A journey through maturity

It's been an eventful month. I guess it sort of started at the end of May, when filmmaker/fundraiser Tom Malloy spoke at the monthly Rochester Movie Maker's meeting. Malloy identified 7 common mistakes that filmmakers make, which I'll share with you here:

1. Not firing a pissed-off crewmember. Especially if he's the DP (director of photography), who sets the tone of the shoot.

2. Being too cheap on food. You should have a great craft service table, not just pizza. A Hollywood shoot pays people a meal penalty when they don't get lunch. (I would add to this an unwritten rule I learned somewhere, probably in film school: if you're not paying people then you definitely have to feed them.)

3. Making decisions too quickly, without thinking them through. He seemed to be talking specifically about deciding who to have on your crew. When hiring someone, you should get references.

4. Not focusing enough on the actors and their performances. You can fix technical mistakes in post, but not acting mistakes. Sound is more important than picture.

5. Giving control to someone who can shut you off in a heartbeat.

6. Not buying swag. He said that T-shirts, hats, etc. are good things to give your team, especially if they're not being paid well. (In the interest of balance, I should say that I've heard other people say the opposite, that it's money wasted promoting the film to people who already know about it.)

7. Not having a vision or taking charge. You don't have to be a dictator or asshole, but you need to know where you're going. You need to have a vision so that people will believe in you and respect you.

Some of these things I've already learned, either through experience or from being told by someone else, but it's still advice worth hearing.

He then ended with an anecdote which basically had the following moral: You need to have the fire and the willingness to not listen to people who discourage you.

That's a good lesson too, and one which I personally have found harder to follow with age. As you get older, and farther away from the world of high school and college, you can end up being less and less in touch with other people who share your goals and priorities, making it more of a challenge to keep the flame alive.

I've been thinking a lot about these things because I recently reached a landmark birthday, one that makes you take stock of your life. As it happened, the 1982 classic Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan was playing at the George Eastman House around the same time, which seemed fitting since that's a movie where Kirk finds himself having a birthday and thinking about getting older. So I decided to invite some friends to have a birthday dinner with me and then go see it.

I haven't watched much old-school Star Trek in a while, so seeing this movie on the big screen again made me realize something. If you were a nerdy kid in the 80s who was into books and creativity, and alienated from the world of sports, then Star Trek was practically your only exposure to grown-up virtues like teamwork, leadership, courage, loyalty, and self-sacrifice. Most other sci-fi tends to be about nonconformists heroically bucking the system altogether, either by escaping it or by overthrowing it. And while that can be a good message when you're an adolescent trying to find your identity and escape peer pressure, it doesn't always apply so well to the working world of adulthood, where you are much more interdependent on other people.

That same weekend, the Visual Studies Workshop had a big sale, which included tons and tons of books on art and philosophy and so on, for dirt cheap. I picked up a fair bit of esoteric and psychedelic reading material, to refuel the creative side of my brain.

When I was in college, the 60s generation still cast a long shadow. There was still a lot of emphasis on being innovative and irreverent, and marching to your own drummer. While that generation had become sour and snobby and censorious by the time I was growing up, I still respected their original emphasis on optimism and creative freedom. And I used to think that sci-fi, as a genre, was part of that, because that was the genre where you could make your own rules and create your own world.

As my generation has come of age and taken over the culture, I've sensed a growing emphasis on hostility and cynicism. It's as if people can't think of any way to make themselves feel important except by resenting and criticizing anyone who's actually made something of themselves. The idea that the role of creative people is to be a punching bag for less creative people doesn't sit well with me. My generation's attitude seems to be that life is just one long struggle to climb back into the womb. The few tentpole movies that aren't just nostalgic reboots of an existing franchise tend to be about the world being destroyed. There's a sense that the past is more comforting than the future.

But if you can manage to escape from people who have that mindset, and look at what the next generation are up to, there seems to be much more friendliness and sociability and willingness to make connections. I know that musician Amanda Palmer had a gig not that long ago where she let fans sign her naked body. I find it hard to fathom having that kind of trust in strangers. I'm much more used to having to have my guard up.

Rightly or wrongly, I guess I learned a different life lesson, from my peers and from the generation before us. I learned that you can expect other people to try to stomp you down, and that you will survive only if you stick to your guns and don't worry about what other people think. But I'm feeling like that lesson has outlived its usefulness.

A lot of the experiences and influences I've had in recent years have led me down the path of satire, of wanting to tell stories that protest and point out what's wrong. But with the modern wealth of entertainment options, people are much more likely to filter out anything that doesn't speak to their existing tastes or values.

People want to be entertained, and that's not a dirty word. But being an artist isn't a dirty word either.

That's the twin challenge I'm facing when trying to write these damn novels. I'm trying to get back to the wildness and freedom and craziness that meant so much to me when I first became a writer and a filmmaker. At the same time, I'm also trying to brush up on my understanding of what a story needs in order to truly click with an audience. Is there enough action? Is there enough humor? Is there enough character? Does it have that deeper level that makes something truly loved, not just briefly fashionable?

There are times when it barely seems worth the struggle, and then there are times when unexpected rewards occur. This past month, to my great surprise, I won a Most Distinguished Member Award from the Buffalo Movie-Video Makers group for my work as writer-director-producer of Saberfrog and co-producer of another feature, Bury My Heart With Tonawanda. The latter film, from writer-producer Adrian Esposito, has a heartwarming message of growth and acceptance and forgiveness, which has moved audiences to tears at screening after packed screening, most recently at the Memorial Art Gallery this past Thursday.

One of my past influences, cult filmmaker David Cronenberg, once said that he makes films in order to find out why he made them. Cronenberg is one of the less heartwarming filmmakers I can think of, but he makes a good point. Art is a journey, which takes the artists – and the people they invite to join them – to unexpected destinations.

So that's the trick – to stay open to new emotions and experiences as much as possible, even when other people seem more skeptical. It may get harder as you get older, but it is worth the effort.

