So the time I got my first motorcycle i got it built from parts by Barron Gunter at Illuminati Cycles, which was a lot behind El Globo, the Mexican Mafia club at Sunset and Vendome

And part of the deal I was kind of his shop monkey for a while, scrubbing rust off pipes and learning things, and he had somehow become a millionaire during the original dot.com boom and been married to this woman and joined the Navy and had an antique store in Austin and been betrayed by that woman and lost that money and become a 12-stepper, I wasn’t really sure of the chronology there

And I came in 2 or 3 days a week and he only charged like $1400 for a CB350 with the ‘68 2-tone tank (and a scratched cylinder and electrical gremlins) but he was taking forever to put it together, I was coming in all summer while he did “Black Bomber” CB450s for rich Hollywood assholes and I put up with it until the day his credit line guy came by and while that guy was standing around I picked my moment to curse Barron out about how I gave him this money and he was just sitting on it not doing a goddamn thing and what the fuck that was an actual business deal not palling around

And next week that’s how I got Blue Bitch!

@boikoda said: Quite a few Turks, too.

Yeah the music publishing guy who ran the webcast where I saw Lisa Loeb promo her summer camp album (when in reaction to online eating revenues labels introduced 360 deals and publishers were focusing on placement in commercials and vidya as their angle) was Turkish, and you’d see a few occasional flags but not much of a collective community presence.

I do wonder how much of that was the Armenians already loudly owning the local public expression re: Turks with “fuck them”. On Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day you’d see young Armenian men dragging leased BMW 3-Series up and down between Hollywood and Hillhurst blasting System of a Down and glaring out the window about the Turks with Armenian flags at the corner of their bumpers.

God help me but the whole Armenian thing I saw in LA (at one point Little Armenia, but these days it’s like Little Armenia:Little Italy::Glendale:New Jersey), down to how in the 21st century it leans hard into wounded victimhood, really came off as a Borat-level satire of nationalism, especially when the rest of their public-facing culture is the same pastries and tiny coffee and hookah and spiced chicken and mint leaves as everyone else

Oh , crystal chandeliers, they were known for that too, as a lace-curtain thing ranked between a display case of Hummel figurines and those huge columns out front, full mirrored wall, gilt everything “Persian Palaces”

Man, kinda nice to recall and unlimber all my LA stuff, I was still me back then so I picked up all sorts of senses of things.

At one point I figured out what all the bodies in Greater LA that had police powers were and how many men under arms they had and that included like, the Federal Protective Service in charge of a few downtown buildings and these colleges with their own forces, and the SPCA apparently? And then there was like this locals only-type environmental preservation nonprofit with rich donors in the mountains west by the ocean that absolutely did not have police power but used it anyway, like some sort of Catholic schism over the monopoly on force.

kontextmaschine:

understatedocelot:

kontextmaschine:

Friendly reminder I was at the AdultFriendFinder Christmas party in the Hollywood Hills in like 2008 and the PUA guru “Mystery” was there and all these industry professionals who blankly watched each other double penetrate each other for a living couldn’t take their eyes off him slouching in a lawn chair with that stupid hat, the charisma was real

fine, I’ll take the bait.

how did you get invited to the adultfriendfinder christmas party in hollywood in 2008?

As the +1 of a coke dealer called “Ross Angeles”!

One other time I followed him to the Hollywood Hills home of (okay at this point I want to interject these are places with one master bedroom built as entertaining venues for guests) this actor, it used to be Sammy Davis Jr.’s house, with an indoor pool, and he was apparently this recognizable name from the UK I had never heard of and his two agents – one of whom looked like a high school linebacker turned fat businessguy and the other had the biggest Jewish nose I’ve ever seen – explained the series he was here for was like “True Blood meets The Office”, and then there was a thing where the actor was inviting people (mostly girls) into his bedroom to see his wild cat

So all through my teenage years I really wanted a Mitsubishi Eclipse. The 97-on, scalloped sides one.

