16 Apr

Posted at 15:39h in Film Fundamentals
The British director Michael Powell once told me his notion of giving advice when he was working as a consultant to Francis Ford Coppola and Zoetrope Studios. Powell described the process quite simply: “I tell them what I think they should be doing, they pay me a lot of money and then completely ignore everything I said.” Yes, Michael Powell inspired me to become a film consultant. I am still working on that lots of money part, but I love the rest of the arrangement. Just hand out advice and move on.Unfortunately, it is an extremely competitive field. Heck, every five minutes a new blog post appears somewhere online about the top five (or ten, or whatever) things filmmakers need to do when crowdfunding. All any indie filmmaker needs to do is spend about the next six months on Google and get hot tips on

15 Apr

Posted at 11:47h in Credit Spectrum
This is the title of a classic on change "management," Leading Change, by John Kotter. The word management is in quotes because the premise of the book is that change cannot be managed, it must be led. Going in a straight line to get off the beaten path and on to a new one seems preferable, but it won't lead you there. You need leadership to change course. The essential value-add of Kotter's book is that he linearizes the process of institutionalizing change so it looks like a dotted line. He identifies eight characteristic errors of change leadership that are like the holes between the dots. Reading Kotter's book, I was nagged by one question, the same one that had bothered me in a change-offsite sponsored a large NY based bank in the early 1990s. The session leader put up a power point slide similar to this one and asked, how would you advise Red Arrow to motivate the Blue Arrows to change direction? Right there, he lost me. 
  1. why does Red Arrow want to turn at a right angle to the crowd of Blue Arrows? Is he really smart or incredibly stupid? 

10 Apr

Posted at 15:50h in Credit Spectrum
In Brain Dead, Arianna Huffington asks, "[W]hat accounts for the epidemic of illogical thinking in Washington, where policy makers refuse to grasp what's plainly right in front of them?" She is talking about the employment crisis, of course. Denial is the answer, obviously. But, denial of more than the fact of an employment crisis. This denial goes deep, casting doubts on the capabilities of our brightest economic experts. Expertise in today's market means proficiency in a way of thinking. We have ample reason to believe this way of thinking is part of the problem.

05 Apr

Posted at 13:23h in Film Fundamentals
Sometimes I shouldn't be allowed into a theater. Take last December when I went with my son to see The Hobbit. He's a big Peter Jackson fan. Me, I just occasionally like seeing how lots of money gets splashed on the screen. So we are stuck there for about twenty or more minutes of previews. Normally, I love previews. They are often better than the actual movies. But it occurred to me that all the previews looked like the same film, over and over again. The earth is a wasteland after some kind of disaster with our hero facing some sort of plot by nefarious plotters or whatever. You got Tom Cruise in one of these suckers, Will Smith and his son in another one and I forget who all else in about two dozen other variations of basically the same script. Then we had terrorists blowing up and taking over the White House, also over and over again. So I stand corrected. Hollywood has two scripts that they are endlessly recycling. Though wait a minute. If you destroyed the Earth, I bet you had to blow up the White House, so why not combine these two scripts?  Just be sure to book Morgan Freeman. After all, he seems to be in half of these movies. This tells me several things.

01 Apr

Posted at 20:15h in Outside Looking In
I sat on the couch with my glass of wine. I was beat. Although it was a Sunday, I’d spent most of the day at work, welcoming the incoming summer study abroad students to their Paris program and helping out at their first orientation session, before seeing them off for their group dinner. So it was with a touch of wariness that I answered my cellphone, which was indicating an unknown American number. On the first day of a new program, anything can happen. “Yes, hi, this is Jared’s mother. Is this Emily with the study abroad program?” It was. To what did I owe the pleasure of this Sunday evening call? “I’m getting worried. I texted Jared a couple hours ago and I haven’t heard back from him.”

