Smile

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

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...

...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

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

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

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

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