AREA FIVE: "Liza McCready"

THE MAKING OF AREA FIVE

Area Five came about from a weird need to use the internet for something...else. I wanted to make a short film, but I lack just about all the resources needed to pull off something that looks good. Cash being chief among them, followed by crew and gear (in no particular order).

Thus, it became an exercise in limitations. What did I have? What could I do? I have a cheap digital camera ($100) that's just a step above cell phone cams. I have no sound equipment to speak of. I can wrangle no more than probably two people at one time. Probably not actual actors either.

Sets? Well, I just got creative there. It's a frakking storage unit. I could have done something in my apartment or outside, but I just didn't want to set anything in my apartment and there's a distinct lack of control in doing things outside, though I've got an idea or two for the future there. Also, I didn't want to do anything that looked like it was in LA.

There's the limitation of YouTube. Naturally, I want people to be able to see it, and YouTube provides an excellent platform, so there's the ten-minute maximum. I know that people's internet attention span is probably closer to three minutes, but suck it.

The internet also favors comedy. I am not with the massively funny, so again...suck it, internet.

So, all of the above spells low-tech. So, I began to think, how can I excuse being ridiculously low-tech. How can being low-tech be part of the story or the concept in someway. Well, if you've ever seen police interrogation video on the news, you've noticed that it uniformly looks like total crap.

And, of course, Homicide: Life on the Street, is one of my favoritest shows ev-ar and is the master of the police interrogation scene. Can you say homage?

And so, the concept of the police interrogation video, pulled straight from the police archives was born. I wanted to spiff it up some. Technologize it. What if the detective had access to all municipal databases (not to mention the internet) by means of a tech assistant (so as not to spoil the rhythms of interrogation). It would also allow me to play with some on-screen elements, making this look less like a short film and more like an artifact.

Winston (Crump) is a guy I worked with. He's taking acting classes. I talked him into it. Emily (Liza), I was just talking about the idea with, mining her for advice (because she's taken on the whole professional short film thing, directing it herself, and she's totally a producer) and, for some reason, asked her if she'd be interested. She was, for psychological reasons. She wanted to see what it was like to be on the other side of the camera.

The 911 operator is my neighbor. I reached out for some local flavor and in Chicago, cast Joelle as Shelby Vance.

I found and totally wrecked a table. Graffiti, installed a handcuff bar (as seen on The Shield), hit it with stuff, etc. Got some stuff for the wall and, after deciding that no room in my apartment could be adequately converted, nor my garage, I located a Public Storage that had regular doors instead of roll-ups. And one dollar for the first month rent. Hyper-scammy. The set was probably the easiest part.

My hands, not so steady, nor was the camera designed to be held as steady, so the camera was stationary. On top of a box. It fit.

The Public Storage closed at five, so we had to be out before then. Also, we had to stop shooting when ever somebody decided they needed their ratty old couch.

Also, I'm no director. Not technically anyway. A little bit of experience dealing with stage directing, but not for something to be edited, blocking and what-not was a little more fluid that it should have been, so I would up doing a lot of directing after the fact. And after I learned how to edit. Some. I probably didn't do it right, but come on...the instruction manual was (I kid you not) 1152 pages. And not awesomely clear on some topics.

Very much a learning experience.

PROVING I'M NOT COMPLETELY DEAD YET

There will be something by the end of the extended weekend. In the meantime...I was asked, thus I will answer the following:

As of 7:30 PM today,

Last Thing I Watched: House: "Wilson's Heart" (third time)

Last Thing I Listened to: NIN: The Slip "Demon Seed" (car stereo)

Last thing I Read: Best American Short Plays 1990 (I feel I should point out that I did, in fact, read this in the last week, not 18 years ago)

In the meantime, too much to write. A pilot, a one-act, some CBR, another thing, and a rewrite.

BOXY: NOT THE KID FROM BATTLESTAR

Yesterday, I attended the Breaking into the Box thingy at the Writer's Guild Foundation. Largely just for infotainment purposes, but there's always unexpected highlights. Hanging with Shawna, certainly, and speaking geekese. Ran into some other friends as well. Talking to Josh Appelbaum, he formerly of October Road and no sooner mentioned than he being currently of Life on Mars. Talked to Kevin Falls (and managed not to say the word "Sorkin").

And any time you've got Shawn Ryan, Brannon Braga , Allen Heinberg and Damon Lindelof on one panel at the same time, you will be infotained. Lindelof spoke of being showrunnerless at the beginning of Lost. Heinberg was very enlightening and candid about the Grey's Anatomy writer's room. Past and present.

