Filmmaking 101

Tribeca Flashpoint Media Arts Academy

2010-04-13T17:10:00.003-05:00

Hi Again. I think this explains it all pretty well.

PeterH

By Mark Caro, Tribune reporter

1:33 p.m. CDT, April 13, 2010

Tribeca is the name of a Lower Manhattan neighborhood, film festival, institute and production company, and now it has a strong Chicago association as well.

That's because the company founded by actor Robert De Niro, his producing partner Jane Rosenthal and her investor husband Craig Hatkoff has taken a 50 percent interest in the Loop-based two-year digital media vocational school Flashpoint: The Academy of Media Arts and Sciences. The school now will be known as the Tribeca Flashpoint Media Arts Academy as it opens a virtual pipeline between the 75,000-square-foot Clark Street facility and Tribeca's New York headquarters.

"It really means amazing opportunities for our students," Flashpoint president/CEO Howard Tullman said, noting that his school was "looking for a strategic partner as much as an investor."

"It's state of the art," Rosenthal said of Flashpoint. "It's really an amazing place. It just happened to be the right fit for what we were looking for."

Tribeca has been in expansion mode of late, overseeing not only the Tribeca Film Festival (launched in 2002 and running Apr. 21-May 2 this year) but also a virtual version of the festival, a cinema, a production facility and an institute involved in community outreach and education. Rosenthal said her company has worked with middle-school and high-school students before, but Flashpoint represents the first such partnership with an institution for more advanced students.

Built out in a high-rise kitty corner to Daley Plaza, Flashpoint welcomed its first students in September 2007 and has seen its enrollment grow from 110 students to the current 450, Flashpoint Dean Paula Froehle said.

"What Howard has pulled together in a very short period of time, it's almost hard to believe," Hatkoff said.

The school takes a contrasting approach to the film program at nearby Columbia College, which offers a traditional four-year liberal arts degree. Flashpoint is a two-year immersive program designed to prepare students, college age or older, for work in the digital media world.

Local-based filmmaker Harold Ramis has close ties to Columbia College, and also appears in Flashpoint's promotional materials. He said he still values a four-year liberal arts education, but he's also impressed with Flashpoint.

"It's a really cool facility," Ramis said. Calling Tribeca an institution that "does things right," he added, "I can't imagine this is a moneymaking enterprise for them, but as a pipeline for talent and well-trained students, it's probably a good thing."

To Rosenthal and Hatkoff, the partnership is less about bringing Flashpoint students into the Tribeca fold than boosting an industry in a state of wild flux.

"I've been in the industry for over 25 years, and I've never seen the industry change more," Rosenthal said. "The jobs and the skills (needed) are changing dramatically, and you need to stay forward thinking. The students that do come out of this program will help us keep our industry healthy."

Hatkoff cited a question posed by a Gates Foundation report: "How do we prepare students for jobs that don't yet exist?" Flashpoint, Hatkoff said, is poised to do just that.

Tullman said he envisions Tribeca Flashpoint students getting involved in various aspects of the film festival, such as working with filmmakers and helping them develop marketing materials and trailers. (Flashpoint students already have done such work on projects such as "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," distributed by Chicago's Music Box Films.)

Rosenthal said the specifics of the interplay have yet to be determined. "It's too soon to say what students at Tribeca Flashpoint will be doing at Tribeca," she said. "If students have the opportunity to work at Tribeca and if we have the opportunity to work with students, that will be fantastic."

The President and Me

2009-03-24T06:30:00.004-05:00

I am feuding with President Obama.

His unintended gaff to Jay Leno comparing his bowling abilities to those of a Special Olympian has set off minor outrage in these parts.

As loyal readers know, my sister, Mary Beth- here with my dad, won a silver medal at the 2003 Special Olympic World Games in Dublin. I made a film about it and growing up with a special needs family member called "what's two+three?" Click on the link on the right and you can see more.

So when I heard about the President on Leno I jumped into action with the goal to get Mary Beth and the film to the White House to bowl against the President and to screen the film for him.

By Saturday morning my sister was on the front page of the Quad City Times Newspaper (where she and my parents live). That night she was the lead on the 10pm news- showing a clip of my film right after Obama's misspeak. A press release went to the Tonight Show- trying to get Mary Beth to the White House to bowl against the president and have Jay Leno finish what he began. Through other connections we got the film to top Obama aids in the White House. I contacted the Shrivers and the Special Olympics in D.C.

It's rare when you get a p.r. shot like this and I did whatever I could to capitalize. Coincidently, I have just begun work on the next Special Olympics film- the 2011 World Games are in Athens, Greece. I think having President Obama's endorsement would be a great way to raise some development funds.

Here are links to the article and Mary Beth's TV appearance- best seen on a PC with Internet Explorer as your browser. Scroll down to the March 21 10pm newscast. She is the lead story.

http://www.qctimes.com/articles/2009/03/20/news/local/doc49c45fcfc92b2023408526.txt

http://www.kwqc.com/Global/category.asp?C=79072

PeterH

Taking Chance

2009-02-28T16:28:00.003-06:00

In the news this week was the Obama administration's decision to revisit the policy on allowing pictures of the caskets bringing home dead soldiers. The previous president did not want pictures such as the one here to see the light of day. I am glad about Obama's decision, it's both patriotic and symbolic, but I also understand if family members of the deceased would choose not to want photos like this be seen.

All of this ties in with a new HBO film that screened at Sundance called Taking Chance. It stars Kevin Bacon who plays a real life colonel who accompanies one casket back to its final resting place. I say often that one of the things I like about films is when they take me some place I would never get to go, and this film does that. We follow Bacon's character on his journey from Dover Air Force base to the family in Wyoming. It was fascinating in its simplicity.

I have always thought Kubrick's Paths of Glory was the best anti-war war film I have seen. I think Taking Chance is right there with it. We get to see the very real and very unglamorous after effects of war. I have seen some reviews from its Sundance screening that weren't all that favorable, but I liked it. It's small and quiet and dignified and pays its respects to the fallen soldiers.

See it if you can.

PeterH

The Oscars

2009-02-22T11:45:00.004-06:00

A quick post about tonight's Oscars. I don't really care about the awards, especially this year with times so tough it seems strange to celebrate millionaire celebrities and studios when things are so haywire in the world. I look at it sort of like this year's Super Bowl between teams I don't care about. I'll catch a little maybe, by Monday morning the highlights will be everywhere to see.

I miss bad songs and streakers and Cher in a bad dress. Bring back those Oscars or make it a 60 minute highlight show.

That said, here's what I hope happens:

Best Film and Director- Slumdog and Danny Boyle. I've met him, interviewed him, great guy, great filmmaker, I liked the film. Please win.

Best Actor- Sean Penn.

Best Actress- Meryl Streep

Supporting Actor- Heath Ledger

Supporting Actress- Viola Davis

Documentary- Man on Wire

Foreign Language- Waltz with Bashir-

Adapted Screenplay- Doubt

Original Screenplay- Frozen River.

I bet I am wrong more than half the time, but I am not in any pools, those are the folks I want to see win.

PeterH

No Subtitles Necessary

2009-02-09T06:32:00.003-06:00

This past weekend Oscar winning cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond was in Chicago speaking with filmmakers and on Sunday holding a master class for students and industry professionals.

That's Vilmos on the left and director and cinematographer Jim Chressanthis on the right at yesterday's master class, and those are my Flashpoint students there in the front row.

There were two events on Saturday. On Saturday morning from 11-2, in an event only open to students and industry professionals, Vilmos and Jim screened clips from their work, discussed their techniques and choices and took questions from the audience. It was really fascinating, especially if you are a filmmaker.

On Saturday evening, in an event open to the public, they screened Jim's film No Subtitles Necessary: Laszlo and Vilmos and took questions from the audience. The film is excellent- it appeared at Cannes last May and is on the festival circuit now. It depicts the friendship between Vilmos and Laszlo Kovacs from their escape from Soviet controlled Hungary in 1956 to their arrival in Hollywood, and how they helped shape the look of American films from the late 60s to today.

After the screening I was lucky enough to get to go out with them and have a drink and talk film. It was my personal highlight of the weekend.

Here's a quick list of some of the films Vilmos and Laszlo has photographed.

Vilmos:
McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Deliverance, Scarecrow, The Sugarland Express, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (won the Oscar), The Deer Hunter, Heaven's Gate, Blow Out, The Witches of Eastwick (where Jim Chressanthis was his intern). To date he has shot over 80 films.

Laszlo ( mere 70+ films before his death in 2007)
Targets, Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, Shampoo, Frances, Ghost Busters, Little Nikita, Say Anything.

This will be the first of several posts about the weekend. More to follow soon.

Peter H

Sundance Film Festival- a wrap

2009-02-05T21:09:00.004-06:00

This is my last piece on this year's Sundance Film Festival, I promise. This time it's my overview of the experience.

First and foremost I had a great time. I was only there for maybe 85 hours, but I went to seven film screenings, three panels, three parties and lots of hanging out. I saw some great films, bad films and some in between. I met a lot of industry folk and learned a few things.

Among the things I discovered:

Independent Film is in flux. The small little film that goes big- Sex, Lies and Videotape, Blood Simple, She's Gotta Have It, Stranger Than Paradise, all 20-25 years old- is a thing of the past, BUT also maybe a thing of the future. A good story will go a long way.
Distributors have no money for films that don't have a name or can "open."
DIY distributing, when put in motion before production is a viable way to get your film seen.
Sundance- it seems like all the films in the festival had some Sundance connection- getting into Sundance or the Institute is the trick, once in you are in.
5600 short films for 90 slots. Why even try entering?
Where else can one go see a documentary like Old Partner- the Korean film about an old farmer and his 40-year old dying ox. That and the short film panel were worth the trip.

In short I learned a lot. glad I went, I look forward to going next year and hope we can take some students.

PeterH

Yet Another Sundance Panel

2009-02-01T16:06:00.003-06:00

Sorry if this is getting old, but hang on for just a little longer.

Perhaps the panel I was most looking forward to attending was on Tuesday afternoon- immediately following the Obama inauguration. (A side note on the inauguration... I gave up tickets for an 11:30am screening of We Live in Public- which ended up winning the jury prize for U.S. Documentary to see Obama take office. A good trade, I think.) The panel was looking towards at the future of independent film and on it were Sundance Festival favorites- Tom DeCillo, Barbara Kopple, Gregg Araki and Steven Soderbergh.

I love all those filmmakers, but to me Tom DeCillo had the best insights on independent film. DeCillo was the DP on Stranger than Paradise- perhaps the first indie film of the 1980s indie movement. He went on to make Sundance films- Johnny Suede, Living in Oblivion (all filmmakers need to see this film), Box of Moonlight and others. He has a documentary about The Doors- called When You're Strange in the festival.

Highlights from DeCillo:

Independent Film used to be about saying no to Hollywood, no to the suits. Now it's just the opposite. Independent film (and by extension the Sundance Film Festival itself) is more like Indiewood, or Hollydent. People want to get into Sundance and use it as a launching pad for Hollywood.
It's a lot harder to raise money now as an independent because Hollywood has taken over so many independent studios.
His definition of a director, "The guy who gets the money."

Other interesting comments from the panel.

Soderbergh: The most independent guy in Hollywood is Steven Spielberg beacuse he can do anything he wants.

Kopple: The most important thing is to be good storytellers. We want to see your vision not what you think Hollywood wants.

That's a good place to end, I think.

PeterH

More Sundance Panels

2009-01-29T06:22:00.003-06:00

Another very interesting panel I attend was the new filmmaker panel co-sponsored by Variety and the Illinois Film Office. Eight first-time Sundance directors were there- three were women I am happy to say. All had films in the festival- the two with the biggest names were The Greatest starring Pierce Brosnan and Susan Sarandon, written and directed by Shana Feste and Marc Webb's 500 Days of Summer with Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

Some common comments from the panelists.

The importance of Film school- everyone went to some film school either as a graduate or undergrad.
Be prepared, then really be prepared.
You will have a moment when all hell breaks loose. Don't worry about it.
There are hundreds of compromises to make. be ready to make them.
Scariest thing I have ever done.

That's just the tip of the iceberg, but it rings true to me.

When I saw the panel, only 500 Days had distribution- it has a $7 million budget. Low by Hollywood standards, but not low by typical Indie Film standards. I think that says a lot about the festival.

Two more Sundance posts on the way from me- One about the Soderbergh panel, the other just on views about the festival and the state of independent film.

PeterH

Sundance Film Festival-panels

2009-01-26T06:32:00.002-06:00

Sundance is over, the awards have been announced-Push won the Dramatic Prize and We Live in Public won for documentary. I saw neither. I had tickets to We Live in Public but I opted to watch Obama instead.

I want to talk about a panel I attended last Sunday. It was about distribution and new ways to get your film seen. There were a series of panelists, filmmakers, distributors, producer reps, etc... but the person who stood out to me was filmmaker Lance Hammer.

Last year at Sundance his film Ballast was in competition and was a hit with audiences. The film failed to get distribution- or at least a deal satisfactory to the filmmakers- so they have been slowly getting the film in front of audiences one market at a time. This DIY (do it yourself) distribution, when done thoughtfully seems like a good direction to go.

I don't have time or space to give all the details, so I will just bullet point some of the key topics discussed.

Blogging and social networks. Lance said that if he was starting all over he would hire a blogger and treat him as a key crew member. The blogger would not only blog about the production, but track mentions of the film in other blogs and link to other interested parties. They talked a lot about Facebook and Google Alerts- I am wondering if they get pinged because of this post. (If so, Lance or someone from the Ballast team leave a comment.)
There is no money out there for small film distribution. Their suggestion is to include some marketing and distribution money in your production budget. The days of over paying for an indie film are over. Be prepared to hit the streets with your film.
Reinvent the distribution model. Arguably, Ballast and Lance Hammer were never as hot as they were last year at Sundance. The film should have been released as close to that date as possible. There was an interesting discussion about Festivals having an on-line component so more people can see films at the time. (In fact if you go to iTunes you can download 10 short films from this year's festival. Look up Sundance Storytime.)
Use multiple platforms to get your film seen- both pay for play (itunes) and free distribution. The goal is to get eyeballs on your film. In fact one person even said that piracy is not a bad thing for them, they consider it flattery.
Perhaps the one thing I took away from the panel was this: Find your 1000 true fans and market to them. Don't take a wide shotgun approach, but target the people you really think will like the film and aggressively go after them.

There was a lot more, in fact I got more out of this panel than I did the bigger panel two days later with Steven Soderbergh, Barbara Kopple, Tom DeCillo and Gregg Araki- but more on that later.

I have Netflixed Ballast. It is "saved," as there is no distribution date yet. I hope to see it, and I invite anyone who has seen the film to comment.

PeterH

Absolut Mango

2009-01-23T07:33:00.004-06:00

More specifics about panels an films at Sundance in a later post, but I wanted to share some of the non-cinema highlights of the festival.

Along Main Street in Park City many storefronts are taken over by sponsors- The New York Lounge was where I saw Susan Sarandon and Pierce Brosnan as I stopped in for a bagel. The music pavilion was where I saw Paris Hilton running from photographers, and just down from the Egyptian Theater was the Queer Lounge sponsored by Absolut Mango.

The Queer Lounge was a great place to hang between shows and panels. For a small donation you could drink all the Absolut Mango vodka you wanted- too mango-y and not vodka-y enough for my taste- and meet a lot of interesting people, queer and not. We met folks from Pixar, who made a little film called Wall-E this year, and just regular film fans who stopped by for a drink.

Just like this post, the Queer Lounge was a nice place to stop and change your mind.

PeterH

Sundance Short Documentary Program

2009-01-20T09:52:00.002-06:00

This post was lifted from an email I sent my Flashpoint Academy Documentary students after seeing the Short Doc. program yesterday.

Hello From Sundance,

I have been to six screenings so far and by far the best one was the short documentary program. There were 8 films selected out of 1200 entries. Just think about that 8 out of 1200. The only one you will be likely to see is an HBO Documentary on the actor John Cazale- Fredo from the Godfather. It was great, but it was also the longest and by far the most expensive, and it didn't seem to fit in with the other seven films as it was the most commercial.

A few trends I noticed:

Lots of graphics. Two films were originally designed for the Internet and were all graphics and/or found footage- one about nuclear weapons and the other about Internet censorship.

A third film was about a Canadian artist and they shot an interview, but the entire piece was animated. Very beautiful and poetic.

Another trend- recording dialog and interviews separately and shooting B-roll. No on camera interviews. Two films I saw- one was shot with a digital still camera and the other about people who store their belongings in public storage in Scotland- recorded their interviews on a digital disc recorder separate from shooting.

This is very interesting to me because of the emphasis it puts on the B-Roll. The Scottish storage locker film was great because of the images they shot, and perhaps because there were no talking heads or faces.

There was a fascinating film called Utopia Part 3 about the world's largest shopping mall- in China. The mall is a bust, no one goes, there are only a few stores open, but it really illustrates some of the problems China is having with growth and capitalism.

After the HBO/Cazale film perhaps the most traditional doc. was about high school kids in New Orleans post-Katrina. The filmmaker followed three students who were attending school even though they were living by themselves- their parents and siblings had moved or been taken to foster care. The filmmaker said that 20 percent of students at the school lived without their parents.

The final film- and one I hope I don't have to see again- is called Chop Off. It's about a performance artist who chops off body parts as his art. Very tough to watch- no amputations on screen- and full of medical and media ethics questions.

Those are the 8 films out of 1200 that made it. Just seeing them makes me want to explore some of these techniques and shoot more film.

PeterH

Sundance Film Festival

2009-01-19T09:54:00.002-06:00

Hello from Park City, Utah. I am at the Sundance Film Festival with Flashpoint Academy Academic Dean Paula Froehle. It's my first Sundance experience and so far it has been a lot of fun, very informative, and we even got some business done.

Details and pictures will follow- the dumb filmmaker can't get his pictures off his camera until he returns to Chicago. Here is a quick rundown of our first 36 hours.

Two film screenings- a bad collection of shorts, and great Korean documentary called Old Partner about a farmer and his 40 year old ox.
Two very interesting panels- one on new ways independent filmmakers can self-distribute their films, the other hosted by Variety and the Illinois Film Office- 30% tax breaks to shoot in Illinois!- about 10 directors to watch.
Lots of hanging out talking film, talking film business.
A great debate, about the film Doubt, though I think it was determined (I determined) that Betsy Steinberg, head of the Illinois Film Office, and I were right about what happened to Phillip Seymour Hoffman's character and everyone else is completely wrong.
Celebrity sightings: Pierce Brosnan, Susan Sarandon, Perry Farrell, Paris Hilton, Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

More later, more specifics and pics.

