There are locations dotted up and down the whole of Southern California that I’d like to test, but this one park caught my attention. Not because it stood out for any excellent reason, but simply for the fact that it is there and near to a place that I am familiar with: Downtown Fullerton.

I asked Sean if I could borrow the camera for the night. What do you need it for? he asked. Location scouting, I said, to which he cautioned me about the potential of being mugged. Not for my own personal safety, mind you, but for the sake of the camera, which I think costs more than me. I don’t know what I cost my parents all these years, but I like to think I’m pretty expensive.

Fact: real-world lighting is like the flash bulb on the digital camera you got at Best Buy. It is out to make you look as ugly as possible. Oh sure, in a vague Michael Mann sorta way, the shots in the video could be mistaken for intentional urban romanticism, in which I’m out to capture the soul of city life by incorporating conflicting color temperatures. But I am not Mann (I am Men) and I’d rather stick to traditional modes of lighting.

The key problem is the lack of separation of the subject from the environment (which can be avoided by placing the subject in front of a darker background). But the Eww! factor comes in the form of chiseled shadows: depending on where the coincidence of light falls on the subject, it renders most of the facial detail as flat or unseemly. Shots like that have the clumsy appeal of shining a flashlight off camera and onto the actors. No thanks.

The heck is all this testing for? For my short film, or something like that, which I have yet to commit to paper. I think I will have Sean do most of the acting, along with perhaps Drew and Lainey, if they’re available. It is narrow-minded of me, as an aspiring filmmaker, to not branch out and work with new people. But in an Ingmar Bergman sorta way, it allows me to focus on the task at hand with folks who I don’t have to struggle to communicate with. And this is a small, personal project, intended to nurture the growth of the baby filmmaker inside me. It’s a practice piece, plain and simple.

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.

Here we have our first lineup of eerie and altogether moody short stories, each one noteworthy in their own way. For the aspiring writer, reading them is like a flex of the muscles; for an obese writer is he who does not read.

One could read classic literature and all that good stuff, and one still should. Yet horror is often excluded from that category, possibly because horror is, as Stephen King noted, “…like Rock ‘n’ Roll: a quick bop to the head that makes you feel good.” But that hasn’t stopped some of literature’s finest celebrities from sinking to the level of this most irrelevant of genres. Edith Wharton, Edgar Allen Poe, and even Roald Dahl let their guard down to have a bit of fun. Poe did it full-time. Scholars hate to admit that he dug Horror, and so they made-up the term Gothic Literature, which is four syllables longer and less convenient to pronounce.

What does the P.D. in the title stand for for, you ask? Public Domain. All of these stories are free to the general public. I have linked each one to their respective text-in-full. But rather than eyeball the stories through your awfully bright screen, I would suggest something less harmful to the eyes, like Dark Room, by doing a simple copy-and-paste. And if you have an iPhone, I recommend importing the stories into a fine app like Stanza.

The Apparition by Guy de Maupassant (1887?)

A routine errand to retrieve documents inside a lonely, derelict house takes an unexpected turn for the errand-runner.

This is a sharp little vignette that, if for no other merits, succeeds in relating what it is like to be irrationally frightened. Or maybe it is entirely rational. We have all felt, at some point, the presence of something beyond the spectrum of human sight. Some call it nerves; others call it ghost.

Of a Promise Broken by Lafcadio Hearn (1901)

A newly wed young wife is terrified at the thought of being left alone at night. She married a widowed man whose previous wife succumbed to illness; on her deathbed, she made her husband promise not to fall in love with another woman. Now that promise has been broken.

For those who believe that J-horror evolved out of the film industry, this very brisk tale is a precursor. Less like its deliberate Western counterparts, it is light on pretension and quick to scare.

The Monkey’s Paw by W.W. Jacobs (1902)

A man is offered an exotic prize from a friend who has returned from overseas. The prize? A monkey’s paw. While the friend claims that it will grant the user three wishes, he warns that it was created by a shaman who sought to prove that the universe is in perfect balance; thus each wish comes at a tragic price.

