My cousins Hannah, Lily and Max just moved to Malibu. They used to live in the UK and still have their British Accents. Their mom, my cousin Jennifer, is home schooling them in a round house on top of a mountain. Jennifer also makes movies with their dad, my cousin Jason. The house is decorated with stained glass, Catalina Tiles and the gears of a ferris wheel from the Malibu Pier of yesteryear.
There are wonderful things about this house—-the view of the Pacific; the crackle and roar of the fireplace on cold stormy nights; the dining room diorama of westward bound pioneers; the stellar sound system and smell of freshness serving as a reminder that we’ve still got an atmosphere. Frightening things about this house, also—rattlesnakes, coyotes and backing out of that steep, curved driveway after dark. We have great times together.
Our most recent project was taking headshots. Waited till “magic hour” (round 5:30, 6:00pm) when the light was gold; went out onto the balcony; jumped rope, sang songs and listened to Beatles music.
…so now I’m gonna blog about it and from now, when someone asks, I’ll be able to choose whether I want to tell them or refer them to the blog. It’s so cool, being able to do that. Just say, ‘read my blog on the topic, ask me if you have questions’ thereby avoiding interaction. Ironically, interaction is what this Pilot Writing Workshop was all about which is maybe why I liked it so much. I 
was pushed above and beyond my comfort zone. Had no idea storytelling could get this complicated and intricate. It’s totally mathematical, how all these characters connect to the central characters like spokes on a bicycle wheel. There’s always the going back to the personalization, the need to justify. And while I still vye to avoid interaction (specially when it come to half-backed characters and storyline) it’s very focused and constructive and safe and results oriented. But there’s the living, breathing, ever-morphing aspect as well. fractals, patterns recreating and recreating and recreating themselves, giving the creation process a refreshingly linear beatsheet. It’s architecture. Characters, traits, situations on a customized excel spreadsheet. It’s, well, a long road ahead. And I’m not saying that most of television isn’t total crap cause it is. And I only started watching it two years ago; Rod Lurie’s Commander-in-Chief inspired me to come to Hollywood, then of course the idiot network dropped it in it’s first season. But that’s besides the point. Point being, this is an amazing pilot writing workshop. The instructor, the Emmy nominated writer, Ellen Sandler is able to convey enormous amount of info in a short amount of time without compromising individual one-on-one type feedback. The workshop opened me up to a completely diff kind of storytelling. Ellen is truly on the side of the individual writer and people like that are not easy to come by—particularly in the graduate school arena. Here’s a pic of the final class. Of course we all needed beer in order to recover from those seven weeks of functioning on overdrive.
Still trying to get the hand of this. I am fortunate in that my buddy LJ is helping me through this training wheels phase. He is now the proud owner of a Uniqlo T-shirt. There is only one Uniqlo in the entire US and that is in Soho. The t-shirt is a birthday gift. I got my friend Cathy another Uniqlo t-shirt; she’s the one who told me about Uniqlo. LJ doesn’t have a site to link to but he is working on a lesbian dating site called subverge.com
There are wonderful things about this house—-the view of the Pacific; the crackle and roar of the fireplace on cold stormy nights; the dining room diorama of westward bound pioneers; the stellar sound system and smell of freshness serving as a reminder that we’ve still got an atmosphere. Frightening things about this house, also—rattlesnakes, coyotes and backing out of that steep, curved driveway after dark. We have great times together.
