WYGIWYS (What You Get is What You See)
What you get is what you see, not the other way around. Some days we live to remember, and other ones we’d kill to forget. Cinema opens all the doors and then leaves the crowd to get lost and found in what it got. That in itself – the search for what cards are in our hand – can be a life-long journey. In a shared environment of survival games, what’s your next story in the making?
There is a game I think I learned at First Step Nursery School in Santa Monica. I use it in my Story Design Workshop to develop characters.
It goes like this, (fast):
Q. What do you prefer?
[Add Optional opposite questions]
Al Pacino or De Niro?
Chocolate or Spinach?
New York or Berlin?
Black and White or Color?
2D or 3D?
Where is Mickey? Where is Walt? Where is Mowgli? Last I saw him he was dumping Bagheera and Baloo and following tail into the global village.
I worked props at Disney Studios in 1994.
The Job? pick up and deliver to the set a 1930s phone booth, a cadaver and other paraphernalia.
Simple movies love audiences. They don’t exploit, they offer, share, touch. The asses-in-seats is a mentality no different from that of a 100 years ago. Cinema then, was a freak show. The target was a passive masse of folks with limited knowledge.
Why are most filmmakers now moving to less predictable content and form? Are target audiences changing? Who will be the new audiences for cinema if we put aside fashions and trends, product placement and compulsive behavior?
A friend of mine says Hollywood is a religion: high priests, prophets and happy endings. The prophets are the brands, slipping logos into frames, rasing fear. Hey Kid! You are not thin enough, you are not pretty enough! Kids deserve better movies too.
Edison understood how content needs to get eyeballs. He made a fortune 5 cents at a time showing two genres: boxing match and ballerina strip-teases.
Let’s step out of the NickelOdeon era.
/danny
I pushed the eject button over Hollywood and landed in Värmland. Värmland is a region of Sweden. More Holywood than Hollywood, so I get asked: “Why?”
That is the question.
This strand of posts will be connected, like scenes, sketches, or dots. In any order. I am a storyteller, a filmmaker, not a reporter. My favorite film is “F for Fake” by Orson Welles.
Each entry is like a scene, with its own beats. Some will sparkle like homemade fireworks. Some will crawl, like a Lucia procession in the Swedish darkness. All scenes are open for your feedback, like in a workshop.
This part of the blog is like raw footage. You be the editor, you be the direcotr. If a moment doesn’t play, jump cut to another. Try something else, blog back later. A crossword puzzle, a circular story, a Stan Brackhage flick or even Godot will always wait for you because it’s the interesting patterns, the open source and multiple interpretations that turn on audiences and makers alike.
When you are done with each scene/post, invite in someone else you know.
looking forward
/danny
(copyright 2007)
