The first guest speaker on the first morning of the Moving Image Institute in Film Criticism and Feature Writing, New York Times critic A.O. Scott made a comment about the problematic nature of Iraq films that seemed to me to serve as a wider metaphor for the current crisis facing those of us struggling for security and longevity as film writers. To paraphrase, Scott suggested that dramatizations of the Iraq conflict have so far been generally disappointing because not only do we not yet know the outcome of the war, but it’s hard to hypothesize what either a positive or negative end would actually look like. This is essentially how I’ve come to feel about my chosen profession of late: unable to imagine what either a best or worst case scenario would actually look like, the idea of establishing long-term career goals seems unfathomable.
The Scott session, for me, reinforced the notion that there’s a divide between those of us who struggle to cobble together a living out of our engagement with the online film community, and those who, because of age or professional stature or other factors that I’m too young and naive to grasp, see the increasing empowerment of the audience as a nuisance.
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Karina will be AWOL for most of Wednesday and at least part of Thursday. While I’m gone, you need to go to Hollywood Elsewhere, because Jeff Wells has obtained the script for the movie adaptation of Peter Biskind’s 90s indie film expose, Down and Dirty Pictures. I mean, I think he has––technically, he posted scans of pages on April 1, but he groveled for a copy of the script several days before, so it’s likely legit. Anyway––the pages he’s scanned are…something to behold. They appear to be the first four pages of the screenplay, and they set the film up as a decony film-within-a-film, wherein Bingham Ray and Jeff Lipsky argue over the portrayal of their own foibles. Read, and talk amongst yourselves. Wells says they’re hiring “name actors” for a Toronto shoot beginning in the fall. Um…casting ideas, anyone?
