After not one, not two, not three, but four three-hour epics spanning a decade of production, Peter Jackson revisits his Heavenly Creatures phase. This looks real good.

The man’s a hard worker, and while some knocked King Kong for being shallow, I thought it was a well-directed adventure, which is saying a lot for a genre overstuffed with mediocrity. The poor guy must’ve starved himself skinny and spurted out gray hair directing and perfecting, evidence the man is a slave to his passions. Here, just look at this picture:

I never cared for the first two installments of Lord of the Rings: sub-par screenwriting and editing stretched to three hour length. Then he did The Return of the King, and then King Kong. Regardless of your opinion of those films, the man’s direction improved. With his adaptation of Sebold’s “The Lovely Bones”, it could be that those four epics were really just practice, and now we’re about to see the real Peter Jackson, the one who put himself on hold since finishing “Heavenly Creatures.”

“Well that’s preposterous!” you say. But look at Guillermo del Toro. He made “Chronos,” an original vision, then hit his stride with mainstream entertainments like “Hellboy” and “Blade II.” Then he surprised everyone with his Arthur Machen-esque “Pan’s Labyrinth.” Quite a parallel, I think. Both directors seem to share the notion that horror and fantasy are alike; that there’s real beauty to be found in the ugliest of places…if only we could be bothered to be courageous and embrace it like their protagonists.

I expected a passable war film. What I got was, in the words of Joe Hill’s tweet, “a cool-blooded character study.” Oh, The Hurt Locker can be an action flick if you’d like—though the ‘action’ is a necessary byproduct of its subject matter. If things blow up and people get shot, it’s not because John McClain is on the loose. There are no bad guys.

Instead, these are faceless killers who want to do very awful things to people. Like blow them up. The film doesn’t try to weave an escalating plot. It sidesteps formula for a more human touch: it is a patchwork of fearsome missions designed to test their resolve. Jeremy Renner as the man in the bomb suit takes center stage as the cool blooded risk taker. As in Scorsese’s nearly plotless “Bringing Out the Dead”, it is enough that he do his miserable job, while the “why” of why he does it is slowly revealed.

Revealed, but never explained. Every moment in The Hurt Locker is an exercise in understated pathos. Detail is treated with such direct crystal clarity, we may be forgiven if we don’t notice them.

This is punctuated in the movie’s final moments, a sudden departure from the ruins of Iraq and into civilian life in the States. To those who question the restlessly shaky camera, and why the editing is the way it is, the scenes in America provide an explanatory antithesis to the queasy style. The poetic final shot, with its man in a bomb suit walking down a deserted alleyway, is elliptical in how it evokes the very first scene.

This is a good “war movie”, but an even greater character study and technical marvel if you know where to look. Mark my words, friend, this is genuine Oscar bait.

Because the actors were good at what they did (memorizing four pages of the script I wrote), we wrapped photography in ten minutes shy of an hour. Which was great; because the light pouring through the window was our key light. Any longer and the sun would’ve gone down several shades too low, a no-no regarding continuity.

Two nights ago, the four of us got together and shot my itty bitty skit in a parking lot I. Remember when I blogged that I wanted to shoot a “practice skit,” you know, to get my hands dirty? This was it.

Er, I wrote it the night before we shot. Bad idea. Remember: stories are never written, they are rewritten. Mine had the germ of a story, yet it hadn’t germinated. Despite this, Jaemin and Mike waded through the murkiness and emerged as solid actors. They’re amateurs and likely don’t give a damn about being the next John Cho; but in the thirty takes I pieced together in Premiere, they’re very competent. Not fantastic, mind you. But they’re much better than they think.

The skit itself is…proficient. I’m not gonna say it’s good, because it isn’t; but it is proficient. We lit the interior of the Scion with three battery operated LEDs I got at Target; wrapped them in an orange gel. The exposure was great at 1200 ISO, and the lights matched the background. It seems like it’s coming from a nearby street lamp, and that is precisely the effect we set out to achieve.

In other news, we completed the new layout for Take Zer0 3.0. Sean tells me he just sent out the .psd to our coder to be coded.

Because I like bothering Sean, I drove the thirty miles to his house and tested the camera in a place I had picked out, a parking lot. Sean had to park at a certain distance and at a peculiar angle from the two street lamps, each of a different color temperature. Then I busted out a twenty-dollar portable LED lamp and wrapped it with a gel. There’s a tiny bit of extra light from a fluorescent I placed in the backseat.

For the ten minutes it took us, the resulting shot isn’t too awful. There’s a Wong Kar-Wai meets Michael Mann vibe to it. And yet, before I pat myself on the head, it needs plenty more coordination. That nasty shadow on his neck could be flagged out of the way. I’ll likely buy another LED to provide more fill. I believe the ISO is at 1600.

The following shorts fall under the banner of this disreputable genre, bound by common ground: to instill in you that most universal feeling. No, I don’t speak of love. If they are not all directly frightening tales, remember that fear is not to be confused with terror. The latter wants only one thing. While fear can indeed frighten, it can also inspire awe, wonder, and a powerful sense of mystery.