PeterH

Got Film If You Want It

2008-12-15T06:43:00.000-06:00

As Chair of the Film/Broadcast Department at Flashpoint Academy it has been a personal mission of mine to have our students shoot film. Typically we shoot HD, but this fall, thanks to Kodak, our advanced cinematography students shot some super 16mm. After seeing the rushes I felt confident that we could shoot our own film, so last Wednesday production began on October Surprise, Flashpoint Academy's 3rd Production-in-Action.

October Surprise is a film set in a TV news room on the eve of a presidential election. Some mysterious photos of the leading candidate have appeared and there is a rush to see if they are real or fake.

Our advanced students are doing the heavy lifting on this film. Supported by key professional crew members, our students are shooting film. Production wraps this Thursday, then a much deserved winter break. More details and photos to follow.

PeterH

BTW Got Live If You Want It was the name of the Rolling Stones first live record, so I borrowed the title for this post for our first film.

Studs

2008-11-02T17:34:00.000-06:00

Studs died.

Jesus wept.

Hello again, it's been awhile, give me a break I have been busy. I'll give you a recap of life since September in another post, but first a few words about Studs Terkel.

I met Studs when he agreed to read a children's version of Icarus and Daedalus for my TV show Rainbow Soup. http://www.rainbowsoup.tv/video.html
We shot him in his house- like everyone did the last years of his life. A few brief memories:

1) He left a message on my answering machine, "Peter, this is Studs. Sure, I'll read the story, let's set it up." I was in a parking lot in Baltimore checking my messages when I got it. I must have played it back a dozen times just to hear, "Peter, this is Studs."

2) I was at his house a short time after his wife died. His phone rang and it was a solicitor asking for his wife. He explained she had recently died, the solicitor didn't miss a beat and started to pitch Studs on whatever he was selling. Studs politely declined and hung up. He turned to me and said, "That happens all the time. They don't hear me say she is dead."

3) Just as we started rolling he was telling a story, I don't recall it, but the only part we have on film is Studs saying, "Wilt Chamberlin, Harold Washington and me- what an unholy trinity." I have no idea the context, but I laughed and you can hear me off camera.

4) At the end of the piece I asked Studs advice he would give young people. He thought for a moment an said, "Read. Read Twain and Shakespeare."

Good advice, thanks Studs.

PeterH

Peter Gabriel- Witness

2008-09-13T14:47:00.000-05:00

When I met Peter Gabriel at the Womad Festival back in 2001 he rounded a corner wearing a loose windbreaker and was carrying a small video camera. We shook hands and the entire time he kept filming me. It was very disconcerting and more than a little odd. But it kept me honest- it is a true document of our first meeting.

After a moment I looked at the camera and then at him and said, "Do you have permission to do that?" He didn't laugh, but instead asked if I was going to stop him.

That was my introduction to Peter Gabriel.

In addition to all his great music, Gabriel is known for pushing the envelope of technology- both music and film. Look at those videos from 20+ years ago, they are amazing today. He is also known for being a human rights advocate. He has combined both of those passions to promote the idea that the camera tells the truth and can (and has been) be used to help prevent human rights violations.

He can say it much better than I can, so watch this 14 minute long presentation if you care at all about telling the truth.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/peter_gabriel_fights_injustice_with_video.html

PeterH

The Suits

2008-08-24T17:06:00.000-05:00

There was a really depressing article in Friday's Wall Street Journal about how Warner Brothers- in part based on the success of the last two Batman films- is going to make fewer, more expensive films, and are going to mine DC Comics for characters. Warner Brothers currently produces 25 t 26 films per year, and will cut back to 20 to 22 films a year- with as many as eight "tent pole" films to be based on DC Comic characters.

Oy.

Is this short sighted? Warners recently closed its two art house labels- Warner Independent Pictures and Picturehouse. Evidently the films produced by the these entities: Goodnight and Good Luck, Before Sunset, In the Valley of Elah, La Vie en Rose, The Notorious Betty Page, Pan's Labyrinth didn't fit the new Warner's model. Maybe if Edith Piaf and Edward R. Morrow had been comic book characters things would be different.

Read the article and weep.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121936107614461929.html?mod=2_1168_1

PeterH

Even More Witch

2008-08-14T22:11:00.000-05:00

Just a brief update.

Team Flashpoint has been named one of three finalists in the Experimental Witch Project. A PAL HD version of the film has been shipped to Italy at their request. We will know more on August 24.

PeterH

Isaac Hayes

2008-08-10T18:26:00.000-05:00

I was all set to blog about Peter Gabriel when I learned about the death of Isaac Hayes. The Gabriel blog will come next, but in the interim a few words about Isaac Hayes.

For my TV show Rainbow Soup, I had the opportunity- and ironically it came less than an hour after meeting Peter Gabriel- to shoot an Isaac Hayes show from the pit of the 2001 Womad Festival outside of Seattle. His set started and the band vamped for what seemed like five minutes and then from the side of the stage Isaac walked out, dressed in camouflage, army boots and sunglasses. He shuffled across the stage with a huge smile snapping his fingers. The crowd went wild. It was a great moment.

He sat at his keyboard right in front of me and for 30 minutes played right to our camera. He was fantastic, the audience loved him, I did too, and then security came- even though I had permission- and shut me down. A moment later someone from Hayes' team crawled out to me and asked why we weren't shooting, when I explained he said, "Isaac wants you to shoot him, keep going!"

We fired back up and ten minutes later security came to kick me out. As we left the pit, Isaac looked down at me smiled and gave us a thumbs up. A moment later, between songs, using his "Chef" voice he complained about security being a little to harsh on some members of the press. The crowd cheered and I felt vindicated. After his set I hung backstage with him. He was just a nice man. Very funny, cool guy.

While he might be most known for his Oscar winning song- the theme from Shaft- I wanted to talk with him about his role on The Rockford Files back in the 1970s and his transformation into Chef- this was just before he left South Park.

I am writing this in the quick moments after learning about his death, more thoughts later perhaps. Isaac Hayes will be missed- as will Bernie Mac- a great Chicago talent and presence.

PeterH

The Real Thing- Aaron Levy

2008-08-09T17:42:00.000-05:00

I had breakfast the other day with a former student of mine named Aaron Levy.

Remember that name.

Aaron was in town from New York visiting his parents and he rang up his old teacher.

After getting his B.A. Aaron hung around Chicago. He logged film for a reality sports TV show, I hired him as a p.a. a few times- he was lousy as a p.a. it was just not his cup of tea (not mine either)- and he did a variety of add jobs like work in a lawyers' office. In all his spare time he would write. Of all my students in these near 13 years of teaching college Aaron is the one who sticks out as a writer. As a college student he was a mediocre filmmaker, but an excellent writer. More importantly he loves the act of writing perhaps more than anyone I know.

A few years after he graduated I prodded him into applying to graduate schools and he was accepted at NYU. Two years later he received a M.F.A. in playwriting. In the years since NYU he has been a struggling artist. He has had some opportunities and readings, took some more classes, got hired at an off-Broadway theater as a manager. In June had a one act play produced in Washington D.C. He's on the rise.

When Aaron walked into the restaurant early the other day he was a new man. Gone was the round, soft, relaxed former student. In walked a lean, 32 year old playwright- an artist, a person on a mission. I was taken not only by his physical transformation- he also quit smoking and began exercising- but his emotional transformation. Sitting before me was a creative person to be reckoned with. As we ate, Aaron told me about his new play. It's about race and youth and when he pitched it I got goose bumps. He asked if I want to read it. I said, "No, I'll wait to see it."

So you don't think I romanticize all of my former students, I left the restaurant and went to my second meeting of the morning (I get a lot done before 9am). This was with two former students- who I have previously hired- who have really good editing jobs, making nice money and doing really fine work. I like them a lot, respect them even more, but they are not artists of the same caliber.

If there is a consistent theme to this blog it is work hard, then work harder. It takes ten years to be an overnight success, just keep at it if it is something you want to do. So with apologies to Tom Stoppard keep your eye out for playwright Aaron Levy- the real thing.

PeterH

More Witch

2008-08-01T21:08:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I blogged about the Experimental Witch project and today I am giving this space over to Lori Bohner the Flashpoint student who directed the film. That's her in the center between the two leads and amongst the rest of the Flashpoint crew. I'm going to let Lori tell the story of how the film came to life.

As a reminder the film was made by students who had been in the program less than six months before production began. I am proud of their effort and how they collaborated and worked as a team.

PeterH

The moment you informed us of the Experimental Witch Project I fell in love with the idea. So did many other students. About 35 students began brainstorming ideas for our adaptation of the character Heron. My intentions were to be one of the writers and possibly co-write a script. The group began monthly meetings in January. By March our numbers had dwindled as students were be called toward various other projects. In April we began weekly meetings with about 7 students to discuss a shooting script. I had read The Witch of Portobello cover to cover by this time and my script was the most finished and was chosen by the group to produce. By consensus of the students I was elected by the group to become the director. I felt honored.

I was drawn to the project because I feel a connection with this story. Immediately I thought of two actor friends of mine I felt would be perfect for this role. I had also had been a volunteer for the Romanian Film Festival in the fall and loved the old building the Festival took place in and thought it would be perfect for this script.

Things started coming together.

I asked Adam Darin only two weeks before shooting to be my producer. Without him I would have been lost. He was the ambitious leader I needed to assemble the rest of the missing crew and help organize my thoughts. I held two rehearsals with the lead characters and had no time to hold a casting session for the extras. I decided to create several Craig's list ads searching for different profiles. I had about 15 responses from various actors and had detailed phone conversations and 'hired' them from the conversations and head shots they had emailed me. I even met one actor on the train. I was creating a 'to do' list that he read over my shoulder and he happened to have a head shot on him. He was perfect!

My only complaint was tardiness. The day of the shoot not one single person (except myself :o ) was on time. Even with the chaos in the beginning we quickly pulled the ship up-right and got our first shot off. Adam had made a wonderful shot list and floor plan for us to follow which gave us the perfect check list to accomplish our 117 shots in one-days-time! The atmosphere was very professional and the crew and cast rolled up their sleeves and worked their tails off.

I was recommended a composer and met with him to give him my thoughts on what type of score I was looking for. We had many other meetings following that initial. He was absolutely great. Meanwhile two students, Kyle Krause and Vlad Sava, created two unique cuts. Kyle's on Final Cut and Vlad's on Avid. We ended up with Kyle's as his was more complete.

We got a late start on the editing process and I felt rushed at the end but was happy with the final result. Our sound designer, Ian had two days to finish the final sound mix ...and voila...Love and Lovelorn. We had a great team and great crew. I am pleased.

Sincerely,

Lori

Witch of Portobello redux

2008-07-31T17:06:00.000-05:00

In January I blogged about how Paulo Coelho was allowing his book The Witch of Portobello to be adapted by filmmakers and allowing them to compete for a $3,000 Euro prize. Each filmmaker had to apply and if selected, had to create a short film about one character. I applied and was given the character of documentary filmmaker on the search for Athena.

So instead of making the film myself, I opened it up to my students and supervised their production. They did the heavy lifting, I sat back and ate craft services. Click on the link to see the Team Flashpoint submission. On my next blog I will share comments from my students about the process.

PeterH
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uc0U9onOrc4

The Dark Knight

2008-07-19T11:13:00.000-05:00

This past Wednesday Flashpoint Academy was one of the sponsors of the Chicago premiere of The Dark Knight. The film was shot in Chicago last summer and the premiere was held at the Navy Pier Imax theater.

As one of the sponsors Flashpoint was allowed to be on the red carpet, in the screening and at the party afterwards. I was elected to be the person interviewing the stars on the red carpet. We were able to get a couple of students out there with me- this is Matt and Joe, as well as our in-house producer Paul Matian. We interviewed Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, producer Charles Roven and others and our students got to meet and speak with director Christopher Nolan. A great time was had by all, and just another way Flashpoint is different from other film schools.

I'll let the pictures tell the story.

PeterH

We've Got a Winner!

2008-07-18T07:24:00.000-05:00

About a month ago a group of Flashpoint students participated in the Chicago 48 Hour Film Project, and last Saturday night their film, Urn Doctor, M.D. won the Audience Prize for Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Cinematography, and Best Editing.

Team Flashpoint was one of 30 teams that competed during the Chicago event held during the weekend of June 20-22. In 2007, some 30,000 filmmakers participated in the 48 Hour Film Project in 55 cities around the world. This year, 15 cities were added, the 48 Hour Film Project will tour 70 cities.

To compete in the 48 Hour Film Project, teams must write, shoot and edit a short film in just 48 hours. All teams are given the same character, prop, line of dialog and genre, and must finish their project 48 hours later.

This year’s elements were “Walter or Wilma Western Repair Person” (character), an urn or container with a deceased’s ashes (prop) and a line entitled “What’s the Password?” (dialog).

I am very proud of them because they exhibited all of the things we try so hard to deliver at Flashpoint-namely collaboration and communication. Team Flashpoint was comprised of students across all four disciplines. Those students are:

Bill Douglas-producer/team leader,
Matt Arauz-director,
Adam Darin-assistant director/ Lead Actor
Steve DaDouche-director of photography,
Ian Roelle - chief audio technician,
Pat Sokley - assistant producer
Tony Schiavone-Editor
Ben Cline-editor
Josh Gort-gaffer
Scott Fedor, Austin Johnson, Chris Janonis, Mike Rolfsmeyer -graphics/PA's

Vlad Sava - Additional Camera Support
Timothy Daniel - Wardrobe/Craft Service/ PA
Kyle Krause - Additional Camera Support

Kara Powell - Lead Actress

Check out their website. http://www.urndoctormd.com

Congratulations Team Flashpoint!

PeterH

It Ain't Over Until It's Over...

2008-07-14T06:45:00.000-05:00

... Yogi Berra supposedly said that about the importance of playing hard through all nine innings of a baseball game because you don't know how it will turn out until the game is complete.

It ain't over until it's over, just sounds better to my ears.

The same is true for film work or anything in the arts: the creation of the project is not enough, you have to see it through until the end. For young filmmakers it means packaging, presentation, pitching the finished film, then more screenings and more presentations. One of the hardest things to do for young artists is to sell their own work-their artists not salespeople- but it is also the most important.

You can't just finish the film and show it to your friends and family and assume your work is done. That's amateur hour, and if you can't get out there and sell yourself- or at least give it your best shot- then get out of the business. I think Patti Smith said, "If only 14 people see it, is it art?" OK, maybe it wasn't Patti Smith, but I like her and will attribute it to her. But the point is well taken.

Vincent Van Gogh didn't sell one painting while he was alive. It didn't make him any less of an artist, but it made him depressed and crazy and one ear short of the full compliment, and ultimately it killed him. Van Gogh couldn't sell himself- and he drove his brother and dealer Theo nuts by his lack of self-promotion.

A few years ago I made a pilot of a TV show called Rainbow Soup. It was a show about art and world culture for kids (tweens) and their parents. We tried to create thirty minutes that would be interesting to both parents and kids- so Peter Gabriel sings and Studs Terkel reads a kids' version of Icarus and Daedalus and the film director Stephen Frears is the voice of an animated character.

When the pilot was finished I felt my work was about half done. We then set out promoting and selling the show. We created an elaborate mailer- including a painted soup bowl, a game and a package of instant "Rainbow Soup." All of this came in a package about the size of a cereal box. It was fun, but it also included all the important facts and figures about the series. It took maybe six months to put it all together, but it got people's attention and I am as proud of the salesmanship of Rainbow Soup as I am about the content.

The show never got picked up for TV, but it has lived a nice life on the internet and in schools in the United States and Canada. I even keep a letter from HBO Family, which after careful consideration rejected the show, but praised our marketing campaign. It's the best rejection letter I have ever received.

So just remember what Yogi said- it ain't over 'til it's over. You can see a clip of Rainbow Soup at http://www.rainbowsoup.tv/.

PeterH

What's It All About?

2008-07-11T06:38:00.000-05:00

A few weeks ago on NPR's Fresh Air, they played a 1997 interview between Roger Ebert and Martin Scorsese done at Ohio State University. The two men are discussing Raging Bull- they played two clips from the film on the radio and it is fascinating just listening to the film- and Ebert begins the discussion like this:

...People will discuss the subject matter as if that is what the film is about. The film is about boxing, or it’s about gangsters. A film is not about its subject, its about how it’s about its subject. The subject is neutral, people don't understand that. Whenever anyone makes a statement I don’t like to go to movies about ... fill in the blank. My response is 'anyone who makes that statement is an idiot.' I don’t want to go to bad films about cowboys is maybe a more intelligent statement.

Well said, Roger. Raging Bull was about a boxer not about boxing.

If you want to hear 12 minutes of Ebert and Scorsese's discussion as well as listen to two scenes from Raging Bull, then go to itunes and look up the June 27 Fresh Air podcast or visit npr.org and go to the Fresh Air archives. It's a great, passionate discussion as well as an interesting insight into how Scorsese shot the boxing scenes for Raging Bull. Later in the broadcast Michael Imperioli talks about working on Goodfellas and what it was like to work with Robert DeNiro.

Check it out.

PeterH

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

2008-07-10T06:06:00.000-05:00

I finally got around to seeing The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Julian Schnabel's film about Jean-Dominique Bauby, the editor of Elle magazine who suffered a massive stroke which left him in a condition called "locked-in syndrome."

It's a terrific film in many ways: the story of what happened to Jean-Do is amazing. After his stroke he was in a coma for 20 days. When he awoke he was mentally aware of his surroundings but paralyzed with the exception of his left eye. He used his eye to communicate, blinking as a transcriber repeatedly recited a French language frequency alphabet. Using this method he wrote a memoir chronicling everyday events and what it is like for a person with locked-in syndrome. It took 200,000 blinks and each word took approximately two minutes to complete.

Another reason I liked the film was Schnabel's use of the point of view shot. Much of the film is from Bauby's point of view, so the viewer really feels what it is like to have this condition. Using the p.o.v. camera, the viewer finally catches a glimpse of the afflicted Bauby in a refelection. It comes as a shock that this person- with a brain which is quite alive- is in such a horrible physical state. By using this p.o.v. shot we got to experience the feeling Bauby had when he saw his own reflection.

During the film I found myself thinking that Mathieu Amalric-who plays Bauby in the film- was terrific bringing this character to life. While I do think Amalric did a great job, I think it was Schnabel's direction that made Amalric's performance so strong. During much of the film we don't see Bauby, we only hear him. So when we finally get to see Amalric's crumpled body it is even more horrific for us, because WE have had locked-in syndrome and we now realize what it has done to OUR bodies. Julian Schnabel was most deserving of his Oscar nomination for best direction and I think he should have won.

The Protagonist

2008-07-05T07:51:00.000-05:00

I saw a remarkable documentary film not long ago called The Protaganist, directed by Jessica Yu. The film interweaves the stories of four unrelated men who have been consumed by their personal journeys. The men: a former German terrorist, an "ex-gay" evangelist, a bank robber and a martial arts expert.

From The Protagonist website.

