Ronald D. Moore: "Building a Better Battlestar"

First off, BATTLESTAR GALACTICA really is as good as everyone says.

If you're not watching it yet, Netflix the miniseries and see for yourself. It's a drama set in a science fiction world, rather than being a sci fi drama, and the writing staff are fearless in their story choices, going for rich, authentic, and complicated over tidy, false, and cliche every time.

Ronald Moore was this year's keynote speaker for the Vision track of the Game Developers Conference. The connection between the hit Sci Fi Channel series and games might seem a bit tenuous, until you remember how many games are built on franchises or properties from other media. The GTA series got a sea-change facelift with GTA3; Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time gave that franchise a kickstart.

Using "then" and "now" video clips for illustration, Moore outlined how, in creating the new BATTLESTAR GALACTICA series, he went back to the original show and broke down its elements to their fundamental architectural and dramatic purposes. Those elements then were altered or reinvented to fit the show's new, more realistic approach.

To quote from the speech's program description:

"Our goal is nothing less than the reinvention of science fiction television. We take as a given the idea that the traditional space opera – with its stock characters, techno double-talk, bumpy-headed aliens, thespian histrionics and empty heroics – has run its course and a new approach is required. That approach is to introduce realism into what has heretofore been an aggressively unrealistic genre...”
– Ronald D. Moore, the Battlestar Galactica Series Bible

My notes (and some SPOILERS, newbies!):

Premise - The Cylons' genocidal attack on the colonies and the desperate flight of the survivors. Pretty dark stuff. Genocide isn't fun. Moore wanted to keep the attack realistic and serious, in contrast to the laser-heavy 1978 scenes, and focus on how the assault is experienced by those living through it.

Family - The Adama family unit is central, but the family is less literal than in the original, more situational, and more rife with conflict. In the original, Adama's children are posted with him on Galactica (hardly realistic) and their relationship is strong and healthy. And boring.

Apollo - Brought onto Galactica with plenty o' baggage.

Commander Adama - Reframed as an active military man, fallible, with imperfect relationships with his children.

Zack - Still dead, but in a way that informs the current relationships.

Athena - Gone. But the daughter role is still there, occupied by someone else...

Roslin - Instead of an ineffectual, supporting-cast old man, the President is a very present woman, the fleet's mother figure, a balance and foil for Adama. She's also an emblem and reminder of the apocalypse: every time you see her you see someone who's in her position due to horrifying, cataclysmic events.

The government - Moore's impression of every Council of Twelve meeting:

COUNCIL: Let's trust the Cylons!

ADAMA: You're idiots!

Rather than a useless gathering of old guys in robes, the new Galactica's government is a civilization at war, with all the associated thorny problems and uprisings and sacrifices and making-do.

Starbuck - Adama's true daughter. Dirk Benedict's Starbuck -- a gambler and drinker who had problems with authority and slept around -- got by on charm and assured the audience that everything was going to be okay. The man lit his cigar off a Cylon's helmet in the credits, for Pete's sake!

So the new Starbuck? A gambler and drinker who has problems with authority and sleeps around. These, Moore says, when painted realistically are the characteristics of a very screwed up person. Starbuck is high-functioning in this military crisis environment because it's the only one in which she can function.

Tigh - Moore didn't want to write another Riker, the "I agree!" guy. In the real Navy (in which Moore served briefly; I'm a Navy brat me own self), the XO is the guy who makes you work. The CO is kinda lofty and you may not get to talk to him, but the XO is all up in your grill.

The XO, in short, is hated. Give that guy a drinking problem and buckle up. Tigh is also an indicator of Adama's fallibility: Adama cares for the people who serve with him, and has a blind spot to their flaws.

My additional two doubloons is that Tigh is far too old to still be an XO. The fact that the show opens with him still without his own command says something about his ability and career path.

Boomer - The original Boomer was a pretty boring utility player, just there to go on occasional missions or patrols. The new Boomer was intended to be young, naive, not yet super-proficient as a pilot, and in an inappropriate relationship with a noncom, someone more experienced and worldly. Boomer's a window for the audience into the story's new world. The decision to make Sharon a Cylon came, Moore said, after finishing the miniseries script. "You wanna know what'll make sure the series gets picked up?" Moore says David Eick asked him. They added the reveal at the miniseries' end without changing any of the previous scenes with her.

Cylons - The decision to make them look human was initially made in response to the limitations of TV. Given the expense, use of physical or digital effects would have to be severely constrained. Necessity's once again the mother of invention, and with human-looking Cylons we get all sorts of creative doors opened. Cylon social structures, cosmology... I particularly love the paranoia that pervades the series due to this one fact.

Baltar - Moore wondered, as I remember doing too, just why the hell the original Baltar betrayed the colonies. I mean, what was the point? In researching "Great Traitors in History," Moore learned that betrayals derive much less from ideology or abstract ideas than they do from the most concrete and base of motivations: (1) Greed and (2) Sex (money and women, in Moore's words).

The new Baltar is a smart, rich, accomplished man pleased with his place in the world, and susceptible to a female presence who bolsters those perceptions. "Yes, you're smart, yes, you're accomplished." So susceptible that he sells out the human race without even really noticing.

Vipers - The team thought these were cool as is, so they're in the new series largely unchanged.

SpaceCam - Moore said he found that unrealistic camera shots always brought him out of a story, such as the impossible tracking shot of the rocket lifting off in APOLLO 13. The fx crew on BATTLESTAR is directed to construct space scenes as if a real cameraman is there, placed realistically, and having to do things like refocus when shifting to a new depth of field and reacquire a subject lost while following.

Interiors - Real places where real people live and work. The CIC doesn't have some crazy pointless rotating platform or a highly vulnerable picture window, it's deep in the best-protected part of the ship.

And why, sci fi TV veteran Moore has repeatedly asked his production design folks, do people who live in space have pictures of space on their walls? None of that here. Personal mementos, yes, rugs, tapestries, yes. No nebulae prints.

The universe - The galaxies of BATTLESTAR are empty and lonely. Much less populated than in the original series. No space bars full of foxy alien dancers with more than the usual number of eyes. Without the "planet of the week" the story can turn inward and focus on the characters and their predicaments.

The search for Earth - Moore showed the two series' clips of Adama addressing the fleet about their new plan to find Earth. The scenes are quite similar, even down to the staging. The chief difference is that in the new series, Adama presents a lie, one told to preserve hope.

The talk ran long, but Moore graciously stuck around for a bit to answer a few questions. The only real interesting one asked how the episode's stories are structured. Moore said he looked to HILL STREET BLUES as an inspiration, and built the stories this way:

A - Weekly story, typically event/situation-driven
B - Story over 2-3 episodes, mostly focusing on character issues
C - Big season-long mythology, such as Season One's political explosion

Pretty frackin' good talk, I have to say.

GDC Wrap Show

A grab bag of thoughts from the Game Developers Conference, which just ended:

An interesting dichotomy of trends this year. The convergence between Hollywood IP and games emerged as one big theme (several sessions on writers and storytelling alone, in fact), with the burgeoning casual game industry the other. The big vs. the small.

A little odd/concerning to me that most of the casual game sessions were about the business side of things, rather than design thoughts and what makes a good casual game. A lot of starry-eyed developers seeing only shorter production cycles and lower start-up costs may be in for a nasty surprise when they try to unload the 300th knockoff of Bejeweled into the market.

I missed most of the keynotes this year except for Ronald Moore, who gave an excellent talk on reinventing BATTLESTAR GALACTICA which I'll write up in its own post.

It's no great hardship to miss the marquee sessions, really. Will Wright is always brilliant, and I heard interesting things about the PS3 and Nintendo speeches, but the keynotes are the most likely to get rebroadcast online and blogged six ways 'til Sunday.

Had to leave halfway through the Independent Games Festival/Game Developers Choice awards ceremony because I've been ill with some sort of pulmonary death phage (fine, a cold), but I knew I was at a hip videogame awards show and not some dusty old-media awards show because the model chick they had handing trophies to the presenters was in a blood-red cheongsam and had an armful of tattoos. Edgy!

The awards at this shindig are lucite blocks on a little arc of metal. Again, edgy! No twee hood ornaments here. Videogame awards look like something you could encode the human genome on and bury to later repopulate the planet should Armageddon come between clip montages.

Speaking of the genome, there must be something in our DNA that makes us incapable of correctly exiting a stage after accepting an award. Lots of that at this show too. Luckily there was Tattoo Girl to do that "this way, nimrod" arm-gesture thing.

The Darwinia guys wore tuxedos. A class act.

I saw Ronald Moore on the Expo floor a couple of times, talking to few enough people that I probably could've gotten in there and chatted for a bit. However, thanks to my pulmonary death phage I sound like a congested moose with a cough and I didn't want to be remembered to Mr. Moore as That Moose-Sounding Fangirl Who Gave Me Her Cold.

I'm getting worried about the size of GDC. The huge number of attendees makes it hard to move through the crowds of black-t-shirted devboys, sessions are slanting more toward general-interest topics, and hit overflow numbers quickly. A couple of sessions got started late because organizers had to herd us into a larger room. Nothing like last year's Will Wright Spore talk debacle, but things are getting bad.

The Expo floor is nowhere near E3 excess, but the elaborate booths and swag are headed in that direction. There were even some actual booth babes (gah), along with one waggish nod to same: a mannequin in t-shirt and baggy khakis with a laserprinted sign reading "BOOTH BABE" around her neck.

Latecomers to the boxed-lunch line were stuck with the vegetarian option and got very grumpy about not getting their chicken or roast beef sandwiches, which made me laugh. It's a sandwich. Grilled vegetables will not kill you.

Anyone wondering why the game industry has a hard time being taken seriously had only to stroll past the entries in the "Graphic Impact" concept art contest, fully 80% of which were improbably busty chicks. Some of them even had clothes on. Freud would've been bored out of his kopf, with all the large guns and menacing snakes in evidence.

I'm driving a really weird rental, a dumpling-shaped Ford that looks like a cut-rate clone of the PT Cruiser. The Boyfriend calls it the PT Loser. I call it the Ford Grub.

Saw bunches of Grubs in the San Jose Convention Center parking garage, which leads me to believe that Ford just dumped a whole fleet on Avis with a "we can't move these fuckers!" throwing up of hands.