To the uninitiated, this roundup is the second installment to P.D. Horror Stories Roundup #1. Unlike that one, the stories here are shorter overall, with more variety in tone and style. And if you’re reading this at night, I really, really suggest you watch this skit to set the mood! It’s an amusing three-minute cartoon; but Annable is a superb storyboardist, and “The Hidden People” slowly builds suspense.

All stories are linked to their text-in-full. I recommend you read them without eyestrain; thus, copy and paste the stories from your browser window and into a free application like Dark Room. If you have an iPhone or something similar, Stanza is another free alternative. **Some of the below texts may require you to copy and paste.

Mr. Bierce, writer for The San Francisco Chronicle, here discloses three allegedly true vignettes, all to do with the horror of the vanishing act: people who spontaneously disappear without a trace, right before the eyes of their loved ones. Included is an article outlining the theory put forth by Dr. Hem, that there exists a “space between spaces.”

The prose of Ambrose Bierce, best known for An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, has been cited as too choppy when compared to his counterparts “across the pond,” yet so dry and matter-of-fact that no one has ever cared. His topics touch on the supernatural as much as they do with factual reports; and to our heightened fascination, this flavors his stories with a hint of the very real.

In a deserted hut in the middle of the night, a young woodcutter awakens to see an eerie ‘woman of the snow.’ She makes him promise not to tell anyone he has seen her, else she will return to suck the life out of him. Years pass, and he forgets his promise…

Memorable tales are often the simplest, and here no time is wasted delivering the punchline. Modeled after a Buddhist fable, this is so tightly structured to be one of the popular ‘Kaidan’ adaptations; among others, it even inspired an episode of Tales from the Crypt.

Upon hearing cries for help, a ship’s crew encounters a small boat at sea. Its unseen occupant is unwilling to board and shuns from the light of their lanterns. From there they are told the strange tale of a nearby uncharted island, where there lies a bizarre landscape.

The unusual concept borders on sci-fi, yet the framework is horror. While not directly frightening, it instead bears the qualities of a subtle, well-remembered nightmare. Hodgson is more fascinated by horror than he is frightened by it; and this fascination elevates his work into territory rarely trodden. This popular piece has been adapted several times into film and television.

On a hill sits Thurnley Abbey, a reputedly haunted mansion. That doesn’t bother Colvin’s friend, who is about to marry and plans to inherit the place. The old friends get to talking about ghosts, whereupon Colvin jokes, “If one were to see a ghost, one ought to speak to it.”

Told at a leisurely pace, this tale concerns the passage of time and the role it plays in sticking to our word. Or maybe that’s just pretense. Unlike a typical haunted house story, nothing out of the ordinary actually happens in Thurnley Abbey. At least until the time comes.

A handful of friends who disbelieve in the supernatural decide to stay overnight in the Toll House, a place fraught with peculiar history: its occupants are always discovered dead the morning after.

Lesser known than his masterwork “The Monkey’s Paw,” this short is no less ingeniously plotted and still holds up a century later. No spectral sightings here. The mystery of the Toll House lies within the weary framework of the human mind. A refreshing perspective to the often stale genre of haunted houses.

Aurthur Jermyn was an intelligent young man of good standing. So it came with surprise to those who knew him that he doused himself in oil and set himself ablaze. Thus, compiled for your perusal, here we have the facts concerning the late Aurthur Jermyn, and the queer reasons why he chose oblivion.

Lovecraft’s non-Mythos stories were either lightweight mood pieces or heavyweight pulps. This refined piece, a standalone tale, is verbosely economical, with subject matter that’s pleasantly pulp-ish. Even better, he manages to tell a bizarre story in such a spare amount of time.

A farmer sees that his neighbor will encircle a large mound rather than cross over it. He tells the farmer an oral history of the dirt mound, which had its origins with the Spanish conquistadors and is now considered a bad omen. That night, convinced of buried treasure, and unbeknown to the neighbor, the farmer begins to dig.

When he wasn’t writing stories to meet a deadline—or maybe because he was trying to meet a deadline—Howard had pacing in spades. Here, he tells an efficient tale of pure inevitability: what will happen is inevitable, predictable even, and breathlessly we expect it. Not for a second is that an understatement.

Through his window, a teacher witnesses a bizarre murder. Years later, he is witness to yet another strange event; one that bares an eerie correlation to the previous.

Horror could do with more surrealism; after all, to witness a perceived supernatural event is downright strange. This short-short is as light as a fable, but the plot unfurls with such a dose of magical realism that, well, who knew horror could be so…elliptical?

Oh, there’s plenty of crap to clog the drain. The awful stories, the dull stories, the stories in bad taste—they stagnate in cliches. It takes a great storyteller to tell a story about ghosts, because everybody knows all the good ones have been told.

Allow me to summarize what I read from an EC rag. I believe it was an issue of Tales from the Crypt. Now, this is straight from my memory, and so for those who know the tale, forgive any lapses in my telling.

It opens in the early 1900s with a young woman and her grandmother. There is talk about a certain young man, and the girl is commanded by her heartless grandmother never to see him again. The girl sneaks out and attempts to see her lover. But it’s raining out—pouring—and she succumbs to pneumonia. Days pass. The poor young woman dies; not from being out in the rain, the narrator supposes, but from a broken heart.