Then in 2006 when I was finally buying a car they restyled away from that into some dumb smooth teardrop-butt style. (I had been driving a hand-me-down Acura Integra, but they had luxuried up the new ones to match the US “Acura” badging, and the thing they replaced the old sporty/practical coupe slot with, the Civic GT-R, was in high demand so waiting lists and $3,000 markups.)

So I found a used one to take for a test drive (on the car-dealership strip on Brand Blvd. in Glendale. Did you know dealership strips like that exist cause towns in multi-jurisdiction economies offer beggar-thy-neighbor tax deals?)

And I realized the ergonomics were terrible, the sight lines were absolute shit, and the performance was underwhelming as hell.

That was before we somehow ran out of gas, I’m afraid the salesman thought he lost the deal that way, and not just cause the car was shit.

(I got a Scion tC, rode it hard for a few years before it got stolen, got paid out near new value and then LAPD found it in a cul-de-sac around Temple and the 101. The tow lot lady said everyone made the Lebowski jokes about the Creedence by then. I pocketed the insurance and had this ratbike mechanic named Barron in the back yard of a Mexican Mafia club rebuild me a 1968 Honda CB350.)

So when I first moved to LA I lived in Los Feliz and I don’t know why but there was def. a 24 connection. Looking it up I don’t think it had sets at Prospect Studios, but maybe the LA location shots were based out of there?

Anyway, “drunk Kiefer Sutherland” was the neighborhood mascot, I was there once when he bought the bar a round at the Drawing Room. Across the street, when an episode aired Ye Rustic Inn would do a thing called “Jack Bauer Power Hour”, you put your money down and get a shot of beer each minute, a shot of whiskey every time he kills or tortures someone and some other things, some of the crew came out to witness the finished production that way

Also Mary Lynn Rajskub, the indie comic who played girl-in-the-van Chloe, had one-woman shows at the atheist church down the street, the “Center for Inquiry”. I remember the one about giving birth and becoming a mother was called “Mary Lynn Spreads Her Legs”

so when I was in LA I knew people in the porn industry, this was back in the mid-late 00s when the industry was still a valley thing you could make money off shoots, before it became a loss-leader for escorts and then dispersed to so many semipro bedrooms

anyway one of the guys was a casting agent, which I got to talking about what that involved, which totally he admitted that it was the Backroom Casting Couch thing where he’d take the 19-year-old UNLV girls coming in and fuck them on camera and it was a dream job

(the actual Backroom Casting Couch is totally set-up, which means it’s a fantasy that only someone already in the industry would know to think up. it also means it’s a premise that’s not much of an acting stretch for any given girl)

and it’s not even that that was a corruption per se because “how you look and act while having sex in a variety of positions” really was the basis on which you were being evaluated for roles

but the thing that threw me was he was like “honestly, my biggest value-add was giving her a chance to say no”, like he’d do the preliminaries and get the camera and drop trou and be like “time to put you through your paces”

and she’d freak out or hesitate like “well, I wanted to be a porn star, not have unprompted sex with someone I just met, filmed for people to see”, this was like the 2000s height of “raunch culture”, Jenna Jameson and Sasha Grey and Stoya as mainstream C-list

and he’d be like “honey, if you have something to realize, this is the time to realize it rather than the first day on set when we’ve got a house rental and a permit and a director and equipment rental and makeup people and male talent waiting on you”

which is to say as skeezy as it sounds “the guy you have to fuck in his office” was a replacement for “the producer there to abuse/manipulate/coke you up with $20,000 on the line” and I think it might have been an improvement

Just thinking back to that time over a decade ago in LA where I was at Cha Cha on Glendale, near closing time, and I met this Disney animator and her wife.

And we really hit it off, I mean weren’t none of us sober, but in particular I’ve always seemed to really get along with lesbians, I do wonder if this is related to how I identified as a lesbian through a lot of puberty.

It was even a particularly lesbian bonding session, we clicked over an appreciation for the “Abby Winters” porn series, which was Australian girls schlicking or hooking up with each other that seemed a lot more “authentic” than the standard for “industry” porn back then

California has a 2am closing time and it was a weekend so they were like “come back to our place” and I was like “fuck yeah”, and it was this bungalow and they excitedly one-upped each other telling me about the elbow-grease renovations they’d made, which I had to laugh at, because lesbians.