Figuring out sci-fi timelines

Happy Towel Day, and Happy Birthday to that other franchise too!

So I have Book One of the Saberfrog novels more or less completed, and I'm compiling my notes to figure out the storylines for the other four. One of the things I'm having to do is nail down how much time passes between each book, and how old the characters are at the time.

Doing so has gotten me thinking about other franchises, and how much time is supposed to pass between installments. You've probably all seen movies where the sequel is supposed to take place only months or days after the original, even though the sequel was made years later and the actors are therefore older. Or sometimes they don't say how much time has passed, so you sort of assume that the same amount of time has passed for the characters as for the audience.

Occasionally it's hard not to wonder. Did the Peanuts characters live in a universe where little kids never age, or did all 50 years of it actually take place within a few years (say, in the late 1960s and early 1970s)? If the eleven seasons of M*A*S*H took place during the three years of the Korean War, is it possible to figure out what seasons took place in what year?

Of course, usually these series just make stuff up as they go along, without worrying about how things fit together or whether the actors are aging faster or slower than the characters they play.

But such franchises, if they last long enough, may eventually reach a point where they want to make prequels, or they want to have spin-offs that take place between existing installments. That's when the ret-conning begins. That's when some canon-keeper has to sit down and determine, once and for all, when these various installments took place, and how much time took place in between.

I decided to do some research and find out what the proper timelines are for some of these franchises. I figured knowing how much time was “really” passing, and how old the characters were at the time, would cause me to see these stories in a new light. Kind of like watching Memento in correct chronological sequence.

Anyway, read below for some occasionally-surprising chronologies,  in a shamelessly cracked.com-style format. I was never hardcore enough about any of these series to memorize every date or follow every spinoff, so a lot of this is new to me.

STAR TREK

The Star Trek timeline apparently went through various changes before being arbitrated by writers Michael and Denise Okuda. This Wikipedia article was my main source. Ignoring most of the various time-travel episodes, and focusing on when the “present” of the various TV shows and movies were supposed to be (as well as some backstory that is/was in our own future), here are some fun things I've learned about the Trek chronology:

1. Some of you reading this might live to see World War III.

The Trek TV shows and movies contain references to Earth's history getting worse before it gets better. The famous villain Khan is a product of the Eugenics Wars of the 1990s, which at the time were still in the future. World War III and the resulting apocalypse apparently take place in the 2050s (something to look forward to). The time-travel plot of Star Trek: First Contact puts our heroes at the end of this, in 2063, when humanity launches the first warp-drive spaceship and makes contact with the Vulcans.

2. The Enterprise was sloppy seconds by the time Kirk and the gang came aboard.

An early Enterprise, glimpsed in a picture on the wall in the first Star Trek movie, launched in 2123 according to a reference book that came out when that movie did. I don't know if other sources have stuck with that.

I never saw much of the show Star Trek: Enterprise, but apparently its four seasons take place in 2151-2155, with a series finale set in 2161, the year the United Federation of Planets is founded. Most of the original series characters are born in the 2220s or 2230s. (The timeline of the new J J. Abrams movies splits off at the point of Captain Kirk's birth in 2233.)

And after all that, the Enterprise we know and love, the good old NCC 1701, apparently had not one but two five-year missions with other captains – the first commanded by some guy named Robert April, the second by Christopher Pike. (Pike was the lead character in the first, rejected Star Trek pilot, called “The Cage”; it's considered canon because its scenes were used as flashbacks in a later episode.) So the old girl was in service for a good 9 or 10 years before Kirk took over. Who knew?

3. The original-series actors were older than the characters they played … except Spock!

The Wikipedia article states that Kirk's famous five-year voyage was from 2265 to 2270. I measured these dates not only against the birthdates given for these characters, but against how old the actual actors were at the time the show was made. If we assume that the first season of Star Trek in 1966 took place in 2265, then are the actors playing above or below their age?

At the start of the five-year voyage, Kirk would have been 32, while William Shatner was 35. Spock was 35, the same age as Leonard Nimoy (ironic since Spock is an alien and therefore the one character who could get away with being much older or younger than he looks). Sulu was 28 while George Takei was 29 – also pretty close. Scotty was 43 while James Doohan was 46.

But the hazards of space travel must have physically aged some of these characters just a bit beyond their chronological years. Uhura was 26 while Nichelle Nichols was 34. Dr. McCoy was supposed to be only 38 even though DeForest Kelley was 46. The biggest gap: Chekov was 20 while Walter Koenig was 30 (he was a year older than Takei, even though he was playing the young guy in the crew).

Also, I wasn't under the impression that the 1970s Star Trek animated series was considered canon, but according to this timeline, the three seasons of the original series and the two seasons of the animated series really do add up to comprise the famous five years.

4. There's a whopping 12 years, including another five-year mission, between the first and second movie.

In the real world, there was a ten-year gap between the end of the 1960s TV series and the first Trek movie, and I always assumed that there was a similar gap for the characters. But apparently, Star Trek: The Motion Picture takes place in 2273, only three years after the original mission ended. So while the characters have only aged eight years since the start of their original mission, the actors have aged 13 years.

But by the time of the movie Star Trek II, we've jumped ahead another twelve years, to 2285. This fits since Khan mentions being marooned by Kirk “fifteen years ago”, which is about how old his TV episode would have been when Star Trek II was made. But it also means that the characters are 20 years older than they were when the original series began, even though only 16 years had passed for the actors.

This Wikipedia article also claims that there was another five-year mission in between. No idea if that's just speculation based on the final scene of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, or if there are a bunch of novels or comic books or something that I don't know about.

5. When the last of the Kirk-era movie came out, the aging actors had actually aged less than their characters (though not by much).

Trek II and Trek III take place in the same year, with Trek IV the year after that and Trek V the year after that. We're up to 2287 now, and while only 2 years have passed in the Trek universe, the actors have aged 7 years. By now the actors are pretty much in sync – the characters are 22 years older than when they first started enterprising, while the actors are 23 years older.

