The Dotted Logline

Playwriting was one of the best workshops I took while working on my MFA at Emerson. It was also the most aggravating. I was focused primarily on screenwriting, which was all tight structure and tighter dialogue and plotting everything out down to the tiniest little detail in advance. Playwriting was all about letting things flow and meander where they wanted in the hopes that they would eventually come together into something beautiful, perhaps even coherent. It was a very organic process. Scary as hell, too.

But my playwriting professor, Betsy Carpenter, must have been doing something right. Her class swept the playwriting fellowship awards at least three years in a row, with the winners (myself included) receiving full productions from the very same theater department that vastly outnumbered us in number of entries. And this was despite a deadline that was increasingly pushed back to cripple the workshop and us sacrificing most of class one week for a “field trip” to the pub next door to watch a few innings of the Red Sox/Yankees game (a trip that was both completely dry and top secret, of course.)

Betsy ended up being my graduate thesis adviser. As my thesis was a screenplay and I was working on it long distance to avoid paying another year’s rent in Boston, I was a little concerned about how things would work out. Betsy was great, in an incredibly odd way, but she was rather unpredictable too, much like playwriting itself. It was a a bit of a scary prospect.

Scarier when I didn’t hear back from from her about my preliminary draft for a few months.

When I did finally hear from her, Betsy told me that the screenplay would certainly pass the thesis defense in its current state, but she thought that I could do better. It was tepid, as she put it.

She had two words of advice. “Watch Brazil.”

So I did. And she was right. Brazil showed me exactly what was wrong with my script and exactly what I needed to do to fix it. In the end, there was very little “defense” needed for my thesis defense.

I was in Boston for two weeks to wrap up all of my thesis business. During that time, Betsy invited me to not only sit in on, but participate in two classes and three readings for her current playwriting workshop. She told me several times how great it was to have me back. It was great to be back.

I just received word from my friend Alex, a classmate and friend from the playwriting workshop, that Betsy Carpenter passed away this morning. She had been undergoing cancer treatment for several years. I don’t think I’d known that.

I hadn’t spoken to her since I finished my thesis. I kept meaning to e-mail her but I was waiting until I had some news to tell her about my play. I wish I had dropped her a note to say hello, to let her know that I did make it out to LA after all, to tell her that I have never gotten better advice crammed into two small words.

I just got back from a screening of Slither, a fantastically funny horror film starring Firefly/Serenity’s Nathan Fillion. I wasn’t really familiar with James Gunn (the writer/director), but I’m definitely a fan now.

The movie had, in my opinion, perhaps the best balance of comedy and horror I’ve seen in a movie, though it definitely tipped towards the comedy side of the fence. The dialogue was great (almost too good for such a campy film) and everyone’s timing was just dead on. I had been warned about the gore factor beforehand but I didn’t think it was really that bad. In fact, I went in hungry, and left craving steak and marzipan (don’t ask.)

There was also a great little Q&A afterwards with James, Nathan, and Michael Rooker (the heroine’s husband turned alien cannibal squid flesh katamari thingie.) It was very informative. Apparently Gunn’s cat gets a “little girl being molested” look when it has to go to the vet, Nathan spent most of the film doing nothing and does a great impression of a 1920’s film director, and Michael got to manipulate a prosthetic alien vagina with his foot (when the prosthetics weren’t causing him pain… Ouch).

Slither made me think of Shaun Of The Dead, though I felt that overall, it worked better. The latter tried to cram too many genres in, and I found the pathos of Shaun’s mother and best friend dying to be rather depressing. Slither is much more upbeat. When cute little girls convulse horribly and die, it’s funny! Plus, hive-mind alien zombies are so much cooler than regular old boring brain-eating zombies. I never got the zombie thing myself.

I was also reminded of Monster by Christopher Pike (I had every book by Christopher Pike as a kid) due to slight similarities in the plot (small town flesh eating alien possession.) That book always made me crave steak too.

A friend of mine brought up the topic of Gary Oldman tonight, someone whose work I’ve long admired but whose existence has always frightened me just a little bit. See, Gary Oldman never looks the same twice. And I’m not just talking about his film roles. If you look at his public appearance photos on IMDB, he looks different in each of those too. Personally, I have no idea what Gary Oldman actually looks like.

I’ve had a theory for a while that there is no such person as Gary Oldman. Instead, there is a sort of Gary Oldman Collective, a group of talented actors who all share the name between them. If you think about it, it’s the only logical explanation. If Gary Oldman was a single person, he’d have to be a shapeshifter. And that’s not logical at all.

