rants Archives - Page 10 of 12

The Two-Step Plan to Write a Screenplay

I had a chance to speak at a DC Film Salon panel on screenwriting. It was a really interesting session, with lots of great questions from the audience. This is the advice I provided.

I won the Film DC Screenwriting Competition in 2006 for my feature-length screenplay, Mount Pleasant. Since then, people have asked me about screenwriting, what software I use, if I took classes, etc… How’d I do it?

It’s simple, really. Just two steps:

Read
Write

Continue reading “The Two-Step Plan to Write a Screenplay”

New Article: How Do You Measure PR?

The Public Relations Society of America defines public relations thusly:

“Public relations helps an organization and its publics adapt mutually to each other.”

Which is just an awful definition, reeking of the stale conference room and whiteboards crowded with b-school jargon. Merriam-Webster has a slightly better explanation:

the business of inducing the public to have understanding for and goodwill toward a person, firm, or institution

PR is about getting the word out about your product, cause or service. I’d consider myself a semi-professional PR practitioner, busy trying to “induce” the public to do something increasingly unknown in 21st century America: read a book. And not just any book. My book, fiction, of all things, by an unknown author.

So, I’m always interested in new ways of “inducing” (why not just say “persuading”?) the public. I attended a session on movie marketing put on by the DC Film Salon. A pair of PR stars gave a presentation on how they got the word out about indie films, including some creative tactics like having screenings for “tastemakers.”

But the room was filled with cash-poor independent filmmakers. How could they afford these PR services? And, moreover, would this be a good use of their limited funds? I asked if there was any way to connect the parties and screenings to the most important metric of all – ticket sales. But there’s no way to accurately measure the impact of PR.

Which is what inspired me to write How Do You Measure PR? It’s on the blog FlackRabbit, published by my friend Margie Newman, who is perhaps the smartest PR person I know. We’ll see what answers her readers come up with.

Why I'm Not at SXSW This Year

SXSW Interactive is an annual conference of social media and web geeks in Austin. It’s a huge, exhausting event that takes place over a long weekend in March and is popularly known as the conference that introduced Twitter and other new forms of communication.

The criticism now is that it’s gotten too big and too corporate, dominated by giant corporations trying to be hip. And that it’s gotten to be such a chaotic moshpit that it leads to network outages.

I went to SXSW in 2007 and 2008, just the right moment before it became mainstream. The conference taught me to love the brilliant minds at 37signals, whose radically hopeful ideas about the future of work cannot arrive soon enough. I learned that project management should be as simple as possible. Gantt charts and MS Project should be avoided in favor of clear goals that everyone can understand. REWORK is their vision for the ideal work environment, where meetings and busywork are eschewed in favor of collaboration and results. Their philosophy is subversive and attractive for anyone stuck in boring meetings or lengthy conference calls. Continue reading “Why I'm Not at SXSW This Year”

One Degree of Separation: Me and the Oscars

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.

Undoing Reform: Cronyism in the DC Government

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”

Do You Have a Minute for…

On the streets of DC, there is a proliferation of well-meaning people soliciting for good causes. It’s not just the holidays, they’re parked on sidewalks year-round. Clever, too, for they patrol in two-person teams and stake out opposite ends of the block. I have been known to walk in the street or pretend to talk on my iPhone to avoid them.

Do You Have a Minute is a post I wrote for FlackRabbit, a blog on PR. My argument: these street teams cheapen the reputation of the charities they represent.

The TSA, Blogger Bob and George Orwell

There’s been a lot of discussion going on at GovLoop about a post I did about the TSA blog. In it, I asked whether the TSA blog was supposed to be propaganda or the unvarnished truth.

GovLoop is an online community designed to be “Facebook for feds”.

I objected to the fact that “Blogger Bob” from the TSA categorically states that no one is being groped at airport checkpoints. This is so far removed from reality to be laughable. Anyone who has opened a newspaper or turned on the news has seen countless reports from ordinary citizens about being felt up at TSA checkpoints.

Blogger Bob responded to my post on GovLoop. He accused me of spreading misinformation. He puts “groping” in quotes as if it’s all a big misunderstanding. This agent of the government is disappointed in me. That’s a bit worrisome, considering the tools the TSA has to make my life difficult.

Friends of Blogger Bob defended him in the comments. One person even texted me privately. They say he’s a good guy. I’m sure he is. I’m sympathetic – being a blogger for the TSA has got to be an impossible job.

I’m a big fan of government blogging. When I worked at NOAA, I set up a blog and advocated for greater blogging within the organization. The scientists at NOAA do fascinating work that deserves greater coverage.

But government bloggers work for the people. They have an obligation to be truthful. They’re not supposed to do propaganda – that’s expressly illegal. When I was at NOAA, the feds I worked with stressed to me that we were public servants. All of us, contractors and feds, united to provide quality, vetted information to the public.

“Our work speaks for itself,” one veteran fed told me, declining to do any PR at all about what they did.

Government bloggers have an obligation to be truthful. When they deny the obvious (no one is being groped) that destroys their credibility. And the Orwellian language is even worse – “enhanced patdowns” for that hand on your groin.

Winston Smith rewrote history in 1984, changing the facts to match the policy of the day. We’ve always been at war with Eastasia…

It’s a dangerous path that the TSA is on. Instead of providing factual information, they give us taxpayers self-serving spin. I hope that the TSA and government bloggers turn away from this future. Because at the end of this long road lies Winston Smith, in a cubicle, sending inconvenient facts down the memory hole.

Lessons from the Fire – Part Two

cleanup — Fans and a large dehumidifier cope with some water damage on my floor.

So, late one afternoon, my building caught fire. My apartment was fine; other people weren’t so lucky. This is part two of lessons learned. Check out part one for my initial thoughts on having a backup plan and other realizations.

Stuff Matters!

It would be nice if I had a zen-like approach to material possessions. I think I lead a fairly minimalist life but when I couldn’t get back into the building, all I thought about was my stuff. I knew the fire didn’t reach my apartment but I was worried about water damage. I pictured water pouring down on my brand new MacBook Pro and soaking the pillow-top mattress that I like so much. Plus, books, photos, art, letters from friends, keepsakes, personal items, clothes and everything else.

I’m glad that I have renters’ insurance (that’s really a must) but so much of the analog stuff that really matters is irreplaceable. Continue reading “Lessons from the Fire – Part Two”

Would Self-Publishing Have Saved John Kennedy Toole?

A Confederacy of Dunces is one of my favorite books. In this picaresque novel, John Kennedy Toole creates a vivid and hilarious world, the French Quarter of the 1960s, and populates it with unforgettable characters and fantastic scenes. His protagonist is Ignatius J. Reilly, perhaps the first slacker in American literature. He disdains work and the modern world, longing for the Middle Ages when his genius would be appreciated.

I read A Confederacy of Dunces in college and loved it from the very first pages. It’s a broad comedy, expertly told by someone who clearly knows every inch of his beloved New Orleans. Moreover, Toole was familiar with the slang and patois of the city’s residents. He portrays them as corrupt, flawed, confused – but always well-meaning, in their own way. Continue reading “Would Self-Publishing Have Saved John Kennedy Toole?”