And they poured more drinks and said I could sleep there tonight and called their guy friend to come over and put on a The Mighty Boosh DVD, and he showed up like half the way through the first episode and he looked like he had read all of Sandman before it was collected as graphic novels

But by the end of the episode the animator had started to run her hands through my hair and nuzzle me, and that made me put together a few things she had said, like oh she’s actually bi and it’s been a while and honestly if it was just us I would have but we were on a couch with two other people including HER WIFE

And then, and then the thing is her wife noticed it. And made a thing of it. But not in a way that could resolve it, she was relentlessly chipper, like “AWW LOOK [SHE] MADE A FRIEND” and then kept going on about how CUTE it was, and taking pictures, while this girl continued to grope me, and I couldn’t tell whether that meant they were in it together as predators or whether this was some passive-aggressive thing about forcefully projecting an innocent reading while reminding her that her WIFE was right there

And I tried to make eye contact with the guy friend for help or at least guidance and the look I got back was “I realize exactly how fucked up this is but I’m not the one who’s gonna solve it for you”, so after the second episode I pretended to pass out asleep and they left me alone with her and she gnawed on my neck for a while but eventually gave up

Anyway I ended up being Facebook friends with them and so I occasionally saw how their life was progressing; they bullshitted with their mates, they joined scenes and causes, they gradually drifted away from scenes and causes. The other year they had their first kid by artificial insemination and good for them and I decided it was time to stop following.

Anyway I don’t know exactly what Zoe Quinn’s shooting herself in the foot with right now, but if they try to tell you that being weird and neurotic and a little off about sex is specific to straight male vidya artists, nah

On the contrary, people constantly make clever indie movies like the 80s-90s boom, just too many of them, and they have no marketing budget to make you aware of them.

You could watch them on IFC or Bravo, but you don’t, which is why the Independent Film Channel doesn’t show independent films anymore and Bravo channel-drifted to reality shows for gay yuppies and associated hags

There’s probably an independent film festival near you, but you don’t go to it, and there’s maybe someone at a local newspaper or blog that went themselves and wrote about the movies, but you didn’t even read that, did you?

Back in the Echo Park Vons, I remember one time two guys were standing in the aisle and one had to move to let me pass and as I did I greeted them, “::nod:: detectives” and from the look in one of their eye I was right, and so proud

(They were a black/white late-30s male pair that didn’t vibe gay at all, wearing sports jackets just baggy enough to keep a gun from imprinting)

kimbureh:

fuckyeahisawthat:

jellyfishjulie:

Y’all I read a lot of scripts. And the one note I give over and over and over and over to the point that I can pretty much copy and paste it from one review to another…. let your characters lie. Let them omit, stumble, and circumvent. Allow them to be completely unable to express what they’re feeling. Make them unable to admit a truth. Let them sit in silence because they can’t think of anything clever to say! Let them say the exact wrong thing!

Dee Rees talks about it in her BAFTA lecture (which you should ABSOLUTELY WATCH): that what your character actually says should be three degrees of separation away from what they mean to say.

I read script after script after script where characters articulate their needs, desires, and objectives with perfect accuracy off the cuff 24/7 and there is not one single human person on this planet who is actually able to do that. This is the #1 thing that’s going to make your script sound stilted and the #1 thing that’s going to make shit difficult on your actors. Let them shut up, and let them lie.

This!! In real life no one says what they mean. We say we’re fine when we’re not. We keep secrets because the truth is painful or embarrassing. We fight over stupid shit that’s a stand-in for what we’re really upset about. We don’t say what we want or need because recognizing, let alone vocalizing, our wants and needs is hard.

If your characters say what they mean all the time, you, as a writer, are robbing yourself of so much power to affect the audience. This is true in all writing but especially in dramatic writing, where everything in the character’s interior life has to be externalized in some way to be known. You can create intimacy by allowing the audience to see something your character hides from other characters. You can create tension by letting the audience know the character has a secret or has told a lie they don’t want revealed. You can create catharsis by allowing the character to finally say what they’re really thinking at a key moment.