Her lover is mortified. He is forbidden by the cruel grandmother to attend her funeral, where she is to be sealed in a mausoleum, not buried. Acting upon this detail, that night the young man ventures into her mausoleum to say his farewells. To his luck, he finds the heavy doors to the crypt open. Inside, he sees his beautiful lover in repose, and spends the night whispering sweet nothings by her open coffin. As he turns to leave, a gust of wind kicks up and the giant doors seal shut. Horrified, he attempts to pry them loose. Then he bangs on them with his fist. Nothing works. He is trapped.

Weeks pass.

Nearby custodians wise up to the noises coming from the mausoleum and unlock the doors. They discover the young man, still alive, but terribly shaken and emotionally disturbed. It turns out that in his tortuous ordeal, he survived by drinking water from morning dews. Eventually he grew hungry, ravenously hungry and, well, he had to nibble on something…

What a horrible story! Very awful and disgusting. And very good. My point is that it could have been lifted from another story, “ripped off” so to speak (EC writers were known to borrow from classic works). But it hardly matters. This is a fine story because of how deliberately it is told.

Remember this: all bad horror stories are uninspired knockoffs. Good ones are merely inspired. So until next time, I hope you all enjoy these stories as much as I did!

We four lingered in Sean’s room and rambled on about the topic that gets every trendy male hot in the crotch: short films. Jaemin and Mike shared story ideas they spent Monday preparing. Sean explained Rory’s First Kiss. Me, I loosened my lips about “The Sequel to How We Met,” my seven page script. This is to be our summer of creativity, and from this afternoon I think we all gleaned a rush of inspiration.

When our meet came to an end and they stepped aside to return to that magic place I call El Aay, I led Sean into his sweltering garage.

This is where my script takes place, and so I tried to light it. The gold hue on his face is from a reflector off camera. The problem is we’re using ten-dollar utility lights, with tempered wax paper to diffuse the bulbs. While this makes a passable medium-to-close shot, there’s no ‘artistic’ coverage in spots with less coordination of lights. The walls are too dark.

The answer to this problem lies with china balls: omnidirectional exposure for all the nooks in the garage. Separation and tone will be controlled by a gradient: light to dark, no black.

I did my best to churn out a dialog piece, in which characters do nothing but talk-talk-talk. In Screenwriting they advise you not to “tell” as much as you should “show.” My guess is that “showing” is for certain types of cinema I want to avoid at the moment. Plays are ideal for dialog: we know going in that action will be substituted with speech. We expect it. In cinema, it can feel like we’ve been cheated. The best talk-heavy films make us feel rewarded for listening and paying attention.

I saw the trailer for 500 Days of Summer. I liked it. But it made me feel dirty. If it looks good, it is because it fills in the cliches like a tailored suit. I’m sure there’s an emo checklist at the office of every small studio; if you qualify you get submitted to Sundance, like a darling honor student bussed away to the national spelling bee. I imagine the studios blowing kisses and shedding a tear, “Do your best! Even if you don’t win, we still love you!”

Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies and Videotape ignited a crazy-unique revolution of varied tastes. This current “revolution” seems aligned to please the studios and the iTunes crowd, and that makes me suspicious. When indies become homogenized in the future (if they haven’t already), where does that leave the voices of artists who don’t care about how cute Zooey Deschanel is? Or how awesome it would be if Natalie Portman was baited in front of you like a carrot-on-a-stick?

Oh that’s right. We’ll still have the internet, you and I. Hmm, now about those china balls…

It’s not a legitimate creative endeavor. It’s actually my first test of Sean’s 5D Mark II; I just embellished the footage to make it seem as artsy-fartsy as possible. Nothing is scripted. Sean really did have that weird dream and he really is telling it to me for the first time. He’s no Spalding Grey, but it is sort of interesting.

I am impressed with the Mark II. The bigger sensor is a giant leap from our EX1. And guess what? I held the camera steady, without any support, for nearly four minutes. With the EX1, I would’ve trembled from muscle asphyxiation. It’s the difference between lifting a baby and a fat kid. Not that weight figures into my process that significantly; it’s just nice to know it’s there, like a kind thought.

I will shoot the script I wrote. Nothing fancy. It’s under ten pages and takes place in one location, indoors, where lighting can be controlled. I will use the Mark II. I want to quickly stage the movements, block the shots as efficiently as possible, and hopefully end up with an amusing six-minute narrative. This will not be ambitious. That’s later. For now I just wanna clear my creative sinuses.

And to anyone interested, I’ve been slowly drafting the second entry to P.D. Horror Stories Roundup for the past three weeks. I’m still trying to decide on two more short stories to add.

So bye-bye whoever’s out there. Bye-bye until my next video. And that could be as soon as three weeks…so, hmm, I guess this post isn’t as dramatic as it seems. But the internet still kind of sucks.

That was an hour ago. He didn’t say much about Rory’s First Kiss; handed me his copy (briefly mine) of Scott Pilgrim Vol. 2, and took off in his Scion, saying the weather was too cold to be hanging out.

