A Stormy Story Conference on the Rewrite for the Pilot Episode of the TV Series based on The Louise Log

patiently transcribing Mr. Green's notes on the rewrite

I’ve been nose to the grindstone this week working in a very focused and disciplined way on the rewrite. And this is thanks, in large part, to the excellent suggestions you made on the fb feed last Friday. Thank you again!  I had some bonafide breakthroughs and am feeling very very excited, so much so that I've recently switched songs and am now listening to The Cranberries’ Zombie on repeat.

One of my co-writers, Mr. Green, (who actually is kind of overworked) carved out the time tonight to read the draft and to sit down with me to discuss it.

I asked him for a simple summary of his reaction to the new draft. He obliged me.

 “It’s very much closer and is a lot funnier.” I asked him to elaborate. “No I can’t do that.”

He's very good with the boundaries, a fact which sometimes angers me.

“I don’t like your attitude.”
“Well I don’t like YOUR attitude!”

We managed to make it through all twenty-nine pages, me carefully taking notes on every one of his (often excellent) suggestions. And then Mr. Green pushed me over the edge. He asked if I’d ‘make a deal’. Having been married for a while, I knew where he was headed.

All week, in gratitude for the time and energy he was eventually going to give to this story conference, I’ve been catering to Mr. Green, peeling his oranges and even accompanying him today on one very long and boring errand. His ‘deals’ usually have something to do with chocolate. Tonight I flatly denied him. No deal. I didn’t even want to hear the terms.

Knowing that this was going to be the subject of tonight’s still unwritten blog, Mr. Green responded: “Well you know what? Everybody’s going to feel sorry for me and you’re going to get a lot of comments because my wife won’t walk to the store with me to get a little piece of chocolate. Imagine! A husband can’t get his wife to take a walk around the corner to satisfy his chocolate addiction.” 

Mr. Green likes to say things two times.

Sometimes I have to make hissing cat noises to hold my ground with Mr. Green.

Go Big or Go Bust: On believing that you're good enough (Part 3)

So before moving on to other topics, I want to tell you the story of an evening in 2009 when I had a very odd to downright bizarre but relevant experience.  

I’d been invited to be on a panel at the Paley Center for Media on 52nd Street. Midtown. Fancy. It was an event organized by the Writers Guild on the subject of writing in the then-new medium of web series with Fred Graver as the moderator. There was a conference call to prepare us all after which I’d memorized some bullet points so I wouldn’t ramble or drift off-topic. 

We were each supposed to supply a short video to screen and so I’d spent hours preparing a hi-res version of the episode about Louise and The Hot Repairman and had delivered it to the technician at the Paley Center. 

Everything was going as planned.

With my unique ability to delay leaving the house until the last possible second and still squeak through the door on time, I’d headed off to the subway, nervous and wishing I’d worn more comfortable shoes.

But then as I rode uptown on the E train, a lump rose in my throat and with it, that strange experience of anxiety, the extreme fascination with but detachment from my fellow straphangers, the acute awareness of every passing second as if I were actually headed to my own execution. 

By the time I got off the train at 53rd Street, nervousness had ratcheted up to panic and I decided that I simply couldn’t go through with it. I was too frightened. I’d make a fool of myself. Everyone would be better off if I got back on the subway and rushed back home, calling to say that I’d been suddenly taken ill … as I sort of had.    (to be continued)

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Go Big or Go Bust: Getting Ready for a Flurry of Activity (BONUS: hear Mr. Green learn from Matthew McConnaughey)

It's the season for hibernation ... but I'm going in the other direction - I'm coming back to life! After almost a year of thrashing around and trying to figure out the next step, I've got a plan. 

Here's a (2:00) clip to start the ball rolling.  More soon.   (Please click the 'Like' button and be instantly rewarded for your big heart.)

Go Big or Go Bust: Six Top Tools for Creative Work in the Digital Age

This blog was started as a way of keeping you, dear reader, up to date on my efforts to get The Louise Log  out to a wider audience.  (The urgency to reach more viewers is financial - this show needs to become self-sustaining in order to continue.)  

I thank you for giving me a wide berth as I’ve gone down meandering paths into my past life, trying to see if there’s some obvious pattern at work here and, if so, how I might be able to break it.

The good news is that, in spite of me and my personality still at the helm, we have a very exciting plan in the works which I’ll be able to say more about in the next week or so.

Until then, here’s some of what I’ve learned from making this show.  

I used to routinely face a wall of anxiety too tall to see over and too wide to get around.  The only possible way to deal with this is, obviously, was avoidance, otherwise known as procrastination.  As you may have read, in what is by any standards an epic mastery of this approach to life, I managed to stretch out the rewrite of the script for my ‘second feature’ for SEVENTEEN YEARS.  Making The Louise Log  taught me a number of tools to deal with this demon.  

Tool #1 is limitations.  Having ‘wasted’ so many years on one miserable script, I was like an over-primed pump ready to explode.   It helped that I was fifty-five years old and well aware that people start dying at that age.  So before mine got me, I started to set my own deadlines.  Mr. Green had been writing a blog once a month for years.  I decided that I’d make one video a month.  

Tool #2 is a variation on Tool #1: Start where you are with what you have.

In film, I’d worked with Camera Operators and Directors of Photography.  I knew nothing about shooting and less about video.  Furthermore, in 2007, no self-respecting filmmaker was shooting video with a camcorder and putting it up on YouTube.  Fortunately, as previously outlined, I had the gift of desperation.  There was the family camcorder which, guess what?  Like cell phone cameras, camcorders are point and shoot.  A two year old could press the two buttons and probably get something worth looking at.  

