Ha. Ha ha. Oooh, that title must be a typo. It should say, “Jordan Lapp is Watching Almost Famous”. Wish fulfilment much?

Anyways, “Almost Famous”, the movie by Cameron Crowe, is making me think of the state of movies today. I can’t mention this movie to friends without someone telling me how awesome it is. I suppose I was in a weird place the first time I watched it, but it really left an impression on me. Every time it’s playing anywhere, I just have to watch it.

It’s an amazing film, and even when it was released it got great reviews (it currently enjoys an 88% rating on Rotten Tomatoes). I was going to write about how the studio system today wouldn’t know how to market this movie.  I was going to write about the fact that it had no A-list stars and no special effects, and wasn’t 3D, thus would fall between the cracks. Unfortunately, it turns out that it didn’t even break even at the time. The budget was a stunning 60 million dollars, and it made back 47 million, so maybe even the studio system back then had no idea what to do with it. Maybe the budget was way too high in the first place. Today, this movie would either star Justin Bieber or have a budget close to 4 million and be released direct to DVD.

It’s discouraging when movies like Almost Famous fail to break even while lesser offerings make back four times their budget. I was trying to figure out what this says about the mentality of the movie going public, but I suppose it says more about the state of marketing these days. Every movie has a few good lines of dialogue, and if you splice them in with enough shiny special effects you can fool anyone into paying to see a movie once. Every time I see this trailer I take three steps towards the video store, even though everyone on Earth thinks it’s like two and a half hours of flushing your head down the toilet.

So, moral of this post, for my movie, tentatively entitled “Deeper”, I’m going to try and cut a damn good trailer.

• In canadian tire. There is not one, but several handheld, portable toilets. #

• 2 minutes into watching 2012, and the stupid is already strong #
• I think I can actually see the actors puke into their mouths when they say shit like, the neutrinos are mutating into a new kind of particle #
• Abandoned 2012 last night. Tried again this morning. LA is being destroyed. This is why you watch Emmerich. He should have started here. #

One of the reasons this blog has been so dead recently is that I’ve been spending all of my available time working on the second draft of my third screenplay.

A fantasy/horror, I’m really excited about this one. It’s written so that I can shoot it with an incredibly small budget if I can’t find funding for it.

My normal process in writing a screenplay (and normal is a weird word, because this is just my third so I’m still feeling things out here) is to first write a one paragraph idea, then a 1 page synopsis, a detailed treatment (outline), and finally a “muscle draft”. If you’re not familiar with the concept of a muscle draft, I’ve referred to it as a SFD (Shitty First Draft) on this blog before, but in order to refer to the concept in polite company, I’ve borrowed Darren Aronofsky’s term for it.

In the muscle draft, you’re going for quantity over quality… things will chance as you go along, and you’ll long to go back and revise, but you can’t. Neither can you edit your prose, or do anything besides plowing through. It’s painful for perfectionists like me, but the idea is that, at the end of the process you have a complete screenplay to work with.

I’m at that point right now. I think the concept will blow people’s minds, but the second draft is definitely going to focus on character development, and plot holes–and also going over the prose until it sings.

It is certainly a relief to finally allow myself to write well. It’s like going from a factory to a studio. I’ve been the button pusher, and the chance to finally be an artist again is music for the soul.

I’ve been really sick for the last three days (cold, flu, whatever), and so I’ve been watching a ton of movies I PVR’d off the movie channels.

It’s taught me a fair amount about movie making.

1) On Golden Pond is based on a play that was adapted for the screen by the actual playwright. This leads to a movie that is massively heavy on dialogue. All telling, no showing. Andy and I have spoken about too much dialogue in a movie, and I never really got what he meant until I saw this movie. I mean, the dialogue smokes (I suppose), but modern films will show much more with images.

2) I’m watching Quarantine right now. The zombie movie is generally the first genre movie attempted by the low budget genre filmmaker because zombies are a cheap monster to make, and the makeup effects are well understood. Found footage is another way that independent filmmakers compensate for shitty equipment–”Yah, it’s SUPPOSED to look shitty because random people don’t have the money to buy Hollywood cameras.” Seeing a major studio do a found footage zombie movie with real actors and shit feels wrong. I mean, they do a good job, but it’s hard enough to make an independent film, and it only gets harder when Hollywood raises the bar like this. I’m not really advocating cordoning off certain areas of filmmaking for low-budget “film ghettos”, but I AM saying that Hollywood should make movies no one else is capable of making, not simply better versions of cheap movies. (And, yeah, I know this is a shot-by-shot remake of a cheap Spanish independent flick. That makes it worse, not better.).

Also a reason why word of Joss Whedon’s “Cabin in the Woods” film is disappointing. The “Cabin in the Woods” is the domain of the low budget horror. Evil Dead, Cabin Fever, Bag Head, Eden Lake (no cabin, but plenty of woods)… I could go on and on. Intersect is set at a cabin in the woods, with a big, big, big caveat of course. This is because it’s a controlled environment that you can usually get for cheap from a relative or friend for weeks at a time. To see a filmmaker of Whedon’s calibre using the setting just makes it tougher for the rest of us.

As my friend Andrew LeBlanc says, the trick about independent filmmaking is not to make a shittier version of a film your audience has already seen. My second script was like that. A romantic comedy and a road movie, I think it had a certain charm, but cast say, Owen Wilson in it, and it gets drastically better. Which means that I’m competing with Owen Wilson movies.

Instead, I decided to make a movie only I could make. The tentative title is “Intersect”. Obviously, it’s not a zombie movie.

3) I watched “The Brothers Bloom” recently. The writing in the movie was absolutely wonderful, but the ending was a let down. I would recommend the film though, because its director, Rian Johnson, is followed pretty much the same path as I aim to into film making–that of the storyteller.

In my admittedly uninformed opinion currently there are three paths to success for the young director:

1) Work your way up. Graduate from film school, work 5-10 years in the industry, eventually get a shot. Alternatively, direct music videos, make short films, eventually get a shot.

2) Be a SFX wizard. Neil Blomkampf (Live from Joberg), Carl Erik Rinsch (The Gift) both followed this path. Being a great storyteller helps here too, but if you impress enough with your short film, you can get hired to direct and have someone else write the movie.

3) Blow people away with your storytelling. Rian Johnson’s first feature won the Special Jury Prize for Originality of vision at Sundance, and the Brothers Bloom is a smoking script (aside from the ending). “Primer” also succeeded for this reason.

Obviously, it’s this third path that I’m aiming for, and I think Intersect is going to do it for me. The script is fully plotted, over 2/3rds written, and I’m in the process of locking down cast, location, and props. I can’t wait to get started.

Oh god. Quarantine. It’s a zombie movie. The characters are aware of this. There’s a little girl, clearly a zombie, and the cop goes up to her all calm and reassuring. “Hey little girl who couldn’t possibly be a zombie even though she’s bleeding from the eyes, everything’s going to be okay! Just stay calm while I get real close.” Also, why does the camera man never say anything and continues to film when his life is in danger? Put the camera down and save your own life, man! There’s hundreds of people involved in the process of filmmaking. Why does no one ask these kinds of questions?