This is the classic of horror literature, reiterated and spoofed down the last century or so. It was the inspiration for a segment in The Simpson’s Treehouse of Horror and even made it into a fantastic episode in Rod Serling’s Night Gallery, albeit in the form of a loosely inspired retelling by Fritz Leiber (in my opinion).

The Body Snatcher by Robert Louis Stevenson (1906)

Two middle-aged men meet outside a bar. The story recounts their youth together in medical school, where human dissection is a common assignment. They become entangled in a black market of murdered cadavers and grave robbing. As their acts grow more heinous, it begs the question of when—and how—their grotesque crimes will catch up to them.

Stevenson’s writing is surprisingly contemporary. By that I mean how he deals with the details of the story: these are nasty doings done by nasty people, all leading up to a nasty ending that caught me off guard.

Afterward by Edith Wharton (1910)

An American couple buys a Victorian mansion in England and jokes with the seller if it has any ghosts, to which the seller replies:
“Oh, there is one, of course, but you’ll never know it.”
“That there’s a ghost, but that nobody knows it’s a ghost?”
“Well — not till afterward, at any rate.”
“Till afterward?”
“Not till long, long afterward…”

And so begins a slow, dreary tale of husband-and-wife that doesn’t seem to go anywhere for half its length. But that’s the point, precisely the point, I tell you. Because you don’t find out till…a long, long time afterward.

The Man Who Found Out by Algernon Blackwood (1921)

An aged professor departs for Assyria. He informs his young apprentice that, since he was a boy, he has had dreams of a stone tablet; and on this tablet was written the true purpose of mankind in the universe. Months pass. In time the professor returns. He tells his apprentice that he had indeed discovered the tablet; that he found out the true purpose of mankind, and that he has been disturbed by it ever since.

No doubt the mystery of the tablet is the seller of this piece. What was inscribed? Mr. Algernon Blackwood, conjurer of earthly dread, withholds it till the very end; then deals with it in such restraint to mirror the most subtle and intellectual of filmmakers.

The Whisperer in Darkness by H.P. Lovecraft (1931)

When a record flood engulfs Vermont, newspapers report sightings of jelly-like forms floating down the currents. Wilmarth is skeptical of the sightings, but he is countered by letters from Ackeley, who lives in a remote Vermont townhouse and swears that the sightings are genuine. Thus begins a correspondence, with Ackeley’s letters indicating a desperate plight: he claims that secretive beings dwell in nearby hills, and that his guard dogs are found dead the morning after, evidence of nightly intruders.

This is one of my favorite Lovecraft stories. It is light on Mythos and allocates time to proper plotting: we get the slow-to-burn sensation that this letter after letter affair is going to climax into something unexpected. And it does. Bizarre and altogether disconcerting.

Pigeons from Hell by Robert E. Howard (1935)

A man awakens from a sweaty dream—something about hearing footsteps in the floor above—and finds himself back inside the abandoned plantation house where he and his friend chose to spend the night for shelter. When his friend arises in the dark, as if in a sleepwalk, and ascends the stairs into darkness, the man is shocked to hear a second set of footsteps from the floor above.

I have only touched the surface of what happens in this story. There’s voodoo, a mystery, and a Hitchcockian “wrong man” scenario all at play here. It is also crisply written. Howard’s taming of language sustains an atmosphere of palpable pulp: the dream sequences are particularly strong. As in real life, the true nightmare lies in the ambiguity of being asleep and not knowing when to pinch yourself.

* * *

So there you have it; eight different stories from eight different writers, some writing decades apart from the other. I doubt each story will be for everybody, the way I doubt “2001: A Space Odyssey” is for everybody. It is not a question of quality—as I consider all of these stories to be worthy of a read—more so than it is a question of preference. And century-old “Gothic Literature” might be pushing it for some folks. So for those who can digest it, more power to you.

I hate to slam my preferred method of expression, but there is just no such thing as the ultimate art form. Film certainly is one of the most popular and the most varied. But that does not make it the ultimate anything. This isn’t Pizza Hut and this isn’t The Ultimate Meat Lover’s Pizza.

Film certainly has a jack-of-all-trades-but-a-master-of-none sensibility. Yet it isn’t as “photography” as photography; isn’t as “music” as music truly is. Just because it incorporates elements from other mediums does not mean that it gets away with stealing its essence—as if the movies were some comic book villain that parasitically absorbed the abilities of its host.

