The elephant in the room: The deep, mind-blowing symbolism of Snuffleupagus

I've been working on a lot of projects this past month, and have seen some interesting films. However, I won't have time to talk about all that before the month is out, so instead I'm going to discuss something else that's been on my mind.

I don't know about you, but sometimes when I'm on YouTube I will just enter something in a search engine. You know, just to see what comes up. I might enter the name of a movie or TV show, just to see what the top result will be – a trailer, a popular scene, or a fan-made parody or music video.

One day I felt like doing a search for “Snuffleupagus” because that is a Sesame Street character I was always fond of as a kid. Looking back on that show as an adult, I find it funny that there was a character whose very existence caused the other characters to have a disagreement about the nature of reality.

Yet I also recall, as a kid, being frustrated that Big Bird couldn't convince the other adults that Snuffleupagus really existed. In hindsight, it seems slightly reckless for a kid's show to instill such an emotion in its impressionable viewers. According to Snuffy's Wikipedia page, the character was originally created to tap into kids' experience of having imaginary friends. Yet the larger mission of kids' shows – particularly educational ones – is usually to instill proper skills, values, and socialization into kids' growing brains. Sesame Street, for all its adult-friendly humor and irony, was psychologists carefully designed based on input from child psychologists. By contrast, the ontological dispute over the existence of Snuffleupagus seemed to encourage kids to regard adult authority as fallible, arbitrary, and unjust.

Notoriously, Snuffy's existence was finally made known to the other adult characters in 1985 because the show's writers were worried about the possible real-life parallels with children being afraid to report sex abuse for fear of being disbelieved. While that seems a valid concern, it seems to me to be a narrowly Freudian interpretation of what Snuffy represents. It treats Snuffy as a metaphor for buried sexual trauma. But I prefer a more Jungian analysis. To me, Snuffy is an archetype. He represents a form of universal wisdom that is not fully accessible to the civilized world.

As a logical-thinking adult, I find it impossible to avoid the question of why adults who inhabit a universe of talking monsters should find it difficult to believe in Snuffleupagus. When Gordon or whoever insists that Snuffy cannot exist, he is addressing a seven-foot-tall talking bird while saying it. In this innocent, unrealistic, cartoony universe, what line does Snuffleupagus cross by existing?

It seems to me that Snuffleupagus was intended to be some kind of prehistoric animal. He looks like a woolly mammoth, while his long tail and his polysyllabic, mock-Latin name also make him resemble a dinosaur. So maybe the idea is that adults dispute Snuffy's existence not because he is unbelievable, but that there shouldn't be any of his kind still alive.

The trouble with this theory, though, is that the adults don't seem to have any trouble believing in the Count. Vampires are mythical creatures, so why do they believe in a vampire but not a woolly mammoth? Perhaps this is because vampires are creatures from folklore and religion, embodying beliefs about the human soul. By contrast, mammoths are creatures from the secular world of science. They died out thousands of years ago – possibly as a result of early humans – in defiance of the creationist belief that the earth is only thousands of years old and that the environment could not possibly be altered by human activity. Perhaps Snuffy challenges traditional religious morality, and a sense of man's place in the universe, in a way that the Count does not.

Another thing I notice about Snuffleupagus is that he is the only one of the main Sesame Street characters to walk on all fours. This might be significant as well. It's common to anthropomorphize animals as humanoid characters who stand upright – from the bird-man of Lascaux to the Egyptian gods to all the famous Disney and Looney Tunes characters. Peanuts fans will notice that Snoopy gradually became bipedal as his role in the strip grew. These characters seem acceptable to the human world. And yet, a four-legged talking animal – whether it's Snuffy, or Mr. Ed, or Michigan J. Frog, or even the talking dog from that “do you think I should have said Joe DiMaggio” joke – tends to be a secret, known only to one person.

Could this be a subconscious acknowledgment of the possibility that our ape ancestors were able to develop intelligence, and civilization, only when their front limbs were free to build tools and make language gestures, and that an intelligent being who walks on all fours is therefore impossible? 

