past the shattered door

If you're unlucky enough to have an event that can engender PTSD - in my case the events surrounding my brain tumor diagnosis in 2005 - then I am so sorry. You'll work for years - running, meditating, therapy - to modify, mollify, blunt, ignore all subsequent manifestations but the event has such force and power that all your improvements and updates will just be blown into the wind, plywood to a hurricane, bandages to an amputation. Rising in different forms: depression, anxiety, panic attack. Sometimes a combination. Beware triggers they say. For me trigger is not being able to get in touch w/ M, who in more than one way is my lifeline and conduit to outside world. Due to recent iphone update which rendered cellular function kaput M's phone was working intermittently and so we jerry-rigged a fix for but the fix kept not holding. Sunday night she went to reading and was out late and I couldn't get in touch w/ her b/c of this issue with phone. She couldn't receive calls/texts or make them. N was running fever and suddenly out of medicine so my original impetus was innocent enough: ask her to pick up medicine on way home. But it just so happens that sick kids is another sort of ptsd trigger for me (something or other about the betrayal of the body, of the inability of us to rely on anything b/c we're just one event away from a shitstorm) and lo and behold, after trying several times to call and text her, it began:  slow implosions, getting faster, getting closer with each passing minute. An interior dialog of panic/don't panic, while a series of dark looping images whirled by. The don't panic voice was akin to a stewardess telling everyone to stay calm when we can all just look out the window to clearly see imminent fire, explosion, oblivion b/c this plane is going down.  I absolutely right-now had to get in touch with her. I knew she was at after-party at some place so I tried getting a hold of the people she might be with. No dice. I texted a couple individuals. Nothing. It began rising up from the floor, this blackness, encircling my stomach, my heart and lungs. I looked up our car insurance so I'd have the license plate and VIN number to tell the police when they came. Headlights flashed by on the trash can on the street. Just the passing bus. I began checking alerts on my phone, seeing if there was anything horrific-fireball-on-the-interstate wise. I began thinking when/how to tell the kids. When/how to tell her mother. Text from a friend dinged in: they saw her leave an hour ago w/ K.The clouds parted and Oh sweet Jesus, thank fucking god. I called K, no answer. Texted K, no answer. FB messaged K, nothing. And just like that all the light quickly vanished. Breathe. Deep Breath. Breathe. Deep Breath. Somewhere inside I knew I was overreacting. We'll laugh about this in a couple days. How ridiculous I was that night. Ha ha! I tried to keep coming back to Occam's Razor: she and K probably went for drinks and got to talking. But then the alternate timelines came roaring in and they were equally plausible razors: she gave K a ride home and perished on the way/perished on the way back/lost control of the car in the industrial part of town w/ no one around but skeevy meth-heads and her phone isn't working, oh god. it's fucking midnight. Red alert. urgent. I couldn't just stand there waiting in my pajamas. I put on pants. I went out into the front yard, looking up and down the street, looking for light, listening for engines, heart pounding, throat constricting. Text from friend dinged in: have you heard from M yet? let us know when she's home. Great, now they're worried too dumbass. I went back inside and, feeling at absolute loss and b/c I couldn't just stand in the kitchen hyperventilating or picturing the next morning when I'd tell the kids, went down to my office, sat down at the keyboard and started writing an email to her with trembly fingers, partly to document what I was feeling and give form to it, and partly to say goodbye. We had just had our first solo night together in 7 years the night previous and had an amazing time (drinks/movie/live music/pinball/no kids/laying in bed reading the sunday ny times!) and the screenwriter in me couldn't help but see that narratively this would be them moment in the movie that it would all end due to unseen, dark forces. Element of surprise. Let your characters think they're safe. Of course, this is it. This is how it ends.

Is it possible that this whole time that I've held the brain tumor and all that surrounded it in the rearview mirror, as something in the past that I was done with, not knowing that it still enveloped me? That it gave me just enough wiggle room to allow me to think I was free? Does the attendant insecurity, negative self-feelings and corollary emotions which I've just long presumed lay within me actually have their sources at the point of impact? And isn't this a freeing thought in some regard? That the reasons I still feel myself wrestling with these forces across the years owes nothing to my own limitations and everything to the sheer force of the event. The running, the breathing, the meditating, the therapy, the too-many-beers - all just shape-shifting bandages for my amputated limb. Should I just let go entirely, submitting in whole to these forces? So much effort would be instantly alleviated if I'd just accept that: You don't have the upper hand here. 