The problem with filmmaking is that no one artist is truly in charge; genuinely, absolutely in charge. Some even dismiss the auteur as an illusion perpetrated by the French (kidding). I say that even if the auteur did exist, they would still not have as much control over their vision as, say, a single painter before a canvas of their own; or as a writer before their own typewriter. The difference is that they can create undisturbed. If Robert McKee was correct in his statement that the screenplay is the only original art in the movies, and that everything else is interpretive of it, then surly this is the biggest drawback of filmmaking as pure art: the artist never has free reign over their own creation.

But even if the artist did have absolute control over their vision, then what must be said about the audience? Movies are victim to the worse spectators of any art form combined. Because it is approached as disposable entertainment, audiences of all kind–any kind–will attend a movie without knowledge of its vision; of its genre or its intentions. Compare this with the audience for classical music or literature: the spectator, the audience, will always have been “initiated” into the medium prior to actively engaging in it. Before they can pursue, they must experience it; and if they pursue, then they must surly like it. Consider even the matter of taste within the mediums: a fan of classical music will know not to attend a Metallica concert, and a fan of Metallica will not readily attend a classic symphony. They know their boundaries, and so the respective artists are free to delegate to a preconceived audience as they see fit.

Not the same with movies. Instead of the artist delegating to the audience, the audience–however oblivious and untrained–will try to delegate to the artist. What you have is not an industry bursting to the brim with uncompromising visions, but rather an industry that tries to peddle to the untrained eye. This is where we get the phrase, “This movie is depressing,” as if the film has violated a contract with the viewer by having them leave with anything less than a smile. They confuse most films for simple entertainment (which indeed should leave you with a smile) rather than for pure art, which can be whatever it wants to be.

There I was in the dark (I like to brainstorm past midnight, the shimmer of the moon on the windowpane), wondering what the heck my story was all about; the confidence I had felt in my heart now sank into the pit of my bowels. All of a sudden I hated my story, and I suspected it was because I was fuzzy on the ending. Because if I was unsure of the ending, the rest of the plotting—the build-up, the expository, the character development—it all rang false. And I was so close to a story, so close to wringing it with my hands and proclaiming it my own.

I resigned myself to bed and read my paperback of Fables, a comic book series. This volume centered on The Arabian Nights. Afterward I looked up ’1001 Nights’ on the Wikipedia of my iPhone. I then read a few of its stories (it is in the public domain and can be accessed on the web). I read one called ‘The Three Apples.’ For being a couple hundred, maybe even a thousand, years old, it was wonderful. Apparently it was the very first murder mystery in recorded history. Here is a snippet, courtesy of Wikipedia:

A fisherman discovers a heavy locked chest along the Tigris river and sells it to the Abbasid Caliph, Harun al-Rashid, who then has the chest broken open only to find inside it the dead body of a young woman who was cut into pieces. Harun orders his vizier, Ja’far ibn Yahya, to solve the crime and find the murderer within three days or else he will have him executed instead.

Already in the first scene there is a mystery and a “ticking clock.” The story goes on to involve three apples, which can be called the runners of the story: an aesthetic element that serves to connect one plot strand to another; without it the story would lose its natural binding. Hence they “run” (appear) throughout the story. These three apples weave together coincidences, plot twists, and ultimately, the true identity of the murderer—all while the reader hopes the vizier Ja’far doesn’t get executed in trying to solve this impossible crime.

While the story alone sobered me up, it was a statement from a famous filmmaker that gave me the insight I needed. A common theme of The Arabian Nights is that of fate and destiny, and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini had this to say when adapting it into a film:

“Every tale in The Thousand and One Nights begins with an ‘appearance of destiny’ which manifests itself through an anomaly, and one anomaly always generates another. So a chain of anomalies is set up. And the more logical, tightly knit, essential this chain is, the more beautiful the tale. By “beautiful” I mean vital, absorbing, and exhilarating. The chain of anomalies always tends to lead back to normality. The end of every tale consists of a ‘disappearance of destiny,’ which sinks back to the somnolence of daily life… The protagonist of the stories is in fact destiny itself.”