Six years supposedly pass before the events of Trek VI in 2293, even though the movie only came about two years later. So the 1960s Trek cast, much mocked for their oldness when their last film came out in 1991, had aged only 25 years in real life while their characters had aged 28 years.

The opening prologue of Star Trek: Generations – in which Kirk, Scotty and Chekov christen the new Enterprise B – takes place in the same year as Trek VI despite coming out three years later. So those three actors end up breaking even.

I also notice that this is quite near the end of the 23rd century. I wonder if Starfleet celebrated the transition, or if there was a Y2K3C bug of some kind to worry about.

6. Compared to all of the above, the timeline of the later TV shows is a lot less nuts.

Skipping past the ill-fated Enterprise C (seen in the time-travel episode “Yesterday's Enterprise”, set in 2344) brings us to the era of Star Trek: The Next Generation, as well as Deep Space Nine and Voyager. Each of those seasons is a year, with Picard's crew of the Enterprise D have their adventures from 2364 to 2370, with the other two shows persisting into the 2370s. So all of those seasons (bar the time-travel ones, of course) apparently take place exactly 377 years in the future from when they first aired.

I haven't bothered to check how the dates of the Picard movies line up with the amount of time passing for the actors, but those movies take us to the end of the 2370s. And apparently, when the elderly Spock leaves his own time period in the J.J. Abrams Trek movie, the year is 2387 … and Spock is 157!

7. During the original series, Kirk and Sulu were deadbeat dads.

As you may recall, we met Kirk's grown son in the film Wrath of Khan, and Sulu 's grown daughter in Star Trek: Generations. The thing is, we never heard mention of these characters before their appearances in those films. So when the heck did Kirk and Sulu conceive these people?

Well, the simplest approach seems to be: figure out how old they were when we met them, and then work backwards. Unless there's some official source I don't know about, I don't think the age or birthdates of these characters were ever given, so the best I can do is assume that the actors were the same age as their characters.

Merrit Butrick, who played Kirk's son David Marcus, was 23 when Wrath of Khan came out. If that film took place in 2285, then David was born in 2262, when Kirk was 29 and still three years away from starting his famous five-year mission. So Jim Kirk and Carol Marcus (who was probably about five years younger than Kirk) got it on before the 60s TV show, not during or after it. I kind of assumed that, but it's nice to have figured it out for certain.

But what about Demora Sulu? Actress Jacquelin Kim was 29 at the time of Generations, set in 2293. If we assume that Demora was therefore born in 2264 … well, OK, she was also born before the TV show.

But where's her mom? It seems logical to assume that David was raised by Carol as a single mom, since he's got her surname and not Kirk's. But Demora is, well, a Sulu. So when Sulu was running around with his Enterprise friends, he had a daughter at home that he wasn't taking care of. Or maybe he was divorced and lost custody of her anyway.

Where was Demora during the third and fourth movie, when Sulu risked his career to save Spock and thus ended up in exile? Well, if Trek III was in 2285 and Trek IV the year after, then Demora was 21 … OK, that's not so bad. She would have been in college by then.

An extra wrinkle: According to http://www.startrek.com/database_article/sulu, Kirk had previously met Demora 12 years prior to the time of Generations. That would have been 2281, in between the first two movies. Sulu must have reconciled with her by then. She would have been about 17, so hopefully Kirk didn't make a pass at her.

STAR WARS

Star Wars would seem to be a simpler timeline, since we've got just the six “Episodes” to worry about. (Well, and a Clone Wars movie and some TV episodes and a zillion books.) But there are still some surprises.

1. Man, there are some novels set WAAAAY back in the past.

This Wikipedia article gives dates for all the Star Wars novels, including the novelizations of the six movies. Assuming the novels to be even remotely canon, we can use these dates to make sense of the Star Wars timeline.

I've read very few of the SW novels – none since the first Timothy Zahn book 20 years ago – so I'm gonna stick mainly to stuff that relates to the six movies. But I couldn't help but notice that there are some book series set thousands of years before the movies. It makes me wonder what kind of world they're set in. Was the Star Wars universe still hi-tech back then, or do those stories take place in a time before spaceships and talking robots? Is there an Also Sprach Zarathustra moment when someone invents the first lightsaber? I suppose I could read them and find out, but it kind of blows my mind just to think that such books were written at all.

2. “Weird Al” Yankovic correctly guessed how old Anakin and Padme are in Episode I.

“Oh, did you see him hittin' on the queen / even though he's just 9 and she's 14”, sang Weird Al in his famous Episode I parody “The Saga Begins”. Well, apparently that's how old Anakin and Padme actually were during the events of that movie. Michael Kaminski's The Secret History of Star Wars, an exhaustively researched book chronicling Lucas' revisions to the Star Wars backstory from the 1970s to 2005, gives those ages for Anakin and Padme in Episode I. The Wikipedia articles for Darth Vader and Padme Amidala also agree, unless someone's since changed those articles just to piss me off. (You knew Anakin Skywalker and Darth Vader are the same character, right? … um, spoiler.)

3. Obi-wan Kenobi seems a bit old to be a student.

I have long wondered how old Obi-wan was supposed to be in Episode I. Filming began around June 1997, when Ewan McGregor was 26. I seem to recall the blurb on the VHS box saying Obi-wan was 30, but VHS has now gone the way of Clive Revill's Emperor so perhaps we should no longer consider that statement to be canon. Kaminski's book says that Obi-wan was 25, and I'm prepared to accept that. At the very least, all evidence seems to point to Obi-wan being in his mid-to-late 20s.

In our world, though, 22 is old enough to graduate from college. (Also – to skip ahead a bit – that's how old Anakin is in Episode III, by which time he's clearly been a full Jedi for a while. And Luke, after what appears to be maybe a year of training of most, achieves Jedihood at age 23.) And we know from the prequels that Jedi training normally begins during childhood. So what is Obi-wan's problem? Why is he still following Qui-gon around as an apprentice at age 25?

