 Neal Romanek writes for and about The Pictures - movies, tv, comics, games, web content, and even cave paintings. |
March 11th, 2010
‘(Los Angeles) is a country coming down from its trip. We are 91 days from the end of this decade, and there’s gonna be a lot of refugees. They’ll be goin’ round this town shoutin’, ‘Bring out your dead.’”
- “Withnail & I” (1987), Bruce Robinson
(this article originally appeared at screenwriting
website Twelvepoint.com, Feb. 2010)
When I was 17 years old, I set off for Los Angeles to attend the Cinema-TV Production School at the University of Southern California. On the plane I read William Goldman’s ”Adventures In The Screen Trade” and planned my future.
I knew – everyone knew – that if you wanted to make movies, you had to go to LA. You also had to have a degree from a top-rate film school. A writerly alcohol and drug habit was a good idea too.
I know today – having learned through experience – that I was starting my life’s journey based on a complete pack of lies. But I was 17 years old and it was the 1980s. When you’re 17, starting a life’s journey based on a pack of lies is…well, it’s what you do, isn’t it?
I graduated from film school with a host of brilliant classmates. Some went to Portland and Seattle and actually made movies; some went back home to Texas or Connecticut. The rest of us went out into LA to seek our fortunes. Post-film school life in LA was exactly halfway between “Sunset Boulevard” (1950) and ”The Big Picture” (1989), a fantasy veering crazily from cynical gloom to sweet comedy and back.
95% of my USC classmates began their course determined to win at least one Best Directing Oscar but the attrition rate of Cherished Film School Dreams looks a bit like a casualty roster of WWI pilots. By the time of our graduation, many of my friends had traded in their ideal visions for something more bite-sized and realistic. Why? A good film school’s job should be to impress upon its students that filmmaking is a bizarre and tedious process that sane people ought to avoid. And USC has one of the best film schools in the world. Also, students began to learn that there was a massive array of supporting crafts that go into a film production and discovered that one of these fired their hearts and imaginations in a way the vague, grandiose vision of ‘Oscar-Winning Director’ could not.
There were a few emotionally-immature, mental defectives – I among them – who refused to surrender the dream (while increasingly suspecting that they were utterly unemployable in any normal work). We graduated and began to write spec screenplays – lots of them – and gave them to anyone and everyone who pretended to want to read them.
 Screenwriting is hard, thankless work. Though not like digging ditches or mining coal, obviously. Digging ditches is something useful and beneficial to society. 1000 hours spent fretting over an urban melodrama about vampires hasn’t been on the Nobel Committee’s application form for some years. But because it is hard work, rather than churning out new material, a few of the devoted dreamers became obsessed with rewriting the same screenplay over and over again – infusing it with a Great New Idea with each pass – until the thing read like a transcript for the blind of a David Lynch movie written by a teenage girl on ecstasy. Thankfully, most of them gave it all up before they went mad.
In a very few years there were only a handful of us left, writing one spec screenplay after another, each waiting for his or her particular stars to align.
My stars aligned early on. One of my first sci-fi screenplays was optioned by Mario Kassar – the Old Hollywood-style movie gangster who brought us “Rambo”, “Total Recall”, “LA Story”, “Basic Instinct”, “Terminator” and ”Stargate”. It was in the twilight years of the era of script mega-sales, those days when coke-addled producers would shell out $3 million for an idea written by Joe Eszterhas on the back of a McDonald’s napkin.
I had the obligatory ‘tyro screenwriter’s mega-deal’ article in ”Daily Variety” and every major director whose career started in television advertising was on the verge of saying ‘Yes’ to the film. Then, just as quickly, it all petered out and I was left in the tragic position of living in a big house in the Hollywood Hills, with a view of Catalina on a clear day, transported into the world of an A-List screenwriter.
