I will post more in the next day or so. Just a very quick note for now…

Rented 2 DVD’s this weekend, films that I skipped purposely in the theater, because they were better suited for an in home viewing. First up: Lady in the Water.

Admittedly, I am a M. Night Shyamalan admirer, one who wanted to like this movie, because his previous 4 films ranged between quite good and excellent, and I enjoyed each on a multiplex screen. Enough peers warned me off this flick, so I passed, and waited for the DVD. I watched it carefully, and will make only one observation. The real problem with this movie was the form; it needed to be a book. Interesting characters, a workable situation and a reasonable paced plot, Lady could have been a great read. A classic fairy tale, even. Some imagery plays well mentally, yet translate those same ideas for screen, and it falls short. Also, because the medium lacks the depth to bounce between a number of characters thoughts, complicated story arcs get lost, or dampened. Both compromises happened here. Chalk it to an extremely ambitious concept executed with the right intentions, but unfortunately in the wrong media.

Hollywoodland suffers from a different–and oh so similar–problem. This concept was the stuff of a made for television movie, twenty years too late. As a twelve-year-old, I might have liked this one as the Sunday Afternoon Million Dollar Movie. Alas, it surfaced in 2006, fifty years after George blew–or someone blew–his brains out across his bedroom wall. Ben Affleck did better than I expected, and Adrien Brody is a talent of note, but otherwise this could have been done for a lot less scratch, and for similar results. The storyline offered countless possible explanations for the former Superman’s death, yet very few reasons to care about the characters, why someone might want to kill him, or why he wanted to die.

Verdict: Lady, rentable; Hollywoodland, flushable.

First day back to writing after roughly two weeks off, which followed two–endless, oh so endless–weeks of ten hour plus days at work. The technical needs of a school are highly cyclical, and swing from the doldrums of summer, where crickets keep me upright, to the first months of a new term, where by the time I fix the seven problems waiting for my arrival on campus, three more emergencies beckon, one possibly tragic.

In the past few weeks, I discovered I don’t mind submitting my work, a task never pursued seriously or with any specific method until now. Very consciously I elected to get the product as right as I could manage, before investing any energy into selling it. Now that the “package” is together, talking it up is less difficult than I expected. And I don’t mind the waiting part, knowing full well I’ll never hear back on some queries, and other responses might take months–or years–more. There’s a reason for a query burst, a break to allow responses to filter back, and then a reload.

Far, far more difficult was not writing at all, a movement that rests on my actions alone. The longer I avoid it, the bigger pain I become. When I start taking nonsense personally, and the beer in the house seems to disappear, that’s a good indicator a “pause” stretched into the danger zone.

A place I prefer not to visit.

Tomorrow I receive suggestions from a woman who used to work for a top shelf literary agent.

Here’s a snippet regarding her impressions:

“…I think you have the right attitude about all of this. The bottom line is that you need your readers to enjoy and participate in your work. So I’m going to go back over my markups, to hopefully make them as clear as possible, before I give them to ( –redacted by Sam– ) to give to you. Please don’t hesitate to write me back with questions after you’ve looked things over…”

Now interestingly, her tastes are serious literary fiction. Of which The Last Track is not. Needless to say, I’m very, very grateful she’s making time to read and comment on a piece–even in part–that burrows wide of her personal preferences.

See, right there, that’s one of them there signs. Like M. Night style.

Must keep listening to the voices.

Reviewed my 2007 writing resolutions again tonight and marked progress, particularly regarding the second item: pitch The Last Track to 40 agents. Without dropping exact numbers, and including the second round fired off today, hitting that number–if necessary–will not be a problem. At this point, it makes sense to allow time for replies, ease off the queries, and increase the writing output.

Did some background work for the guerrilla marketing campaign, or item three. Since the plan involves a number of people besides myself, I’m in a holding pattern at the moment. Rest assured, the ball is rolling in a sound direction.

No progress on the first item–entering 20 writing contests with cash prizes–other than identifying the contests. Of the four tasks, here I made the least strides. Initially I set the goal aside temporarily with the proviso of readying The Confession for entry in the First Chapters competition, but after a few more weeks into the project, I dropped that idea. In its present form The Confession is too personal for consumption; I may like the notion well enough, but the ideas are too raw, a steep percolation is necessary. Hopefully with some more effort it can be more accessible. And when I say accessible, I’m not talking about selling the piece, I mean being comfortable taking it out of a trunk and showing someone.

While forsaking First Chapters, I am honoring step four: finish a draft of The Confession before tackling another large manuscript. While this course may suggest self-indulgence, I must finish anyway, because allowing the process to happen as it wants will lead me to another place. That point I take on faith. But there’s another reason to continue, even if the manuscript never sees print.

I believe some stories need to be written, want for a writer to step through the associated emotions, feel them and capture their effects on a page, yet not share the actual product.

Projects with such a charter–and I truly hope I have very few of these in me–are not made for a reader; they exist solely for the writer.

Based on a true story, Breach follows the tail end of a massive internal investigation of FBI agent Robert Hanssen, who was arrested for treason and espionage in 2001. And interesting as that sad chapter in American intelligence might be, the biggest problem weighing down this thriller is that everyone already knows how the story ends at the outset. Unlike other fictional recreations, like Titanic, here we don’t root for survivors, or the heroes trying to save the children.

Perhaps for security purposes very little of what happened can be shown, and the director wanted to honor real events which meant pulling punches. Maybe the story arc did not lend itself to a visual adaption. But if either is the case, going for the dramatic would have been acceptable, and a lot more entertaining. A bit of artistic license goes a long way. Ultimately there is not much story to Breach.

What works:

1) Tight, zinger based dialog keeps many of the scenes afloat.

2) Chris Cooper. Great actor caught in a mediocre movie, yet he makes the best of his sentence.

What needs improvement:

1) Ryan Phillipe. He’s just cursed.

2) The script. Going for inspired by a true story, i.e. keep the names and the fact that Hanssen got arrested and invent the rest, would have unleashed a cosmos of drama and entertainment. Instead, I got warm milk and stone cold cookies.

3) The concept: In the wake of 9/11, do audiences really want to see the FBI in an unflattering light? Because they look bad here. Just awful.

Verdict: Cable.

Per Stephen King’s advice in On Writing, I’ve been reading a lot lately, tearing through a half dozen books in the last fortnight. One biography really speaks to me above the rest, The Man Who Heard Voices.

Director M. Night Shyamalan extends writer Michael Bamberger unprecedented access to his life and career, with great emphasis on the story behind the Lady in the Water. The point that resonates like a clarion call is the sheer belief buoying M. Night’s risk taking; M. Night hears voices and listens.

For a lot of writers–screenwriters or otherwise–he’s a hero, and if he isn’t, here’s why he could be: M. Night literally wrote his way out of a suffocating production deal. When it became clear he could not make films he believed in because Miramax management took issue with his vision, he wrote The Sixth Sense and left for Disney. He did this because the voices told him to. Later the same voices told him to leave Disney for Warner.

This level of conviction is relatively rare, even among hyper-creative individuals. Whether the final product connects with audiences or not, M. Night is a believer who seeks out like minded individuals to foment his vision. In M. Night’s view, there are no coincidences, and the older I get, the more I concur with his position. Seemingly unrelated events and people are often connected, but not everyone sees–or wants to recognize–the threads binding them.

Michael Bamberger paints a picture of an eclectic writer and auteur, one that can fumble, and also one that can–when the forces align, and the voices say the right things–deliver a true movie experience.