Mar 09

YouTube Bigger Than Everyone Else – Combined

Posted: under Current Affairs, journalism, Online (Multi)Media, television, Web/Tech.

Almost unnoticed, the paradigm shifts and the fate of the "ostriches," the media companies that still cling desperately to the notion that the internet is just a fad, is sealed. I’m still preparing for the trip to Chile – and God, I needed this week off just to take care of all the other ticky-tacky [...] [...more]

Almost unnoticed, the paradigm shifts and the fate of the "ostriches," the media companies that still cling desperately to the notion that the internet is just a fad, is sealed.

I’m still preparing for the trip to Chile – and God, I needed this week off just to take care of all the other ticky-tacky stuff before I head down – but I had to jump out of prepping my speech(es) to note this otherwise ignored bit.

According to Hitwise, that low-level grinding noise that you can hear, if you have just the right kind of ears, was the massive entertainment-consumption paradigm ponderously shifting in favor of online entertainment.  Remember, this data is for a site that barely existed two years ago, and was created using what was basically the equivalent of the money spent on doughnuts for the Teamsters on your average Jerry Bruckheimer shoot:

During the week of February 3, YouTube’s traffic surged
above the combined traffic to all of the television network websites.* This is
a landmark event in the changing face of web traffic and entertainment
consumption, now that entertainment seekers are now more likely to go to
YouTube than any other television network or gaming website. The custom
category of 56 television cable and broadcast network sites received 0.4865% of
all US Internet traffic for the week ending

2/17/07

, while YouTube received 0.6031%.

Blaaahhh!  Head … exploding … moving … too … fast …

[bonks head repeatedly against desk]

(phew!)  That’s better.

Way back in ’99 when I started getting involved in streaming video, we all knew that watching and, more to the point, interacting with entertainment media via your computer was the Wave of The Future. Still, the thought was that movie and TV studios and producers would be smart enough and nimble enough to get out in front of this wave, and that in the future, we’d see Mel Gibson and Julia Roberts and Sharon Stone (remember – this was the late 90s – these people were still relevant) all doing their thing in an interactive streaming video environment.

What we underestimated was the tenacity with which the hidebound bureaucratic studios and production companies would cling to their outmoded business models, when the future could so clearly be seen.  To be fair, when Web 1.0 imploded and everyone standing near the impact craters (such as yours truly) lost their shirts, the closets the shirts had been stored in and the houses that contained the closets, it gave the mossbacked reactionaries a perfect "I told you so" moment.  Since then, the future has arrived like the swelling of the wave pictured above.  The flailing attempts of media companies to kill YouTube have only made it stronger – viz the whole reason it got big in the first place.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what happens from here on out. It may not be YouTube that winds up the eventual winner – in fact, I don’t think that the strictures of Web 2.0 allow for such thing as an "eventual winner."  There will be constant churn.  And that’s OK.  The reign of the "Big 3" networks and the Sony/Warner/Viacom/Fox megaliths will continue. For a while, at least. If by no other means then by using their enormous cash reserves to buy up New Media properties and attempt to co-opt them into their orbits.  Hell, even YouTube is owned by Google.

But these megaliths are all rooted in shifting sands. The fact that a snot-nosed startup can beat them up on the playground and take their lunch money, AFTER said megaliths have spent the last 15 years throwing billions and untold man-hours of labor attempting to encircle and capture the New Media market proves just how incompetent and short-sighted the management structures of these companies are.

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Mar 06

Alone again, naturally…

Posted: under Books, Current Affairs, journalism, Online (Multi)Media, television, Travel, True Enough - TV Pilot, Weblogs.

There is a valid reason that I have been posting here very infrequently the last month or so.  I quit my day job.  My last day was Friday. As of this morning, I am working fulltime for myself and the mighty Hard News, Inc.  I will be doing multimedia consulting, freelance writing and continuing to [...] [...more]

There is a valid reason that I have been posting here very infrequently the last month or so. 

I quit my day job.  My last day was Friday.

As of this morning, I am working fulltime for myself and the mighty Hard News, Inc.  I will be doing multimedia consulting, freelance writing and continuing to move forward direction, shooting, producing and editing my own (streaming) video projects.