01 Apr

Posted at 17:35h in Outside Looking In
The first hint I had that the evening on Phillip Island was going to be unique came in the form of this sign in the Visitor Center: checkunderyourcarsforpenguins My husband and I had decided to spend the night on this Australian island, a couple of hours from Melbourne, in order to see the Penguin Parade, a nightly event that turned out to be exactly as adorable as the name promised. And it delivers exactly what it claims to: a parade of penguins, hundreds of them coming ashore once the sun sets, landing on the beach and heading to their burrows. The viewing areas are set off from the landing site, in order to protect the penguins and their habitats. A series of boardwalks are built over the area immediately inland, so that you can wander around after the penguins land, and watch them up close as they make their way to their burrows.

30 Mar

Posted at 17:23h in Film Fundamentals
Some people are still pondering the business market for DVDs. Guess they haven't seen the memo. It's over!  Kaput  The DVD is not yet dead, but it has been admitted into hospice. Various news agencies are already working on the obituary. It will eventually join the rank of such other great devices as the VHS cassette and the Laserdisc. I don't think it will be a sudden death. More like a lingering decline (which is already well underway). But the end of the DVD format is in sight and the reasons are all pretty straightforward. Technically, the format has long been iffy. It wasn't supposed to be, but that thinking was based upon the presumed archival possibilities of DVDs.

20 Mar

Posted at 19:32h in Film Fundamentals
First thing, right up front, there are no secrets. None whatsoever. Or at least, that was what I thought until I recently got a variety of spam for assorted hot offers that unlock the ancient secrets of the screenplay. Heck, some of these promotions sound as if I will be spending the next twenty years in a Tibetan monastery. Good thing I can substitute my credit card number in lieu of esoteric training. In reality, some of these folks (and their various web sites) can teach you how to write a screenplay. That doesn't mean they can teach how to write a good screenplay or even a marketable one. All they can do is give you the basics about how to format and structure something that just might resemble a plausible script in the most elemental sense of the term. Of course, you could figure that out for yourself if you were so inclined. But it is different strokes for different folks and buyer beware and all of that standard advice. People have a Constitutional right to pay as much as they want for any amount of screenwriting seminars they desire. I have heard reports from folks who claim they come out of these seminars feeling truly inspired, which I assume is why they keep going back every year. Few if any of them have yet to produce a single marketable screenplay, but they have lots of inspiration. Sometimes you just want to do something that makes you feel better about yourself. Really, nobody can teach you exactly how to write a screenplay. What you can learn, is how to structure a screenplay. That occurred to me while reading an article at The Guardian by the BBC writer/producer John Yorke. In What Makes a Great Screenplay?, Yorke unreels a quick but highly detailed breakdown of key narrative and dramatic components in the screenplay structure. I'm not sure that I would totally agree with every point Yorke makes in this piece. But it is worth careful scrutiny by anyone interested in learning narrative craft. Yes, I said craft.

15 Mar

Posted at 14:30h in Credit Spectrum
Historical Preamble Around April of 1915, the Western Allies of WWI embarked on a campaign that would quickly turn into one of the costliest mistakes in modern warfare: the Battle of Gallipoli. This fiasco was largely motivated by a legitimate desire on the part of the Western Powers to resupply their ally Russia, as always cut off from the main European theater. Under the leadership of (First Lord of the Admiralty) Winston Churchill, the Allies decided to attack the Gallipoli peninsula on the edge of the Aegean Sea with some of the less capable warships in the British Navy’s then considerable arsenal. However, when combined Anglo-French naval forces proved unable to break through Ottoman defenses lining the Dardanelles, land forces were called in, ultimately with catastrophic results in terms of both material and human losses. This was carnage of hitherto unseen magnitude, whereby casualty rates routinely hovered around 90% on the Allied side. It was also the series of engagements via which Mustafa Kemal, himself a commander at Gallipoli, emerged decisively as the undisputed leader of modern Turkey, and during which he gave what is arguably the most celebrated order in military history: “I do not order you to fight. I order you to die.”