“Hey guys! This new DVD came in. I wonder what’s on it.”

“Aaarraararararargggggg…g.g.g…..”

@Dan: You, sir, say brilliant things. It’s why Martha Stewart follows you. She knows your wisdom can penetrate even her hardest exterior. Also, her anus.

@Dana: Good call on Pulp Fiction. See, I feel like Reservoir Dogs had a reserved sense of cool. But since then, Tarantino (whose work I still love) cannot contain himself or his worst instincts. He oversaturates his work with “cool.” It’s why half of Inglourious Basterds works (for me), and why half of it is outright ludicrous.

@Josh: Yes. Reserve the cool. Make sure the cool serves the purpose. Make sure the purpose doesn’t serve the cool.

@Maggie/Rick — please do not explode in girl rage. Nobody wants that. I mean, unless you’re going to film it. Then, y’know, go for it!

– c.

Last night my partners and I were having a bit of an impromptu development session for our next project, and after they spent more than 2 hours forcing me to let go of a particular Darling, we found that the whole concept opened wide for our creative members to spew forth.

It was hard to let go of that one cool piece of the puzzle, but I’ll be dipped if the project doesn’t have ten times the potential of success now than it did before last night.

The other problem with the cool shit? It consumes all your attention — you’re in love with that particular Fonzerelli chunk of cool, and it keeps you from seeing all the other cool all around you. Sometimes you gotta step out on your cool steady and have you a little strange. Suddenly cool in all its infinite variance jumps out at you. I was stuck on my current WIP — needed a bridge between a couple storylines and couldn’t get there with the charcters I had, but I loved those mother fuckers. Then I did the Hilary’s Scar piece — made up Bahram Lafitpour for that and, in the words of Hans Landa, THAT’S A BINGO. He’s just what I need over in the WIP.

Cool is everywhere. But if you’re too focused on the cool you got, you may miss the cool you need.

Dan

Luckily, I have a pair of partners that help keep me on the straight and narrow. Jason calls Shenanigans every time I try to introduce an element to a project that I’ve fallen in love with simply because of the coolness factor.

On the other end of things, my wife is not at all reluctant to point out when I swing the other way and begin to over-think things to the point of stripping all of the cool out of an idea for the sake of logical conclusions.

I’ve found that a proper balance for me is to have a cool shit concept like “geriatric super-heroes in a nursing home” (a project actually in development) and allow only a handful of smaller cool fragments to glom onto the project.

If you’re eating shark meat sushi, you don’t want to cover it in jalapeno jelly and garlic croutons. Sure, it’s all cool and funky, but it just turns your meal into an inedible pile of Japa-Greco-Mex mush.

I certainly can — what do you want to know about the emotional core?

– c.