The Sonnyboo Intern Program 4

Kubrick’s Kinetic Kinescope!

As I trudge throw my stack of books to read, I should not go near a Half Priced Books ™. If my car drives by, the money flies out the window and into a register. I picked up 5 new books, one of which is about the master, Stanley Kubrick. Now I love me some Kubrick movies, but there are all kinds of myths about him as a person. This was a book written by the screenwriter of EYES WIDE SHUT.



This book stirred some controversy because it was hurriedly published right after Stanley’s death in 1999. Kubrick’s family immediately denounced the writings as playing up all of Stanley’s eccentricities while downplaying his normalcy. In the documentary his family put out, they went to great lengths to portray Stanley Kubrick as a normal person, which he was for the most part. He was obsessive-compulsive, perhaps even clinically so, but he was not a freak of nature.



The book paints the screenwriter as more of an ass than it does Kubrick as anything other than a very controlling director…. As if no one could have guessed that before reading the book. I like hearing Kubrick’s voice. I have obtained his screenplay draft of NAPOLEAN, something I still haven’t read yet. I also got FEAR AND DESIRE, his first feature, and some of his early documentary work. Fantastic stuff. Stanley had a great eye. His still photography from LOOK magazine blows away a lot of people’s lifelong pursuits in stills.

One of the things in this book that’s great is reading how much he loved PULP FICTION and Quentin Tarantino. I don’t know if Q ever knew this, but I’m sure he’s heard this. Kubrick was also very competitive with his contemporaries, but by the 1990’s, very few of them were making movies. He never considered someone like Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, or George Lucas as “competition” because they were still young upstarts, but they also worshipped Stanley from before they were in Film School; he liked that, obviously.

As a kind of “answer” to this book, I had already read Michael Herr’s book on his experience writing a screenplay with Stanley. It was far kinder than the current book’s view. Still, Michael Herr based FULL METAL JACKET on his own experiences, plus he had already worked as a writer on APOCOLYPSE
NOW.

Anyways, I do like reading anything about Kubrick. It’s interesting to see his world from various people’s points of view.

The Kubrickian Phase

For a little over two years I’ve been struggling with how it feels to be liked and hated with such intensity, and usually by strangers. I tried to say I didn’t care, but I obviously did. Looking over blogs of the past few years, since I’ve been blogging a journal for 6 years or so, you can clearly see someone who cared a lot what other people thought of himself. Things have changed though.

I can say in all honesty I don’t care anymore. I’m going to do what I do. I’m not interested in how other people will think about me. I do have an interest in how they feel about the work, as in my film work, but I won’t spend any of my time thinking about how people feel about me. It’s not my job to try to convince anyone to like or not like me or to change their minds about who or what I am.

If someone wants to buy into the mythology and rumors of days long gone or even the wild interpretations of my motives for doing things, I cannot be held responsible, nor do I have any need to change their mind or work to convince them of anything.

I have found a peace that I have not known in my life. I am uninvolved in most of the dramas in my film community. I tend to leave my laptop at work even on weekends just to get away from filmmaking as an all consuming thing. I want to live something more of a life, so I’ve taken up bowling for fun. I love it, even though it is minimalist physical activity; that is still an increase for me. I take little interest in what other people do or don’t do, as it has no affect on me.

All I want to do now is more work. How other people want to perceive me is none of my business quite frankly. I’m not going to go to many MOFA (Mid Ohio Filmmakers Association) meetings anymore. I’m getting plenty of social outlets and I don’t feel my physical presence will do much, as in I see the people I want to see whenever I want to anyways.



I’ve entered what I am calling my “Kubrickian Phase”, which is not to do with comparing myself to the master himself, as it is that I don’t want to be in the public much and I’ve clearly changed my output of work to be more about quality than quantity. No, I do not think everything I’ve made is golden. Some of my movies are quite bad actually, but I’m okay with that. Those are what I made at a certain point in time and with whatever skills I had at that moment. I won’t abandon these pieces as if they didn’t exist, but I intend to improve and make better films. I drew a line in the sand and I want my work to be better than what I made in the past.