Ah-ha! An appearance of destiny that manifests itself through an anomaly. In screenwriter-speak this is referred to as the Inciting Incident. But with ’1001 Nights’, the inciting incident becomes something so much more specific; and this specificity is what gave me the sobriety I needed to overcome my writer’s block—better than a cold shower and black coffee combined.

Lets break down this information, dissect it.

1. It is vital that the anomaly affect the protagonist directly. In the case of The Three Apples, it is the discovery of the dead woman in the chest. The vizier’s destiny is to bring the murderer to justice.

2. The first anomaly will not need to make perfect sense. It will unravel itself through the anomalies that proceed it. This is called the plot.

3. The anomaly will take on a cohesion of purpose; it cannot be perceived as entirely random. Through the proceeding anomalies, it should become clear that “destiny” is leading the protagonist (or antagonist) in a clear, but unforeseen, direction.

4. This sudden semblance of meaning, which was vague at the beginning, will solidify and give the story purpose.

5. By the end, the plot will fit together in an obvious manner as to banish any idea that destiny alone had a hand in it. Everything does, in fact, make logical sense; it just didn’t seem like it at the time. All along the protagonist was master of his or her own destiny.

Tip number five is absolutely essential in creating a twist ending. And yet I suspect that all endings end this way, because most endings strive to be unpredictable. A twist ending simply takes this principle to the extreme. Tip number four is the “beauty” of the story that Pasolini was referring to; when the plot strands snap together before the viewer’s eyes. It is embedded in human nature to try to make sense out of patterns, and we take delight in a story when it weaves together in a way that we did not foresee. But I am getting ahead of myself.

What banished my writer’s block, and what I think will help you banish your writer’s block, is this notion of destiny, which is like a guide rail for the writer: it will take you safely through your story from beginning to end.

“The Arabian Nights” amplifies an important trait of storytelling: the correlation of events. This miraculous chain of events is sparked by a singular event that at first seemed inconsequential to the story’s outcome. But nothing in traditional storytelling is random; little by little events contribute to the outcome of the ending; thus the events are said to be correlated. In real life, when a series of events seem to be correlated, we would label that fate or destiny. Without that correlation, we would perceive each event as an isolated moment—a solitary vignette that means nothing. (as an aside, our vain attempt to make sense out of unrelated events is what makes the films of David Lynch so interesting)

Here is a story that relies on correlation:

A grumpy businessman sees a shaggy dog on his lawn. He shoos it away.

We learn that he does not have much family.

He is then informed that his estranged younger brother died in an accident five years ago. He feels no remorse.

The dog returns, wagging its tail. The man grows irritated.

He calls the pound. They take the dog away to be put to sleep.

The man learns that his brother was a devout Buddhist; he believed in reincarnation.

Curious, the man calls the pound. He discovers that a family “took the dog back” to their home in another state.

He realizes that the dog traveled hundreds of miles to be on his lawn.

After digging through records, he finds out that his brother died in that particular town.

The man feels regret for not taking the dog in, yet he cannot explain why.

This is a story I made up just now. Regardless of its quality, each event is correlated. It begins with a random anomaly (dog shows up on lawn) and goes through a chain of anomalies that intensifies the purpose of the narrative (dog symbolizes his brother). Without this notion of destiny, the “point” of the story would be lost. It can be said that the destiny of the protagonist in the above example is to reconnect with his estranged brother, a task that he fails to notice due to a lack of imagination. Whether or not he (or the viewer) believes in the act of reincarnation is beside the point. It is implied within the context of the story thanks to the correlation of the scenes. What we are left with is a clear idea of who this man is: defeated, lonesome, and without hope of a livelier existence. The ultimate point of the story is to highlight this fact.

So if you have trouble with your story, try placing the plot on a guide rail; steer your protagonist in a predetermined direction. You could think in terms of “theme” and “message,” but those are awfully vague terms that tend to sidestep character altogether. What “The Arabian Nights” does so well is rephrase those loose screenwriter’s terms into a much more holistic specificity. And that specificity is called Destiny. Read more »