I pitched ideas to every company of note in LA. I joined the long queues of writers brought in to give a fresh perspective on whatever proposed sci-fi/action/fantasy property Company X was developing. A few of those projects, after years in development purgatory, finally did escape and audiences seemed to like them. They usually ended up with a single writer’s name on them but I’m sure all of us who sat there saying to execs “The villain in “Blade” must under no circumstances be Count Dracula” feel a certain attachment to those projects, like when you receive news that someone you had a fling with has become married to a jerk not nearly as attractive and talented as you.
With growing dread, I came to understand that the tedium I was experiencing is the bulk of the work in a booming Hollywood career. Get your latest brilliant spec read, get a meeting, hear about their project, pitch them your take on their project, wait by the phone for your agent to call, repeat ad infinitum. Ad infinitum. If you are very lucky, someone will accidentally pay you a great deal of money to pour your heart and soul into their project when everyone involved knows but never mentions that the project will almost certainly never be produced.
I was pitching a television series idea to the production company of a woman who has made at least one of your favourite sci-fi movies, had an arsenal of good writing samples to show and not the worst track record, and I felt like I was no closer to making movies than when I was on the plane to LA at age 17.
Then it occurred to me that movies are made by people who are making movies. You know what I mean? Marathons are run by people who are running marathons, cakes are baked by people who are baking cakes. Am I making sense? It’s the simple and obvious that has always eluded me. The Hollywood studio system is about not losing money first and making movies second. That is how many successful businesses operate. It’s how NASA operates. NASA’s primary purpose is not to send stuff into space, it’s to allocate resources and personnel in such a way that everyone at NASA still has a job next year. Imagine my surprise when I realised my entire career – and the careers of many successful writers I know – had been a case of shaking an apple tree year after year, waiting for oranges to start dropping.
I hope I don’t seem a complete ingrate – I do like apples – but I just didn’t want to spend any more time eating apples, wishing they were oranges.
So I moved to London…
(end of part 1)
January 5th, 2010
Saw James Cameron’s “Avatar” (2009) yesterday afternoon in 3D at the Shepherd’s Bush VUE Cinemas in London. Went with my Dad who has seen more movies than I am ever likely to see, including the 3D masterpiece, “Bwana Devil” (1952).
One of my first thoughts was: Now I know what the Act III of “Return Of The Jedi” (1983) should have looked like.
“Avatar” isn’t Jim Cameron’s best movie. That honour still goes to “Aliens” (1986), as beautifully plotted an action movie as there has ever been. A respectable horror movie too, but it is primarily an action movie. Still, I really found “Avatar” exquisitely beautiful in its design and execution.
Already I’m getting flack from Film World Colleagues, who found the movie to be ham-fisted. Where I saw delightful design choices, they saw lipstick on a pig.
The fact that there is nothing new in its premise – that “Avatar” is “Dances With Wolves” (1990) / “Little Big Man” (1970) / “Lawrence Of Arabia” ?? (1962) / “Fill In The Blank” In Space – seems a weak criticism of the movie, though it’s been trotted out a lot over the past couple weeks.
 Vietnam vet Wes Studi (far left) played the leader of a Pawnee raiding party in "Dances With Wolves" before playing Eytukan in "Avatar" Cameron has deliberately kept the story simple, obvious even, to provide a solid framework on which he can hang all his beautiful decoration. To get clever with both design and story at the same time could invite Unmanageability – the bane of Cameron’s existence. Cameron has always kept his plots and characters very simple, virtually mechanical in their efficiency. When he has tried to reach for more complex and subtle (relatively) themes and plotting, the movies have suffered. And, recalling the tales told about the production of Cameron’s two “wettest” movies, “The Abyss” and “Titanic”, his crews have suffered too. For Cameron, “Keep it simple” is a mantra that leads to success.
The story structure in “Avatar” is really quite adroit – solid and simple. As any good writer will tell you, “solid and simple” is actually hard to pull off, because false notes – and there are some in “Avatar” – stick out like signalling antennae on an alien lifeform.
