Tonight: Crazy With Signs Of Progress; Tomorrow: Sunny & Promising

I used to belong to a fraternal organization where sometimes I attended a monthly meeting with my fellow members. The secretary would call out the names of committees and the heads of those committees would speak for a moment on their current status. Occasionally, and I suspect it was when they would be caught short that month, a committee head would stand up when called and simply say, "Progress." The roll call would go on, more than once accompanied by titters from other members.

So when I note the beginning of my second month on this blog, I have this to say:

Progress.

Okay, I'll give you more than that.

I've always had an organic manner of writing, starting with a premise and some scenes and the most general of outlines and progressing from there. It's my downfall, I know. When I've hit The Wall and can't figure out what's next, an outline would have helped me, but it's not always there. Right now, since I've stopped laying Mouse down on paper until I work out an issue where I can't decide which of a pair of characters to kill (it makes so much more sense to follow the rest of the story with the character I'd intended to kill), I'm in a state of mental progress with nothing to show for it.

Yes, I believe it's all writing, the ideas, the process of laying it down, the reading and re-reading and rewriting, but I want to get to that place where I write out a draft and see how it all hangs, beginning to end, and I'm not there yet.

Since I started this blog, I've reviewed my past projects to find which of them show promise enough to continue. One of them is a Western set in a Gold Rush boomtown some years after the last nugget has been mined, and in my loose mental outline I knew how I wanted to end the story, just not how to get to that ending. Last night as I was about to fall asleep, the 'how' popped into my head, although I hadn't been thinking of that script at all. It just happened. I'm almost angry with myself that I can't afford myself more time to germinate and foster those 'Eureka' moments, but such is life.

Tonight I went to see a screening of The Crazies, the 1973 horror film by George Romero. One of the stars, Lynn Lowry, introduced the film and then George Romero and she answered questions after the film. This being Romero, the Q&A was lively and informative. Romero is candid but discreet and was a good sport in the face of some dumb questions (including one where an audience member thought the film had been made in the 80's and later being berated by one of the moderators for daring to choose the next question himself from a guy in the front row instead of the kid in the back the moderator had handed a mike to---and whose question was "In the movie, what's the blood made out of?"). He answered a range of questions, including one on why Night of the Living Dead was in the public domain (he'd originally titled it Night of the Flesh-Eaters, but when Walter Reade decided to distribute the film, they changed the title, removing the one copyright notice on the print Romero had supplied) and some on what comes next (Universal is hoping for a Land of the Dead continuation, but he just finished a draft of his adaptation of King's From a Buick 8), but the one answer I found most prescient was on his writing process. An earnest audience member looked to be hoping to get some vaildation for his political views by asking Romero about the post-Vietnam timeframe of The Crazies by pointing out the military in the film is not prepared for the scope of the disaster they're facing, and was Romero trying to comment on the inadequacies of the military machine at that time?

Romero's answer: "Hey man, I wasn't making a comment. I was in the shower and came up with the idea that it would be cool to have them not be prepared. Sometimes ideas just come to you in the shower."

If one of our most allegorical filmmakers can admit that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, I can breathe easier about finding the meaning and just let the story flow.

One more Romero anecdote: An audience member asked what films had inspired him, and Romero replied that The Tales of Hoffmann, the 1951 Powell/Pressburger opera fantasy film, struck him in his youth and he'd take the train from his Bronx home to Janus Films in Manhattan to rent their print of the film in order to see it, sometimes finding it had been rented already by some kid in Brooklyn, and on several occasions when that Brooklyn kid went to Janus to rent it, he found Romero had already rented the print himself. Eventually, Romero found out the kid from Brooklyn's name was Marty Scorsese.