But as their stories unfold, one starts to see the parallels between the uncommon, common experience of these four men. Each character embarks on a journey for valid reasons, only to find himself so deeply embedded in the cause that he becomes the opposite of what he had intended. He is blind to this fact, though, until the forces of fate and character boil and distill to a single moment of dark epiphany. In telling this echoing story, the film asks: what is the path to extremism? In responding to the turmoil of life, where does one draw the line between the reasonable and the unreasonable? And how does one recover from the delusion of certainty?

In addition, the film is based on the works of Euripides and the film uses quotes from his plays as chapter headings. Yu also uses wooden rod puppets- pictured here- to stage both excerpts from Euripides and scenes from the four men's past. The puppetry is really amazing and adds a layer to the film that would not otherwise be there.

Jessica Yu won an Oscar in 1997 for her short documentary, Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O'Brien, who lived for decades in an iron lung after being paralyzed by polio. She has directed other award winning documentaries and in the small world isn't it category, a former student and regular reader of this page, has worked with her and says only good things.

Check out The Protaganist it's well worth it.

PeterH

Florida State University

2008-07-02T07:14:00.001-05:00

Last weekend I went to Florida State University where I spoke with a group of film students working on their thesis films. The dumb filmmaker likes nothing better than a road trip, and getting a chance to talk film with passionate film students was the icing on the cake- or perhaps the cake itself. I think the cultural exchange- visiting and lecturing at another institution- was very valuable.

FSU has a good program. There are only 60 undergraduates. The program is set up like this- the first two years are general education classes and the final two years is hardcore filmmaking. I really like the practical, hands on approach- something we do at Flashpoint. I also liked seeing how the students really had to collaborate. Each student must serve as a writer/director, producer, DP, a.d., sound, production designer or editor on a film. There are some other hard rules as well- films cannot be more than seven and a half minutes- they will not be accepted otherwise. For the thesis (B.F.A.) films the school pays for 2000 feet of film and processing and gives each film a $250 stipend for food and production design.

Having taught only at urban campuses, I was envious that students had 24 hour access. I was in the film department at 11pm Saturday night and there were probably 20 students editing, building sets, meeting etc.... It was great to see and reminded me of my own misspent youth hanging out making film at all hours.

My lecture was about personal vision. I bored them with my journey, then we talked about Tom McCarthy- writer/director of The Visitor and The Station Agent and his personal vision. Regarding both films we talked about what makes family and community and themes of connection. It was a nice evening- the students were engaged and engaging and some even took notes. Several asked me if they could send me their work so I could comment. I look forward to seeing it.

I want to send a special thanks to Joey Daoud who found me, thanks in part to this blog, and brought me down to speak. Check out his Coffee and Celluloid blog- a good taste of what it is like to be a hard working film student. http:coffeeandcelluloid.com

Finally, despite the nice trip, it is nice to be home. My own Flashpoint film students began their second productions this past Monday and I look forward to seeing what they produce.

PeterH

George Carlin

2008-06-28T13:59:00.000-05:00

I was sorry to hear about the passing of George Carlin. Along with Richard Pryor, Carlin helped change stand up comedy. To me Carlin was a truth teller and a wordsmith. He knocked down pompous hypocrites with just the right word. He called a spade a spade.

For a 9th grade drop out, he did pretty well for himself. He had a plan- radio first (he had a radio show in Shreveport, LA when he was 18), then comedy, then films. He wanted to be Bob Hope or Danny Kaye. He felt it was his birthright and he didn't need three more years of formal schooling to get there. He was also blessed with a mom who instilled in him the love of language. The dictionary was an important book in the Carlin house.

Below is an excerpt of his famous seven-dirty words monologue. He can say it better than me. George Carlin you will be missed.

PeterH

There are some people that aren't into all the words. There are some people who would have you not use certain words. Yeah, there are 400,000 words in the English language, and there are seven of them that you can't say on television. What a ratio that is. 399,993 to seven. They must really be bad. They'd have to be outrageous, to be separated from a group that large. All of you over here, you seven. Bad words. That's what they told us they were, remember? 'That's a bad word.' 'Awwww.' There are no bad words. Bad thoughts. Bad Intentions.

And words, you know the seven don't you? Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cocksucker, Motherfucker, and Tits, huh? Those are the heavy seven. Those are the ones that will infect your soul, curve your spine and keep the country from winning the war.

Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cocksucker, Motherfucker, and Tits, wow. Tits doesn't even belong on the list, you know. It's such a friendly sounding word. It sounds like a nickname. 'Hey, Tits, come here. Tits, meet Toots, Toots, Tits, Tits, Toots.' It sounds like a snack doesn't it? Yes, I know, it is, right. But I don't mean the sexist snack, I mean, New Nabisco Tits. The new Cheese Tits, and Corn Tits and Pizza Tits, Sesame Tits Onion Tits, Tater Tits, Yeah. Betcha can't eat just one. That's true I usually switch off . But I mean that word does not belong on the list.

Actually, none of the words belong on the list, but you can understand why some of them are there. I am not completely insensitive to people's feelings. You know, I can dig why some of those words got on the list...like cocksucker and motherfucker. Those are...those are heavy-weight words. There's a lot going on there, man. Besides the literal translation and the emotional feeling. They're just busy words. There's a lot of syllables to contend with. And those K's. Those are aggressive sounds, they jump out at you. CocksuckerMotherfuckerCocksucker. It's like an assault, on you. So I can dig that.

Details, Details, Details

2008-06-26T09:20:00.000-05:00

"God is in the details," the architect Mies van der Rohe said. (Though I prefer the Devil is in the details, but you get the picture- details are important.)

The first class all Flashpoint students take is called Sound, Image, Time & Space (SITSP). I like to call it the "attention to details" class. Last September I co-taught the course with Flashpoint Visual FX chair Perry Harovas. The first thing we did on day one was to play a sound effect of a car driving. We then asked students what they heard. It very quickly went from "a car," to "a car on wet pavement, in the country, evening, microphone at a certain distance away, etc...." To me that is paying attention to details, and in good all art God (the Devil) is in the details.

This brings me to two films I saw recently. No Country for Old Men, the multi-Oscar winner from the Coen brothers, and Jeff Garlin's I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With. Forget the subject matter and the themes of the films, the difference in the attention to details was remarkable.

I must preface this by saying that I really like Jeff Garlin. I love him on Curb your Enthusiasm, and I think it was great he made this little movie in Chicago. In May he came to Flashpoint and gave a very inspirational talk. That said, I didn't much like his film and it was mostly because of his lack of attention to details. In short, too many scenes had little or no sound design, not enough extras, and overall it just looked like a thin film. I could go into detail- if you see it, look at the first scene with Sarah Silverman and you will know what I mean- but won't.

No Country... on the other hand was just terrific. Details are everywhere- look at the haircut Javier Bardiem wears. The pop tops on the beer cans, the language spoken, especially by Tommie Lee Jones. Everything is so clearly thought out and executed it is beautiful. Coincidently, John Murray chair of Flashpoint's Recording Arts department just screened it in his Aesthetics of Sound class as an example of how it is done.

I hope Jeff Garlin makes another film and makes it in Chicago. And next time I hope he follows Mies van der Rohe's ( a fellow Chicagoan- he moved here to head up the Illinois Institute of Technology's architecture program and designed many notable buildings here) advice and pays attention to details.

PeterH

August take 2

2008-06-14T20:24:00.000-05:00

In December I wrote about the terrific play Steppenwolf Theater Company play August:Osage County by Tracy Letts. I saw it last summer in its world premiere in Chicago. At Thanksgiving it moved to Broadway and a two months ago Tracy Letts won the Pulitzer Prize for drama. Tomorrow it is up for Tony Awards for Best play, two best actress and four other awards. It's terrific and I wish them all luck.

This is what I wrote in December.

All happy families are alike, Tolstoy told us, and each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. But I’d bet the farm that no family has ever been as unhappy in as many ways — and to such sensationally entertaining effect — as the Westons of “August: Osage County,” the new play by Tracy Letts that blazed open last night at the Imperial Theater.

A fraught, densely plotted saga of an Oklahoma clan in a state of near-apocalyptic meltdown, “August” is probably the most exciting new American play Broadway has seen in years. Oh, forget probably: It is, flat-out, no asterisks and without qualifications, the most exciting new American play Broadway has seen in years. Fiercely funny and bitingly sad, this turbo-charged tragicomedy — which spans three acts and more than three blissful hours — doesn’t just jump-start the fall theater season, recently stalled when the stagehands went on strike. “August” throws it instantaneously into high gear.

You can read the rest of the review here. I am glad I got to see the show in Chicago.

http://theater2.nytimes.com/2007/12/05/theater/reviews/05august.html?ref=arts

PeterH

The Last Picture Show?

2008-06-12T13:39:00.000-05:00

An article in today's Wall Street Journal caught my interest. Headlined, "Hollywood Studios Seek Control Over Delivering Movies to Homes." The gist is this: studios will allow consumers to watch newly released films in their own homes (in HD).

On the surface this is really interesting, and for a moment I was even excited about the prospect. But then I began thinking, don't we already watch films in our own homes and we call it television? Or Netflix or something.

As I thought more about it, I began to see it as yet another way Hollywood is trying to prop up its sagging industry. They sugar coat it with nice packaging- but you know it's just another way for them to gouge us for more money.

How would they price it? If it's $10 to go to the movies per person- then a living room full of people watching on your monster TV is worth what?

The other thing it got me thinking was what would it do to the theater business (as if big business really cares what happens to the little guy)? I could see a lot of jobs disappearing. Already the independent theater owner is a thing of the past. Now what the ticket taker kid making $7 an hour?

How would they prevent bootlegs?

I don't have a definitive thought on it, but while it seems like a good idea, I can imagine more harm than good coming from it. There will be even a bigger divide between the haves and have nots.

Your thoughts?
Read the WSJ article here.
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB121323446764566713.html?mod=2_1567_leftbox

PeterH

Sydney Pollack

2008-06-07T11:33:00.000-05:00

Sydney Pollack died last week and I would be remiss if I didn't write something about him.

I think I was more of a fan of Sydney Pollack the person than of Sydney Pollack films- though he made a bunch of great films as director, producer and actor. I especially love Tootsie.

What I liked about Pollack was this: here's a guy from Indiana who worked his way up through they system by going to New York to become an actor; working in live television (remember live dramas on TV?), then directing TV westerns (if you don't remember live TV then you don't remember westerns on television either) and other episodic TV in the 1960s. He went from TV to film at the very tail end of the studio system when a director could come up through the ranks.

His films were notable to me for his casting. He used really big stars (Redford, Streep, Hoffman, Pacino, Fonda, Streisand, Cruise, Hackman, Bill Murray, Lange, Teri Garr, Harrison Ford, Penn, Kidman and the list goes on) as leads and big stars in supporting roles. You don't see that so often. How great is Bill Murray as Dustin Hoffman's roommate in Tootsie? Or Willie Nelson in Electric Horseman? He must have been doing something right to have names like those lining up to go to work for him in supporting roles.

Late in his career he became a prolific producer with his production company- Mirage- and he continued acting. He produced Michael Clayton (in which he plays a supporting role) which was nominated for a Best Picture Oscar this year. He also championed smaller film directors- he produced for the late Anthony Minghella- and small projects. His last film as director was the small and interesting documentary The Sketches of Frank Gehry.

Sydney Pollack will be missed.

PeterH

The Adams Family

2008-06-04T20:02:00.001-05:00

While on hiatus from Filmmaking 101 one of the things I did was watch the remarkable HBO mini-series John Adams. The series was based on David McCullough's Pulitzer Prize winning biography of our second president, John Adams. The series stars Paul Giamatti as Adams and Laura Linney as Abigail Adams, David Morse as George Washington and the always terrific Tom Wilkinson as Ben Franklin.

The show was excellent on many levels, not the least of which was the craft of filmmaking. Combining period costumes and exteriors (Colonial Williamsburg) with state of the art graphics- 18th century Philadelphia and the White House were recreated in a computer- brought the early years of our country to life.

The film made me think about the guts our founding fathers had to divorce themselves from Mother England on the hope that things would be better. Given that our fledgling country had no currency, constitution or nation government, this was no small risk taken.

The other thing that struck me was what an unusual lead character John Adams makes. Unlike the convenient heroes of our country- warriors, noble men, victims with a cause, crusaders- John Adams was a cantankerous, cranky, sarcastic, talkative New Englander. He never met an argument he felt he couldn't win. He stood up for what he believed even when it wasn't popular. He fought authority, he did what he felt was right, and he made enemies of powerful people.

Dale Carnegie he was not.

A few summers ago I went to a family reunion on my mother's side and saw my future and my past. Almost all the men there were cantankerous, sarcastic, talkative and bald. I was proud to be there because I, too, am an Adams. The HBO film, like the family reunion, showed me my past and my future- warts and all.

See the mini-series it is worth the effort. And for this one time I will sign off with my full name.

Peter Adams Hawley

Flashpoint Academy Year 1: that's a wrap!

2008-06-02T16:50:00.000-05:00

Hello again, it's been awhile since I have written. Thanks for your patience and all the emails asking where I have been, I hope this helps explain somethings.

This past Saturday, May 31, Flashpoint Academy celebrated the successful completion of our first academic year with an event we called Flashbash.

During the afternoon we presented work from all four Flashpoint disciplines- Film, Recording Arts, Game Development and Visual FX & Animation. In addition we screened our two Production in Action films, The Collector and The Intruder, and a highlight reel of all the special events held at school during the previous nine months.

Here are some numbers from the Film Department:

62: Student film productions produced and edited.

32: Film Students that began and September and survived until June.

14: Film Students who began classes in January.

8: Making of The Intruder documentaries created by the fall film students.

4: Making of Not A Pretty Face documentaries produced by January students.

2: Weeks until June 16 when those January students return and begin the push through the summer during which they will make a second film, a music video, and learn Avid.

1: Tired Chair of the Flashpoint Academy Film Department.

PeterH

A Few Words on Charlton Heston

2008-04-10T05:59:00.000-05:00

Charlton Heston died the other day and it is sad to me to have him remembered only for his NRA positions and his embarrassing appearance in Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine. Heston was from an era in Hollywood that doesn't exist any more- there aren't too many sword and sandal films or westerns being produced these days.

Can you imagine a George Clooney or a Brad Pitt in Ben Hur or The Ten Commandments? Can you imagine Heston in Oceans 11?
Nope. There is an irony with today's stars that just doesn't allow a Ten Commandments to get made. Even remakes of Heston films like The Omega Man (Will Smith in the Heston role) and Planet of the Apes (Mark Wahlberg) use FX to tell the story and the strong leading man plays second fiddle to the technology.

No, what makes the Heston versions of those films work is that he is us. Charlton Heston, the actor, not the character is our representative staring down the planet of the apes or discovering what soylent green really is. In Tuesday's Wall Street Journal film critic Joe Morgenstern wrote of Heston, "What he did in that film (Omega Man) may not have constituted great acting, but he created a great presence, a one-man surrogate for the beleaguered forces of civilization."

Later in Morgenstern's piece he quotes from Pauline Kael's review in The New Yorker of The Planet of the Apes. "With his perfect, lean-hipped, powerful body," she wrote, "Heston is a godlike hero; built for strength, he's an archetype of what makes Americans win. He doesn't play a nice guy; he's harsh and hostile, self-centered and hot-tempered. Yet we don't hate him because he's so magnetically strong; he represents American power -- and he has the profile of an eagle."

In the cold war era, I think we needed guys like Heston, just like we needed counter culture figures like Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper to balance him out. Somewhere between those two ends is a real American hero. Charlton Heston was on the far right edge of that frame.

PeterH

Let's Play Two!

2008-04-05T14:33:00.002-05:00

Meteorologically, today is the nicest day we have had in Chicago since a freakish 65-degree sunny day came and went in early January. The calendar says spring, but the Cubs played their first home game last Monday in a 45 degree mist. With the exception of today it still seems like spring is a ways off. However, today's nice weather got me thinking about baseball and more specifically baseball films.

Baseball pictures by and large stink. I like Field of Dreams and Bull Durham and a lot of The Natural. Eight Men Out is great, but that is more historical than anything else- plus who can resist John Sayles and our friend Studs Terkel as the writers Ring Lardner and Hugh Fullerton. But more often than not baseball films are garbage- especially if you are a baseball fan. William Bendix as Babe Ruth? Gary Cooper as Lou Gehrig? The worst is Anthony Perkins as Jimmy Piersall in Fear Strikes Out. Trust me Perkins is scarier as a ball player than as a motel keeper in Psycho.

A problem I have with baseball films is that even the best baseball film is not better than the experience I have going to an average mid-season major league game. (Major League, the film is not a great movie, either.) And going to a minor league game is even better. It's just a blast and so much less commercial and more "joy of the game" than Big League ball-and way better than a bad baseball movie.

The best baseball film I have seen is a documentary HBO did years ago called When It Was a Game. They used home movies from fans from the 1930s- 1960s and voice over of real ball players to describe the experience. Some highlights include 16mm color film from the 1938 World Series between the Cubs and Yankees- color footage of Lou Gehrig. Take that Gary Cooper! Also, ball players like Enos Slaughter talk about how they played for the love of the game. They even had to bring their own sandwiches to eat between games of doubleheaders.

For you youngsters doubleheaders are what teams used to play on holidays and most Sundays so they could take the next day for travel. The owners wised up and realized they could maximize profits by playing 81 home dates, hence the opening days on in snowy March and a World Series that bumps into Halloween.

But of course you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

PeterH

p.s. I know that is a photo of Jackie Robinson and not Ernie Banks-the source of "Let's Play Two." Robinson is the most important player in baseball history- he is emblematic of the idea of when it was a game. His picture deserves to be here- just as it is a good thing that his number 42 has been retired by all major league teams.

Film Production 2

2008-04-02T06:20:00.001-05:00

The Flashpoint Academy film students just finished production on their second films. This is a picture from the set one day last week.

Before they embarked on these films I sat in on a series of production meetings and was struck by how much the students have grown since their first productions last November. I would like to chalk it up to brilliant teaching on my part, but in fairness I think the students did most of the heavy lifting on this one. Of course they learned from their first films, but then in January and February they observed and worked with professionals on the set of The Intruder, our Production-in-Action film, and finally in the weeks leading up to this production they pulled it all together.

We had a group meeting before they set out where all the Film and Recording Arts came together and I told them how I was witnessing their transformation from film students into filmmakers. This transformation was evident all over the place; in their language- I have never heard as many people throw around the term "script lock" before and in their demeanor- they stood taller, they were more confident. They didn't assume anything, but sought out answers to problems. This attitude was a big difference from their last productions.

This week and for the next two the students are huddled around their Avids editing the films with delivery set for April 18. It's exciting to watch their progression, but at the same time I hope the students reflect on their own personal growth and development. They have come a long way in a very short time.

