Best song ever in a movie

I had a conversation today that reminded me of To Sir, With Love, which put the song in my head all afternoon. I love that song. I used to listen to it as a kid and I always thought it was about a young woman talking to her first love.

In college, my first truly inspired story for creative nonfiction class was a story about my stepdad called "To Sir, With Love" and was about how I always had to call him "Sir" when he was mad.

Then as an adult I saw the film for the first time. I've said this before - want to know what teaching is like? Don't watch Dangerous Minds. Watch To Sir, With Love.

For about three weeks after I watched that movie I had that song in my head, only I couldn't get through it because I kept stopping to cry. Every time I thought about that line "A friend who taught me right from wrong and weak from strong, that's a lot to learn." it just gets me. Sometimes I feel like we've all gotten together and made an agreement that we're going to get through high school together. They drive me nuts, but I love those little bastards.

So given that I loved that song before I knew the movie, and now it has even more emotional appeal, I think if I had to choose a favorite movie soundtrack song of all time, that's probably the one.

You got one? Best song in a movie ever? With words? It doesn't count if it doesn't have words.

Loglines for kids

Every year, the National Endowment for the Arts hosts The Big Read, a program where kids all over the country read the same book and participate in related events. Last year it was 11th grade and The Maltese Falcon, prompting me to spend a semester on film noir. This year it's a collection of 20 Mexican short stories published specifically for this year's Big Read.

The good thing about that is that the kids like it. We're the first class reading the book at our school, so they're excited to think almost nobody else has read this book, and they LOVE reading Mexican literature because almost all of them are Latino. The downside is there isn't a whole lot of information on these stories as a collection. Several of them I'm able to look up and research, but for the most part I have to do a lot of the prep work myself. Not that I mind, because I'm having fun learning, but it involves a lot of staying after school in my room and working.

I decided that since we just finished reading a novel as a class, I'd let the kids handle the stories on their own. We read Octavio Paz "My Life with the Wave" as a group, and now they're going to split into groups and each group will take either one long story or two shorter stories and research and present them to the class.

In order to help them choose, I had to go through each story one by one, count page numbers, and create a logline. That was the learning part, creating the loglines. I had to come up with one sentence that summed up the story but kept it sounding interesting enough that the kids would want to read it.

"After a man buys the statue of an Aztec god, his life changes for the worse as the god gets progressively stronger" sounds interesting. "Philosopher Pao Cheng thinks about existence" does not.

It's a challenge, because I want these kids to want to read the stories, but some of them leave me not much to work with. One of the stories is 2 pages long and describes the process of shooting a deer. My logline: "A hunting story." What else am I supposed to do with that?

Then there's tone. Some of the stories are serious and some comical, and I want to give the kids an idea of which is which. So "A man ponders his relationship with a large, quirky woman" is what I went with for the story about the guy who dates an obese lady he thinks is kind of nuts. I figure throwing in "large" and "quirky" do the trick to indicate tone.

Then there's the combination. One of the stories is an employee in a train station just talking and talking in this absurdist voice to a guy who just wants to board his train. I had to figure out how to make it sound both interesting and comical, when all I really had was straight dialogue, mostly one-sided. This is what I went with: "A train station employee explains to a perplexed traveler why he can’t go to T. despite having a perfectly good ticket."

My point here is, if you ever want to practice writing loglines, get a book of short stories and try to create a logline that would make a teenager interested. It's not as easy as it sounds.

Just this one thing about From Paris, With Love

In case you didn't catch it, I wanted to point out something about the trailer for From Paris, With Love.

Okay so despite the bizarre baldness and the earrings or whatever, and the fact that this movie is about wooohooo a craaaazy out of control guy with guns! I'm talking about the moment at the end of the latest trailer where John Travolta, who's most popular character ever is probably Vincent Vega, who's most famous speech ever was about the different ways French fast food restaurants title their dishes, that same actor, John Travolta, his character Charlie Wax says he enjoys eating a "royale with cheese."

I just wanted to point that out.

Remember that scene in Be Cool where he dances on stage? Like the time he danced on stage in Pulp Fiction?

Yeah that's when you know your movie is trying too hard.

Putting the puzzle together

As I come to a sense of temporary completion on Burnside, I have begun to work on what I want to be my next script. I had a low budget scifi thing I wanted to write, but I have no second act and I have yet to write a really good script that takes place in the present, so I altered my plan to work on this carjacking thing I've been thinking about. I've always wanted to write something in the vein of Three Days of the Condor, where your main character isn't a super badass, just a guy in the wrong place at the wrong time with no discernible training.