Here's a thought. In The Empire Strikes Back, you may recall Yoda saying that Luke had “much anger in him” and the ghostly Obi-wan replying “Was I any different when you taught me?” You may also recall fans being annoyed when the young Obi-wan in Episode I seemingly contradicted Yoda's statement by turning out to be kind of a wallflower.

Well, here's my fan theory. I think Obi-wan was not a good student. Maybe he got held back a bunch of times due to bad grades, or getting in fights with other younglings or something. We know from Episodes II and IV that he likes to go to the pub more than you might expect a Jedi to do, and that he's friends with some dodgy characters. So maybe when we see him in Episode I, he is as square as he is because he's been trying hard to put some youthful mistakes behind him.

It's also possible that the plot of Episode I was originally intended to have Obi-wan in the Qui-gon mentor role, but Lucas changed his mind and decided to make Obi-wan an apprentice. But I like my theory better.

4. The Emperor is REALLY old by the time he meets Luke.

The actual Star Wars films never say what kind of calendar the characters use in this universe. However, Star Wars spinoffs apparently date everything relative to the Battle of Yavin, i.e. the attack on the first Death Star in the original Star Wars (Episode IV).

So the prequels take place in the years BBY (Before the Battle of Yavin), while The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi take place in the years ABY (After the Battle of Yavin). I don't think this is supposed to be the dating system actually used by the characters, merely a way for authors and fans to keep track of the time scale.

Anyway, Episode I takes place in 32 BBY. According to http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Palpatine , Palpatine was 30 years old in 52 BBY, so that would make him 50 years old during Episode I. (Actor Ian McDiarmid was about 53 when the movie was filmed.)

Episode II takes place ten years later, in 22 BBY. Anakin is now 19 (about a year younger than Hayden Christensen was), Obi-wan is 35 (about 6 years older than Ewan McGregor), Padme is 24 (about 3 years older than Natalie Portman), and Palpatine is 60 (7 years older than Ian McDiarmid).

Episode III, made three years later, takes place after another three years, in 19 BBY. Since Luke and Leia are born at the end of the movie, and Episode IV (the original film) is set in 0 BBY, it doesn't take a math genius to work out that Luke and Leia are 19 during the original film (about right for Carrie Fisher, though Mark Hamill was about 4 years older during filming). By then Vader (nee Anakin) is 41, the soon-to-be-late Obi-wan is 57, and Palpatine – though we don't see him in that film – is 82!

As in the real world, Episode V is three years after Episode IV, but only a year passes between Episodes V and VI. Nonetheless, when Luke confronts Emperor Palpatine, he's dealing with a dude who is 86. No wonder he walks with a cane.

ALIEN VS. PREDATOR VS. PROMETHEUS

Now here's a fun one. Take two franchises that were never intended to be in the same universe, make a couple of unloved movies to unite the two, and then make a prequel to one series that actually takes place in the future of the other series.

If we put all these stories in chronological order, then …

1. What happens in gang-ruled, near-future 1997 L.A. stays in gang-ruled, near-future 1997 L.A.

We begin with the movie Predator (which came out in 1987, so presumably took place then), followed by Predator 2, set in the then-future L.A. of 1997 (it was released in 1990).

Then … we get Alien vs. Predator in 2004. That film's sequel, Alien vs. Predator: Requiem, apparently also takes place in 2004. In neither film do I recall the characters recollecting the not-so-long-ago days when L.A. was a post-apocalyptic hellhole. But I haven't seen those films since they came out, so I don't remember.

The Predators go it alone again in Predators, released in 2010. I haven't seen it but am assuming it took place in the present. Apparently the Predators stopped bothering us by the time we mastered space travel.

2. The crew of the Nostromo really were the absolute last people to find about these aliens.

One thing I've noticed is that when a past-its-prime franchise gets an overdue reboot, the last and most hated installment before the reboot actually seems to lead directly into the reboot. The TV show Enterprise wasn't very popular, but it's an attempt to be a grittier prequel to the Kirk era, and in hindsight it seems entirely fitting that it would be followed by the J.J. Abrams' Trek film, which brings us to the era of a young Kirk. Similarly, everything Doctor Who fans criticized about the 1996 TV movie – the Doctor-companion romance, the slick production values, the bombastic score, the baffling and sentimental deus ex machina ending – in hindsight seems to predict the exact formula that made the modern series an instant hit under Russell T Davies.

What I'm getting at is this: The Alien vs. Predator films aren't gonna top any Sight & Sound poll any time soon, but what seemed like the silliest thing about them when they came out – the idea that Earth already knew about these aliens years before Ripley and company discovered them for the first time – ended up being the very same idea that Ridley Scott's eagerly anticipated prequel Prometheus bet all its chips on.

So 2010's Predators is followed, 13 years later, by Peter Weyland's TED Talk from 2023 – you know, that viral promotional video that came out before Prometheus did. The actual movie Prometheus – apart from its infamously cryptic opening – apparently begins in 2089; the ship takes until 2093 to arrive at the planet where they first discover the aliens. (Who already visited Earth in 2004 – did I mention that?)

According to http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1446714/faq and http://thewertzone.blogspot.com/2012/06/filling-blanks-tying-prometheus-to.html , the original Alien takes place in 2122, so it's just a mere 29 years after Prometheus that Ripley and the gang encounter the aliens on a different planet. The Weyland-Yutani corporation must have done an excellent job covering up both of humanity's 21st-century encounters with these aliens, or else the Nostromo crew might have been better prepared.

3. Ships can travel faster than light, but not that well.

As I indicated above, the crew of Prometheus leave Earth in 2089 and arrive at LV-223 in 2093. That's four years. So obviously it takes a long time to get from one star system or another. You can't just hit the hyperdrive and get there quickly.

Or can you? Consider that in the real world, the nearest star to our sun (Alpha Centauri) is more than 4 light-years away. Meaning that's how long it takes light – the fastest thing in the universe – to travel that far.