Here I am in Diamond Bar, halfway home, outside a coffeeshop sipping hot coffee. Rain drizzled. The two males on the table across say the word Fuck a lot, discussing Timothy Leary and shit that happened that shouldn’t have happened but did, and any recent movies that pissed them off. They’re just the characters I need: angry on a dime and irrational. The script I showed to Sean was practice. All scripts are practice. But that one I burned through in a week and I soaked in a lot. Well time to soak in more.

The story for my next script swells in my brain like a tumor. I need to get it the fuck out, to mock the two in front of me. I need to put it on paper. To those who have trouble composing a script, remember this: writing is hard; exorcising your demons is easy.

That guy Sean sent me this video yesterday. It’s a speech by Ira Glass, who, like most flamboyant men, is inspiring. I agree with what Ira says because it’s common sense. “Keep trying” “Work hard” “You’ll get better” are the tenants of his speech. I agree. You should keep trying and work hard, and eventually you’ll get better. Am I being sarcastic? I guess it’s a revelation if you’re really down on your luck. Or if you just like the way Ira talks. I do.

I wanna slam headfirst into the next script. It’ll be a light drama flavored with romance and a dash of angst. But I can’t, not now. We have two actor reels that I need to write scripts for. Then I need to finish shooting and editing this little musical by an elementary school. For a bunch of preteens, they’re pretty good (some skits were also a tad provocative for their age). It’s a favor for my cousin who works in the After School Program. It’s also practice. For what, I don’t know. Then on Saturday we drive to Lake Forest to be interviewed by R.J. Adams.

Clouds are forming. Coffee’s getting cold.

I think Sean has run into a bit of blockage with Rory’s First Kiss. Maybe that’s why he didn’t tell much. He’s scripting a brief prologue sequence to break the ice. That’s a good idea. It’s what I’d do. For that twenty page script, I wrote the bulk of it between ten at night and three in the morning. I’d recommend he do that too, when the day is long dead and the city has ceased to live. Everything stops. Midnight is insulation from reality.

Have you heard the theory of the Accordion Universe? If we believe the universe began with a Big Bang and will end when it collapses on itself, then the theory supposes that another Big Bang will take its place. From there the universe begins again, identical to the previous. Even time is identical. If your mother died of cancer in that universe, the same will occur in this one. If you kissed a girl on June 19th, 1995 in that universe, you can look forward to kissing her again some trillions of years later. You just won’t know it.

Déjà vu is leftover psychic residue, seeping through the cracks.

Which reminds me of Haruki Murakami’s popular short story, called “On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning.” I read it one afternoon in a bookstore. You can read it here if you like, or this:

A man sees a beautiful girl walking down the sidewalk. He tries to think of a reason to speak to her but he can’t. So he goes home. He thinks of something profound he should have said to her. The two of them were once lovers, he supposes. They knew each other to be soul mates. In order to test this, they decide to separate; if they meet again, then it must be true love. They go their separate ways. And then, each is stricken with raging influenza. On the verge of death, they both recover, but have lost their memory. Time passes. Now they have crossed paths with each other, they way they had hoped, but this time as strangers, unaware of the true love they had set out to prove.

“That is what I should have said to her,” the man says, and from there the story ends.

A Thousand Words by Ted Chung is a Murakami story without the surrealism. Which is to say it is a Chung story. The protagonist is a man with whom I share my immediate sympathies; who makes a choice that leads to the discovery of potential happiness. The story never rings false and is told with such efficiency of economy that it practically tells itself.

I want that efficiency for my script, which will be two-and-a-half times longer than Mr. Chung’s. I have seen “A Thousand Words” four times and have mentally dissected it. It’s my motivation; but it is not my inspiration. That belongs to this masterwork, Red. Is it a serious film? That’s a matter of intelligence, I suppose, the way football is a matter of strength: I have no doubts I consider it too rough while a stronger man may find it passively enjoyable.

What fascinates me about “Red” is the same with the Accordion Universe: it needn’t supply an answer. Like “A Thousand Words” didn’t need a conclusive ending to be romantic. Like how Murakami’s story, one of his most well known, is powerful due to an ending that in fact questions the romance. What I am getting at, what I am trying to say, is this:

I am scripting the ending, and I pray it does not suck.

Yet by running this silent gauntlet of, lets face it, incurable dissatisfaction, you realize you still want to tell a story; because the people in your imagination have no other way of seeing the light of day, and you pull it together for them–not for amusement, not out of boredom, not for the praise of strangers: but writing for the sake of unleashing characters upon a world you hate, and tipping the balance in your favor, evening the odds a bit. To cultivate an understanding of your unsavory being through miraculous creation, by contributing to the world a part of yourself.

And the guy next to me, he said, “Why not just raise a family?”

I am in a bit of doubt as to the quality of the story. I came up with the outline in a half hour; good timing, but I suspect it was hasty. Francis Coppola did say that young writers are their own worst enemy: they judge their own writing self-consciously and abandon their work before completing them, a big no-no. Better to finish what you have and simply rewrite the darned thing. As McKee said, “Stories are not written. They are rewritten.” Amen. And so on those merits I think I will persevere.

