Even though I went to film school, I love this site. It’s
truly geared to the indie and DYI filmmaker, with information varying from
equipment, to film festivals, competitions, writing, editing, industry news and
even the never ending question: “Should you go to film school?”
Like I said, I already did go to film school and my
experience was priceless to me (only metaphorically speaking, there was a very
real price tag to my education, thanks Mom!) But in the age of the digital
revolution, there’s so much that can be done without having to sell a vital
organ to pay the bill.
Nevertheless, it’s a great site that hopefully will inspire
and empower some indie female filmmakers everywhere to go out and make a movie.
For the cinematographers out there, they even offer a free
eBook, The DSLR Cinematography Guide.
Check it out for yourselves and make sure to sign up for
their newsletter, like them on Facebook and follow on twitter.
As we gear up for another year of film submissions, I want to take a minute to talk about the 7-Minute Itch. After 8 years of looking at hundreds of short films, films that started well but then sagged and died despite all the good work that went into them, I think many of the failures of comedy are in the structure of the overall script. In a short film, somewhere around 7 minutes, the story needs to take a turn. A big turn, to change the game entirely for the audience. It doesn't have to be a Hollywood change where the stakes for the main character suddenly escalate, thought it can. It could be any turn that wakes up the viewer lulled into "knowing" what the film was about and ready for it to be done. Curiosity is aroused. Instead of being ready for it to end, I want to see where it goes from there, at least for another 7 minutes. Then wrap it up. Or take yet another turn, a different turn, and then I'll be with you to the end of your half-hour. (Stories over a half-hour long need even more in terms of story, with almost as much depth as a feature, and they have a very hard time finding a home in film festivals.)
CAVEAT: When you hear 7 minutes, do not think of a stopwatch. Think of a cigarette. Cigarettes burn at different speeds depending on how much and how often you puff on them, but if a cigarette stays lit, it has a maximum span before it fizzles and goes out. If you want to keep smoking, you have to light another. A completely new cigarette. Likewise, your story after your 7-minute turn, should feel like a new movie. You can stretch it a bit if you are bringing your film to a bang-up finish. However, if you add another five minutes of interesting complications in the same vein as the rest, it causes a kind of despair: I'm tired of this. Let me go! You may love the charm of the moment, but if I feel the mental and emotional equivalent of an attack of claustrophobia, your charming scene becomes torture to me, no matter how well done.
EXCEPTION: If you are making a film that is more experimental, an artistic deconstruction of comedy, or a recursive philosophical parody (we had a French film like that the first year that was 26 minutes) all bets are off. But a discussion of comedy and aesthetics has to be for another day.
Yesterday's Top Ten list and the (sad) exclusion of Roseanne and I Love Lucy from the list made me remember a documentary I watched over 3 years ago. Chronicling the life of the eminent triple-threat hyphenate screenwriter-actress-producer Gertrude Berg,Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg celebrates her seminal achievements and reaffirms her status as a broadcasting pioneer. It’s beyond incredible how someone can be on top and eventually suffer from almost complete obscurity. Imagine Oprah being forgotten 60 years from now. Well, that’s exactly what happened to Berg. Her name rarely gets mentioned as a pioneer, yet as Yoo-Hoo shows, she can lay claim to having invented the sitcom with her popular show.
Director Akiva Kempner weaves together archival footage from the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s with insightful interviews of an eclectic bunch of talking heads, including Berg’s co-stars, family, and fans, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, actor Ed Asner, producers Norman Lear (All in the Family) and Gary David Goldberg (Family Ties) and NPR correspondent Susan Stamberg – all of whom reveal just what an extraordinary woman Berg was. Kempner also includes excerpts of audio from Berg’s well-loved radio show, The Goldbergs, which launched her writing and acting career when it aired in 1929 (just one month after the stock market crash), as well as rare footage from the CBS television show which followed in 1949. The television version of The Goldbergs, a situation comedy about a middle class Jewish family, earned Berg the first Best Actress Emmy in history and a tremendous fan following.