Dialogue in Alien indicates that the planet they're visiting (later christened LV-426 in Aliens) is in the vicinity of Zeta Reticuli, a star which in reality is 39 light-years away from Earth. But as one of the commenters here points out, in the film it apparently is considered possible to get home to Earth from there in 10 months. (And when that estimate is announced in the movie, it's greeted with a groan, indicating that that's actually an unusually long time.)

Without faster-than-light travel, you probably couldn't even get out of the solar system in 10 months, so it seems safe to assume that faster-than-light travel is involved. It's just not as advanced as the faster-than-light travel seen elsewhere in the sci-fi genre, since traveling between the stars seems to take months or years, rather than days or hours. It's more like going on a ship would have been in the days of Columbus. So 4 years is considered a reasonable travel time, but 57 years is not ...

4. This saga spans a huge time frame, during which not much seems to change.

Aliens, of course, takes place 57 years after Alien, since that's how long Ripley has been told her shuttlecraft had been drifting in space. Since we only hear that information in a scene that turns out to be a dream (something that confused me as a kid, frankly) I wouldn't be at all upset if someone decided to ret-con it away, but it seems to still be considered canon.

57 years ago in our world, hard drives and videotape were brand-new inventions. Segregation still existed. So did the Soviet Union. We hadn't yet put a man on the moon. Someone who'd been in hibernation for 57 years would have a lot of catching up to do. But in the Alien universe, there don't appear to have been any giant advances in that time. Space travel seems to be the same. Androids seem to be the same.

We're never quite told when Alien 3 takes place, but Alien Resurrection apparently takes place 200 years after that. Again, no big technological, cultural or political shifts seem to have occurred in the three centuries since the time of Prometheus and Alien.

I don't have any witty point to wrap all this up with, except this: They should do an Expendables-style teamup of the various main characters from this double franchise. Bring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Danny Glover, Sanaa Lathan, Lance Henriksen and Noomi Rapace out of cryosleep to team up with the cloned Ripley so they can fight off the Aliens and Predators at the same time. I can't remember if Ron Perlman's character was still alive at the end of Alien Resurrection, but if not then clone him too.

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY

If you think you know who's buried in Grant's tomb, or how long the Hundred Years War lasted, then you probably feel brave enough to hazard a guess as to what year 2001: A Space Odyssey took place in. (Clue: the title.)

Well, not so fast, wiseass. There's a big old “18 MONTHS LATER” intertitle separating the early Heywood Floyd scenes (in which the monolith on the moon is discovered) and the later scenes of Dave, Frank and HAL aboard Discovery. So which part takes place in 2001?

It seems reasonable to assume that the Dave/HAL stuff, which makes up the bulk of the drama, is the part that takes place in 2001. If so, then when did the Heywood Floyd stuff take place? If the HAL stuff is in the second half of 2001, then the Heywood stuff is in early 2000. But if the HAL stuff is in the first half of 2001, then the HAL stuff is in late 1999.

The movie itself doesn't offer many clues, other than Heywood being told by a colleague that she hopes to see him at a conference in June. Which doesn't necessarily help. However, an easily forgotten fact is that 2001 is actually a minor franchise – it spawned a series of novels, one of which was made into a cinematic sequel. So let's see what the movie 2010 has to tell us.

The opening titles tell us that, yup, the monolith was discovered in 1999, and that Discovery was lost in 2001. Later dialogue in the film says that the order given to HAL which led to his breakdown was dated January 30, 2001. I'm guessing this was slightly before the HAL scenes shown in the movie, so the HAL scenes have to take place no earlier than February 2001 ... but also no later than June 2001, in order for the Heywood stuff to take place in late 1999 rather than 2000.

Which raises the next question … when does 2010 take place? As in the previous film, there are scenes set before and after the long journey to Jupiter. In an early scene, Heywood tells his son that it will take two and a half years to go and come back. So half of that round trip is 15 months (fuel efficiency has apparently improved since 2001). Assuming that the bulk of the drama is in 2010, when does the beginning of the movie take place?

There's a big honking close-up of a Time magazine cover during the latter part of the movie, but the date is out of focus. The month looks like a long word – so it's either one of the ones ending in “ary” or one of the ones ending in “ber”. If it's an “ary” month, then it's early 2010, so the opening scenes could be late 2008 or early 2009. But if it's a “ber” month, then it's late 2010, so the opening scenes would be late 2009. Screw it, let's just say 2009 and call it a day, especially since it's a future vision that never came true anyway.

Well, that was a fun waste of time. But if you want to know the correct chronologies of River Song, Jack Harkness or the Daleks, you're on your own.

The write stuff

Sorry to have been away from the blog for a couple months. Too busy living!

OK, I'll be more specific. At my friend John's behest I sent out some screeners of my movie to get reviews. I got a glowing review from German website Search My Trash: "loving but also enjoyably mean ... viciously funny ... irreverent ... insane ... a really fun trip". The site also interviewed me about the film.

The film also got comparatively mixed reviews from Film Threat and Swedish website Film Bizarro. I also sent screeners or emails to other sites, but these are the three that responded.

Also, a movie I helped produce, Bury My Heart With Tonawanda, had its festival premiere at the 2013 Buffalo Niagara Film Festival. It won two awards: Best Western New York Film, and Audience Award. Hopefully the film will have additional success in other festivals.

Apart from the usual everyday challenges of work and stuff, and the occasional don't-feel-like-doing-anything lull, I'd also been developing another project, a sort of biopic about the behind-the-scenes history of Doctor Who. I'm not normally one to make fan films – in general I think people should create their own work from their own imagination. But this was a subject that I've been passionate about for many years.  

After much research and rewriting, I had a script that I was pleased with, and that friends who've read it said they really liked. I was going to do it as simple animation (or possibly a radio drama), and was ready to start casting voice actors. However, my enthusiasm for the project fizzled when some nastier details emerged in the press about the behind-the-scenes behavior of 1980s producer John Nathan-Turner, who has become the subject of a new biography.