You’re also creating a much more interesting text for your actors because you allow for the presence of subtext. If you’re someone who directs your own material you’ll start to realize how little you actually need your characters to say to make it clear exactly what’s going on with them. What starts as a monologue in the first draft may, in rehearsal, become a single line, which in the final cut becomes a shared glance, and the audience will still know exactly what you mean.

I love this. thank u so much for pointing this out so concisely, it explains so well why some lines have an insane impact, while others feel just meh

OP opens acknowledging script reading and note-giving as structural features of the industry but I think she undervalues how shallow assessments by time-pressed lower-tier fake-it-til-you-makettes actively discourage subtlety.

Bcuz its an ask already to be the assistant/d-girl reading your script of one of 3 that night to understand even a capably written straitforward protag

I think this may be one of the auxiliary forces behind the “Golden age of TV” as vs. movies, that because TV spec scripts (to pitch as a writer) don’t have to develop new characters or (to pitch as a pilot) get attention paid to the potential of characters independent of the immediate scenario

They have as thorough set dressing as anyone and everyone shoots on digital these days (vs. a film/video split)

So it’s a real testament to the value of postproduction that telenovelas still look like shit in that soap/BBC tradition

When in the whole #MeToo thing it came out that Matt Lauer had a button under his desk that controlled his office door lock

And people were like “eww, why would you even have a rape button”, and the answers were “security” (not really) and “everyone does” (true)

But having done a short tour in Hollywood biz-office work I can confidently say that in a media economy that turns on attention, fucks will just barge into your office and demand your time if they can (and thrive doing it) and it’s basically a way to rig an enforced they-knock-on-the-door-you-yell-“come in” system

me: this karaoke night is the queerest non-explicitly-queer event I’ve ever been to, maybe this really betokened a real shift in the culture

also me: disco wasn’t explicitly queer

me: …

also me: when have we been to a more explicitly queer event?

me: no that birthday party at The Abbey in WeHo, remember?

also me: that was just a generic weekday bar where 40-somethings grabbed our ass all night

Oh also, that “hit on the head by a coconut” bit reminded me of something - you know the famous palm trees of L.A.? Palm trees (Which are grasses, you know that? That seemed weird to me but in the last two years as this sawgrass-like tuft grew in my front yard the old blades dried as a spiky trunk, so I get it now)

Anyway palm trees are not native to LA, and the “desert” association aside do not naturally thrive in LA, they were mostly planted in the old boomtimes and require tending

Except when actively maintained they grow hugely tall with the same little tuft at the top, meaning as they get older unlike branching trees they generate less shade

And as the dried fronds drop in the Santa Ana winds from that high up they shatter windshields of parked cars

Anyway it doesn’t matter ‘cause some decent parasite infestations have finally made it to LA that the climate doesn’t kill, so the palms are inevitably doomed now

argumate:

thenightetc:

argumate:

people seem to enjoy watching charismatic actors playing emotionally resonant characters in a lovingly rendered setting with a consistent and unique aesthetic where the plot is merely a rough scaffolding that makes no real sense

Which is funny, because plot is at least theoretically the cheapest aspect (in some cases it can be done by one person working alone with no special equipment!), and therefore the one it makes the least sense to cut corners on.

But I suppose movies and tv involve a lot of editing, re-takes, doing things out of order for various pragmatic reasons, cutting things out for time or because they didn’t look good onscreen, and with all that maybe it’s not surprising that plot falls by the wayside, because plot is about the gestalt and not about any individual scene.

Plus, it’s easy enough to suspend your disbelief until it’s over–if you’re immersed, you probably won’t worry too much about what seems like minor inconsistencies or whatever, because you’re trusting that by the end it’ll all hang together.  And when you get to the end, well, you may have forgotten or at least no be longer thinking about various quibbles!  So it’s entirely possible to watch a movie, enjoy it, come out of it thinking “gosh that was great, very emotionally satisfying”, and only later go “wait, actually what happened there”… especially if you rewatch it.

that’s just it! you would think that good writing would be prized, considering it’s so cheap relative to a single visual effects shot, but in practice you would rather sacrifice it in favour of literally any other aspect of the production.

