*smells the air*

Did something die in here?

Why did someone leave a double-headed dildo in the sink? It’s…covered in… marzipan and cake batter? *licks it* Yes, yes. Marzipan and cake batter. That’s definitely it.

Is that…

Is that blood on the curtains?

Goddamn. You leave this place behind for a week, and a handful of deviant hooligans just run a train on it. It looks like Snuff Film In Wonderland around here. A gently listing hamster wheel in the corner (sans hamster, a mystery I do not care to answer), a pair of ventriloquist dummies peering out from behind the heating vents, and the distant discordant noise of calliope music. And that smell. It’ll never come out.

Well. The maid is not going to be pleased. She’ll get an extra big tip this week, if you know what I mean.

Get it? Get what I mean? See what I did there?

Oh, stop it. It means I’m going to give her five extra dollars. Pull your dripping chin out of the gutter. Foul-minded mutant.

What I’m trying to say is, holy shit, I’m back from Wild Mormonia, fresh from the Liberal Elite Outpost that is The Park City Snowpocalypse of the Sundance Film Festival 2010. Presumably you already saw my after-report on the Sundance Screenwriters Lab, but if you didn’t, it’s right over there. When the Lab had completed, we were birthed cruelly into the world and thrust headlong — squalling and trying to use the umbilicus like a rope to pull ourselves back into the warm and comfortable womb — into the madness that is the Sundance Film Festival 2010.

So, let’s talk about that. Painting With Shotguns-style. Boom.

Snowblind And Slushfooted

Park City puts about the best face on winter that you can imagine. It snowed a whole helluva lot while out there (anywhere from a couple inches to a foot over each 24-hour period), and since it basically doesn’t melt, that means it just builds up and up and up. Fresh powder atop old snow never lets the place feel too dirty, though the sidewalks and streets eventually coalesce into a gooey, gray-snot slush bog that will eat your feet if you’re not careful. (Seriously, the slush puddles are like some devious D&D trap for confused Los Angelinos; they are mysteriously the same color as the asphalt, so you think you’re about to step on roadway terra firma and really you go calf-deep into a frozen slurry of filthy wintermuck.)

Winter there has a certain charm: gently falling snow, a faint wind, lots of light (like the eerily snaking ski slopes illuminated at night, leading directly into town).

So, yes — it puts the best face on winter.

But let’s be honest. To me that’s like saying, “It puts the best face on Charlie Manson.” You can dress that dude up in a suit and put some concealer over that Swastika on his forehead, but in the end he’s still Charlie Manson. He’s still going to shit in the punchbowl.

I am not a fan of winter.

The snow is pretty, but you stand in it for an hour, and that stops mattering. You almost lose your footing (nearly shattering your ass-bone on the icy, slush-slick sidewalks) and winter’s beauty and grace quickly tally up to a grand illusion. The traffic snarls, not just because there’s a whole lot of it but also because all of it has to wind its way through snowy, gooey streets. You saunter beneath icicles that, were they to fall, they could pierce the skull of a Kodiak bear and pin him to the concrete.

I can’t help but wonder what a Sundance would look like when it wasn’t hip-deep in winter.

So, yes. Sundance. Winter. They’re probably inextricably bound at this point, so what use is there in complaining? It’s pretty. Shut up.

Horde And Throng

Way I see it, you get two types of people at the Festival.

One: people who love films.

Two: people who love film culture (read: celebrities, parties, etc).

In the great Ven diagram, there surely exists a reasonable group of people who swim in the commingled waters of both ponds, but in general, I figure it’s good for you to know which you are and plan accordingly.

Me, I was present for opening weekend and the two days preceding it. It gets busy. In the daytime, I’d say the “film lovers” outnumber the “culture hounds.” Lots of packed buses and screenings and wait lines for tickets. When night falls, the streets get fucking busy. The Beautiful People emerge. The culture hounds take to the streets. Parties, music, snow, taxis, limos, madness. Not really my thing, though it might’ve been more my thing had I been there with more people. I did know people there, but getting in touch with them was…

Well –

The Mighty Oak Has Fallen

My unabashed tech-love for the iPhone was crushed beneath the bootheel of Sundance. The iPhone service out yonder can eat a dick. I don’t know on whose shoulders the blame must fall, but I’ll just let the shotgun spray of rage take down both AT&T and Apple, thanks.

Seriously, it blew. I guess it’s because everybody and their goddamn Labradoodle has an iPhone out there, but you’d think someone would plan accordingly to have a solid network running. You could literally look at the phone and watch service yoink up and down as if on a yo-yo string. 3G! Five bars! Zero bars! E! Twenty bars! No service! Battery low! Wireless! Existential dread! I’d try to get in touch with people, and… bzzt, good luck with that shit. Text messages would be cast out into the ether, as useful and as recognizable as one mote of snow among millions. I’d leave the town proper to go back to my hotel and — bing! Three voicemails! Three missed calls! New text messages! It was as if the pony-riding mail carrier came hurrying up just as the sun was setting –

“Hey, here’s a message for you. The man with the donkey wants to meet you at 3PM by the Old Jail.”

“But it’s 9PM now.”

“Oooh. Sorry, pardner.”

Once in a while I’d see a pair of AT&T reps — two giggling girls in bright orange shirts — wandering the streets, and I wondered, how long would it be before someone cracked an icicle off a doorframe and jammed it in one of their ears? “Can you hear me now?” the killer would cry, knowing full well that he was cackling a Verizon catchphrase because, really, “There’s an app for that!” doesn’t really make much sense in the context of icicle-caused brain death, does it?

