Life Pilot, Pilot Light

Watching the first season of Life in bed with the fan on because it is too hot in New York to do a goddamn thing.

Season 2 ended in April and I'd forgotten how noticeable the light is in Life. Life is set in L.A. (I often refer to it as my novelty murder show) and the light is somehow very L.A. Bright, contrasty - almost blown out by default.

I started thinking about light this Summer because my fun, light, Spies shooting at each other Gabrielle-Anwar-with-no-bra-on Summer show is Burn Notice, which is set in Miami. Miami also has a very distinct light - I talked about it a bit here, or maybe that was Hawaii, same dif.

Now, USA put on a new show to follow Burn Notice, Royal Pains, and on the surface it seems like a good follow up. It's a Summer show, except instead of spy in Miami it's a doctor in the Hamptons. But it's a bit like a methadone dose - it's technically a substitute, but ultimately it just leaves you jonesing for the real thing.

I'm sure the creators of Royal Pains are sick of the comparisons, but it's hard not to make them and find RP has trouble stacking up. The biggest advantage Burn Notice takes is that its characters are more flawed and interesting.

But the contrast that always strikes me straight away is the light. The light in the Hamptons seems weak, diffused - less harsh, but less interesting. Where Burn Notice / Miami light is brutal, exotic, uncompromising, Hamptons light is doing the best it can with limited resources. It's like a Summer day in Oslo.

Writing Fail?

When you start thinking "maybe I am doing everything wrong," that's when it's a good time to stop writing for the day.

No good can come from taking that thought to any logical conclusion.

More Writing

I opened Final Draft and then got distracted by internet and then went back to Final Draft, and I saw a blank page and panicked.

What was really happening was that Final Draft had opened a blank document and I was looking at a blank document and not at my sports movie that I am writing. I figured this out and opened my sports movie (I am on page 66 of maybe 120.)

What happened before I had time to figure out what was happening was that I saw a blank page. A blank page is just very scary when you are writing something.

The Rise of Randy

I saw comedian Aziz Ansari doing a character, Randy, in a Comedy Central special that showed standup routines Judd Apatow taped for his new movie, Funny People.

So I did a search for Aziz Randy on YouTube. What's interesting is that Ansari only wrote a few bits for his Randy character, but he tried them out in a bunch of different places. Watching the same bits over and over, you can really see how Ansari perfected these bits and the character.

Randy in Athens, GA Dec. 11, 2008
Randy in NYC Jan. 1, '09
Randy at Bonnaroo June '09 (you can also see him doing some of the same bits more or less out of character for contrast.)
Randy in two bits that showed in the Comedy Central special last week: Jacuzzi and CVS. (This one was maybe a little dirty for cable.)
Ansari discusses his process in character here.

Here is how I know I am going to end up in grad school: even when I am fucking around on the internet late at night, I am still basically doing research.

The Sims

ribbles: I only ever made one Sim. I worked quite hard on getting her life together. After awhile, I realized I was putting a lot of work in to micromanaging the life of a fake woman who would never know I existed. I still think of her from time to time (via The Regret Index, a very handy window in to your soul.)

Writing

I finally started writing this script again after nearly three weeks off for research and getting the rest of my life out of the way (I also took an additional week off because it was scary to start again).

So far, I think my sports movie has at least one good joke in it. That's a good enough day's work for me.

Sport Movie References

So I'm writing a sports movie, and one of the fun things about it is that I've gotten to run down all these great movie references while trying to figure out this movie. It's so gratifying to be putting my favorite things about movies in the world of my movie. It's like I get to experience my favorite movies for real.

Like there's a scene where a character has to start everybody on their training by giving a rousing speech, and I got to think a lot about the rousing speech Sean Connery gives in The Man Who Would Be King - the one that begins "We're going to teach you soldiering. The world's noblest profession. When we're done with you, you'll be able to slaughter your enemies like civilized men." I've always wanted to start a speech by saying "I'm going to teach you how to be PAs - the world's noblest profession."

Or I decided that I was going to spend my first act introducing a bunch of characters because I needed a bunch of characters on my sports team. So I've watched the first 30 minutes of favored ribbles movie Ocean's 11 like four times (and taken notes.) I have come up with like a dozen new reasons this movie is genius (example: each character gets an appropriate individual version of the theme music in their introductory scene.)

Another interesting phenomenon: because I am trying to write pretty close to formula for the first draft of this film, thinking about bad sports movies has been just if not more useful than thinking about good sports movies. Enough so that I can no longer figure out which category Cool Runnings falls in to.

Ooh! And because it's a woman's team, I get to name everyone after my ex-girlfriends.