“it looked terrible and the acting was wooden and the actors unappealing but gosh that plot was fantastic, 10/10” just isn’t a common review summary

A lot of this just has to do with the structure of filmmaking by which the director is the boss (though accountable to studio funders/moneyman producers)

adjust to the other factors - actors and sets have already been paid for and film has already been shot, actors might be tied to production or promotions deals, but scripts can be rewritten easy separate from all of that, on the fly, even a new writer (this was how Joss Whedon really made his name)

In TV this is different writing has higher priority, some structural reasons relating to time pressure – you NEED to deliver a coherent time block by this deadline, every week, but the sets and actors are paid for for the season, at least the first 13/22s of it

A lot of the “Golden Age” of “Peak TV” has to do with the formation of writers rooms’ and the rise of the showrunner - the head writer who runs the whole production, has approval over casting, writing, directors - in the early ‘80s

Before TV tended to be more like standup comedy or magazines - you might have a core group of staff writers pitching ideas and guiding episodes but they solicited a lot of outside writers to submit stuff, or took pitches on spec, which is why a lot of old shows kind of play like commedia dell’arte, with the characters representing broad types with trademark quirks that any writer can pick up and run with

Then in the ‘80s you started to get more funding for staff, which let you bring on more writers and have them spend more time rewriting what outside stuff you had. That’s when shows started to get more distinct - Miami Vice was an obvious example but that was more in the way the action played to the visuals; that had something to do with writer-showrunner Michael Mann being one of the first-generation film school graduates coming out of the ‘70s, who’d been trained on the field as a tradition to innovate with. This is also how you get the densely knit comedy of early Simpsons, with money into writing

That was well-funded network shows at least, first-run syndicated shows – ones that weren’t run on a network but directly took bids from broadcast stations in each market – tended to be lower-funded genre pulp stuff. But even there there were standouts in the ‘90s, Xena, Babylon 5, even Star Trek: The Next Generation were syndicated

The Star Trek franchise of series was one of the last to take a lot of outside scripts, too, their tradition was always drawing on the wide pool of SF print writers. Anyway the syndicated angle kind of died as FOX and WB and the UPN gathered a lot of spare channels and regularized them, ran stuff like Buffy and Voyager themselves

So as the ‘90s went on you started to see more and more seasonal arcs as shows gained in their narrative capacity, then you saw the premium channels (which had more been doing anthology shows or soft porn for their original series) latch on and away we go

kontextmaschine:

And for whoever’s hammering my inbox, no, when I was Hollywood I did work with a management company that had a line in kids/teens but really I didn’t see any dirty stuff

the “dirty, exploitative” gossip I heard was how aspiring stage moms would pay to go to “talent expos” in, like, Hawai’i, where agents would be paid to fly in and sleep with EACH OTHER and have a vacation and AT BEST some of these kids would get a chance to move to LA to try to make money for the agents

for all that there WERE hypersexual 14-year-olds with moms who vicariously enjoyed the attention

and the most earnest stage parents who would bend their morals - I remember an evangelical family who didn’t want their elementary-age angel in stuff that said mild curses, but when Scientologists solicited him for an internal campaign that paid, and I called up saying “you probably aren’t interested but it’s my job to ask?” they were like “welllllll”

honestly MY biggest moral “oh jeez” was this family from Orange County who wouldn’t pull their daughter out of school and drive her up for every casting because she has a life there and the school officials were obviously complaining

and I was assigned the task of calling them up and saying hey we’re not an after-school enrichment program, we’re a business that gets paid when you book shoots and you book shoots by going to auditions and if you don’t go to auditions we’ll drop you and she’ll know you fucked up her dream

and I was terrible at it and the principals had to do it themselves and that’s probably part of how I got fired but cmon it’s hollywood I expected to get fired by assholes