At the Filmmaker’s Lodge during the day (pictured), you could get reliable wi-fi, and at any given time you’d find dozens of iPhone refugees, huddled around the signal the way one might hunker near a campfire.

The industry loves the iPhone.

Which means the industry killed the iPhone service.

Speaking Of The Industry

A large proportion of the people at Sundance are in the industry. This makes sense when you look at it — when you add it all up, you get like, 150+ films there, and if each of those brings 10-100 people along for the ride, that right there is a not insignificant portion of the 40,000 people who show up.

Great thing about it is, it’s a very friendly and welcoming industry. Everybody is happy to talk to you. They want to know what films you’ve seen, what you liked, didn’t like, and so on. Actually, the first question someone usually asks is: “Do you have a film here?”

When I’d respond with, “No, but I’m just coming off the Screenwriters Lab, blah blah blah,” it amazed me how many people were aware of the Lab and its significance. Very exciting stuff, and I continue to feel crazy privileged.

Oh, I did see some, erm, “celebrities?” Short list: Kevin Sorbo, Josh Radnor, Mario Lopez — you know, the big fish. The true Hollywood players.

It’s funny, though, how often you hear, “So-and-So is a dick!”

“Michael Moore is a dick!”

“Dax Shephard is a dick!”

“Tommy Lee Jones is a dick!”

On the one hand, I get it. Last thing you really want is to be swamped by people who probably don’t give that much of a shit about you — they just give a shit that you’re Somebody. Alternately, you paint with too broad a brush, and suddenly you’re alienating real, actual fans by brushing them off and trying to get to your restaurant on time. When I saw Josh Radnor, he stopped every three feet to take a picture or sign something, smiling and gracious the whole time. I’m not some rabid Josh Radnor fan (ignore the posters on my wall, shut up OMG SQUEE he’s so kewt), but I have new respect for the guy because he knows where his cred comes from. His cred comes from the fans, because without them, who is he?

Actually, I’ll say that at Sundance, one of the best things is the shit you overhear. The buses are great for this. It’s a cross-pollination of insightful film commentary and dipshits dissecting film with incisive criticism like, “That movie was fuckin’ stupid.”

Thanks, Ebert, for that thought-provoking review.

Oh, Right, The Films

I was planning on seeing 10+ films, and I think I saw… what, five? Disappointing, I know. Thing is, I was only there for a handful of days and was trying to cram way too much into that timeframe.

In order of Least Awesome to Most Awesome –

Howl: I’m impressed that they really went for it with this movie, I really am. Franco as Ginsburg comes alive; his performance is astonishing, and him simply reading the poem aloud through the film makes me fall back in love with a poem that, honestly, I had dismissed in my disdain for poetry. But the project fails to come together. It started as a documentary, and then added in actors to portray the characters, but only in the context of documented artifacts (recordings and transcripts), and then further went on to add… animation? The court case portrayed adds an interesting and complex layer, but it’s all steak and no sizzle. The narrative portion would’ve felt stronger had it actually been a narrative portion rather than an acted rehash of documentary materials (I’d rather have just seen Ginsburg himself). The animated portions, which easily comprise 30% of the film, are almost entirely CGI (which is jarring and arbitrary; why not hand-drawn?) and seems only cursorily married to the poem itself. As I say: it fails to come together. The animation in particular is troubling. It has no place there, and it feels like nobody really committed to it.

Lourdes: This is a nice little film, but I’m just going to have to bow out and say, “It’s good, but just not for me.” It’s quiet, slow, thoughtful — which translates to me having a hard time keeping my eyes open for the first half of the film, which drags. Set in and around the miracle-factory of Lourdes, it aims to have a subtle run-through of satire, but it’s so subtle you really have to comb the material to find it. Satire for me works when it’s not-so-subtle. The characters are nice, but the film only picks up (and even then, at a slow walk) in the second half, when the miracles start happening. It’s a nice film. It is. But it isn’t a horse I can ride.

Four Lions: This film’s a stone’s throw from outright excellence. Imagine, if you will, a sincere, humanist, satirical take on terrorism. Suicide bombers in particular. As Chris Morris, the director, said during the film’s Q&A (paraphrased), “Take four average blokes and have them plan something and they’ll probably fuck it up.” That idea applies here to four wannabe Jihadists in London who want to martyr themselves and get to Heaven. They’re dipshits. Everyone around them is a dipshit. It’s equal turns hilarious and sad and strange, and those tonal shifts are brave, if a little hard to navigate. (Also hard to navigate: muddy accents. Some possibly great lines were lost on me — and I think the audience in general — simply because I couldn’t understand them.) It’s a really interesting film, though the one thing that actually prevents it from being truly brilliant is the fact that the characters are ultimately hollow. We never get insight into who they really are or why these Londoners are so attracted to the idea of martyring themselves before Allah, which is a shame.

Animal Kingdom: This fucker is a gut-punch. I think of it now and I get this feeling of incredible dread. Australian crime film, totally bad-ass, really grim stuff — and not grim in the way that something like Reservoir Dogs was. This is a deeper layer, a septic infection that really pulls at you. These characters are fully-formed and not at all caricatures, which makes their behaviors and fates all the more troubling. It’s like a roller coaster ride where the track takes you only downward, downward, downward — never up. You don’t know what specific misery awaits for these characters, but you know it’s coming. Your balls draw up. Your sphincter tightens so hard it might snap like a broken rubber band. This is hard stuff. It’s also really brilliant. David Michôd is to be commended for this.