PeterH

David Lean

2008-03-30T16:09:00.000-05:00

Perhaps my favorite part of the last Oscar telecast was when Jon Stewart pulled out an iphone and said he was watching Lawrence of Arabia. In that moment everything good about technology and bad about the film business came into focus. Funnier yet was when he turned the phone on its side and said you really have to see it in wide screen.

David Lean, Lawrence of Arabia's director, would have turned 100 on March 25. Lean is the person who comes to my mind when I think about directors who make BIG pictures. David Lean was the epic director.

David Lean began as a film editor. Michael Powell, another one of my favorite directors, said David Lean was the best editor he ever worked with. And Powell knows something about good editors- he was married to Thelma Schoonmaker who has won three Oscars for editing Martin Scorsese films.

In his early films as director Lean worked with Noel Coward- no slouch either. In Blithe's Spirit Lean actually makes the ghost a little scary, not something Coward probably had in mind. Lean then went on to direct perhaps the two best film versions of Dickens' novels- Great Expectations and Oliver Twist. Those opening images of Great Expectations are beautiful and haunting- no mean feat as the opening pages of the book are about as good an start to a novel as you will find. Twist, too, is great despite Alec Guinness' over the top and perhaps anti-Semitic Fagin.

Powell, Coward, Dickens and Guinness are great for starters but come on dumb filmmaker get to the big films. OK. How's this for big films: Summertime (1955), The Bridge on the River Kwai, (1957) Lawrence of Arabia, (1962), Dr. Zhivago (1965). That's a pretty decent career in that one ten year stretch. If you haven't seen those films do yourself the favor- just not on an iphone.

To illustrate some of Lean's directorial genius I am going to share a couple of interesting (to me at least) attention to detail moments from Lawrence of Arabia. 1) In the famous scene in the desert when Ali appears- while it seems like all we see is sand- Lean's art department has put coal in the desert helping us draw our attention down the darker lines and towards the character. Lean was forcing us to see what he wanted us to see. 2) The costume designers put Peter O'Toole in more translucent robes as the film progressed to make Lawrence more Angelic.

Those are details that aren't taught in film schools, but perhaps should be. (Note to self, start teaching it!)

One more thing about David Lean. He made his last film when he was 76 years old- A Passage to India. For that film he was nominated for Oscars as Best Director, Editing and Adapted Screenplay. Has anyone ever been nominated for an Oscar for writing AND editing the same film? No bad for an old man. I hope to do that when I am 76.

PeterH

Check out Anthony Lane's article on David Lean in the current New Yorker. Lane's piece was the inspiration for this post.
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2008/03/31/080331crat_atlarge_lane

Bathing with Bierko

2008-03-28T15:12:00.001-05:00

Yep, that's my friend Craig Bierko washing John Malkovich's head. I am so proud of him.

I have known Craig for 25+ years. For four of those years we were either roommates or next door neighbors. We walked around the city of Boston- literally around the perimeter of the city- one night in support of a relationship gone bad. We made a short film together as seniors in college and then a few years later he starred in my film Victimless Crimes.

While I have been making TV commercials, documentaries and shaping the minds of young filmmakers, Craig has been in Hollywood and New York starring in films - In Cinderella Man he gets to be the bad guy opposite Russell Crowe, he did a season of Boston Legal, and is currently starring in the Fox show Unhitched. He has also starred in a couple of Broadway shows, most notably Harold Hill in The Music Man, for which he was nominated for a Tony award.

Last year about this time I was in L.A. and we were having breakfast (Craig and I have probably spent more time over Ham and Cheese Omelets (me) and Tuna Melts (him) than any two people should) when he told me of this idea of a talk show set in a bath tub.

Lo and behold a year later what shows up on my "Internets" than this talk show starring my friend Craig in a bath tub.

Check out all 2:45 of Bathing with Bierko here.
http://www.superdeluxe.com/sd/artist/craig_bierko

PeterH

A Loss

2008-03-21T06:22:00.000-05:00

The writer and director Anthony Minghella died the other day from complications of surgery to remove cancer of the tonsils and neck. He was 54 years old.

When you think of the great filmmakers of the end of the 20th century and the beginning of this one, Minghella is probably someone you overlook but shouldn't. Between 1990 and 2006 he made seven films which were nominated for a total of 24 Oscars, winning ten. The biggest of the bunch was The English Patient for which he won best director. He also directed Cold Mountain and the not yet released The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency. That's not a bad track record for the son of ice cream factory owners from the Isle of Wight.

My favorite film of his is The Talented Mr. Ripley which felt as if it could have been directed by Alfred Hitchcock, which is no surprise because the Ripley was adapted from the novel by Patricia Highsmith who wrote Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train. The common thread of all the Minghella films mentioned here is that they were adapted from novels and not originally created for film. This is ironic because Minghella was a great writer, his first film Truly, Madly, Deeply was from his original screenplay and is perhaps his most personal work.

He will be missed.

PeterH

Gone Baby Gone

2008-03-16T13:44:00.000-05:00

I can't believe it has been two weeks since I last posted. It must be the late winter, spring will never come to Chicago, doldrums.

When I think of young, contemporary American filmmakers Ben Affleck is not a name that immediately comes to mind. However, he owns an Oscar for co-writing Good Will Hunting and he directed the terrific, yet hard to watch film Gone Baby Gone. He is someone I have to take seriously as a filmmaker.

Gone Baby Gone is one of those films that when it's over you have a debate about the character's actions. Are the choices Patrick (Casey Affleck, great as a serious lead) makes the right ones? You can argue both sides of it forever and that to me makes a great film.

Gone Baby Gone is based on a novel by Dennis Lehane, who also wrote Mystic River, which Clint Eastwood (another often overlooked American filmmaker) made into an excellent film. Lehane's milieu is the dirty, underside of Boston- the Roxburys and Dorchesters, far from Back Bay, Beacon Hill and Copley Square. He creates these morally ambiguous characters, yet fills them with depth and dimension.

It's a excellent film well worth checking out- and I haven't even mentioned Amy Ryan's Oscar nominated performance as the mother whose missing daughter starts the plot in motion.

PeterH

The Oscars

2008-03-02T10:02:00.001-06:00

It has been a week so I think it is about time the dumb filmmaker weighed in on the Oscars. The truth is I didn't see enough of the nominated films to make an informed decision, but I can say this: I loved Juno, have always been a fan of P.T.Anderson, thought Once was great, and Ian McEwan, author of Atonement, is one of my favorite novelists- Saturday from a couple of years ago is brilliant. This preamble brings me to No Country for Old Men by Joel and Ethan Coen.

In the early and middle 1980s there were a series of New York-based filmmakers that meant a lot to me- Spike Lee, Jim Jarmusch, Susan Seidelman among them. Those filmmakers and others from the time helped usher in the second great post-studio era wave of American filmmakers. But for me the Coen Brothers were the sine qua non of independent American Cinema.

Blood Simple, their first feature was literally a text book example of how first-time directors could get a film made. I am not kidding, how Blood Simple got produced was used as an example in a Film as Business class I took near the end of my college career. For those who don't recall, the Coens and their DP Barry Sonnenfeld shot a trailer for the film and used it to get financing. The trailer was moody and atmospheric. It highlighted the creepy aspects of the film and showed no stars (it hadn't been cast yet). Lots of driving down the road at night and gun blasts coming through a wall. It was a brilliant (and now much imitated) plan and it worked.

Since then the Coens have won 4 Oscars (can it be 12 years since Fargo came out?). I compare the Coens to those fringe bands that gathered a small but loyal cult following and over the years hit it big. Compare the Coens career arc to those of REM (college radio got them their start) and U2 (Boy and October anyone?). Small fringe acts, competing against the big boys and mainstream hit machines, but 25 years later, look who is left standing.

I don't have any one favorite film- I love Barton Fink and O Brother... and there is a little of Dude from The Big Lebowski in me (yes, I had Creedence tapes, too.) Raising Arizona always makes me laugh. What I like about them is that they are original and familiar all at the same time. This variety of work is why I appreciated Joel Coen's comment at the Oscars thanking people for allowing them to play in their own little corner of the sandbox.

I want to thank them for 20+ years of great films.

PeterH

Teen Parents

2008-02-27T06:27:00.000-06:00

Readers of this page know that Jim and I have been working on the Teen Parent film for months and years. Yesterday, we recorded the final voice over with Kathy Brock, the ABC7 Chicago news anchor.

We recorded the session in one of Flashpoint's state of the art
studios. Three recording arts students engineered, produced and mastered the session and I brought in a film student to help me direct Kathy.

It was a great opportunity for the students to see professionals in action, and to be part of a major project. We got the same service and final product as if I had gone to a professional recording studio. It is another way Flashpoint is different.

Before and after the session, Kathy toured school, amazed at what she saw and wished there was something like it when she went to college. Thanks to Flashpoint president, Howard Tullman, for the pictures.

PeterH

57 Channels (and Nothin' On)

2008-02-23T14:41:00.000-06:00

With apologies to Bruce Springsteen, there's nothing on TV.

There is an interesting article in the current Atlantic called "The Revolution Will Be Televised." In short it is about how some people are getting rid of their TVs and are using their computers as television sets- they down load or You Tube everything.

This is an interesting idea, but not for me. This is what I want in a Television:

A BOX that I can move around and sync to my computer and have it wirelessly go to a flat panel HDTV. That box would be a hard drive (like Tivo) and I would get the following programming. Call it TV A La Carte:

Network shows- The Office, 30 Rock, Lost, 60 Minutes- live sporting events and breaking news. (Super Bowl, Oscars, 9-11 tragedy)
HBO (all their services but I pick the shows I want).
Sports- I would pick Red Sox and Celtics games.
PBS (selected shows).
Various cable- selected shows.

Also, I want all those shows to come downloaded to me one day a week. I watch them when I want. I also want all episodes of a series- not one a week. Why not. Give me at least 4 episodes of Lost.

That's about all I watch. And I almost never watch TV live or when it is scheduled to be on. I only caught up to the Super Bowl at the end of the 4th quarter.

Also, this box should also allow me to send the program as a quicktime movie to someone else. I would be willing to pay the privilege- say $200 a month- about my cable, internet and phone bill combined.

Why not? That's how I want to watch TV. One reason is that our subscription cable bill helps subsidize the smaller, fringe networks. BUT as I said, I will pay a premium to get what I want, how and when. The other reason is that it would be hard for new shows to break through to me. True, but advertisers would have a real sense of who I am, AND producers and networks would be free to send me trial episodes for my viewing pleasure.

The technology is there. Someone deliver.

PeterH

School Security

2008-02-17T12:25:00.000-06:00

When I was in college, Security was the name of the most popular band at school, and thinking of them was the only time I ever thought about security on campus. But now I am on the other side of the classroom and it seems every couple of months there is a shooting on a college campus. Last week at Northern Illinois University, just 65 miles west of Chicago, there was a shooting, killing five and injuring more.

Security on campus means something very different to me now.

Yesterday was parents' day at Flashpoint and I spent time telling the parents of film students that one of the things we do is create a safe environment for their children to work in. I was speaking about emotional safety, the safety to be vulnerable and explore, but I could have just as easily been talking about their physical safety.

I don't have anything new to add to the violence on campus discussion. Yes, it's sad. Yes, it must stop. Yes, the emotional well-being of students must be looked after and help given when and where needed. All of the same things I wrote about last spring after the events at Virginia Tech.

Today, I just wanted to take a moment and reflect on the events at a college just down the road from mine.

PeterH

The Red Camera

2008-02-14T06:32:00.002-06:00

This is a picture of the Red Camera all stripped down. Not all that impressive looking, but it is a piece of technology which is going to change the film production process.

For eight days beginning Jan. 30 and ending Feb. 8 Flashpoint Academy produced The Intruder, a short Twilight Zone-esque film, using the Red Camera. It was the first time the camera had gone out as a rental in Chicago and it was yet another way Flashpoint is at the "bleeding edge" of both education and technology.

Since I am not the most technical person I'll give you the lay version. The Red Camera, captures a digital image at 4K resolution. That's more than double the image quality than the Super Bowl broadcast, while film itself is about 12K resolution. To my eyes you couldn't tell the difference between the Red images and 35mm film.

The camera will accept any 16mm or 35mm lenses with a PL mount. You can record to a 320 gb hard drive, but we chose to record to 8gb compact flash cards. Those flash cards would hold four minutes of "film." When filled they would be transferred to a computer and reformatted and reused. In short it was not much different from using your digital still camera except we were capturing 24 frames per second. As a point off comparison- the Panasonic HVX200 P2 camera shoots 16gb cards which can hold 42 minutes of film.

The Red Camera comes at a base price of $17,5oo and with all the accessories you will probably spend $60,000 to have a decked out camera. That's not a lot of money if you shoot a lot of film. And because of of the huge, file storage issues, you will probably need another $30,000 of computer technology and storage space. Cheap if you are making lots of film or working on a feature.

Check out the camera for yourself. http://www.red.com/
Here is a picture of it all tricked out.

PeterH

Internet, Films and Education Reform

2008-02-09T08:22:00.000-06:00

There is an interesting interview in today's Wall Street Journal with Reed Hastings the CEO of Netflix. Netflix is partnering with a Korean company to create a (TV) set top box which will allow users to stream films from the internet directly to their TV. (It's about time, if I have to go to my mail box one more time to get a movie, my head will explode!)

When asked if he was worried that people would be willing to pile yet another box under their televisions (I have three, plus a small stereo nestled under and around my TV) he replied, "No, that's not my concern, and the reason is if you've got compelling content, people will hook up another box." Ah- the compelling content argument always one of my favorites, but he's right good content (almost) always wins.

So the question is begged, why not a Netflix set top box? "We looked at that and realized that customers also want this functionality that is embedded in other devices, like a game console, and that we should work purely on just being an incredible service." How refreshing someone wants to focus on delivering a much wanted product with incredible service. They aren't interested in doing everything.

Hastings is convinced Internet television is the future and he knows it will take a while getting there. "I think there's a huge category of people who will watch movies on laptops, and remember it's not the laptop of today. Think of the laptop in five years. People will continue to watch movies on TV no doubt about it. But laptop screens are improving and young people are living on laptops."

Perhaps a more interesting thing to me about Reed Hastings is his passion for school reform. After amassing his first fortune he began trying to "figure out why our education is lagging when our technology is increasing at great rates and there's great innovation in so many other areas-health care, biotech, information technology, movie-making. Why not education?"

This positive note is a good place to end. I think what we are doing at Flashpoint Academy is changing traditional education and looking to the future and new technology and finding a way to integrate them. And speaking of the future of education and movie-making technology, the next post will be about the Red One Camera- which we just used over the eight days of production of the Flashpoint Academy film, The Intruder.

PeterH

Viral Marketing

2008-02-02T07:35:00.000-06:00

I was interviewing a perspective student ten days ago and asked what part of the film business most interested her and she said the viral marketing of films. I was surprised because I ask this same question to all the perspective students and usually I get answers like, editing, directing, screenwriting. Viral marketing was a first, but I was glad to know at least someone is thinking about the back end of the film production line.

A brief history of viral marketing courtesy of Wikipedia.

The term Viral Marketing was coined by a Harvard Business School professor, Jeffrey F. Rayport, in a December 1996 article for Fast Company The Virus of Marketing. ^[6] The term was further popularized by Tim Draper and Steve Jurvetson of the venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson in 1997 to describe Hotmail's e-mail practice of appending advertising for itself in outgoing mail from their users.^[7]

Among the first to write about viral marketing on the Internet was media critic Douglas Rushkoff in his 1994 book Media Virus. The assumption is that if such an advertisement reaches a "susceptible" user, that user will become "infected" (i.e., sign up for an account) and can then go on to infect other susceptible users. As long as each infected user sends mail to more than one susceptible user on average (i.e., the basic reproductive rate is greater than one), standard in epidemiology imply that the number of infected users will grow according to a logistic curve, whose initial segment appears exponential.

I tend to think of viral marketing as word of mouth on steroids. Generally, there is some intrigue and a twist or a catch. I can see why a young filmmaker would be interested in the viral marketing of films.

Two days after Heath Ledger died the Wall Street Journal had an article about Warner Brother's viral marketing of the new Batman film. (Ledger is the Joker.) It began a year ago on-line with a fake newspaper website called the Gotham Times. There soon came a competing website called the haha times- the Joker's version of the paper. And it went on from there. Warner Brothers has spent a mint on using Ledger in the marketing campaign, the question is what will they do now.

Other notable viral marketing campaigns for films are the insane buzz- including a great fake-documentary- around The Blair Witch Project. For my money, the marketing campaign and the fake doc. were better than the real thing. More recently there was the campaign for Cloverfield which generated huge advanced publicity.

I am glad to see young filmmakers thinking in these ways. I think the onus is on me to have the curriculum reflect these trends.

PeterH

Let it Snow

2008-02-01T19:29:00.000-06:00

I have been swamped with work and now a foot of snow. The dumb filmmaker apologizes for his absence from this page, but promises to return with all new exciting posts on viral marketing, Flashpoint Academy's production-in-action- film, The Intruder, the Red camera- which The Intruder is using- and much, much more.

I also want to thank all the people who commented on the cheating post, Chris Burritt, and Heath Ledger. I appreciate the loyal readers.

Enjoy the Super Bowl, go Pats!

PeterH

The Internet, Kids Today and Heath Ledger

2008-01-25T07:20:00.000-06:00

This past Tuesday the PBS series Frontline broadcast a fascinating look at teenagers who have grown up with the Internet. The program focused on a small New Jersey town about an hour's train ride from Manhattan. It looked at a different families and shared stories about how being on-line 24 hours a day is shaping these kids' lives.

Among the things I learned is the following: Young people don't have the time to read. The go to Sparknotes.com and read that. My favorite quote, "If I had 27 hours in a day I would read the book, but I just don't have the time." As a result teachers teach with the understanding that the students aren't reading the text, just the sparknotes and teach to that. That's sad.

Other items of interest:

The reach of both My Space and Facebook. If a high schooler doesn't have a page on those sites they aren't anyone.

Cyber bulling. One boy was bullied via the internet and developed an on-line relationship with another boy who convinced him to kill himself. There is a website which teaches you how to hang yourself. Another website which helps you figure out the "coolest" way in which to kill yourself by giving you a questionnaire. Sort of the "Cosmo Quiz" for the suicidal. This 13-year old boy hung himself.

A group of high schoolers took a train into Manhattan and spent the night partying- and documenting it with their cell phone cameras. It wasn't long before their pictures of their night out was on the Internet and their parents found out. The kids weren't upset their parents learned about the partying- they were upset that the parents thought it was such a big deal.
(Note to self- make sure all pictures of me at the Kentucky Derby 1985-1987 have been destroyed.)

It was a fascinating program and very unironically you can watch the whole show on-line at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/.

Also on Tuesday the actor Heath Ledger died. I was in class when the news broke, but my computer was on and I received an e-mail and a text message telling me the news. At the end of my class I was talking to a guest speaker who came to another class. I asked him how it went, he said fine, "But when news of Heath Ledger's death came on-line we had to stop and discuss it. I thought they were taking notes with their laptops not surfing the net."