And for whoever’s hammering my inbox, no, when I was Hollywood I did work with a management company that had a line in kids/teens but really I didn’t see any dirty stuff

the “dirty, exploitative” gossip I heard was how aspiring stage moms would pay to go to “talent expos” in, like, Hawai’i, where agents would be paid to fly in and sleep with EACH OTHER and have a vacation and AT BEST some of these kids would get a chance to move to LA to try to make money for the agents

for all that there WERE hypersexual 14-year-olds with moms who vicariously enjoyed the attention

and the most earnest stage parents who would bend their morals - I remember an evangelical family who didn’t want their elementary-age angel in stuff that said mild curses, but when Scientologists solicited him for an internal campaign that paid, and I called up saying “you probably aren’t interested but it’s my job to ask?” they were like “welllllll”

Ke$ha’s pretty good at enunciating to the beat. Maybe that Swedish training.

Shame she bit the hand that feeds, the entertainment industry has a lock on the California judiciary (if only by virtue of bothering to know what all the various appointment procedures are to ensure their favoreds are always advancing on the cursus honorum) and even in the current year the FUUUCK they were gonna let people break recording contracts by crying rape (culture)

you ever hear of Amaani Lyle, a writers’ assistant on Friends (like an intern, but still paid in the ‘90s), tried to sue some “hostile environment” schtick, and Hollywood one and all took sides against her, sure they were making hella rape jokes about characters who were kinda their coworkers, jokes against their coworkers directly (a running one about Courtney Cox having a vagina full of dried up twigs), but BE COOL and also creative necessity, the First Amendment, the writers of Gilmore Girls were writing amicus curiae briefs

(it was the 90s tho)

Lyle lost and got blackballed cuz obv. and I think maybe joined the Air Force? Which was a more typical course for a young black striver

heytherepumpkin:

“I hope it rains soon,” everyone says. The ground is dry and dusty and cracked. Your mouth is dry and dusty and cracked. You’ve forgotten the taste of water. The earth has not. You hope it rains soon.

At In N Out, you order animal style fries. They growl softly when you’re not looking at them. You suck at your chocolate milkshake and keep your eyes averted.

Everything is traffic. Everything is freeways. There is nothing but the cars surrounding yours in a too-close embrace, and your legs in cutoff shorts sweat-sticky on the scorching leather seat, and the venti vanilla soy latte extra shot light ice you ordered at a Starbucks hours and miles ago. You are going to die here. Maybe you already have. The only station you can find is Jack FM.

Someone mentions winter, and you laugh. Everyone knows there’s no such thing as winter. There’s just the sun, and the heat, and the eternal fire on the hills.

The room begins to sway. No one notices. You’re all so used to earthquakes. The floor splits open, and you plummet into the dark. No one notices. You’re all so used to earthquakes.

Celebrity sightings are common. You see Cary Grant buying avocados at Albertsons. You won’t be making guacamole tonight.

Strawberries are in season. The roadside stand is empty of people but full of crates. You eat dozens of the juicy, swollen, meaty berries. Your lips and hands are stained red for days. You can’t get them clean.

It’s the happiest place on earth. So why do you dream a faint refrain of “It’s a Small World” and wake cold and unsettled and achingly lonely?

The rains come, finally. Cars stop in the streets. People collapse to their knees. There is water falling from the sky. You weep, and weep, and pray that it will end soon.

You’re in the ocean, waves lapping at your calves. “There’s something touching my legs,” a nearby tourist says. “It’s just seaweed,” you say as you edge back towards the beach. Maybe if you reach the dry sand fast enough, they’ll take the tourist instead. 

At night, you hear screaming, thin and echoing. Despite the heat, you shut your window. It’s just the Santa Anas, you tell yourself, desperate to sleep. But you lie awake long into the night, listening.

The Armenians are angry at the Turks. They have invented a new holiday dedicated to being angry at the Turks. It is in the middle of a new month they have invented dedicated to being angry at the Turks.

The bus comes once an hour. The bus has not come, so the hour cannot pass. The sun and moon rise and set. The tides turn. The bus does not come. The hour does not pass. Forever, it will be 3 PM on Serj 19th.