Boy: And yet, nothing I saw really pleased me as much as Boy, the new film from Taika Waititi (aka Taiki Cohen, who I assume is half-Jewish, half-Maori, easily the weirdest genetic broth in the history of mankind). Go watch the trailer. It won’t do it justice, but it’s a good start. The film is sweet, funny, and often a little bit fucked up. The kid who plays the titular character (“Boy”), James Rolleston, was hired on a Friday and started shooting on the following Monday, and was not an actor, but he nails it. Waititi’s last film, Eagle Vs. Shark, really failed to manifest, and I think ended up being more a mish-mash of tired Napoleon Dynamite notions. This film, however, fires on all cylinders. I suspect it’s intensely personal for the director, much as he seems to claim it’s not (during the Q&A he said it wasn’t autobiographical, but then went on to say that it’s set where he grew up, that the father character was just like his character, and that the protagonist lives a life much like Waititi’s own), and all this comes out. It’s a world where magical realism doesn’t quite exist, but instead lives in its shadow. Great stuff. I look forward to seeing this again. For the record, Waititi plays the father, and he’s great in that role. Oh, and Taika came through the Sundance Screenwriters Lab. How cool is that? An exciting legacy.

I did attend the Slamdance Filmmaker’s Summit, which was great. Even if Soderburgh didn’t show.

What Now?

So, I’m back. What now?

Well, I go back to blogging. I have to clean up the blood and cake icing from those miscreants what took over me space over the last 10 days.

I got line edits back from Super Agent Stacia Decker, so that’s my first priority is to bang them out and get this novel up and running.

Obviously we’ve a head of steam on the script — I’ve got to finish transcribing my notes and making sense of all of it, but all told, I have an alarming and almost eerie sense of clarity regarding the script and it’s troubles. Eager to jump on that, too, and knock out a draft over the course of February, then maybe a second draft soon after. We may try to have the right script up and running to submit to the Director’s Lab in June, if we determine it to be a good fit, time-wise.

If I go back to the Sundance festival in the next year(s), I’ll be sure to plan better and not come off a five day introspective think-tank stint beforehand, because holy shit, that’s jarring.

So, that’s that. I’ll be around.

What’d I miss, peeps?

But to tell you what happened?

Impossible.

Impossible in part because words cannot do it justice. How do you accurately describe magic? How can you plainly discuss the connection between people and the energy of the story? How do you put in words the truth of a miracle?

Impossible in part because it’s not fair to even try. It’d be unfair to [Choose Your Own Deity] to describe [That Deity] in the garbled, gutter-fed garbage tongue of the human language. Surely you know about that scientific principle that by examining an experiment you affect the experiment? Different but similar principle at work, now: by describing the experiment that is the Lab, you basically take a big effluent dump on the experiment that is the Lab and you steal some of its precious magic.

Put differently:

The First Rule of Screenwriter Club Is You Don’t Talk About Screenwriter Club.

So. Just know that it’s got all the magic and weirdness of a shamanic headtrip and that words will only muck it up. Just shut up and drink the tea, says the ayahuascadero.

Distilled down, our one advisor Erik Jendresen perhaps said it best (and I’m paraphrasing, perhaps): “It is a place of pure purpose and impeccable intent.”

That said, I can tell you some of the things I learned — or, at least, some of the things I think I learned since my brain is still combing through the sand and finding many gems — during this process. I’ll list these barking puppies in no particular order.

Ready?

Let’s do it.

Story Is King…

It’s clear that in “show business,” that term takes a special life. It’s often very much about the show, and very much about the business, but nowhere in there is this element of story. And so, often enough, story is lost.

And that’s sad. Story matters. Story is everything. It’s why we do this, it’s why we take ourselves and others on this journey: because we want to convey a story and through it evoke feeling and thought and other abstractions. Good stories are keenly experienced; bad or non-existent stories rest on the road like roadkill.

Every meeting was about getting to the essence of that story. Not that there exists only one way through to it: every advisor had his or her own way into the story, but no matter the path in, it’s a path you must carve yourself. What is it about? Why do you want to tell this? What is your purpose? What is the voice of the story? Story, story, story, story.

…And Characters Are Those Who Serve The King

I took that away from the process. Yes, story is everything, but something still has to shoulder that heavy burden, and the characters are the ones who do so. They are your voice. They are your puppets. They are the vehicle by which we take this journey. For our project, HiM, we did a great deal of work on the story world and the overarching story itself, but we clearly, plainly, obviously did not do enough work on the characters who operate in this story, who manifest the story for the audience. Sure, we’ve done a story bible, a game bible, we’ve done outlines and treatments and five drafts of the script…

But now? It’s time to do a character bible.

Nobody Tells Stories The Same Way

I come here to this blog and I give you Ways To Tell Stories. It may sound like I’m talking down to you — and, let’s be honest, I am, because I’m just a giant dickface. But let’s be clear: I’m only giving you a glimpse of the possibility, I’m only giving you a place to start — or, more specifically, a place to start asking questions.

One thing you learn is, there’s more than one way to tell a story. Or, put differently, there’s more than one way to sacrifice a bleating goat to the Ancient Muses. Hooked knife? Catgut cord? Hand grenade? “Skiing accident?” So many options!

Wait. Where was I?

Right. Stories.

The advisors are great, because they don’t agree with each other. And these are all accomplished creators, all people who respect one another’s work and craft. One approaches the problem with a hammer, the other with a wrench. One advisor doesn’t necessarily know what the story’s “about” at first, while another advisor must know the answer to that question before approaching the first blank page. This is true of beginning the story, of finishing the story, of rewriting the story. But, but, but…

But You Still Need To Constantly Revisit The Process

The advisors still examine the fundamentals. They don’t reject any one thing out of hand. They’re still keenly aware of the craft and the process and its many moving parts. A lot of writers will make a decision about telling a story by ignoring those many moving parts, those fundamentals, and that’s a way into disaster.

