart is a surprisingly nice film.

All of this brings me to two films I saw recently that have a different take on addiction and recovery, but to me were maybe the most valid of all the films. Interestingly they both deal with killers, but in very different ways.
You Kill Me stars the always terrific Ben Kingsley as a hit man for the Buffalo, NY Polish mob who is sent to San Francisco to dry out. In S.F. he gets a job in a funeral home, where he meets Tea Leoni (who also produced the film. I wonder what attracted her to the material?) and goes to A.A. He gets a sponsor and gets his life together. There are several scenes in the A.A. meeting and several more with his sponsor, Luke Wilson. Though it is a dark comedy it touches on issues about addiction and recovery that those other films don’t.

The other film is Mr. Brooks starring Kevin Costner and William Hurt. Costner is Mr. Brooks, Portland, Oregon’s man of the year and a serial killer. (Where do they come up with these ideas?) He wants to stop killing but his alter ego, William Hurt, won’t let him. He goes to A.A. meetings where all he says is that he is an addict and leaves it at that.

The thing that struck me about both these films is the power of the anonymous group and how people could sit and talk or not, but it was clear recovery was a process they were all going through. Very interesting, though a little thin on the fake bat attack scenes.

Peter H

A victimless crime?

Years ago a made a film called Victimless Crimes. It was about a pair of art thieves who stole paintings with the theory that no one got hurt. The gallery owner got his insurance money, the artists had already been paid, so why not rip them off. See, a victimless crime. Aren’t I clever.

While I enjoy referencing myself and my work, I am bringing it up because of the issues I recently blogged about- file sharing and file stealing. I wouldn’t steal a library book or a computer. Why would I steal a computer file? Why would I take something I know has been stolen? Just because the software company, or Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington in the case of American Gangster. Aren’t physically around as one takes their property does not make it OK.

On one of my first posts I wrote about You Tube and how much I disliked them. The main reason was because of all of the illegal work up there. At the time I mentioned my own work with Denny Dent was available on You Tube because someone had taken a copy and posted it. While they did it as a tribute to Denny, and at first I was flattered, now I am greatly bothered.

fEERtherepEER, the person who posted it, needs to know that what they did was wrong. And while I appreciate the 47,851 views (minus my two viewings) you do not have my permission to use it. It is my work, my property. Stop.

This is not a victimless crime.

PeterH

Smile

Regular readers of this page know my fondness for The Marx Brothers and Groucho in particular. Those readers should also know of my affection (addiction? disease?) for the Boston Red Sox. At school this afternoon I had students congratulating me on the World Series victory as if I was the Red Sox bullpen. I blame my Great Aunt Amy for this Red Sox affliction, but that is another story for another time. Check out the Soxaholix link to the right to see the depths of this condition. However, as this is a blog about film I’ll bring it back to Groucho.

As I kid my parents showed me classic old films. Sometimes my dad would bring home a film print of Laurel and Hardy or the Marx Brothers and we would project it on a wall in our living room. The screenings were infrequent, but wonderful. More often we would watch on TV a Charlie Chan film or some other relic that most readers of this page will have no idea what I am referencing. (Once on TV there used to be something called The Late Show where old movies would be screened. Now there is You Tube- see below.)

To me Groucho is the best. For pure anarchy and zaniness nobody can beat him- a raised eyebrow, an eye roll and a leer can get more laughs than a thousand stand-up comedian monologues. But Groucho hard a dark side. He, like many geniuses, was depressed. He lost a fortune in the 1929 stock market crash, married badly and had more personal failures than one would wish on your worst enemy. And, unlike the rest of us, he didn’t have a Groucho Marx in his life to make him laugh. If anyone needed a Groucho it was Groucho.

So for everyone who reads this page and needs to smile here is Groucho as Captain Spaulding almost 80-EIGHTY!- years ago in Animal Crackers.

Now I must be going.

PeterH

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCvz8y_DUSY

The Times They Are a Changing- Again

Bob Dylan is in Chicago this weekend and as always he has me thinking about the times we live in.

Not too many years ago if you were a Chicago based filmmaker and didn’t have a production office in the 312 area code you were not a player. All of the major production houses, post-production facilities and recording studios were within a few blocks of each other. While many still are there, the film community has expanded and your physical location is nowhere nearly as important. These days an ftp server or secured website is as important as an office. More often than not we post rough cuts and let the client see them when and wherever they want to. This comes in very handy when a handful of people need to screen a cut.

At Flashpoint I am currently teaching a Creative Producing class where we spend a fair amount of class time discussing changes in the industry. Of late the conversation has turned to public art, giving away your work and new modes of distribution. It is very interesting and the students have lots of insights.