I went through kind of a crappy time in my life around eleven years ago, which coincided with the time when Nathan-Turner died and was thus being talked about a lot in Who circles. People talked about how he continued to do his job in the face of harsh personal attacks, and I took a lot of comfort in that example. My development of this Who project largely grew out of that. I knew John Nathan-Turner was a controversial and not-always-liked character, but that was part of what made him a flawed hero in my book – in spite of his faults, he continued to fight for something that others no longer believed in, despite being harshly criticized for his efforts.

When I read some of these new details, I realized John Nathan-Turner wasn't someone I could fully endorse as a protagonist. He still had his virtues, but his faults were unpleasant enough that I no longer felt like I wanted to spend hours of my own time on a non-commercial project that hinged on him being a sympathetic underdog. And it's probably just as well – I realized I'd still been carrying the baggage of that time in my life, embodied in this script, and it was time to let go.

What I am working on now is the series of in-universe sci-fi novels that Josh, the protagonist of Saberfrog, is always obsessing over. For a long time I've thought it would be cool to have those books actually exist, so that when he talks about them in the movie he's talking about real books that you could actually read.

I've written the first one and it's not that long – more of a novella length – but it's my first attempt at a novel, and certainly the longest piece of prose fiction I've ever created. I've sent a draft to some friends to see what they think, and now I'm moving on to the second one in the series. One day, I'll be able to sell the movie and the books together as a set!

I also have a prequel idea, kind of a Corman-esque B-movie about some of the older Saberfrog characters as loony college students in the 1960s. I've written the beginning of that script and gotten an enthusiastic response from people I've shared it with, but I haven't gotten much farther in it. I might end up jumping back and forth between that project and the novels, depending on what mood I'm in.

After years of focusing on the movie Saberfrog, I'm content simply to do some writing for a while. I had been thinking about maybe filming something new this year, and while I wouldn't entirely rule it out yet, it's now slightly late in the year to not have a full script or a plan. For now, I would just like to be creative in a way that doesn't cost anything or require the coordination of locations and other people's schedules.

So there'll be a new Saberfrog-related movie, and/or the Saberfrog-related novels. And I'll be working on them at my own pace, as time and energy allows. Hopefully by the end of the year I'll have something to show off. I'll let y'all know.

Also, yesterday I went to the annual artist conference DIY Days in New York once again, and got to network with other artists, writers and filmmakers outside my usual social circle, which was a huge shot in the arm.

While stimulation from others is important, finding the inner peace and strength to do your work is also important. When you're in a rut, the tendency is to constantly look elsewhere for answers, thinking that reading one more book or seeing one more movie or going to one more event will restore your focus. But I've found that when you're actually being productive and creative, that's when everything clicks. The smart and successful people aren't necessarily the ones who read and think and analyze the most. Maybe they're actually the ones who understand the basics just enough, and then roll up their sleeves to actually do the damn work.

So that's the next step right now. Just doing the damn work.

Making sense of it all

It's been a busy two months. I sent out some screener copies of Saberfrog, and have gotten a couple reviews – a very positive one from a German site called Search My Trash, and a rather more mixed review from Film Threat.

Getting that kind of public feedback for the movie has been a big shot in the arm. In the years since I started this blog, I've sometimes filled the slower months with blog posts about semi-related topics about filmmaking, discussions of movies that had some indirect kinship with Saberfrog, and the occasional flat-out rant about things that were bugging me about my generation and/or modern culture in general.

In hindsight, it seems like the plot of Saberfrog, and the writing, production and release of the movie, has been part of a larger effort to make sense of, adapt to, the world that's very different from the one I knew in my 20s. Over these past few years I've witnessed the rise of transmedia, the demise of Borders and classic Final Cut Pro, and a general shift from a world of sensitive artsy loners who were philosophical about art and filmmaking to a slicker, snarkier, hyper-social, on-demand world where there's more competition for attention and eyeballs.

I think the biggest shift of all has been the shift from a culture of analog media to a culture of digital media. People my age learned to embrace the scratchiness of a 16mm film screening, the grubbiness of a VHS bootleg, the mustiness of a used paperback. I remember “watching” scrambled pay channels that still let you listen to the sound even if the picture was garbled. I even remember fiddling with a TV aerial to try to pick up snowy, distant transmissions from stations in faraway cities.

It's not that those days were better, necessarily. It's just that we folks of a certain age learned to associate those kinds of analog artifacts with authenticity. Knowing that a work of art had some miles on it, or survived in only compromised quality, made it seem more rare and valuable somehow. Every counterculture aesthetic – from the hippies to the punks to the grunge slackers – embraced the idea that dirt and distortion and rawness made things cool.

But that was an analog attitude, and we're in a digital age now. There are no garbled or snowy TV channels – either you get a channel or you don't get it at all. People still like movies, but they're not held on a pedestal anymore. Movie theaters aren't these sacred cathedrals where you go to worship the art of cinema – they're just one of many possible outlets where a piece of “content” will become available. You can still make a low-budget movie, but you're no longer a one-of-a-kind hero for doing so, and if you do it's not supposed to have the bedraggled Clerks aesthetic – now it has to be shot on a DSLR and look like an Oscar-winning Hollywood cinematographer shot it in order to stand out as a professional production amid all the kittens playing piano. As a fellow producer recently put it, when you submit a movie to a festival nowadays, “you're competing against high school kids with cell phones.”

Saberfrog didn't seem like that weird a movie when I wrote it or shot it, because my head was still in the analog era, when people reached into their soul and pulled up something strange and raw and personal because that's what they had to do and because that's what independent film audiences were looking to see.

But perhaps it's a good thing that I didn't know any better, or I might not have made the movie. No matter how much the world changes, I think there will always be a need for people who see things differently, who have the guts/craziness/courage/foolishness to do what other people aren't doing. At the very least, it shows other people that such things are possible.

