We’re Making A Movie

As I type this, Ray Flynn is editing our movie, “External Monologue” on a Mac here on the kitchen table.

We started early. Actually, I started excruciatingly early – 6:30 AM. Helaine woke up and I was too jazzed to go back to sleep. Three hours – as I’m now seeing, not enough sleep for me.

As hard as we tried to preplan, it became obvious much of this would be written today.

The members of our movie team started arriving around 8:20. At 8:50 neither our writer nor director had shown. No problem. They made it in the nick of time.

Our ingredients, the special things this movie had to have, arrived via email at 9:00 AM sharp.

July 16, 2005

CINEMASPORTS Remote Ingredients and Guidelines

Here are the ingredients for today’s event. No interpretation is wrong, so be creative.

1. An unexpected visitor

2. A tickle

3. Crumpled paper

Movies should be 3 minutes or less. (20 seconds allowed for credits, so movies should not exceed 3:20 min. total.)

Not much time. Still, we took well over an hour before we shot the first frame of video. Everyone threw ideas back and forth.

A concept that Chris Arnott and Hugh Mackay brought with them was our framework. The rest was molded to fit.

People brought medical instruments, lab coats, all sorts of things. We used none of them! That was OK.

On the other hand, a lineman for a local utility drove by in his bucket truck… and we got him to shoot a few seconds of ‘crane’ video. Not too shabby for an ad lib.

I’m not going to say much, because I expect to put the finished product here on the website tonight or tomorrow. Why spoil the fun.

The question is, will we be finished in time? At the moment we’re two and a half hours from the deadline to start uploading. I think we’re OK.

The accent is on the word think.

They Dropped the Ball

On my way to work, I pulled up to a traffic light, adjacent to a car driven by my town’s mayor. Windows down, we started to chat.

Did he know the phones were still out in my neighborhood? Still out… he didn’t know they were out at all!

As it turns out, as far as I can tell, no one in emergency services in my town was told that a cluster of 300 homes was without phone service. No 911. No nothing.

A lineman I stopped characterized the cable that failed as being old. But, cables shouldn’t take on water just because it rains. Maintenance is supposed to cover that, I thought.

I really don’t know too many people at the phone company, but I do know their PR person. And so, this evening, I dashed off an email to her with the hope that it gets kicked upstairs.

I’m starting to reach simmer on this. They’re not selling Slurpees. They’re the phone company, selling among other things, my lifeline to safety.