Tonight I read a good portion of Douglas Adams’ The Salmon Of Doubt on the plane ride back from my grandfather’s funeral. It is an interesting book, full of snippets of writing that give some nice snapshots of Adams as a person. It’s a small thing (can a mass market paperback really sum up the entirety of a human life? Can a eulogy?), but it is some comfort

Now, I’m a Christian girl with some fairly set beliefs about death, but the loss of the experiences and dreams, the real story of a person’s life that only they knew, has always struck me as utterly tragic. I don’t believe that a person’s existence really disappears, but it can be hard to think outside of the realm of human experience and people are quite apt at forgetting. Actually, it seems like people are quite apt at not listening, or at least asking, in the first place. Which is why I unfortunately know more stories about the life of Douglas Adams at the moment than I do about Alton Houser. Sometimes we realize too late that people’s lives aren’t something we can pick up and study at our convenience, like a paperback book.

I went down to the University of Miami tonight to see Dave Barry and his wife Michelle Kaufman (a sports writer for the Miami Herald) speaking at my old dorm. It was a lot of fun. I even spoke with Dave Barry a bit. He called me a shrew bitch. Actually, he told me that Arthur Golden, author of Memoirs Of A Geisha, had called me a shrew bitch. Being that this was Dave Barry, I’m pretty sure he was joking.

This came about because I briefly mentioned that when Arthur Golden came to speak at my high school shortly after Geisha was published, I sort of questioned him about the believability of the ending. Afterwards I realized that was probably really rude, but he was exceptionally nice about it, and even sent me a personally inscribed hardcover, since I told him I didn’t have a copy of the book for him to sign (I had borrowed my English teacher’s copy the previous day so I could read the book before her came.) That remains one of my nicest encounters with an author, aside from Tamora Pierce.

But anyway, Dave Barry and Michelle Kaufman were both quite interesting, and I enjoyed the talk. It was almost worth driving on the Palmetto to go see it, except nothing is worth driving the Palmetto.

Thanks to a tip from my dad, who actually reads the newspaper, I finally got off my ass and went to something arts-related in South Florida. Amber Benson, best known for playing Willow’s girlfriend Tara on Buffy The Vampire Slayer, was promoting the release of a movie called Chance that she had written/directed/starred in along with several other Buffyverse alums. I’d heard good things about the movie and Amber herself was doing a Q&A after the she showing, so I trekked over to downtown Ft. Lauderdale despite my fear of driving at night and walking alone through cities that aren’t Boston at night.

The movie itself was very interesting. It was apparently shot on DV over the course of five weekends, so it had a very homemade feel to it, yet the cast was comprised of mainly very talented professionals. The structure was interesting (though time progression was occasionally hard to follow, and the writing was quirky and funny (though it was best when it wasn’t trying to be.) There were some really interesting directorial choices and several spots where everything just snapped right into place perfectly for a moment. It was overall a very crafted piece and I enjoyed it, though at the same time my first thought afterwards was to wonder what Amber would create in the future with more time and money and experience. Amber herself indicated that this was a project she hadn’t necessarily expected to ever be seen by the public, and while it is good, it does feel like that.

Amber herself was very nice, answering questions and talking with people well past midnight, despite it being the second showing of the night and her apparently having spent the day at a local convention. I got to speak with her a bit and she was very friendly, even willing to have me send her my screenplay AND stage play for her to read, which I thought was beyond generous. She’s also very tiny in person. I like talking to people around my size because don’t feel like I’m five years old, for once.

In a related note, a local film writer wrote a brief but scathing review of Chance on the basis that the actors are portraying characters that are very different, sometimes even the opposite of the characters they played on Buffy. Either I just arrived from a strange parallel universe where actors are generally praised for being versatile, or Phoebe Flowers is an idiot. Though I’m sure there are people out there who are horrified to learn that James Marsters doesn’t always talk with a British accent.

My family had a little viewing of Superman: The Movie, which I hadn’t seen for a number of years. There were a number of things that were rather silly, like Kryptonian technology being powered by hula hoops and Marlon Brando looking like he is reading his lines at some points (which according to legend, he is.) And it’s especially odd seeing Brando get top billing, then Gene Hackman, THEN Christopher Reeves.

But what really struck me was the scene with the first appearance of Superman in Metropolis. It wasn’t anything especially spectacular: catching first Lois Lane and then a damaged helicopter as they fell off the roof of the Daily Planet. But the reaction of the crowd, first astonishment, then joy, was really quite beautiful in a very honest and innocent way. I’ve never really been a Superman fan, but I can’t deny there is a real power to the concept of that moment of realization.

I was shocked last week when I read that Reeve had passed away. When I was a kid, the earliest “grown-up” movie I remember seeing was Superman III, perhaps not the best movie experience, but very memorable, especially the Clark Kent/Superman fight in the junkyard. Like so many other people, Reeve was synonymous with Superman for me, and his riding accident and subsequent paralysis was shocking.

But Reeve showed he was a real hero, not only through his work promoting funding for research into reversing spinal cord damage, but his continued involvement with the film industry, which he clearly loved. His appearance as a scientist on Smallville, with hints of the classic John Williams theme worked into the score, was one of the most touching television moments I’ve ever seen.

I am sorry that Christopher Reeve was never able to walk again, like he wished. But maybe now, he’s flying, and flashing us that trademark smile on the way.