Serenity Now

"I'm more likely to lose my temper on a film set than almost anywhere. Often the level of idiocy is so exalted that it's impossible to comprehend"
-John Malkovitch 

The juxtaposition of the image and quote above should be self-explanatory. For one thing, somewhere, someone thought "Buddha" and, in the next moment, thought "Keanu Reeves."

Regular followers of this blog know that I have been a Zen practitioner for some time, and it would not surprise them to find that I spent the last week doing sesshin, an intensive week of mostly meditation, but also includes face-to-face teaching, dharma talks, liturgy, and other elements of Zen.

One of the "precautions" (as the onus is on you, they aren't referred to as rules) is no electronics, cell phones, internet, or reading. The point is to shift your mind away from your usual concerns.

Eight-to ten hours every day is zazen, or zen meditation. Contrary to popular thinking, meditation - at least as practiced in Zen - is anything but escaping the real world, or drifting off into a peaceful place. It is about getting in touch with your true mind - the eyes are lowered but open during zazen. Everything in practice is pointed toward seeing your "true mind" and then taking that into the real world.

That means that practice means nothing if it does not make sense on the subway, at home, and, in my case, on set or in the production office.

And that is where this post comes in.

I avoided using the title "Zen and the Art of Film Production" or something like that because the term "Zen" is thrown around very loosely in a New Age way that has little to do with Zen practice. Phil Jackson is an excellent basketball coach, and surely has studied some with a teacher, but he is not a Zen master.

There is something in Zen called "right livelihood," which basically deals with making a living in a way that does not violate the Precepts. As film production does not (at least necessarily) include killing (thoughts of killing a director are not included if you don't carry it out), misuse of sex (what grips do in their spare time does not count), abusing intoxicants (difficult to determine that fine line of what defines 'medicinal use after rough day'), lying or stealing (add your own wisecrack here), it technically does not count as violating this.

However, day-to-day application of working in film production is a whole other matter.

On a basic level, it's hard to find time for daily meditation when you are barely getting by on four hour's sleep.

The bigger problem, as I see it, is the culture of film. This is something I have thought about in the past, but kept coming to me during sesshin. When you are doing over 50 hours of meditating in a week, you think about a lot of things.

One of the oldest things I remember seeing when I moved from theater to film was the Seven Stages of Film Production. The inclusion in Michelle's blog tells us this still rules strongly today:

Seven Stages of Film Production

1. Wild Enthusiasm
2. Total Confusion
3. Utter Despair
4. Search for the Guilty
5. Persecution of the Innocent
6. Promotion of the Incompetent
7. Distribution of T-Shirts

Definitely not Zen.

There is no need to explain any of that to anyone who has worked in film. Part of this is true because of the unpredictable nature of film production - weather, actors dropping lines, stunts and effects that need excruciating planning, traffic during company moves, and so many more.

Part, though, is a culture of chaos that production thrives on, as the "stages" above suggest. It often seems that producers or directors are determined to eschew time-honored procedures that work for a different way to do things. I can't say how many times it felt like people involved looked at the way to do things that worked and said, "Let's do this instead!"

I'm not talking here about being creative on screen, but, rather, ignoring procedures that work. Yes, there needs to be flexibility, but some things work, and should only be shunned for good reasons Examples? Go to any one of dozens of posts in this - or most other - film production blog.

Just in recent weeks, I saw a writer/actor sabotage getting a $4.5 million film financed (one he has been trying to get done for four years) because he did not want to transfer the copyright to the production company, which is basic procedure* and done on every film.

There is a Sicilian expression I heard a lot as a kid referring to not "Biting Your Nose to Spite Your Face." **Basically, don't do harm to yourself just to do harm to others you don't like. But, in Rule # 4 (Search for the Guilty) above, I have often seen the the need to "blame" someone outweigh the more important priority - fixing the problem. This need some producers or directors have to assign blame poisons the morale of a crew and, from a practical matter, makes it harder to fix problems, because everyone is now in CYA*** mode and thus look to hide rather than correct problems.