Or, is a four-legged talking animal actually some kind of spirit animal, who speaks to us not in the spoken language of civilization, but on a more primal, spiritual, archetypal, subconscious level?

If the latter, it raises the potentially brain-melting question of why a giant bird would envision a woolly mammoth as his spirit animal. Well, remember, in the real world, birds and elephants have a symbiotic relationship. Birds perch on elephant's backs to get food, and in turn alert the elephant to predators by flying away.

Alternatively, remember that Big Bird is a large, flightless bird. Perhaps he, too, is an extinct animal who should not exist in our world. Perhaps he is a dodo or a moa or an elephant bird, and thus feels a kinship to a fellow living fossil. His loss of the ability to fly, and also the theory that birds are descended from dinosaurs, both tie him to a more ancient world that modern humans refuse to acknowledge. Perhaps that is why he alone possesses the wisdom to see, and hear, a four-legged animal.

But wait, I hear you say, what about Eeyore? He's a four-legged talking animal that other characters believe in. Well, that's a good point. The inhabitants of Hundred Acre Wood do acknowledge the existence of Eeyore. But he seems less inclined to acknowledge them. Eeyore regards the two-legged characters as lacking wisdom. Hmm.

Interestingly, a comparison of Sesame Street's Snuffleupagus and the Disney portrayal of Eeyore reveals one strong similarity – a droning, monotonous voice that stands in stark contrast to the chipper, extroverted tone adopted by all the other characters. Perhaps Snuffleupagus/Eeyore is not simply a spirit animal, but a counterculture guru, tapping into a calm inner wisdom that is denied by the more worldly and hypersocial characters around them. At least in his early days, Snuffy would answer questions with cryptic statements. In fact, some people go so far as to equate his slow speech and movements with drug use.

In any case, it's hard to avoid the sense that Snuffleupagus embodies all of the thoughts, beliefs, and realities that modern Western civilization attempts to keep hidden. Perhaps nothing emphasizes this more than 1992's legendary “lost” Sesame Street episode, “Snuffy's Parents Gets A Divorce” This was an episode that attempted to handle the difficult subject of parental divorce in a way that would be palatable to kids. But the episode disturbed and troubled test audiences, and so was shelved. Even before it was made, there was apparently resistance to making the episode: executive producer Dulcy Singer argued that divorce was a middle-class issue, while the urban underclass in Sesame Street's target demographic would be more likely to be in single-parent households.

Remember, this was the same show that, a decade earlier, had sensitively handled the death of Mr. Hooper following the real-life death of actor Will Lee. That episode aired, but not one about Snuffy's family. It's as if Snuffleupagus carries painful implications – not only about consensus reality and the trustworthiness of authority, but also about issues related to class, and to the integrity of the family unit – so troubling that even death is easier to face.

What does all of this tell us? Does it mean that even in an urban, multicultural, enlightened society, there are still limits on what terrible truths may be spoken of?

Look at the original Snuffleupagus from 1971. Look into those terrifying yellow eyes, before he was redesigned. (skip to 1:10) What does he know, that we dare not learn?

One final thought: I remember, as a child, seeing the episode in which the adults finally saw Snuffy and admitted he was real. But even this did not result in absolute consensus. As I recall, the adults saw Snuffy when he was sleepwalking, and wearing a white nightshirt. And so the argument between Big Bird and the adults changed from whether Snuffy existed, to whether he was brown or white.

Does this tell us that consensus reality is ultimately unattainable? Is it significant that the community could only accept Snuffy when he was white, but not when he was brown? Also, consider the fact that Snuffy's favorite foods are cabbage and spaghetti; does the reluctance of the Sesame Street community to acknowledge him represent the downtrodden status of Irish and Italian immigrants in turn-of-the-century New York?

Or, most horrifyingly of all, is it simply possible to read way too much into a puppet character in a kids' show in a strained attempt at comedy?

