Mass Cult - An independent creative community

Courtesy of Focus features and The Los Angeles Times:



Not a lobbycard, but a newspaper box insert... still very cool though. 

The plot thickens and the stakes are raised as JONNY QUEST behind-the-scenes becomes as dramatic and hurried as the action onscreen.

If you develop Social Games I want to talk to you. Im looking to invest in  games,  developers and projects

Im looking for consumer and corporate applications. I’m not looking for knockoffs of existing games/apps. I’m also looking for physical products that have integrated social gaming components . My preference for all the above is that they run on or  integrate deeply  with Facebook and/or Itunes 10/Ping and all the devices they support.

You can post them here or email me at blogmaverick@aol.com.

If I like it , I will respond. If I dont, I wont.  I wont sign and NDA.

TIA

Before you start writing any screenplay, make a playlist of music that feels like the movie. It’s a fundamental part of my process.

I’ve done this from the beginning. For Go, I had a mix tape with Christmas songs and rave beats. 1 For Big Fish, I burned a CD. In the age of iTunes, it’s vastly easier. Think of movies that resemble your movie, then click through their soundtracks, previewing tracks before adding them to a custom playlist.

Most of these songs would never be in your final movie. Rather, you are assembling music that reminds you of the feeling you’re trying to create. More crucially, you want music that reminds you why you’re writing this script.

A good playlist helps you get started. A great playlist helps you finish.

Over the life of a project, you are bound to lose enthusiasm many times. Deep into the second act, you’ll curse the decision to write it. On your third draft, you’ll wonder why the opening set piece is so much better than everything else.

That’s when you need your playlist. Listen to it and remember. Let it be your totem, your mandala, your happy place. I rarely listen to any music while I write, but during crunch times, it helps. Particularly days like today, when most of the jackhammers in Los Angeles are outside my window.

What was this movie, again?

Professional screenwriters often have to ping-pong back and forth between several projects. During one week in the early-aughts, I had to write on Big Fish, Barbarella, Jurassic Park 3, Minority Report and Scooby-Doo. That’s a lot of switching gears. Music helps.

For a more recent example, here’s a touchstone track I used for Preacher, 10th Planet by Hot Snakes.

For an unannounced thriller I’m writing, I used both Let’s Misbehave and a track from Silent Hill 2.

Right now, I’m writing Monsterpocalypse and Frankenweenie2. Danny Elfman’s fantastic and underappreciated title track for Planet of the Apes gets me in the mood for smashing buildings, while half his canon is appropriate for Frankenweenie.

Is it a luxury to pick tracks from the composer who will probably be doing the soundtrack? Yes. I won’t apologize.

It’s your choice whether to share your musical influences with your collaborators. I almost never do. For The Nines, I gave my editor the tracks, but only one (“You Keep Me Hangin’ On”) made it into the movie.

The truth is, by the time you’re actually making the movie, you’re often thoroughly sick of these tracks. They’ve served you well, but you don’t want to hear them again.

1. Mix tapes were plastic cassettes with two geared spools of magnetic film inside. Analog music was recorded onto each side of the tape, generally at 1:1 speed. Because this meant a lengthy process, the mix tape maker could spend time decorating the paper liner used to protect the tape, perhaps writing the song titles.
2. Did you know the original short film for Frankenweenie is on iTunes? And did you know Sofia Coppola is in it?

Hi gang,

Got tied up yesterday with work and didn't have time to post the Jonny Quest documentary chapter so today you get a double feature!

Enjoy.

Thank you for writing one of my favorite movies. I saw Go at the theater when it was released and it has since been one of my favorite movies. One my favorite characters in one of my favorite movies is Todd Gaines.

There is one part that has always left me wondering. Was Todd really going to kill Ronna?

On one hand, Todd simply didn’t seem like a murderer. A sleazy drug dealer? Yes. Murderer? No.

On the other, in a deleted scene, he did pull a gun on Claire and left Ronna for dead after Adam and Zach hit her with the car.

Todd also didn’t come across as stupid, reckless or naive. It seems if he wanted to kill someone, he would have chosen a better place than a very public party where he likely would have been recognized by his clientele.

This has always been a dilemma to me. I was hoping you could shed some light on it for me.

– Thomas Lehman

Todd Gaines never shot anyone, and had no intention of killing Ronna. He wanted to scare her.

Look at events from his perspective: He’d been played for a fool by a cocky teenage girl. Beyond the sting to his ego, she’d cost him money. If word got around out how she’d outsmarted him, other customers might lose their healthy fear of him. He knew where Ronna would be, so he decided to go find her.