These people have made choices as to how to tell their stories, but these choices are made intelligently, with all aspects understood — further, they recognize that the process changes and shifts and may become a whole other thing when the next project comes along. What’s good for the goose is not always what’s good for the gander, but they damn sure still know what a “goose” and “gander” are, and they know all the things one can possibly know about those animals.

Yes, one may choose to begin the story by first understanding the characters, while another may begin the story by first understanding one of the story’s greater concepts (“What’s It About?”), but these are conscious, informed choices. They know character. They know dialogue. They aren’t ignorant of the choices, of the constituent parts.

They have become masters of the craft by mastering each element.

Only then do you have the tools in your toolbox from which to pick and choose.

Criticism Is Best When It Is A Conversation

I expected the criticism to be hard. Even though I intuitively understood some of the areas that weakened our script, I knew there’d be other criticisms, and further, criticism is really never easy to hear.

Except…

At the Lab, it was easy to hear.

It took me a little while to figure out why that was.

First, it’s because we engaged in the critical process as a conversation. We sat with one advisor at a time, and they didn’t begin rattling off issues — we began a conversation about… well, who knows? Sometimes about the project. Sometimes about something related, or something unrelated. It was never a lesson plan, it was never a pedantic or pegagogic experience. They treated it like a conversation between peers, between storytellers. Yes, implicit in that is how one party is more experienced than the other, and thus it was about engaging and transferring wisdom more than it was “telling” or “teaching.” As such, the critical elements came out naturally — it drew it out of the work and out of our own mouths rather than as something “delivered from on high.” Their job was to help us tell the story we want to tell. Further, their job was to facilitate on our own the understanding of the frailties of the work.

Second, criticism is easier in person. Reading something has no context, no emotion. Sometimes, that’s necessary — but here you have aspects of body language and laughter and periods of thought glimpsed through furrowed brow. Text on a page is cold. A conversation is warm. Text is passive. A conversation is active. You learn more through conversation. Compare it to being handed a picture of a forest, or being able to walk through the same forest. One will do it some justice, but the other is a fuller, richer experience. You find things you don’t expect. You kick over logs. You find what lies beneath and what takes wing above.

Third, the advisors were clearly willing to learn about us and the project rather than just approaching it straightaway. That give-and-take really matters, and it helps to draw out the problems in the script the same way you might milk a snake of its venom. (And “milk a snake of its venom” is not a euphemism for masturbation, unless you really, really need it to be. I leave it in your capable hands. Erm. Yeah. Shut up.)

The criticism was not hard to hear.

It was challenging, yes.

“Challenging” not as a synonym for “difficult,” but as an expression of, “I’d like to challenge you on this point, and I’d further like you to challenge yourselves.”

Sometimes, You Need The “Pause” Button

As a freelancer, it’s always go, go, go. It has to be. You need to eat. You need to get work. You need to ABW: Always Be Writing (put that coffee down, coffee is for penmonkeys only).

You don’t ever really slow down or stop.

And that’s a bad thing. Especially for big projects, projects of personal paramount importance. The Lab offered us that opportunity. It offered us the chance to exile ourselves from all the bullshit, to extract the signal from the noise just by dint of taking the time to really listen for it.

It’s womblike.

It’s a safe haven.

It’s a place to hit “pause” and do nothing but eat, drink, sleep and shit your story. (Okay, yeah, “shit your story” sounds a little egregious. But, fuck it, it’s right on. You can’t take in the story and process it without somehow purging it back into the world, and that’s what I’m talking about. Unless you’d prefer “vomit your story,” but I don’t think that’s a helluva lot better.) Really — that’s the process, that’s the trick. We took five days and lived with our work. We lived with the things we love about it, and we lived with the things we didn’t like, and through that, we gained focus, clarity, energy, and even frustration. But frustration is good. The bees stir, and when they do, you know you’ve done the right thing. Sometimes, you have to kick over the hive and live with the consequences of that.

Writing Is Rewriting Is Rewriting Is Rewriting

Writing is the easy part.

Everything else is rewriting.

You better learn to love that.

You speak to these master storytellers, these professionals, and the one thing you talk about most is how the story lives in the rewrite. We’re talking about people who have written classic films and stories — Out of Sight, The Fisher King, Band of Brothers, Cronicas, Menace 2 Society – a whole goddamn insurmountable hill of brilliance that I’m barely cresting.

And those stories were all born in rewrites. Sometimes drastic rewrites. The process of how The Fisher King came to be is one where the script changed in dramatic ways, pinballing here and there until it arrived at the great film it became (a film that could not be made today, mind). You talk to these writers, and it’s five, ten, twenty full drafts — not “I wrote two, and then stopped.”

Now, what’s funny is, I might take back that aforementioned nugget: “Writing is the easy part.” I don’t know that it is. Writing that first time is a place of unending potential, and thus, of limitless fear and uncertainty. But rewriting is just an arrangement of those elements you worked so hard to put in play.

I’m starting to wonder that if, for me, rewriting is now the easy part.

Because, I gotta tell you, after this whole process? I am fucking geeked to rewrite this script with Lance.

Just The Tip Of The Iceberg

This is just the beginning. I haven’t even begun to process all the little miracles that glommed together to form the Screenwriters Lab. I have a notebook full of possibility (thanks to Rob Donoghue), but that notebook does not comprise the total animal. I’m the blind man feeling the contours of the elephant. Right now, I’ve just got the trunk, the eye, the tail, or some other unfortunate part that we won’t talk about lest the elephant get a good lawyer and sue me for sexual harassment.