Perhaps these questions are ultimately unanswerable. Perhaps each of us can only glimpse a fragment of the whole truth, as shown by the parable of the blind men … and the elephant.

And if, after reading all this, your mind still dares to deny that the impossible is possible, here's a clip of Snuffleupagus ice-skating.

Three big lessons I've learned about writing

So I've got a draft of the first novel done, and I've gotten some feedback from friends. It's been surprisingly positive. I say 'surprisingly' because writing the book was a slow and difficult writing process, and getting it above novella length has been a struggle. Being much more used to writing screenplays, I knew that there would be a learning curve, and that by the time I got to the final book I would know a lot more about writing, knowledge that I could then apply to revising the earlier volumes. (I'm not gonna think about publishing – self or otherwise – until I'm sure the books are as good as I can make them.)

Now I'm starting to write the second book, and I find it's flowing a lot better. Thinking about why that might be, and thinking about things that I and other people have written, has made me think about some lessons that I've learned about writing.

These are lessons I learned by doing. Some of this is stuff that I've always believed but couldn't articulate until now, and some of it is stuff that I learned only after making mistakes.

LESSON ONE: Your character needs to be active. He or she needs to have a goal, and be willing to do something to achieve it.

The biggest mistake that people seem to make when they first start writing is having a character who doesn't do anything, who is introverted, alienated, lonely, and passive.

Everybody does this when they start writing. Everybody. Even people who are proudly anti-art and anti-independent in their tastes, who never watch a movie with subtitled dialogue that isn't spoken in Klingon or Huttese, seem to want to write an Antonioni film on their first attempt. If they ever go to film school or take a writing class, and have to read or watch the equivalent efforts by their fellow students, they would probably discover how boring that is for the audience, and it might make them realize that their own version is probably just as bad.

Why do new writers tend to fall into this trap? I can think of two possible reasons. One is that, as a new writer, you are trying to Express Your Personal Self, and writing is an internal process anyway. So it just feels good to write a character who is caught up in his or her thoughts, cut off from the world.

The other, and much worse, reason is that they allow themselves to think that being weak and passive and doing nothing is somehow … deep. I'm not sure how this attitude caught on. Once upon a time, even punks and hippies and grungies wanted to actually do things and make things. But nowadays I notice that a lot of people – especially on the Internet – really can't identify with anyone who had a dream and put in the effort to make that dream come true.

Somehow the people who strive and aim high, and pick themselves up when they fall, are the villains that deserve scorn whenever they do even a single thing wrong … while the people who just sit back and do nothing but complain about everything have somehow convince themselves of their own superiority.

All I can say is that when I was first trying to teach myself to write screenplays, I tended to look at movies that I liked, and try to figure out how they work and what made me like them. I know that many other people have done that also, but it might be less common than I thought it was. How else to explain why people who take pride in only liking genre films – movies about characters who DO THINGS – keep wanting to write dramas about navel-gazers who are helpless and passive?

When people write, they reveal a lot about their own psychology. People who are unambitious, and see life as one big conspiracy against them that they can do nothing about, are unlikely to be able to lead a main character through the process of changing the world. The people who write one page of something, and then can't think of what happens next, are perhaps struggling to understand how a person might go about making things happen.

Sometimes I hear people say “Well, I want to write about character rather than plot.” But here's a secret: Plot is what reveals character. What your character does to achieve a goal, how s/he treats people, how s/he responds to challenges … those are the things that reveal character. Not just sitting around spouting monologues.

So if you're thinking about writing about a character who does nothing, try writing about a character who does something. If that's not true to who you are, then watch some movies or TV shows, or read some novels or comic books. See how fictional characters respond to stuff, and try to learn from that. Study some successful models and try to follow them. Get your character off the sofa, wipe the streaked mascara off her face, and send her out on a journey!