This move is one that is both exciting and terrifying for me, but I keep singing to my self the siren song of the New Age-y types, you know, the one that goes "there is no growth without a little pain" yada yada blah blah. As with most cliches, it is a cliche because it contains a core or truth. I have learned all that I could learn from the day job at the law firm (although the front-row seat on the police misconduct melodramas was constantly amusing), and now it is time to throw myself into an arena where I will be challenged and forced to grow & learn more.

My first big gig is a contract with the U.S. State Department to go to Santiago and Concepcion, Chile, to deliver a series of presentations on the changing nature of the internet, convergence, new media and the art of fostering conversations and innovation.  I will be giving these speeches in Spanish (which already makes me sweat – I am fluent, but rusty, shall we say), and the schedule is pretty relentless.  I will be talking to a roomful of newspaper publishers, editors and executives, an auditorium full of university students, and a roundtable of new media/website managers. 

Watch this space for further news & updates.

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Feb 09

The Anna Nicole I Knew

Posted: under Current Affairs, journalism, Pop Culture Quirkiness, television.

I first ran into Anna Nicole back in ’92 or so, when she OD’d at the Peninsula Hotel.  I was assigned to do the story, and I rushed over to interview what turned out to be some of the most valuable sources I’ve ever had.  I got great quotes about how the paramedics nearly dislocated [...] [...more]

I first ran into Anna Nicole back in ’92 or so, when she OD’d at the Peninsula Hotel.  I was assigned to do the story, and I rushed over to interview what turned out to be some of the most valuable sources I’ve ever had.  I got great quotes about how the paramedics nearly dislocated their shoulders trying to hoist her onto the gurney (she was a big girl), how she had drank about 8 "Sex on the Beach" shots and then got onto the vodka&vicodin regimen when she got back to her room. 

She then accused her boyfriend, Daniel Christopher Ross, of trying to kill her by trying to force the pills down her throat.  I managed to get her on the phone from Midway Medical Center, where she muzzily denied that anything was wrong with her, until I started reading her direct quotes from the police report.  "Naaawwhhh! Thas’ nah whah Ah said!" she slurred, and then started trying to tell me some disjointed story about people trying to kill her until someone grabbed the phone from her hands and slammed it down.

A year or so later, she dumped Ross, and he immediately called because he was trying to flog the tell-all story about his wild nights will Anna Nicole all over town.  He was wired-up and jumpy, chainsmoking and claiming Anna Nicole and he used to smoke crack, that crack was the only thing that would keep her thin, and that she would let her son (who was then about play with her boobs in the bathtub. He basically trashed her, and told lurid tales about her sex life and how she used to eat gi-normous breakfasts of biscuits&gravy, half a dozen eggs, sausage, pancakes, etc., all topped off with booze and pills.

About a year after that, a shift character who claimed his gang name was "Sweet Pea" and who claimed to be her bodyguard/boyfriend/chauffer called up to tell all.  He had nude pictures of Anna Nicole performing various acts.  He claimed that she had been pregnant with his baby, and that he had a picture of her in the shower, naked and fried out of her head, sitting down and talking to the baby in her swollen stomach.  Sweet Pea said that he was talking because her drug use was getting out of hand, and he feared for his baby’s life.  And he also wanted $25,000 for the photos and the videotapes of group sex.

Next was the whole J. Howard Marshall brigade – all the cretins and golddiggers trying to come up with ways to chisel off a chunk of his fortune from either him or her.

Next came the authors of the book "Big Beautiful Doll," who were the photographers who claimed to have discovered Anna Nicole back in the day, and who had written a tell-all book about what she was really like before she got famous, back when she was working the drive-thru chicken window in rural Texas.

Then came a number of parties back in ’99, when a friend and I ran into Anna.  The host of the party offered to introduce me to Anna, saying that he thought that we would get along.  By this time, I was taking a hiatus from the reporting biz (well, more or less), but curiosity compelled me to go over and sit next to her.  During a rather contentious conversation with my friend Steve, she put on a fake-Brooklyn mob guy tough voice and said "Yeah, you gots big balls, huh?" And then she reached over and grabbed his crotch. She then proceeded to get hammered and started calling me "Johnathan." I tried to tell her my name, but she insisted on calling me Johnathan.  Finally, a girlfriend of hers intervened, explaining "She just broke up with her boyfriend Johnathan, who looks just like you."  So I figured I might as well play along. "All right, yes, I’m Johnathan," I said.  "Why haven’t you called me back?" she pouted, and then stuck her hand down my pants. The woman had a grip like a blacksmith, and would not let go until I stood up and made my escape. 

