Day 1: Part 2
I don’t know what I’m doing.
The previous entry talked about this ambitious plan and format and…that’s not going to work. I wrote that almost a year ago and things have changed. So let’s tear it down and start again.
Now that that’s out of the way, I want to talk about what this blog is about and why I’m doing it.
I’ve been writing since I was 4. I always turned in the longest essays and stories in school, took extra credit assignments to write more, and I joined a writing group full of people in their 50s and 60s when I was 11. I filled hundreds of notebooks with stories, movie scripts, and comic book ideas.
I’ve also loved movies for as long as I can remember. From the early flashes of the ‘89 Batman that infected my dreams as a 5-year-old to the brutal realism of 70s films like The French Connection that informed the terrible short film scripts I wrote in high school, movies have had an impact on my life only matched by music. My best friend from first to ninth grade loved movies as much as I did. And his mom had a dual VCR setup, meaning that there was always a new (usually R-rated) movie for us to watch when his mom went to bed.
One of my first jobs was at the Glenwood Springs Blockbuster Video in the late 90s. I don’t know how many free rentals employees got every week, but I do know that I would take movies home without checking them out if I’d already reached my limit for the week. In less than 3 years, I watched hundreds of movies, most of them for the first time.
My brain buzzed with the frantic action and shattered glass-sharp dialogue of Quentin Tarantino. Toshiro Mifune’s furrowed brow in the films he made with Akira Kurosawa revealed the power of Shakespeare to me in a way that reading the Bard never did while simultaneously revealing a genre I’ve now loved for decades — the samurai story. As a teenage heavy metal maniac and punk, I forced Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Phantasm, Halloween, Cannibal Holocaust, Scanners, and dozens of other horror movies on my friends.
During my high school years, I started playing music and as the band I joined senior year started to gel and I began singing instead of playing bass, my plans for going to film school fell away. For the next five years, music was the only thing I cared about. When I had extra time or an idea that stayed lodged in my brain called for it, I wrote short stories and a few bad feature scripts.
As that band shed members and stalled, I started looking for creative projects that didn’t require other people. Writing took over again. I went to college and took as many literature classes as I could and a few creative writing classes. I met some great writers and new friends in the creative writing classes at Front Range Community College. When I got to Colorado State University, I decided against ever taking a fiction-writing class ever again. But I did learn to love the practice and discipline of poetry at CSU.
While I’ve been working in marketing for the last (almost) decade, I’ve been plugging away at a number of film and TV scripts. A few of them are complete and pretty good, a bunch are anywhere from 10-60% complete, and there are dozens that are a page or two long and buried deep on an external hard drive. A year ago, I had an idea for a blog where I’d watch a movie I hadn’t seen before and write about it every day. It felt like a good way to write something that isn’t client work and to watch more movies. Win-win.
Except I don’t know how to write about movies. Or music. Or any other form of entertainment or culture. I don’t feel well-read enough to throw my hat into some ring and state my half-formed opinions as if they’re valuable or informed. I also don’t really feel like writing about a bunch of shitty movies that I wished I hadn’t watched. So like many of my writing projects, I did a ton of prep work and it petered out.
But those partially completed scripts have been eating away at me as I write content for my day job. But it appears that my brain has a daily character limit and my job is running through my allotment of writing every day. But that doesn’t stop a story beat I’m stuck on from floating to the front of my mind and sitting there, making itself an annoyance a couple times a day. My perpetually exhausted brain will remind me that I should be writing when I’m trying to get to sleep. The guilt for not watching new movies and writing about them rises up whenever I look at the bookcases full of Blu Rays in the living room.
In early April 2024, I grabbed a new notebook and started tracking when I was and wasn’t writing. On the days where I didn’t write anything for myself, I had to admit it in the notebook. That didn’t feel great. I started writing more frequently, even if it was only a few scene ideas or sketching out some solutions to problems that had slowed progress on my scripts.
As a perfect example of a great idea that arrives with no warning and no obvious connection to anything, I realized I could use the movie blog as a way to keep me inspired about my own work and to keep me writing and learning.
With that rough framework, here’s what this will look like (at least for a while).
I’ll be posting an entry for each new movie I watch. These will probably have some sort of short plot synopsis, a few things I liked, and then some discussion about what I learned watching this movie. That could mean:
Genre tropes and placement within the “canon”
Plot/story structure ideas
Scene discussions
Character work
Etc.
When it makes sense, I’ll write some genre or filmmaker posts. If I had loose threads from individual movies or some big picture ideas that I found interesting, I’ll try to write something that gets close-ish to film theory/criticism to get me to try writing in a form I’m new to.
Visually, I’m not sure what I’ll include in each post but I’ll look for ways to break up my overwriting.
If you made it this far, thanks. I’m looking forward to what’s coming next and I hope you are, too.
First up, a few posts in the original form I envisioned for this blog. It’s a bit of a cheat but I’ll need all the help I can get to do this every day.