The movie has a skeleton of very simple, rock-solid sequences – like its cousin “Dances With Wolves”. “Dances”, one of the longest movies to ever win a Best Picture Academy Award, flies by for most people because it is constructed of straightforward, firmly constructed sequences. Knowing where the story is going – having “seen it before” – carries the audience along. We are always anticipating the next beat. We know what is supposed to happen next, more or less, but we don’t know exactly how it will be presented. And that is the way expert storytellers do it – just ask Hitchcock.
Oh, and Cameron stole the entire “Avatar” idea from me. I wrote, in high school, a story of a race of simple blue-skinned aliens who lived on a jungle world. A human male is drawn into defending them from a highly technological man-machine who wants to take the blue-skinned guys’ precious, sacred mineral.
Naturally, I plan to sue.
Of course, I ripped off – and still do – all the other sci-fi writers I knew and loved. “Avatar” is a conservatively plotted, “classic sci-fi” story, in the vein of one of the Heinlein or Asimov books. It absorbs all the flavours and styles that those great 20th century sci-fi authors – and their hundreds of imitators – spun and then sings it back in Cameron’s voice. Just as I did in my own voice via my high school “Avatar” precursor.
We are in an age of illustration in movies – and we have Peter Jackson to thank/blame for it. The goal in so many big studio movie adaptations is not to bring new insight to a story or a franchise, but to illustrate an existing property faithfully. Peter Jackson’s stunning success rested on giving audiences exactly the “Lord Of The Rings” that they had imagined – plus a bit more. A lot of people – well, myself anyway – watched the “Lord Of The Rings” movies thinking, “Wow. If I had a bit more imagination, then that is exactly how I would have imagined it.” In other movies, the source material has been so sacred that barely a word or beat is changed in the film adaptation – “300″ and “Sin City”. I think “Avatar” follows in this tradition, illustrating a sci-fi story already existing in the back of our collective imaginations. Dragon riders, floating mountains, glowing forests with trees the size of skyscrapers – we all know bits and pieces of these from books and wall calendars and dreams. It’s as if Cameron has supplied the movie to a story we had known about all along.
There’s much more to say about “Avatar”. For one, its political stance is fascinating to me. It’s a major studio movie by a major studio director that takes an aggressively anti-neocon POV. Very unusual.
But I’d like to hear your comments, then we can get into some discussion.
August 7th, 2009
The BBC’s South Pacific – 1000 Islands, 1000 Challenges
By
Neal Romanek
(as printed in the July 2009
edition of TVBEurope)
 Tanna Volcano in Vanuatu, South Pacific “South Pacific” (2009) is the latest attempt by the BBC documentary team to break all previous records. The six-part series is the first to present a thorough study of a part of the world that is still relatively unexplored.
TVBEurope spoke with veteran BBC producer Huw Cordey about the production of the series. Cordey has been involved in many of the BBC’s landmark wildlife shows. He was a segment producer on “Planet Earth” (2006) and “The Life of Mammals” (2002), but “South Pacific” is his first time as producer of an entire series.
The remit of the series, narrated by Benedict Cumberbatch, was potentially as wide-reaching as the location itself. Even as broad in scope as “Planet Earth” is, it is still a definable location, but before beginning production on the series, the very definition of “South Pacific” was open to debate. “The most obvious definition,” Cordey says, “is everything in the Pacific that’s south of the equator. But that was too narrow for the series because we wanted to look at it in terms of the cultural and natural history aspects, and these things don’t always respect invisible lines like the boundary of the equator. Covering Hawaii, which is well above the equator, was entirely appropriate. It was colonized by Polynesians from the south and the animal and plant species that arrived there were carried by the same natural forces that populated the rest of the islands.”
With so many locations to choose from, literally tens of thousands of islands, over such a vast area – all the seven continents could be put inside the Pacific Ocean with room to spare – production planning had to be meticulous. Islands large enough and flat enough to feature a grass airstrip were reached by plane, but a lot of crew and equipment travel was exclusively by boat.
The series also had the challenge that very little scientific work has been done on most of the islands. Scientists simply have not gotten around to fully exploring the Solomon Islands or the island of Vanuatu.
