writer, photographer, web person from Washington, DC.
The Art of Non-Conformity: Set Your Own Rules, Live the Life You Want, and Change the World by Chris Guillebeau
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Perhaps because I’m an avid reader of Chris Guillebeau’s blog, I didn’t get as much out of this book as I thought I would. It’s still a good book, however, for people who want to live differently and pursue non-traditional goals. However, a lot of it is very familiar to regular readers of his blog.
I was sitting at home when it happened. There, in the audience of the Kodak Theater was someone I recognized. Luke Matheny, director of God of Love. And he had just won the won the 2011 Academy Award for Best Live-Action Short.
Tall, with a mess of wild hair, he’s easy to pick out of a crowd. I recognized him from the filmmaker party at the DC Shorts Film Festival. I’m an executive judge with the festival and have been sort of an uber-volunteer for DC Shorts. I’ve judged films, taken photos, checked-in filmmakers, supervised volunteers, distributed catalogs and managed the screenplay competition (which I like best of all).
God of Love won the Audience Choice Award at DC Shorts. It was a breakout hit, according to The Washington Post.
I didn’t actually get to talk to Matheny at the party in September of last year. I met other filmmakers, including the director of Touch (a poignant short film I really liked) and the hilarious brains behind Enter the Beard. After a couple drinks, I’m not a bad mingler. I’m not one to flit about a room, a social butterfly, but I enjoy meeting creative people. As a writer, it’s really inspiring to me.
And that’s the way I felt seeing Matheny bound up from his seat in the audience. Inspired. I’ve written screenplays before, and even won a local screenwriting contest, but Hollywood seemed like an impossible and futile dream. (And perhaps not a very desirable one, as I learned after a visit to the set of The West Wing.)
I also felt confused. I like DC Shorts because it’s the anti-thesis of Hollywood. The short films we show are singular works, not the product of committees filled with MBAs. They’re made on small budgets and are works of passion. And DC Shorts is programmed by Washington-area filmgoers. Anyone can be a judge and help decide what gets included in the festival. (Regular people are such good judges, in fact, that Ryan Kearney of TBD thought that there were better films in DC Shorts than the Oscars.)
To go from the democratic world of our festival to bright lights of the Kodak Ballroom – that’s something I never thought I’d see. I didn’t think there were any connection points between the two worlds. We were separated by thousands of miles and completely different sensibilities.
Moviemaking in Hollywood is about millions of dollars, bloated egos and budgets, teams of writers and executives tearing apart good stories. It’s about loud explosions, hackneyed catchphrases and plots that make no sense.
DC Shorts is about the filmmaker. Singular. It’s a festival for filmmakers, programmed by movie lovers.
The Oscar win is great for Luke Methany and, by extension, great for DC Shorts.
But people shouldn’t wait to be discovered by the entertainment industry. Instead, they should write that book, paint that painting, film that movie. Don’t ask for permission, don’t look for validation, just tell your story.
You could have the greatest idea for a movie in the history of the world. But Hollywood will still reject you. It’s better to be an angry filmmaker. Better to make your art on your own terms.
Want to see your short film included in a festival like DC Shorts, DCIFF or Rosebud? Then check out my article for the Pink Line Project on how to get your movie in local festivals.
It could even lead to the Oscars! God of Love won the 2011 Academy Award for Best Live-Action Short. But before that, it won the Audience Choice Award at DC Shorts.
My novel, Murder in Ocean Hall, has advanced to the second round of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award (ABNA).
ABNA is a competition sponsored by Amazon for self-published and unpublished novels. This year’s competition will award two grand prizes: one for General Fiction and one for Young Adult Fiction. Each winner will receive a publishing contract with Penguin, which includes a $15,000 advance. (I’m entered in General Fiction.)
Quarter-finalists will be announced on March 22 while we don’t find out the first place winner until June 13.
The competition is also a great way for Amazon to highlight their self-publishing tools, CreateSpace (for print books) and Kindle Direct Publishing (for e-books). They’re both easy and free to use.