A few weeks ago the band Radiohead announced they would release their new record and let people pay whatever they wanted for it. We did a survey in class and the average price our students “paid” for the record was a little over seven dollars- some said they would pay nothing, others more than $20. Interestingly, after they first few hundred thousand downloads, the average price paid for the Radiohead record was just about eight bucks. Our un-scientific survey was pretty accurate.

From Radiohead we jumped to Wes Anderson and his short film The Hotel Chevalier which is a free download on iTunes. They are using it as a marketing tool for The Darjeeling Limited and it seems to be working. We don’t have enough public art in this country and it is great that a successful filmmaker is putting his work out there for free.

From Wes Anderson we turn to Ed Burns, the actor and director whose film Purple Violets will be released not in theaters or on DVD but directly to iTunes. This will be the first film released on to iTunes and I believe it is a harbinger of things to come. Purple Violets was made for $4 million and received good reviews when it premiered earlier this year at the Tribecca Film Festival, yet it didn’t get any great distribution offers so they decided to go straight to a digital release. The p.r. alone has probably helped recoup the investment.

Finally, we come to American Gangster the new Denzel Washington, Russell Crowe, Ridley Scott film. American Gangster opens in theaters next Friday, yet at least half of my students have it already on their computers thanks (no thanks?) to someone posting a screener copy. I looked at some of the film and it is a great copy and as of yesterday I heard that it had been viewed on-line at least 30,000 times. That’s a lot of people not paying for American Gangster movie tickets or DVD rentals.

For the record I am completely against stealing works of art (or works of Crowe). But as I talked with my students they said, “Our generation takes it for granted that our work will be copied, shared and stolen.” (BTW, thanks for making me feel old and categorizing me into that generation.) I don’t like that but they thought nothing of passing a flash drive around the room and getting their own copies of American Gangster. It will be interesting to see how they feel in a few years when someone is stealing their works.

PeterH

TW3

That Was The Week That Was was first broadcast in Britain in the early 196os and gave David Frost his first wide television exposure. A short time later an American version appeared giving TV audiences their first real glimpses of performers like Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Woody Allen, Alan Alda and Buck Henry. Both shows were satirical looks at the week’s news, a precursor if you will to The Daily Show. I bring this up because last week at Flashpoint was both very typical and oh so atypical. Let me explain.

On Saturday the 13th the actor Jeffrey Wright and rapper/actor Mos Def came to school as part of The Chicago International Film Festival. Sometime around 10pm there was Mos Def pounding on the drums in one of our recording studios.

Tuesday, representatives from Morocco and the Chicago Sister Cities program came to school to explore cultural exchange opportunities. And that evening about 1/3 of our students went to a screening of The Darjeeling Limited where writer and director Wes Anderson and co-writer and star Jason Schwartzman answered our questions.

On Friday Mesh Flinders, creator of the Internet phenomenon Lonely Girl 15, was on campus speaking with students and high school counselors and administrators. Friday afternoon the first ever Flashpoint Academy Machinima Challenge took place. We divided students into eight groups and using the Team Fortress 2 game engine, created eight short films in the span of five hours. At 5pm we had a screening and later this week those films will be posted on the web.

All of this happened under the lens of Channel 11 (the local PBS affiliate) who came to do a piece on us for their program Chicago Tonight.

On Saturday Flashpoint had an open house and 180 perspective students and their parents attended looking to enroll in January or next fall.

On Sunday (some of us) rested.

That Was The Week That Was.

PeterH

The Environment

Al Gore, than man who should be president, owns the Best Feature Length Documentary Oscar for producing and appearing in An Inconvenient Truth, and last Friday he was named a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on the environment.

I didn’t really care for An Inconvenient Truth. While the message is an important one, as a film I feel it fell short- to much of Al on the phone or working on his Mac. I would have preferred to see his presentation in person rather than the film. Of course I believe what he was saying so he was preaching to the converted.

I do think often about all the petroleum products used in film manufacturing and production and all the chemicals that process and develop film. Where does it go? Out of sight out of mind? For environmental reasons I am glad we are moving towards a filmless/tapeless work flow, but I can also imagine a pile of batteries and computer chips and flash drives at the bottom of a land fill. I am one of the few people who are happy that I have to turn in my iphone to get a new battery. Apple is doing the green thing, I think, but of course I drive a hybrid and eat granola- actually as I type these words- so I naturally lean that way.

This summer one could travel the Northwest Passage by boat for the first time in years. Polar Bears are dying because their environment is melting away. Polar ice caps are shrinking at an alarming rate. I am happy for Al Gore, but I really hope the planet heeds his warnings before it is too late.

PeterH

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