I really hope Ernest Adams never stops giving his traditional final-day lecture. It's always thought-provoking and inspiring, and the perfect note to end the week on. This year he posited an interesting take on interactive stories, which I will also probably go into more detail on later.

Overall, a good year if a little thin on meaty sessions. The Austin Game Conference is definitely on the rise as a better, more leading-edge industry event, and it focuses on online.

The best part of GDC is reconnecting with industry friends and colleagues, some of whom I only see once a year. Fabulous to catch up with those of you I saw, and sorry I missed those of you I didn't. There's always next year. And E3. And Austin...

I Know the Way to San Jose

Headed up north later today for GDC. Catch y'all in a few days!

ARGs Go to the Big House

A pair of Spanish dotcom millionaires have opened a live prison break game inside an old bank in Madrid.

15 Euros gets you solving puzzles, ducking laser alarms, and clambering through metal ducting. Adventure game meets boot camp obstacle course, wrapped in a futuristic escape fiction.

Nifty, if lawsuit bait. I bet there's more than a few waivers you need to sign before hitting lockup.

I have a vague memory of a live ALIENS game in Europe -- Belgium? The Netherlands? -- where you and your ill-fated party ran around in subterranean tunnels chased by a guy in a rubber Alien suit. Anyone recall that?

What's particularly cool (to geeky me at least) about La Fuga is the database and positional tracking they use to see where all the "inmates" are inside the gamespace, and how this data is used to do things like change your future experience of the game. You might get tracked into a more difficult area the second time through, depending on how well you did on your first escape.

Now, all they need is the hot Wentworth Miller clones as extras! Maybe for the planned Times Square version?

So Not the Drama

Do we ever need to have another character anguish over his compatriot's prone, bloodied form, "Don't you die on me!"?

How about, after Bloody Guy dies, having Anguished Guy raise his tear-stained face to the heavens and yell, "Noooooooooo!"?

Yep, never.

Jane Espenson recently posted on comedy lines that are too shopworn to be funny anymore.

Allen B. Ury had a similar article in Fade In magazine's email newsletter about overdone dramatic motifs, such as the protagonist being dead but not knowing it, and the mentor who turns out to be eee-vil.

These two got me thinking about lines in non-comedies that have been so bled of impact through repetition that they need to be officially retired, if not set out on an ice floe to die.

In particular, the "Big No" is so knackered that it's even stale when satirized, but that doesn't stop filmmakers from going to its dried-out well. I'm looking at you, George Lucas. Vader yelling no at the end of Episode III only made the audience want to scream along with him.

Me, I can't stand "Can you zoom in on this area here?", which commits the double sin of being played-out and technologically wrong. I also think we need to find new ways of saying "What've we got?" when the cop/CSI/psychic detective shows up at a crime scene.

What are your (least) favorite overused dramatic lines? I bet you scriptreader types have a few...

Do You Like To Watch?

Last week Microsoft announced their 5000th patent, a system for enabling robust spectator functions in online games.

This is vintage Microsoft, claiming an excellent, existing idea as their own. Spectator mode is not new. Players of online shoot 'em ups like Doom and Unreal Tournament have been able to do that for decades.

But an observer mode that allows pans, cuts, and other devices common to filmed sports (and film in general for that matter), however, must be novel, right?

Well...

No less than the US Government has been working on this for some years. Replayable after-action reviews, complete with cueing, annotation, and varying camera angles, are already being developed for a number of military simulation games.

However the patent spaghetti sorts out, those behind this idea are undeniably onto something. The US may not have the spectator-gamer culture of Asia (yet), but making games viewable and accessible to people who want to watch instead of play -- or want to watch as a precursor to playing -- is an important and compelling expansion of the player pyramid:

    -Hardcore-
  ---Engaged---
 ----Casual-----
-----Observers----- 

There are lots more folks at the bottom of this pyramid, just as there are millions more people who watch professional football than attend live games or play.

The gamers at the top of the pyramid, the scary-dedicated ones, are really good at what they do, and watching them is fun. I'd much rather see two elite Battlefield 2 squads go at it then get my n00b azz mortared as soon as I log in.

And I'll never live to see the high-level content on World of Warcraft in person, but it'd sure be fun to watch some level 60 players romp through it. Those EQ and WoW raid videos are popular for a reason. Leeeeroy!

The Lighter Side of Hell

Because I don't want to go into the weekend on a grumpy note over that CDC nonsense, here's some Friday goofiness.

This World of Warcraft as text adventure piece is both hilarious and alarmingly accurate.

And who doesn't like mean cats? Be sure to read the captions.

Elf Needs Lobbyist, Badly

Let's see, the bird flu is coming, obesity is on the rise in children, and New Orleans is awash in contaminated ground sediment, so what do Senators Lieberman, Clinton, and other bipartisan supporters want to task the CDC with?

An exhaustive study on the "impact of electronic media use."

The CDC?!

Videogames and movies don't make me want to go postal. But ill-informed political posturing?

The misappropriation of an agency who, frankly, has bigger and more lethal fish to fry?

The first step of anti-videogame legislation (because, let's face it, that's what this is about, not movies or cell phones) masquerading as research?

Those make the IGDA, the ACLU, and the angel puppies cry.

Look! Up in the Sky! It's a Bird! It's a Plane! It's... a Methodist!

From the Too Much Free Time Department comes an exhaustive list of comic book characters and their religious affiliations.

For extra fun, check out the catalog's visual reference. The most pathetic supergroup has to be the Legion of Lutheran Superheroes, which consists of Mastodon and, um, Jimmy Olsen.

Orchestrating Gold

The LA Times has an interesting article on how CRASH won Best Picture.

No crazy conspiracy theories here, just careful research and marketing by Lionsgate, who treated the race for the Academy Awards' top bauble like a political campaign.

CRASH won, the article asserts, because the right people saw it, specifically LA-based actors and editors, two key voting blocs.

The network effect also comes into play: Paul Haggis and the movie's large cast have been in the business for a long time, with associated relationships and friend-of-friending.

Relationships alone won't guarantee a vote, but word of mouth is perhaps the most powerful type of marketing. I'd wager that World of Warcraft is the first of such games for many millions of its players, who got into the game because a friend recommended they try it out.

Of course, no one's going to vote for a movie they think is terrible, even if it is set in LA, highlights actors, and a friend recommended it. Lots of people didn't like CRASH, but lots did, and Lionsgate made a strategic effect to connect to those lots.

Those 130,000 screeners, a joke in some circles when they came out, seem much less foolish in the cold hard light of post-Oscar March. The CRASH DVD was at #3 on Amazon when last I looked.

Oscar, Warmed-Over

The Boyfriend and I visited Hollywood and Highland on Saturday to see the preparations, which was pretty nifty. The carpet is pinker than it appears on TV, and the swooshy faux-deco set pieces fronting the enclosed tent (security check? Car wash?) far more chintzy looking.

Yes, the Oscars are held in a mall. They hide it all remarkably well on TV, but directly above the grand, gold-swathed entryway you can grab a plate of nachos before you hit the Sunglass Hut.

Various young, apple-cheeked show workers were snapping the occasional picture of each other in front of giant Oscar statues, which I found endearing. Even if you're on the other side of the velvet rope, it must still be pretty magical.

The techie-roadie-Teamster types were rather less enthralled. A par can is a par can, no matter whose boobs it's lighting up.

What impressed me the most at the Kodak Theater was the incredible cross-section of onlookers who were crowding the area, both American and international. The movies this year may not be the mass market's bread and butter, but glamour and celebrity clearly are compelling and evergreen to a wide swath of humanity.

I was going to live-blog the Oscars for all three of my readers, but between errands and squeezing in a song or two on Guitar Hero I ended up TiVo-speedwatching the whole thing.

The masses of people at Trader Joe's were either doing the same thing, or -- gasp! -- did not care that the Oscars were unfolding mere miles away while they bought their Two-Buck Chuck.

Onto the show itself...

So CRASH won Best Picture. I can't say I'm not disappointed.

I need to see CRASH again -- I first watched it on a laptop on a plane, admittedly not ideal viewing conditions -- but while I thought it contained some strong scenes and performances, I found it overall manipulative, safe, and too redolent of movies that came before such as MAGNOLIA and SHORT CUTS.

Okay, many movies are manipulative, but I find CRASH's flavor really hard to watch, because it's full of a pervading sense of menace that finally erupts to destroy the person who least deserves it. I knew who the redshirt would be by his second scene, the poor bastard.

And yes, safe. The message? Racism is bad. What's risky about that?

And while the movie poses a challenge to the viewer, it doesn't offer any suggestions or solutions either, and precious little hope, other than to contrive to get yourself into a charged conflict with someone of another race and therefore Come To an Understanding. Either that or hug your housekeeper.

That's another thing: there's a slight whiff of the misogynistic about CRASH. The female characters are all either one-note racial sketches, bitchy, and/or victims of personal violence.

I do think time will vindicate BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, as well as the bumper crop of other excellent movies from 2005 like CAPOTE and THE CONSTANT GARDENER.

Other notes on the night:

Jon Stewart was fine but not nearly as funny as he can be (a Bjork/Cheney joke? Dusty stuff). Loved the attack ads, though.

Huh. The orchestra is playing that go away music as the winner starts to speak. That sound you hear is Oscar peeing on your special moment, kids!

Yay! Go Rachel Weisz! A great character in a great movie. Way to leave that THE MUMMY RETURNS stink behind.

Amy Adams was also amazing -- go rent JUNEBUG right now -- but she'll have more chances, I've no doubt.

Can George Clooney really be that classy and charming and politically aware? Gads, I hope so. And I hope the cloning people start with him.

Naomi Watts' dress looked like a manic badger was set loose on it.

Holy cats, did those interpretive dancers just recreate the assault scene from CRASH during the Best Song performance? Kill me now.

I didn't know Tim Burton was dating Elizabeth Taylor.

Sucked for him and the Wallace and Gromit guys, stuck in the cheap seats by the sound board.

Were Keanu's eyes always that teeny-tiny?

Hated Charlize's look. Like Brigitte Bardot being attacked by someone's home ec project.