And just having your character do what other people tell him to do? Not quite enough. It's a step in the right direction, but it's not quite enough. Ever heard of the “refusal of the call”, that Joseph Campbell moment when the hero doesn't want to accept the mission he's been given, before eventually agreeing? Until now, I never thought about why that trope is there. But now I realize why it works: It shows the character actually doing something. By choosing the life that's familiar to him over the one that's being presented to him, he is taking a stand. And when he decides for himself that the mission is actually important and that he is willing to take the risk – often for personal reasons other than the ones initially presented to him – he is again taking a stand. Without this element, the character is merely a pawn.

I've certainly written – and even filmed – scripts about a character who is introverted and alienated, as a vessel for my own feelings at that particular stage of my life. So I can't be too smug about this. However, a trick I used to compensate was to surround my alienated protagonist with more assertive and colorful characters who get pulled into his or her orbit.

Which brings me to ...

LESSON TWO: Your character should have, or make, friends.

I'm calling this a “should” rather than a “needs to” because it's certainly possible to tell a decent story about someone who is alone on his or her journey. However, it's damn hard to do this well.

And why do you want to? When have you ever seen a movie that you liked, that did this? I guess it gets back to the “I'm alienated, no one understands me, so I'm going to write about loneliness” approach again, so I won't repeat points I've already made, except to add one thing: Stories with multiple characters are more interesting.

You know how a lot of people say that TV is now better than movies? Why might that be? One reason is that there's more time for big story arcs, but another reason is character. A modern TV drama tends to have an ensemble of characters, each of whom gets his or her moment in the sun, and viewers often have a particular character that they love (or hate).

An important thing about writing for an ensemble, rather than a solitary protagonist, is that you have to write characters who aren't you. Rather than just having a sullen loner who is meant to represent your own sad-sack viewpoint, you have to imagine characters who stand on their own merits as fictional creations, who have their own hopes and dreams and quirks and strengths and weaknesses.

Maybe it's just me, but I always liked movies where there was a gang. I always liked it when there were a lot of characters with different abilities or personalities. You know, obscure arthouse fare like Star Wars and Aliens and, I don't know, The Goonies.

Having a gang means that your characters can talk to each other about the plot. When something happens, they can all have different reactions. The brave one, the fearful one, the smart one, the naïve one, all can have different perspectives on the action. Also, you can split them up and send them off on different subplots. This might be a challenge if you have difficulty coming up with one plot, let alone two or more, but that's part of why you should try it.

What can I say … As a writer, I guess I've always found the Wizard of Oz template more appealing than the Eraserhead template. Even though I like both of those movies.

LESSON THREE: Having a story is more important than having themes or a message.

You might be expecting me to drop the Sam Goldwyn quote “If you want to send a message, call Western Union,” but I personally think that's too cynical and discouraging. Film and literature are certainly capable of having something to say.

I prefer a quote from Orson Welles, who said that “most movie messages … could be written on the head of a pin.” I take that to mean: you can put a message in a movie if you want to, but it won't actually amount to that much. It won't be as important and earth-shattering as you think it will.

There certainly have been moments when it seemed like movies could change the world. The late 60s/early 70s has been widely hailed as such a period. I would argue that the late 80s through the 90s – an indie-friendly period stretching from Blue Velvet and Do the Right Thing all the way up to Fight Club – was another one.

I'm not sure we're living in a time like that right now. Maybe once upon a time it was oh-so-shocking if a movie made a political statement or criticized something about our society. But now we have blogs, talk radio, and entire cable TV channels devoted to decrying how much worse things have become since … well, since the last time people said how much worse things have become.

With indie cinema seeming to become ever more marginalized by franchise Goliaths, I don't really like to discourage anyone from consciously putting a personal philosophy or political viewpoint in their scripts. However, I'm not sure any philosophy is likely to be compelling enough to compensate for the lack of a decent story.

First of all, with all the chattering going on out there on the Internet, the chance that you genuinely have an absolutely unprecedented opinion about something is somewhat low. If you think you do, then by all means go for it. But you can't just (to paraphrase Team America) read the news and then repeat it like it was your own opinion.

