I Will Not Read Your Fucking Script

Josh Olson was cornered at a party by a young man and his girlfriend. The young man recently spent a year of his life writing a screenplay, and was about to submit it to a contest or whatever--but he wants a professional opinion. Is this any good? Who better to ask than someone who's been nominated for an Academny Award for his work on A History of Violence, right?

Olson knew he should have said no. He barely knew the guy but he knew the girlfriend, and so took the 2-page synopsis, read the crap, and tried to thoughtfully put down words on paper. The e-mail took him longer than several movie rewrites, and later, another mutual friend comes up to him. "I heard you pulled a dickmove on Whatshisface."

This is why Josh Olson--and any sane writing professional--will not read your fucking script:

Which brings us to an ugly truth about many aspiring screenwriters: They think that screenwriting doesn't actually require the ability to write, just the ability to come up with a cool story that would make a cool movie. Screenwriting is widely regarded as the easiest way to break into the movie business, because it doesn't require any kind of training, skill or equipment. Everybody can write, right? And because they believe that, they don't regard working screenwriters with any kind of real respect. They will hand you a piece of inept writing without a second thought, because you do not have to be a writer to be a screenwriter.

Screenwriters never really get the respect they deserve. Olson relates an anecdote about Picasso, who was approached by a guy at a party and asks Picasso to draw on a napkin and he'll pay him. Picasso does it, hands the drawing to the man and asks for a million dollars. "What, but it took you thirty seconds to do that!" Picasso shrugs, "Well, it took me fifty years to learn to do that in thirty seconds."

The anecdote underscores the fact that writers are never really perceived as professionals. Olson compares this with asking a house painter friend to paint your living room on his day off, or asking a surgeon to take out your gall bladder over coffee. Writers get paid to read someone's work and give their professional opinion on it. Nobody really just wakes up and goes to the gym, and suddenly realizes, "But, oh, I can do a triple bypass on someone right now." The same way with writers.

Elsewhere, a really bizarre internet true story by Olson: The Life and Death of Jesse James.

Culling

The built in dictionary in my computer tells me that "to cull" means to "select from a large quantity" or even more telling, "to reduce the population of (x) by selective slaughter." The x in the definition was wild animals, but in my case, my goal is to reclaim shelf space.

I have "panic piles": At home, there are three stacks beside the desk divided into fiction, theory/CL references, screenplays. There's one reserved for what I'm currently working on, like the stack of crime fiction I had amassed while taking up a writing class that required me to come up with a story with crime in it. In the end, I don't think I read a lot from the panic file. But it did manage to calm me down a bit to know that in case I get blocked, there's something I can refer to or take inspiration from.

I suspect it's the panic pile that made my shelves burst with all sorts of books. My desk at the office now holds two piles: one for the fiction classes, another for the comics, and not much real estate left for actual writing. The situation at home isn't any different. I already had one culling session at home, wherein I put all the books I had in my room in the middle of the floor, and began piling them into keep/throw, with special mounds for fiction, nonfiction, plays/drama/screenplay, poetry. The tallest pile was fiction, the mere molehill, poetry.

Laura Miller in her essay says that the books we keep say a lot about ourselves and our state of mind: "There are two general schools of thought on which books to keep, as I learned once I began swapping stories with friends and acquaintances. The first views the bookshelf as a self-portrait, a reflection of the owner’s intellect, imagination, taste and accomplishments.For others, especially those with literary careers, a personal library can be “emotional and totemic,” in the words of the agent Ira Silverberg. Books become stand-ins for friends and clients."

I suppose my panic and to keep piles attest to that. But Miller has more: "The other approach views a book collection less as a testimony to the past than as a repository for the future; it’s where you put the books you intend to read." I'm not going to claim that I've read each book I own. There are books I buy because I intend to read them. It is wishful thinking. I have a copy of the The Complete Stories and Fables of Kafka that I've had since college and I never read it fully. Or sometimes I love a book so much that I buy a copy when I find it in book bins. Only to find out later that I just bought my third copy of Sylvia Plath's novel. I eventually gave away all my copies of The Bell Jar, I think.

Right now, my goal is to get rid of previous panic piles which have no use for me anymore. While I liked The Truman Show (film and script), there's no reason to hold on to the script book, especially since it can be accessed on the net anyway. And the many many potboilers I picked up and never got around to finishing? Maybe I'll hold on to it a bit more.