Murder in Ocean Hall is a mystery set in Washington, DC. The world’s most famous oceanographer is killed at the Smithsonian. Set during the summer before the 2008 presidential election, we follow Detective Thomas across the city as he encounters the powerful and the powerless in his quest to solve this high-profile case. Thomas has grown bitter from decades of investigating bloody mayhem on city streets. Despite the new condos and gentrification, has the city really changed?
Murder in Ocean Hall is available exclusively at Amazon. The paperback is $9.99 while the Kindle e-book edition is just $2.99.
Check out the trailer for the short film “Catching Up”. It’s a film by an American University film student, Mary Ratliff.
I first encountered this script during a live reading at Arlington Independent Media. At the time, I thought part of it seemed unrealistic – a little girl in a prison? But it’s based on a real story. Truth is stranger than fiction.
The script for this film was a finalist in the DC Shorts Screenplay Competition, where I got to read it as a judge for the competition. Mary is just one of our talented finalists who have gone on to make movies and do other great things.
She’s also part of what I like to call the “AU mafia” of filmmakers, including Colin Foster, who just filmed Man with a Bolex Movie Camera. As an AU grad myself, I think this is awesome.
Official Trailer for Catching Up from Mary Ratliff on Vimeo.
Since I was quoted in this article, Second Run: Why Local Filmmakers Are Miffed by Crystal Palmer’s Return to the D.C. Film Office, I thought I’d elaborate on my thoughts on why I’m miffed.
In the run-up to the mayoral election, I was told by many well-meaning folks that Vincent Gray shared the reformer credentials of Adrian Fenty but without the hard edges. He would be a fairer Mayor, one more attuned to the needs of citizens.
The people who tried to convince me of this notion hadn’t lived in DC as long as I had. They assumed that the city had always been this way. They didn’t remember the days of DC as the murder capital of the country, of when city government was synonymous with corruption. They thought of Marion Barry as an entertaining relic, not the coke-addicted “Mayor for Life” who drove the city into bankruptcy. Continue reading “Undoing Reform: Cronyism in the DC Government”
Check out my article, Lessons from The West Wing, in the Austin-based literary journal, Black Heart Magazine. It’s about a trip I took to the set of The West Wing during its final season of filming. I got to go for winning the Film DC Screenwriting Competition for my feature-length script, Mount Pleasant.
While behind the scenes of this iconic TV series, I learned that the entertainment world isn’t so glamorous. On the other side of the bright lights, it’s a business like any other.
Check out my article on Man with a Bolex Movie Camera. This short film was recently accepted into the Cinekink Film Festival. It’s a local production, written and directed by students from American University’s MFA film program. I went to AU as an undergrad so I was glad to write about this production for the Pink Line Project, where I contribute articles about the DC filmmaking scene.
I first encountered Man with a Bolex Movie Camera when it was a script. It had been submitted to the DC Shorts Screenplay Competition. I was one of the judges and we selected the script as a finalist. Local actors performed this funny and sexy story in a theater in the round setting on a rainy night in October 2009.
While the script didn’t win the competition (Annie Coburn, another AU student did), writer Colin Foster benefited from the experience. Based upon hearing the response from the audience, he shortened the script and tightened it up a bit.
Continue reading “Sneak Peek: Man with a Bolex Movie Camera”
DC Shorts finalist Colin Foster enjoys a table read of his screenplay, The Man with a Bolex Movie Camera.
The DC Shorts Screenplay Competition is a different kind of screenplay contest. What makes it unique is that the winner receives $2,000 toward turning their script into a film. The film is also automatically admitted into the following year’s DC Shorts Film Festival. Continue reading “How to Win the DC Shorts Screenplay Competition”
I wrote a short piece for FlackRabbit on my adventures in book marketing. Last year, I published a book, Murder in Ocean Hall, using the awesome CreateSpace.
Why publish it myself? Because the traditional publishing model is broken and it takes a year to get a book in print, even after it’s been accepted by a publisher. Being a web person, that struck me as a crazy and unnecessarily long time.
The downside, of course, is that you have to do your own marketing. However, that’s been a good learning experience, which I write about in the FlackRabbit article.