There was always weird energy around her.

Finally, Mark Stuplin of E! was assigned to produce her reality-TV show.  About two weeks into the show, he called and moaned, "I’m producing a train wreck!"  The show debuted with huge ratings and a weekly re-hash on KROQ here in L.A., where fake-morning DJ Laqueesha said things like "I just want to run up and kiss Anna Nicole all over her body! She is so damn stupid! This is the greatest TV show ever about brain-damaged people that I have ever seen!"

I think that it is only a matter of time before someone puts 2 and 2 together and figures out that, like Marilyn and the Kennedy brothers, Anna Nicole and the Bush brothers had something going on.  How long until we get the conspiracy theorists to come out and say that Jeb had her iced so that she wouldn’t blow the whistle on her affairs with the two Bush boys?

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Dec 26

Charlie Brown Christmas

Posted: under Online (Multi)Media, Religion, television.

Haven’t been able to, nor interested in posting much in the past week.  The combo of getting over illness and holidays has left me rather wrung-out.  So here’s something to sit back and giggle about, as well all trudge through this dismal, meaningless week between Christmas and New Year’s, wondering what the hell the next [...] [...more]

Haven’t been able to, nor interested in posting much in the past week.  The combo of getting over illness and holidays has left me rather wrung-out.  So here’s something to sit back and giggle about, as well all trudge through this dismal, meaningless week between Christmas and New Year’s, wondering what the hell the next year is going to bring, and if there’s any way that it could possible top the absurdity of this last one…

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Nov 09

K-Fed and Britney: Divorce, Web 2.0 Style

Posted: under Current Affairs, journalism, music, Online (Multi)Media, television, Web/Tech, Weblogs.

An (absurdist) lesson in the lightning multi-platform flow of information these days: It is worth noting that the same day that I cited the election results as being exemplars of the pervasive and still growing influence of the web and New Media … comes this example of a confluence of all manner of instant information [...] [...more]

An (absurdist) lesson in the lightning multi-platform flow of information these days:

It is worth noting that the same day that I cited the election results as being exemplars of the pervasive and still growing influence of the web and New Media … comes this example of a confluence of all manner of instant information flows.  This incident is a valuable case study in the way that the cameras-are-everywhere ethos of reality TV ran headlong into instant wireless communication, all to be regurgitated as streaming video on the web, and, of course, immediately tagged and put up on YouTube.

What earth-shaking event could bring such powerful forces to bear?

Britney Spears filing for divorce from Kevin Federline, of course.

It seems only logical that Britney, who is immersed in media overexposure – no, strike that – she’s been floating like Neo in the pre-awakening Matrix pod in a thick funky slimestew of pervasive media hyper-exposure since she played the Naughty Catholic Big-Boob Schoolgirl … (erm, ahem) … it seems only logical that since every other goddam move in her life is
instantly observed, uploaded to the celebrity media cloud, tagged, blogged, cross-referenced, Dugg!, Tailranked, Newsvined and then translated into Urdu …

…it seems only logical, I say, that her divorce is also created, pervaded by, exploited and tut-tutted by the very media that has spawned, tormented and controlled Britney’s very existence.

A brief chronology is in order:

1.  Britney’s ne’er-do-even-average-let-alone-well husband Kevin Federline (aka K-Fed, Federleezy, or the most pathetic no-talent rapper since Vanilla Ice) was being followed around by a camera crew hoping to do a reality-TV show about his new album.  Why anyone would waster perfectly good electrons to capture this is beyond me. But whatever.

2.  K-Fed was being his normal embarassing self – and for those of you who have not caught his act, the very act of observing his act is to be an unwilling dupe, a victim, kind of like volunteering for the traveling hypnotist act back in college, and awakening to find yourself naked, on-stage in a mass circle jerk, regressed to the age of 8, with a stack of Legos crammed up your butt.  Or was that just me?  Anyway – K-Fed was going off about how great his career was, how Britney was his biggest fan, pushing him to do his genius music, blah blah, transparent desperate stupid lie, blah.