I’d worked as a film editor and had always been intimidated by video editing.  Apple’s imovie is so simple, two year olds can now edit the video they’ve shot.  I went to the Apple Store’s One-to-One sessions and learned imovie until I broke it with overly complicated sound tracks.  Then I learned Final Cut Pro.  

Which brings me to Tool #3: Baby Steps

If the first episode had been with more than one actor, I probably would have broken out in hives and cancelled the shoot for not being able to breathe.  

But by the fourth episode I was working with two actors.  By the fifth episode,  there were four actors (two of them children), props, several shots crossing the very busy Seventh Avenue and a rented location (the local public school),  

By episode forty-three we had four SAG actors in their underwear, a fifth (fully clothed) SAG actor 900 miles away on Skype and a crew of five.

Tool #4: Practice Makes Perfect.  Well, yes and no.

On the one hand, working constantly, my craft exploded.  I learned more making The Louise Log than in making all my other films combined.

But a great thing about digital technology is that you don’t have to get it right the first time.  Or even the seventeenth.  For Season One, we didn’t have a professional sound mixer on set. The sound for the first seventeen episodes was whatever the camcorder picked up.  In the episode in the Principle’s Office (12), the air conditioning noise was so invasive, it ruined an otherwise strong episode.  Yes we had to lose thousands of views, but we took down the original uploads of almost all the sub-par audio, dubbed them and re-uploaded a lot of Season One.

Tool #5: Collaborate and Ask For Help

Digital technology makes it possible for one person to do almost every job.  Please don’t ask how I know this.  Unfortunately, the chances of a one-person project reaching a wide audience are greatly diminished.  If only for the (extremely important) fact that the marketing and promotion will be easier if a lot of people are involved and invested, work with a group.  

Tool #6: Story Trumps All

Make sure the script is strong or make sure you have the leeway to salvage it in the editing if it isn’t.  A voice-over saved us more times than I can count.  

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Go Big or Go Bust: New Efficiency Model - The Berlin Film Festival (Part 6)

After having the ‘World Premiere’ of How To Be Louise at the Sundance Festival (trailer below), I flew from Salt Lake City to Newark to pick up one year-old Frank at my parents in New Jersey. 

(2:07) trailer for How To Be Louise starring Lea Floden as Louise and Bruce McCarty

On arriving at my parents, guess who didn’t recognize me?  Guess who wouldn’t even look at me?  Choking back tears, I wallowed in heartbreak until my mother suggested that I pull myself together.  

Frank and I headed back to Brooklyn to join Mr. Green who had arrived from Japan to meet with students in his lab and to take over with Frank.  Having schooled Mr. Green on what he needed to know, I set off for our European Premiere.  (Premieres are a very big deal in the world of film festivals.)

Having never been to Berlin, I didn’t know what to expect but my hopes were high from what I knew from Kurt Weill, Lotte Lenya, Marlene Dietrich, the Bauhaus and Max Beckmann.  I was not disappointed.

The Departure by Max Beckmann

In spite of it being a bitterly cold February with the usual icy streets and sidewalks, the mood of the city was jubilant: the Berlin Wall had come down just two months earlier. Lea Floden and I stayed in a small hotel and had schedules packed from morning til night. We went to a festival party in a high-ceilinged room hardly bigger than an over-sized living room.  The draw was neither movie stars or film producers, but rather the Soviet Army marching band in full uniform. They played Swing Era music with lots of brass and I can't find the words to describe how explosive, how loud and incredibly exciting it was.  It was like the music was coming from inside my body.

And then there was Berlin. On one of my forays into the streets around the festival, I came upon a pharmacist who seemed to be trapped in the 14th century. The pharmacy had large windows through which I could see that it was a jewel box of exquisitely functional wood work - shelves, drawers, cabinets and mirrors. But it was the pharmacist himself who made my jaw drop.  He wore a perfect white lab coat and his white hair was cut in an impeccable Prince Valiant bob with a page boy curl.  This vision eventually inspired Everett Quinton’s character Ethelred’s hair in Season 3 of The Louise Log.  

Everett Quinton in the Prince Valiant wig - (We didn't have the budget for the curl of a pageboy.)

Lea and I met up with some other filmmakers who were taking a trip over into what had been behind the Iron Curtain ninety days earlier.  The drab and barren-looking architecture and the looks on the faces of the people in East Berlin were in striking contrast with the opulent and free feeling of the western part of the city.  In the guarded way the East Berliners looked around (or didn’t look around} while sitting on a bus or walking past us on the street, it was clear that decades of a repressive regime had affected them.  

I spent most of my time in Berlin at the festival, walking in one direction or the other of a very long hallway in the building which housed The Market.  It was easy to meet new people and find old friends.  Our friend and long-time champion Lynda Hansen who organized American Independents in Berlin was there and we met Josef Wutz, a producer and actor and many others I've lost touch with. 

Like everyone, we had a few screenings set up at The Market.  As you might expect, The Market is where the business happens in modest screening rooms for small groups of people in the industry.  A very nice bonus of Market screenings was the Sign-In List which was handed to the filmmaker after the audience had been seated.  I was thrilled to see that a number of film festival directors were at our first screening, including Richard Pena of the New York Film Festival.  My first short had screened at New York before he was the director and I held my breath imagining that my first feature might be invited too.

Less than ten minutes into the screening, the bulb in the projector burst.  Eventually the lights came up.  Some time later, a technician poked his head in and asked for our patience in several languages.  There was complete silence in the room.  I was in the back row chewing off my nails.  After a few more minutes, Richard Pena got up and left. 

(to be continued)

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