When their conversation was interrupted by a poorly-driven Miata, Gaines bolted. I’d consider that fight-or-flight, a self-preservation instinct. When they find a girl’s body, you don’t want to be the guy with a gun.

In conversations with Tim Olyphant before we shot the movie, we discussed that Gaines probably wasn’t a full-time drug dealer. Maybe he went to art school, or worked as a club promoter. For set decoration, we gave him an art table and a bunch of illustrations.

If you met Gaines on a rainy morning — like Claire later does — you might think he’s a pretty nice guy.

WGAw members should now have received ballots for the Board election. It’s an important vote, because this Board will be setting the agenda for the next round of negotiations.

Reading through the seventeen candidate statements, I was happy to see such quality crop of candidates, including many writers I know and admire. In making my choices, I’ll be looking for a balance of TV and feature writers at various levels of experience. A showrunner has a different perspective than a spec writer. Both are important.

Craig Mazin has good suggestions, including a reminder on why you may want to vote a short list:

“Hey, we’re supposed to vote for eight.” No…you can vote for up to eight. You don’t have to vote for eight. Indeed, if you really want these five to be elected, just vote for these five.

Voting for eight makes it less likely your top choices will make the cut.

I get nervous voting for slates. With the financial and creative issues facing the Guild, I’d rather see healthy debate than easy consensus.

In the non-candidate statements at the back of the book, you’ll see I endorsed two candidates: Mark Gunn and Aaron Mendelsohn. Both are excellent. Over the past few years, I’ve come to rely on each of them for honesty and pragmatism about WGA matters. I hope to see them returning to the board for another term.

Ballots are due September 16th.

Saturday, September 25th Republic Pictures will be 75 yrs. old and the Neighborhood Council of Studio City among others is throwing a party at CBS Radford Studios (formerly Republic Studios backlot).

Details are here at the website.

Admission is free.

Continuing our screening of this fantastic look behind-the-scenes at one of my favorite television programs of all time.  In this episode we learn the foundations of the Hanna Barbera cartoon empire that paved the way for the creation of JONNY QUEST.




Stay tuned.

There are a lot of amazing things on the internet wedged between the layers of ... well, you know Sturgeon's law and all that.

I happened upon this home made documentary on the origins of one of my all-time favorite television shows  JONNY QUEST.  Made with a degree of scholarship and affection for the series, the mediamaker used readily available Mac tools and a lot of effort to create something you should see.   In fact, I'm pleased he used those simple tools because as he states in a later chapter - the restrictions often led to unique solutions.




The entire film is broken down into 27 chapters - each one a glimpse into the creative process and history of television cartoons as we know them today.  I'm going to post them a chapter at a time - one a day - for the month.  Please feel free to share these videos and come back every day around this time to get the  next chapter.

LA Times Company Town is reporting that Blockbuster is preparing for a mid-September bankruptcy. 


"Executives from Blockbuster and its senior debt holders last week held meetings with the six major movie studios to discuss their intention to enter a “pre-planned” bankruptcy in mid-September, said several people familiar with the situation who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of ongoing talks.Blockbuster is hoping to use its time in Chapter 11 to restructure a crippling debt load of nearly $1 billion and escape leases on 500 or more of it 3,425 stores in the U.S. Maintaining the support of Hollywood's film studios during the process will be critical so that Blockbuster can continue to rely upon an uninterrupted supply of new DVDs.Blockbuster has lost a total of $1.1 billion since the beginning of 2008 and has been severely hamstrung in efforts to grow its business due to interest payments on $920 million in debt. Earlier this month the company announced that most of its debt holders had agreed to a forbearance on interest payments until Sept. 30, during which time it would attempt a recapitalization."
Not exactly sure what to say about this except that it's an end to an era.

(You may prefer to watch it full-screen, or HD on Vimeo.)

I’ve been promising readers that I’d do more of these screenwriting scriptcasts. And I will. Today’s is nominally about dialogue, but I ended up switching a lot of stuff around in the scene in order to accommodate new — and reduced — dialogue.

Since this scene is much longer than most of these scriptcasts, I’m including before and after versions after the jump.

INT. WINNEBAGO – NIGHT

A young woman sits on a couch in an old, run down Winnebago. She is only 25, but she seems overly worn and agitated. She clutches her leather purse to her chest and smokes a cigarette. There is a tatoo of a rose on her ring finger.

This is MARLA.

