A photograph of Cookie Mueller by Nan Goldin on HBO's "The Deuce" brings James Killough back to the roaring downtown scene of the mid-80s and the AIDS epidemic....
It seems essential for many fictional detectives to have insurmountable personal issues and challenges. But why?...
I’m mentoring a young friend through the process of writing and directing his first feature, which he’ll shoot in a year; he’s still in development tweaking the script before it goes out to cast. His executive producer, the former president of a major studio, said to him the other day, “Your cinematographer is the most important person on set after you.” I couldn’t agree more.
There’s nothing like working with a great DP, it makes all the difference in the world to the outcome of your film on many levels. The most important level for me is the personal, the experience of making a film. I don’t get to direct often, so when I do I want to enjoy it, to be carried away by, yes, the quasi-spiritual experience of creating something worthy in harmony with my crew, as cheesy as that might sound.
A couple of weeks ago I was in a preliminary meeting for a TV series I am being commissioned to write. One of the associated producers, who has hitherto exclusively made reality-TV fare, suggested the characters break the fourth wall and talk to the camera, in mockumentary style, which works to great effect in both TV and feature-film comedies — note the word “mock” — but not in drama.
As a purist, I was taken aback by the suggestion of deploying this unnecessary device. I reigned in my kneejerk contempt for it by nodding and muttering, “Hmm, interesting idea.” It just didn’t suit my vision for this particular piece at all, but I’m also coming in later in this project’s process. I’m changing it from a comedy to at most a dramedy, although by the time I’m through it’ll likely be an outright drama with comedic hints now and then; one of the main characters has a personality disorder that is too often the butt of jokes, which isn’t so bad as it is tiresome and inauthentic to how both people with the disorder and their caretakers deal with it in real life.
Scarlett Rouge reports from a barge in the middle of the Venice Biennale....
Dear James —
I’ve recently parked my meandering caravan in Torino, Italia, and transformed it, with a quick wiggle of my exceptional nose, into a glass-enclosed nest surrounded by woods and autumn leaves. Between the chirps and trees, I’m finally at home, or close to it. Who would have thought it was in Pino Torinese, or Turinese Pine, that I would find my comfort zone? But perhaps the reasoning is not so obscure: A childhood fantasy was being a tree fairy, living among mossy evergreens, luminous enchantments crackling from my fingertips. It’s a fantasy that lingers yet.
Scarlett and family do Frieze differently, of course. And that drags up all sorts of memories of Hollywood hedonism....
Let me start with the obvious caveat that I am deeply and inherently prejudiced in favor of the particular form of narrative filmmaking that I specialize in: fictionalized biographical and autobiographical dramas. I do on occasion dabble in the magical, either with overt supernatural themes or the more subtle magical realism, which is my preferred cut-off; I don’t like to stray far from authenticity. But the unreal isn’t my forte because it isn’t what I’m passionate about.
This wasn’t always the case. When I was younger and mired in a miserable childhood in a gilded cage, I escaped at any opportunity by turning inward and daydreaming a world I could control by magic. When I taught myself screenwriting in my early twenties, my stories were entirely supernatural; as I like to say, “Twenty-somethings are only adult teenagers.”
Let me immediately digress onto a tangential subject that will hopefully serve as an intro to my main topic. It occurred to me the other day, when I was discussing with Scarlett Rouge the alarming fact that almost nobody in the English-speaking countries is reading contemporary French writers in translation, that there are no female auteur filmmakers. In any language. None. There currently isn’t, nor has there ever been, an autrice filmmaker, as she would be called.
I don’t consider Sofia Coppola an autrice. The only thing that distinguishes her films as her own are the willful lack of adherence to dramatic convention and the obsession with the inane antics of privileged white female teens and twentysomethings. Her niece, Gia, is doing exactly the same thing, but upping the now signature Coppola Family pretension by working with proto-wankers like James Franco. At this point in the history of filmmaking, the only place I can bear to see the Coppola name is on a wine label.
After his friend Will Chancellor publishes his first book, Killough has a few thoughts on the rewriting process....