Kids today.

PeterH

The Name of the Game...

2008-01-18T06:26:00.000-06:00

... is collaboration.

All artists collaborate in one way or another, you must in order to succeed, and the most successful artists instinctively know how to work with others. More importantly they know their work will be better with the input from other people. Collaboration frees you up to do what you do best.

This brings me to guitarist, musician, artist David Broza who performed at Flashpoint Academy yesterday afternoon. Broza believes his gift is creating music not writing lyrics, so over the course of his 30-year career, he has actively sought out collaborators to write the words set to his music. He works with writers, poets, finds stories from current events he wants to sing about and has someone else write the lyrics for his songs. And I forgot to add he works in three languages- Hebrew, Spanish and English- and he is a self-taught guitar virtuoso.

A student asked him how he goes about finding these people to work with, and the short answer is that he picks up the phone, makes the call and asks. It's easier now for him of course because he is famous, but it is the same method he has used since the 1970s. This is an important lesson to all of you eager artists out there- ask for help, especially if you are passionate about your work- you will find that simpatico person.

In the meantime check out David Broza and add some of his music to your collection.

http://www.davidbroza.net

PeterH

My Cheatin' Heart

2008-01-12T06:52:00.000-06:00

"I was thrown out of college for cheating on my metaphysics exam. I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me." Woody Allen

I heard an interesting piece on NPR earlier this week about how many young people take for granted that everything on the internet is free and they should never have to pay for it. However, those of us who create content do like getting compensated and at some point we will no longer tolerate the wholesale theft of our work. A few months ago I posted about how half of my students had DVD quality copies of the film American Gangster a week before the film opened in theaters. This, I think, is a good example of this assumption that if it is out there it is mine for the taking.

If you start from a place where all information is free, then where do you draw the line? Can you look into the soul (and test paper) of the student sitting next to you? Is it all right to knowingly cheat on a test just because that information is out there anyway?

Of course not.

I have two theories on students cheating. The first is what I wrote above- we are living in a society where it is so common to take things from others that getting an answer or two or three seems like nothing- everyone is doing it. My other theory is that students are cheating not for themselves but to please their parents and teachers. They are so insecure that leaving an answer blank or actually admitting they do not know something is much more painful than using someone else's work as their own.

I'll end with another quote from Woody Allen that I feel sums up my opinion of cheaters.
"His lack of education is more than compensated for by his keenly developed moral bankruptcy."

PeterH

Chris Burritt

2008-01-10T18:24:00.000-06:00

On Monday my friend and former colleague at Columbia, Chris Burritt, died. Chris was a terrific lighting and camera teacher. His students loved him and I am writing this post because I know a lot of my former students, who were also his former students, read this page.

I am sorry to break the news to you this way.

Chris and I were the union reps for the Columbia College Film and Video Department and we spent a lot of time together. The spring and summer of 2005 we met twice a week as a new union contract was being negotiated. It is fair to say that there was not a single person more responsible for the benefits the current adjunct Columbia film faculty enjoy than Chris Burritt. He busted his butt to get us everything he could, then would stand in the background at faculty meetings as I got to explain to the faculty our hard fought benefits.

I know a lot of people think I was responsible, but don't kid yourself it was Chris. He knew the contract inside and out, I was just a front man. And that is just the way any good camera and lighting person would want it- to be in the shadows casting light on the things that are important to see.

You will be missed.

PeterH

The Strike Beard

2008-01-05T17:07:00.000-06:00

There is an interesting piece in the Talk of the Town section of the current New Yorker about the beards being grown as a sign of support for the writer's guild strike. Perhaps the most famous of the beards belong to David Letterman and Conan O'Brien. Jay Leno's conspicuous chin is notable for the absence of a beard, and he is about to pay a fine to the WGA as a consequence of going back to work.

The New Yorker piece is interesting to me less for the connection to the strike and more about how beards are often the result of a transitions in men's lives. "Thus we get Al Gore after the election (whiskers of grievance and release), and Ted Kaczynski in his cabin (isolation and madness), and Johnny Damon with the Red Sox (superstition)-all iconic beards in their proper context."

To that list you can add me (lazy, cold), but not so iconic. Just coincidently, but perhaps not, I stopped shaving just before the new year. We'll see how it goes. I have had a beard a few times before, just as they said in the New Yorker during times of transition. For me it was right after 9-11. I was on vacation during the event and was not shaving and just kept going for awhile until I needed to get on a plane and looked a little too Atta-esque. The last time was a couple of years ago when I had a little brush with my own mortality and had a beard for about six months.

I hope the strike ends soon.

PeterH

The Experimental Witch

2008-01-02T08:08:00.000-06:00

The author Paulo Coelho is doing something interesting with his latest novel, The Witch of Portobello. Instead of selling the film rights to Hollywood he is inviting his readers and filmmakers to participate in making the movie. The plan is as simple as it is cutting edge. It takes advantage of all things internet and I am sure it is a great piece of publicity for the book and author.

Here are the broad strokes.

1) You select a character and chapter you want to make a short film about. The synopsis from Publishers Weekly (via Amazon) is below.

2) You register on his website. The first 200 valid filmmakers get chosen to submit a short film. http://paulocoelhoblog.com/experimental-witch/

3) You post the film to You Tube and the winning chapters will be selected. Each winning filmmaker gets a 3,ooo Euro prize.

I think it's a great idea and will sign up just to be part of it. If I get selected all the better. But mostly I think it is a great way to for an artist to share his work with others. I hope many (i.e. student readers) filmmakers register.

PeterH

From Publishers Weekly
Multimillion-seller Coelho (The Devil and Miss Prym, etc.) returns with another uncanny fusion of philosophy, religious miracle and moral parable. The Portobello of the title is London's Portobello Road, where Sherine Khalil, aka Athena, finds the worship meeting she's leading—where she becomes an omniscient goddess named Hagia Sophia—disrupted by a Protestant protest. Framed as a set of interviews conducted with those who knew Athena, who is dead as the book opens, the story recounts her birth in Transylvania to a Gypsy mother, her adoption by wealthy Lebanese Christians; her short, early marriage to a man she meets at a London college (one of the interviewees); her son Viorel's birth; and her stint selling real estate in Dubai. Back in London in the book's second half, Athena learns to harness the powers that have been present but inchoate within her, and the story picks up as she acquires a "teacher" (Deidre O'Neill, aka Edda, another interviewee), then disciples (also interviewed), and speeds toward a spectacular end. Coelho veers between his signature criticism of modern life and the hydra-headed alternative that Athena taps into. Athena's earliest years don't end up having much plot, but the second half's intrigue sustains the book. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Some Thoughts About Chevy Chase

2007-12-30T15:46:00.000-06:00

A few weeks ago Chevy Chase came to Flashpoint to talk to our students and I didn't have the time to blog about his appearance, but he has been on my mind so better late than never.

I want to begin by saying that until meeting him, I didn't really think anything about Chevy Chase. I liked him on SNL 30+ years ago and a few of his movie appearances, but that was about it. However, after meeting him and seeing him talk I have become a fan. The following are some of my highlights of his hour speaking to students. First off he was very funny almost the entire time. It is clear he just is funny.

1) Collaboration. Almost the first thing out of his mouth. He talked about how important it is in the arts to work and collaborate with others. As faculty we preach that all the time, but somehow I think coming from a star it will have more impact.

2) The importance of writing. He credits his success to being a writer first and a performer second. Again, as faculty we talk about developing students' writing skills. This, too, I hope will sink in.

3) He is really smart. It is clear he is well read and can draw from a wealth of knowledge.

4) His comedic influences. His father, a noted political and social commentator. Chevy told a very funny story about how a few years ago his father cracked up Mike Wallace and others at the US Open tennis matches by referring to the ball boys as an 11 letter epithet that begins with C that years ago got Lenny Bruce arrested. The point being that anarchy and surprise are a big part of his comedic background. He also cited Groucho and Ernie Kovacs (Chevy and I have something in common afterall) as major influences on his career.

5) Schools. He admitted as a young person he had issues and was sent to "nurturing" schools. He wished he had a place- like Flashpoint- that would have allowed him to be himself.

6) In the middle of his talk, sort of out of nowhere, he launched into "Live from New York it's Saturday Night!" When he did I got goose bumps and it surprised me. I had that "Wow, it's really him," moment.

I hope our students got as much out of him as I did. Last week I flipped on the TV and there he was in Christmas Vacation. Not a great film, but I watched for awhile out of my new found respect for Chevy Chase.

PeterH

Helvetica

2007-12-28T17:31:00.000-06:00

During the late summer just before my friend Dan Devening, an artist, gallery owner and college professor, went to Austria on a fellowship (show-off) he told me about a film he just saw called Helvetica. It's a documentary about the typeface by that name and the revolution it has caused and the reaction to that revolution. Who would have thunk that a documentary about a font could be so interesting, but it was.

A lot of filmmaking is about paying attention to details. In fact almost all good art in some way pays attention to the little things. And perhaps there is no group of artists more into the details than graphic designers. Throughout Helvetica one watches half-crazed designers discuss the greatness of the font, while another group of designers talks about how Helvetica is a curse. One camp thinks fonts should be neutral while the other group says fonts should add something to the text. As a side note my favorite font- until seeing this film- has always been "default."

In addition to the joys of watching passionate artists in a great debate, and learning a lot about how typefaces are created and used, Helvetica is also visually very stunning and has quite a lot of humor in it. (Though it helps if you think it is funny that all the graphics in the film and in the subtitled part of the DVD are also set in Helvetica.) The director, Gary Hustwit, and his crew take great pains to frame all of the interviews and visuals -there is a lot of signage in the film- with great care.

To me Helvetica is an example of just how great the documentary form can be. Here is a film about something few of us care about and all take for granted(at one point Helvetica font is compared to air) yet our attention is riveted. I suggest you check it out.

PeterH

I Am Still Here

2007-12-18T06:29:00.000-06:00

This has been the longest the dumb filmmaker has been away fom his blog since he began it. Things have been very busy for him, but there is light at the end of the tunnel, and he promises to stop referring to himself in the 3rd person.

A brief recap of the last few weeks:

Singer/Song writer Michelle Shocked came to Flashpoint where she cut a song and shot a music video- coming to your computers soon.

Last week Chevy Chase was at school. That's us with Paula Froehle, our academic dean and Steven Berger Flashpoint's in-house producer. Chevy was great. Very funny and he spoke well about the importance of collaboration and writing.

All of the film students have shot and are no editing their first films. I have seen many of them and I am quite pleased with the outcome.

On the professional front Jim shot one final (he promises, really) sequence for the teen parent film while I was with Chevy Chase- thanks again Jim. And we are racing to the conclusion of this major top-secret (non-disclosure) film we began in October.

By the end of the week things should return to some sort of consistency and blogging can resume in earnest.

PeterH

Don't Just Take My Word On It

2007-12-05T06:23:00.000-06:00

I wrote the blog about August: Osage County, the Broadway play, last night about 10pm. I woke up this morning and opened my New York Times to see this glowing review by Charles Isherwood.

All happy families are alike, Tolstoy told us, and each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. But I’d bet the farm that no family has ever been as unhappy in as many ways — and to such sensationally entertaining effect — as the Westons of “August: Osage County,” the new play by Tracy Letts that blazed open last night at the Imperial Theater.

A fraught, densely plotted saga of an Oklahoma clan in a state of near-apocalyptic meltdown, “August” is probably the most exciting new American play Broadway has seen in years. Oh, forget probably: It is, flat-out, no asterisks and without qualifications, the most exciting new American play Broadway has seen in years. Fiercely funny and bitingly sad, this turbo-charged tragicomedy — which spans three acts and more than three blissful hours — doesn’t just jump-start the fall theater season, recently stalled when the stagehands went on strike. “August” throws it instantaneously into high gear.

You can read the rest of the review here. I am glad I got to see the show in Chicago.

http://theater2.nytimes.com/2007/12/05/theater/reviews/05august.html?ref=arts

PeterH

One Strike Down One to Go

2007-12-04T21:26:00.000-06:00

A few weeks ago I wrote about the writer's guild strike and how it is affecting people on all ends of the entertainment business pay scale. Until now I haven't mentioned the other big strike- the Broadway stagehand strike that recently was resolved.

There is an interesting piece in the current New Yorker about a woman who is a wig maker for both Phantom of the Opera and Saturday Night Live. She was forced out of a job because of both strikes and has resorted to cutting hair out of her Manhattan apartment bathroom. Since the stage hands have returned to work, I assume she has half of her income back, but it goes to show you how tough it can be for people who aren't rich and famous.

My connection to the Broadway strike is through my friend Sally Murphy (above) a member of Steppenwolf Theater and one of the stars of August: Osage County. The play had it's world premiere in Chicago at Steppenwolf this summer and made the move to Broadway only to get there in time for the strike. August is terrific. It's funny (often very) sad (often very), tragic. The three hours fly by and I hope New York audiences get to see it. A modern day Death of a Salesman, perhaps.

Anyway, I am glad the strike is over and the show is back so Sally and the rest of the cast can return to work. August: Osage County is a play that needs to be seen.

PeterH

Chuck Close

2007-12-01T07:57:00.000-06:00

Perhaps the most frustrating thing to me about being a dumb filmmaker is the lack of opportunities I get to practice my craft. I just can't wake up in the morning and announce that today I am going to make film. Like Blanche Dubois, I am dependent on the kindness of strangers (well-paid teamsters, SAG members, and other crew types.) I don't know if I would be a better filmmaker if I had more opportunities, but I certainly would be a different kind of filmmaker. I would really like to explore different visual styles and techniques.

All of this brings me to Chuck Close the photographer and portraitist, one of his self-portraits appears here. For more than thirty years Close has explored different versions of the same form. Typically he takes a photograph of his subject and then creates a grid on a canvas and paints huge portraits from the picture. Over the years his method has remained the same, but his style has changed.

Earlier in his career his portraits were photorealistic. Stunning giant portraits of his subjects that worked on the viewer differently from various distances. By the time you get close to a nine-foot tall face you see it very differently than from across the room. Today his portraits are much more abstract- see above- yet he still works within this same process of taking a photograph and creating a grid. Close's paintings take months to complete but they all start with that 1/100th of a second image which captures his subject and over the years he has returned to the the original photographs to make new portraits. I am envious that he can return to the same source material and create new works of art while exploring new artistic territory.

To me his process has many benefits. Everyday he can work on little pieces of his paintings. Each square of his grid becomes a mini-painting with its own abstract style. He can stop the work and return to it on and off for weeks. Each grid builds positively on itself and over time he has a finished portrait. The key here is belief in the process. Close has created a system which works for him and within that system he is free to change his style.

One final thing about Chuck Close. About 20 years ago he had a major stroke that rendered him paralyzed from the shoulders down. Since then he has done all of this work from a wheel chair with a paint brush strapped to his wrist.

PeterH

The Future is Unwritten

2007-11-27T06:41:00.000-06:00

Career opportunities are the ones that never knock
Every job they offer you is to keep you out the dock
Career opportunity, the ones that never knock

Last week my friend Dan took me to see The Future is Unwritten, the documentary about Joe Strummer, the man who wrote those words. It’s a really great piece of filmmaking and it helps if you are a fan of the band The Clash and punk rock but there are several things that make it stand out as a film.

The film opens with an amazing image of him recording the vocal track to White Riot. They have taken out all the other musical tracks and all you hear is Strummer screaming the lyrics into a microphone. It is an arresting image and draws you into the film immediately. Slowly the instrumental tracks fade in and White Riot as we know it plays, but until that happens all we see is a mad Brit screaming into a microphone.

There is no narration. The entire Strummer story is told through pictures and interviews with friends and colleagues. Hard to pull off, I have tried, but it really works. This technique drops the viewer into the film and we find our own path rather than have someone lead us.

Many of the interviews are done around a campfire at night. Interesting the first couple of times you see it, then frankly annoying…until near the end of the film when we discover Joe Strummer loved campfires and towards the end of his life he began inviting people over to sit around a campfire. Suddenly this visual style had meaning.

Julien Temple directed. He is best known as a music video director, but clearly the subject had meaning to him- he was friends with the band in the 1970s- and had a lot of his own archived material in the film. The Future is Unwritten is clearly a labor of love. When we saw it at the Music Box Theater it was the only theater in the country screening the film, though it had a successful festival run. If you are a fan of the Clash or just want to see an artist at work see the film.

Joe Strummer died from an undiagnosed heart defect on his couch in December of 2002 shortly after returning from walking his dog. The day before he mailed Christmas cards to his friends, cards he designed and created. They arrived just as those friends were learning about his passing.

PeterH

A Death in the (TV) Family

2007-11-24T07:56:00.000-06:00

When I learned about the passing of Dick Wilson, TV's Mr. Whipple from the Charmin ads, I cannot say I was overly saddened, but it did make me pause and reflect on some of my wasted youth in front of the television and how TV advertising has changed.

Mr. Whipple, along with Mrs. Olson, the Folger's coffee lady, and Madge the Manicurist for Palmolive dish soap, were staples of TV for two and a half decades. Dick Wilson made 504- that's over 4 hours!- Charmin commercials. Mrs. Olson and Madge also had TV lives that spanned more than a generation. The ads must have been successful because you don't keep going back to the "Ladies, don't squeeze the Charmin," well if the TP ain't moving off the shelves.

Today these ad campaigns wouldn't last more than a TV season and that says as much about how we watch TV as it does about the ads themselves. In the 1970s when Madge had her customers soaking in Palmolive I would have had to get up off the couch and turn the channel to make her go away. Since there were only two other channels I left it on and Madge and the others were begrudgingly allowed to come into our living room. Today with the clicker and the Tivo and downloading episodes from the Internet who watches commercials- especially one's with characters like these three?

The other thing that strikes me about these characters and ad campaigns is the complete lack of irony and sense of humor. In reviewing these spots you can just see comedians like David Letterman waiting to skewer them. In fact an early Letterman memory of mine had him making fun of the Florence Henderson Wesson Oil commercials. Today if a TV spot isn't quick hitting eye candy then it won't last.

So, I am sorry Mr. Whipple, Mrs. Olson and Madge your time has come and gone. I am sure you will live on in You Tube land where people can get there nostalgia and irony in two clicks.

PeterH

Religion-part 1

2007-11-20T09:57:00.000-06:00

I guess it should come as no surprise that organized religion is having an influence on the film business. I am not talking about films like Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ or Mel Gibson's The Passion of Christ, but rather the impact from new modern day mega-churches and television ministries.

Over the last 10 years I have had more and more students come to class with film production experience not from their high schools but through their churches. Many churches have youth groups devoted towards filmmaking. Many of those same churches also have expensive cameras, switchers capable of creating a live TV broadcasts, and advanced editing suites.

Who would have thunk it?