There are a couple of space heaters humming in the corners, providing a faint electric heat.

WALTER comes in from the back bedroom of the Winnebago and sits across from Marla. He wears a black knit beanie and a New England Patriots hooded sweatshirt.

MARLA

It’s fucking freezing in here. Those heaters don’t do shit , you know.

WALTER

You’ll get used to it. I’ve got extension cords running all the way to my Mom’s house. I’ve got like 30 of them strung together. That’s like a quarter mile or something.

Walter opens a yellow lunch box and takes out a small electric scale and envelopes of tin foil.

WALTER

Did I mention today’s special? I’m giving away a free date with yours truly when you buy 2 grams.

Marla looks out the window across the frozen plain.

MARLA

In that case, I’ll just take one, then.

WALTER

Very funny. I’d act offended, but I’m a nice guy. You know that.

Walter takes a couple bags of yellow COCAINE.

WALTER

I’m giving you a couple free Oxys for the come down. I’ve been told this is an especially speedy batch.

Walter looks up at Marla who seems distracted by something.

WALTER

Come on, Marla. When are you going to let me take you dancing? We could drive down to that new club in Bangor.

MARLA

I would never be seen with you in public. It’s embarrassing enough I had to work with you.

WALTER

Well, you don’t no more. You really pissed off the other waitresses, by the way. I think Maggie wants to fight you.

MARLA

Please. Maggie is a cunt.

After a beat.

MARLA

You done over there? I can see my breath in this place.

WALTER

What? So you’re just using me then? Is that it? I thought you liked me.

Marla takes the baggies and stuffs them into her purse. She gets up and walks out the front door of the Winnebago.

Walter shakes his head, smiles and pops a cigarette into the corner of his mouth. The heaters buzz.

Here’s the revised version:

EXT. DIRT ROAD IN THE WOODS – NIGHT

A heavyset man in a New England Patriots sweatshirt works his way down a chain of extension cords, unplugging them and plugging them back in. He’s methodical and unhurried, despite the cold.

This is WALTER. He’s 40, with a Grizzly Adams beard.

The cords connect a broken-down Winnebago to a house a hundred yards away. At least, they’re supposed to.

INT. WINNEBAGO – NIGHT

With a BUZZ, an electric space heater begins to glow, its power restored. Battery lights FLICKER ON.

Seated on a worn-out couch, a young woman pulls her last cigarette from the pack. She YELLS OUT to Walter:

MARLA

That’s it.

WALTER (O.S.)

I get it?

MARLA

(annoyed)

Yes!

This is MARLA. She’s a hard-lived 25.

She tries to light her cigarette, flicking her lighter again and again. It’s dead.

The trailer rocks as Walter climbs in. Spots the cigarette.

WALTER

Wish you wouldn’t smoke.

She puts the cigarette back in the pack, not even looking at him.

WALTER

Just, I got asthma.

TIME CUT TO:

A YELLOW TACKLE BOX

Walter opens it, sorting through the contents.

WALTER

I’m giving you a couple free Oxys for the come down. I’ve been told this is an especially speedy batch.

Marla gets her money ready.

WALTER

Did I mention today’s special? Buy two, you get a free date with yours truly.

MARLA

In that case, I’ll just take one.

WALTER

Come on, Marla. When are you going to let me take you dancing? We could drive down to that new club in Bangor.

MARLA

I don’t really dance.

WALTER

Movie, then.

She doesn’t answer. Walter takes that as a no. He hands her two little baggies .

WALTER

I’m not a bad guy, Marla.

MARLA

Didn’t say you were.

She hands him the money and heads out.

INT. MARLA’S CAR / EXT. WOODS – NIGHT

Marla starts the engine. To her right, she sees WALTER’S MOM (70) watching out the kitchen window, concerned.

Marla backs down the driveway.

From the director of NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD, Mark Hartley,  comes this ode to the frenetic filmmaking in the Philippines!

Uncut.
Unleashed.
UNBELIEVABLE!

"Machete Maidens Unleashed is a profile of exploitation film set in the steamy jungles of the Philippines, where enterprising filmmakers, specializing in garbage, could go and make the most of their movie dollar in a setting where you didn’t have to deal with unions and regulations. The result was a boom of coked-out action and horror movies that tossed aside all notions of human decency and catered to low-lifes everywhere."

Here is where the NSFW trailer resides.

Enjoy (you lowlifes)

I’m going to simplify what I consider to be the best investment advice I have ever been given and share it with you.  Here you go:

1. If you have any credit card or other type of consumer debt on which you pay 5pct or more interest, pay it off.  Compound interest is your enemy.  The chances of you earning more on your money than you are paying in consumer interest rates are slim. Pay it off.

