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notes from the cutting-room floor
May. 12th, 2007 11:33 amSetting out from the scabby foothills of Ered Glamoth, yesterday's portion of the Mordorian Death March made it only so far as the banks of the River Culdiun. Being a parched season, the river bed was bone fucking dry, but always fearing sudden and unexpected flood, I made the crossing and reached the eastern banks before calling it a day. The Plains of Nurn stretch out before me. Which is to say, yesterday I made many cuts, most of which made little sense to me, but I made them anyway. A paragraph requiring half an hour to compose may be dispensed of in only an instant. Snip. Delete. Easy peasy. It hardly even hurts. Strictly out-patient stuff. Just don't pick at it, or it'll never heal.
Today, we will linger on the banks of this bedroughted river, and the March will not continue until Monday. A communications breakdown has both permitted and made necessary this early interruption. I'm glad of it, for my part. It means I have today and tomorrow to write a vignette for Sirenia Digest #18 (May '07). Monday, though, the long walk resumes.
Spoke yesterday with producer D, letting him know that the "Onion" screenplay has been sidetracked until after the 23rd, and I was relieved to find him very understanding.
I forgot to mention that we saw Spider-Man 3 with Byron on Wednesday. I was reluctant , but I went. See, I owed Byron, having forced him to sit through X-Men 3, even though we all knew it would suck. My twisted Mystique fetish, what can I say. Anyway, yeah, Spider-Man 3. I enjoyed it more than Spider-Man 2, but not nearly as much as the first film. At least three films were trapped inside Spider-Man 3, and it went on maybe forty-five minutes too long for my liking. The Bruce Campbell cameo was a breath of fresh air. All in all, far too much in the way of touchy-feeliness, the mushy sort of sentimentality that makes me cringe. The film swings wildly between breathtaking and achingly dull. Too much plot, too little substance. But we did get a Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix trailer beforehand, so all was not lost.
Anything else about yesterday? Well, we had a short peregrination in the evening. It would have been longer, but a thunderstorm was moving in. Wonderful thunder and lightning, a marvelous wind sweeping over Freedom Park. Someone in a big red pickup truck stopped and warned us about falling trees. Ah, worry not, Chicken Little. Later, after dinner, we did a Toho Kid Night, first an unedited, undubbed cut of Daikaijû Baran (Varan the Unbelievable; 1958), which I think is actually one of the best of Ishirô Honda's films, moody and dark and fun. However, it's almost impossible to root for anyone but the monster, driven from his primeval sanctuary, where he was bothering no one, then murdered for posing a threat to humanity. Okay, well maybe he ate a few villagers now and again, but these things happen. Anyway, the second feature was Uchu daikaijû Dogora (Dogora, the Space Monster; 1964), and what a difference six years can make. Uchu daikaijû Dogora is a goofy sort of clash between diamond-stealing gangsters. the Tokyo police, and carbon-stealing aliens. It's what might have happened, I think, had Charles Fort lived long enough to write a kaijû eiga which was then rewritten by Maynard G. Krebs. There were some genuinely creepy visuals near the end, as gargantuan jellyfish-like aliens drift gracefully through the clouded sky above a Japanese coal-mining town and rocks rain from the heavens. I think this film must have been made after Ishirô Honda discovered LSD. Later, we watched The Sifl and Olly Show on YouTube, then an episode of Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, and, finally, read a chapter of The Children of Húrin before deciding enough was enough, too much fun for us, and that bed must be faced. That was yesterday.
Oh, and Thursday night, while we were cleaning my office, Spooky found a stack of photos I'd meant to scan last month for my MySpace page, but then mislaid. Stuff from 1995-1996, including a shot from the '95 World Horror Con (my first) in Atlanta and one from the grand opening of Pain and Wonder in Athens (also 1995). Gods, I was a young'un. Anyway, they have now been scanned and you can see the photos here. I think I'm making peace with my MySpace page. I seem to have somehow taught myself a method of looking at the pages without seeing all the hideous flashing ads.
The platypus is tapping hisherits wristwatch and muttering that there's weird erotica to be written, and he wants something boy-on-boy this month, I think, so I suppose I should make an end to this. Later, kiddos.
Today, we will linger on the banks of this bedroughted river, and the March will not continue until Monday. A communications breakdown has both permitted and made necessary this early interruption. I'm glad of it, for my part. It means I have today and tomorrow to write a vignette for Sirenia Digest #18 (May '07). Monday, though, the long walk resumes.
Spoke yesterday with producer D, letting him know that the "Onion" screenplay has been sidetracked until after the 23rd, and I was relieved to find him very understanding.
I forgot to mention that we saw Spider-Man 3 with Byron on Wednesday. I was reluctant , but I went. See, I owed Byron, having forced him to sit through X-Men 3, even though we all knew it would suck. My twisted Mystique fetish, what can I say. Anyway, yeah, Spider-Man 3. I enjoyed it more than Spider-Man 2, but not nearly as much as the first film. At least three films were trapped inside Spider-Man 3, and it went on maybe forty-five minutes too long for my liking. The Bruce Campbell cameo was a breath of fresh air. All in all, far too much in the way of touchy-feeliness, the mushy sort of sentimentality that makes me cringe. The film swings wildly between breathtaking and achingly dull. Too much plot, too little substance. But we did get a Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix trailer beforehand, so all was not lost.
Anything else about yesterday? Well, we had a short peregrination in the evening. It would have been longer, but a thunderstorm was moving in. Wonderful thunder and lightning, a marvelous wind sweeping over Freedom Park. Someone in a big red pickup truck stopped and warned us about falling trees. Ah, worry not, Chicken Little. Later, after dinner, we did a Toho Kid Night, first an unedited, undubbed cut of Daikaijû Baran (Varan the Unbelievable; 1958), which I think is actually one of the best of Ishirô Honda's films, moody and dark and fun. However, it's almost impossible to root for anyone but the monster, driven from his primeval sanctuary, where he was bothering no one, then murdered for posing a threat to humanity. Okay, well maybe he ate a few villagers now and again, but these things happen. Anyway, the second feature was Uchu daikaijû Dogora (Dogora, the Space Monster; 1964), and what a difference six years can make. Uchu daikaijû Dogora is a goofy sort of clash between diamond-stealing gangsters. the Tokyo police, and carbon-stealing aliens. It's what might have happened, I think, had Charles Fort lived long enough to write a kaijû eiga which was then rewritten by Maynard G. Krebs. There were some genuinely creepy visuals near the end, as gargantuan jellyfish-like aliens drift gracefully through the clouded sky above a Japanese coal-mining town and rocks rain from the heavens. I think this film must have been made after Ishirô Honda discovered LSD. Later, we watched The Sifl and Olly Show on YouTube, then an episode of Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, and, finally, read a chapter of The Children of Húrin before deciding enough was enough, too much fun for us, and that bed must be faced. That was yesterday.
Oh, and Thursday night, while we were cleaning my office, Spooky found a stack of photos I'd meant to scan last month for my MySpace page, but then mislaid. Stuff from 1995-1996, including a shot from the '95 World Horror Con (my first) in Atlanta and one from the grand opening of Pain and Wonder in Athens (also 1995). Gods, I was a young'un. Anyway, they have now been scanned and you can see the photos here. I think I'm making peace with my MySpace page. I seem to have somehow taught myself a method of looking at the pages without seeing all the hideous flashing ads.
The platypus is tapping hisherits wristwatch and muttering that there's weird erotica to be written, and he wants something boy-on-boy this month, I think, so I suppose I should make an end to this. Later, kiddos.
