Early in the day (that places it at two o’clock for those bums who rise at noon…like me), Sean and I met with Jaemin and his friend Mike. We want to band together and form a kind of filmmaking JLA.

We four lingered in Sean’s room and rambled on about the topic that gets every trendy male hot in the crotch: short films. Jaemin and Mike shared story ideas they spent Monday preparing. Sean explained Rory’s First Kiss. Me, I loosened my lips about “The Sequel to How We Met,” my seven page script. This is to be our summer of creativity, and from this afternoon I think we all gleaned a rush of inspiration.

When our meet came to an end and they stepped aside to return to that magic place I call El Aay, I led Sean into his sweltering garage.

This is where my script takes place, and so I tried to light it. The gold hue on his face is from a reflector off camera. The problem is we’re using ten-dollar utility lights, with tempered wax paper to diffuse the bulbs. While this makes a passable medium-to-close shot, there’s no ‘artistic’ coverage in spots with less coordination of lights. The walls are too dark.

The answer to this problem lies with china balls: omnidirectional exposure for all the nooks in the garage. Separation and tone will be controlled by a gradient: light to dark, no black.

I did my best to churn out a dialog piece, in which characters do nothing but talk-talk-talk. In Screenwriting they advise you not to “tell” as much as you should “show.” My guess is that “showing” is for certain types of cinema I want to avoid at the moment. Plays are ideal for dialog: we know going in that action will be substituted with speech. We expect it. In cinema, it can feel like we’ve been cheated. The best talk-heavy films make us feel rewarded for listening and paying attention.

I saw the trailer for 500 Days of Summer. I liked it. But it made me feel dirty. If it looks good, it is because it fills in the cliches like a tailored suit. I’m sure there’s an emo checklist at the office of every small studio; if you qualify you get submitted to Sundance, like a darling honor student bussed away to the national spelling bee. I imagine the studios blowing kisses and shedding a tear, “Do your best! Even if you don’t win, we still love you!”

Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies and Videotape ignited a crazy-unique revolution of varied tastes. This current “revolution” seems aligned to please the studios and the iTunes crowd, and that makes me suspicious. When indies become homogenized in the future (if they haven’t already), where does that leave the voices of artists who don’t care about how cute Zooey Deschanel is? Or how awesome it would be if Natalie Portman was baited in front of you like a carrot-on-a-stick?

Oh that’s right. We’ll still have the internet, you and I. Hmm, now about those china balls…

But it still sort of sucks. I know I promised to stop blogging until I made a video. While I haven’t precisely lived up to my word, I don’t think readers should suffer from the lack of content. So I made this.

It’s not a legitimate creative endeavor. It’s actually my first test of Sean’s 5D Mark II; I just embellished the footage to make it seem as artsy-fartsy as possible. Nothing is scripted. Sean really did have that weird dream and he really is telling it to me for the first time. He’s no Spalding Grey, but it is sort of interesting.

I am impressed with the Mark II. The bigger sensor is a giant leap from our EX1. And guess what? I held the camera steady, without any support, for nearly four minutes. With the EX1, I would’ve trembled from muscle asphyxiation. It’s the difference between lifting a baby and a fat kid. Not that weight figures into my process that significantly; it’s just nice to know it’s there, like a kind thought.

I will shoot the script I wrote. Nothing fancy. It’s under ten pages and takes place in one location, indoors, where lighting can be controlled. I will use the Mark II. I want to quickly stage the movements, block the shots as efficiently as possible, and hopefully end up with an amusing six-minute narrative. This will not be ambitious. That’s later. For now I just wanna clear my creative sinuses.

And to anyone interested, I’ve been slowly drafting the second entry to P.D. Horror Stories Roundup for the past three weeks. I’m still trying to decide on two more short stories to add.

From this point onward, astoryuntold will cease to exist until I write, shoot and edit something really, really, really good. I have deduced that this website, like most of the internet, is made for showboating and gloating and is slowly turning me into an attention whore; which is kind of fine. But if it’s anything the internet is good at, it can make it seem like you’re working when you’re not. It is distracting me from hands-on, creative work—real intensive labor, not this lazy abstraction of Tweets and Blogs and Emails. It makes me depend too much on people I have never met, which is a very shallow, inside-out way to live. I want to put my directing cap back on again, where I feel safe and at home; if still a loser.

So bye-bye whoever’s out there. Bye-bye until my next video. And that could be as soon as three weeks…so, hmm, I guess this post isn’t as dramatic as it seems. But the internet still kind of sucks.

So I handed this guy Sean my twenty page script. He sat in the parking lot, in his car, for around a half-hour or so. When he came back out he said nothing, only smiled. I asked if he finished it. He said yeah he did. He really liked it, he said. That’s good, I said. Anything you didn’t like about it that you wanna suggest for the revision? No, he said, I liked it a lot. Good, I said, confident yet strangely let down by his review. I snap a picture of him.

