To anyone who reads this [still under construction] blog, I am so very very anxious to shoot something. Not in the bang-bang-somebody-call-the-cops sorta way, but in the peculiar way that only filmmakers do it: by writing and recording and editing something that isn’t real and was never real to begin with; but we pretend it’s real because life is so much more interesting that way.

I cooked up an idea about a month ago, but it’s an ambitious little narrative that I’d rather not spoil; a genre piece in the same vein as a half-hour episode of The Twilight Zone. Yeah, ideas like that ain’t exactly art. It’s entertainment, so sue me. I come from the school of Sullivan’s Travels. So an hour ago I rummaged through the back burner of my brain and unearthed a new idea. I’ll withhold the plot until I actually have one, but I wanna make it full of exteriors, at night. Ambient noise will put a damper on the dialog, and so I’ll devise a way to place any crucial dialog into a single indoor location.

At about ten o’clock this evening, I parked my car, put on my jacket, and went out for an hour-long stroll. Location scouting. Most of the city lights emit a color that’ll be greenish in post. The rest of the “practicals” cast a red-orange hue.

So this may turn out to be a short film (or skit), or it may fall through. The only variable that will stop me is myself. That is to say that sitting on my ass will get me nowhere. I will not grow as a filmmaker. Anyway, I’m getting too personable (but isn’t that what blogs are for?). To any filmmakers reading this, amateur or otherwise, do not sit on your ass and whine about the routine of everyday life. The moment you start whining about your one passion and don’t even realize it, you are fucked. Solve your own damn problems and fix your own broken schedules (that you broke yourself and were too lazy to fix) in order to make that idea into a script, and that script into a short that strangers can dream about.

Why? Because I am tired of seeing lib-dubs on Vimeo. I spend hours on that site scouring for legitimate shorts that instead turn out to be nothing but montages scored to Sigur Ros and stuffed with shallow focus fetishism.

For reference—and because I felt the urge to see it again—I popped “Taxi Driver” (1976) into my DVD-ROM drive. Holy shit. This is an amazing movie. I’d seen it about three times prior, but that was ages ago. Apart from De Niro’s performance and Schrader’s observant, slow-to-burn screenplay, Scorsese has never been better. Yeah, The Departed and The Aviator are more technically accomplished, but there is a sharp contrast between directing a film and designing a film. His latest films look great, but they don’t “feel” as much as his earlier accomplishments. And they don’t look any better, either. They’re just more varnished. Michael Chapman’s cinematography in “Taxi Driver” is gorgeous—Wait, no. Gorgeous is not appropriate for this movie. It’s more than that. It is poetic, which is allowed to be ugly yet still be beautiful. It is all technique with little gloss. All the better to witness the technique.

Here is one of my favorite moments in the film, a rather revealing scene that uses diegetic music and mise-en-scene (notice the shoes). This is before Scorsese went all-out on a non-diegetic soundtrack, apart from traditional scoring. Even Travis’ voice-over can be said to be diegetic, as it physically shows him scribbling in a notebook. And to anyone who hates zooming because they were told it is unnatural, take note of its transparency in this scene. Robert Altman also employed a lot of zoom in his movies.

On the beeeed,
Where we both liiiiieeee,
Late for the skkyyyyyy…

Afterward, I decided to revisit yet another nineteen-seventy-six film about madness: Roman Polanski’s “The Tenant” (1976). It certainly was weird when I first saw it. And even now it still stands as a weirdo of an experience. But having dived a bit into Gothic Literature, I can now rationalize how well Polanski taps into the doldrums of insanity.He did it before in “Repulsion” and “Rosemary’s Baby,” but those were exercises in intelligible Jungian psychology. “The Tenant” taps into a netherworld that modern psychology has yet to put into words. And as always, Polanski directs it all with such transparency of control that we experience the movie more than we observe it. Which is the purpose of a lot of his films; such as in “Chinatown,” in which we only know about as much as Jake Gittes knows.

Hmmm. Maybe my plot will be about madness? Surly that goes against the feel-good philosophy of Sullivan’s Travels.