Huw Cordey is extraordinarily well travelled. His father worked for Shell and Cordey had been all over the world long before he began his career with the BBC documentary team, yet even he was stunned by how remote the locations were. “A great portion of our locations I had never even heard of.”
The first episode of the series features the idyllic island community of Anuta. Half a square mile in area, with no harbour, and surrounded by reefs and fast current, Anuta Island is accessible only by a carefully piloted boat. From a remote port in the Solomon Islands, it took the production’s yacht – owned and piloted by the team’s cameraman – five days to get to Anuta. Cordey and his crew were dropped off, and with no place at Anuta to anchor, the yacht had to sail away to a nearby port – 75 miles away. The “South Pacific” crew were the first visitors to Anuta in two years. The previous visitors were the crew of the BBC programme “Tribe”. Cordey and his crew had an experience usually thought of as belonging to another century: “The Anutans had gotten wind of our coming only a day before our arrival because they have a VHF radio on the island which they use to communicate with a few Anutans living on the Solomon Islands.”
 Filming an Oceanic Whitetip Shark, Hawaii Surprising television audiences is never easy today, especially when the BBC has set such consistently high bars for itself. “When you’re talking about landmark television, you generally have to do two things. You either have to improve upon sequences that have been done before – either with technology or by showing better animal behaviour. Or you surprise people with something completely new. In some ways it was easy to surprise the audience because so much of it was unfamiliar.”
Varicams were used throughout the series – including the underwater sequences – with four kits shared between the crews of the six episodes. A relatively small number of cameramen were employed to cover the entire series. Having a smaller pool of photographers was more cost effective, and simplified production in not having to reinvent the wheel every time a new cameraman was introduced to the production.
“South Pacific” features all the technical sophistication of its BBC antecedents – and more. The Cineflex camera stabilization mount was used on helicopter shots, the same technology famously employed on “Planet Earth”. Cineflex mounts were rigged onto the helicopters of the obliging Chilean navy, for flights over Easter Island, a Chilean protectorate. The series features the first ever HD aerial shots of Easter Island and its foreboding statues.
Of course, the series features technical innovations used for the first time on nature TV shoots. Even before the series premiere, much buzz had been generated by online video of surfing legend Dylan Longbottom riding waves in super slow motion off the island of Pohnpei. The shots also feature the first slow motion footage showing the details and vortices of massive waves as they form and break. The images are both hypnotising and breathtaking.
 Cameraman Bali Strickland with TyphoonHD4 This super slow motion footage was captured by the TyphoonHD4 camera. Like the Photron camera used on “Planet Earth” to shoot South Africa’s breaching great white sharks, the TyphoonHD4 records continuously to a hard drive cache, at extreme shutter speeds. The TyphoonHD4 is able to retain full HD resolution up to 1000fps. Its light sensitivity – essential for underwater shooting – was what made it Cordey’s choice.
Dr. Rudolf Diesel, the German mind behind the system, was asked to designed a waterproof housing for the camera’s first foray under the sea. The unit would be making its debut in big surf, with a reef two meters below, and would need to be manageable by a single, swimming operator. Diesel, both an engineer and an expert in marine biology, was literally adjusting the camera housing until minutes before shooting.
Bali Strickland, a 29 year old Australian who has shot some of the world’s greatest surfers and greatest surfing footage, operated the TyphoonHD4. In partnership with Dylan Longbottom, he wrestled twelve foot waves and the massive camera housing, and managed to capture some of the series’ signature shots.
Even Strickland, however, was apprehensive about the job. “There was very little room for maneuver,” Cordey explains. “Bali Strickland had to use all his skill to keep himself safe, and the camera too. He said to us right from the start, ‘Look, if I get in danger, I’m sorry, but I’m letting the camera go.’” To confirm just how treacherous the shoot was, Longbottom, who some call the best surfer in the world, moments after getting one of the shots, was pushed into the reef by a wave. He managed to get the surface, almost knocked out, with blood pouring out of one ear.