Sometimes, like Josh in the movie, I have an internal debate raging in my head. I wonder whether making low-to-no-budget movies is still worth the trouble, what kind of movies I should be making in today's world, whether there's a big enough audience for the kind of movies I believe in, and whether I have enough of the huckster instinct that it seems to take to promote yourself nowadays. But somehow I always end up coming to the same conclusion: Just do what you believe in.

And every effort opens doors. You end up going places you otherwise wouldn't have gone, and meeting people you otherwise wouldn't have met. And as easy as it is to get confused about where our online culture is headed, with all that crowding and diversity, you have to remember that no one is consuming all of it, that there are still niches, and that if you're smart and persistent then you can find the folks who get it.

I've been doing a lot of writing in the past couple months, and I'm plotting what my next project will be. It might be connected to Saberfrog in some way, or it might be something new with completely different characters. There's life in Saberfrog yet, but I'll probably be switching my energies to a new project in the next couple months. And I hope that those of you who've followed the Saberfrog journey this far will join me on the next journey as well.

Stay tuned …

Happy New Year's Day (After)

Well, it's a new year. Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, even that Mayan apocalypse malarkey is all safely behind us now.

As we march bravely into 2013, here's a little inspirational story for all you artists and poetic souls out there.

Some months ago I was at a library sale, where they had not only books to buy, but also some audio cassettes at $1 apiece.

Among the cassettes was a box set of Derek Jacobi reading Le Morte d'Arthur, Thomas Mallory's famous book of Arthurian tales, a book that a teacher had once encouraged me to read back when I was a sword-and-sorcery-obsessed teenager. I'd never gotten around to actually reading it, and now I had an opportunity to have Sir Derek read it to me. Even though this box set contained several tapes, I got the whole thing for $1.

At home, I played the first side of the first tape, in my CD/cassette combo player that had served me faithfully for 22 years. But then I could play no more. The cassette part of the player had finally died.

In casual conversation with my mom one day, I mentioned that I'd bought this book-on-tape but was unable to play it. Then, the next few times I saw or spoke to her, she started asking me unsubtle follow-up questions. I thought, “She's fishing for Christmas present ideas, and wants to buy me some gadget for playing tapes.”

Sure enough, come Christmas day, I get a mighty CD/cassette/MP3 playing boombox for Christmas. All because I mentioned my interest in listening to a book on tape I'd bought for $1.

OK, maybe that's not the most inspirational story of all time. But the point is: If you have dreams, share them. You never know who might be inspired to take part in them, and help them to come true.

Some dreams are harder to admit to than wanting to play some used cassettes. But you'll never know if you don't communicate them to others.

I wrote most of this blog entry on a train ride home from NYC, where I spent New Year's weekend at a friend's party. On the ride down, I watched and listened to some recordings I'd downloaded at various times but never got around to watching and listening to.

Without thinking about it, the ones I chose were interviews with fantasy/sci-fi authors. Doing so made me think yet again about why we write, and why we tell heroic stories about accomplishments and great deeds. The highbrow awards might go mostly to stories about defeat and depression, being sullen and sulking. But stories about action – about people doing things and succeeding – are just as important, just as essential to our health.

I also got around to reading an online transcript of a circa-1999 interview with cyberpunk author William Gibson. He mostly was making fairly abstract statements about the modern media and how our perceptions have been changed by it. Of course, things have changed even more since that time. Back then – and for several decades prior – the way to be hip was to show how deep and introverted you were, and how alienated from society you were.

But cyberspace (as it was called then) has turned out to be a vehicle for jokes and socializing and self-promotion, not just urban angst. Even the hipsters have gotten wackier. I'm not much of a gamer anymore, but there's an argument to be made that exploring virtual worlds are a way of safely testing strategies that you could then apply successfully in real life.

And in a way, all the free nonsense you can get on the Internet – legally and illegally – has raised the standards. Art seems less precious. The moving image isn't put on a pedestal anymore, not when the tools for making it have become more accessible. It's easier to create, but harder to create in a way that will be considered good. As other writers have pointed out, pop culture has become more complex and challenging, with elaborate TV story arcs and branching computer-game narratives.

When you create something now, you gotta think about why you're doing it, and who you're doing it for. Art for its own sake doesn't seem to be enough anymore. There needs to be a human connection.

But just because it's harder doesn't mean you shouldn't try. You don't truly know whether your vision communicates if you don't communicate it.

The old attitudes die hard. Many people – especially of my generation – seem convinced that hating something is always smarter than loving something, or that people who do nothing but complaining and passing judgment are somehow superior to people who actually manage to create something or make something happen. There's an attitude that people with achievements and accomplishments are the bad guys, and that being a do-nothing is the only way to keep it real.

The trick is to not let those attitudes hold you back. My New Year's resolution is to keep it positive. So aim high, dream big, work hard, and make those New Year's resolutions come true.

Have a happy, prosperous, and productive 2013!

An inspiring video for 12-12-12

Yup, it's 12-12-12. If I was really clever I would have posted this at 12:12 pm, but oh well.

To celebrate, here's a video that I'm very happy with, that I've contrived to give a “12” theme:

These are the man-on-the-street interviews that I recorded during my road trip. I asked several creative people questions about art – why we make it, why it's important, and how to cope with pressures not to do it.

I asked these questions because they were questions that I, after several years of ups and downs with this movie, found myself struggling with. But while I'd been finding these problems to be increasingly unsolvable on my own, everyone I interviewed had upbeat and articulate answers.

I presented a rough assembly of the footage at a Buffalo Movie-Video Makers meeting, but the editing still needed work. I then tightened it up to 10 minutes so it would fit nicely on YouTube.

What motivated me to refine it further, however, was a call for submissions for short videos to screen at a holiday party at Squeaky Wheel. Videos needed to have either a “December” or “12” theme, and I reasoned that since I asked 5 artists 7 questions, I met the “12” criterion.