I could write you a thousand thoughts about the last five days, and I’d still have only grasped a part of the elephant.

What I do know is this:

The process feels unrepeatable. It feels as precious as a lightning strike.

It isn’t.

I know it isn’t, because they do this year after year, and they bottle that lightning every goddamn time. Hell, a number of our advisors were once fellows going through the program like us. It works. It works again and again.

And that’s one thing I take away from this.

Future projects need to experience a process like this.

You need to hit “pause” and get inside the skin and bones of your story.

And you shouldn’t do it alone.

I think we all need to find a collective of writers. Not just virtually — obviously, a number of you are gifted creators and friends at the same time, but the virtual space is good for only so much.

I wonder if that’s a step that could be taken: a once a year thing, a thing out there in the real world in a place of exile, a safe haven to embrace story and the creation of it.

Every project I have, I want to put through these paces.

I told a story the last night we were there that I think best exemplifies my experience –

When I was a kid, I saw a bird in a field. I thought something was wrong with it. It looked sick. I went to the bird intending to pick it up, sure of what I was seeing, and then my hands found nothing but a gray rock sitting in the dirt and grass.

Later, they gave me glasses, and the world came into focus. “You just needed spectacles, dumb-ass.” Oh.

That’s how I feel about this. With our project, we just needed a pair of eyeglasses. A way to focus. A way to find clarity.

We were so sure that our project was a bird, and really, it was just a rock.

It’s time to make this motherfucker fly.

(Don’t think I’m done talking about this process, either. I’ve got a billionty more thoughts on the subject. I want to work through it, to constantly hold it up to the light and see what it is. Further, I’ve got to pimp the great people I met, from the advisors to the fellows — I was honored to be in refined company and rarefied air. Lance’s 2-year-old son said a great thing about his father: “Daddy’s going to Sundance to dance with the big kids.” That’s a beautiful thing, and is wisdom from the mouth of innocence. I feel like I got a chance to dance with the big kids, and what a dance it was. Lance will also be putting up his thoughts over at Filmmaker magazine, so I’ll link to those elements when they appear.)

Imagine that in this room is a collection of writers.

Imagine that the logs in the fireplace pop while outside, snow falls.

Imagine that the only thing they want to talk about is the craft of writing and storytelling.

That was probably the baddest-ass part of the yesterday — a safe headspace where you can go and ask questions of those who have come before you, those writers who have been storytelling professionally for decades, those writers who have helped to shape and define those stories you love.

It’s powerful shit, people. This whole Sundance Lab thing has been a great way to slow things down, to hit the “pause” button and hunker down over your work like a bird at a nest and do nothing but live with that project. And to not be alone during this process, to have people who sit there with you and answer questions and call you on your bullshit and help you draw out the best version of your story –

Well, that’s just crazygonuts good.

Anyway, today’s the last full day here at the screenwriters lab, which is a shame, but there comes the time when one has to reenter the atmosphere. It’s been this weird time travel bubble here where it feels like I’ve been here an hour, and been here a year all at the same time. And while I’d love to sit comfy in this womb forever, I’m also super geeked to get born back to reality and start instituting changes not just here, but in all the work going forward — new ways and old tools for storytelling.

More tomorrow, methinks. I’ll be down in Park City at that point, and should have a little more time to get caught up. (Don’t think I’m willfully ignoring comments or mails or anything; this is a pretty intensive process where we are rarely in our own space, which is ultimately a very good thing. Or, alternately, perhaps I think you smell a little, and I’m afraid to tell you.)

I’m a little more cogent this morning than I was during the previous posts, as I’m not writing this at the end of a day, when my brainsponge is swollen to capacity. It’s morning, and the sponge is still oozing Narrative Possibility into my synaptic channels, but at least I’m fairly confident that I’m not jabbering at you in burbles and chirps.

We’re midway through the Lab at this point, and I won’t bore you with details yet (plus, I gotta be out the door in a handful), but so far it’s been a punch to the cerebellum. That sounds like a bad thing, but it’s most certainly not. That punch jars loose a lot of loose nonsense. It offers quick clarity, the same that might come with, say, an adrenalin rush.

Four advisor meetings so far, two more to go. We were warned that it’s possible to come away from this process confused, and that’s okay — different advisors have different opinions, and by showing you the many facts of your work, you may not know what face is the right one.

That hasn’t been our experience so far.

The meetings have been complete layer cake: each piece contributing to the end result, a cohesive thing that tastes of buttercream and story rather than sewage clots and uncertainty. Or something. See earlier note, brain asplodey.

It teaches me that I don’t know jack about jack, and that’s actually more enlightening than it is troubling. Because if you feel like you know everything and you’re at the top of your game, you can’t really get better. I know there’s room to grow, and a lot of old preconceptions that have to tumble by the wayside, but that means the work we’re doing now will only improve.

That’s pretty dang sexy.

I’ll get deeper into that when I have the time and the brainspace to do so — but, for now, I’m just excited to be in these conversations (and that’s what they are, conversations; nobody is speaking down to anybody, this isn’t a teacher-student relationship but rather an experienced writer-less experienced writer relationship), I’m excited to be around such talented peeps.

Oh, and Utah’s alcohol laws don’t suck as much anymore.

All right. Time to go get my head straight. Oh! And pants. I should probably wear pants. I mean, just for the social propriety, sure, though it looks pretty chilly out there today.

Fact: I am tired.

Fact: We spent five hours today locked in intense discussion over the nitty and the gritty of our script. Two advisors of much capability and wisdom coming at the project from two different angles, both awesome, both otherworldly, both super-crazy-holy-shit-helpful.