Meryl Streep's intro of Robert Altman with Lily Tomlin went on too long (we get it, already, it's Altmanesque), but they were gracious and looked fabulous. Terrific dress on Meryl.

My inner snark was kind of hoping that Altman would unleash a little on Hollywood, an establishment he's famously been at odds with for many years, but he took the high road, as befits one of our greatest directors.

Jessica Alba needs a sandwich.

When will they abandon that horrible creepy-cheesy moment when the animated characters du jour "appear" onstage to present an award? Stop. Just stop.

The stuffed penguins were cute, and the movie was lovely, but MURDERBALL should've won best doc.

Yay! Cleaned-up pimp song rocks the house, despite yet more sketchy interpretive dancing. Seriously, I thought there was a moratorium on that stuff.

See, Larry McMurtry is a writer. He's in jeans.

And in closing, what is up with all the gum-chewing? Half the stars they showed in cutaways were chomping like Holsteins.

Get some class, Hollywood. We're watching. Well, except the mob at Trader Joe's.

The Greatest Game Never Made?

The rumors are true! There really was an unreleased Penn & Teller Sega game. Smoke and Mirrors is (was? Would have been?) a collection of postmodern minigames in the inimitable P&T style.

Chief among them is the fabled Desert Bus, in which you drive a bus across the Nevada desert to Las Vegas-- in real time. Make the 16 hour roundtrip, the legend goes, and you score one point.

Screenshots, commentary, and a torrent for the brave on Something Awful's forums.

MATCH POINT

I'm probably going to writer hell for this (what would that be, I wonder? Nonstop screenings of Joe Eszterhas movies?), but I didn't love MATCH POINT.

Not bad, just meh. But the Woody Allen of THE PURPLE ROSE OF CAIRO, ZELIG, and of course MANHATTAN and ANNIE HALL is (or was) certainly capable of more than meh.

And he owes us more after inflicting CELEBRITY on us.

SPOILERS and blather follow.

The questions MATCH POINT raises are interesting: what would (or wouldn't) we do to protect what we've worked hard to achieve? What is really important in life, comfort or passion? Does love stop being love when it becomes inconvenient?

Unfortunately, these questions are voiced through dialogue that struck me as merely pedestrian. Joyless, missing that Allen wit. Characters speak exactly what's on their minds, with no hint of subtext. Worse, too many lines clunk awkwardly when they fall from the lips of the very pretty Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Scarlett Johansson.

I loved most of the character portraits, everyone layered and real and flawed, and Allen definitely knows how to make a loathsome guy still somehow sympathetic (Exhibit A, Sean Penn's jerk of a jazz guitarist in SWEET AND LOWDOWN), but Rhys Meyers' amoral social climber Chris is a sullen cipher, who tells us too much of who he is and shows us too little.

I kept expecting the way in which he plays tennis -- as the title indicates, the game's both a key plot element to the story and its central metaphor -- to reflect some of his ambition, ruthlessness, or manipulative nature.

One moment that does work is Chris' callous pretense of being on a cancelled vacation to avoid his hysterical mistress Nola. Why not give us more of those actions, and cut back on the "I have a very comfortable life with my wife that would be ruined if I left her for my pregnant girlfriend" spoken obviousness?

And why did we, after seeing the movie almost entirely through Chris' eyes, have to take a left turn and spend scenes with the not-suspicious-enough detectives? Why the clumsy ghostly confrontation--OOPS! It's a DREAM! And not even his dream, or the dream of anyone we've spent any time with.

Some of that just feels lazy. I like the sneaky reappearance of the neighbor's wedding ring, but what about Nola's coworker? She knows Nola's seeing someone ("Is it him?" she asks when Chris calls Nola to set her up for the murder), and appears to know about her situation. Wouldn't the police talk to her?

Maybe it's not fair to lay procedural mistakes at Allen's doorstep, since the movie isn't really about murder, but the movie begs it by shifting abruptly into crime drama territory and its important tiny details.

At the end of the day, I liked this movie better when it was CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS. Or, for that matter, A PLACE IN THE SUN.

For this rehash, truly original movies like HUSTLE & FLOW and JUNEBUG -- which crackle with dialogue that's both realistic and lyrical, and which leave so much deliciously unsaid -- got shut out of a nom?

The Academy sure does love them some Woody. I did too, once.

Stuck? Clean Out the Catbox

Kitty gets a fresh place to crap and you may just find your scene.

Lemme 'splain. Ever have an exchange like this?

RANDOM PERSON: So, you're a writer.

ME: What? Did the scotch and social awkwardness give me away?

(Pause while Random Person tries to figure out if I'm kidding. I am not.)

RANDOM PERSON: Where do you get your ideas?

ME: Uh, in the shower?

The question asked is about content not context, of course, and we all have different sources for the muse inside our crazy crazy brains.

But I'm fascinated at how often ideas hit when I'm working out, drying my hair, or washing dishes.

I problem-solve tactically at the computer, at the foxhole level, stitching up story holes, tweaking dialogue, and whatnot.

But for big inspiration? Ideas for entire new scripts or knotty, large-scale challenges like how to rebuild a weak protagonist? More often than not those hit when I'm nowhere near that tyrant blank page. Say, folding laundry.

There must be something about how the noisy mind shuts down for these rote physical tasks that lets the remaining synapses churn away, burning background cycles. For me at least. And anything like going for a jog that helps mitigate Writer's Ass and gives a creative boost is an angel puppy in my book.

How about you? When or how do you get your ideas?

Meet Me at Arcadian Noodle

A little Friday silliness: some lunatic anagrammed all the stations on London's tube map.

Half of them sound like Edward Gorey place names. New Queasy! Stoutening Honks!

I've been to the half-price theater ticket booth in Queerer Elastics many a time.

Whoop That Trick

The US chapter of the Sex Workers Outreach Project is calling upon consumers to boycott Grand Theft Auto.

GTA, the whores claim, is morally questionable.

Yes, players can beat and kill virtual hookers in the game (but not rape anyone, as wrongly noted by SWOP).

You also can do the same to virtual cops, gangsters, ice cream salesmen, little old ladies, and innocent passersby.

We're waiting for the Frozen Dessert Servers Coalition to release a statement expressing concern about the game's cost to the morality and socialization of children, for whom the game was not created nor to whom it legally can be sold, any more than, say, RESERVOIR DOGS.

In the meantime, cheer with me: Down with G-T-A! Have you saved a ho today?

Happy Valentine's Day, Pass the Gin

Ken Levine's got a nice post on the true nature of love. Hint: it doesn't involve mass produced, low grade chocolate or ugly-ass heart-shaped jewelry.

Speaking from the distaff side, mostly we don't want the stupid Valentine's Day stuff. It's just as much a fabricated, consumerist trap for us as for you, except we have to wear uncomfortable undies.

What we want is to be in the room when you watch the Mets (read, Cubs).

When I think of aspirational screen couples, Nick and Nora Charles are right up there at the top of the list. Sassy, sweet, wholly unrealistic and marvelous. While The Boyfriend and I are short on glamour and have solved hardly any murders, both of us can make a killer martini. That's a start.

Here's another reprint from my movie column from Oxygen's (alas, now-defunct) Girls on Film site, about Dashiell Hammett's classic twosome.

---

THIN MEN

Chill those cocktail glasses! Here come Myrna Loy and William Powell, the immortal Nick and Nora Charles of the THIN MAN series. This sophisticated pair has survived plenty, including a disastrous Broadway musical and the rather overextended run of their own franchise. The last of the 6 THIN MAN movies came out 13 years after the first -- oof -- and the quality of the writing deteriorated sharply once the writers ran out of Dashiell Hammett source material. And -- I'm going out on an un-PC limb here -- the movies aren't nearly as much fun when tippling Nick dries out. Plus Nick Jr. comes along, yawn (fun fact: a pre-BLUE VELVET Dean Stockwell plays li'l Nicky).

Here are the first, and best, two of the flicks featuring filmdom's favorite flatfoot couple.

The whodunit of THE THIN MAN (1934), by today's mind-warping, THE USUAL SUSPECTS-type standards, is almost comically tidy in the way that it trots out all the, well, usual suspects. Wynant (Edward Ellis) is a successful, paranoid, divorced inventor. In the first half-hour we meet everyone who might wish Wynant ill, from the shifty bookkeeper to his greedy mistress to his even greedier ex-wife. Wynant then promptly vanishes, and his daughter Dorothy (Maureen O'Sullivan) goes to family friend Nick Charles for help.

We see Nick taking the first of many, many drinks in the film, teaching some bartenders how to make a proper martini. Nora enters, towed by the terrier Asta, and soon catches up with him, to the tune of 6 martinis. Yow. Nora wants Nick to take the Wynant case: he protests he married her, and her money, to get out of the detecting game.

There's such an easy chemistry between Loy and Powell that you wonder if the occasional mugging or physical comedy was ad-libbed and kept in the final cut. They deliver breezy dialogue with impeccable timing: Nick mistily muses, "We're all like that on my father's side." Nora: "And how is your father's side?" Nick: "Much better, thank you. How's yours?" Loy is beautiful and elegant, and Powell manages somehow to be kind of sexy even though he's got no chin to speak of. Nick is supposed to have a tough-guy background, but, as played by Powell, the toughest Nick ever had it was getting cut from the Exeter lacrosse team.

The absent Wynant is accused of killing his mistress. More murders get pinned on him as the police search high and low, while Nick and Nora piece together the facts. The end of the film is fairly absurd, as they throw a fancy dinner party for all the suspects. Nick pins a case on everyone until the real murderer cracks. Hard to imagine Simone and Sipowicz flipping a suspect this way, but hey, in 1934, it seemed to work.

1936's AFTER THE THIN MAN brings us to Nick and Nora's chichi digs in San Francisco, on New Year's Eve. Rather than getting to hang out with the quite un-respectable souses who've invaded for a "surprise" bash, our heroes have to go to the Most Boring Party Ever. Hosted by Nora's battle-axe aunt, who looks like Ed Wynn in drag, the party is an excuse to get Nick to inquire discreetly after cousin Selma's (Elissa Landis) straying nogoodnik husband.