I'd already gotten it down to 10 minutes so it would fit nicely on YouTube, but Squeaky Wheel's length restriction was only 5 minutes. So I edited tighter and tighter and tighter, until the video said everything in 5 minutes that it had said in 10.

While the video didn't get accepted (they liked it but didn't think it fit a party mood), it gave me a reason to trim it as tight as possible, and I'm happy with the result. In fact, this video is probably the greatest souvenir I took home from the trip.

Even while reviewing my earlier 10-minute cut, I realized that I had gotten a pep talk from five strangers. Whenever filmmaking – or any other creative enterprise – starts to seem like too much hassle for too little reward, I can now rewatch this video and be reminded why I should press on. The realization that I even got such enthusiastic input from five strangers – after years of considering myself an introvert – is a shot in the arm as well. Whenever I'm at risk of letting bitter, small-minded, unadventurous, unimaginative people get to me, I can watch this video and be reminded what it's all about.

Also, I'm finally sending out review copies of the movie, to get some press and maybe even some distribution nibbles. This is something I should have done earlier, but with everything else going on in my life lately it never quite made it to the top of my to-do list. However, I'm motivated to do it now, because I want to start 2013 with a fresh project. It might be a spin-off project related to Saberfrog, or it might be something completely new and different.

My goal is to take everything I've learned from Saberfrog and build on it. Moviemaking is a form of communication, and I'm ready to get the conversation going again.

So thank you to John, Calvin, Cynthia, Vanita and Caitlin for your inspiration, and for making the journey worthwhile.

Learning from Kevin Smith

Well, Saberfrog is finally for sale at my website. I also need to somehow put the movie online for sale somewhere, and also send out review screeners. All of which I probably should have done ages ago, but I have a job and other things to do with my time, which to me are major obstacles to being any kind of social-media butterfly.

You've certainly heard by now about the new Star Wars movies that have been announced. There's nothing I can say about this that hasn't been well-said by online critic Outlaw Vern (and, in the comments below, by his fellow Ain't It Cool alum Mr. Majestyk). For better or worse, people now have even more reason to keep voicing their thoughts about Star Wars. The unending kvetching about that franchise and its creator gets me down sometimes, because I think artists should be allowed to take risks and make unexpected choices, even if the results are variable.

But people are possessive about Star Wars in a way that they aren't about anything else. Also, in the age of the Internet there's not really consensus anymore – while some people have greater access to the media or go to greater lengths to make their viewpoint known, almost nothing is universally loved or hated. As Kevin Smith once observed, every movie is someone's favorite movie.

Speaking of whom, a friend and I went to see Kevin Smith perform in Buffalo a few weeks ago. By chance, I got to ask him the first question of the evening. I asked him about an interview he'd given a while back, in which he said that he was tired of the online negativity he'd endured – not only criticisms of his work, but personal attacks on himself and his family.

I asked him how, in the face of such negativity, he maintained his faith that there might still be an audience out there who was receptive to his work.

Smith said that, at age 42, he'd learned to overcome his fear. He talked about how, when he was younger, he was always afraid of getting in trouble, but now he realized that there was little as an adult that he would do that would genuinely get him in trouble. He recited a quote he'd learned: “Worry is interest paid in advance on a debt that never comes due.”

More than once over the years, Smith has expressed the philosophy that he creates things and sends them out in the world, to find out if anyone else gets it. That approach has worked for him. One might argue that Smith's career began at a time when people were less obsessed with franchises and more hungry for individual, personal versions. Over the years, though, Smith has nurtured an audience and developed his own brand, so he's in a position to be able to create more personal work secure in the knowledge that there would be at least some audience for it.

That's the challenge facing most artists these days.

Before I set out on my Saberfrog tour, I was asked “What did you learn about yourself making this movie?” I didn't have a good answer to that, but I did learn some important things from the trip itself.

You have to know where your audience is, and how to reach them. That's the lesson I've learned from making Saberfrog.

When I was developing the movie, I was proud of the fact that it was a hybrid of genres, and that it represented a particular viewpoint on the world.

But how do you market that, when there are so many entertainment options that the only way for a consumer to filter it all is to limit yourself to the stuff you know you'll like?

You have to be a salesman. You have to make yourself and your project seem appealing to people. That's another lesson I've learned.

During my traveling showings of Saberfrog, I interviewed some people that I met in the different cities that I went to, asking their thoughts about why we make art and why it is important. I did this so that I would have something to show for my travels in case the screenings weren't well-attended, and also because I myself was seeking answers to these questions.

I showed a rough assembly of this interview footage at a Buffalo Movie-Video Makers meeting, and one attendee said that this was a measure of how “pure” I was as an artist – that this was what I chose to do to promote my movie, rather than thinking like a businessman. He didn't seem to mean it as a criticism, exactly, but it was a valid point.

Because I'm an introvert at heart (or because I grew up in a world where caring about something other than sports was kind of frowned upon), I'm still getting used to the idea of being able to share my creative passions with other people. My nourishment was more solitary – it came from books and obscure films and foreign TV shows, all of which seemed to come from a better world than my own, where people were smarter and more inventive and more thoughtful. There wasn't a social connection between artist and fan, only a philosophical one. So I'm still adapting to the idea that art is not solely a means of personal expression, but of communication. And not just artist-to-audience communication, but interaction.

Obviously the film scene has changed unrecognizably in recent years. This article has really rammed home, more than anything else I've heard lately, how film as we knew it really is on its way out – and that well-known, widely released films that came out when I was in college are already becoming unshowable in their original format.

We're only going to have digital copies of varying quality (depending on how much money gets devoted to transferring them) that may not even last very long. For lower-budget filmmakers like myself, obviously a DVD or Blu-ray is going to be the public screening format of choice most of the time. But to go to a public screening of a Hollywood movie (including ones that aren't even 20 years old) and basically be watching them on a big-screen TV … what is the point? If it's basically what you could watch on your entertainment center at home, why go to a theater?

To have a group experience, that's why. That's the one thing that still matters. Having something to share, and talk about, with other people.

That's what it's all about.