I was on the third sentence of the goodbye email when lights came through the window. A car in the driveway. I stood to look out the window. It was M. locking the car and beeping the alarm and striding across the grass oblivious, like a normal person home after a night out. It was getting close to 1 AM. I walked upstairs and cracked a beer to help me calm down before catching her up on the events of the last couple hours.

Barbara Turner

Barbara Turner died in April. I've been in deep denial, dreading/avoiding writing anything at all about it, as if the act of writing will be a horrible homework assignment which will end with me facing the cold fact that she is not here any longer. Alternately kind and caustic, hilarious and serious she was a formative presence in my life.

I had just been accepted to AFI in Screenwriting and needed a summer job before the semester began (and student loan $ rolled in). I went up to AFI and looked on the job board (this is in 1997, internet just a baby) and saw an announcement for screenwriter Barbara Turner needing a research assistant. I knew just who she was from seeing Georgia (and from reading her corresponding interview in Scenario magazine.) My heart pounded when I called the number. A real screenwriter. I was given an address and told to come by to meet Barbara the next day.

"The pay is shit". These are among the first words Barbara said to me as I sat at her kitchen table. Though early afternoon she was drinking prosecco. By good fortune she had two scripts back-to-back that had to be written & researched in short order, one based on a historical account of 2 possessed girls in early 19th century Illinois, and the other an adaptation of a novel set on Majorca in the 1500's. Each would require a high volume of research.  She had already hired another AFI Screenwriting student named Guy Davis and would I like to join them? I muttered "sounds good" and tried to play cool but inside my heart was doing flips. I could see a framed award from the NY Film Critics Circle on a nearby shelf. This is inner circle shit. I've made it! I didn't mention that I hated doing research or talking to people lest that sway her decision to hire me.

Guy and I started in earnest the next day. First up was the Illinois project. Barbara as writer had the same degree of commitment as a hardcore method actor. Which is to say, it wasn't enough to know the names of artifacts and customs and principles of 19th century Illinois, she had to fully comprehend them at the molecular level. Each day found her sitting at her desk or in a chair in her office reading for 7, 8, 9 hours while myself and Guy were sent out into the corners of Los Angeles tracking down books, maps, folios, daguerreotypes, poems, farmer's almanacs. I spent a week chasing a period song down, finally finding sheet music at the UCLA Music Library. We got it to a pianist and had him record himself playing/singing on cassette tape so she could hear it. (The net result in the screenplay was a line of description: They enter the house and  hear "Period Song" being played on a piano in the next room). After 6 weeks or so of dedicated research Barbara begin writing.

screenplay drafts on legal pads

The process in short: She sat in her chair next to her sharpened pencils and wrote the script out in longhand on legal pads, starting at page 1 and going page by page to the end. Guy and I (and her research coordinator Chris) were all a room or two away in case we were needed.
"Brian?" I'd be summoned suddenly after an hour of silence.
"Yes?"
"Which book had the picture of the dray-wright reattaching the wheel?"
"I'll look"
"Thank you. And I need all the notes on that parade.  And the spiritualists"
Moments later I'd return with a stack of things. She'd check what she needed and return to writing.

At the end of each day she'd phone her friend and former assistant Pam in NYC and read what she'd written over the phone, Pam would type along and then fax the pages back to Barbara (again, pre-internet really). The next day would repeat until the script was finished. And by finished I don't mean a draft was finished, I mean the script was complete after one pass owing to the depth of Barbara's commitment and research and her deep talent. The screenplay was invariably also awesome and lyrical and pitch-perfect. (note: get your hands on her work.)

a million yrs ago in nyc

Barbara was always a real-world counter-point to the screenwriting dogma I was absorbing at AFI. You should not do X in a screenplay or Award-winning scripts do this by page X. Her screenplays transcended these. They talked about how the camera was moving, about if it was a medium or tight shot; they had expository paragraphs just for the reader; they talked about the rhythm of the cutting. All standarized verboten in a million screenplay seminars and a million hastily-assembled how-to screenwriting books. Years later Barbara learned that her one of her screenplays was used in a film school class as an example of WHAT TO NEVER DO IN A SCREENPLAY and she, true to her nature, took this as great honor, as proof positive that her work was landing correctly in the world.

One of the most vital things to Barbara was how a screenplay sounded. When I would nervously pass her my specs a frequent note after she read it was: I think you need to hear it. (Another common note: You should direct this.) How the words flowed on the page and in the reader's eye and ear was the aim, how the writer's voice presented itself and landed, in lilt and command.

My tenure working directly for Barbara ended in the fall with the start of film school but since Barbara still needed help (and Margaret - my girlfriend at the time, now wife - needed a job,) Barbara hired Margaret as research assistant.  They worked together for several years and across time Barbara became a dear friend and ally.