The husband might as well have a red bulls-eye painted on his chest, so many people want him dead for so many reasons. And die he does. Was it the trampy singer? Her gangster boyfriend? Cesar Romero? There's a fatally important mustache, many cocktails, and Jimmy Stewart. The movie ends with another improbable gathering of the clans, Nick addressing the peanut gallery until the truth comes out.

Sure, there's murders up the wazoo, but the world of these movies, even when dealing with the rougher element, seems so... civilized. Even ex-cons and thugs wear coat and tie, and rise when introduced to a lady. And detecting looks like much more fun when you have an alluring husband/wife and a highball in hand.

The rest of THIN MAN line:

Another Thin Man (1939)
Shadow of the Thin Man (1941)
The Thin Man Goes Home (1944)
Song of the Thin Man (1947)

So why not pick up a couple and make up a batch of martinis, recipe from Philip Collins' book The Art of the Cocktail:

1/2 - 1 oz. dry vermouth
2 oz. dry gin
Shake well with ice and strain into martini glass. Add olive.

Serve with quips and raised eyebrow. Drink 6 in a row, darlings, and you'll get what you deserve. Cheers!

I Wish I Knew How to Alt-F4 You

Some enterprising soul has created BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN skins for The Sims 2 .

Green-diamond Ennis and Jack to happiness at last! And no, that's not a euphemism.

Plane Jane

Just back from a quick trip to Vancouver. One row in front of me on the plane sat a braying drunk girl and her slightly less drunk guy best friend? Boyfriend? Booty call buddy?

Unclear, because she made much about getting married to someone else in March, and yet all but had her hands down 17B's pants one and and a half screwdrivers into the flight. The other half ended up spilled on the floor in a fit of honking and snorting that I think was laughter.

Both came on board plowed and the subsequent vodka didn't help matters any. I can tell the guy was less lit than she was because he kept shushing her as she cursed a loud and voluble blue streak. Kids were just three seats away.

If it was Mardi Gras and there were beads to be had, girlfriend's tank top would've been up around her Tweetybird neck tattoo. Just that classy.

But I didn't mind the shenanigans, because I had John August and Jordan Mechner's nifty pilot OPS, in all its permutations, to read.

If you haven't read them, John's files are a goldmine, showing not just what another beat sheet format looks like, but also outlines, and how a script can evolve through development hell-- erm, process.

The episodes are all good, of course, but I prefer the Iraq story. Just seems tighter, more suspenseful, with higher stakes that impact more on the human level.

One minor quibble from the peanut gallery was that I wanted the refrigerator unit breaking to come out of character or situation, and not be arbitrary. Maybe Vanowen was rushing away from the checkpoint, annoyed at McGinty's fine, hit a bump, and it cracked. Or the truck was something McGinty procured, and to save money he ended up with a lemon.

If the generosity of sharing these materials wasn't enough, John also wrote up the illuminating tale of the life and (living?) death of the show.

A pity it stalled out -- would've been a surefire TiVo Season Pass.

Stick a Fork In It

(the screenplay format was messing up the sidebar, so I removed it)

Done!

The new feature script I began in January to finish by the end of February is done, with three and a half weeks to spare.

Last time I posted an update was about two and half weeks ago, when I had a complete outline. Sort of a long time between updates, but for a secular humanist I have an ornery superstitious streak and didn't want to post how things were going.

They went well. I averaged about five pages an hour.

Better still, those hours passed in that delightful, timeless flow state we get when we're creating, if we're lucky. About as good as it gets, isn't it?

A few methods I use, for those interested in craft details (if you're not, go look at something cute):

1) Fairly detailed character bios
2) Beat sheet outline format
3) Stopping for the day when things were going well, and before beginning a scene I felt confident about

Between #1 and #2, at no time was I stuck on a scene or at a loss for what the characters would say. In fact, they often surprised me. One turned out to be a Dodgers fan, the bitch. Who knew?

#3 is a trick attributed to Hemingway. It's a great feeling, being excited about getting back to the story rather than worrying that there's no gas in the tank.

A note about #2. I've always believed in outlining, but for features have had trouble finding a format that works for me. Standard outline form reminds me too much of school term papers. Writing the story in full prose feels too heavyweight. Index cards have never rung my bell, because my handwriting is terrible and I think (and type) much faster than I can print.

I've found TV scripts easier to write (I finished one of those in January as well), mostly because I wrote the pages from a beat sheet format.

On a typical beat sheet, you work out the entire plot scene by scene, building toward the act outs. Some writers describe the scene in prose, some in just a few words. Mine tend to be brief stream-of-consciousness fragments.

Here are a few examples from my CSI spec:

INT. MEDICAL EXAMINERS’ ROOM - DAY

Yes, she was hanged (petechiae). Ligature marks confirm. OJ. Toxicology shows Vicodin, and that she likely had an addiction. Hair smells of cigarette smoke. “Uh, you two want a private moment?” Secrets.

EXT. HOUSE – DAY

Police there. Hank covered in blood. Confessing. Has gun still. People watching outside. Kids. Helen pulls them back. CSIs note this.

INT. HOUSE – DAY

Catherine and Sara walk through the house, imagining the shooting. Celia dead in the yard, three gunshots.

FLASHBACK of shooting

INT. HALLWAY – DAY

Daniel arrives. Distraught. Fought with Trish the last time he saw her.

Features don't have act outs exactly (or do, depending on what school of thought you may subscribe to), but do have internal structures to build around.

And it's a fluid format. One scene may expand to several, or get rearranged, or vanish altogether if the story requires. But the bones are there.

Just a few lines. A high-level view of where the scene takes place, what needs to happen in it, tonal notes, maybe a snippet of dialogue. But from such bits does a final script grow.

As for my new script, it gets to bake a week or two before facing the rewrite knives. Not for nothing are we told -- again by Hemingway -- that the first draft of anything is crap.

Now Playing on a Computer Near You

A couple of interesting tidbits in Business Week about James Cameron and Ron Howard conceiving MMOGs to go along with upcoming TV and film projects.

My first thought is that these guys, admirable filmmakers both, have no fucking clue what they're getting into.

The rampaging success of World of Warcraft (and EQ before it) has lit up dollar signs in a lot of eyes, but a painful reality check awaits those unfamiliar with MMOG development.

These games are hard to build. Much harder than making a movie or a TV show, and they take a lot longer.

Imagine making a movie where the script is never finished, the actors count in the thousands, don't know their lines, or ever hit their marks. Many badmouth you publicly and some even actively try to sabotage your production. Oh, and you're trying to invent the camera and projection equipment as you go.

Going with a middleware company might sound good on paper, but integration with a platform rather than homegrowing your own has its own, significant problems, and there has not yet been a AAA title built on such a middleware package.

The elements that make a movie compelling by and large don't work in a virtual world: a single authored narrative, a small set of characters or even just a single main character, and, duh, an ending.

Virtual worlds, Diablo-like hybrids like Guild Wars aside, comprise not a single story handed down from on high but multiple mini-stories (quests), which are largely window dressing for the more compelling, dynamic, and utterly uncontrollable player narratives. Everyone's a hero. And the stories don't end.

If I had to guess, these games will be less like MMOGs as we know them and more like Halo or Diablo, smaller-scale spaces with limited ways to interact with and impact the world. Which might be fine. Who wants to be a crafter in Terminator Online?

But why the warning bells, you ask? Building and marketing a fictional world based on a popular media property's got to be a no-fail, multimillion-player bet, right?

Star Wars Galaxies, anyone?

Matrix Online?

Bueller?

Actually, a MMOG based on FERRIS might be kinda fun...

Shrub

Did I miss something, or did Bush last night compare himself and the morass in Iraq to Lincoln and the end to slavery, the Greatest Generation and WWII, and -- holy weeping angel puppies -- Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement?

What a knob.

Oh, and I'm pretty sure all of those people could pronounce "nuclear" correctly.

But my favorite bit comes from FOH (Friend of Hell) Dr. Gori, who quotes the Prez:

"A hopeful society has institutions of science and medicine that do not cut ethical corners, and that recognize the matchless value of every life. Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research: human cloning in all its forms, creating or implanting embryos for experiments, creating human-animal hybrids..." [emphasis and incredulous eye-rolling mine]

Well, damn. There goes the mermaid vote.

Golda Meir Pwns U, N00b

Maybe what doomed the Atari E.T. game was not crappy design, greed, or corporate hubris, but the fact that the movie, as good as it was, wasn't a Best Picture nominee!

(Oh, wait.)

(Guess it was crappy design, greed, and corporate hubris after all.)

Set Your TiVo for Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

What should I espy squirreled inside a block of house ads on the Sundance Channel (bless 'em, does that channel have anything but house ads?) but a promo for Season 2 of SLINGS AND ARROWS, the delicious Canadian series about the certifiables at a Shakespeare festival.

It's airing in February. Huzzah and hey-nonny-nonny!

Hey, It Was a Busy Fall

Jumping on an idiotic bandwagon months after it leaves East Moron? Sign us up, says the city of Los Angeles, which this week filed suit against Take-Two Interactive over Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

In other news, the city of Los Angeles today dispatched a flotilla of rubber dinghies to New Orleans to help "those poor souls stranded on their rooftops."

Okay, So You Miss a Sauced Paris Hilton Barfing into a Main Street Snowbank

Holy after-party, Batman, my assistant forgot to courier me my Sundance tickets!

Of course, I don't have Sundance tickets.

Or an assistant.

But I have TiVo and the internets!

Can't make it up to Park City this year? Technology to the rescue, baby.

The Sundance Channel is airing daily reports chock full of interviews, day-in-the-life video journals, and goofy man in the street interviews. Especially funny is host Whitney Cummings' attempts to scam her way into parties and swag. That girl's got mad griftin' skillz.

Blogging Sundance has several reporters in the field. Check out their film reviews and news on who's buying what, plus random articles and party reports.

For minimum content and maximum snark -- and pictures! -- visit Defamer, who's dispatched cranky, funny editor Mark Lisanti to the snowy slopes.

Best of all, with this stuff you can be part of the scene from the comfort of your own home, while wearing clothes no sane human being would wear in public, let alone to a major film festival. Or, would.

Some of the Stuff I Saw in Grad School Was No Better

Who needs film school? You only need a Flickr feed, some random zooms and cuts, and an arty soundtrack to create a buzzworthy visual tone poem! Look out, Sundance!

