Distractions of Lola

nprfreshair:

Paul Thomas Anderson tells Terry Gross about the first scene he wrote for The Master:

Well, it’s inspired by the actual questionnaire that’s out there as relates to Scientology, but I had changed it and switched it around. And I came to that many years ago, and actually found it was a great way to just start writing. Forget any implications of making a film or story about this — it was really just writer’s block and sitting around. The best way for me to start writing a story is to get two characters talking to each other. And if you got questions from one, you’re gonna have to get answers from the other, and you can start to find out who is coming out of you when you’re writing, if you know what I mean.

So I just started doing it as an exercise, and that’s probably one of the scenes that I wrote first in the movie … working from the middle. But I wrote that years and years ago. [I] didn’t really know who these people were, so I just started discovering who they were by what their answers would be.

nedhepburn:

Aaron Sorkin, What I’ve Learned.

Everybody does lists of the hundred greatest movie lines of all time. “You can’t handle the truth!” always seems to be in there, which is very nice to see. But for me, the best line will always be: “We’re going to need a bigger boat.”

The rules are all in a sixty-four-page pamphlet by Aristotle called Poetics. It was written almost three thousand years ago, but I promise you, if something is wrong with what you’re writing, you’ve probably broken one of Aristotle’s rules.

You’re allowed one fuck in PG-13. The rules are silly. Not all fucks are equal and not all cocksuckers are equal.

I had a lot of survival jobs. One was for the Witty Ditty singing-telegram company. I was in the red-and-white stripes with the straw boater hat and kazoo. Balloons. Even when you’re sleeping on a friend’s couch, you have to pay some kind of rent.

I desperately need the love of complete strangers. That’s one reason I overtip. I love when skycaps, waiters, and valets are happy to see me.

The only political experience I’ve ever had came in sixth grade when I had a crush on Jenny Lavin. Jenny was stuffing envelopes after school at the local McGovern-for-President headquarters. So I thought it’d be a good idea if I volunteered, too. One weekend they put us all in buses and took us to White Plains, the county seat, because the Nixon motorcade was coming through. We went with signs that said MCGOVERN FOR PRESIDENT. I was holding up one of these signs and a 163-year-old woman came up from behind, took the sign out of my hand, whacked me over the head with it, threw it on the ground, and stomped on it. The only political agenda I’ve ever had is the slim hope that this woman is still alive and I’m driving her out of her mind.

I do not diminish the incredible symbolic importance of a black man getting elected president. But my euphoria was a smart guy getting elected president. Maybe for the first time in my lifetime we had elected one of the thousand smartest Americans president.

I kind of worship at the altar of intention and obstacle. Somebody wants something. Something’s standing in their way of getting it. They want the money, they want the girl, they want to get to Philadelphia — doesn’t matter. And if they can need it, that’s even better.

Whatever the obstacle is, you can’t overcome it like that or the audience is going to say, “Why don’t they just take the other car?” or “Why don’t you just shoot him?” The obstacle has to be difficult to overcome. And that’s the clothesline that you hang everything on — the tactics by which your characters try to achieve their goal. That’s the story that you end up telling.

Oh, I’d love to get A Few Good Men back. I feel like there isn’t a scene where, if I could have it back for half an hour, I couldn’t give you a better scene.

I keep thinking that I graduated from college a couple of years ago when it was actually 1983.

You’ll be able to say ”motherfucker” on network television before you’ll be able to take God’s name in vain.

When you’re a hit, you get a little more elbow room and you walk with a bigger stick.

Except when I didn’t have any, money has never been that big of a deal to me.

A friend is somebody who says the same things to your face that they would say if you’re not in the room.

By the way, you don’t have to necessarily always enjoy being with your friends. It’s possible to have friends that drive you out of your mind. Don’t you have friends that you’ve had since you were a little kid? And you constantly have to explain to people who’re just meeting him: “I’ve known him since fifth grade. He really is a good guy. Trust me. Really — he’s got a heart as big as Montana.”

I feel like if I’d gotten married once a year, every year since I was twenty-five, there would never have been the same five groomsmen twice. Two new people would always be coming in. My brother is a constant. He would stay.

There are these signposts along the way of getting older. The first is when the Playmate of the Month is younger than you are. Suddenly you’re starting to feel dirty because you’re twenty-three and she’s nineteen and you really shouldn’t be looking at that picture.

The next thing that happens is professional athletes are younger than you are.

Then coaches and managers are younger than you are.

And finally, the last one that happens: I’m the same age as the president of the United States.

When I’m done with an episode of television,I feel euphoric for about five minutes and then I’m Sisyphus.

All being finished means is that you haven’t started yet.

#writing

(via damnafricawhathappened)

yea, just watched this. yikes on all levels.

(Source: joeydeangelis, via kilmenow)

MAD MEN!!!!
O__O
and i thought the last episode was intense.
why you gotta make me feel all the feelings and more this week, whyyyyyy?!? 

WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS BEYOND THIS POINT

bravo, sir, agreed on all counts. but just fyi: while Darabont is still listed as an exec producer, he is actually no longer a part of the show (Glen Mazzara is the showrunner now). i can’t wait to see what Rick’s gonna be up to in season 3. 

neighborhoodthreat:

Originally, I had written a very long and very decent summation of the Season 2 finale of The Walking Dead. Then my browser crashed due to my obsolete computer’s need to sabotage me at every turn. Tumblr is unable to retrieve the post, so now as a result, you get a completely new essay.

The Walking Dead is something of an anomaly in modern television. It is a horror-drama. Horror is a genre often relegated to cinema due to the visual nature of the on-screen action. It not only requires the compressed time of cinema as well as power of cinematic attraction: before The Walking Dead, television violence never entered the realm of horror. Before The Walking Dead, you would be hard pressed to find anyone who would tune in, week after week, for their gross-out’s and gorefests, rather than have it compacted to two hours or less, R-rating intact. But that’s why The Walking Dead soldiers on, establishing a new, and uncharted precedent in television genrefication, and it shows that horror, like any other genre, is viable in the televisual format.

What of the content of the show itself? Last night’s episode raises many questions about the intent of the creators as well as the course of the show going forward. After a long and harrowing season of obvious twists and painful turns, The Walking Dead went out for the season on a high note. Fans had been complaining of a lack of zombies: the show’s producers answered with more zombies, no less a Romero-homage with the farmhouse shootout. Fans were getting restless with characters that added little, or were irritating: they killed off Dale, Jimmy, and Patricia, and Shane. Dale and Shane present two specific choices on the part of the show’s creators, though.

Within the greater context of the character assemblage, Dale was the moral anchor of the group, trying to stand by some form of societal normality in the fact of apocalypse, some sort of humanistic group belief. Shane on the other hand presented us with the fierce will of individual survival. They were diametric opposites and carried that relationship throughout Season 2 until it reached a head: Shane ultimately threatens Dale’s life after a confrontation, not explicitly but through a realization on Dale’s part that Shane will do whatever it takes to keep himself (or what he perceives as an extension of himself - Laurie and Carl) alive. Dale is the only one alerted to Shane’s true nature before his betrayal in the penultimate episode, when Rick kills him. Dale dies an episode prior to this in a moment of happenstance, brought on by the perceived ineptness of Carl in the face of danger. With the deletion of these characters from the group, the equation was somehow unbalanced up until the last 5 minutes of the finale. Who would assume the moral center of the group and who would embody the individual, the loner, struggling for his own?

It is in the last five minutes of last night’s episode that we finally see the proper characterization of Rick Grimes, something that the show has been severely lacking. Having narrowly escaped the farm, their resources sapped and their future uncertain, Rick assumes the mantle of both Dale and Shane: his moral core is intact, if not bolstered by what can be see as his transition from an ad-hoc leader to a full-blown dictator. “This is no longer a democracy,” Rick spits, with almost as much venom as Shane ever spat, but not without good reason. Thus far, the foolish nature of the group has gotten them into situation after situation. There is a certain reluctance on Rick’s part, surely - you can see it in his well developed monologue to Laurie (a character who is becoming more and more unfocused (did she love Shane? Did she ever love her husband? Why is Carl never in the house?)) - and a remorse for his actions, but that is the drama that bolsters the horror. It is the horror of humanity in the face undeath, a fact we are alerted to in Season 1’s finale. As Rick explains, everyone is infected, and with that knowledge now revealed to the characters as well as the viewer, the subtext of Rick’s actions are now laid bare and the ascension to an iron-fisted leader clear. He knew the stakes and has been playing them, but what can he hope to win? The search for normalcy is now over and with Season 3’s location, the Prison, looming heavily in the last frame of Sunday night’s episode, a new search is underway. The goal of this search has yet to be divined, but the introduction of the Governor, no less the cast of the Inmates, should add a great deal of intrigue to the course Season 3 will take.

So all this time, Frank Darabont and the producers have seemingly been setting up a very realistic (albeit zombie-filled) television show. But now, what of Mishonne’s entrance into the fray? As a comicbook character she worked; as a character on a live-action television show, how could she? Her introduction creates an interesting turn in a show that was otherwise running the risk of repetition. Her presence, framed by two armless walkers chained to either side of her, samurai katana glimmering in the morning light, is a leap into the fantastical for a show that has otherwise grounded itself in conventional zombie-lore. Now ultimately, the characterization of the group in Season 3 will be determined by both the location and the introduction of a fantastic character element, no less the realization that death is no longer the end in the universe of The Walking Dead.

All in all, after a slow, lumbering start, The Walking Dead is now transitioning from a television curiosity to a show that stands on its own two feet. Whether they will be successful with the curveballs thrown in the last couple of episodes in Season 2 has yet to be seen, but the true success that The Walking Dead has ensured is that of the horror-drama as a television genre, no less giving more credence to the format & formula that AMC has created with its growing roster of exciting and challenging television programs.

(via neighborhoodthreat-deactivated2)

just finished my spec! initially i had joked that if i spec-ed True Blood, it would probably be considered fanfic. what did i learn from all this? a lot, but mainly: writing is hard. 

read more of “I’m Comic Sans, Asshole” 
 

scripted vs. shot: Mad Men, 1x13 - the Carousel scene

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suRDUFpsHus