3.  At dinner, the camera crew caught K-Fed scrolling through his Sidekick mobile device. No big deal, yeah, yeah, his bored expression said.  And then –

4.  All blood, all plasma, all fluids drained from his face. His jaw dropped like Bush dropping Rummy.  Yep.  Britney had told him she wanted a divorce VIA TEXT MESSAGE.

5.  The next one deserves a number all its own, even though it is just one word.  That word is:

6.  Classy.

7.  So now comes the fun part – Brit dumped him – via an instant email messaging system – that was picked up by reality-TV everpresent cameras – and the whole thing was uploaded and put on YouTube within A DAY.  And now the web has the papers detailing the two sides starting to battle over money and the kids.

8. And of course, then along come I, to blog about the whole sordid mess.

Now then.  I used to work in the celeb scandal mining biz. But it used to be that meltdowns like this took days, weeks or months to happen.  This one happened in HOURS. 

Wow.

From top to bottom, the news – you know, that word really doesn’t even fit anymore, but "information" just seems so squishy – business has changed.  Blogs are the instant watchdogs of the electoral process.  They drum up support for candidates, they extract campaign contributions, they suggest policy, hell, they are all over the process.

And now the New Media - by which I include 3rd-tier reality-TV cable outlets,  streaming web video, instant messaging, blogs, etc. – are all over the celeb scandal niche? Folks, the war is over.  The world has moved on.

 

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Aug 28

Day 4 – Heat, Helicopters and Hubris

Posted: under Film, Online (Multi)Media, television, True Enough - TV Pilot.

The fourth day of shooting started with me driving the ‘Sclade to the alley behind Ted’s house – yes, that same Ted that appeared in Day 1.  He had generously offered to allow me to shoot in the alley behind his house, because it’s pretty photogenic – well, for an alley – and it has [...] [...more]

The fourth day of shooting started with me driving the ‘Sclade to the alley behind Ted’s house – yes, that same Ted that appeared in Day 1.  He had generously offered to allow me to shoot in the alley behind his house, because it’s pretty photogenic – well, for an alley – and it has a slight incline and a leftward curve at the end of it that read well on camera. 

It allowed me to cheat my picture car at the end of the alley so that it matches up well with the footage that I shot on Day 3 in the alley by my house.  I had originally wanted to use an alley that I scouted that is just south of Pico Blvd., but that would have involved a helluva lot less time on set … if I had shot this project as originally envisioned, that wouldn’t have been such a big deal.  But the script was re-written at least twice in the week leading up to this shooting day (which apparently prepares me perfectly for working on higher-budget shoots … as below, so above, apparently).

As I was driving west on the 10 freeway in the Escalade, tunes cranking, worrying about what shots I was going to try to get first, I had the compulsion to just keep driving past the Overland exit.  Do a Thelma&Louise … just keep going all the way to the Santa Monica pier, crashing through the steel safety grate in this unstoppable behemoth of a car, and then down the pier at 80 mph and finally off the end to hang in the air, suspended and being captured by thousands of tourists who packed their cameras for just such an occasion, before crashing into the ocean and blessed oblivion.
The weight of anxiety was starting to get to me. 

I felt that each day that I managed to survive in this
production was some kind of a trick.  That I had somehow managed to fake it through to the end and safely escape … but then the next day, I would awake and find that I now had to add another deck to the house of cards that I was constructing.
Add another deck, and then move everyone else in the cast and crew onto that flimsy waxed-paper flooring and move around and perform and do our thing. 

All the while trying to banish from my mind the sheer certain knowledge that we were all standing on the flimsiest excuse for footing, and that it was sure to come down around my ears at any second.
And yet.  And yet. It didn’t.
Although the beginning to this day certainly seemed to augur that way.  I arrived on the set to find that not only were we totally socked in with clouds, but that it was beginning to drizzle.  I immediately saw the future – the storm would roll in off the Pacific, we would sit in the backs of our cars with the trunk gate open, chatting to kill the time, and every so often someone would stand up and shout out that they thought they saw a break in the clouds, and we’d all get excited for a minute … and then the rain would really start to pour down again. 