An interesting use of technology. Brings up Eisenstein- and Kuleshov-type questions about our brain's extraction of meaning and narrative from sequential images.

Is a film still pretentious if it's an algorithm that's directing?

BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN

Certain shelves are groaning with statuettes, with more to come. Random thoughts and SPOILERS ahoy.

I can tell I liked BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN because it's stayed with me, the memory of it sort of deepening and melding over time.

DONNIE DARKO was another film that had this lingering effect, so maybe it's just a Jake jones.

I knew Heath Ledger had this in him from his tiny but shattering role in MONSTER'S BALL, and of course Jake has proven chops. But former lightweights Anne Hathaway and Michelle Williams? Damn.

Michelle may seem to have the meatier role, with Anne hidden behind adding machines and big Texas hair for most of the movie, but just watch girlfriend go in the phone call scene where she tells Ennis of Jack's death. Subtle work from an unlikely quarter.

It takes no small amount of skill to craft a short story (and it is short) into a feature length screenplay as Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana did, even if Mr. McMurtry is grumpy about computers. Did hieroglyphic scribes bitch about the "dry embrace" of papyrus?

Much of the best dialogue was retained from Annie Proulx's story. "If you can't fix it, you gotta stand it." Jack's spotlight "I wish I knew how to quit you" speech, lifted wholesale. Many interior thoughts appear onscreen as spoken lines.

The movie fleshes out Jack's story in particular, adding more about Lureen and her father. The latter scenes form an interesting counterpoint and foundation for when you later meet Jack's own father, and glimpse that stunted relationship.

The story says right out that Jack's ashes were never going back to Brokeback Mountain, but the movie doesn't need to. You just know.

I don't think the waitress subplot works. Ennis is damaged when she meets him, and the movie doesn't illustrate why she falls in love with this broken, closed-off man. For his part, she's a convenience, maybe even a bit of a beard. She's just a one-liner in the short story.

Amazing visuals throughout, from the gorgeous, wild "Wyoming" (see comments) countryside to its threadbare prairie towns.

While the reappearance of the shirts is a standout of the film -- a classic emotional gutpunch -- the story handles their backstory a bit better. Because it's prose, you can learn when you see the shirts that Ennis lost his back on the mountain.

In the film, Heath says as they leave, "I can't believe I forgot my shirt," which rankled me as an archetypal tell.

Why not show the shirt, forgotten at the campsite, as they pack? Or show Ennis rooting in his knapsack in the truck, not finding it?

Of course, Larry and Diana have been presented awards on TV and I haven't, so what do I know.

Love that Ennis re-hangs the shirts at the end, putting his outside Jack's, protective and enveloping.

Another great metaphor? The corraling of Ennis's spirit into smaller and smaller spaces, from mountainside to shabby house to small apartment to tiny trailer. Will this guy ever be happy again? Can he be?

I'm of two minds on the added scenes with Ennis' daughter. The sentimentalist in me appreciates the addition of a thread that shows that Ennis still can connect with another human being, and that offers some hope for him. But that hope is not present in the short story, and seems a little dishonest for his character.

Who thinks Ennis actually went to his daughter's wedding?

Hell-Bent for Leather Update

At the beginning of this year, I set a goal for myself to finish a new feature script by the end of February. Of course, the NaNoWriMo folks are making me look like a slacker for compressing a writing timeline into a fortnight, the ambitious bastards.

Well, after a few hours at The Office this weekend, I now have a full outline of HBFL (that's the mindset, not the script's title) and will be ready to get into pages shortly.

I liked The Office, once I got past the minor absurdity of paying six bucks an hour for the privilege of sitting in someone's storefront. The place is nicely appointed, hushed as a library, with comfy Aeron chairs and Bose noise-canceling headphones. Those things are magic. I was sitting right next to a quietly burbling fountain and homeboy got canceled. Not a burble.

Gamer Love

If you and your sugarpie aren't in the same guild, your evenings may go a little something like this.

Give It Up for Johnny on the Synths

Scott the Reader recently replied to Fun Joel's scribosphere questionnaire with another, a suggestion to list a favorite line of dialogue that you've written.

Here's one of mine:

(Holding up index finger) "I can count on one finger the number of conversations I've had with them since I moved out. And it's not this finger."

Clever, I think. I think it's clever enough that I'm starting to wonder if I may not have written it, but that I picked it up somewhere, unwittingly internalized it, and spat it back out again as my own.

It should be noted that I'm paranoid.

But I fear this because it's happened once before, in rehearsal for one of my plays.

DIRECTOR: You know that's a line from SIXTEEN CANDLES.

ME: What? Where?

The director describes the scene. I remember it.

ME: Well, shit.

Writers, especially screenwriters who are by their very nature media hounds, are all about synthesizing their experience of the world, absorbing and combining bits and pieces of what they see and hear and learn and feeding that into what they create.

From KING KONG to SHREK to SCRUBS, which recently contained a throwaway DEADWOOD reference, conscious quotations and homages both verbal and visual are on the rise. Also, too, are the unconscious ones, as the creators of these texts (Warning! Warning! Literary criticism term off the port bow!) exhibit through their work more and more of the media and information saturation that's part of our modern lives.

Is this a problem? Maybe. I don't think any of us look forward to the day when a TV show or movie is nothing but lazy quotes of stuff that came before.

Pause for laughter.

Yeah, that's already happened, lots of times. So let's buck the trend.

Examining your work with a critical eye helps. So does making sure you're feeding your brain with books and music and art and nature and current events and travel in addition to what can be TiVo'd. But synthesized observation is part and parcel of what it means to be a creative person.

Of course, there's a point at which "synthesized observation" becomes "plagiarism." Anyone, um, recognize that finger line?

Failing Gracefully

"M.A.D." is a standout Season 1 episode of the universally excellent VERONICA MARS.

A girl wants to dump her abusive boyfriend. The dilemma she's in: the boyfriend roofied her at a party once, and has incriminating, raunchy video of her that he will post online if she leaves him. He's not interested when Veronica approaches him about playing nice, and gambits to retrieve the video go nowhere.

Finally, with no other choice, Veronica arms the girl with potent ammo of her own. The boyfriend's a homophobe. Veronica mocks up a website that looks like a love letter he's created to another guy. The girls threaten to release this to his friends and the Naval Academy, his dream school, if he publishes the video. This is the Mutually Assured Destruction of the ep's title.

And?

It doesn't work.

The jerk releases the video and the girl is humiliated.

She does not retaliate with the website, being a better person than he (and arguably better than Veronica, who would've fired back with both barrels not to mention coming up with the idea in the first place).

Veronica, smart, capable Veronica, failed. And this makes her more interesting. More accessible, more human.

Of all the episodes of CSI and COLD CASE that I've seen (and that would be all of them), some of the ones that stick most in my memory are the ones where the bad guy gets away or someone screws up. Where, due to circumstance or error, our heroes just can't bring the case across the finish line.

It doesn't happen often, and shouldn't. These aren't the Keystone Kops, after all. But the occasional setback helps ground the show in some semblance of reality -- shit happens to us all -- offers rich character opportunities, and keeps the stakes interesting.

In a serialized drama, failure is almost a necessity. Speaking of diverging from reality, I nearly gave up on PRISON BREAK early on when things kept going so swimmingly for Michael.

But when things started going wrong, they got interesting. Losing his toes? Groovy. Stuck with psycho T-bag in on the plan? Fabulous.

This is true of more than TV, of course. Beyond the expected twists and reversals of a well-plotted story, movies who put failure at their center can really be something special.

A heist movie is a heist movie, right? But have the scheme go south and you get the spare, heartbreaking A SIMPLE PLAN.

There's a whole subgenre of compelling, inspiring sports movies where The Good Guy Loses, because winning the big game is not what those stories -- ROCKY, TIN CUP, MURDERBALL -- are really about.

Tom Cruise in MISSION IMPOSSIBLE is a crashing bore because the cat. Can. Do. No. Wrong. How much more watchable is RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, THE FUGITIVE, or AIR FORCE ONE? Give me Harrison Ford getting beat up and left for dead, any day.

Memed!

Tagged, I'm it! Fun Joel started this scribosphere meme and Shawna handed it along to me. Here goes:

ONE (1) earliest film-related memory:

Drive-in double feature of BUGSY MALONE and THE BAD NEWS BEARS.

TWO (2) favorite lines from movies:

"Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night."
ALL ABOUT EVE

"Wallace Beery. Wrestling picture. What do you need, a roadmap?"
BARTON FINK

THREE (3) jobs you'd do if you could not work in the "biz":

(I'm including theater in biz, and excluding it here)
Librarian
Astronomer
Computer programmer

Could I be any more of a girlgeek?

FOUR (4) jobs you actually have held outside the industry:

Concessionaire at art house movie theater (I guess this is a little industry-related)
Drama teacher (um, this too)
Sandwich maker
Campus recycling center serf (hard, stinky work. Left the next quarter to work the multimedia desk at the liberry)

THREE (3) book authors I like:

Michael Chabon
George R. R. Martin
Barbara Ehrenreich

TWO (2) movies you'd like to remake or properties you'd like to adapt:

SO PROUDLY WE HAIL! - Little known 1943 movie about WWII combat nurses in the Pacific, starring Claudette Colbert, Paulette Goddard, and Veronica Lake in the performance of her career. Harrowing and gritty, and a welcome reminder that the Greatest Generation wasn't all guys.

"Doom Patrol" - Grant Morrison's run of this comic book is straight-up absurdy stuff. Superheroes in need of thorazine and a hug. Dark, funny, and probably completely unfilmable.

ONE (1) screenwriter you think is underrated:

Paul Weitz. I just watched IN GOOD COMPANY. This and ABOUT A BOY are about as poignant, funny, and authentic dramas as I've seen, featuring shaded, complex portraits of men trying to become more themselves.

THREE (3) people I'm tagging to answer this meme next:

Bill, Ras, and Shawn.

KING KONG

Finally saw it. I'm with Ken Levine on this one. Peter Jackson shows distressing signs of an incipient case of George Lucas Disease.