It would be easy for me to go through a litany of stupid things others do or have done, but what concerned me more, as this thought kept coming to me, was my own actions.

I started my last feature film on a good note, waking up each morning offering one of the gathas from my original teacher, Myotai Sensei.

"May this be a day of blessing and being blessed,
Honoring and being honored,
Loving and being loved."

Sounds pretty simple and direct, right? Nice way to start the day.

By Day 2 of the shoot, I found myself publicly (and very unkindly) chastising the director and DP for doing some extra shooting prior to moving to our second location even though they got back on time - I wanted them there early to get a jump on what I thought would be a hard scene.

An hour later, I was sitting wondering why I had done that.  Had making the day become so crucial to me that logic and basic courtesy needed to be abandoned?

Yes, I apologized to both later, but, after all these years, the pressures of production still lead to these types of moments, to sometimes doing things that are technically correct but not very nice.

My producer's assistant was an incredibly nice young lady, who was doing this project for the love of it and not for money (it was unpaid,as she could not work for pay here). She was earnest and kind. Near the end of the shoot, I asked if doing this job had given her more insight into producing.

She said that it showed her that she did not want to be on the production side. "Seeing how production works has brought out my dark side," she said.

If you met her, the idea that she even had a dark side would be comical.

I'm not about to give up, convinced that there is a compassionate way of producing film that is also practical and efficient. My way of dealing with folks on set reflects this in a much stronger way than it once did, and I will work to keep moving in that direction, work harder to make that work.

My progress will be noted here from time-to-time. Will definitely try to be more successful than the folks below.












*Film is the only medium I know of where the author does not retain copyright, even if it is not a work for hire. It MUST be in the hands of the production company as part of Chain of Title.

** The phrase evidently goes back to the 12th century when women would disfigure themselves to protect their virginity.

***Do you  really need me to define CYA?

January Blues

"Last night's storm was fierce
As I can see from this morning's
Thick blanket of snow
Rising to kindle woodchips
In lonely Shigarati Village"
-Lotus Moon: The Poetry of Buddhist Nun Rengetsu

File this one under "mundane but true."

Generally, I try to steer clear of any topic that might be the subject of a local news feed, no less a ""slice of life" piece.

Those of us who chose a freelance life know that at times things will be slow, and in New York, things will generally be slow in January. Nothing new to see here.

Normally, January doldrums are no more common for me than the need to "do something" on the weekend, seeing as I can just as easily be working on the weekend and off on Wednesday.

Like most of us, I have a routine between gigs. A little more time meditating. Start or get back to a writing project. Of course, the endless round of emails, phone calls and resumes sent in search of the next project.

This is not usually accompanied by anything more than the usual angst, depression, doubt that all of us working in this business experience.

This year, though, was a little different. I share here not to wallow or complain - my life is good - but because I know how much we all share bits of the same truth; how what we think is unique to us is actually being felt by others in some way.

Consider this my turn in that virtual support group.

This January, I came off a rather hectic ride that goes back through most of the last year. It included working on a short, directing a play, shooting that play as a short film, dozens of budgets, and rewriting a horror script for a producer I know.

Then, of course, there was line producing a feature.

At the beginning of the feature, in early prep, I was still trying to do changes for a few features and polish on the horror screenplay, to the point where I could not finish everything I was doing. There was the inevitable irony that every freelancer experiences, having to turn down work because I was so busy, knowing there would be a need for that work once the feature was over.

The Universe provides, but it does so with a twisted smile and a sense of humor. You have to learn to laugh along.

A busy year would segueway (sorry, I hate the new spelling "segway" - the root word is segue!) into a feature where any time I could get four hours sleep or do one thing at one time was a good time.