Rudy Diesel has developed a second generation housing for the TyphoonHD which weighs in at 11kg – as opposed to the series’ 20kg prototype. The “South Pacific” camera was also only able to capture two 2.5-second shots at 500 fps before it had to be returned to the boat, opened, and the footage downloaded. The latest iteration of the system allows almost as much recording time as batteries will allow.
One of the great messages of the series is that life is determined and will always find a way to flourish. Cordey points out “Every single one of those thousands of islands. has been colonized by something. In the South Pacific there is no such thing as a deserted island.”
 Kennedy Island, Solomon Islands —
May 10th, 2009
Solving 3D Headaches:
Matt Brennesholtz Helps
Negotiate A Challenging 3D Future
By
Neal Romanek
(as printed in April 2009 TVBEurope)
“I love watching 3D, it’s just that after 10 minutes I have a pounding headache.”
At tradeshows, exhibitions, screenings, even meet-ups of 3D devotees, one hears it over and over. At the Digital Television Group’s Summit 2009 in March, an overview of Sky’s plans for 3DTV was introduced with “Here’s Chris Johns to tell us about eye strain.”
There has been a mad rush to produce 3D content even though their may not be the viewership for it. Critics vocally wonder if the producers of 3D content are living in a fool’s paradise, preparing for The Next Big Thing that may never come. The Beijing Olympics was touted as the “3D Olympics”. 3D trials were to play in limited markets, primarily in Asia. The fact that few people have heard that Beijing was the “3D Olympics” may suggest how successful the experiment was.
Creating dynamic, believable and commercially viable 3D images is a challenge that has been around longer than most people suppose. 3D is usually associated with the 1950’s and the spate of anaglyph-based 3D feature films – although the anaglyph technique had been used to create 3D images since the 1850’s. The first stereoscopic motion picture patent was taken out in the 1890’s and the first 3D camera rig was patented in 1900.
TVBEurope talked with 3D expert Matt Brennesholtz, a senior analyst at Insight Media who has worked in partnership with the 3D@Home Consortium. The 3D@Home Consortium was formed in 2008 to speed the commercialization of 3D into homes worldwide. It also attempts to facilitate the development of standards, roadmaps and education for the 3D industry. In 2007 Brennesholtz co-authored a 400-page report “3D Technology and Markets: A Study of All Aspects of Electronic 3D Systems, Applications and Markets”. This all encompassing document forecast the viability of 3D display technology in a vast array of markets into the next decade. Its scope included not just stereoscopic 3D displays, but a variety of autostereoscopic displays, and rotating image plane, vibrating membrane, and micropolarizer technologies.
Brennesholtz is an expert in display technologies, having been a lead projection system architect at Philips LCoS Microdisplay Systems. He has a masters of Engineering in Optics and Plasma Physics from Cornell University and has been granted 23 patents. Still, we asked question most on everyone’s mind – why do we get a headache when we watch 3D?
“One of the fundamental problems with 3D displays,” he explains, “is the problem of convergence and accommodation.” Convergence is the ability of the eyes to stay trained on a point in space and allows you to focus on the text on a mobile phone three inches from your nose. Accommodation is the ability of the eye itself to focus in distance like a mini-camera.
Stereoscopic images rely on the brain’s default setting of always making a single image out of the pair of images received by the eyes – as opposed to how chameleons do it. The perceived “space” between the two side-by-side images in a 3D show is compensated for by convergence with the eyes going from being parallel towards being crossed and back – just as they would in watching a live event.
The element that is challenging for the brain – and for some viewers – is the image in a 3D display is always exactly the same distance away, on the surface of the screen. The convergence of the eyes sends the message that objects are moving forward and backward in space, but the real image each eye is capturing stays put. The brain is trying to tackle two different ways of seeing at once, like a computer running two memory intensive applications at the same time. The fact that the eyes are making very few focus changes, doesn’t mean that the brain is not revving like an engine every time it thinks something is moving toward it or away from it. Perhaps, like the trick of being able to pat your head and rub your stomach at the same time, the brain may get the hang of it with repeated viewing.