Alright, out with the details. It’s why you’re [hopefully] still reading, right? I’m not gonna deal in specifics, but I’ll say it takes place inside a car on a third date. The girl recites a poem that sets up the theme of the story. Her date is intellectually challenged and wants desperately to impress her with knowledge of literature he does not possess. Thus in his attempt to woo her he…ends up introducing the ‘B’ story into the mix. This ‘B’ story acts as a catalyst to the date until the boy and the girl arrive at an epiphany, which is defined as “the sudden realization or comprehension of the essence or meaning of something.” In this case, the meaning was embedded all along in the girl’s otherwise nonchalant dialog as well as in the poem.

Yep. It’s a dialog piece. I want to be as much Edith Wharton as possible. She understood that the spoken word can be more than base expository: it can peel back the soul of the story in playful ways the viewer will not comprehend until the time arrives. Richard Linklater understood this in Before Sunrise. I’m not that big of an egotistical ass to compare myself to those two artists. I just wanna take a crack at it, for practice sake. And because Mr. Coppola is telling me not to give up, even though I want to.

Unlike my other project, this script has been tangibly composed in Final Draft, so rest assured that the B.S. meter is low on the threshold. I dislike hyping anything I do, apart from practical means, like this personal blog, which is more a conversation than look-at-me! marketing (right?). On the internet it is too easy to become an attention whore, and I wish to look where I tread. I should have the script printed and sent to Sean by Sunday or Monday, where I can gauge his opinion. And hey, maybe we can shoot soon enough.

After I waved goodbye and [secretly] blew kisses as he drove out of the parking lot (and towards a new horizon in Life’s chapter), I lingered with Sean. We loitered at the place where Wong Fu shot a segment of their music video. Totally rad. We discussed fragments of Rory’s First Kiss and the business of actor reels. Then I confessed to Sean how bored I had gotten with life. So he brought up the idea of shooting something other than our respective projects, something shorter with less meat on its bones, just to refresh ourselves.

When I handed Sean my copy of Scott Pilgrim, we bade farewell and I set off for the hour-long drive home. I stopped at a coffeeshop, scribbled a story idea, then took off, only to stop at Panera Bread for their tasty (and gloriously salty) French Onion Soup, where I scribbled more notes. By the time I was mopping the bowl with a crust of bread, I had arrived at the story’s conclusion.

It will be dialog driven. I want to use Sean and Lainey again because it’s easier that way. But as Sean pointed out, they might suck. Anyway, I think they’re decent actors when given light material. The skit will be a brief romance. I’ll have to sleep on it before I write it, and with any luck I won’t hate it when I wake up. For now, so you have something to click on, here’s an ambient instrumental that I wish to use for the prologue. Lainey’s character recites a poem amidst a montage of the city, all at night:

Download audio file (Macroform – Letting Your Head Fall.mp3)

I don’t even know if I’ll use it because I don’t know if we’ll even shoot the darned thing (which, if we did, could be in two weeks or less). But here’s to hoping it’ll work out.

…I should totally remaster what I can, because they really need the overhaul. The screencap is from the newly tailored ending of Drew’s “The Trick of the Treat,” which I was in charge of editing along with my own “The Thing at the End of the Hall.” That’s two ten-minute long shorts I had to cut and polish within two days, because at the time we wanted to have them out for Halloween. I never gave them a final cut. The ones you might have seen on YouTube are the “Absolute Utter Crap” cuts. Avoid them. The ones on Vimeo you can call the Alpha cuts.

Do the new cuts make a difference? Is Ridley Scott’s cut of “Blade Runner” superior to the studio’s? I’m not saying our skits are as awesome as that masterpiece, but I am saying these final cuts make a dent. I finally color-corrected every shot in Drew’s segment and tweaked the exposure and saturation throughout. Here’s a before and after of what I did in post. The natural lighting was piss poor and perhaps we shot a little too quick; although we did use a reflector. I was the one holding it, crouched on the floor off-camera like a good little monkey.

What made this segment such a pain to edit was the audio: I mixed tracks from opposing sources while trying to mask the ambient noise (there was a church congregation at the time of shooting). That took a good handful of hours to clean up in my effort to make the three conversations appear seamless. I then revised all the sound effects and added more (keys jingling, door opening and closing, the ruffle of the candy bowl). It took me less time to cut the video than it took to mix the audio.

I’m proud of it. Visually, “The Trick of the Treat” now contains more depth of contrast and a flesh-toned color palette. Aurally, the skit is more seamless to listen to. It’s also a minute-and-a-half shorter, at 7:40, versus the nine minute cut on Vimeo and the perversely longer one on YouTube.

Hopefully Drew will upload it onto his Vimeo account and replace the older, inferior cut. I’ll post “The Thing at the End of the Hall” whenever I get a Plus account. This is not to assert the notion that we made never-before-seen masterpieces. Heck no. What I am saying, and what I am excited to show anyone willing, is that these skits are not as bad as what they were. And, God help you, if you liked them before, you’ll like them even more.

It seems everyone I know is gettin’ down and dirty with their creative selves. Jaemin Yi is, and of course so is Sean with his romance Rory’s First Kiss. Spring has that effect on the physiology of an artist. I guess for everyone else it makes them want to clean or breed or something.