Both are great filmmakers and proven storytellers who need to have their hands slapped when reaching for the Bigger is Better cookie jar too often.

KING KONG sports better dialogue than Episodes Crap through Crud (note that it's hard to do worse than "Hold me like you did by the lake on Naboo, when all we had was our love.") but the movie is just as bloated and reliant on oddly ponderous action scenes that feel like levels in the videogame, not integral sequences that evolve the story.

Random thoughts and SPOILERS follow.

Why show just one uber-T. Rex when you can show three?

Why spend two minutes showing the ship neeeeeeearly crashing on the rocks when you can show ten?

Why invent a few kinds of horrible bugs when you can throw a dozen concept designs at the screen?

Uh, because it's boring and dilutes impact?

The Shelob scenes in THE RETURN OF THE KING were far scarier than KONG's bug pit. JURASSIC PARK's single T. rex and mere three raptors created much more memorable, iconic set pieces (Ack! They can open doors!). I saw KONG yesterday and already am forgetting what chase happened when.

The ancient town looked pretty cool, sort of like Osgiliath, post-orc renovation.

Did we need the dinosaur bungee cord scene?

Another successful motion capture performance by Andy Serkis. Most of the emotional resonance in the movie came from the saddest, biggest digitized monkey in the world.

Naomi Watts did a nice job considering that 80% of her screen time is looking in horror at something out of frame.

While I appreciate the nifty twist of having the bookish writer be the hero, I don't know of any playwrights who can rappel down mountains, stunt drive, or wrangle oversize bats. Well, maybe Lillian Hellman, but that's it.

Product placement is somehow cute and quaint when it's period. I hate that I think this.

Plot threads are left dangling like dinosaur bungee cords. What happens to the weaselly actor at the end? And what made him un-weasel back on the island and come back to help save everyone in the bug pit?

Why waste our time with scenes setting up the Little Jimmy subplot then give it no resolution?

And maybe I'm looking for too tidy or modern a wrap-up, but why doesn't Jack Black's Wellesian movie producer come to realize that he's the architect of all this havoc? Why not let him understand how much he's destroyed, and the price of his egotism?

Yes, I know "Beauty killed the beast" is a line from the 1933 original, but when Black intones it I wanted to scream, "It was you, you moron! Not to mention dozens of sailors, natives, and Depression-era extras. Get a good lawyer."

It's no small irony that Jackson appears in a cameo in one of the biplanes that sends the grand ape plummetting onto 34th Street.

Still, Ang Lee's pre-BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN project was THE HULK. I live in faith that PJ can keep his inner fanboy in check and let the story take the reins again.

Hell-Bent for Leather

I'm back from vacation, quads newly jellied by climbing about 176 Maya pyramids, and still bleary enough that I misread a label at the store on Tuesday and bought a bag of baby arugula instead of baby spinach. Arugula, which is Italian for "yuppie chump weeds," is expensive and bitter to the point of being painful. The first wife of lettuces.

So. The January question is, existing obligations aside, what to tackle writing-wise as the new year kicks off?

The goal: a new feature script by the end of February.

I'm not starting cold. I have a premise, character sketches, rough outline, handful of punchy moments, and a title, but that's it. Two months from early prep to first draft, the version I fondly call the crap draft.

Anyone else want to play?

Ready, set, go!

Scribosphere Movie Night?

Fun Joel got me thinking. We all like movies, we all like talking about movies. Would folks be into getting together to see one sometime, say something that's bubbling to the top this awards season? We could decamp afterwards for a tasty beverage and witty debate. Or maybe just the beverage.

Plenty of good choices: MUNICH, SYRIANA, BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, MATCH POINT, THE RINGER. I kid.

What do you think?

Golden Apples, Oranges, Kumquats

Today the WGA announced its nominees for the best screenplays of 2005, the usual mixed bag cinematic buffet that reminds me to get out of the damn house to see some movies and/or stop filling my Netflix queue with well-intentioned, earnest, thoughtfully paced foreign films that I will never watch.

ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

CINDERELLA MAN, Screenplay by Cliff Hollingsworth and Akiva Goldsman, Story by Cliff Hollingsworth

CRASH, Screenplay by Paul Haggis & Bobby Moresco, Story by Paul Haggis

THE 40 YEAR-OLD VIRGIN, Written by Judd Apatow & Steve Carell

GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK, Written by George Clooney & Grant Heslov

THE SQUID AND THE WHALE, Written by Noah Baumbach

How nice to see a comedy in there! That Murrow guy was hilarious.


ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, Screenplay by Larry McMurtry & Diana Ossana, Based on the Short Story by Annie Proulx

CAPOTE, Screenplay by Dan Futterman, Based on the Book by Gerald Clarke

THE CONSTANT GARDENER, Screenplay by Jeffrey Caine, Based on the Novel by John le Carré

A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE, Screenplay by Josh Olson, Based on the Graphic Novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke

SYRIANA, Written by Stephen Gaghan, Based on the Book "See No Evil" by Robert Baer

Cowboy-on-cowboy action will not be denied, people.

Merry Merry!

I'm going off the grid until after New Years. While the jungle resort where I'll be staying has WiFi (!), I will be too busy drinking things involving rum and bananas and trading Indiana Jones quotes with The Boyfriend to keep the hell fresh.

In the meantime, watch some holiday movies, hug your loved ones, pick up a major award. Play some games, even the kind that don't beep or give Jack Thompson agita. Write if you feel like it and don't if you don't.

I leave you with a piece I wrote during my three-year stint as a columnist on classic movies for Girls on Film, which is not the kind of website you think it is. Years ago the site was bought by Bolt and then by Oxygen (yes, Oprah's internet play) and then closed down, so I have no idea who owns the rights to my columns but I know it's not me. Please don't sue.

Anyway, enjoy. I've kept the dated refences intact partially for your amusement (Shasta McNasty! VCRs!) and mostly because I am lazy.

Merry Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Solstice, Festivus, Chrismukkah, and all the very best wishes for the new year!

---

A Classic Christmas

Heaven help us, Ricky Martin has a Christmas special. Amidst the seasonal faves "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" and "The Year Without a Santa Claus" (starring Heat-Miser and his chilly bro), TV this time of year chokes on Very Special Episodes of shows that were dreck even before getting dunked in eggnog. Me, I'm headed straight for the video store. Come along before the cast of "Shasta McNasty" goes caroling.

The undisputed champeen of holiday flicks, IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE (1946) stands up just fine under the ritual yearly viewing. For both of you who haven't seen it yet, LIFE is about Everyguy George Bailey (James Stewart) on the worst night of his life. Sent to save him is Clarence (Henry Travers) an angel who not only hasn't earned his wings yet, but has by all accounts "the I.Q. of a rabbit."

George's story is one of kindness and self-sacrifice, starting from saving his brother's life as a kid. Putting aside his own grand dreams, George grows up to see everyone around move on to apparently bigger and better things. Pal Sam Wainwright (Frank Albertson) makes a fortune in plastics. Brother Harry (Todd Karns) goes to college and becomes a decorated Navy pilot. For his part, George quietly but surely becomes a pillar of his town, marrying the radiant Mary (Donna Reed) and starting a family.

Missing money, threat of arrest, and a string of other indignities drive George to the brink of suicide. Clarence counters by showing George what life would be like had he not been born: not a pretty picture. The town teems with sleazy bars and pawn shops. People are mean and hard. Harry and all the men he would've saved as a pilot are dead. George sees the light and runs home to a triumphant Christmas Eve, the community he served for so long now coming joyfully to his aid.

If you think LIFE is just a goody-goody holiday tale, think again. It zings with humor and stellar performances, stuffed with more terrific lines than a fruitcake has nuts. It's a wonderful film (pardon the pun), from the charming walk home that George and Mary share after their first date to their magical wedding night. More than just about Christmas or angels, IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE is about the often-forgotten fact that each of us touches many other lives, a sentiment well worth remembering this time of year.

Check out WHITE CHRISTMAS (1954) if you want to score big with your Great Aunt Marge. Bing Crosby, musical numbers, Vermont through Hollywood eyes... it's 1950s eye candy with a yuletide twist that'll have Aunt Marge swooning into her Pink Lady.

Bob Wallace (Crosby), a well-known crooner, and Phil Davis (Danny Kaye), a wannabe entertainer, first meet as soldiers in WWII. After the war, Phil joins Bob in his act, the pair becoming hugely successful. A businesslike look-see at the singing Haynes Sisters -- Betty (Rosemary Clooney) and Judy (Vera Ellen) -- turns into more as the gents join the gals at a Vermont inn for their holiday gig.

Who should be running the inn but their old General, now retired and finding business dangerously slow. Our heroes decide to give the General a whopper of a Christmas gift, and pull all kinds of strings to move their sellout Broadway show up to the mountains. Naturally, love blooms among the fir trees for one and all.

Make no mistake, WHITE CHRISTMAS is a musical. Aside from the numbers sensibly staged in clubs and rehearsals, these folks break into song at the drop of a top hat, from musing about snow on the train to serenading each other over liverwurst sandwiches. And break out the Benadryl if you're allergic to huge production numbers-- this is old-style Hollywood, with the dancers and spangles to prove it. WHITE CHRISTMAS is also trademark post-war fare, with appropriate respect for the veterans of World War II. The soldier element might be enough to keep Uncle Mort awake, but don't bet on it.

So don't let holiday TV turn you into a Scrooge. Your VCR can be your window on Christmases Past. Grab some vids, mull the cider and snuggle close to the ones you love. Happy Holidays!

Doc Doc Goose

One nice thing about the holiday TV hiatus is that it gives us all a chance to catch up on DVDs. A number of documentaries bubbled to the top of my Netflix queue:

MAD HOT BALLROOM - Delightful. When I heard about this movie, I figured it'd be one of those heavy-handed deals about kids lifting themselves up from poverty through dance. Or growing up and learning how to deal with their identities and the *gasp!* opposite sex. Or coping with a high-pressure competitive situation.

While MHB touches on all these, it's with a light, deft hand. The filmmakers don't have any obvious agenda, except that of showing the joy these young dancers express as they merengue and rhumba.

