Venal Scene

Friday, May 20, 2005

Crack That Whip

Jeez Louise. Spent the last 72 hours doing the last thing I wanted to be doing: playwriting. I wrote 3 drafts of a one-act and single drafts of two full-length plays this semester. Enough! But I had to do a major rewrite on another one-act for Last Frontier Theatre Conference. I know, we should all have such problems as mine. How'd I like to trade places with anybody in Mosul?

But this is my life, and these are the pebbles in my shoe. Why did I rewrite a play that the conference already accepted? Because I'm crazy. And the play needed it, in heaping teaspoons. I hear the first twenty pages of it in class this semester, and jeezburger deluxe. Where was the play, buried underneath the writer's detrius? How the things that seem so brilliant at home fall flat on stage.

But I think I've fixed it in the rewrite. The writer's dangerous freedoms: for instance, I like large casts of characters. That can be great, but it can also cause a script to lose focus. I limited myself to three characters in this round, and the play's a lot sharper for it.

No more playwriting now. Not until June 15th, anyway, when I have to get started on my thesis. We just found out our thesis teacher will be Marsha Norman, which I'm thrilled about. But we f�te her on Monday, and I don't want to be caught unprepared if the subject of my thesis comes up.

"How about a play that begins with a playwright announcing he's going to kill himself by the end of the party? Marsha? Marsha?"

Must search my notes this weekend for an idea.

posted by Dan 1:35 PM
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Monday, May 16, 2005

Call Me Francois

To stretch us as writers, NYU makes us get behind the camera for a digital filmmaking course. I know nothing about this stuff, but it was nice to be in a class where I was the shameless ignoramus, instead of the disguised one.

For fun, I thought I'd make available my Amateur (with a capital AAAAA!) films. The first one is my final project, The Homunculus, featuring my father-in-law in the titular role. It also stars my classmate Jason Schafer, who knows a little bit more about moviemaking than I do.

Get the film here (12.9 MB -- sorry dial-ups, any smaller and the text in the movie is unreadable) Enjoy in the vein of a friend playing around with a camera -- and paying an obscene amount of money for the right to do so.

In case you were wondering, and you weren't: Chico is Jason's Chihuahua, and our production team's mascot.

posted by Dan 11:36 AM
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