Actually, the most interesting stuff came from the non-writers. It was interesting to hear executive points of view on a variety of subjects. Their main point (and you really should now this by now) is write your own voice. Specs serve a purpose, but original material is the thing. Short original material. In fact, David Babcock (Reaper) mentioned that he would have his agent send only the first act of one of his plays.
One of the coolest thing is that brand new Queen of HBO (really, isn't that a better title) Sue Naegle was on hand. An interesting view as she makes the agent to exec transition.

Some few things, random things.

• Life on Mars pilot will be reshot, rewritten and recast (not Jason O'Mara, though, thankfully should have asked about Colm Meany,) it'll be done in New York (can you say tax break). Pleases me to no end because of my well-known weariness of stuff set in L.A.).

• Told Kevin Falls that I just can't bring myself to delete the last (best) episode of Journeyman from my DVR. He says music rights are boggling a DVD release. Of course.

• You wanna be an assistant. Call Appelbaum's office. He's only had the show for five days. He is, however, already staffed.

• I wasn't aware that Desperate Housewives is reshooting (or rather just reshot) their finally because ABC rejected the original. Hmm.

• You cannot get into the business if you don't know Winnie Holzman. Can't be done.

• Seriously though, lots of breaking in stories. I'm always interested in these, despite the fact that they are basically unrepeatable. Best one was Appelbaum's. A CAA agent asked out a waitress friend of his and his partner. She made it conditional on the him reading their spec. Bam.
  

Attendees I spoke with were waffley on the usefulness of the day in actually "Breaking into the Box" ( a lot of common sense advice, really) but every single one, myself included, said, "it makes you want to write stuff. Right now."

And when I got home. I did.

Will I go again next year. Yeah. Probably.

DOLLHOUSE TRAILER

Until it gets pulled down, which could be any minute now.

"TAKE A LOOK AT THE LAWMAN..."

The Life on Mars trailer.

It looks like they took visually a step further than the original. It looks good. I hate the trailer, but the show looks good so far.

FIRST THINGS FIRST...

...but not necessarily in that order.

I admit it, my ability to prioritize sucks harder than a hull breach on the International Space Station. Keep your physics nitpicks to yourself.

I don't overly involve myself in too much stuff if I can help for this very reason. It's a lesson I've learned in the last couple of years or so, I guess.

There's the writing I do writing scripts. There's no deadline on these (unfortunately) yet these are the things I'm drawn to first and foremost. For instance, yesterday, I spent a chunk of time rewriting the first act of Hellcat. This largely because the main character slapped me around and she said ...


• DANNY
• What the fuck is this shit you've written for me? Do it over again or I'll turn your arms into tentacles.

I thought about that for a bit and decided that the tentacles would be bad, so... I do what I'm told.

Also, I've got this short deadline piece for CBR, not to mention some other pieces down the line that I should be jumping on, but I was working on Hellcat and on the next thing.

The next thing is some video editing I need to do. Fortunately I have been doing that. Finally. I had to get around some technical difficulties, but I'm there now and I'm on a roll. That project should show up before too long now.

In doing these things, I 've fallen back on the notes I owe a friend on his Mad Men script. It was a good script. I liked it, but I'm generally a "discuss the script" guy and so I need to make some time to write out a good, thoughtful assessment. I thought I'd see him today, but I'm not, so I'm totally doing that. I feel like shit about not doing that earlier. If anything I may actually have more time today than I planned for, so maybe I can use it to get caught up on that shit, but then I have the character from Hellcat in my ear.



• DANNY
• (whispers)
• Come back. You know you want to. Just put those fingers on the keys and make word things go.

Then, oh, there's another pilot I got to get out of my head yet has a very - well, I think it has a very limited usefulness to me, but I'm going to do it anyway.

Then there's the Pushing Daisies spec, which I've let sit long enough to get some distance on it so I can go back at it for some rewrites.

All of the above has suffered for about an hour while I watched the newest possible Doctor Who. And another hour while I was Outback. I'm sorry I needed a steak right there and then, and there's one just up the street. And suffered while I've been writing this post.

BTW, while I've been writing and editing, I've had on the PBS mini-series Carrier. I had eight hours of it on the DVR. Fanfuckingtastic documentary. Now that's a reality show.

OK, back to work. Sorry Danny, you're just going to have to wait a while, I got some catching up to do.

THE LINE BEGINS TO BLUR

NIN - "1000000"

I want you to consider something. Something relating to TV, trust me. But there's some background I need to relate first, so bear with me.

Now, I'm a huge fan of Nine Inch Nails. It doesn't really matter if you are or not, just digest and consider. If you're knowledgeable about Reznor's recent goings on, skip down to the paragraph that begins with "Shortly after.."

Trent Reznor, who essentially is NIN, is on a roll of forward thinkingness. It started just before his contract with Interscope Records finally lapsed. His last album with that label was a concept album. Two words that scare the shit out of me. Year Zero was essentially fragments of a militarized post-Bush future in which rights are something people used to have. There is an uprising and there is something coming down from the sky. My fear was unfounded.