2.  Cash is King. Now that Madoff is in jail, no investment can offer returns with zero risk. If you don’t fully understand the risks of an investment you are contemplating, it’s ok to do nothing. In times of massive uncertainty like we are facing today, doing nothing is a valid and IMHO preferable investment strategy. Just put your money in the bank.

3. Cash Creates Transactional Returns.   What does this mean ? It means that you should analyze what you spend money on over the course of a year. You will get a better return on your money by being a smart shopper and taking advantage of  cash, quantity or other types of discounts than you will in the stock market.  Saving 15pct on the $1k dollars worth of items you know you will absolutely spend money on is a better return on your money than making 15pct in a year on a $1k investment  because you don’t pay taxes on it.

If you have under 100k dollars in liquid assets,  your net worth will be higher in one year if you follow this advice  than if you follow ANY other investment advice any broker or banker will give you this year.

In the last few weeks two companies have released services that enable you to take tweets and turn them into a newspaper or magazine format: Paper.li and Flipboard.

Alltop is a great source of information for both Paper.li and Flipboard newspapers. If you’d like to learn how to do this for Paper.li, click here, and for Flipboard, click here.

Tim Shrumm sent me a link from Adam Levermore on How to Design a Retro Sci Fi Poster.

This is excellent, step-by-step instruction on creating your own pulpy comic and mag covers.

Get out there and fire up your Photoshop!

I wrote a whole series of articles warning people about the stock market over the years. You can see them here. It’s gotten worse. So I thought i would write some more about why you should probably avoid putting any new money into the stock market…

If you haven’t noticed, individuals are avoiding the stock market in droves.  There has been an enormous exodus from equity based mutual funds. Why ? Because people buy stocks for only one reason, they want them to go up in price. If you don’t believe the market is going to go up. If you don’t believe you can find a greater fool to buy your stock, or the stock your funds own, why would you buy either ? You wouldn’t and people aren’t.

The amazing thing is that doing nothing in the market is the smartest approach to the market. It is pretty  much impossible for some man or woman or child who devotes a couple of hours per week to the market to outperform the professionals who spend 24×7 doing this for a living and when they are asleep, they have a workforce full of people doing more of the same.  In this day and age, none of us are smarter than the market.

I didn’t always think this way.  I didn’t ever think there was a truly efficient market until just recently.  What changed ? The availability of capital changed.  While we can argue about whether or not the market is efficient because everyone has access to the same information, I would always argue that they didn’t efficiently use that information and even if they did, capital was not always allocated correctly  to every market segment.

Capital found its way to where people/funds thought they were smarter than the rest. Some people thought they understood the tech markets better than others. Some thought they understood retail better, etc.  The belief that an individual/fund had an advantage  drove where capital was allocated.  People posted good performance or identified macro opportunities and put their own and others money to work.  Others saw the success and followed.  Like the saying goes “first there were the innovators, then the imitators, then the idiots”.    Fortunately for market participants over much of the history of the stock market, if you were  the innovator that was  smarter and faster than the other guys, you could make money on the long and / or short side of the market before the imitators and then the idiots flooded the market.

The door was open to opportunity in the past simply because capital was relatively expensive. It was expensive to raise, it was expensive to borrow.  High cost of capital creates scarcity of capital.  The more expensive the scarcer. The scarcer the capital, the more untapped opportunities just waiting for innovators to exploit and the longer it took the imitators and idiots to chase the same opportunities and close them. Which is why you found funds and smart people posting great returns over a long period of time.

But a not so funny thing happened on the way to and through the Great Recession. Capital became progressively cheaper.  It became the opposite of scarce. It became readily available. To anyone.

The innovators had put together unique mortgage programs. The imitators made it a little easier to partake.  Then the idiots took over. Capital was so easy and suckers and idiots so prevalent, everyone believed that there was always going to be a greater fool to buy their house and /or give them refinancing money. Until the idiots couldn’t collect on the mortgages they lent or pay the mortgages they took out.  That de-levered the system and we know what happened next to the banking, mortgage and housing industries and the entire economy.

In response to that great de-levering, the government stepped in and I truly believe they saved us.  Sure, they watched as the idiots dragged us into the mire. Sure they allowed all those mortgages to be guaranteed and that was a key culprit in the Great Recession.  Our government has never been very good at being proactive at anything. Reactive… thats another matter. That gets the votes.