And usually what people have to “say” is grouchy and negative. Every once in a while we get an Amelie or a Ferris Bueller's Day Off or something that tries to convey a positive philosophy, but usually we get A Hard Hitting Satire rooted in anger. To some degree that's the rebellious spirit of youth and/or art … but man, we are so knee-deep in that toxic negativity now. It used to be a brave thing to create art that challenged the status quo, but that hostility is now so omnipresent that it has become the status quo.

For me the absolute worst is when people write a script or make a film that merely exists to criticize something ephemeral ... like a particular politician or celebrity who's going to be out of the limelight before you know it anyway, or a current pop-culture trend that you find annoying (often for no better reason than that it differs from the pop-culture of your own childhood). When I see something like that, I tend to think: Come on, dude. You had a chance to make something cool. You could have been part of the solution. Instead you gave the problem free publicity.

I guess it's easy for me to say all this stuff now that I'm more experienced. I've done much of the above, and have now gotten it (largely) out of my system. Maybe people need to do it wrong first, not just for practice but because you need to get those things off your chest somehow. But what motivated me to write all this up was encountering a lot of scripts recently that are about self-absorbed inaction.

Two decades ago, indie filmmaker Hal Hartley complained about the “empty formal posturing” of suburban film students trying to make urban gangster films. He said that, instead, they “should be writing stories about sitting on their couch watching gangster films.” But since then, we've gone so far in that direction. We've had so many Kevin Smith and Quentin Tarantino wannabes who've embraced the “dude, we can make a whole movie just about guys in one place talking” aesthetic of both directors' debut films without demonstrating the wit or cleverness of either. Spouting opinions has become a substitute for actually doing anything or having any ambition.

So I think a little of the “formal posturing” that Hartley complained about 20 years ago – understanding how drama and storytelling and genres work, rather than just snobbily rejecting them or nerdily critiquing them – would go a long way toward making off-Hollywood scripts and movies better.

And novels, too. Speaking of which, time to get back to work ...

Quit your griping and start your typing: Or, the future of art and storytelling and stuff

As both an independent filmmaker and a punster, it's tempting to refer to the recent July 4th holiday as Independent's Day. But this year, for me at least, the label fits.

As I've mentioned before, I often attend events at Visual Studies Workshop, particularly their screenings of old 16mm short films. Their most recent screening was July 5, and had an Independence Day theme.

I'd been in kind of a creative rut recently. I still wanted to complete the books I was trying to write, but I was wondering if my heart was still in it, or what I would do with these books when they were done. I still considered myself a filmmaker at heart, but the complexities of low-budget moviemaking are not to be treated lightly and I wasn't sure if I was quite ready yet to re-enter those waters.

Anyway, at the VSW event, I inquired about a two-day course they'd announced for that weekend called “Performing Books”. I wasn't sure what this course was about, but it seemed to have something to do with combining elements of literature with elements of film/video and live performance. It seemed like it might offer a way to bridge these two worlds in which I was trying to rekindle my interest.

I hadn't had a weekend completely to myself in a long while, and I was looking forward to spending the holiday weekend catching up on things and trying to get back into my writing. I wasn't sure I wanted to give up 16 of those hours. But my gut feeling was that I should take this course.

And I'm glad I did, because it rekindled my creativity. The teacher, Tate Shaw, showed some different types of unconventional books that artists have made, and also showed some videos of various artists who had combined live readings with multimedia. A few of these were by people I knew of – Marina Abramović (the subject of The Artist Is Present, a documentary that was shown at the local High Falls Film Festival), Laurie Andersen, and of course Crispin Glover – while others were new to me.

I didn't “get” absolutely all of the work being shown, and some of it was the kind of stuff that my college-age self would have sneered at as pretentious and boring. But years after college ended, as a working adult studying this stuff by choice, I now appreciate why less accessible forms of art exist. The whole point of it is to challenge you, to make you think, to see things from a different angle. Even if you don't “like” it, it's good for you in a way. And it made me excited about my own work again, because it caused me to think of new ideas and new approaches.