In addition, there was an alternate reality game which spread so far as to have some players actually get sorta kidnapped, taken to an actual NIN concert and have the show raided by Year Zero soldiers. This ARG just won a Webby award. Deservedly so. Here's a rundown on the whole monster. It's crossover in the actual and physical, with mysterious USB drives and white vans is fascinating.

From there, released the multitracks of all the songs on Year Zero (essentially making the album available for free.) and set up a remix website where fans can post their NIN remixes and creations with just a few basic restrictions. Fans like me. It was launched when he released a CD of Year Zero remixes by people like Ladytron and members of New Order, oh and a fan who went by Pirate Robot Midget. Yeah, a fan.

Then there was the album he produced and performed on for his bud, Saul Williams, kinda of a pseudo-rap, beat poet kinda dude. It was called The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust. Reznor and Williams released it as a pay-what-you-want download. The results were a little disappointing, but then before doing it, very few people knew who Saul Williams was. Now he's on a Nike ad. BTW, it's not free anymore. It's five bones. Worth it, though.

Then there was Ghosts. In which Reznor released 36 instrumental tracks, like this one (the guitar at the end makes me think of urban cop shows). Very experimental. Zero commercial value, right. Certainly not getting on the radio. He released a chunk for free and took preorders on CDs, in varying editions. In the first two days, he cleared a million dollars. When it hit the stores a month later, it debuted at #14 on Billboard. An experimental album.

The tracks are also released under a creative commons license, so you can use them for your own non-commercial videos and what-not. And there's the Ghosts Film Festival on YouTube. And there's remixable multitracks.

About a month later, he like..BAM new album. It's called The Slip and it appears to have been conceived and recorded in maybe a month or two and immediately, last Monday, released as a free download. Free. CD's out later on. They will sell. And, yeah, multitracks to remix.

Here's the TV part.

Shortly after Year Zero came out, Reznor spoke about taking to concept that drove the album and the ARG and porting it to TV. Recently, he was asked about it again...

Though crippled by the writers' strike, a proposed TV series based on the Year Zero concept is ‘‘still churning along''.

This is what I want you to think about. If Reznor, having done all this stuff I just described, got his fingers into TV, what would happen? Free day and date downloads, in addition to DVD sets? Webisodes, sure. Other series have done that, but how about expanded or alternate cuts episodes online? Soundtrack albums that actually affect the story?

How about format busting? Instead of say, an hour once a week, how about a half-hour every three-four days? It's worked before, you know.

Remixable TV shows. Re-edit episodes. Shoot your own footage and cut it in and upload it. Sturgeon's Law will apply, but it's about that ten percent, you know.

Or how about fans shoot their own footage, upload it and episodes get written around selected clips. Stories of the future freedom fighters. Just like a one minute or two minute thing and the staff writers find a way to craft something around it, if not as a basis for a story, at least utilizing it in service of a larger or different story. This is something I'd like to see done somewhere, if not on a Year Zero series.

I hope this gets off the ground and is allowed to do whatever it can. The line begins to blur.

And Trent, the email is m at redrighthand dot net.

THIS IS FUCKING BRILLIANT

Watch it. Now. NOW!

LIFE ON MARS?

I was immediately intrigued when I first heard of Life on Mars. Once I started watching the BBC series, I stayed intrigued, despite the fact that it seemed like the show was basically a seventies cop show with a little bit of mind games. Then I realized I loved the show precisely because the psychoscifi element was so subtle. It had a little of everything, character, procedural stuff, and mindfucking. I was also leery of how long they could carry this on, the whole man-out-of-time thing.

Oh. What? Two seasons and out. Cool. Hit it. Hit hard. Get out. Kinda thing you just can't do on American TV.

Enter David E. Kelly and ABC, last pilot season with their American version of Life on Mars.

At first, I was skeptical. I read the pilot script. It's basically the original pilot with different place names and the British stuff taken out. Respect for the original material. Still skeptical though, just not as much. Then it was cast. Look at them. There's nobody in that cast I don't like. And Tommy Schlamme directing. Not a bad thing at all.

So while this has been hanging in the ether for, like, a year...it just wouldn't die on the vine and so, in that time I have been alternately looking forward to and dreading it.

Hollywood Reporter is saying it looks good for the upfronts.

"Mars," which had been dormant since the pilot was shot last summer, has gained momentum in the past week and appears close to a series pickup, with "October Road" creators Josh Appelbaum, Andre Nemec and Scott Rosenberg -- all repped by Endeavor -- in talks to come on board as exec producers and ABC Studios in talks with 20th TV to join as a co-producer. However, sources indicated that no deals can be made without the blessing of Kelley, who created the U.S. version of the British series and owns the rights to it. Kelley is currently reevaluating his involvement in the project, starring Jason O'Mara as a 21st century cop transported to the 1970s, as it goes forward.