Hey, I lived through a shoot like that – a Nissan shoot where they had a poor guy in an animatronic lion head costume in a tux, shooting on the Bel-Air mansion of the strange Persian family that owns the B____ chain of high-end fashion stores.  The rain kept pouring down, the Japanese video crew got desperate, so they sent the guy out there in costume, and the rain started shorting out the little motors that were supposed to move the eyebrows and mouth and started shocking the guy inside the suit, who started screaming as smoke began to pour out of the outfit and they tore at the buckles and belts to get it off his head before it electrocuted him…

Meanwhile, the actresses were around the front side of the house (I hadn’t been able to put up the sign yet telling them to come around back) and calling the phone that I had forgotten back at my house in my rush to get out the door.
Eventually, it lightened up a bit and I began by shooting the whole Jamie and Mandy get honest with each other scene. 

This is a really intense bit of acting, because it is when the two women drop their pretenses and tell each other what’s really on their minds. This takes them from contempt to anger to shame to defiance to resolution.  And then at the end, the Jamie character is left amidst the garbage, with a
choice to make – whether she chooses to stay there amidst the place where her choices have led her or to make a new choice and try to get out.  And just as she’s come to a realization that she has to make a change in her life, that she can’t keep living this way, exploiting other people’s pain for money – that choice is taken out of her hands.
No good deed goes unpunished. The one person in the story who makes a choice to live honestly and with integrity winds up being the one who gets screwed the hardest. 
Hey, folks, it may be a comedy but it’s based on what I know and what I saw when I was working at the tabloids.  Virtue is punished. Sin is rewarded.  That’s the way it is.

I ran through this scene a number of times, and let the actresses really feel it out for themselves.  Then I made a few suggestions – such as to Brynn that she would be trying to sneak away, and would have gotten away clean, except that she heard the two girls discussing their relationships in a way that just outraged her, so she had to stop and comment.  Like Hamlet not killing his uncle in the chapel when he had the chance, this pause was her fatal flaw. 

OK, maybe not exactly like Hamlet … but you get the idea.

I also cautioned them to really let things build a little more before they started screeching at each other.  And Kelly Kay Davis, as the neighbor/friend Rachel really did a lot with her role – she brought this whole “been there-did him” jadedness and yet smart and goofy sense of humor that fleshes out a role that could have been totally two-dimensional. 

She was also patience itself – I used her in the first
shots of the day and the last shots of the day, and in between, she had to do a whole lot of nothing, while I ran around fighting with the light and the noise.

Ah yes.

The light and the noise and the heat.

Because, you see, about an hour into the filming, the sun started to come out.  Patchy clouds at first, but soon, the sun was just burning down relentlessly.  And all the nice even light that I was getting turned into patches of extreme brightness and dense shadows.  Good luck making that match with the footage I shot the day prior.  And then my actresses started getting sunburned from being out so long waiting for the light to get right.  Both Brynn and Erin are very fair – Erin started getting freckles on her face coming out and Brynn’s shoulders were lobstering.
Meanwhile, every goddam plane at Santa Monica airport used the airspace overhead to take off, land and circle in.  The light and the noise worked hand-in-hand. 

When the light was good, the noise was bad. When the plane went away, the clouds opened up and the sun burned down.  I couldn’t catch a break.

The raw tape of this period has much cursing and waving of fists at the sky on my part.  I began to regret even bringing up the subject of Fitzcarraldo, because I felt I had jinxed the production. 

So during lunch, I worked with the guys in the car.  I got Chris to run down the alley.  And again, as my other actors did, he managed to make what couldhave been a very flat scene into something interesting.  He ran and danced and bounced around like Jim Carrey.  Great physical comedy, very smart. At one point, he picked up a tree branch and carried it in front of him like camouflage.  And then at the wall he kicked his feet, scrabbled for purchase, and then upon hearing the Mandy scene from Day 2, began humping the concrete post.  Great stuff.

It was after lunch that things really started to get away from me. It was getting hotter than hell, and I was unable to get the one shot that I wanted, because one of Ted’s neighbors had parked his pickup truck in the alley, pulled the whole freaking wheel off and was hammering on it.  Right in the middle of my shot.  So I had to try to improvise around it.