MARCH OF THE PENGUINS - Amazing story, amazingly filmed. Really just a National Geographic special writ large, it's nonetheless an astonishing tale, full of sweetness, perserverance, loss, and hot penguin-on-penguin action. It's not afraid to make you choose sides (seals are mean!) and goes to some lengths to anthropomorphize the penguins, who already look like a scrum of maitre d's.

Although the making-of doc behind the doc tends to the overwrought ("Do I darken the purity of the White Continent with words?"), it provides more birdy footage plus context for the filming, which included a near-fatal whiteout that sidelined production for a month.

MURDERBALL - Apparently audiences found quadriplegic rugby players less cuddly than penguins. Too bad. This story is far more gripping and immediate. Lively and lecture-free, MURDERBALL zings with the energy and personality of its stars. Yeah, these guys are in wheelchairs, but they're just as ornery, proud, horny, independent, and occasionally juvenile as anyone else.

At its heart a sports movie, MURDERBALL follows Team USA and their Canadian rivals, and the drama runs high. A parallel story thread about a newly rehabbed young man trying to come to terms with the shifted definitions of his life provides both bitter and hopeful moments.

The most heartbreaking scene for me, though, came at the very end, where the team demos quad rugby for future players among Iraq War veterans, all of who look about fourteen years old.

MONDOVINO - Not as well-shaped as these others, MONDOVINO zips from vineyard to vineyard around the world, painting a sobering (har!) picture of the impact on the wine industry of globalization, technology, and high-profile consultants.

One year, an Orellaia red sells for 35 Euros. The winery partners up with American juggernaut Mondavi, and the next year the wine's at 110 Euros and named the best in the world. Not, importers and retailers note, because the wine got better, but because it was made more palatable to the market and critics. Kinda makes me feel like a slob for buying my wines from the bottom shelf at Vons.

Goose! WINGED MIGRATION - Okay, I saw this ages ago in the theater, but it was top of mind because:

(1) It's another incredible story about the natural world.
(2) Even more than MARCH OF THE PENGUINS makes you gasp, "How did they film that?!"
(3) Though narration-free (Morgan Freeman must've been booked), it contains myriad mini-narratives, some funny, some sad (crabs are mean!).
(4) It's the DVD selection of the month in the cat area of the kennel some friends are using to board their feline over the holidays. Yes, in LA even the cats have screening rooms.

Happy Horrordays

I'm pretty sure Sartre came up with that "hell is other people" bon mot after coming off a 10-hour shift working retail during Christmas. It's well-known among the dramaturgical cognoscenti that the first drafts of NO EXIT were about three retail clerks doomed to work the Friday after Thanksgiving for all eternity.

That day's alternate moniker, Black Friday, was not coined by the media or by merchants, mind you, but by cash register slaves and stock jockeys. I know -- I used to be one at a Borders Books.

We're rounding the bend to December 25th, which is when they come out of the woodwork, those people who've waited until the last minute to shop and as such are full to the eyeballs with panic and guilt in addition to whatever intrinsic assholery they may bring to the party.

So, I'd like to extend a holiday wish.

Please have a kind word for the folks at Candles R Us or Trendy But Generic Clothing or Ottomans! Ottomans! Ottomans!.

Their feet hurt.

They make crap money.

They've been asked to find a book for a customer who can only say that it's pink. Title, author, genre? "No, but it's pink! Jesus, are you some kind of goddamn idiot? Fine, I'll just get it online."

Knock yourself out. You think I get paid on commission, bitch?

Retail workers get sick more often than those in other industries, because you bring in your germs and leave them all over the merchandise.

You mess up their sections and then complain that you can't find anything.

You decide you want to charge your purchase instead of using cash only after the clerk has finished your transaction, which as any retail survivor (and David Sedaris in his brilliant SANTALAND DIARIES) can tell you is a gauntlet of calling over the manager, initialing this, filing that, and starting all over.

Don't assume this is the only job they can get or that they're stupid.

Your mileage may vary, but in my store many of us were working to save some money for grad school. One guy was headed to Georgetown for his MBA. I was between Stanford and NYU. We even had one woman who had been a lawyer for years and just decided she wanted to do something different.

Retail is different from the law. When you're a lawyer, you can put the bad people in prison. In retail, you smile and give them a complimentary bookmark and mentally record them for when you have a private hitman at your disposal. I'm looking at you, Pink Book.

As I used to say, any day in retail you can walk away from is a good day.

So ask your clerk how they're doing. Listen, smile, wish them well. They're worthy and needful of any kindness right about now.

Except for the clerks at Barnes and Noble. Those guys are freakin' morons.

Detention

Things all we delinquent writers should pen one hundred times, if only that didn't keep us from actual writing:

Only writing is writing.

Reading about writing is not writing.

Rereading something you've already written is not writing.

Rewriting is writing, but the obsessive polish and re-polish and re-re-polish of the same eight pages for the last year and half is not.

Outlining is writing.

Taking a walk to think about writing is not writing if it ends in a latte and two pairs of new shoes.

Blogging about writing is not writing.

Blogging about bad haircuts is certainly not writ--

Ahem. Gotta go.

You too!

Cute Enough to Make Your Teeth Hurt

You must click this now. Read the captions too.

Awww!

I Look Worse in Hats

For some reason, the very nice but misguided folks who've cut my hair of late think I can pull off the choppy, layered look. The kind that says, "Are you READY TO RAAAWWWK, DETROIT?!"

I'm not Joan Jett, people. I'm not even Joan Lunden. I'm edgy as a bagel.

The conversations with the stylist (lordy, call them hairdressers at your peril) typically go like this:

STYLIST: I think some more layers in here will be fun!

ME: It won't be too severe, right?

STYLIST: No, no. Wispy. Sweet. Fun!

ME: That "fun" is scaring me.

STYLIST: Just some architectural chunks in there.

(Pause while I blink and try to parse this. Stylists love to use words like "architectural" that have a different meaning in the parallel reality of chairs that can go up and down via a foot pedal)

ME: Okayyyy... Will it be subtle?

STYLIST: Oh, yeah. Subtle. But fun!

And I end up with a haircut that makes me look like I should be holding Courtney Love's purse as she yarfs into a Vegas toilet somewhere.

I'm in meetings where I want to be taken seriously as a Credible Creative Person and I'm now rockin' a 'do that says Off Her Meds and possibly Flight Risk.

Fun.

Wednesday Web

Guess what? When you change the fundamentals of your online game and jettison characters -- and their associated relationships -- that took your audience years to build, players don't like it very much. At all.

A Feast for Crows, George R. R. Martin's new book, is, duh, doing well. Even though The Boyfriend says it suffers from incipient Robert Jordan Disease, which involves taking 300 pages to tell 40 pages of story, I'm looking forward to it.

Martin, a former story editor and producer for "The Twilight Zone," knows how to give his characters layers and complex motivations. While ostensibly fantasy, the Song of Ice and Fire books (particularly the first couple), tend to the Shakespearean in scope and theme. They feature messy, violent politics, Tudor vs. Plantagenet-style, rather than twee fairytaling around the countryside. Oh, and there's a lot of sex.

How is DIE HARD like SIDEWAYS, and how can that info help us make better games? MMOGuru Raph Koster thinks gamemakers need to improve as filmmakers in order to help the medium realize its potential, including getting smart about hiring actual writers to work on games (naturally, I agree).

At the heart of this is what Raph calls the Pixar lesson, namely that story deserves respect, as does the audience. Amen.

O Holy Crap

I'm at a Christmas party and no one I know is there.

For the shy (INFJ in my case, if you're into all that Meyers-Briggs stuff), this is a pretty solid definition of hell.

I attended a couple of earlier festivities with The Boyfriend, and the poor bastard was as usual stuck talking to me all night, but he's not at this shindig.

This is an alumni thingie for my college. Those functions tend to hit me where I live because everyone there was valedictorian and is clever and poised. This particular alumni thingie is in Los Angeles, so not only was everyone there valedictorian, but also homecoming queen or king. The ones that weren't now run record labels.

In such situations I can't even take refuge by tucking into the free pinot because I don't want to be That Girl, you know, the one who after midnight turned into Tara Reid and fell into the pool.

So I'm stone-cold sober, socially paralyzed, and wishing I was home watching Christmas movies.

Speaking of! The real reason for this post, some of my seasonal movie faves. In no particular order:

IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE - Darker and funnier than you remember.

HOW THE GRINCH STOLE CHRISTMAS - WARNING! VERY IMPORTANT!! I mean the ANIMATED version, with charming Chuck Jones art and plummy voice work by Boris Karloff. Not the Jim Carrey redundancy, for the love of Fah who for-aze.

WHEN HARRY MET SALLY - Not strictly speaking a Christmas movie, but many of the story's key moments happen at the holidays. The season of groveling, revelatory Mallomars.

MUPPET CHRISTMAS CAROL - I'm serious. Michael Caine gives excellent deadpan as Scrooge in the face of adorableness (Fozziwig!) and catchy songs, but the movie gets scary and sad right when it's supposed to. All that and mini Miss Piggies. Get over yourself and rent it.

THE THIN MAN - Another not-quite-Christmas movie, but who cares when you have William Powell shooting ornaments off the tree with a BB gun while Myrna Loy watches, amused, in a new fur coat? In a movie that glimmers with champagne dialogue, this wordless moment is a standout.

THE GODFATHER - Okay, okay, I'll stop cheating, but the Godfather saga is framed around moments rich with ritual and family significance: weddings, baptisms, the holidays. I love Al Pacino's tense and terrifying vigil at the creepy, Christmas-quiet hospital.

A CHRISTMAS STORY - Some time ago I came across a rant against this movie, which I just don't get. So it's faux nostalgic. Nostalgia is false almost by definition. A CHRISTMAS STORY is funny, sweet, just arch enough, and yes, authentic, capturing the tribulations and joy of being a kid at yuletide. Plus Peter Billingsley now is poker buddies with Vince Vaughn, so there's that.

What about you? Any other holiday flicks you find yourself watching year after year?

Another County Heard From

TV writers both aspiring and ascended (erm, that came out more Operating Thetan VI than intended) take note: another pro writer has tossed his official SIMPSONS staff baseball cap into the scribosphere ring.