Hmm. I still don't know. Will it seem like it's gone too long after just one season? Or will it have some new different energy?

Think I'm gonna pop in my Life on Mars DVDs.

I SAW THE INVISIBLES

We will not discuss the legality of my doing so.

It's awesome when I turn up a new British TV show. Largely because I don't track the British TV industry as closely as I do the one I'm trying to work in, so when they show up, it's kind of a surprise. It's even better when that surprise has an extra surprise in it. The first surprise in the new BBC show, The Invisibles, [tangent] nothing to do with Grant Morrison. If his Invisibles came to the screen, it would perform utterly destroy at least 25% of the minds attempting to watch it, leaving a whole new variety of drooling couch potatoes all around the world. Something that the cognitive surplus seems to have cut down on...which, by the way, I doubt the actual existence of.[/tangent]

The other surprise is that it stars Anthony "No Pants" Head.

The Invisibles is about Morris and Syd. Both were the top of the second-story game back in the olden times (1970's). Now, they're retired. In fact, Morris (Head) and his wife are moving into a retirement community. Circumstances, of course, conspire to get them back into high stakes cat burglary.

Off the bat, I've got a few problems, not the least of which is (gray hair not withstanding) that I have some difficulty accepting Tony Head as a retiring dude in a retirement village being all retired (he's only 54 in RL). Still, he's monstrously cool, and we watch nonetheless.

Secondly, this isn't really treading any new ground. Nearly every (if not every) aspect of this show as been done before. Repeatedly. And I'm not really getting a sense of anything terribly different from the handling of any of those aspects.

Lastly, the show is a comedy/drama and the comedy just wasn't hitting for me. A lot of clumsy old guy trying to be stealthy comedy on the part of Syd (Warren Clarke). Mostly other stuff that was just...there.

Now, I'm going to keep watching though. There's room for improvement, certainly. And there's some nice stuff in there two. Head's character is great. There's a fantastic scene where he's trying to recover his lockpicking skills and he's just not getting it and he says, defeated,...


• MORRIS
• I am the best safecracker this country has ever produced. I am William Shakespeare, Bobby Moore and The Beatles. And once, blood ran through my veins.

..., but refocuses and he says it again, this time stating the fact. And he's just on. This guy is one of my favorite actors, ever.

Also, the show also stars Dean Lennox Kelly as their younger, new partner. You may (or may not) recall his as the aforementioned William Shakespeare in last year's "The Shakespeare Code" on Doctor Who. He's okay. I dig him. And while I'm at it, the new redesigned BBC DW site blows big Sontaran chunks.

Next week, Head's daughter Emily turns up as his TV daughter.

I'm not terribly familiar with the writer, William Ivory, though I have some passing familiarity with a show he was previously identified with, Minder. Very passing, though. Passing like the ice cream truck that you spot out the window, but you can't get out there fast enough.

So despite not being that impressed, that lockpicking scene sold me enough to keep on it for a while. There was also a nice twist about halfway though the episode that I won't give away and didn't turn the concept on its head or anything, but made sense to me and was "right." That gives me a little more hope for future episodes.

RETURN OF THE AUSLANDER

The Shock-haired Sentinel is back!

Thrill to the latest adventure of THE AUSLANDER in Astonishing Adventures #3.

In this new tale, written by...some guy, the Amnesiac Austrian who wanders the wartime United States unraveling Nazi plans that come to him in his dreams finds himself racing against a team of German agents in New York's Diamond District. Who will get to the vital component of a super-advanced death ray first? Who will be the one to possess "The Yellow Star of Antwerp?"

Also, in this latest issue, the Mad Pulp Bastard himself joins the party. About damn time too. He turns up with "A Head For These Kinds of Things." Twisty and dangerous.

Astonishing Adventures is available as a FREE .pdf download from either the Astonishing Adventures site or any number of mirrors, but I only know of this one.

You can also read it online at Issuu.

Since it's free, you've got no damn excuse for downloading this cool pile of pulpitude and gettin' your pulp on.

And if you missed the previous adventures of THE AUSLANDER, you can download the first issue, featuring his debut in "Formula for Fatality" right here (Issuu version here) and the second issue, with "A Taste of Treachery" here (Issue version here). The second issue is also available at Amazon.com if you like your pulp more palpable...or pulpable. I'm told that the third issue will be there shortly. The first issue is available from Lulu.

The dudes running the show do this for the pure love of pulp fiction, so while it's not the slickest publication there is, and some typos sneak through, but then it IS free and it's just good solid fun.