Luckily, Jon showed extreme courage and trust.  He HUNG OUT THE SUNROOF OF A MOVING ESCALADE AND SHOT DOWN AT CHRIS AS HE GRABBED THE TRASH.

If any one tiny thing had gone wrong – if Jay had twitched the wheel to send the car into a concrete wall, if Brynn had faltered and fell under the wheels, if a crazy kid had screeched into the alley from the other direction and caused a head-on crash that decapitated everyone …

but it didn’t.

Nothing went wrong.

The footage looks fantastic.  Chris is triumphant.  Brynn dashed out again, and again into the street, stopping right on her mark and screaming “NO!” in desolation and despair into the camera.  Great stuff.
I am still missing a couple of shots. I need to get the garbage truck coming closer.  I need to get a close-up of the bag o’ trash in Brynn’s hand. 

And I’d like to get a shot of a garbageman laughing and smoking a stogie while operating the hoist.  But these can come later…
At the end, sunburned to within an inch of my life, tired of chasing after my clipboard of shots, sleep deprived, I sagged into a chair. 

Jon looked up at me – he was about to snap shut the last plastic lock on his big camera case.  When this last catch snaps home, we’re wrapped.  Last chance to get a shot in, he said. 

I wearily shook my head no.

I can’t think of anything, I said.

He snapped it home, turned around and stuck out his hand. 

“Good job. It was a pleasure working with you,” he said.

Same here folks.  Same here.

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Aug 25

Day 3 – Paparazzi in the Pressure Cooker

Posted: under Film, journalism, Online (Multi)Media, television, True Enough - TV Pilot, Web/Tech.

The third day of shooting dawned with me already running behind. I was supposed to be using a borrowed Range Rover for the picture car. That had fallen through at the last moment. So at 10 p.m. the night before, I was calling around to rental car agencies, trying to nail down a place that [...] [...more]

The third day of shooting dawned
with me already running behind. I was supposed to be using a borrowed Range
Rover for the picture car. That had fallen through at the last moment. So at

10 p.m.

the night before, I was calling around
to rental car agencies, trying to nail down a place that would rent me a
big-ass SUV. I managed to find Budget
Rent-a-Car in

Beverly Hills

– which
was a real blast
from the past for me, since back in the tabloid days, I had
rented a Ferrari Mondiale from them and driven it to the Hotel del Coronado for
a stakeout of Donald Trump. It was a
blast going down, and then the weather changed – to the point where, when the
photog and I were staking out the private airstrip that The Donald was using to
ferry hoochies in and out, it actually started sleeting. Not exactly the weather for cruising up the
PCH with the top down.

Anyway. I awoke scrambling, with acid already in the
pit of my stomach. I drove with Janine’s cousin to the Budget to pick up the
car, and got my first nasty surprise of the day. Apparently, that Budget also rents the big
U-Haul like trucks and Saturday is the day that everybody chooses to do their
moving on. So the line was already out the door. It was a ½ hour wait to get to the counter,
at which time the guy behind the counter had apparently had a car accident
recently and gone through the windshield. He was not motivated in any real,
appreciable way,
and
seemed to have problems focusing on anything other than
the cleavage of the sweaty girl one station over.

Meanwhile, the lighting fixtures
in the ceiling were falling out unpredictably – the electrician had just been
there and had “fixed” the lights, whilst being staggering drunk. 

It would not have been out of
place for me if at this point, Death Himself had shown up with a scythe and
skeleton-raven on his shoulder, laughing at me. I was drumming my fingers on the counter like Keith Moon at his most
deranged, when someone finally recognized that I was about 10 minutes from
decapitating everyone on the premises and taking off with whatever cars I could
get. They tried to pass off some shoddy
mini-Lexus SUV on me. I held out for the Escalade. I knew that I was going to
need as much space as I could. It cost
me about 4 times as much as I had budgeted for this prop, but at last I got in
the car and sped off.

A side note here. If you ever get
the chance to cruise through Beverly Hills on a Saturday morning behind the wheel
of a big black Escalade, pumping out heavy bass tunes – do it. You will feel like the star of your very own
hip-hop video. I laughed because every
damn station on the radio was tuned in to badass hip-hop music. I think I saw the glitter of an expended 9mm
shell on the floor mats; or maybe that was a chip off some fool’s grill after
one of Suge Knight’s boys had dribbled his face against the dashboard like
Steve Francis pounding the ball on his crossover dribble.