Fact: My brain is full of ideas. These ideas are competing for dominance in some mad Darwinian Thunderdome. A thousand ideas enter, twelve are allowed to leave.

Fact: Seen three movies today. I will literally see more films this week than I probably saw during my entire 2009. At least, theatrically.

Fact: The food is lovely.

Fact: The room is also lovely. If I had to define it’s style, I would call it “Kokopelli Pimp.” Or, “Tribal Ski Beast.”

Fact: I am surrounded by talent on all sides. It equally buoys and burdens.

Fact: Who the hell are you people? Who let you post blog entries while I was gone? What was I thinking? What is wrong with me?

(Fact: Actually, nice work, people. Even if someone did leave pubic hairs in the dishwasher. That’s just weird. Animals.)

Fact: All day I have been redefining what it means to be a writer. Expect this madness and uncertainty to continue well into this year and perhaps decade, and I will most certainly use this bloggeryspace to mouth off about my nascent mumblyheadedness.

Fact: OIJ&JUHHERW&JKWERJWER7ert

CARRIER LOST

NO CARRIER

It’s been a long day.

The kind of day that begins at 3AM.

The kind of day that, at 3AM, decides that your coat zipper is broken and you best find a new coat to bring. Pronto, biznatch.

The kind of day that involves hours of travel on every end.

But, it’s also been a bad-ass day.

I shan’t say much at present. Just know that I am nestled in the middle of the mountains, surrounded by three feet of snow and icicles that are literally four inches in diameter and about four to five feet in length.

Do not stand underneath these.

I am in the presence of awesome people; some are lab runners, some are lab advisors, others are lab fellows.

I am tired.

And tomorrow, the script gets a right good flogging from our first advisor.

I am, strangely, looking forward to it.

I think I’m ready? The first five days are the smackdown. A lineup of incredible screenwriters takes us and our project by the throat and shows us the light. (And it is an incredible lineup with a venerable pedigree. Narnia, Potter, Out of Sight, A Perfect World, Band of Brothers, JFK, Legends of the Fall, and more.) Then, three-four days of the festival proper, in which I’m cramming in… I think about 13 movies in a three-day period.

I had to buy a new keyboard (external) for my laptop, since the lappy is shedding keys the way our Belgian shepherd sheds his coat.

I got the script printed out, bound up, ready to rock.

I’ve got some airplane books. Thought about bringing King’s Under the Dome, but that book weighs about as much as two toddlers duct-taped together (and each holding a brick). Economy says I can carry more books if I don’t bring that one. I’m almost done Finch, and so that should remain at home. I might bring Allan Guthrie’s Slammer, Nancy Mauro’s New World Monkeys, and Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker.

I cobbled together a business card –

I took Will’s advice and dropped that drop shadow (er, that’s not actually redundant, though it sounds it) in the final version that the printer has. Funny story about the card actually, and how’s it’s largely an accident caused on behalf of my wif’e’s brilliant intervention. I was just going to do cool text on a backdrop, maybe a texture, and be done with it. She said, “I like that one image of you.” So I grabbed it and dragged it onto the screen (card done in Photoshop), and the image needed to be resized. But we looked at it, and Michelle was like, “That actually looks kind of cool.” Then, when I placed text, the forehead crinkle served as a nice flourish between the texty bits, so… well. There it is.

I’ve still got some more stuff to do (pick up jacket from cleaners, find Plane Snacks, confirm a few things). Otherwise, we’re clear to depart.

Let’s talk about what happens whilst I’m gone.

I’ve no idea how much time I’ll have available for bloggery-do.

I’ll have the iPhone, of course, and you might turn your gaze toward my Tumblr stream. If I take snaps, I’ll live-blog there.

I’ll try to tweet. (Amazing that words like “tweet” are now part of the language, and nobody considers this strange. “I’ll tweet to you later.” “Okay, weirdo.”)

Whatever I can get posted here, I’ll post.

Of course, you’ve got a whole crazy lineup of material coming your way from Minds Brighter Or Weirder Than Mine.

All that said:

Laters, peeps. (I’m actually not gone until 3AM, but, I’ll be running around with my head on fire before then.)

More specifically, it  smells like gym class. That mix of sweat, rubber, and bleach. Lots of bleach. So much bleach, it withers the nose hairs — stay in there too long, and the polyester in your gym shorts will start to peel and blister, as if held just away from a match flame.

On the walls, monitors. Different stations playing. One plays an odd, almost jarring assortment of music videos: Megadeth, Lady Gaga, Duran Duran, Black Crowes. Another plays Fox News; perhaps I could imagine pumping my legs and chasing down a pack of fleeing Birthers, or fake-biking over the sluggish bodies of Teabaggers. (Then again: Shep Smith. You kinda have to love Shep Smith.) A third, sports. A fourth, I don’t even know.

Nobody speaks.

It’s just the squeaking of machines. The panting. The grunting. The Megadeth and Duran Duran. The fans whirring.

I need my iPod — well, iPhone — or I’ll go fucking batty.

I bring my own beat. The “Ezzerzize” Playlist. Asteroids Galaxy Tour, Cold Cut, Crystal Method, Jay-Z, Lady Sovereign, Nine Inch Nails, Santogold, the Ting Tings.

It puts me in the mode. Not the mood — the fucking mode. Goggles down. Robot heart, engaged.

Lets me tune out.

Lets me watch.

I watch the two dudes in love with their biceps. They don’t watch the women. They watch themselves. Were it possible, each would love to masturbate with the crook of his bemuscled arm, crushing his tiny penis beneath the stampede at the gun show. The walls have mirrors. These guys love that. If they were more honest with themselves, they’d just make out and get it over with.