So this is the fun part, the part where you shift ideas around. Should they dump the car in the lake? Nah. Too cliche. Crash it into a store front like in Lethal Weapon? Nah, then the cops would find it too easily.

It's a game where you throw pieces at the puzzle and see what fits. This doesn't work, so you try the next idea. That doesn't work, so you keep going until you find something that does. And sometimes even after you write what you think worked, you find out you just smushed a piece into a place where it didn't really fit. But sometimes, if you're lucky, you can lock it into place perfectly. You see that scene where the family runs from the zombies at the beginning, or where your lady ninja hops along rooftops to get away from the soldiers. And it plays in your head and then on the page and you never question it.

Anyway, it's pretty cool.

Lookit: I found my painting

See this picture? I did, once upon a time on a wall in The Louvre. It's getting nigh on ten years now since I first saw this image. I looked at it and laughed and thought, that must be a cool dude.

About a year later I thought, I should buy a print of that painting, only I couldn't remember who painted it. I knew it was called Self Portrait but couldn't remember the painter's name. I thought I remembered he was Italian.

Want to know how many Italians painted something called "Self Portrait?" Want to know how many are hanging in The Louvre? I don't remember. It was too many.

I've often thought of calling The Louvre and describing the picture and asking them if they know which one I'm talking about. It's a pretty memorable painting, n'est pas? But I never got around to it.

I've Googled "Italian painting finger pointing" "self portrait guy pointing" "pointing painting" and any other assortment of phrases. I've painstakingly pored through all the paintings posted on The Louvre website and searched through every art website I could find trying to find this painting. I want it to hang in my house. Maybe in my bathroom, maybe in the living room; I haven't decided yet. But I knew that even if I had to fly back to France and walk through every single room, I would find this painting.

I mean, it's a super awesome painting. Look at that guy. Don't you want to hang out with that dude? Old ladies must have hated his guts.

Then yesterday on a message board someone posted this picture with some words over it, no doubt part of some meme I never saw before. My jaw fell completely to the floor. I frantically messaged the guy: Where did you get that omg holy shit.

Turns out, there's a whole series of Zazzle products with this picture on it. So here I was, spending whole hours of my life trying to find this painting, and there are people out there with it on a mug.

He's not Italian at all. His name is Joseph Ducreux and he was a French baron. He also painted a picture of himself yawning, a painting that now hangs at The Getty of all places. I've been to the Getty. I bet I walked right past whatever room it's in.

I am filled with glee over this discovery. Now if I can just find a print of Théophile Steinlen's Apotheosis of Cats, my dream art collection will be complete.

Oscars and whatnot

Exciting things are happening today. I had to leave work early for a thing and now I'm home with extra hours to spend writing. First I have to research the origin of poker because I have two characters who are going to play cards and discuss the rules of the game, but since this is a period piece I need to make sure the version of the game that I pick is one that fits the time. I'm afraid I may have to play poker this weekend as research. It's a hard-knock life.

There are too many movies nominated for Academy Awards and most of the time they end up being a publicity race anyway, but I'm still excited that Kathryn Bigelow was nominated. The Hurt Locker is a nearly perfect film and it deserves every bit of recognition it gets.

Avatar, on the other hand, is way overrated. It's pretty and expensive and made a ton of money. It is not an amazing story. There are whole categories for technical feats on film - Avatar should sweep those, but it should not take any award for storytelling.

The one film I feel like got robbed was The Road. Robert Duvall deserved a nomination for sure, and the screenplay is beautiful.

Annnd LOST. Who's excited? I am. What the fuck is going to happen? I DON'T KNOW. Nobody knows. Who's where? What's when? Does this show even exist or did my brain make it up while I was sleeping?

Now I will go write.

I am a slacker

I have been shitty about posting. I wish I could say it was because I've been writing too much to have time for this, but the truth is, there's a heavy bag at our house now and I've been punching it.

I know now what I need to do to fix my script; I just have to stop napping on Saturday and write instead. I've been compiling a list of agents to seduce when I'm done, people who've repped Blacklist writers with similar material, people who've said interesting things in interviews, people whose names I like. I've got a whole strategy planned for phone calls and query letters. Last time I got one read out of about 9 queries, so maybe this time my higher concept idea will net me some more opportunities.

I just have to finish the damn thing.

This weekend. Swear.