I got back to my house, which
doubled as the set, and pulled the SUV into the alley. The crew was already there. Chris was late,
because he had been out until

4 a.m.

with a bunch of Vivid Video girls. Or so he would have us believe.

Jon looked up at the bright
overcast sky and said, “As far as I’m concerned, we’re lit!” I guess the lighting conditions were actually
rather fortuitous. I had been afraid that it was too dim – that I was going to
have a problem matching the footage because it was dim and then would clear
later – but that turned out to be a problem that only materialized the next
day.

Shooting outdoors proved to have
its own challenges. Not the least of
which was the sound – throughout the morning, helicopters kept passing overhead
right when I was getting good performances out of Chris and Jay.

Now for the complimentary
stuff. I knew that I had made a right
move when I cast two good improve stand-up comedians for these roles. I knew that I would need them to go off script
a lot to make these roles come to life. And that turned out to be one of the better decisions I’ve made. They
improv’d well, you could see that they actually liked each other and got along,
and they made my movie funnier than it would have otherwise been. 

So we shot them clowning and
emoting in the alley next to my house, and by noon, my mother’s words about
“getting the worst sunburns on overcast days” turned out to be, like most of
the wisdom that my mom attempted to impart to me in my life, absolutely true
and necessary. I had spent most of my
time leaning over to
peer at the monitor stuffed into the back of the truck and
thus the sun had baked the shit out of the back of my neck. Yes, I was, as I
have been so many other times in my hick-goes-to-the-big-City-life, a genuine
walking redneck. Yee-haw!

When it came time for my actors to
start driving around in the SUV, I gulped and said a quick prayer. I had tried
and tried to get insurance through the Filmmaker’s

Alliance

program, only to find my calls and emails falling on deaf ears (eyes? Internal organs?). So I was flying naked. In the picture that you see of my running
away down the alley in front of the car, I half wanted to just lie down in front
of it and let it run me over. One wrong
turn, one little old lady with a shopping cart or the car being backed up too
far, too fast, and I turn into a guy with a bad moustache at the border
crossing at TJ, lining up to work as an English teacher at the college of the
Americas under the alias of Sven Nater.

It was hot and sweaty out,
although not as hot as it had been the previous weekend, when we had set
all-time records for heat in

California

. If I’d been trying to film in that heat, we
would all have been either dead, or very very dizzy. I had bought a giant
canvas carport from Pep Boys two days before, and I expected that we were going
to have to put it up and then use it as a sunshade and diffuser… but like I
said, it was overcast and I got lucky.

The most challenging shots both
physically and acting-wise were the s
hots where Jay had to drive the ‘Sclade
down

Venice Blvd.

at 50 mph
and have a gradual, tearful breakdown. We had to cut for the lights, weave around slowpokes and give money to
the withered crackhead stationed at the left-turn lane at La Brea and Venice
(Jay gave her money and asked for a joke. She had none.) But still, Jay managed to break down
repeatedly. He drove and just started
crying – he changed the mood in the car. That was good stuff. We had six people
crammed in there – my two actors, me, Jon the cameraman, Adam and the Brian laconic
sound dude. Thank God and Sunny Jesus I went for the big SUV. The mini-Lexus
would have been a disaster.

Oh yeah – and all this took place
on my birthday.

So happy birthday to me. It’s the
most expensive present I’ve ever given myself. I still don’t know whether it will ever turn into anything other than a
testament to my own vanity or hubris or silly nostalgia. But I freakin’ shot
this!

Next up: the most difficult day was saved for last.

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Jul 26

The Trash Don’t Lie

Posted: under Books, Current Affairs, Film, journalism, Online (Multi)Media, television, Weblogs.

Photos from Day 1 of the shoot: It has been damn near a month since I’ve written anything substantive on this blog,and the pictures below will tell the story of why.  I have undertaken the most ambitious, and most foolish endeavor of my writing/video career – I have written, produced and am directing the short [...] [...more]

Photos from Day 1 of the shoot:

It has been damn near a month since I’ve written anything substantive on this blog,and the pictures below will tell the story of why.  I have undertaken the most ambitious, and most foolish endeavor of my writing/video career – I have written, produced and am directing the short film/pilot "Trash" based on the story of The Great Flying One-Handed Trash Nab pulled off by Roger Hitts and me back in 1991.

