freewrites

freewrite 5.23.20

Have a bunch of pilot episodes ready to go. Develop a show and record it and have a show bible written and have them ready to sell to networks. Hire writers I trust (jeff and alexander)

I don't think it was the finale people were pissed at with LOST. It's that the writers were being intentionally misleading for the entire final season and that was the episode they revealed that they'd been yanking our chains for 19 episodes. That doesn't feel good. It's tough to pay off duplicitousness like that in storytelling.

Lost was a bootcamp for showrunning and one of the best things to come out of it was lindelof's subsequent shows The Leftovers and Watchmen. The Leftovers especially, uses many of the same themes as Lost, but uses them in more mature, less pulpy ways.

Lost rocks as long as you don't take it too seriously. It's a weird, pulpy as hell genre show. The problem with mass audiences was that the genre-ness crept up on them. Starting off as a drama. A scripted Survivor, and the weird elements got more and more prominent until it was full on Steven King territory.

Edit Lost Chronologically.

Everything that evokes meaning is good. movies, drugs, novels, love, sex, dreams. Anything that evokes meaning and/or beauty is divine.

trust yourself so you can begin to trust others

Freewrite 5/29

classes in film direction, project management, and leadership and business would be useful as an artist. You have to be able to manage large organizational tasks and resources and personnel to create ambitious works of art.

I'll look at film forum now.

Turns out being constantly connected to an instant global validation/outrage machine isn't the way to make good art.

I like the idea of calling rough drafts "vomit drafts" get it out and then restructure and reshape and then you can call it a rough draft. A rough draft is something someone else you're close to can read and a vomit draft is for my eyes only.

Humor is important for experimental media. Even if it's a really offbeat humor sparsely used. You need a reason to enjoy and return to an experimental work or you won't put in the work to warm up to it. Based on the strength of Upstream Color, I'd say Shane Carruth could be this generation's David Lynch except that his movies are relentlessly humorless. Rich Kelly's Donnie Darko was successful because the humor worked, his subsequent movies Southland Tales, the humor did not work at all and The Box was devoid of humor.

This is similar to how comedy is important to expanding consciousness and calling out injustices. You need to get over the discomfort of new ideas and humor is the only way i know of to diffuse that without pain and recovery or exposure therapy.

Humor is important to growth. Enlightenment would be a riot. There's a reason the buddha is always depicted laughing.

Exposure therapy or comedy, those are the two mechanisms of personal growth.

When confronted with something truly new there are only two natural reactions: revulsion or laughter. A little bit of humor can at least give you a mixture of both.

escapist humor is not good. Confronting humor often is. Escapist humor reinforces the status quo and is often punching down or is insult comedy. Think a lot of sitcom humor. finding humor in taboos, drawing lines of acceptible behavior instead of breaking them down. wall-building humor. vs boundary dissolving humor.
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what part does boredom play in a lot of our social ills of the moment? Stress and boredom simultaneously are a bad combo and makes people pick other people apart and pick fights.

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