The timing of this class was perfect. It was a case of one door opening when another closed.

Because some time earlier that week, I happened to vist the sci-fi website io9 for some reason. I have a love-hate relationship with that website – there's some fun and interesting stuff there, including science news and some good articles about writing ... but also some snarky junk, especially in the user comments. Anyway, one of the headlines was “When is the right time to finally give up on a series?”

My patience with nerd negativity had been declining for several years now, but against my better judgment I clicked on this link. As someone who was trying to write a book series, I thought I might get some insight into what elements make a series work, and what mistakes cause the audience to lose interest.

But when I read the page, I saw no insights into the art or craft of storytelling, or appreciation for the challenges of doing it well. All I saw was one fan grievance after another, as nerd after angry nerd listed a series they hated and the moment they gave up on it, and how as a result they now hated Stephen King or Orson Scott Card or whoever.

The one halfway thoughtful comment I saw was from someone named Rob Bricken, writing under the handle of Superman villain “mxyzptlk”:

“Maybe a better question is why we persist in keeping up with stories that have long ago made us question "Why am I keeping up with this?" ... maybe completism is a geek flaw — we're continuously drawn back to a flawed storylines [sic] because they tap into our weakness for identifying flaws, and that coupled with our completist tendencies make for craptastic bait we have a harder time ignoring than taking.”

I would have liked to take that observation as something constructive – that fans have the perfectionist mind of an engineer or programmer, and have an instinct for spotting bugs. More cynically, though, it seemed to indicate that these people just like to complain and criticize.

And that was the moment when I finally realized that this was not the audience I wanted to reach out to. This was not the community I wanted to be part of. Not when there are other communities of artists and DIY-ers and even some 'normal' people with minds more open than they get credit for.

Prior to that, I'd been thinking about why I originally wanted to make movies, and why I was so passionate about science fiction and fantasy when I was younger. Cinema was something that entertained and excited people ... and if it didn't, that just inspired the restless and creative souls to want to create their own original visions and put them on screen. At the same time, the sci-fi fan community seemed to be a haven of smart and friendly people in an otherwise brutish world.

But something seems to have gone sour. It's weird because I don't think fans have ever had it better. The biggest TV shows in the world right now seem to be Doctor Who and Game of Thrones, and maybe Sherlock. Every halfway decent drama on TV nowadays, genre or otherwise, has gone the Lost / Babylon 5 route of epic story arcs that span multiple seasons. Every tentpole studio movie seems to be based on an established franchise and marketed to the Comic-Con audience.

So I don't completely get where this growing anger is coming from. However, I do get the sense that Hollywood isn't liked right now. The studios seem to be putting more and more eggs into fewer and fewer baskets, trying to please everyone and instead pleasing no one. Their losing strategy in the last couple years has been as follows:

• Instead of ever making an original movie, just buy an obscure property whose core audience is very small, but also very vocal and determined to create bad publicity
• Hire an auteur director who will want to put his own original stamp on the property, thus alienating the aforementioned core audience
• Spend so much money on the film that it will have to be an all-time blockbuster just to break even
• Produce a really generic marketing campaign that doesn't tell you what the story or premise is, or why you should see the film, instead relying on the obscure brand to sell itself
• Generate nothing but apathy or hostility from the fans (who don't like auteurs), the critics (who don't want to see an auteur wasting his talents on a remake of something), and the general public (who don't know what this thing is or why they should care)

A similar formula admittedly worked for the Lord of the Rings and Pirates of the Caribbean movies, but recent attempts to duplicate those successes have grown ever more futile.

