Death Comes In Twos

Last year, when both Ingmar Bergman and Michaelangelo Antonioni died on the same day, it felt like more than a coincidence. It was as if some uber film critic was making a cosmic ironic comment on the state of movies today.

What, then, are we to make of the deaths of both Arthur C. Clarke and Anthony Minghella today? There is no cosmic joke here, just a sad realization that the man who gave us the book of 2001:A Space Odyssey and the man who gave us TRULY, MADLY, DEEPLY and THE ENGLISH PATIENT will create art no more.

Ben Kuchera, in a column in Ars Technica today, quotes the three laws that Clarke was famous for.

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

The last of the three is famous, in and of itself. I often wonder, imbued with the good ol’ sensawonda, just how someone merely 100 years old can hope to internalize all of the changes in his or her lifetime. I know that when I emerge from the editing of a film and look around, it seems like the editing technology has drastically changed. A mere five years ago, a mention of the acronym DI would have gotten you stares of incomprehension (unless they thought you were talking about drunk driving). And that’s just in my small little neck of the woods, and in five years time.

Clarke (who has written “Against The Fall of Night”, “Childhood’s End,” “Rendezvous With Rama,” and “Islands In The Sky” in addition to the novel he wrote with Stanley Kubrick) has been writing since 1937 and, in that time, has created some remarkably detailed and plausible future worlds. Remember, when he started writing, the concept of launching anything into space was incomprehensible. The Internet? Not even a gleam.

Yet Clarke, and a few other science fiction writers at the time, managed to conceive of all of this, at a time when the magazines that published science fiction were more concerned with Bug Eyed Monsters and women in the clutches of monsters.

Now, that is a visionary.

Still, I’m particularly entranced by that second law, that one needs to go beyond what we consider possible in order to discover reality’s true limitations.

Speaking narrowly, there are two types of directors in the reshaping process in editing. There are those who will make big, broad changes early on and see what breaks. They will remove entire scenes, rearrange whole sections of the film, drop favorite moments and excise great lines Then they’ll see what absolutely needs to go back to the way it used to be (or, to be more precise, go back a little ways to what used to be).

There are also directors who will work in smaller incremental changes, slowly chipping away at problems until they arrive at a comfortable resolution.

Neither approach is right. Both of them work (though the second method takes longer).

My own preference is to make broad changes — to push past the possible into the impossible — and to see what works. It is axiomatic that once you take a scene out of a film, no one misses it. When you do, you know you’ve got to keep it in the film in some form. So, plenty of things that I’ve resisted changing for what I thought were very good reasons, turn out to be quite expendable in the long run. You never know what is going to work and what won’t (within reason). It’s a cliche, but, really, you never know.

So, Clarke’s second law has ramifications everywhere.

Anthony Minghella didn’t have Clarke’s same speculative fiction side of things, but he managed to blaze a few paths in storytelling and character development. The people in TRULY, MADLY, DEEPLY (the awesome Alan Rickman, years before the caricature he plays in the Harry Potter series) felt blindingly real. The story of a woman who cannot let go of her husband, after his death at an early age, the emotions that Juliet Stephenson portrayed were touching. Not because they were telegraphed, but because they weren’t.

THE ENGLISH PATIENT was a different canvas altogether. Those of you who have taken my Intermediate Editing course know that I play the Caravaggio interrogation scene to demonstrate the use of silence and sound contrast. Walter Murch is given credit for the concept but, as we all know, nothing gets put in a film without the director’s permission, and I’m sure that Minghella enthusiastically was aboard the beautiful use of sound and music to create the horrifying mood of the scene.

It’s that kind of collaboration that we all seek in this business. I know that Walter Murch admires Minghella almost as much as Thelma Schoonmaker admires Martin Scorsese. That comes from a respect for talent, of course, but it also comes from a realization that their directors allow them to do good work. These directors have the ability to step back and let their collaborators come up with ideas.

Not every director can open up that easily. The ones that do are worth their weight.

I will certainly miss the art that Anthony Minghella and Arthur C. Clarke created, even though it will live on — past my own death, I’m sure.

Awareness Test

The Transport For London has an online test that’s part of their campaign to ‘look out out for cyclists.” It’s a video of two teams of four basketball players passing a basketball around. You’re asked to count the number of passes that the team dressed in white makes.

I’ll let you go away and watch the video. Then, come back here for my point (which will be continued by clicking on the “Read The Rest of This Entry’ link below).

Click here for the video.

iTunes and Wal-Mart

No, Apple and Wal-Mart haven’t merged, but I was intrigued by a Billboard piece yesterday (here is the Yahoo News link) that reported on Wal-Mart proposing a five-tiered pricing structure that, according to the piece, “would allow the discounter to sell albums at even lower prices and require the labels to bear more of the costs.”

According to sources, the Wal-Mart proposal would allow for a promotional program that could comprise the top 15 to 20 hottest titles, each at $10. The rest of the pricing structure, according to several music executives who spoke with Billboard, would have hits and current titles retailing for $12, top catalog at $9, midline catalog at $7 and budget product at $5. The move would also shift the store’s pricing from its $9.88 and $13.88 model to rounder sales prices.

Not only is this an acknowledgment of the decline of the sales of physical products (CDs and music DVDs) but it is also a further nail in the coffin of allowing the labels to fix their retail prices in whatever way they’d like.

You may remember that the biggest beef that labels like Universal Music had with Apple’s iTunes was that they couldn’t force Apple to sell with a pricing structure that the labels wanted.

“I don’t think this is a Wal-Mart discussion,” one top executive at a major label said. “I think this is a future-of-the-business discussion. Right now everyone is paralyzed.”