Anyone want to put together a used books sale?

I suppose my panic and to keep piles att

Mlle. Personality

Stumbled upon this site called Typealyzer, where you put in your blog's URL and it tells you what kind of personality you have. Apparently, I'm a Visionary. More:

The charming and trend savvy type. They are especially attuned to the big picture and anticipate trends. They often have sophisticated language skills and come across as witty and social. At the end of the day, however, they are pragmatic decision makers and have a good analytical abilitity.

They enjoy work that lets them use their cleverness, great communication skills and knack for new exciting ventures. They have to look out not to become quitters, since they easily get bored when the creative exciting start-up phase is over.

Really, now: "social" and "witty" in the same sentence? Right.

A bit of warning though: I typed in the URL of a Filipino speaking blog, but it turns out Typealyzer only supports English and Swedish (!), so there you go. But it wouldn't hurt to try.

Swiped quiz off this.

Professors Strike Back

Stephanie Rosenbloom writes in The New York Times that professors are now using the web, either via social networking sites, blogs or personal webpages, to reveal information about themselves in the hopes of "becoming more human" in the eyes of students. And there's even a show on mtvu called "Professors Strike Back," which gives the maligned professors to refute the comments in RateMyProfessors.com.

The show has become more popular than the music premieres on that channel. Which only goes to show that for a lot of students, the thought that professors have lives beyond the classroom is almost unthinkable. Sam Gosling, psychologist and associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin, narrated an anecdote where a female student saw him in the street near the campus and looked absolutely horrified. "Like, ‘Wait a minute, you have a life?’ The idea that I would continue to exist — it was sort of a violation of her expectations.” Gosling goes further to say that students today think professors are not doing their jobs unless they convey information in zany, interactive ways.

Teaching has lost some of its god-on-the-podium status. To teach these days means also means to entertain. It's such a taxing demand, to relay information and to make like a talk show host at the same time. What matters is the ability to teach. But students seem to be under the impression that learning is like being part of a talk show audience. "Here we are now, entertain us," and if you fail to do so, you get comments on evaluations like, "Bring a pillow."I tend to agree with the article that this is an unfortunate trend, this need to know that your professor likes Project Runway or has climbed the rockface in Galera. Some are of the opinion that knowing these little things make for a more comfortable learning experience. Whether the "humanization" of professors come in the form of dishing out jokes or crazy anecdotes along the lines of "I have a life, too, you know" or posting more of the same in blogs or social networking sites, this need for transparency seems doubly unneccessary for me.

And yet, I'm posting this on my blog. So take everything with a grain of salt.

Hello Moto: You Suck

I've been a Nokia girl all my life, and almost all my phones suffered the same end: stolen or death by drowning. But I figured, maybe a change wouldn't be so bad. So I got myself a new mobile recently, a Motorola w375.



Here's a YouTube video demonstrating the w375's "capabilities."




I liked the orange one, but it's out of stock. I got a shiny black phone. The first thing I noticed about this new phone was that it made me a slower texter. The keypad takes forever to react, and is prone to moving on to the next letter so I had to be really careful keying things in. There's something to be said about Nokia's very friendly GUI.

Then the battery gives up way too fast for a brand new phone. The w375 is dead after a day and a half. I thought that perhaps I didn't really fully charge it the first time. But hey, no worries. The manual said I could charge it by charging it to a PC via the mini-USB cable. Great.

Until the day I finally had to do just that. I'm far away from home, unexpectedly, and although I carry a big bag, a phone charger isn't in it. But hey, I have DSL, nyahaha. I can look up the phone's manual and charge it via PC. Harharhar.

But the phone doesn't display the "charging" icon and it's asking for a driver. I check the website and says that all drivers should be in the installation package and that the phone's software is already up to date.

Still no go.

Then I check users' forums and find out that I'm. Not. Alone. Read mostly unsatisfied customer comments here.

It turns out that Motorola did not include a set of drivers for the w375. How nifty is that huh?

Hay naku, had I known I would have just bought another Nokia phone and not this one which boasts a camera--crappy and an alternative USB storage device--all 100kb of it.

Hello, Motorola, if you're reading this, it's the first and last time I'm buying a phone from you.