I have seen my share of church-produced films and I have yet seen one that made me really take notice. What I have seen is a lot of young people having fun, going on outings and generally making a high end home movie. Not bad really, but like most home movies, of no interest to anyone who isn't part of that family.

So I don't really know what to make of this church based filmmaking. I assume it is a way to get more young people interested in the church. But what is the goal? I don't see it as a training ground for young filmmakers. Is it the modern day equivalent of an ice cream social? "Hey everyone come over to our sanctuary and let's make a movie?"

By contrast a student recently showed me the trailer for a feature film his high school made. And based on the two minute trailer it was really terrific. I could see the student filmmakers learning craft and taking something from it. It was not a home movie. Maybe this is an example of the separation of church and state.

I dunno. More on this topic later.

PeterH

Solidarity

2007-11-18T12:07:00.000-06:00

This is a picture of my friend Craig walking the WGA picket line in Los Angeles earlier this week. His TV show, Unhitched, for Fox is on hold due to the strike and Craig walked the line in support of the writers.

The day before Criag sent me the photo a former student and teaching assistant of mine who is now in Los Angeles e-mailed me to say she, too, was walking the line in support of the writers. Eliza Hajek is not a celebrity actress but an up and coming editor. She was offered an assistant editor position on Grey's Anatomy, but the show and job is on hold due to the strike.

I think these two stories really highlight some of the overlooked issues of the strike. While Craig is a successful actor who has money in the bank (though I am pretty sure he still owes me $50 from 20 years ago) and can ride out a strike, Eliza and her brethren are a few pay grades lower and while not living paycheck to paycheck, still need to pay the bills. I am glad to see them both on the line putting a different face on the battle between the writers and producers. And for everyone's sake I hope the strike ends soon.

PeterH

All The President's Men

2007-11-13T07:48:00.000-06:00

Yesterday's post about Peter Morgan and his films The Deal, The Queen and The Last King of Scotland has me thinking about other movies that depict real news events in a dramatic fashion. How someone dramatizes and makes interesting a story that was recently headline news is beyond me. When it is done well I always like it.

Recently I saw A Mighty Heart starring a nearly unrecognizable Angelina Jolie as Mariane Pearl, the wife of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Daniel Pearl was kidnapped in Pakistan in 2002 and murdered by members of the Taliban. Jolie is great and honestly I don't know much of her work unless Brangelina is a film I missed. Here is the thing about this film: you know what is going to happen from frame one, yet you are riveted. Go figure. It's part detective story, part documentary, part love story and all terrific.

To me the touchstone of these real life films is All the President's Men. Here is a film that came out not long after Nixon resigned, when the country was Watergated to death, yet the film did huge box office, won Oscars and still holds me in its grip when I watch it.

Both films are about journalists and the slow, often boring process of discovery. Both have excellent performances by big name actors and both are gripping. Even though I know Woodward and Bernstein survived and Nixon would resign I still get spooked when I see Woodward in the garage with Deep Throat.

To me what makes All the President's Men work is the quality of filmmaking. Alan Pakula, the director, brought all of the elements together- great source material, an excellent script, top notch actors and great Gordon Willis visuals. It is a defining moment of translating a real story to the screen.

PeterH

The Real Deal

2007-11-12T06:38:00.000-06:00

I saw the British Film The Deal the other day. The film depicts the relationship between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown during the Thatcher and Major eras of British politics. It was written by Peter Morgan (pictured here) who also wrote The Queen, The Last King of Scotland - about Idi Amin- and the play Frost/Nixon- which is being adapted into a film as well.

What interests me about Morgan is how he mines real events and real characters to create his drama. In a profile in the New Yorker a few months ago he said what interests him is not so much history, but "narratives in which real public figures are thrown into unlikely relationships." John Lahr reported, "as a storyteller, Morgan is drawn to volatile, ambiguous antagaonists, " and how ambition interests him "because it's sure fire indicator of damage." I wish my students could de-construct and define their work as well.

Peter Morgan came to screenwriting after a bout of stagefright stalled his acting career and I think he is a good example of how there are many different avenues into the film business. Yet, what impresses me the most about his work is how he is so certain of the types of stories that appeal to him. He has found his milieu and knows how to best mine it. I look forward to seeing his next project.

PeterH

More on interns

2007-11-08T06:58:00.000-06:00

I am not done with this internship idea yet so hold on.

Another former MBC intern is my friend Jay Smith. Jay came to the museum as a college senior at Indiana University. At school he was a TV major and had a clear plan on how to get a job in the business. His first step was to get an internship at the museum.

The museum internship was critical to Jay's overall plan because MBC president Brice DuMont was also a correspondent and producer at Chicago's PBS affiliate WTTW. Jay knew that if he got in good with Bruce he would have a better shot at getting one of WTTW's paid internships after graduation the following year.

Sure enough his plan worked. He parlayed his free MBC intenship to a paid internship the next summer. When that internship expired WTTW hired him full time on their flagship news program, Chicago Tonight. 18 years later he is going strong and is now the managing producer of that program. Over these 18 years he has also written and produced many other programs and documentaries for WTTW, but it all started with a vision he had while in college on the steps he needed to take to get the job he wanted.

So, like former intern Dan in my previous post, this too comes full circle. When I got my Flashpoint job I told Jay he needed to do a piece on the school- the first new college in Chicago in 40 years. He said he would when the time was right. The time was right this past Tuesday. Mayor Daley did the official ribbon cutting at Flashpoint and that evening on Chicago Tonight there was a piece on Flashpoint Academy and brief snippet of the dumb filmmaker. A quid pro quo of sorts.

PeterH

Interns

2007-11-07T08:03:00.000-06:00

A few weeks ago I wrote about my internship at a TV station and how valuable it was to my professional development. Today I want to talk about the farther reaching value interns can have.

I have said many times that before my Flashpoint gig I have had only one "real" job and that was from 1987-1989 when I worked for the Museum of Broadcast Communications (MBC). At the museum we were lucky enough to have several good interns and many of us remain friends to this day.

Our first intern was Dan Lerner. Hard to believe it now, but he was a senior in high school when we met. Your classic over achiever,Dan was writing for the ACLU newsletter and looking to get his foot in any door when he showed up at the museum. Frankly, I don't remember what he did- he probably watched a lot of old TV and recorded it into our archives. Mostly we talked sports- such great conversations as who would you rather have in centerfield Kirby Puckett or Dale Murphy (years later Dan finally agreed with me about Kirby Puckett.) Dan was a good guy and worked hard and we liked having him around.

The night before he went off to college Mike Mertz, MBC archivist, and I took Dan out on the town and said goodbye. (Out on the town in this case means we grabbed a pizza and went to the batting cages. C'mon the museum only paid me $7.25 and hour and only so much town can be had for that kind of coin.)

Dan and I have remained friends over the years. Today he is a political consultant and filmmaker. I am helping produce his film (four years+ in the making) about rock-a-billy legend Sleepy LaBeef. This weekend Sleepy is performing with lots of other stars at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in a concert for Jerry Lee Lewis. Dan will be there, cameras rolling, getting the show and hopefully nabbing interviews with Kris Kristofferson (who saw Sleepy during his college days at Columbia University), Chrissy Hynde and others.

My point with this post is that the benefits of internships work both directions. 20 years ago Dan was a real help to us at the museum and today I get to reciprocate by helping him with his film. Though he has done all the heavy lifting on the film I will get a nice credit and more importantly feel we have come full circle from his days as our intern.

Tomorrow another intern story.

PeterH

Days of Wine and Roses

2007-11-03T07:21:00.000-05:00

I often have a problem watching films about addiction and recovery. Even in the best ones there seems to be some sort of artificiality I can not get past. In The Days of Wine and Roses Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick are great, but there comes a point in the film where it gets preachy and we can see the ending coming 45 minutes in advance. Worse, to me, is Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend. Milland set the standard for the bad drunk, but the D.T. scene is laughable- did they spend any money on that fake bat attack? Yet, the film won Oscars and for years was the touchstone for films about alcoholism.

Films just about addiction are no good. I like Leaving Las Vegas and really appreciate the director Mike Figgis, but I don't need to see Nicolas Cage drink himself to death. I get it already. The typical film is this: I am a junkie, it's fun for a while, it gets out of control, I leave a wake of destruction- physical and emotional- in my path, then I die miserably. In other words see Keith Moon, Jimi Hendrix, Sid Vicious, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, ad. nausea.

Films just about recovery are perhaps worse because we see none of the fun and we get preached at for two hours. These films actually make me want to drink. More. Right there in the theater. Where is the Martini concession? Is there a Pinot Noir vendor anywhere?

Take a pass on Clean and Sober (though I like Michael Keaton) and especially When a Man Loves a Woman a Meg Ryan/Andy Garcia film. A good idea by Al Franken gone bad through a series of unfortunate filmmaking events. (No one knew the film they were trying to make.) A far superior film written by the same Al Franken is Stuart Saves His Family. Franken knows something about alcoholic families and co-dependency and Stuart is a surprisingly nice film.

All of this brings me to two films I saw recently that have a different take on addiction and recovery, but to me were maybe the most valid of all the films. Interestingly they both deal with killers, but in very different ways.
You Kill Me stars the always terrific Ben Kingsley as a hit man for the Buffalo, NY Polish mob who is sent to San Francisco to dry out. In S.F. he gets a job in a funeral home, where he meets Tea Leoni (who also produced the film. I wonder what attracted her to the material?) and goes to A.A. He gets a sponsor and gets his life together. There are several scenes in the A.A. meeting and several more with his sponsor, Luke Wilson. Though it is a dark comedy it touches on issues about addiction and recovery that those other films don't.

The other film is Mr. Brooks starring Kevin Costner and William Hurt. Costner is Mr. Brooks, Portland, Oregon's man of the year and a serial killer. (Where do they come up with these ideas?) He wants to stop killing but his alter ego, William Hurt, won't let him. He goes to A.A. meetings where all he says is that he is an addict and leaves it at that.

The thing that struck me about both these films is the power of the anonymous group and how people could sit and talk or not, but it was clear recovery was a process they were all going through. Very interesting, though a little thin on the fake bat attack scenes.

Peter H

A victimless crime?

2007-11-01T06:35:00.000-05:00

Years ago a made a film called Victimless Crimes. It was about a pair of art thieves who stole paintings with the theory that no one got hurt. The gallery owner got his insurance money, the artists had already been paid, so why not rip them off. See, a victimless crime. Aren't I clever.

While I enjoy referencing myself and my work, I am bringing it up because of the issues I recently blogged about- file sharing and file stealing. I wouldn't steal a library book or a computer. Why would I steal a computer file? Why would I take something I know has been stolen? Just because the software company, or Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington in the case of American Gangster. Aren't physically around as one takes their property does not make it OK.

On one of my first posts I wrote about You Tube and how much I disliked them. The main reason was because of all of the illegal work up there. At the time I mentioned my own work with Denny Dent was available on You Tube because someone had taken a copy and posted it. While they did it as a tribute to Denny, and at first I was flattered, now I am greatly bothered.

fEERtherepEER, the person who posted it, needs to know that what they did was wrong. And while I appreciate the 47,851 views (minus my two viewings) you do not have my permission to use it. It is my work, my property. Stop.

This is not a victimless crime.

PeterH

Smile

2007-10-29T20:01:00.000-05:00

Regular readers of this page know my fondness for The Marx Brothers and Groucho in particular. Those readers should also know of my affection (addiction? disease?) for the Boston Red Sox. At school this afternoon I had students congratulating me on the World Series victory as if I was the Red Sox bullpen. I blame my Great Aunt Amy for this Red Sox affliction, but that is another story for another time. Check out the Soxaholix link to the right to see the depths of this condition. However, as this is a blog about film I'll bring it back to Groucho.

As I kid my parents showed me classic old films. Sometimes my dad would bring home a film print of Laurel and Hardy or the Marx Brothers and we would project it on a wall in our living room. The screenings were infrequent, but wonderful. More often we would watch on TV a Charlie Chan film or some other relic that most readers of this page will have no idea what I am referencing. (Once on TV there used to be something called The Late Show where old movies would be screened. Now there is You Tube- see below.)

To me Groucho is the best. For pure anarchy and zaniness nobody can beat him- a raised eyebrow, an eye roll and a leer can get more laughs than a thousand stand-up comedian monologues. But Groucho hard a dark side. He, like many geniuses, was depressed. He lost a fortune in the 1929 stock market crash, married badly and had more personal failures than one would wish on your worst enemy. And, unlike the rest of us, he didn't have a Groucho Marx in his life to make him laugh. If anyone needed a Groucho it was Groucho.

So for everyone who reads this page and needs to smile here is Groucho as Captain Spaulding almost 80-EIGHTY!- years ago in Animal Crackers.

Now I must be going.

PeterH

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCvz8y_DUSY

The Times They Are a Changing- Again

2007-10-27T08:44:00.000-05:00

Bob Dylan is in Chicago this weekend and as always he has me thinking about the times we live in.

Not too many years ago if you were a Chicago based filmmaker and didn't have a production office in the 312 area code you were not a player. All of the major production houses, post-production facilities and recording studios were within a few blocks of each other. While many still are there, the film community has expanded and your physical location is nowhere nearly as important. These days an ftp server or secured website is as important as an office. More often than not we post rough cuts and let the client see them when and wherever they want to. This comes in very handy when a handful of people need to screen a cut.

At Flashpoint I am currently teaching a Creative Producing class where we spend a fair amount of class time discussing changes in the industry. Of late the conversation has turned to public art, giving away your work and new modes of distribution. It is very interesting and the students have lots of insights.

A few weeks ago the band Radiohead announced they would release their new record and let people pay whatever they wanted for it. We did a survey in class and the average price our students "paid" for the record was a little over seven dollars- some said they would pay nothing, others more than $20. Interestingly, after they first few hundred thousand downloads, the average price paid for the Radiohead record was just about eight bucks. Our un-scientific survey was pretty accurate.

From Radiohead we jumped to Wes Anderson and his short film The Hotel Chevalier which is a free download on iTunes. They are using it as a marketing tool for The Darjeeling Limited and it seems to be working. We don't have enough public art in this country and it is great that a successful filmmaker is putting his work out there for free.

From Wes Anderson we turn to Ed Burns, the actor and director whose film Purple Violets will be released not in theaters or on DVD but directly to iTunes. This will be the first film released on to iTunes and I believe it is a harbinger of things to come. Purple Violets was made for $4 million and received good reviews when it premiered earlier this year at the Tribecca Film Festival, yet it didn't get any great distribution offers so they decided to go straight to a digital release. The p.r. alone has probably helped recoup the investment.

Finally, we come to American Gangster the new Denzel Washington, Russell Crowe, Ridley Scott film. American Gangster opens in theaters next Friday, yet at least half of my students have it already on their computers thanks (no thanks?) to someone posting a screener copy. I looked at some of the film and it is a great copy and as of yesterday I heard that it had been viewed on-line at least 30,000 times. That's a lot of people not paying for American Gangster movie tickets or DVD rentals.

For the record I am completely against stealing works of art (or works of Crowe). But as I talked with my students they said, "Our generation takes it for granted that our work will be copied, shared and stolen." (BTW, thanks for making me feel old and categorizing me into that generation.) I don't like that but they thought nothing of passing a flash drive around the room and getting their own copies of American Gangster. It will be interesting to see how they feel in a few years when someone is stealing their works.

PeterH

TW3...

2007-10-23T18:42:00.000-05:00

...and we delivered a rough cut of the Teen Parent film to our client, and had four crews shooting across Chicago for this other top-secret project and time to go see Springsteen- another story for another day.

PeterH

TW3

2007-10-22T14:03:00.000-05:00

That Was The Week That Was was first broadcast in Britain in the early 196os and gave David Frost his first wide television exposure. A short time later an American version appeared giving TV audiences their first real glimpses of performers like Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Woody Allen, Alan Alda and Buck Henry. Both shows were satirical looks at the week's news, a precursor if you will to The Daily Show. I bring this up because last week at Flashpoint was both very typical and oh so atypical. Let me explain.

On Saturday the 13th the actor Jeffrey Wright and rapper/actor Mos Def came to school as part of The Chicago International Film Festival. Sometime around 10pm there was Mos Def pounding on the drums in one of our recording studios.

Tuesday, representatives from Morocco and the Chicago Sister Cities program came to school to explore cultural exchange opportunities. And that evening about 1/3 of our students went to a screening of The Darjeeling Limited where writer and director Wes Anderson and co-writer and star Jason Schwartzman answered our questions.

On Friday Mesh Flinders, creator of the Internet phenomenon Lonely Girl 15, was on campus speaking with students and high school counselors and administrators. Friday afternoon the first ever Flashpoint Academy Machinima Challenge took place. We divided students into eight groups and using the Team Fortress 2 game engine, created eight short films in the span of five hours. At 5pm we had a screening and later this week those films will be posted on the web.

All of this happened under the lens of Channel 11 (the local PBS affiliate) who came to do a piece on us for their program Chicago Tonight.

On Saturday Flashpoint had an open house and 180 perspective students and their parents attended looking to enroll in January or next fall.

On Sunday (some of us) rested.

That Was The Week That Was.

PeterH

The Environment

2007-10-15T06:30:00.000-05:00

Al Gore, than man who should be president, owns the Best Feature Length Documentary Oscar for producing and appearing in An Inconvenient Truth, and last Friday he was named a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on the environment.

I didn't really care for An Inconvenient Truth. While the message is an important one, as a film I feel it fell short- to much of Al on the phone or working on his Mac. I would have preferred to see his presentation in person rather than the film. Of course I believe what he was saying so he was preaching to the converted.

I do think often about all the petroleum products used in film manufacturing and production and all the chemicals that process and develop film. Where does it go? Out of sight out of mind? For environmental reasons I am glad we are moving towards a filmless/tapeless work flow, but I can also imagine a pile of batteries and computer chips and flash drives at the bottom of a land fill. I am one of the few people who are happy that I have to turn in my iphone to get a new battery. Apple is doing the green thing, I think, but of course I drive a hybrid and eat granola- actually as I type these words- so I naturally lean that way.

This summer one could travel the Northwest Passage by boat for the first time in years. Polar Bears are dying because their environment is melting away. Polar ice caps are shrinking at an alarming rate. I am happy for Al Gore, but I really hope the planet heeds his warnings before it is too late.

PeterH

Internships

2007-10-12T06:29:00.000-05:00

When I was in high school I was given the chance to be an intern (a nice word for free labor) on the production of a United Cerebral Palsy Telethon. The broadcast was produced by Allen Hall, the producer for 25 years of Bozo's Circus on WGN-TV. I only got the job because my dad met Al Hall at a cocktail party and quick to get his kid out of the house Dad volunteered me. (At this same cocktail party my dad had his picture taken with Cesar Romero and it made all the papers. I still have no idea what Dad and The Joker were doing together, but there they are forever together in print.)