This is from the shoot on Saturday, the hottest day in the history of the State of California.  Luckily, we were inside.  Not-so-luckily, the second we flipped on the big 1k floods, the temperature started climbing.  On the left is Ted, playing the maniacal tabloid bureau chief, and on the right is Gina, the mousy, ditzy assistant (with a secret).

This was all shot on HD, by my Director of Photography/Camera operator Jon Bickford, using the brand-new Canon H1 camera.  I can’t wait to see what the footage looks like – and when I get some dailies, I’ll post some of the better clips.  The little back-and-forth between Ted and Gina (real name: Joey Jalalian) was absolutely hilarious.

Somehow, it actually looks like I know what I’m doing in this shot … hey, I’m holding a script and an actor is looking at me as though I were actually saying something that made a modicum of sense.  Which seems unlikely, as I was in a complete stress/adrenaline daze the whole day, feeling like I was babbling like a loon and should probably just have been sedated, swathed in bubble wrap, and dropped off on the loading dock of Cedars-Sinai for a 72-hour psych hold.

I know I made all sorts of mistakes, and I know that despite my best efforts at rationalizing them, they are going to dance and swirl around my head like the tweeting birds in a Tom & Jerry cartoon.

I look at this and I see that I had mostly a blank, featureless wall behind Ted for most of the shots from Gina’s POV and I just frickin’ cringe.  Still, there there was only so much that I could do, seeing as how I was the Writer, Director, Producer, Art Director, Set Dresser, PA and Transportation Coordinator.

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May 30

Embedding Experiment with You Tube

Posted: under music, Online (Multi)Media, television, Web/Tech, Weblogs.

Man if this type of technology actually works, in the long run, this will allow everyone to have and share all their video moments through blogs like this … no man is an island, but he very well may be his very own TV station and multi-media producer … I post this because this is [...] [...more]

Man if this type of technology actually works, in the long run, this will allow everyone to have and share all their video moments through blogs like this … no man is an island, but he very well may be his very own TV station and multi-media producer …

I post this because this is the soundtrack of the Memorial Days of my youth, which I remember as endless long-shadowed warm mosquito days spent running around with my cousins, throwing frisbees and footballs, and jumping into Wisconsin lakes that had not yet scummed over with algae from all the farm runoff.  I had never really understood why a hottie like the mid-70s Cher had flipped for the greasy, drugged-out Greg Allman, but watching this video, I kinda get an idea why.

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Feb 24

When It All Started

Posted: under Current Affairs, journalism, Online (Multi)Media, television, Web/Tech.

I forgot to include this quote about when and especially WHY it was that companies had to start manipulating us all through advertising, rather than just trusting that we would go out and figure out which products were better, and buy them… it seems so strange to consider that there was a time that this [...] [...more]

I forgot to include this quote about when and especially WHY it was that companies had to start manipulating us all through advertising, rather than just trusting that we would go out and figure out which products were better, and buy them… it seems so strange to consider that there was a time that this was not so. We are all so conditioned to believe that the whole ad industry exists to make us change our minds and do things that we wouldn’t otherwise do, that the question of why companies have to do this … well, it just never occurred to me, is all.

Kind of a freaky … wait for it …

PARADIGM SHIFT !!! W00t! I used a management buzzword – can I go home now?

The
turn probably began back in the ’50s, when the admen realized, much to their
chagrin, that advances in technology and the growing standardization of
ingredients were resulting in brands that were technically identical. The old
approach — reciting product benefits, hammering home a "unique selling
proposition" — didn’t work anymore. And so, as the marketers wrung their
hands, wondering how to cope with this newfound problem of "rapidly
diminishing product differences," the ad agencies groped for new and
deeper persuasion techniques, sexier approaches, sharper hooks.

The result, as Richard Tedlow writes in "New and
Improved," was the dawn of our current era of image-based marketing — the
insistence that products not only be good, but that they appeal to our hidden
yearnings, "deep in the psychological recesses of the mind." 

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