That was an hour ago. He didn’t say much about Rory’s First Kiss; handed me his copy (briefly mine) of Scott Pilgrim Vol. 2, and took off in his Scion, saying the weather was too cold to be hanging out.

Here I am in Diamond Bar, halfway home, outside a coffeeshop sipping hot coffee. Rain drizzled. The two males on the table across say the word Fuck a lot, discussing Timothy Leary and shit that happened that shouldn’t have happened but did, and any recent movies that pissed them off. They’re just the characters I need: angry on a dime and irrational. The script I showed to Sean was practice. All scripts are practice. But that one I burned through in a week and I soaked in a lot. Well time to soak in more.

The story for my next script swells in my brain like a tumor. I need to get it the fuck out, to mock the two in front of me. I need to put it on paper. To those who have trouble composing a script, remember this: writing is hard; exorcising your demons is easy.

That guy Sean sent me this video yesterday. It’s a speech by Ira Glass, who, like most flamboyant men, is inspiring. I agree with what Ira says because it’s common sense. “Keep trying” “Work hard” “You’ll get better” are the tenants of his speech. I agree. You should keep trying and work hard, and eventually you’ll get better. Am I being sarcastic? I guess it’s a revelation if you’re really down on your luck. Or if you just like the way Ira talks. I do.

I wanna slam headfirst into the next script. It’ll be a light drama flavored with romance and a dash of angst. But I can’t, not now. We have two actor reels that I need to write scripts for. Then I need to finish shooting and editing this little musical by an elementary school. For a bunch of preteens, they’re pretty good (some skits were also a tad provocative for their age). It’s a favor for my cousin who works in the After School Program. It’s also practice. For what, I don’t know. Then on Saturday we drive to Lake Forest to be interviewed by R.J. Adams.

Clouds are forming. Coffee’s getting cold.

I think Sean has run into a bit of blockage with Rory’s First Kiss. Maybe that’s why he didn’t tell much. He’s scripting a brief prologue sequence to break the ice. That’s a good idea. It’s what I’d do. For that twenty page script, I wrote the bulk of it between ten at night and three in the morning. I’d recommend he do that too, when the day is long dead and the city has ceased to live. Everything stops. Midnight is insulation from reality.

Déjà vu. It suddenly feels like I’ve written this entry before. Whoa! As I peck this from the keypad of my iPhone, somebody sings “I wonder if I will ever see you again” on the radio in McDonald’s here in Norco. For almost three seconds I see the world for the very first time. What a fantastic feeling.

Have you heard the theory of the Accordion Universe? If we believe the universe began with a Big Bang and will end when it collapses on itself, then the theory supposes that another Big Bang will take its place. From there the universe begins again, identical to the previous. Even time is identical. If your mother died of cancer in that universe, the same will occur in this one. If you kissed a girl on June 19th, 1995 in that universe, you can look forward to kissing her again some trillions of years later. You just won’t know it.

Déjà vu is leftover psychic residue, seeping through the cracks.

Which reminds me of Haruki Murakami’s popular short story, called “On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning.” I read it one afternoon in a bookstore. You can read it here if you like, or this:

A man sees a beautiful girl walking down the sidewalk. He tries to think of a reason to speak to her but he can’t. So he goes home. He thinks of something profound he should have said to her. The two of them were once lovers, he supposes. They knew each other to be soul mates. In order to test this, they decide to separate; if they meet again, then it must be true love. They go their separate ways. And then, each is stricken with raging influenza. On the verge of death, they both recover, but have lost their memory. Time passes. Now they have crossed paths with each other, they way they had hoped, but this time as strangers, unaware of the true love they had set out to prove.

“That is what I should have said to her,” the man says, and from there the story ends.

A Thousand Words by Ted Chung is a Murakami story without the surrealism. Which is to say it is a Chung story. The protagonist is a man with whom I share my immediate sympathies; who makes a choice that leads to the discovery of potential happiness. The story never rings false and is told with such efficiency of economy that it practically tells itself.

I want that efficiency for my script, which will be two-and-a-half times longer than Mr. Chung’s. I have seen “A Thousand Words” four times and have mentally dissected it. It’s my motivation; but it is not my inspiration. That belongs to this masterwork, Red. Is it a serious film? That’s a matter of intelligence, I suppose, the way football is a matter of strength: I have no doubts I consider it too rough while a stronger man may find it passively enjoyable.

What fascinates me about “Red” is the same with the Accordion Universe: it needn’t supply an answer. Like “A Thousand Words” didn’t need a conclusive ending to be romantic. Like how Murakami’s story, one of his most well known, is powerful due to an ending that in fact questions the romance. What I am getting at, what I am trying to say, is this:

I am scripting the ending, and I pray it does not suck.