I watch the two girls that never seem to be working out. They’re a little sweaty; hard not to be, since the place is a goddamn bog. These two, they orbit. They walk the channels. You see one on a machine, but then she’s like a ghost; gone a few seconds later, as if she never stepped onto it in the first place. Sometimes, I wonder: are they even here? Maybe they died here, years ago. Maybe their skeletons are in the foundation. These are just their ghosts — spectral gym birds, flitting to and fro. They’re not the only ones. Others wander, too. They stare. They seem lost. Wayward souls. Was there a fire, here? Are they all spirits?

I watch the man next to me. Mid-50s. He’s on the ellipticals. He’s pumping his legs like the pistons in a car. I’m surprised he hasn’t launched his shins up through his asshole. He’s wearing his mad dog face. That fucker’s running. He’s running far and fast. Is he running to? Or from? Either way, he puts my slugabed body to shame.

I watch the older woman in front of me. A stumbling, leisurely walk on the treadmill. She lifts up her shirt. Her body looks like wads of pale clay stuck to a crooked column; it’s all awkward lumps and pockets of adipose topography, hills and dales, buttes and valleys. To emphasize her hotness, she slaps her skin and laughs like a witch.

I watch the Gym Rats: guys and girls who are here every night, without fail. This is their kingdom. They strut like roosters. They lean on machines. They’re exercising more than their physical muscles: the social muscles must flex, too. Of course, most of them are out of shape.

I watch the girl a few machines over. Girl in green. Girl has hollow eyes. I don’t think she blinks. Maybe she can fire lasers out of those things.

I watch the really fat guy on the sit-up machine. He’s sweating buckets. His wife just stares at him like she hates him.

I’m sweating, too. Not buckets. Just a slow seep. Got a rag. Mop it up. Move on. Run, climb, bike — all fake, I’m going nowhere, but I feel the burn, and the device tells me I’m Doing Things like making revolutions or laps or burning calories or increasing my heartrate or feeding Third World children or catching MRSA.

We’re all hooked up to our devices. The machines, yes, but also: our iPods, our phones, our heart rate monitors, our pedometers.

Makes me wonder: are we all powering something? A sinister something? Does a Great Old One slumber beneath this place? Are our fevered, mechanized motions feeding it, somehow? Are we slaves to it, siphoning it devotion with every step? Maybe it’s not sinister at all. Maybe one day the roof will just come off the place, and a big colorful hot air balloon will rise over us, and a man in a top hat with bluebirds on his waxed mustache will wave down at us and shout, “Thank you, kind peoples, for helping me and my Mystery Balloon be back on the air currents to adventure! On to Great Xanadu! Goodbye! Goodbye…”

And he’ll throw us chocolate coins, which we’ll eat, which we’ll feel guilty for eating since, aren’t we supposed to be exercising and not eating candy?

…

Hour later, I’m done. Flesh red. No sweat, I think, except — y’know, lots of sweat.

Muscles sore.

Knees rough.

New sneakers came through, though. Blisters, begone.

No man in the balloon. No awakened Nyarlathotep.

Maybe tomorrow, when I go back.

For now, it’s out into the cold, which feels good.

Hey, listen. It’s nothing personal about your Mom. I’m sure she’s lovely. Yes, yes, I know, she makes a mean batch of chocolate chip cookies. But I gotta tell you, if she’s standing in the way of me and Hawaii, I’ma kill her. I’ll make it fast. Frying pan to the head or something. Whang! Then I’m on the plane, giggling like a tickled schoolgirl. Molesting the lai around my neck.

That’s all this post is. Me letting you know that, if I had to, I’d be willing to put your mother six feet deep to get me back in the tropical state of Hawaii.

I’m not really a beach person.

I fear the water like I fear the reaper’s scythe.

And yet, Hawaii changed me, man. It got in me. I opened my body and let its turtle spirit inside. I’m all like Mahalo, bitches. I can still smell the sand and the tropical flowers.

Winter freaks my shit out. Hawaii doesn’t have a winter. I mean, I guess it does — it rains a little more. But in January, it’s 70 degrees. They have mountains. And valleys. And a bazillion waterfalls. And whales. And giant tortoises. (And centipedes that could eat your face, but we won’t talk about that.) It makes me happy just thinking about it. Then I look outside, and I see the gunmetal nothing of the Pennsylvanian sky, and I just shit sadness. I literally shit sadness, and it looks like a puff of gray cotton, an old dude’s pubes, soaking and sodden with his own tears.

I want real Kona coffee. I want to smell flowers when I get off an airplane. I want words with few consonants and a fuckbasket full of apostrophes as if I’m in some crazy fantasy land (“Welcome to Ma’i'ohalo’ainai’punau’wi’ipi’ioo’oopoo!”). I want sun. I want warmth. I want rainforests and lava rocks and the fear that Pele herself might smite me for stealing volcanic dust in my shoes.

So I’m just giving you the head’s up, brah. I ain’t dicking around. I will collapse your mother’s trachea with a surfboard just to get back to Hawaii. I don’t even care what island. I want to frolic with the mongooses. I want to ride a giant Kalij Pheasant into the sunset. I want turtles all the way down. I want a loco moco as my home. I want to appreciate your kokua. And I will kill your mother to do it. So help me, I will kill her dead. Double-dead. Let her know. Let her know I’m coming for her. My surfboard is waxed. It thirsts for her lifeforce.

(For the record, I won’t really kill your Mom. She can take me. And no, we have no current plans to go back to the islands. Someday, though. Someday.)