Oh alright. Fine. I’ll put up the plot of my script, a short romantic drama. But not the whole thing. And take it all with a grain of salt. There are more juicy bits to the lives depicted here that I left out; and while this is a skeletal representation of the story, it’s soft, tender bone that’s yet to mature, still incubating in my imagination.

One night in a coffeeshop, a cute but nerdy girl, Kate, waits to meet her online pal, Derek, for a blind date. She waves when she sees a guy who matches his description, but he walks right past her. It gets late. Derek never shows up.

The next morning, Bryan is startled out of bed by a phone call; a girl on the other end playfully screams “Wake up! Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!” She intended to give her boyfriend a wake-up call, but dialed the wrong number. She apologizes and hangs up.

Bryan meets his friend, Derek, over lunch. The two don’t get along, but Derek has a favor to ask: he wants Bryan to meet a girl named Kate. Last night he went to meet her, but thought she was ugly and gave her the cold shoulder. She still wants to meet; but because she already saw him when he ignored her, he wants Bryan to stand in. After, Derek says he can make up a story to break off the relationship. Bryan says he’ll do it for the girl’s sake, but thinks Derek is a jerk.

On his way home, Derek stops at an intersection and eyeballs a pretty girl as she enters her house. When he gets a text from Kate, he turns the car around.

Bryan dresses for the date. His phone rings. The same girl dialed the wrong number again, but instead of hanging up she asks for advice: “What’s the easiest way to break up with a guy?” Bryan becomes morose, remembers his ex, and tells the girl how not to break up with a guy. They get into small talk, find out they’re a few blocks from each other, then hang up. The doorbell rings. It’s Derek. He gives Bryan his phone for the date; Bryan offers his phone in exchange.

Derek stops for coffee. The phone rings. It’s the girl. As if in a hurry, she begs Bryan for help, then gives her address. Derek ignores it, drives home. When he stops at the familiar intersection he realizes it’s the same cross-street as what the girl blurted. He glances at the house the pretty girl went into and sees the address is identical. Curious, he parks the car and approaches the house.

There is a theme undercutting the events, but yeah, this is my plot in TV Guide form. I lopped it off about a third of the way (so there’s still a good seventy percent to go), right before the first catharsis. It’s structured as a farce, where the A B and C stories collide in convoluted ways.

I don’t want to tell a love story so much as I would rather tell a story about love. A “love story” is essentially a genre piece, stripped and stupefied to archaic expectations (the meet cute, the denial, the compromise of lifestyle, the happily ever after OR the bittersweet departure). A “story about love” is open-ended, and in all likelihood, truer to the heart. It compels me to go buck wild in terms of style. There’s more to love and life than can be expressed in middle-class, Mac generation music. Behold, I give you New Order’s “Your Silent Face,” a song about death, and a very odd choice of music for my ideal title sequence.

Download audio file (New Order – Your Silent Face.mp3)

The way to sidestep an expected love story is to blindside the audience with other emotions: hate, pity, fear, sadness, and then love. I adore stories that hook us from the beginning, tease us with a slow build, then reward us with an ending in which everything collides spontaneously; not because it wants to impress us, but because the Fates have spoken and destinies must yield (see: In Bruges). It’s not about the “happy” ending, which is always, always easy, but about taking one step further to become the “beautiful” ending.

Rule number one: Everything happens as it must.

“It’s the same with any city. If you go to Hollywood you’ll get a lot of stuck-up people who wanna be actors, so I just stay out of those places,” Chris explained. This guy is talkative, easy-going and interesting. I meant what I wrote in this Tweet—just give him five years, tops. If I was the sort of ‘azn’ who doted on my heritage, I’d be AZN PRYDE all over this guy, who as a fellow Asian-American has directed some cool material. But the fact stands that I don’t give a damn about my roots, not in that way, and even in that light his work is still mighty impressive. He’s twenty-three.

Our meet went aiight. Some awkward silence here and there; or maybe that was because we took simultaneous sips from our drinks. One thing is for sure: Back to the Future is a powerful force to be reckoned with. I was giddy with enthusiasm when Chris said it was his motivation to become a filmmaker. Me too! And when Sean brought up Rory’s First Kiss, his webseries in the making, Chris plunged into even deeper depths of insight: the best stories are first and foremost entertaining. Let me say that I am a believer in Roger Ebert, who wrote A film must be entertaining before it can be art. Damn true, that.

What spurred us to meet was our one mutual fixation: short films. Chris told us his sad, sad story: a student at UCLA, he fell out of love for cinema because his filmmaking peers were so damn snotty and selective. He shot Korean Days of Our Lives (which is so awesome) and then decided that advertising was less artsy-fartsy than cinema. It was only recently that he started up his Netflix account and realized how much he missed the movies and, I suppose, the potential to make his own.

You all know Sean’s story—that guy is busy with Rory’s First Kiss, which can be said to be a series of short films. Me? I’m furiously plotting a twenty-plus page romantic drama. It’s the ending that eludes me: should it end happily, or should someone, like, get shot or something?