To put it cleanly: I learned more about being a writer watching Barbara work than from any book, any class, any interaction in Hollywood. She was a true artist (an overused phrase to be sure, but one that contains how commitment to art/form can yield returns, sometimes at a cost). A true sui generis writer in a town bloated with self-announced unique snowflakes, one whose slender but respectable body of produced work betrays the volume and scope of her true abilities and genius. Many of the best things she wrote are as yet unproduced.

Barbara's desk

There is so much else that can be said but it will just veer into uncollected ramble. The ache of loss and love I feel for Barbara, along with my unwillingness to accept that she is dead are intertwined. Mostly I miss talking with her, getting her opinion on my screenplays, seeing movies with her, deconstructing the latest celebrated indie film, drinking prosecco with her at her kitchen table in the early afternoon, watching shadows slowly extend across the backyard.  I miss the feeling of sitting down to read her latest screenplay and marveling at the movie to be made from the words on the page, the feel of those words - her words - and the lilt and command of her voice.

Barbara is amazing. I say it in the present tense because I feel her in the present tense. Here and not here at once.  I imagine her now, sitting next to me in a dark theater watching current cinema and whispering "I can't believe what I'm seeing" at terrible acting or dialogue. More than anything I have memories of her in tiny moments like this.

from the thank you page of  Margaret's book People Like You

stowe story labs

had outstanding experience last month at Stowe Story Labs retreat. very gratifying to be among similarly-minded writers and filmmakers to exchange screenplays and talk shop as well as to be critiqued (sometimes deeply) by industry professionals in a hard-to-beat locale in May. Had to be apart from the mrs and kids for nearly a week which had its highs and lows obviously. [Waking unencumbered would be an example of the former.] It's difficult to encapsulate how meaningful the whole thing was for me internally and externally (partially b/c it was spread across many days and multiple interactions and partially b/c a lot of it has to do w/ deeply personal self-estimations that span decades) but in short I found it transformative, at once altering my work-flow and putting my pursuits in a different context. Came away feeling energized and reinvigorated

found this writing spot on walk

my script was oblitered by a well-regarded writer moments prior to this photo

consumed multiple Heady Toppers, A +

view from back porch at Timberholm Inn

exciting news via Portland Film Fest

Portland writer/directors @brian_padian & @AABlatt both are finalists in the screenplay contest. Live reading 8/29 2:30PM @prophotosupply

— Portland Film Fest (@portlandfilm) August 7, 2014

honored to be panelist at @portlandfilm panel 8/27 on Screenwriting & Indpt filmmaking. 730pm. http://t.co/gUQX5hqLaC

— Brian Padian (@brian_padian) August 7, 2014

brewing

the next thing is humming on the periphery, eager to announce itself. This is an exciting thing for me because for an extended duration - years and years - there has been nothing but the black sea. I am have always been an all or nothing person, project wise, often to my detriment. I have to put my full focus into one thing. This extends far beyond production, which has a slow decompression period as the details and hustle ebb away. Then comes the long desert of post. (note: this has all been amplified/exacerbated by a family and a day job and no budget all of which multiply durations by a factor of 10.) It's only now, on the edge of putting this movie to bed, that the space for other things starts to show itself. A muffled pulse beat, louder by the hour. Music to my ears. 

screenplay versus direction

There is a world of difference from screenplay to production to finished film. (This is not a new thought and has been expressed/covered in multiple forums most cogently in the maxim: a film is made 3 times - screenplay, production, and in editing).  This is not to discount the primacy of screenplay because I, in part due to my background as a once aspirant screenwriter, think it's vital. But I used to think the script was at the top of hierarchy, the tree the other limbs sprang from instead of how I see it now: the embryo that grows the complex organism. Essential but not ultimate.

The screenplay for the black sea went through multiple iterations and drafts across many years until it finally was nailed down. It's a complicated, slightly dense thing - amusing since i set out to write/direct something straightforward and easily digestible for my feature debut - but after a lot of work I got it to a place where every word of prose and every bit of dialogue was to my liking as we moved across pre-production and into shooting. Overall, it worked. 

On set there were minor adjustments here and there, growing pains, adjustments and reconfigurations particular to production. A line altered here. A line ad libbed there. Bigger: A plate of chocolate (seen in the dinner table shot below), and one character's animated refusal to take any was meant to happen in the background, under the dialogue, to be a foreshadowing for later things. It's tiny and small but important to the world of the film. Further, it worked on the page. But in directing this (to me) complicated scene the plate of chocolate was subsumed by the on-set machinations of multiple eyelines and 2-shots and 3-shots and covering 5 plus pages of dialogue shooting a 4:1 ratio (on Super 16). The plate of chocolate and its import became diminished so the animated refusal was not even shot. A perfect example of how production can overwhelm/alter the screenplay. The writer in me might have fought for the plate of chocolate but the director in me cut it loose to better get through the day. Perhaps this is a case of directorial inexperience.