When that feature ended, there were the holidays, which have been quiet for me for years. My birthday comes right before Christmas, so I am used to celebrating it with some level of solitude, and learned how not to get bummed about that. This year, however, I had a small but wonderful gathering with people who meant a lot to me, a combined celebration of The Feast of Seven Fishes, a Southern Italian tradition, with my birthday.

So it was that the year ended much busier and fuller than usual for me. Alas, ever silver lining has a cloud lurking around the corner, so a wonderful year, a nice retreat, and then a Monday. January 6th, where I woke up and had nowhere to be and nothing I had to do.

Top all of that with this vortex thing that seems determined to give us a winter more appropriate for Buffalo than Brooklyn and you have the January Blues.

Sure, there was catching up on this blog, and the usual work search, but then what?

I have a few writing projects I am toying with now, and finally got the chance to work on the editing for the short I directed. Hopefully, I will have a cut for you here in a week or so - feel free to judge for yourself!

Thankfully, my Zen practice and years of therapy have left me more prepared for these times, and like the rest of us, I'm slogging through. There are good prospects for work coming up, and I am going to get to some short stories I have wanted to finish.

Short stories and possibly a web series pilot - we'll see. The latter has been on my back-burner for a while, and maybe it's time for me to try the almost no-budget thing, the Kickstarter thing, and get this done. I still don't know that I feel comfortable asking the folks I know to send money multiple times a day, but if I get the group I'd like to get together, it will feel more like it's for us, than for me.

A new screenplay? I don't know. I have a number of screenplays, three of which have been produced in one form or another. None have earned me more than a pittance, and the practice of preparing budget for wonderful scripts for others only to see those project not get funded have left me with the same lack of enthusiasm for venturing there that restaurant workers have eating out: when you've been in the kitchen, the food doesn't look as good.

The latter reminds me of one upside to this slow-down; the chance to get back to reading, Currently alternating between some Zen writing, the collected works of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the latest Carl Hiaasen novel Bad Monkey. Each of these are good for different moods.

Hiassen has long been a favorite of mine, ever since Tourist Season. Shockingly, only one of the Miami columnist's novels was directly made into a movie, and that was a disastrous mess based on Striptease. Hiaasen has a great joy in his dark heart, and his villains (usually corporate types from outside Florida looking to destroy more of it's natural beauty for a buck) meet their deaths in ways we root for from the moment we meet them. That the movie version of Striptease choose to water this down was nothing short of a crime against humanity.

In Bad Monkey, Hiaasen's "hero" is a Key West detective who is "busted" down to a food inspector - "roach inspector," as he calls it - for using a vacuum extension in a way it most definitely was not intended on the husband of woman he is sleeping with. His experience seeing what goes on in the kitchen leaves him getting skinnier and skinnier as he cannot see his way clear to eating any food served him in a restaurant.

One of the Zen readings I finished was by my original teacher, the amazing Myotai Sensei (Bonnie Myotai Treace). The poem at the top of this post is from her short work, Winter Moon: A Season of Zen Teaching. (The link to the book is along the right, if you're interested) One of the things I love about Myotai Sensei is her impish sense of humor, the way she makes her teachings simple without being simplistic. An astute writer and editor in her own right, Myotai Sensei shares the poem above as part of the never-ending lesson not to judge but to see things just exactly as they are, without adding a layer to it.

So it is that I do not see this down time as some sort of eternal punishment or hardship, but merely as one moment which will pass, and lead to another moment when there is work.

This post started with me wanting to describe January Blues, and somehow turned into a book review of Carl Hiaasen and a Zen teaching. This was definitely not where I thought it was going when I started it, but if you follow my blog, you know this sort of stream-of-consciousness will pop up more often than not.

Hope you enjoyed the ride. If all goes well, in the next post, I will be sharing a version of the short film I directed, and then back to the turn of the 21st Century. and to the movies I worked on at that time. It's been a while since we got back to the timeline, and I think that time is getting closer.