I went to the studio that evening not really knowing what to expect. I had no skills or experience. I didn't know anyone, BUT I was smart enough to keep my eyes open and see what I could do. For the most part I ushered clowns- Bozo, Cookie, Whizzo- back and forth between the green room and the set and took messages and food between the control room and Al at the front of the stage.

As happens in 24-hour telethons there is a lot of downtime and that is when this internship really paid off. I was just starting to think about colleges and asked Al where he thought a young guy like me should go- Syracuse, Northwestern and Boston University, I still remember his answer. I also spent a lot of time with Jose (Joe) Cornejo who was the associate producer and was a regular member of WGN's Cub broadcast team. I asked him where he went to college and he said, "Hard Knocks."

Thinking he said Knox College I said, "In Galesburg?"

He laughed and said, "No, the school of hard knocks."

I still didn't get it, then finally it dawned on me. "You didn't go to college!" I asked as if he had two heads. Nope, and lesson learned.

I must have done something right that night because Al Hall gave me his business card (the first one I ever received) and invited me out to the station. A couple of years later he gave me a letter of recommendation for college and a year after that recommended me for an internship at an NBC affiliate. Joe Cornejo invited me to the ballpark to watch a Cubs broadcast from the booth.

This one night of experience quickly went to the top of the work experience portion of my resume- pushing aside Soda Jerk, Paper Boy and Camp Counselor. Getting in the door was the first step, but knowing how to act professionally once there was the key. Had I been bored, inattentive, less curious or fallen asleep- all very real possibilities when working all night- I would have missed out on the chance that really helped define and shape my career.

The moral of the story is obvious (it's not become drinking buddies with Cesar Romero) take every opportunity you get and make the most of it when you can.

Lesson Learned.

PeterH

Plate Spinning

2007-10-09T23:30:00.000-05:00

I am often asked about how I can juggle being a full-time teacher and a full-time filmmaker. Honestly, I don't give it much thought, it is just something I do and have done for a long time. Ten years ago I did all that and went to graduate school at the same time and not only survived, but was the better for it.

Multi-tasking is something I am hardwired to do. Much to my mom's displeasure (though I really think she likes getting my dad out of the house) my dad can't sit still. He is busier in "retirement" than when he worked.

To me the real key is collaboration. If you work with a bunch of trusted, good people then executing the work and time management is easy. And come on it is the film business after all. It's not as if I am juggling being a member of the bomb squad and a transplant surgeon.

Of course the main reason for doing this is that being an active filmmaker makes me a better teacher, and teaching makes me a better filmmaker. Besides, what else would I do?

PeterH

The Office

2007-10-07T18:22:00.000-05:00

I tell students often that the hardest part of being a filmmaker is getting the job. Once you get the job you just do what you have been training to do and the work should be easy. But that's not really true, the REAL hardest part of the job is dealing with the client.

Out favorite clients are the ones that say, "Jim, Peter we want you to go to London to shoot a couple of days and then take a day or two for yourselves." This actually has happened, and when it did, I immediately hit the phone and got us a reservation at The River Cafe- our favorite restaurant.

Unfortunately for the dumb filmmaker and his business partner this is a rare occurrence. More commonly we get a agency producer or client who likes to micro-manage. On more than one occasion- see my Cozmic Crunch post- we have had to handhold someone through the process and make a ton of changes only to come back to our original vision.

It is a paradox I never seem to get my head around. We've been hired because the client has seen our work and liked it, spoken with us, agreed to a budget, and then instead of letting us do that work they get all super hands on and controlling.

I don't get it.

When I go to a restaurant I do not barge into the kitchen and ask the chef why he is braising the osso bucco like that. I choose the dish and it is delivered to me. Then, if I have questions I ask. (A little more lemon zest perhaps, but I am finicky.) Yet, in this business you find this all too frequently.

I was recently telling a friend about a project and said we padded a budget because instinctively we knew the client was going to need managing. They will spend more money because we will have to spend time massaging the client, rather than being filmmakers. I think it goes both ways: if the client is a micro-manager then we will need to manage them more. You get what you pay for but please try to stay out of our kitchen. If you need more lemon zest, we'll deliver

PeterH

Let's Play Two!

2007-10-05T15:38:00.000-05:00

With apologies to Ernie Banks, Jim and I played a doubleheader today.

At 7:00 this morning we shot one of our Teen Parents as she spoke to a group of high school students about the choices she made and how it has impacted her life. It is, I think, (Have I said this before?) the last scene we will shoot for this Teen Parent film and it was a nice finishing piece of the puzzle. This young woman comes full circle so to speak.

We wrapped that job at 8:30 and drove into the city to start the second gig. We have signed confidentiality and non-disclosure agreements so all I can say is that over the next month we and a team of cameramen are shooting locations all over Chicago. When it becomes public I can reveal more. I can add this: tomorrow we shoot across the city, ending at Wrigley Field as the Cubs/Arizona playoff game begins.

Between the two jobs we also made an equipment change. The Teen Parent film is shot in standard definition, the new job is on HD. The two experiences could not be more different- both in subject matter and technology and brain function for the dumb filmmaker.

Strange as it seems it is not the first time we have played two. A few years ago we were in Seattle shooting at Safeco Field (maybe it's a baseball stadium thing that ties two jobs together) when we got a phone call asking if we could shoot something at the offices of that really big coffee merchant based out of Seattle- again non-disclosure prevents me saying more, but there is a half-caf, dry, grande, latte in it for you if you can figure it out. Anyway, we wrapped at Safeco at lunch, ate and started job number two. It was a nice way to pocket travel and per diem and do our client a big favor and give them something they ordinarily would not have paid for.

Being double booked has its advantages, but it sure makes me tired. The dumb filmmaker can only keep so many plates spinning at once.

PeterH

Reading Mary Beth

2007-10-04T03:38:00.000-05:00

Today is my sister's birthday. And in lieu of giving her anything tangible for her birthday, (cheapskate, busy) I am going to post a piece I originally wrote for Book Magazine in 2002. In the magazine they gave us the last page and it was illustrated by a drawing of Mary Beth's and one of her journal entries which, as always, begins, "Toady, I..."

Happy Birthday Mary Beth. You are catching up to me.

PeterH

During the summer of 1972, while my mother was pregnant, my parents and I read The Casting Away of Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine together. My father had read the book with his family thirty years earlier. Written in 1896 by Franck Stockton, it details the humorous adventures of two plainspoken, determined women who, along with their companion and narrator Mr. Craig, begin a trip from San Francisco to Japan with great expectations, only to become shipwrecked on a desert island. Ultimately their adventure turns into a better trip than the one they had intended to take.

That summer, we too had great hopes and expectations. I was nearly nine years old and convinced the kid would play second base next to my shortstop, turning the pivot on the Hawley to Hawley to Yastrzemski double play. My parents, teachers and great readers of mysteries, no doubt imagined a future doctor or lawyer or Ellery Queen. On October 4 my sister was born, and it soon became clear that she would not be any of those things. A doctor diagnosed her as retarded and suggested institutionalization.

As it turned out, Mary Beth was not institutionalized, but she would never become a doctor or lawyer or a second baseman, either. Still, like the rest of our family, she has always loved to read. She is about to turn thirty, and while not a strong reader, she is an avid one. She cozies up to the Sweet Valley Jr. High series and loves listening to the Harry Potter books on tape. And she relates to the Madeleine books because she, like Madeleine, was always dodging trouble.

Each summer when we were young, we would take our Pinto station wagon on road trips to and from Massachusetts. My sister and I would share the backseat. The trips were filled with lots of yelling and screaming, and one of my jobs was to keep my sister occupied. The best way to do it was by reading picture books to her. Curious George, Dr. Seuss -- anything with a rhyme and colorful pictures did the trick. When I was thirteen, my sister wandered off during a visit to the Baseball Hall of Fame. My dad, frantic, paid ten bucks for some kid’s bike and tore across Cooperstown, New York, looking for her. She reappeared an hour later, calmly holding hands with the person who found her. Years later in Paris with my parents, Mary Beth refused to leave until she saw the hospital where Madeleine had her appendix removed.

Last Thanksgiving we visited our parents in Florida. Mary Beth, as is her habit, brought three library books with her. She pitched a fit when she realized the books would be due before she returned home, and she didn’t want to pay the forty-five--cent fine. We gave her two quarters, but she wouldn’t budge. So the day after Thanksgiving, we all marched to the post office and mailed the books back to the library. It cost us $3.95, but she was happy that the books were returned on time.

Like the characters in The Casting Away of Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine, my parents and I have adapted to our adventure, and while our journey has not been the one we expected to take, it has been, perhaps, better. We do not take for granted moments such as seeing Mary Beth race across the finish line at the Special Olympics, winning yet another gold medal, or the day she moved into her own apartment in Davenport, Iowa where she works for the Handicapped Development Center assisting physically disabled clients. And though I am an egghead college teacher, I think she might have a greater appreciation for the written word. She is the only one in the family who keeps a daily journal.

I have given up on the hope of playing for the Red Sox, and I know Mary Beth and I will never have deep conversations about Fagin or the Cheshire Cat, but that doesn’t stop me from trying to read her. The other day as she worked her way through another Sweet Valley Jr. High book, I sat wonderingwhere those words were taking her. So, I asked Mary Beth why she liked to read, and she looked at me and gave the same answer anybody would, "It’s fun," she said. "And I like the stories."

The Experience

2007-10-02T21:45:00.000-05:00

If you can just get your mind together
then come across to me.
We'll hold hands and then we'll watch the sun rise from the bottom of
the sea.
But first
Are you experienced?
Have you ever been experienced?
Well I have.
-- Jimi Hendrix

Towards the end of the first class I ever taught a student commented on what we had been doing for the last 15 weeks and said that it was pretty cool. And I flippantly responded, "Yes, that's The Peter Hawley Experience." Of course I was just playing off of the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and how was I to know he had know idea what I was referencing.

Anyway, a few days later other students were saying they were glad they had the Peter Hawley Experience. I thought they were joking, maybe even making fun of me, but no. Soon it caught on and I was even calling my own classes "the Peter Hawley experience (lower case of course.) But it stuck and even as recently as a week ago I heard from a former student who said they were glad to have the "experience."

That word- experience- is funny. It says a lot. It is active not passive. A while ago we were sitting around a faculty meeting and my colleague John Murray commented on how much he hated using the word "exercise" when giving assignments. He added that it always made him want to pull on sweat pants an do push ups- not the image you want to give to students. (Push ups, not John in sweats, a striking figure.)

I couldn't agree more and since then we have made a conscious choice to call all of our in class work- experiences rather than exercises. So my screenwriting students now have the experience of writing and presenting a logline and a pitch rather than the "exercise" of writing one.

This in short is part of what makes up The Peter Hawley Experience. I am so glad I didn't reference another song on Are You Experienced, or all my students would be suffering from "Manic Depression touching their soul."

PeterH

The Graduate

2007-09-29T07:17:00.000-05:00

I was struck dumb the other day (an easy pose for me) when I saw the release of the special 40th Anniversary edition DVD of The Graduate. I have seen The Graduate maybe 20 times, maybe more. It's one of my favorite films because every time I view it I see something else.

I saw it first when I was about to graduate from high school and I think I identified with Ben in many ways- just being a little confused and wondering what there was in this life, all these adults coming at you with suggestions. I don't know what, as Mrs. Robinson says to him.

The next time I saw it was during my freshman year in Boston at a screening on the Harvard campus. Students were laughing. Laughing! How dare they ruin my film by laughing. Then I realized it was also a comedy and really appreciated the humor in the film. On other viewings I enjoyed it for the images- they way they flowed and the montages of Ben and Mrs. Robinson both before and after he tells Elaine of the affair.

I like any film you can deconstruct from multiple perspectives (for kicks look at Casablanca as a musical, then again as a comedy). One could write a thesis on The Graduate as a musical. Everyone remembers the Simon and Garfunkel music but often overlooked is Dave Grusin's great score and incidental music.

One of the last times I saw the film was just after 9-11 and I was struck by how unaffected Ben and Elaine are by the Vietnam War and the Summer of Love. Nowhere in the film- with the possible exception of Norman Fell asking Ben if he is an "agitator"- is there a reference to hippies and the war. Ben follows Elaine to Berkeley for christsakes. I am almost certain there were protests against the war then and someone on campus had a copy of Sgt. Pepper's or The Doors first record or Are You Experienced. The lack of contemporary cultural references is the one strike against The Graduate.

I care about the film so much my friend Craig tells me that on my tombstone (OK I want to be cremated, but that's another story) it will say, "Here lies PeterH. He didn't get to make The Graduate."

PeterH

Pulp

2007-09-26T18:10:00.000-05:00

The first semester I was a college teacher I began receiving treatments for films that went a little like this:

Two hit men, one black and one white, in black suits travel around the city.

or

A man with a band aid on the back of his neck opens a briefcase and a light glows on his face.

or

A woman overdoses on heroin and a man brings her back to life with a needle of adrenaline to the heart.

That spring vacation I finally had some time off and caught up on some movies. So I am in the theater and John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson hit the screen and I'm thinking this is familiar. Then Uma Thurman gets a shot of adrenaline and I start getting annoyed. Finally when a band-aided Ving Rhames opened a briefcase and a light shines on his face, I swore out loud, mid-movie, "Those sons of bitches!"

When class resumed after the break I read them the riot act and tried to introduce the idea of original thought to the class. Since then I have been on the lookout for the popular student film. The following is a brief list of films important to my students and what they tried to do with it.

1) Fight Club. For a while every student film had to be green and film students started throwing around the processing phrase "bleach bypass."

2) The Usual Suspects. Student films are often confusing on their own. When they intentionally try to be confusing watch out.

3) Being John Malkovich. Not the plot so much but how many times can you use the half-floor trick.

4) Trainspotting. There was about a three semester stretch where every student film had to have strung out heroin addicts and music by Iggy Pop.

PeterH

The Classic Film

2007-09-25T06:29:00.000-05:00

There is something really comforting in that old stand by, the classic film. It's that film you have seen a half dozen times at least, or you flip on the TV and there it is and you sit down and watch it even though you have things to do, and before you know it the dishes aren't done and it's past your bedtime.

A bunch of films come to mind- just about anything by Billy Wilder- Sunset Boulevard, or any of his Matthau/Lemon films. Thinking of Walter Matthau takes my mind to Charade, where he is a good bad guy, and Charade lands me on both Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant. Who is the modern day equivalent of Hepburn and Grant? Julia Roberts and George Clooney? Even as I type those names I think, wha? As they say, they don't make them like that any more.

When I was making Victimless Crimes we worked six-day weeks, except for two days when we transitioned from shooting during the day to three weeks of night shooting. I had a serious head cold and settled down with a bowl of matzo ball soup and flipped on the TV. I had been trying to avoid films because I didn't want to "accidently, " borrow any ideas, but I was tired and had a cold and North by Northwest was just starting so I couldn't help myself. I watched it for probably the 10th time and when we came to the cornfield scene I sat up and noticed, really for the first time, how Hitchcock (will I ever be known as a director by just my last name?) put together the sequence.

I took stumbling on NxNW as a sign from the film Gods, so I began redesigning shots for the next scene we were going to shoot. There are no crop dusters in Victimless Crimes, but I can tell you exactly what shots were influenced by watching a classic film.

And my cold went away. Never deny yourself the chance to re-see a classic film.

PeterH

Improvisation

2007-09-22T08:25:00.000-05:00

I like to joke that as a teacher I make it up as I go along. All that preparation- who needs it? If I wanted to do homework I would be a student not a teacher. I am mostly joking, but as in any joke there is a little truth to it. I prefer to think of it as being in the moment and open to the flow of the class. Like jazz musicians playing live, there is a general plan and I work within it, yet still go off on solos and come back for the big finish. It works for me, I think.

Currently I am team-teaching (a first for me) with Perry Harovas, the head of the Visual FX department, and it has been a blast. Co-teaching allows me to be both leader and observer- and I have Perry teach all the hard stuff while I sit back and watch. The class is a micro-class of four sessions geared towards opening students up to the building blocks of storytelling. Informally, I call it the attention to details class.

On Thursday I started the class and these were my only notes:

Recap- Why are we doing this?
Hustle and Flow
Sendak- Shape of Music- process
Zappa
Guitar
Fantasia

I didn't even get to Hustle and Flow- that will be saved for a later day- but those brief notes lead us into a really great 90-minute session. Briefly, for those without a syllabus, our students had read an essay by Maurice Sendak about seeing colors in music. This lead me to ask students about their own creative process. Surprise! they seemed to discover they do in fact have a process, they just hadn't called it that yet. From there we went to a brief essay by Frank Zappa about framing (placing in context) one's art.

Earlier in the day I asked Perry what he thought about me bringing my guitar to class and seeing what the students "saw" as I played. I played a minor chord- students saw generally dark, moody images- followed by a major chord- and suddenly everyone was happy. I then passed the guitar to a student who played a nice little riff using both major and minor chords. It was great- we are about to create the Flashpoint school song. All of this lead us into screening the Sorcerer's Apprentice section of Fantasia and a lively discussion about the interplay of sound and image.

We think it worked well, but only time will tell.

PeterH

Collaboration part 3

2007-09-19T07:19:00.000-05:00

We made it.

Flashpoint Academy opened its doors on Monday and welcomed their first class. Monday was orientation and as part of it we screened Dean Paula Froehle's film, "The Collector," and our "making of The Collector" documentary.

The similarities between making a film and building a college are remarkable. During the summer pre-production phase each of us on the Flashpoint crew had a job to do. Recruiters recruited, IT experts did their magic and faculty hammered out classes, curricula and schedules. All of us worked towards the first day of production both independently and as one- just like a film production- coming together to produce a college.

Speaking of filmmaking and collaboration I owe a big thanks to my Windy Cine partner Jim who really figured out the HD workflow and did lots of post-production work as I phoned and e-mailed changes. The making of really works and it proves even a relatively small documentary needs to have good teamwork in order to be successful. Thanks, Jim.

PeterH

Doing it Right

2007-09-16T07:21:00.000-05:00

There was an interesting editorial in Friday's New York Times about how the University of California-Irvine botched the hiring of the dean of their new law school scheduled to open in 2009.

This was fascinating to me in many ways. 1) Planning a school 2+ years away? Come on we built Flashpoint in a little more than 100 days! It can be done. 2) What does it say to the future professors and students at that school that the boss doesn't have the integrity to stand by his own decisions. (The dean was offered the position, it was rescinded due to the deans left of center politics, then the position was re-offered.) Not a good start for the future law school if you ask me.

This brings me to our little school that does things the right way. Yesterday, the staff and faculty had a final walk through before the doors open tomorrow and we go live. When I walked into that building in April it was cement and plywood and studs on the wall. Today it looks like the nerve center of a high-tech business. It is -in a word I seldom use- awesome. It is clearly a place to do good work and make things happen.