Coming into Philadelphia last night, the plane hovered over very-low rain clouds, and the fiery orange and sickly pallid green lights of the city swam up through those clouds, diffusing the colors, making it look like we were hovering over sunken shipwrecks — some as barnacle-encrusted galleons whose chambers still glow with old fires, and some as fallen alien spacecraft, green light leaking from crooked vents. It was jarring. Surreal. Mixed up, yet peaceful at the same time. An underwater dream while flying in the sky.

That’s pretty much my headspace, even now.

See, the whole week was surreal.

Here I am, some addlepated jackass from the hills of Pennsyltucky. Next thing I know, I’m in LA. City of boxes. City of highways. City of strip malls. City of withered palms. City of deep-dish desperation and mile-high dreams. City of oh-won’t-you-entertain-me?

Coyotes. Smoke from distant brush fires. Orange skies. Traffic.

Everybody’s got a screenplay.

Everybody knows the Big One is coming.

It’s a bee-hive perched on the cliff cusp, tilting and teetering.

At first, I didn’t like it. The town unsettled me. It felt like the apocalypse. It felt like wandering a maze with no cheese at the end. All the cars. All the traffic lights. The starting, the stopping. The endless corners that look the same. You feel locked away in a dream, one of those dreams where you keep running but get nowhere fast.

Over time, though, it gets into you. Like a bedazzled tapeworm.

It feeds on you, and you start to like it.

You adapt. The surreality of the thing becomes engaging. The mind wanders. The same corners and endless streets have a hypnotic quality; the zoetrope of strip malls and storefronts unlocks your head, unfetters it.

And now, I kind of miss it. Don’t get me wrong. I’m happy to be home. I want to be here, not there.

Still. I never felt out of my element in LA. I don’t know what it is. I don’t really know why.

I go to New York, I can find that city intimidating. It has a size, a scope, an authenticity.

Why is it that LA, then, doesn’t intimidate me at all?

Anyway. Onto more practical discussion.

• First, travel. Travel sucks. Getting from This Coast to That Coast is a big punch to the perineum. (Literally; my taint kind of hurts from sitting in one position for so long. I was tempted in the airport to massage it gently, fingers in roving circles, but I think that might’ve gotten me kicked out.) It doesn’t help when a little thing called Tropical Storm Danny (aka Tropical Storm Dickbag) besieges the East Coast and makes air travel difficult. But, if you’re going to travel, please, let me shill for an airline. Southwest is about as close to air travel nirvana as you’re going to get flying coach. It’s still little more than a giant sky bus. You’re still crammed in a metal tube with a bunch of other bleating water buffalos. But they at least make it as pleasant as possible. They practically throw drinks and snacks at your mouth. That’s not great for your diabetes, no, but it’s nice that they’re not trying to charge you fifteen bucks for seven-and-a-half honey-roasted peanuts. The pilots and, what do you call them now, flight attendants? Sky helpers? Cloud attaches? Those people. They’re all very friendly. They update you as to what’s going on. And they did something I haven’t heard in… ten years: “If you look out the left side of the plane, you’ll see some cool shit.” Really? You actually take a moment to engage me? Jesus. Give these people your money. Oh, also: they’re one of the only airlines with something resembling a Passenger Bill of Rights in place. So you know you won’t be on the airstrip for untold hours. (One weird thing about Southwest: you don’t have assigned seats. You take a seat wherever you find one. That takes some getting used to.)
• My iPhone saved my life. Okay, not really. But it made this trip much more functional, much more organized, and much more amusing. I used it for directions. I used it for meeting reminders (using ToDo). It helped me receive updates to the schedule while we were “out in the field.” I used it to find restaurants. I watched episodes of Leverage on the plane (and how can that show not be an inspiration? It’s great, it’s on TNT, and it’s by a fellow game writer, John Rogers). A really, really excellent piece of tech. I’m sad I resisted it so long.
• Speak-a-LA-restaurants, I don’t know that it’s a food town like, say, San Francisco. Or even NYC. But, for all its sprawl and lack of really incredible and obvious choices, I didn’t have one bad meal there. It ain’t a cheap town, but you can eat well for not a lot of money.
• The business of being out there was a resounding success. We headed out there with a project that’s been growing for over two years, and only recently did we come to the conclusion that it’s a series. We went into some very high-level pitch meetings, and from most of them we got great response (and one response we always received: “We’ve never seen anything like this before”). We have a powerful team assembled behind this project, and I continue to be in awe of the creative power and energy brought to the table by these guys. (While I was flying, the team did two more meetings, and both meetings were considered a big thumbs-up. One meeting in particular was apparently a glowing spire of awesomeness — the executive responded very well to the project, and was eager to note where it would fit into their schedule. So, that’s only good news gospel right there.)
• Even cooler, I never felt nervous going into these meetings. I should have. This is way, way above my head. But it never felt like it. I think it’s because I have the uttermost confidence in this project, and I feel like we’ve really crafted something different. We know every crazy nook-and-cranny, so no question is a curveball. We know it’s engaging. We know it connects with people. And so it feels effortless to sit down and cheerlead for it.
• I have a lame array of images taken on the iPhone (not the phone’s strongest asset, the camera — then again, I’ve not found a camera on a phone I’ve really liked, yet), but you’ll have to wait for those.

In closing, Los Angeles is like a really crazy chick. You know she’s hot. You also know she’s deranged. She’ll cut you. She might have a gun hiding in there with her fake-ass sweater-monkeys. She’s a bad idea. But you cannot escape her gravity.

Or, maybe Los Angeles is like a David Lynch movie. (Frankly, Mulholland Dr. makes a lot more sense to me, now.)

Or, maybe it’s like that lost, rangy coyote wandering in the Hills. It’s hungry. Wide-eyed.

Just looking for that next bite.