A bigger example of screenplay v. film came in a another scene that worked on the page. We see character 1 sitting by the window, looking at the ocean and then cut to a flashback where he meets character 2 at a bar. However the scene ended w/ jump cut to later in the night, at same location w/ Character 2 on phone w/ Character 3, Character 1 long gone. Then we cut back to Character 1 sitting by the window. Believe it or not it worked on the page in a sort of lyric poetic way, the words and prose guiding the reader's POV so that it made sense in terms of text. It had a flow and the reader could understand what the screenwriter was attempting to do. So I directed it and we shot it. But once we were in post-production, we could not make it work. All the lyric prose in the world can't shoe-horn two opposing POVs across the cut. Perhaps directorial inexperience again but I also like to think it is a remnant of my dependence on the written form instead of the filmic one.

A screenplay is made of words so it's easy to confuse with literary forms.  But the image and what it says/does-not-say is more enduring and vital than any well-turned phrase in the prose of the screenplay. It's taken me a long time to realize/admit this.

 cross-posted at northern flicker films production blog

on the long game

I spent 7 odd years of my life and youth in Los Angeles, peddling spec scripts w/ minimal return. I moved to Portland over a decade ago with a handful of scripts most of which I've long considered dead and untenable since they found no takers. Recently, considering what to do after the black sea is finished, I went back through some more as a curiosity than anything - some of them are 15 years old -  and was surprised happily to discover that there were actually movies in them, a pulse laying under years of neglect, even if they were obscured by bad writing.

Said bad writing is both a hazard of youthful ambition and of being an aspirant screenwriter, wherein the goal is to get noticed -- find voice to get noticed, write prose to get noticed, write something compelling and memorable to get noticed - not to serve the film. Here is an excerpt of a screenplay I wrote, one I was proud of back in the day, but one which contains some bad prose, particularly parts noted in red.

tough loss

I can feel my own 25 year old desperation in that sentence,  flailing away frantically underneath, screaming to the world "I am different, pick me, pick me". Here's the truth though,  I don't even know what that sentence means in practical terms, much less how an actor would act it or a director would direct an actor through it. Here's another chestnut:

oops! some terror just oozed out.

I found many such bits throughout this screenplay and others, which reminds/bestows a lesson I've heard a million times from a variety of sources: simple is best. This is antithetical to the aspirant screenwriter, or at least it was to me. In Los Angeles, clogged with rising writers and hoping-to-rise writers and mountains of spec scripts, the slow-and-steady-wins-the-race approach feels more like taking a suicide pill than time-worn wisdom. Simple is plain, is anonymous, is replaceable. Instead you have to distinguish yourself, announce yourself, separate yourself.

I don't fault myself for trying so hard, it was an essential and formative component of the person and director I became - and it's a marker of the terrain I've travelled. My focus then lay not on the movie I was writing but the career I was pursuing, and the dark underbelly that was urging it forward: my adolescent need for the world to hear that plaintive 'pick me, pick me' wail and answer it.

Not much to do about it except laugh but I do so wish bad work didn't hang around like ghosts holding mirrors that reflect back the depths of my desperate ambition.

onward, onward, onward

marg just called me from home. 3 envelopes from the nicholl foundation. I had her open them: 3 rejections from Round One. depressing yes but further cementing the absolute random nature of (not having) sucess and how you define it. one of those scripts advanced pretty far in a previous yr, netting me an option (which sounds more exciting than it was, if I find myself w/ a surplus of time i'll recount) and one of the other scripts advanced far as well and got me enough attention to get some semi-respectable representation. Both of those scripts are unchanged and now summarily dismissed from the contest. The other one was the one I love most deeply, the most recent, in other words the one upon whom i had rested my hopes, the one i poured my post-tumored self into, the one that might be The One, the ladder up to the light, the hand from the clouds, the Celestial Nudge but no. Nothing. Silence.

It never gets easier, all these rejections, year after year, it just gets more familiar. As marg said (she a breadloaf finalist this yr, but ultimately a rejectant): why do we do this to ourselves? why are we not accountants?
well, neither of us has the stomach to do accounting but it does, on days like this, seem like a blissfully pain-free and oblivious undertaking comparatively speaking.