Monday, March 10, 2014


I've decided that this whole week is dedicated to movies.

It's not lost on me that this blog is mostly about movies anyway, but this week we're getting specific. This is actually what I was going to do last week, kicking it off with the Oscar recap, but then I ended up having kind of a lot to do after work each day and couldn't get to it. So I pushed it back a week! Everyone's cool with that, right?

Doesn't matter. We're doing it anyway! Let's start here.

I went to college for a while. A couple of different times, actually. I enjoyed it, I learned a few things, and thought it was helpful - for the most part. I absolutely hated that they kept pressuring me to declare a major and start tailoring my class schedule around that one subject. I get why they do it. It makes sense because you can't have thousands of 18-22 year old kids wandering around a campus with no direction (although with how fucking expensive tuition is, I'm surprised they didn't encourage more students to take ultimately meaningless classes for longer period of time. College is kind of a sham like that.).

My biggest problem is that what you want to do when you're 18 isn't always what you end up doing. Most of the time you don't even get close. If you're a doctor, then sure, you're probably always going to work in the medical field, but aside from that, it's wide open. I know a guy with an anthropology degree that works in advertising. Another guy went to law school and works at now. I'd be genuinely shocked if "what you majored in" and "what you're doing now" is ANY better than 50/50.

It's a crap shoot, really. When I was 19, the guidance counselor (or whatever it's called in college) at the University of Utah kind of forced me to choose a major. I was wide-eyed and idealistic back then, so I chose Film. I wanted to make movies. Gradually it changed to Film Studies, because I didn't really see how you could make a living making movies, but I thought there might be a decent future in at least writing about movies. I tacked on a Creative Writing minor for good measure and went through the motions.

Then I got a job writing about movies for the U of U paper and guess what? I didn't really like doing it. I still love reading a few people that write about movies for a living, but the market is so saturated with them that you have to wade through 6 or 7 really bad, link-baiting bullshit pieces to get to the good ones. I have 4 or 5 film writers that I really enjoy reading, but don't trust them 100%. I can make up my own mind.

Maybe that's where I went wrong with my film reviews, though. I tried to write about film in a way that wasn't a straight review, but more of a conversation revolving around my opinion. That turned off a lot of people at the U and I got a lot of hate mail.

Apparently, anyway. No one actually told me how to do my job as A&E Editor, so I made it up as I went along. I didn't know there was an official email address that was collecting everything sent to me until halfway through the second semester. Then I got 6 months worth of emails in a single afternoon, and stopped reading after about 15 people were just complaining about how I sucked at reviewing movies.

That turned me off from writing about movies, but it never turned me off from writing movies or dreaming of making them.

The point of this long, rambling piece is that I'm okay with the path I've chosen, and I never really miss making movies until I read things like this Oral History of SWINGERS piece. This is the kind of thing that makes me want to just drop everything, write a movie, then figure out how to make it.

Since you've already spent time listening to me whine about the collegiate system, you may as well spend another half an hour reading this. It's a really, really great article with all the key players represented. Jon Favreau talks about how he was able to get it made, Doug Liman talks about the tricks he had to pull to get some of the shots (the part where they talk about filming the scene on the side of the road on the way back from Vegas is worth it alone), and Vince Vaughn talks about everything else.

It's movies like this that make me think I could do it. The market is so saturated now, and literally everyone thinks they're a filmmaker that it's impossible to stand out unless you end up with something transcending and brilliant. 95% of the time that won't happen, but it's nice to think about.

Maybe I'll get to it sooner or later. I didn't buy that screenwriting software for nothing.

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