Oscar Nominated Screenwriter Lacks Creativity To Lie To Friends
Of all the plagues visited upon Hollywood screenwriters, none is more onerous than the calls from every resident of your college dorm, and every distant in-law demanding that you read their script. But today one man fought back. In a screed for the Village Voice, Oscar losing screenwriter Josh Olson issued what will soon be a battle cry for scribes everywhere, "I Will Not Read Your Fucking Script!" One can't help but feel Olson's pain. The stations of a writer's cross are many and horrible — being treated like slime by your own agent; guards given orders to shoot on sight if you show up on the set of your film; security summoned when you attempt to chat with the film's starlet at the premiere. But Writer's Guild of America screenwriter goes to bed each night knowing that even if he is being abused, he is being abused by very powerful show business professionals who live in much bigger houses and drive much bigger cars than he. But the horrifying indignity, as Olsen describes, is that once you become a screenwriter, even your oldest friends mistake you for the garbage collector. I'll make you a deal. In return for you not asking me to read your fucking script, I will not ask you to wash my fucking car, or take my fucking picture, or represent me in fucking court, or take out my fucking gall bladder, or whatever the fuck it is that you do for a living. You're a lovely person. Whatever time we've spent together has, I'm sure, been pleasurable for both of us. I quite enjoyed that conversation we once had about structure and theme, and why Sergio Leone is the greatest director who ever lived. Yes, we bonded, and yes, I wish you luck in all your endeavors, and it would thrill me no end to hear that you had sold your screenplay, and that it had been made into the best movie since Godfather Part II. But I will not read your fucking script. He continues: You are not owed a read from a professional, even if you think you have an in, and even if you think it's not a huge imposition. It's not your choice to make. This needs to be clear—when you ask a professional for their take on your material, you're not just asking them to take an hour or two out of their life, you're asking them to give you—gratis—the acquired knowledge, insight, and skill of years of work. It is no different than asking your friend the house painter to paint your living room during his off hours. There's a great story about Pablo Picasso. Some guy told Picasso he'd pay him to draw a picture on a napkin. Picasso whipped out a pen and banged out a sketch, handed it to the guy, and said, "One million dollars, please." Olsen leaves out about from that story the part about how Picasso was, in fact, one the most humongous a-holes in art history. He goes on to tell of the woes of actually trying to be helpful, and how it comes to backfire when it takes him months to read it, how his stack of script reading looms over his bed — a beast forever waiting to... MORE >>
Project Runway: The Model of a Modern Major General Malaise
Project Runway is all about vision and delusion. The vision to let the models pick their clothes, the delusion that they have taste. The vision to move a show and change producers, the delusion that quality won't slip. This week wasn't as bad as last week's abyssmal surfwear challenge, but it wasn't that much better. This year, it was a rehash of the season one challenge where the models get to tell the designers what to wear, yet another way that the black hole of despair called Models of the Runway is pulling our beloved show into it's gravity. The problem with the challenges this year is that everything is just "here's something to do and a reasonable budget to do it with, now let's go to the fabric store." In the past, the vision of the show was not that people made pretty frocks each week, but that they did it out of garbage or car parts or food or Hershey Kiss wrappers. At home we would sit in awe of their skill and ingenuity. Now we just quip about how much better the show was on Bravo. Things we hated: Missing Judges: This week both Queen Tangerine Michael Kors and Nina Garcia Fashion Director of Marie Claire Magazine were absent. This is Kors' third week in a row. Not only have the replacements been subpar, but the judges are part of the reason we watch the show. If they can't make it to all the tapings (and really, how many are there) it's time to find a new judge who can. We're sick of these substitute teachers. The Replacement Judges: We have never heard of this Marc Bouwer person, and his red tie on red shirt combo looks like something you'd buy in cellophane from TJ Maxx. Sending Zoe Glassner from Marie Claire instead of Nina Garcia is like when Joe Biden shows up at your funeral. If we can't have our favorite two judges, at least get us Fern Mallis. Or make Tim finally dish the designer dirt. That No One Is Horrible: By this point in a season of Runway there is usually at least one person to despise, and the hope of seeing him go home each week makes us tune in. This year, there's no one that awful or untalented to rail against. Yeah, there are a few people we like, but heroes are as easy to create as a pair of draw string pants. Give us the ornate couture structure of a good villain! Lady Vitamin Commercials: The worst part about moving to Lifetime is the repetition of commercials for dish soap, tampons, pregnancy tests, and, this week's new terror, Centrum's lady vitamins. What, does taking them make your vagina stronger and sparklier? Things We Loved: Jennifer Rade: Now here is a lady who we would like to see again. A celebrity stylist, she was this week's guest judge, but she was really the third of three guest judges. We could watch a whole hour of Rade's mane berating designers. She's crazy, inappropriate, and just what judging panel needs. If Kors is going to keep ditching the show, they'd better sign Rade. Shirtless Logan: 'Nuff said. Epperson Talking: Up until last week, we'd never heard the man utter a sound. Now you... MORE >>
Happy First Post-9/11 9/11!
On this day eight years ago, four commercial airplanes were hijacked and crashed into buildings and a field. Thousands died. This is the first anniversary of that terrible day, though, that the Terrorists will not still be winning. Have you finished composing your "where I was" blog post or, god save us, your #whereiwas Tweet? Have you muted MSNBC's deplorable annual encore performance of the televised deaths of thousands? Have you remembered to never forget? Good. Fine. Shortly after (or maybe during) that day, our president at the time, a little fuckhead no one liked, handed over the reins to the most psychotic elements of his administration. In the vast national wave of jingoism, paranoia, dread, and fear that followed, he and his friends led us into an unrelated war they'd been planning beforehand, allowed the CIA to wiretap and torture anyone they liked (and encouraged the CIA to wiretap and torture even more than they were comfortable with!), and regularly insisted that our memory of that day should not be sullied with critical thinking or expressions of anything other than still-palpable fear. This played better in the sorts of places that had nothing to fear from international terrorism, but plenty of formerly reasonable-acting people in the major targets did play along, both out of personal conviction and partisan duty. In fact an entire cottage industry of dudes who were Changed Forever On That Day thrived on the internet. Bloggers, all of whom were self-professed Former Liberal Democrats, were suddenly freed to be racist, bloodthirsty warmongers. They were rewarded with traffic and mainstream legitimacy (even as they ritually attacked the MSM as terrorist-loving fifth columnists). Most are still treated as Serious People, even though their defining characteristic was a hysterical response to a crisis. But we don't even need to feel bad about the Joe Kleins, Chris Hitchens, Andrew Sullivans, Glenn Reynolds, Charles Johnsons, and Peter Beinarts of the media world. Because, whatever, they are as responsible in their own ways as Wolfowitz for the Iraq tragedy, but their magical ride on the patriotism express has ended. Barack Obama is the president now. Regardless of what you think of him as a politician or a man, he admirably refuses to engage in 9/11 rhetoric. He does not operate from the cynical assumption that his audience believes that America Can Do No Wrong, that to criticize a war is to be a literal traitor, that to not worship the president is to spit on the graves of soldiers, that the correct response to a tragedy is to create a thousand more. He doesn't talk like that. And so, fucking finally, the anniversary belongs to the latte-sipping out-of-touch coastal elites who witnessed it. On 9/12, people in New York (and DC) did not feel as "great" as Glenn Beck. They just felt like shit. They felt scared and confused and depressed. Many of them were drunk. And only an idiot or an actual terrorist would want to always feel like it... MORE >>
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