An hour later, when Chris glanced at his iPhone and said “Alright guys, I gotta split,” we shook hands and parted ways. Sean and I zipped over to Samy’s, a superstore that sells everything on the planet you could ever want (as long as you’re a filmmaker). I lingered in front of the Steadicam display, fondling the buckles and pneumatic arms as if it were a girlfriend, until Sean whispered in my ear that it probably costs twenty-thousand dollars. We sauntered upstairs (the store is three levels high) to admire the lighting equipment, to which I noticed these really cool babies. Yes, they are also battery powered and dimmable! But alas, the bigger units run up to around two-thousand bucks.

I desire this Litepanel so bad that it violates the Seven Deadly Sins. A powerful, portable floodlight, without the need for AC or a huge-ass generator, is a total revelation.

Sean dotes on Rory’s First Kiss the way a pregnant mother dotes on her unborn child: it doesn’t matter that his water hasn’t broken yet, he’ll still spend hours trying to decide on the wallpaper. At this early stage the plot is all that matters. Still, I’m confident he can bang out a pilot that’s a notch above the production values of The Guild and a notch above the conventions of Quarterlife.

Oh and I am, by the way, eating Taco Nachos, a new $1.99 item from Jack-In-the-Box. That’s my keyboard right above it. See what I just did? I interrupted the flow of the topic and substituted it for an image of cheesy-gross nachos. This is called a Chapter Break. You all may visit the restrooms and make a choice at the vending machines.

Sean said that he has trouble reading my long-ass posts, and so it pains me to say that I shall have to relinquish my rambling insight and give in to this ill-educated, homogenized mass of soul-crushing public opinion. After skimming through successful blogs, I see that the only folks who are allowed long-ass posts are either experts and their “industry tips,” or generally attractive girls who Jack Kerouac the crap out of their sentences and are popular; because men on the internet understand that an attractive girl’s blog is the next best thing to sniffing her hair, and so they linger, a misdirected shot at romance.

Oh yeah! My short film.

After brooding all last night till four o’clock in the morning, I formed a solid idea of the first half. As already mentioned, this will be a romance. It’ll be different from Rory’s First Kiss; so different that it’ll be like the North and South Poles–you can’t get any further apart on Earth than that (right?). Sean told me his influences, which are Wes Anderson’s “Rushmore” and, though he didn’t mention it, “Garden State,” because I know it happens to be his number one movie…and is such an inspiration to him that I suspect it even plays a role in the moral choices he makes in life. (“Garden State” is an insidious puppeteer to trend-conscious youngsters that tells them that if they do not meet a girl like Natalie Portman then their life is broken and needs to be fixed by behaving more like Zach Braff)

Pleasant movie, though. I saw it. Twice.

My influences are of the snottier sort, the kind your single aunt or professors are aware of because of course they are wiser and more mature than you and don’t you dare question that: Robert Altman’s “Short Cuts” and Krzysztof Kieslowski’s “Trois couleurs: Rouge”. Yeah, that’s like trying to measure up to God; but as a failsafe I’ll say that my third influence is Sam Peckinpah’s “Straw Dogs”. Because if I don’t like the way my short turns out then I can just end it on a shootout or a rotting, decapitated head…and it will still be an awesome stroke of brilliance.

Wish us luck! And the Taco Nachos are good but now my heart feels slower.

I think it was worth giving up my discretion, don’t you? Try to imagine an actor standing or sitting somewhere in the frame. I would’ve posed myself, but I didn’t want to leave the camera.

Yes, several elements of this shot are post-processed; the same as what I did to The Thing at the End of the Hall, only less so. I recall the reaction of my cousin’s girlfriend when she saw the pictures of my trip to France. How did you get them to look so good? she asked. I tried to explain composition, exposure, the leading of the eyes, the staging of the subject and in general the rule of thirds, but when I topped it off with Photoshop she went Ohhhh Photoshop! as if that explained everything and nothing else was relevant.

By now it has become second nature of me to expose shots explicitly to raise the black levels, and I am getting better at estimating what the shadows will look like. I adore high contrast; it adds to the sensation of depth. You see, I don’t expose shots by adding lights. I expose them by adding shadows. I just think they’re more interesting and, for an amateur like me, much easier to control. Of course in a location like this I must deal with what I am dealt, and in this case, after rejecting three other locations, I finally found a parking lot with the right kind of lights: florescent, balls of florescent as opposed to tubes. They cast a diffused glow that, depending on the white balance, will give off a sickly green hue, which is what I did in an earlier short; but in one setup I had a warm lamp on the subject’s face, so their skin was preserved a fleshy pink.

Time to shop for a portable warm-toned light. In a close-up or a medium I can throw the warm tones on their face while the rest of the shot remains green. Solid separation without mutating the actor’s face into a Ninja Turtle.

I shouldn’t concentrate too hard on how it will look because that is a separate and altogether difficult process on its own (though it hasn’t stopped me from terrorizing suburban cities with a PMW-EX1). I do by the way have more of a lead on my story, and because I have included a shot of what is likely the ending location then clearly I have come a long way. The tone of the short is laid out, as is the subject matter. It will be a romance of some sort; though it will be more truthful to say that this is drama laced with romantic elements. Hmmm. I feel iffy about the word drama, possibly because it comes off as too highbrow for my abilities.