As I’ve already pointed out, Apple seems to finally be moving in the direction of multiple pricing.  It is intriguing that their huge success in music distribution (they seem poised to overtake Wal-Mart as the biggest music retailer in the US by the end of this year) is putting pressure on others to adapt their sales model as well.  If you have to sell pieces of plastic with more than one song on them, you have to offer the customer something more than iTunes does.  In this case, Wal-Mart seems to be offering much lower cost.

Simplifying Things Using Technology

Steve Cohen has a great object lesson in … well … reality on his blog today. Entitled Priesthood Still Needed, the piece details an entire day spent with tech support trying to figure out why the picture dailies for his new film were stuttering like a misaligned A-frame (don’t ask, don’t ask).

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Tom Cruise’s Impossible Mission

I don’t know why I seem to be stuck on posting videos recently (and I haven’t even been on YouTube recently) but this one is too funny.

Note: Because of slow loading times on some of your browsers, I am just putting this in as a link. Click right here.

VD Is For Everybody

This is a PSA (Public Service Announcement) from 1969 that’s meant to let you know that, well…, VD is for everybody.

Seriously, the stuff you can find on YouTube is staggering. The studios don’t have a fucking chance!

Las Vegas Stories

When I first arrived in Los Angeles in the Seventies, it was very typical to hear New Yorkers like myself comment on the unreality of it all. I remember saying myself that I spent hours looking behind every building, looking to see if they were propped-up false fronts.

Okay, so I wasn’t very original.

But all of this palls completely when faced with the complete unreality that is Las Vegas.

Okay, so I’m aware that this also isn’t an original statement. Every tourist in the world seems to be taking pictures of the fake Statue of Liberty outside of one casino/hotel, or the fake Sphinx outside of another one. The really impressive thing about all of this is that they seem to be taking picture of it to preserve the touching memories, not because they are totally cynical about it.

It boggles the mind.

Yesterday I checked their Yellow Pages. There are almost twelve pages of check cashing (called “Payday”) and Pawnbrokers. It’s a place where it seems that if you aren’t giving your money away to someone else, you are being positively Unamerican. Is it simply lack of access that prevents Al Queda from blowing the place to smithereens? Or do they secretly harbor the desire to get that big casino payoff, or ride on the Monorail past the Paris Hotel and stare at the fake Eiffel Tower?

The town completely creeps me out.

On the other hand, since I’m here in Lost Wages (sorry sorry, old joke there) to attend the NAB convention, I don’t really see much of the town. I’m too busy in the middle of the Las Vegas Convention Center.

Much interesting here at NAB. I’ll report on that some other time.

Tell Me this Isn’t Cool!!

www.humanclock.com

Every minute of every day. Someone has taken a picture with the time in it — 3:39, 4:26, etc. Some of them are really clever. Some are very straightforward. Doesn’t matter. It’s a pretty cool clock.

Easy Shot

In regards to Dick Cheney shooting his hunting partner, the easy joke is that “If this is how he treats his friends, just don’t get on his bad side.”

The real comment, though, is that when you’re the second most powerful man in the USA (some might claim that he’s the first) then you can pretty much do whatever the heck you want and then deal with the consequences later.

I remember this really trashy movie years ago, called THE BETSY. As I remember, it was about a Detroit auto family (back when that meant something) and how they could get away with anything because they controlled the town — sorta like the Ewings in Dallas, right? [A diversion -- I saw the film in Times Square, and there's one scene where a husband comes back unexpectedly and starts walking up this huge sprial staircase to his bedroom where his wife is screwing around with her brother or some such thing. With each step, the audience became more and more restless, calling out to the screen: "Oh, no. Don't go up there. DON'T GO UP THERE!!!"]

In any case, the point was that those who were in power operated with a different set of rules than the rest of us. That will, of course, be of no surprise to anyone who has lived in a monarchy or a dictatorship. The big deal, however, about a democracy is that ain’t supposed to happen.

Sure. Sure.

In any case, Cheney continues to demonstrate that he believes that the rules are for other people, and that hunters who run countries can do anything they want (he paid his missing hunting stamp after the fact, by the way). Just like a monarchy. Or a dictatorship. Or reality.

You Know You’re Busy When…

There’s nothing I like more than wasting my time doing blog entries. It’s such a wonderfully wasteful use of my time. It’s not like there are more than ten or fifteen of you who actually read these entries, but I love doing them.

It’s so much more interesting than finishing reports or grading papers (not that I actually assign papers, but never mind details; this is a world where fiction can pass for fact in the halls of publishing, so don’t worry).

So, you know you’re busy when you can’t find time to do a blog entry in two weeks during winter break!!

Nothing gets done in Los Angeles from Xmas until New Year. In fact, very little gets done in all of December!

I did see a few movies and I did fly back and forth to New York to bury my Dad and help my Mom. I did try and juggle some reports and hire some teachers. But I spent over a solid day of flying time and didn’t find the time to read one book??? Whazzup with that?

An interesting thing happened to my Mom as she was cleaning up my Dad’s drawers — cleaning out old socks and the like. She found an envelope with some cash in it — not much, just about fifty bucks. But she didn’t know that my Dad had stashed it there.

Then she found another one.

And another one.

Then she found one behind the bed end table.

And some more in the sock drawer.

By the time she was done, she had found $1900 in a ton of envelopes.

I’m told that one of the things that is not uncommon in Alzheimer’s patients is that they will squirrel things away — money, change, keys, etc. I don’t know if this is true, but he must have been doing this for years.

In any case, the good thing is that my Mom’s got some money to help her through these times when the paperwork for pensions and life insurance etc. take forever to go through.

$1900. Out here, you could easily go for… oh… two weeks on that.