writer, photographer, web person from Washington, DC.
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.
Check out my latest article iPhoneography: We’re Just Getting Started. In this short piece for the Pink Line Project, I provide some tips on how to best use your iPhone as a camera (hint: don’t use the flash) and advance the notion that the iPhone is the Polaroid of our age.
Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart starts off as a hilarious farce, an inventive look at the future gone wrong. All your paranoid fears about the Department of Homeland Security are well-represented as a bureaucratic error throws Lenny, the book’s narrator, into absurdist peril.
But the novel is much deeper than that. It’s not just a farce, it’s an honest and painful look at a nightmare vision of America. In this dystopia, our country is obsessed with sex and shopping, in hock to the Chinese and teetering on the edge of financial collapse (not too different from today).
The book steadily grows darker and darker as history unravels – we feel for the characters who are so clueless about the inevitable reckoning. And we feel for this country, all the values we hold dear – democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty – all imperiled by decades of folly.
That’s what this book is about – Lenny’s collapse into middle age is mirrored by the collapse of America. Ultimately, it’s a very upsetting book. You don’t want the country to end up this way. The book is dark and funny but it’s also a warning to us as a nation to get our act together. Otherwise, the future will be very cruel.
Several years ago, I was sitting in a bar with a bunch of coworkers. We went out a couple times a week for beer, always to the same place. They were fine people but, good lord, how many times can you hear the same old stories?
While we were rehashing the same old petty little workplace dramas, a group of staffers from the Portrait Gallery came in. They had more interesting things to say than me and my coworkers, for they were talking about art.
It was then that I vowed to get more involved in the creative scene in DC.
In 2010, I was fortunate to not only sample a lot of what the city has to offer, but also participate in it. Continue reading “2010: My Year in the Arts”
Check out Something Found in the Ashes in the Washington Post. It’s my op-ed about the lessons I learned from the November fire in my apartment building.
It’s been a busy couple of months for the finalists of the 2010 DC Shorts Screenplay Competition. Since the live reading of short scripts we did in October, here’s what our writers have been up to:
Interview Date – this funny romantic comedy won the competition. Grant Lyon and Mike Lemcke are now raising money on IndieGoGo to fund production of their film. Check out their video to get a taste of what the movie will be like.
Catching Up – local DC moviemaker Mary Ratliff has already finished filming! Her script was a finalist in the competition. Catching Up is a touching drama and received a lot of publicity in Pulaski, VA, where it was filmed. (I first heard this script at a reading. A little girl in a prison? But it’s a true story.)
Surreal Estate – this script by Lori Romero was a finalist in the competition. She and her husband Tom have been busy with Cyphers. Check out the webisodes of this online series about a mysterious conspiracy.
Break Up, Break In, Break Out – local filmmaker Kelli Herod is figuring out what to do next with her script about the funny side of breaking up.
The Dressing Room – writer Jackie Boor does more than just write screenplays. She has a really interesting book coming out. Inside the President’s Helicopter is the reflections of Lt. Col Boyer, a senior pilot during the LBJ, Nixon, and Ford administrations.
Now that’s a talented bunch of writers 🙂
The Washington Post recently had an article about DC in the movies, highlighting director James L. Brooks for really getting Washington. From All the President’s Men to his latest, How Do You Know?, he displays an excellent understanding of the culture of the city.
We’re not like Chicago or LA or New York. The people here are different, with their own unique challenges and motivations. New Yorkers may think that, just like there are no good bagels in DC, there’s no real “there” in Washington. It’s a transient city, with no realness about it. (Or, as a friend of mine from NYC once said, there’s no “bounty” to it.)
There’s a grain of truth to that assessment – it is a transient city, drawing in and expelling different political classes with each election. But most DC residents don’t work on Capitol Hill. They somehow manage to function without being part of the political class. Continue reading “The Movie That Gets Washington: Broadcast News”