As we walked through the halls Steven Berger, Flashpoint Special Projects Manager, came up to me and said, "This is going to be the best and most sought after film school in the country." I replied, "Unless the dumb filmmaker gets in the way."

Paula Froehle, our Academic Dean, heard this and reminded me that I was the first person she thought of when thinking about creating the film program. That made me feel very good. I think we did the right thing.

Tomorrow it's for real.

PeterH

Circle of Life

2007-09-13T18:39:00.000-05:00

"Old Man look at my life, I am a lot like you were."

I heard that Neil Young song recently and those lyrics really hit home.

40 some years ago my dad and mom packed up their relatively comfortable New England lives and left their families behind to move to Kentucky (From Boston to KY even today that sounds crazy!) so my dad could help start a progressive private school called The Lexington School. A dozen years later my dad moved across town to rival Sayre School and helped shape that school. Today those are the two best schools in the state of Kentucky.

So here I am, nearly 12 years into teaching at one of the largest and best films schools in the United States and I up and leave its relative safety to move uptown and to join a progressive upstart. In a day I went from the biggest film school in the world to the smallest. One of my parent's friends even asked if I should wait to take the job until Flashpoint became established.

What am I, nuts?

If I heard Neil Young's "Cowgirl in the Sand" would it be different? Probably not. I think it is in my blood to challenge students and challenge myself and to look at new ways to present material. In short, old man take a look at my life I am a lot like you.

PeterH

Starting Up

2007-09-11T18:31:00.000-05:00

Prior to Flashpoint the only previous experience I have with a start up venture was 20 years ago when I worked for the Museum of Broadcast Communications. Even then I was just a first generation hire, starting right around the day the museum opened the doors so I missed out on all the pre-launch chaos, business and excitement.

Comparing a museum devoted to archiving broadcast history to starting a new media arts college is an apt metaphor for my own experience, I think. I often say at Columbia I was teaching film history- the past and techniques of how things used to be done. Here at Flashpoint I am on the cutting edge. Not only am I on the cutting edge, I think I am actually one of the whetstones doing the sharpening.

It's heady stuff and something I don't take lightly.

Later this week we are going to shift our work space from a satellite office to the main campus in downtown Chicago. When we leave this office- and the Post It notes on the wall and the bad lighting and the spotty internet, and the iffy food place downstairs- I am going to be a little sad. Much like the astronauts of Apollo 13 who saw the LEM as their life raft, I see our temporary office as the mother ship where all the ideas we will execute over the next couple of years took seed. Soon we will jettison the space and gravity will bring us back to earth and the real world.

As comparisons go I think the opening of Flashpoint Academy, the first new college in Chicago in 4o years, is more like the release of a hot new product. Think of Flashpoint as an iphone or the release of the hot new video game or the Super Bowl or a new CD by your favorite musician. We are like that.

Ready or not here we come.

PeterH

Post It!

2007-09-10T07:14:00.000-05:00

Who would have thought that the most valuable tool in building a college curriculum would be Post It Notes?

In the Flashpoint office we have a wall, much like this one, full of two-foot square month by month calendars going from September -May. On each of those calendars are Post Its with perspective classes written on them. We need a tangible and visual reference for our academic calendar so we decided on little sticky squares of paper. We spent the better part of June and early July putting classes up on that wall. When we finally locked in on a schedule we transferred the information from the wall to Excel programs and then passed that info on to Flashpoint registrar Brad Bergeron. At that point Brad did his registrarial magic and Viola! students and faculty had a schedule for the year.

In addition to Post Its the other thing that really surprises me about this college building experience is how much time we have spent with the registrar. Everything we do in terms of class schedules and credit hours must get approved by Brad. At Columbia I didn't even know then name of the registrar. At Flashpoint he is ever present.

Here is a typical early July day. I am at my computer and Brad quietly walks over to me and says, "Excuse me Peter but you seem to have made a little mistake."

"Huh?" the dumb filmmaker replies.

"Yes, you have 37 screenwriting sections scheduled for group A and only 3 for group B, you know they have to be equal."

As much as I want to say a la Samuel L. Jackson, "Check out the big brain on Brad!" I say, "Sorry, I'll fix it," and slouch back over to the wall of Post Its.

PeterH

Drinking the Kool-Aid

2007-09-09T09:02:00.000-05:00

On Wednesday this past week Howard Tullman, President and CEO of Flashpoint Academy, cuffed me on the back of the head. Yesterday, as we were waiting for people to arrive at a Flashpoint open house, founder and chairman Ric Landry slapped me on the forehead. Now if Paula Froehle, academic dean, slaps me across the face (inevitable) I will have hit the Flashpoint Academy beating trifecta. In all seriousness I take these whuppins' as signs of endearment (if not I have a pretty good law suit on my hands, I think).

We are a week away from opening the doors to the first class and all is terrific. The building at 28 N. Clark Street is state of the art and for the first time in my teaching career I feel I have all the tools and resources necessary to be the best teacher I can be. In all modesty and honesty I believe Flashpoint is going to be a big success and I take great pride in helping to get it off the ground.

More on Flashpoint developments as the week progresses but for now I need to work on my bobbing and weaving and keeping my left up.

PeterH

Sentimental Education- Part 2

2007-09-08T08:11:00.000-05:00

Flaubert's Sentimental Education (that's him to the left) is a ironic and pessimistic novel, but what would you expect from the man who wrote Madame Bovary. I would like to think I am not that dark (I am an Optimist's son after all) but there are certainly some aspects of schooling that drive me mad.

As a teacher I think I draw on all the formal learning from my youth and distill it somehow into my own approach to teaching. I would like to believe I take the best of how I was taught and leave the rest behind. The following are some general things one would find in my classes. It is up to you to decide how Draconian I am.

Attendance- Come to my class. Columbia and now Flashpoint have these serious attendance polices- X number of absences means a drop of a letter grade, more means an automatic F, 15 minutes late is half an absence. (Fourteen minutes late is OK I guess?) I don't get it and don't care. One of the appeals of going to college for me was that I didn't have to go to class if I didn't want to. Just show up to my class on time and everything's cool.

Tests- I don't like them. I prefer oral exams and practical tests- show me you know how to do it. In the film business rarely is there one right answer, usually there are several ways to reach the same conclusion. A standard test doesn't allow for options.

Writing- We will write a lot, tear it up and write some more. You have to be able to express yourself through the written word.

Class participation- Critical. For starters it takes the pressure off the dumb teacher to fill up the time, but more importantly, when we start having a dialog in class as opposed to me talking at you, the class is better.

Presentation- Almost all of my classes have components of students making a presentation to the rest of the class and defending their position. You can not manage in today's workplace with out being able to speak well and concisely.

As I read over these last three topics (I tend to blog in stream of consciousness) it is clear to me that developing good communication skills is a driving force behind my teaching. Being in the communication business, I guess this makes sense.

PeterH

Sentimental Education- Part 1

2007-09-07T09:16:00.000-05:00

School resumed this week in Chicago and the big yellow buses are a reminder of just how much I hated going to school. While I was a good student and had lots of friends and did lots of extracurricular activities I just plain hated going to school. All those rules and regulations, do this and do that- who needs it? But now I am a college teacher so go figure.

From Montessori until I graduated from high school I went to school everyday with my father. Each morning we would get up and have breakfast- the same thing, cereal. After 1700 of these breakfasts before my 18th birthday I now refuse to eat cereal. (The last time was in England a few years ago when my alternative was a “healthy” full English breakfast.)

Our conversation consisted of this: Dad: Eat your flakes. Me: OK.

The sum total of 14 years of weekday morning conversation- 4 words.

Several of those years my dad had a Volkswagon I had to push to get it started and then run to catch up to the car a la Little Miss Sunshine. These moments with my dad were often the highlight of my school day. It was downhill - literally from that start- from there.

So with apologies to Gustave Flaubert below are a series of highlights (lowlights?) of my early education.

Montessori- My grandmother, Kakky, picked me up and asked me what I learned today. I said, “I don’t know.” She said you were in school all day and didn’t learn anything? Oh to have been able to shift into my adult head and say, “You know it was all that 2+2 is 4 and ABC bullshit. Give me a break grandma!.” Instead I said something like “we used crayons” and hoped for unconditional grandmotherly love.

Second grade- Luckily I was allowed to skip first grade, I don’t think I could have handled any more rudimentary education. However, skipping a grade made me forever the youngest in my class.

Fourth grade- Each weekend Mrs. Hackworth (a sometime reader of this page) made the class memorize a poem and be prepared to recite it in front of the class on Monday morning. Now as every fourth grader knows poems rhyme, that’s the definition of poetry, right? Evidently not. Mrs. H. gave us “real poetry” the crap that doesn’t rhyme or make any sense. Poetry and public speaking- I’m in fourth grade this is not Victorian England! Note to Mrs. Hackworth, thanks to you I still have trouble sleeping on Sunday nights in anticipation of failing my poetry reading.

Fifth grade- An insane woman comes to our class room and speaks only in French to us. She refuses to allow any English. This is funny for the first five minutes, then we think she is seriously disturbed. This continues for days and weeks. Finally I burst out, “Je vais a la salle de bains.” Where this comes from even surprises me but my point is made and I was allowed to escape to the bathroom. (I know it really means “I go to the bathroom” but we had covered “May I” yet.)

Seventh Grade- By now I am thoroughly ensconced in the third ring of education Hell. Our assignment is to write a science report and make an oral presentation to the rest of the seventh grade on a topic picked randomly from a hat. My pick: the reproductive process of amphibians. No, nothing safe an easy like the Big Bang (at least my school believed in that) . Being good (strict?) parents I had to rehearse my speech in front of them. I do not know what is worse, talking about frog sperm in front of my parents or in front of 50 7th graders.

Ninth Grade- What is with this incessant need for my teachers to insist on memorization and public speaking? Draconian Mr. Grunwald makes the class memorize the Declaration of Independence from the preamble through the charges section. (Even then I was certain this is something that I would never need to do at any time of my life.) Then, over the course of a month he randomly picked students to recite passages to the class. So I memorized the damn thing and he never called on me!

That’s enough for now I am having bad flashbacks.

PeterH

Hard at Work

2007-09-04T07:41:00.000-05:00

Labor Day got me thinking about hard work- something I try to avoid at all costs. Aren't p.a.s and t.a.s supposed to do the hard stuff while directors and "professors" do the "Big Picture" work?

One of those cliches (if I knew how to do one of those accent things over the e in cliche I would do it, so you grammar police leave me alone) every bad football coach likes to trot out is "Failing to prepare is preparing to fail." Yuck! As bad sports cliches go I much prefer "There is no 'I' in team,"but that is for another post.

But those bad coaches are on to something and I have seen first hand truly great performers bust their butts rehearsing when other mere mortals (or dumb filmmakers) would have been off doing something more fun. I am going to share a few of those stories here and you can infer what you want.

1) In 2001 I was making a TV show for kids called Rainbow Soup about art and world culture and got to observe a lot of different artists in their process. As part of this I had the chance to see and interview Peter Gabriel (pictured here) as he played his first concert in eight years. It was a rather sudden appearance- he was going to headline the Womad Festival in Seattle after Robert Plant had to back out. Originally Peter was going to place a simple acoustic set, but two days before the show he decided to go all out with a band. At 7am on a Sunday morning, twelve hours before he was to go on stage, there is Gabriel and band in a park in Seattle working their assess off rehearsing for the show. At 7 that night he walked on stage and 30,000 people went crazy. He proceeded to play, by his own admission, a very mediocre set. As part of our arrangement I spoke with him on camera just after he walked off stage. He shook his head and looked into the camera and said, "That's what you get when you only rehearse for two days." I'll never forget it, or him really working hard when he didn't have to. The crowd loved him anyway.

2) At the end of our commercial reel there is a spot for MVP.com where Michael Jordan looks into the camera and asks, "Any Questions?" Jim shot him at a Bulls practice, Michael was staying late, by himself shooting free throws. The six-time NBA champ and MVP was in the gym by himself practicing. Did he need to do that? He thought so.

3) Years ago I had to go on a location scout at a local Chicago nightclub. When the manager met us at the door and let us in and in there was loud music playing in the background. It sounded like Elvis Costello to me- he was in the middle of a three or four day stop in Chicago. We round the corner and there on stage was Elvis and the Attractions rehearsing. The manager of the venue asked me if I minded them rehearsing while we were there. What was I going to say, "No! Elvis give it a rest we need to talk here." Of course he could play, however I needed to get on the stage so Elvis stopped what he was doing and invited us up. He was very gentlemanly, asked us what we were about to shoot and if it was OK if he could continue his rehearsal. When I was finished with my work he paused and asked if everything was OK. I said sure and asked if I could watch for a while. He said yes, and proceeded to tear into Pump it Up. My question is this. In the thousands of shows Elvis has played since the mid 1970s how many times has he played Pump it Up? Thousands? Did they really need to rehearse that badly? I guess so.

Practice makes perfect. (Sorry for the cliche.)

PeterH

Laboring On

2007-09-01T13:33:00.000-05:00

It is Labor Day weekend and for most of us that means a work holiday on Monday. Those of us in the freelance filmmaking or college building businesses never seem to get a day off, there is always something to do or something to think about, but at least I don't need to go into the office. I am splitting my work time this weekend imagining my first few weeks of teaching and then writing a proposal for the city of Aspen, CO which wants a documentary on their historic preservation program.

I joke frequently with my colleagues that I don't like to work and I really don't like teaching (if it wasn't for the students teaching would be great!) But that's not true I love both jobs and being a working filmmaker makes me a better teacher and vice versa.

My work time is generally filled creating things and making something (a college, a film, a class schedule) out of nothing. I get to work with clever and creative people who never fail to surprise me with their ingenuity and good humor. My big work complaints these days are along the lines of "Dan, the internet is down " and "What do you mean a January start- it can't be done!"

No, my job is easy and positively cushy compared to coal miners and firemen, and single welfare moms and day field laborers. They are the ones who deserve a day off with pay, so happy Labor Day and thank you for your hard work.

PeterH

You Can't Give It Away

2007-08-30T08:07:00.000-05:00

Ten years ago this week we were hired to make a pair of commercials for Canada Dry and Schweppes. It was a promotional commercial and we had two build two sets using bottles of Ginger Ale, Club Soda and Tonic Water. One set was for the Canada Dry products and the bottles surrounded a Jeep they were giving away. The other set used the Schweppes products and we created a little putting green as their prize was a trip to the British Open golf tournament.

As filmmaking goes it was easy. Once the sets were built it was like shooting still pictures because nothing moved. The hard part of the job was building the sets with the bottles of soda. A semi-truck full of soda was delivered to the studio and for three days the art department and production assistants built our two sets with plastic soda bottles.

The shoot went well, and as often happens the agency was on a hard deadline so we had to transfer film on a Saturday morning- the morning Diana's death was announced- at double time. At the transfer session we asked the agency producer when someone was coming to pick up the soda and deliver back to the bottler. She told us we can't send it back because it costs too much to ship back to Dallas. The soda was ours to do with what we wanted.

What does one do with 10 or 20 THOUSAND bottles of soda? We had another problem- the bottles were sitting in the studio and we didn't want to pay $750 a day just to store ginger ale, so on that Monday we began the process of trying to give away a truck load of bubbly water. First we offered it to the crew, we all took as much as we wanted. (I don't drink soda, but I do enjoy a vodka and tonic. Note to self, next time get the Stolichnaya account.) We contacted charities and delivered cases of product to a Chicago social service agency called Off the Street Club- they were thrilled, but couldn't take more than a few hundred bottles.

We tried leaving it for the garbage collectors, but they wouldn't take it because the bottles were full. So at the end of the day we had a team of production assistants pour a few thousand liters of soda into the gutter and down into the Chicago sewer system.

I like to imagine all the bubbles cleaning the Chicago sewer system, but I don't think that happened.

PeterH

Shout it Out

2007-08-28T19:06:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I shared a tale about a company (General Mills) that was too cheap to send us enough product for their own TV commercial so we had to go out and buy Raisin Nut Crunch and sell it back to them. Today, I’ll share a slightly different take on the behind-the-scenes world of TV advertising.

A few years ago we were hired to make a pair of TV spots for Shout Carpet Cleaner. It was a nice job- two or three production days and a couple of more days to build the set- plus a day of watching grape juice dry and getting paid for it. (When you do product comparison commercials there is a lot of attention paid to the legal end of things. Here we compared Shout to “the other leading brand" (Resolve) as “real people” tried to get dried grape juice stains off of white carpet. To make the test legal, the day before shooting a scientist from SC Johnson and Dan Dreesen, our ace prop master, poured exact amounts of grape juice on carpeting. The stains had to sit and dry over night to make the test valid and Jim and I had to sign affidavits agreeing to the above.)

It ain’t exactly like working in a coal mine this film business.

The shoot went great, lots of real women being amazed by how great Shout worked. It was one of those shoots where everything we did went as planned. As we worked through the first day of production Dan came up to us and said he had a problem. The prop bottles of Shout the agency supplied were beginning to crack. He was able to rig a workaround but we had to be careful how the women handled the bottles.

The next week Jim and I did the edit, Two spots cut to a re-written version of the song “Shout.” They turned into two great little commercials AND the product worked great too. Win Win, right?

Wrong.

It turned out the problem we discovered in the packaging while shooting was the fatal flaw. To make the product work affectively, the bottle needed two chambers to hold the different “ingredients” that make up Shout. That configuration stressed the spray nozzle and the bottles gave out.

So after millions of dollars of development money and thousands more on marketing- including our fees- SC Johnson pulled the plug.

Next a company that had so much product we couldn’t give it away.

PeterH

Clients...

2007-08-27T06:50:00.000-05:00

...you can't live with 'em, you can't shoot 'em.

The number of odd choices and decisions clients make never seems to end. Most of the times they do something because of how it affects (effects- the dumb filmmaker never remembers?) the bottom line. But if you think about it closely the cost of making and airing of a TV commercial shouldn't affect it at all. A commercial- good or bad- will draw attention to a product but the TV production costs are such a small factor in the overall performance of the brand, the outcome is negligible.

As that is my preamble here is dumb client story number 521.

A few years ago we were shooting a pair of spots for the General Mills cereal brands Basic 4 and Raisin Nut Bran. Over a few days we built a supermarket aisle. We cast a kid to be "the Stock Boy" and were all set to go except for one thing- General Mills refused to send us enough boxes of cereal to stock our shelves. It was ridiculous, they are paying $75,000-$100,000 in production costs, yet can't send us a few hundred boxes of their product. The ad agency was no help, but they did tell us we could go buy cereal and charge it back to them as an overage,

So, a few days before the shoot we had production assistants scour the Chicago area for boxes each cereal. We ended up buying an additional couple of hundred boxes of flakes at $4 a box which we then marked up 25 percent and charged back to the agency, which then marked it up again and charged the client. So General Mills ultimately spent $1500 buying their own cereal from us. Go figure.

PeterH