Berg paved the way for the acceptance of Jewish characters on radio and television. The Goldbergs were a huge hit on radio in the Depression era, when there was an abundance of domestic anti-Semitism, manifested by restrictive real estate covenants, university quotas and overt discrimination. Viewers accepted the overt Jewishness of matriarch Molly and her family. Yes, they were Americans, but Molly spoke with a Yiddish inflection, the mannerisms were ethnic, the family celebrated Passover, went to synagogue and at least one episode alluded to the Holocaust. Berg was able to pull off the most positive show about Jews because the Goldbergs were a warm, struggling family that people could identify with. You didn’t have to be Jewish to love Molly.
Yoo-Hoo reveals what Berg represented to middle class families, the Jewish community and how she re-defined motherhood in the mid-20th century. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt is attributed with having said that it wasn’t he, but Molly Goldberg, that got America through the Great Depression. In Yoo-Hoo, Kempner attempts to rescue Berg from obscurity. Unfortunaltey, while the documentary is well-researched, it’s mostly unchallenging and barely touches upon the dark side of Berg’s life. Berg was a complicated, labile woman, whose own mother never recovered from the early death of Berg’s brother and eventually ended up in a psychiatric hospital. Her father never accepted or supported her artistic endeavors. Kempner is less successful at delineating the real Gertrude Berg, who, unlike her alter ego Molly Goldberg, was not the homey, Yiddish mama from the Bronx tenements. Berg was a wealthy, stylish powerhouse who not only created one of the most popular TV shows of her era but stood up to the Red-baiting of the 1950s and personally penned 12,000 scripts.
Yoo-Hoo is more than an enjoyable, edifying journey, showcasing the charming personality and extraordinary work of a television legend. Beneath the pleasingly nostalgic facade of a well-paced and fun documentary, there’s a rich historical tapestry interwoven into the narrative of Berg’s life, the effect of the World Wars and, most significantly, the Red Scare and House on Un-American Activities’ blacklist rendered starkly against the backdrop of Berg’s ostensibly-carefree family comedy. Moreover, Berg is, or should be, an icon to be lauded and remembered, not locked away in the vault of television history. Berg is nothing if not an example of an exceptional feminist ahead of her time who fashioned an incredible career and whose work touched millions. So yeah, a woman invented the sitcom. Who knew, right?
With the recent cancellations of Ben & Kate (created by Dana Fox) and Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23 (created by Nahnatchka Khan),
sitcoms created by women aren't having a great 2013 so far. But, that doesn't
mean that women don't create funny, successful sitcoms, so here's a list of the
top 10 sitcoms ever created by women, according to me. (*Some of these shows were co-created with a man, but I
won't count that against them.)
10) Hot in Cleveland
(Suzanne Martin)
9) The New Adventures
of Old Christine (Kari Lizer)
Here is a great TED talk given by Isabel Allende in 2007. If you write, if you care about women's stories, you spend 18 minutes watching this wonderful, passionate, funny talk.
Reading about apps for the iPhone, I get overwhelmed. They can do so many things, but they all have a learning curve, and it can get pretty steep awful fast. But some apps you can put on your phone just in case and when you think, "Oh, I wish I could..." it turns out you can. Like SoundCloud, sure it is for listening, sharing, and posting music, but it can also grab sound and store it, like when a dog is barking next door and you realize it is perfect for a scene you're editing. I might not use it for music sharing, but I'm happy to have it on my phone in case I want to grab some ambient or a sound for my library.
Thursday, November 01, 2012
A great quote about how writing improves the quality of one's life, especially the life of the mind. This link is to The Daily Dish but the post there is a chain of recommendations. Follow it to the original if you want to read more.
When I have a piece of writing in mind, what I have, in fact, is a mental bucket: an attractor for and generator of thought. It’s like a thematic gravity well, a magnet for what would otherwise be a mess of iron filings. I’ll read books differently and listen differently in conversations. In particular I’ll remember everything better; everything will mean more to me. That’s because everything I perceive will unconsciously engage on its way in with the substance of my preoccupation. A preoccupation, in that sense, is a hell of a useful thing for a mind.