So the government reacted and poured money into the system. They allowed just about any bank with a pulse to borrow money. To this very minute it is incredibly cheap to borrow short term capital. Particularly if you are in the business of trading/hacking the stock market.  If you are a big fund or investor, money is cheap.  Unfortunately for the stock market, it is cheap for everyone. In other words, capital is not longer expensive and it is no longer scarce.

When capital is so cheap that everyone with a pulse thinks they can make money once they borrow it, the stock market is in trouble.

Remember the rule about first there are the innovators, then the imitators, then the idiots ?  It is why the stock market is truly in trouble.

There is SO MUCH CAPITAL available at so little cost to so many that the timeline from innovator to idiot is measured in days, hours and probably even milliseconds.  The guys who are actually smart and uncover new opportunities can’t even get in a position large enough to make it worth their while before the imitators and then idiots pile in right behind them.

Remember the Flash Crash and the discussion about how trades are made in milliseconds, what I called hacking the system ? I don’t know for certain, but Im willing to bet that those innovators that made money by trading in milliseconds, now have so many imitators and idiots that have piled in behind them , putting servers right next to theirs and hiring their algorithm  coders away from them,  that there is no longer any advantage, or not enough of one for any of the players to make any real money.

There is so much capital chasing so little return that big time players are getting out of the business.

So what does this mean for you ?

It means that I don’t know if the market will go up or down, or by how much.  My guess is that it stays in a trading range for a while. There isn’t much money coming in, but enough of that easy to come by capital has so  much ego attached to it, that the same people will get in and out of the market over and over again and trade amongst themselves.

Until something happens.  What that will be, I have no idea.

But I do know that I have continued to add to my cash balance or sovereign debt from around the world (that I have owned for a while now and has been profitable and is  very, very liquid.) The stocks I still own for the most part pay me a nice cash on cash return, or I have owned them for a long, long time and have  more in gains than I want to pay taxes on.  But in total, I have been a net seller of stocks for more than a year. The only investments I am making are small buys into private companies.  I want as much “powder dry ” as possible for when something happens.

I’m not saying you should get out of the stock market. What I am saying is that it is not a bad thing to accumulate cash right now.  Retention of capital is a good thing. Don’t go chasing stocks.  Something is going to give in this market. Like I said, I dont know what it is, but I want to have as much capital available as possible for when it happens.

Baron Rothschild said “the time to buy is when there is blood in the streets”, Warren Buffet said it differently when he said ” you pay a very high price in the stock market  for a cheery consensus”

This is the time to start saving for a “bloody day”.   There  will be a time when capital regains its scarcity. When it becomes more expensive. When it does , what do you want to have in as great an amount as possible ? Capital.

So save your money. Pay off your credit cards.  Put your money in the bank where it is insured.   Be patient.  Get a good nights sleep knowing that your money is not going any where  and just wait till your capital is in demand and you get paid for it. When everyone is complaining about the money they lost, you will be ready to step in and buy.

That is how fortunes are made. Having money when no one else does.  And you can take that to the bank !

I don’t know who “BigSugar” is, but he or she has been meeting some of the same development execs:

A few years back, I did an April Fool’s post about signing on the feature version of Goodnight, Moon. This year, I got pitched it. And died a little inside.

As I wrote about in Why must we have board-game movies?, it’s not that Hollywood is out of ideas. It’s that the industry is terrified of failure, and clings to the safety of recognizable titles. In difficult times, it’s comfort food.

I would like to include a few personal stories of enchantment in my next book. I am looking for examples of how people, products, services, organizations, ideas, or causes swept you off your feet.

Specs:

• Written from your personal experience, not an external, academic view.

• 150-200 words

• Ideally, all the basics would be in your essay: who, what, when, why, and how.

As an example, here is how something enchanted me:

The second most enchanting moment of my life occurred in 1983 when Mike Boich showed me a Macintosh prototype. (The most enchanting moment was meeting my wife.) This life-changing event happened in back of a non-descript building on Bandley Drive in Cupertino, California. Boich was the software evangelist of the Macintosh Division of Apple.

Back then, personal computing was very different. The best case was text on a screen, and if you were lucky, your computer (if you had a computer) displayed upper and lower-case text, and you moved around the screen with cursor keys. Seeing Macintosh for the first time was an epiphany and transformational moment. It removed the scales from my eyes, parted the clouds, and I thought I heard angels singing.

Please send your 150-200 word essay to guykawasaki@gmail.com. Thanks.