“There can be other human factor problems associated with bad 3D displays,” Brennesholtz notes, “with certain types of encoding, for example, but this is a fundamental problem that really is inescapable in the 3D display world.”
The most serious aggravation of the accommodation-convergence discrepancy is when the content creator puts images in the virtual space in front of the screen – the monster reaches out to camera, the enemy fires a hundred arrows at us, and the like. These are the effects that producers may push because they have greater visceral impact, but they are also the things that most bother the eyes. Brennesholtz says the solution is to place most 3D effects at the level of the screen or behind it.
Another significant issue, one to induce headaches in content creators rather than viewers, is that the content has to be created for the screen size and viewing distance of the intended audience. Analogous to needing different sound mixes for DVD, theatrical, and mobile device content, each 3D version of a programme must be mastered with its final destination in mind. Sound mixers have managed complex sets of presets for each intended format, it seems likely that 3D mastering will have to learn to do the same.
Although some roadblocks to the perfect 3D experience are exactly the same as they were in the 1950’s, Brennesholtz points out that the sophistication of today’s technology may overcome the others. “Some of the other problems that have been associated with 3D, like dimness or differences in brightness and color between the two images, can be overcome with proper display, screen and video signal design.”
Brennesholtz underlines the consumers demand for a quality experience that is the principle factor in adoption of 3D. “The end user, whether he’s watching broadcast television or cable or blue ray or is sitting in the cinema, is not going to give up anything to get 3D. He’s not going to give up resolution. He’s not going to give up frame rate. He’s not going to accept flicker. He’s not going to accept headaches. Basically, he wants his 2D experience – which right now when you look at HDTV is really good – but with 3D.”
Questions about 3D are in no short supply. Approximately 10% of the population are unable to properly see 3D, and what kind of a strategy must be developed when such a large segment of the audience must automatically be discounted? Most people are unaware that many TV’s are already “3D ready”, but where is the extra bandwidth going to come from if 3D TV is going to become a reality? And finally, if eyeball convergence and focus are such core issues in 3D viewing, what happens to the 3D experience after the third beer?
—
April 10th, 2009
Having just launched my horror site, “All The Hells”, how I could I not listen to an audio drama called “After Hell”?
“After Hell” a supernatural drama, a mix of police procedural and “28 Days Later”-style Armageddon story. It’s enthusiastically presented and – the key to any good audio drama – uses an intelligent sound design to create spaces, describe scenes, illustrate scenes in detail.
I was sent one of the new CD copies from SciFind Ltd., UK based aggregator of all things scientifically fictional. I was sold on the concept, sight unseen – or sound unheard. I love audio drama – as anyone who has heard my delightfully self-indulgent (yes, delightfully!) “Wretched Goo Of The Imagination” podcasts will tell you. One of my first forays into media production was the recording of a thrilling audio space adventure with my older brother. It was entitled “Face To Face With The Planet Scanodon!” and recorded in the living room of our Ohio apartment on glorious reel-to-reel tape. I wonder if my parents still have that tape in storage somewhere.
And I have not grown up – have not “changed my principles”, let’s say – that sounds better – one iota since then. Here is the planet Scanodon at The Cyclopedia Of Worlds:
The quality of writing and production design may have improved since I was seven years old, but the subject matter…remarkably the same.
Writer-director Joe Medina at Ollin Productions has put together something he should be proud of with “After Hell”. I think Orson Welles would agree with me, if he were animated and rotting next to me in some kind of horrific horror story way, that audio drama – radio drama, we used to call it – is it’s own, self-contained media form. Audio drama, like music, engages the mind and imagination directly – and can – in partnership with our brains – describe atmospheres, textures, spaces, and all manner of impossible absurdities (see again, The Wretched Goo Of The Imagination) with ease. I love it. And will do more of it myself some day, when I finish these several dozen other projects. Well done, to Ollin Productions and the entire “After Hell” crew. Keep up the good work. We want more. We need more.
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Action is the foundational key to all success.
- Pablo Picasso
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