In the near future, some of my new projects will start to go public. There are three separate TV series in the works, all with broadcast outlets. The first one, a short film compilation show that I am calling LOOK AT MY SHORTS TV will probably hit first. Already, I have enough material for 6 of my first 13 episodes of one hour shows. Within the first 24 hours of making a call for entries, I got several options of expanding the show from 4 cable markets in Ohio to several more states and several more prestigious copyright holders of short films contacted me about submitting their catalogs.



The other two shows need more gestation before I announce anything, but along with TV, I have come up with another idea that I’m going to move on sooner. I wanted to do something with actors where I can help promote some of the better acting talent we have in Columbus and an anthology idea occurred that came together in no time. I’m still selecting the other directors and working with writers on the scripts, but this seems like another project that will be popular one it gets finished later this summer.

So, in the end, I am busy. I have my nose to the ground and I’m doing work. A lot of my vices are dwindling away and all that is left is a desire to do better work and to live a little outside of movies.

‘S’allright.

- Ross

An Oligarchy in Place of Supercilious Skullduggery

No rest for the wicked. I am ensconced with post production work. I took on some extra projects this weekend because I now need to recoup a heavy loss this week. On Thursday morning, I awoke to the sensation of cold. First my hand froze, and then the rest of me started to go quite freezing. I awoke at 7:45AM and went downstairs to see what was happening. The thermostat read a warm 51 degrees. I felt the vents and cold air was blowing from them.

I attempted to see the pilot light, but to no avail. I called the service that read the most reputable and this guy came out within an hour and proceeded to spend the next several hours fixing our furnace. Two units had fried in it and I got stiffed with a $600 bill. It could have been worse in terms of cost – we might have had to replace the whole heating unit, but as is – a chunk of change I had not wanted to part with just blew away. It was 34 degrees in the house when the hot air started blowing again. I lost almost an entire day's worth of work helping this guy work on the furnace and of course the cats looked at me like I'm some kind of sadistic bastard for torturing them in the cold all day.



My cold has faded, at least the part that disorients you and makes you woozy. I can still produce record amounts of mucous, and that means spending more money on tissues. All this money keeps disappearing. I keep making it and it keeps going away. This is life. That is the grind, isn't it? Ce La Vie, as the French might say.

My HD-DVD's started arriving, as in the free ones as a rebate on the player. I now have 4 of the special edition High Definition Stanley Kubrick movies. 2001, CLOCKWORK ORANGE, THE SHINING, and EYES WIDE SHUT are now in my collection. I started going through a lot of the extras and special features. There are documentaries galore. I had only recently seen the 2+ hour documentary "A LIFE IN PICTURES", and I subsequently bought it as a separate DVD from a used seller on AMAZON.COM. Some of the documentaries are even in HD.

One of the things that I have been contemplating as I watch a lot of these newly made MAKING OF's and BEHIND THE SCENES is that Stanley Kubrick would hate them. I think Stanley must be churning around in the ground. He detested any kind of commentary or theories or extras on the movies before. Kubrick was of the mindset that the movies were the movies – your own interpretation is what it means. Whatever the film meant to you is what it means. The End. To see film critics giving their opinion on an official DVD of Kubrick's movie somehow endorses these interpretations or validates them; Stanley would have hated that, at least that was his pattern for the past 45 years.

Now for those out there that know how much I love extras and even have made my own "peak behind the curtain" type videos – I am not Kubrick, nor do I aspire to be him. I appreciate all these insights into one of cinemas greatest minds, but I am not trying to imitate Kubrick, either in practice or theory. I can disagree with methods and technique with someone I truly respect and love. After seeing Vivian Kubrick's documentary last year on the making of THE SHINING, I decided I would never behave the way Kubrick did on that set. It was something that completely demystified Kubrick and made me completely believe you can find your own way to direct.

The only similarities I might have with Stanley Kubrick is in the form of a feline assistant editor.



There ends the similarities between me and Kubrick.




Peace to my homies in North Compton. Word.

- PJ