There also might be a class resentment of some kind. I never fully appreciated how deeply Hollywood directors and actors are hated right now until the recent backlash against Zach Braff. If you somehow haven't heard, the former sitcom actor recently decided to fund a follow-up to his cult film Garden State by raising money from fans on the Internet (“crowdfunding” as da kidz call it nowadays). From the bitter backlash he received in some quarters, you'd think Braff was some pampered Tudor who bathed in a diamond-encrusted bathtub full of champagne and baby seals' blood, while raping orphaned migrant workers at the same time.

Most of the criticism of Braff I've seen essentially boils down to “Braff is in the Hollywood system, and therefore all-powerful and evil! He already has all the power and influence required to get a movie green-lighted and distributed by the studios!”

A cooler, calmer head might point out that if Steven freaking Spielberg has trouble making the movies he wants (his recent Lincoln apparently came within a hair's breadth of being made for cable TV instead), then maybe creative clout isn't that easy to come by in the studio system anymore. Nearly every name director who's been a major influence in my lifetime, from Steven Spielberg and George Lucas to David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino and Steven Soderberg and Kevin Smith, has been in the press recently bemoaning the difficulty of getting their movies made and/or announcing their imminent or eventual retirement from filmmaking.

In the midst of all this chaos and frustration, maybe it's time to ask: If Hollywood cinema is really that much of a dinosaur, then why are we still so obsessed with it anyway? We have video cameras, which are better than ever. We have computers. We have the Internet. What's wrong with just making something on a smaller scale, something you truly believe in, instead of trying to compete with the Goliaths? Do you just want to complain, or do you want to be part of the solution?

I can think of at least one person out there who might have the answer. There's a website called CrochetMe.com which, about five years ago, discussed the DIY movement and online distribution with a guy who crochets but also makes web videos. Here's something the guy said:

“I mean, let's face it, in the media there are now eight companies. ... Everything is becoming consolidated, so where there used to be lots of variety, there are now, like, ten giants and tons of tiny little villagers. And yeah, the villagers are going to start making their own stuff because the materials will be available to all of them, and we can't all just do things the way the giants want, because it does seep something out of your soul. I think it's absolutely true on every level of art that this is the worst of times and, like some guy might have said once, the best of times. ... we are now in a situation where everybody can do what they do. ... I will always give them credit for trying to find a way to steal Christmas, but this time they might not be able to. There's always been an independent side to the industry. And for this particular medium, I think it's going to be a lot harder for them to crush it.  .

“[A]t the end of the day right now, you can create something; what you can't usually do is make a fortune off of it. But ... it's not about, "... I'm going to be [a] millionaire without enjoying the process and the product." Ultimately, the artistic expression can't be squelched; it's just they'll try to cut off any avenues for that expression to be, shall we say, monetized in a realistic fashion. Like I'm saying, the sort of people who understand the DIY mentality are more about the doing than the having. So I think that ultimately, my advice is what my advice always is: Make stuff. ... Right now, because of digital technology, you can make crafty little movies, you can make crafty little things that go up for millions of people to see. ... It is no longer the time of sitting around and thinking about doing something.”

It's been five years since the guy gave that interview, and he's since been busy making other stuff but he probably still feels the same. And it seems to me that if that guy wants to crochet and do web videos as well as make Hollywood blockbusters ... and if Crispin Glover wants be a spoken word artist in between Hollywood comedies ... and if Zach Braff wants to crowdfund an indie film … and if George Lucas wants to retire and make experimental films in his garage … and if Ethan Hawke wants to do whatever it is he does … then what the hell is stopping the rest of us?

So I think the smart people are gonna be the ones who stop bellyaching about what Hollywood does, and how mainstream pop culture does this and doesn't do that, and are willing to embrace new technologies and new opportunities, and actually show people how it should be done.

And it doesn't even have to be a traditional movie. That used to be the dream – make a full-length movie and show it in a conventional theater to a live audience. But if that medium is dying (as it seems to be), there are other ways of telling a story. You can make a web series. You can write books. You can be like the folks I learned about last weekend, and find ways to combine existing media into something new.

I think J to the W was right. These are the worst of times and, “like some guy might have said once,” the best of times.

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 …