I read this Edith Wharton short story called “The Letters.” I won’t bore you with the details (even though Edith Wharton is not boring), but I admired the plotting. Everything is peachy and right as rain until the final few pages, where the protagonist’s life is suddenly flipped upside-down and everything dear to her is revealed to be a sham. The neatness of this revelation and the surprise that it delivers is a pleasure to experience, not due to the singular twist in and of itself, but due to how Wharton orchestrates the con: it is clean and bloodless, like yanking off a tablecloth with such swiftness so as to not spill the drinks.

Chaos is drama, and don’t assume that it is all bad, like negative energy, or, to use the layman’s word of choice, depressing. There is this essay by Philip K. Dick, written just before his death (and before Ridley Scott screened a workprint of “Blade Runner” for him) called, “How to Build a Universe that Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later.” This is what the man had to say:

I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe—and I am dead serious when I say this—do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life.

So there you have it. Everything falls apart in this story. Because I want it to. Because I want my characters to mean something. Because I dislike happy stories that begin happy, plow through a second act of more happy, and then end happy. Perhaps it is because they are afraid of what lurks out there in the banality of real, authentic life. Perhaps it is because they are the filmic equivalent of a stoner, so high on its own agenda that it numbs itself to pain. Or perhaps it is because they just don’t try very hard at being human. I am reminded of the wisdom behind Harris K. Telemacher, who said, “Let us just say I was deeply unhappy, but I didn’t know it because I was so happy all the time.”

And here is where I leave you with what I think will be the end music.
Download audio file (EndingMusic.mp3)

Story goes like this: two friends, one night, a bit of backstory and bickering, some broken romance, and a lone plot device to trigger all the anomalies required in a narrative. “Anomalies” are what I now like to call the-things-that-happen-in-a-story. I guess you can stick to calling them Plot Points, but anomaly has a certain ring to it; a word you’d toss around in a room full of nodding scientists, stroking their chins in applied wisdom.

Here’s a shot, captured from when I was loitering the city for locations that I suspected would look interesting. Not all of them were. But this shot had an emo vibe going for it. Combine this with the song I plan to use in the skit and POW! instant combo; like peanut butter and bananas. It’s a mood setter.

Download audio file (Skit_Music.mp3)

Exterior locations are a go-go. They’re so liberating compared to interiors. The only problem is the general public: residents, pedestrians, traffic, and oh yeah cops. I was interrupted last night, scouting locations. Somebody must’ve spotted me through their window. Yeesh. Not a big problem; the cop pulled up to me when I strolled across an intersection. He had those fierce, dagger eyes of a dangerous jock. I wished he wore sunglasses, the way most cops do so you can’t really know what they’re thinking when they pull you over for a ticket, if they’re bored or enjoying it, or if they think you’re smokin’ hot jailbait. You just can’t know.

When he confirmed that I was a film student at the nearby CSU Fullerton, he asked what my short film was. I didn’t know what that meant and if he was just killing time, so I told him it was a skit. A what? he asked. A skit, I repeated, and for some reason he said “Thank you” and I said “You’re welcome,” and he spun off with his buddy riding shotgun, who at this time of night, midnight, donned a patch of black sunglasses.

Truth is that I have been bored since Sean and I went on hiatus with Take Zer0; which forced me, coerced me, blackmailed me to be creative week after week, shooting and editing and writing long-ass posts. To anyone who knows what Take Zer0 is and miraculously also happens to read this blog, yes, Take Zer0 is on break. A very tentative break. Our website kind of broke (Sean dropped it, don’t look at me) and that roused us out of a filmmaking trance that forced us to ask an uncomfortably adult question: what are we going to do with our lives? And so, as a creative diversion from our money-making schemes that could inspire an episode of The Honeymooners, I present to you this potential short film, which isn’t even written yet and yes I do feel guilty like the boy who cried wolf for writing this post.

Even the premature thought of a short film inspires me. I meant precisely what I wrote in this Tweet, which is kind of disturbing as I read it (haha). Apparently I have Asperger’s Syndrome, a condition that’s not all bad, but it does make me think of asparagus. If a thief had stolen all my stories and my ability to relate stories, then I would surly be without hope and become a sociopath. Or a journalist. Because without the ability to tell stories–even the crappiest of crappy ones, in a manner as well as I could tell them–it would be as if I were stricken with Scarlett fever all those years ago as an infant, deaf and blind and forever feeling with the fingers for a way to understand the world.

I think both Sean and Drew deliver pretty solid performances (as in not terrible), especially when you consider that I dumped the script on them only a half-hour before. Not bad, not bad at all.

The pacing is a bit slow, even for only a minute long; but it was to be used as an epilogue, after all (i.e. the denouement). I’m pretty satisfied with the reflector and how it lit up Sean. As for the strobing of the light, the location was chosen because of it; though I’ll admit that it gets a bit pervasive in the first shot of Drew. All in all, the entire video could use more sound mixing—ambient effects here and there—but heck, it’s good enough for being a video that was never used.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.