Ken Levine's freshly-minted blog takes on the writerly life, including what exactly it means when you get a coffee mug from your showrunner for Christmas (shorthand for "pack up your desk, we're getting canceled"), internecine squabbles between LA's West and East sides, and divers newsbits and musings.

One choice item: "Mariah Carey nabbed eight Grammy nominations thus continuing her stunning comeback and pushing back her Magic Mountain concert at Spilikin Corners until October."

We can only hope, Ken, we can only hope.

Game On, Gray Lady, Game On

While it's always amusing to see the New York Times catch up with the more leading edge press -- What's this? People pay monthly fees for some sort of electronic game? Over the internets? What next, miniature phones you can put in your pocket? -- a front page story there is undeniably a benchmark that the subject has hit the mainstream.

This time, it's gold farmers (visit www.bugmenot.com if you don't have a nytimes.com account). Stale news to many of us, but surely a novel head-scratcher to those outside the dev or player community.

For a fictional take on this phenomenon, read Cory Doctorow's short story Anda's Game. It deals with gold farming in MMOGs, but also the medium's larger questions of identity, community, and achievement both true and illusory.

Extra Dry

I stumbled across Martini Shot, TV writer Rob Long's weekly commentary on Hollywood, while driving home the other night. For you Southland locals, it airs on KCRW 89.9, but is also available on Teh Intarweb in podcast format.

Entertaining insider stuff, from hosting stargazers in denial to a new take on Scientologists to more nifty TV show lingo. Though successful and experienced, Long's just as neurotic as the rest of us, be it calling up for the network overnights in a cold sweat or trying (and failing) to reassure a doubtful friend that he Really Is Happy for the friend's lush studio deal.

I think a debate is in the offing between Josh Friedman and Long, who in one piece calls us monkeys to task for our poor sartorial sense. Sweatpants deathmatch!

CSI: San Fernando Valley

What is up with that terrible Jeff Kent pornstar mustache lately sprouted on otherwise toothsome Nick Stokes (George Eads)?

Wacka-chicka-wacka-chicka...

Talking the Talk

Because I am lazy and still digging out from post-Turkey Day catchup on all fronts, here instead of a real post is a link to a real one, Craig Mazin's informative and entertaining on-set glossary. Be sure to scroll down and read the comments for more insidery goodness.

It's fascinating (if not exactly surprising) how much movie lingo derives from that of the theater, which naturally has its own nutty lexicon. Carps and LX, ghost light, par cans, all that left is right/in is out nonsense, twofers, teasers and tormentors... And no, the latter are neither agents nor recalcitrant subscribers.

Going back further, some terms like "flying in" date to the days of tall ships, when many early theater technicians were former sailors, employing their knowledge of lines (not ropes, you fool) and knots in theatrical rigging.

See, it all comes back to pirates. Arrr!

Slumming with Microsoft

Have you seen those vague, arty Xbox 360 ads? The ones with aggressively multiculti crowds having balloon fights and jumprope jams in what looks like the sets from CITY OF GOD?

I think they're supposed to convey inclusiveness, fun, and diversity, but I'm left cold by the disingenuous casting and the poverty-chic setting. I mean, the people who live in those tower block apartments, you think they have $400 to drop on a game console? Instead of on schoolbooks or a bike to get to a job? Or, say, food?

And while it's fun to think of folk playing together regardless of age, gender, race, or class, the truth is, Xbox Live is not diverse. Xbox Live is this kid.

More to the point, it'll always be that kid until the games for Xbox 360 stretch beyond the predictable likes of Madden NFL 2006, Call of Duty 2, and Rumble Roses XX.

Rumble Roses XX?

That's a title that, to paraphrase a Katrina-era rant, deserves to have its developers covered in iPods and left in an unpicturesque alley in Rio.

Hey! The Microsoft marketing bunnies squeal. What about Xbox Live Arcade? Yeah, the service features puzzle/parlor classics Zuma, Bejeweled 2, and Spades, but with the occasional exception like Wik: Fable of Souls, innovation's wheezing by the roadside, and you know that developers of these kinds of games aren't getting a thimble of love compared to Project Gotham Racing 3.

Kinda makes me want to take to the streets of Redmond and throw something. But it ain't a water balloon.

Ante Up, Boys and Ghouls

Activision has a new game out called Gun, which sounds like a serviceable if not spectacular shooter.

What makes this Western-themed FPS interesting is Last Call Poker, the elaborate promotional alternate reality game, or ARG, that was built to promote it. The folks behind LCP are 42 Entertainment, which did the I Love Bees ARG for Halo 2.

The Last Call Poker site includes a real, free poker room but also a parallel puzzle game about unlocking the backstory of the Activision game. The notion is that everyone in LCP, including you, is dead.

Dead doesn't mean eternally resting, though. You and your colleagues in the hereafter have bones to pick and missions to solve.

One nifty element is how the LCP site's visual style -- front page, poker room background, your avatar's clothing -- changes as the narrative has moved back in time to Gun's setting, from present day to WWII Europe to Prohibition to Deadwood.

Part of Gun's backstory follows the bloody history of the antique Navy Colt in question as it slam-bangs into the lives of cross-dressing orphans, OSS agents, Ambrose Bierce, Calamity Jane, Al Capone, and more. A second thread is a Tarantino-y, LA-set action drama about Lucy, poker ace, sometime chauffeur, and rightful owner of the gun in the present day, and all the colorful and homicidal characters hot on her trail.

Pretty entertaining stuff, even if the performances and writing tend to be a bit over the top. You can catch up on the previous episodes at the site.

As the community solves the puzzles, bits of story are revealed through photos, text, fake recorded phone calls, comic book pages, video snippets, and even live events, the last of which is being held this Saturday in a Hollywood cemetery. The event will feature a tournament of "Tombstone Hold 'Em," a poker game using headstones as pocket cards.

Should be interesting...

Truthful Videogame Boxes

Does "Katamari Damacy" really translate to "Magically Adhesive Ball of Garbage"? Maybe it should -- at least you'd know what you're getting.

Imagine the tears and effort that would be spared if your local Gamestop carried games that truthfully declaimed their content, such as Fanboy Bullshit VII and Roster Update NFL 2006.

The Great Indoors

Part of the reason I write things set in the mountains or in space or backpacking around Europe or attending UFO conventions is to have my characters do these things so I don't have to.

As a kid, a Girl Scout no less (a pre-Jack Thompson Girl Scout, mind you. Me and my Atari-playing friends would have no part of that lunacy), I used to go camping, and enjoyed it.

I got older and paler and found that I liked books and movies and the theater and computers more than insect bites and sand in inconvenient places. Any camping trip I'd consider now would probably need to involve a bed with sheets and WiFi.

This December, The Boyfriend, Sis and Brother-in-Law, Mom and Dad, and I are off to Central America. Don't get me wrong, I am very excited to be going. Beautiful country, Mayan ruins, time with folks I love, rum drinks.

It's the preparation I hate. Trips like these involve planning like you're Shackleton tasked with provisioning the goddamn Endurance. You get shot full of vaccines and buy weird things you never thought you'd need that are only sold in weird places.

REI. I'm in an REI, God help me.

I'm a room full of kayaks staffed by people who look like they're made out of beef jerky.

These people terrify me. I know, and they know that I know, that should the apocalypse come, they can and will track me down, joint, bone, and fillet me. Me, I can and will get eaten.

REI sells enchiladas that come in a mylar bag. This is somehow more hair-raising to me than the cannibal scenario.

REI staffers are very nice and very helpful and very cheerful, because they are trying to get you to become an official member of their beef jerky cult, with its associated rituals involving carabiners and helmets and crampons.

Hee! Crampons!

And you can't leave REI without buying something, because the place is overwhelming (did I mention the astronaut enchiladas?) and because the staff will hunt you and skin you in your sleep if you don't, because, y'know, they can.

I now own some unspeakably ugly sandals and shirts that "wick," whatever the hell that means. Wish me luck.

Meet Market

For writerly types in the LA area, there's going to be a gathering at the Hotel Figueroa's Veranda Bar this Sunday, 11/13, at 6pm after the Screenwriting Expo next door. Warren over at The Screenwriting Life has the details.

I may not be able to be there, but a bunch of cools folks will be, so come by if you can! Because writers and booze go together like...well, writers and booze.

Slainte, prosit, and na vashe zdorovye!

The Triumph of Met Expectations Part II

Spotted on TV this weekend, although happily not back-to-back on the same channel:

SANDWICHES THAT YOU WILL LIKE

WHEN SURGICAL INSTRUMENTS GET LEFT

Tasty!

Hallowhine

One of the few episodes of the excellent FREAKS AND GEEKS that I actually caught on TV was their Halloween show. It captures the death of the classic version of the holiday, both for one family and for society at large.

Travel with me, back, back, back, before the giant Spirit stores that pop up in September and vanish November 1 like mushrooms, before the boom industry of pre-packaged Slutty Cinderella and Slutty Ninja and Slutty Napoleon Dynamite costumes.

We're at around 1980 now. You with me?

The show's mom loves Halloween. Dresses up, decorates the house, makes homemade treats for the goblins that ring the doorbell.

This year, though, the younger kid decides he's too old to go trick or treating. The older girl doesn't want to stay home with mom, but wants to hang with her friends. The goblins throw away the treats because their parents fear that they could be poisoned.

The look of sadness and loss on the mom's face is heartbreaking, because not only are her children growing up too fast for her, she can see the end of something fanciful and connecting, mysterious, silly, to be shared with your family.

Flash forward to now, where surely in some neighborhoods the goblins still appear on the front stoop, going home to carefully sort through the candy to avoid the razor blades and syringes and anthrax powder, but not in mine.

The kids trick or treat at school, in the mall, at their parents' offices. Places well lit and clinical and utterly free of that wonderful frisson of being out after dark and talking to strangers! It was scary-but-not-really, because mom or dad was always behind you, curbside, with the flashlight.

This year, we got a grand total of two goblins the whole night, a very shy fairy and her bolder pirate sister, bless her little pillaging heart.

Leftover candy isn't worth it.

Hasselhoffed

I'm huge in Germany!

A quick check of my site referrer stats and a confirmation on the internets shows that a search for "maslow pyramid" on Google Deutschland returns Fresh Hell on the first page.

Next up, Google Sudetenland and maybe Google Austria.