Diane Ragsdale has been on a tear. She wrote an e-book, In the Intersection, she runs an excellent blog, Jumper, and she has given a talk called Living in the Struggle. The talk is a full length academic talk, so it is a bit of a #longread, but it's absolutely worth it. In the talk, she discusses some of the trends among major regional theatres toward safer programming and more assured revenue streams, she calls this a move toward "commercialism." This concern is long standing in the not-for-profit arts community and Ragsdale is far from the only one concerned with the trends in American regional theatre. Todd London has also written a passionate article on the subject called, What Price Idealism, that pleas for regional theatres to return to their innovative roots and reject the creeping commercialism of partnering with for profit groups to take work to Broadway. Both London and Ragsdale have done great work here, but I have to take issue with the idea that what regional theatres are doing qualifies as commercialism and with the underlying assumption that the for-profit world has nothing to teach the regions.
If you want to start a philosophical argument about the nature of theatre, just utter the words "Theatres should act more like businesses." Many not-for-profit practitioners bristle at the very idea that our cultural enterprise has anything in common with pure profit maximizing institutions, many of which are rapacious and conscienceless. Truth be told, not-for-profit theatres are unique and they should not act completely like businesses, because that would be a betrayal of their fundamental mission. But many of these arguments cherry pick by highlighting the worst aspects of business and of poorly run businesses and conflate regional theatres' revenue maximization strategies with "acting like a business" or engaging in commerce.
As it happens, I agree that many regional theatres are making poor strategic decisions in favor of short-term revenue production, but this isn't because they are acting like businesses, it's because they are acting like bad businesses. The Economist has done a masterful job covering the stagnation in Japan over the past twenty years. This article, from 2011, has the same theme as this one, from 2004. Japan has not dealt with businesses that have no serious future, but they do not have the courage to let these businesses fail. They limp along, without innovating or producing much of value, or living up to their original promise, and they continue to exist because it would be painful for the national psyche to let them fail en masse. Corporate innovation is not a strong suit for Japanese businesses, which prefer the assiduous pursuit of goals, not dreaming up new ideas of how to achieve those goals or of new goals. Bad companies make bad assumptions about revenue projections. Companies go south by growing big too quickly. Bad companies limp along for years by nursing existing revenue streams and failing to innovate new products and new business models. This should all sound very familiar to those with experience in the land of not-for-profit theatres of a certain size (usually big). Human beings are notoriously bad at identifying sunk costs (I love this extract calling the sunk cost effect a "maladaptive economic practice" - scientists are the best).
To call this collective set of revenue maximizing behavior "commercialism" is to ignore the positive examples of great companies in the private sector that don't do any of that. Google enables its employees to have side projects (and Apple has toyed with the idea too). Can you imagine what would happen if every regional theatre started acting like that business? IBM is a technology firm that has existed from over one hundred years (this Economist piece is a good overview). It has reinvented itself several times over. How many theatres have the nerve to identify the changes necessary in what they consider their core product and to entirely reinvent themselves? How many theatres have the emphasis on design that Apple has? Or that can focus relentlessly on improving the process of production the way that Toyota has? Toyota has a ton of things to teach the theatre world (empowering every employee on the line to stop it and point out a flaw and requiring, REQUIRING, its employees to regularly suggest improvements to the process, to name just two awesome ideas).
In the end, I do not believe that theatres emphasizing safe shows over riskier material, theatres that seek the widest audience, that they know, are becoming too much like businesses, too commercial. They are making a huge mistake because they are becoming too much like bad businesses. How many theatres are truly laser focused on maximizing their resources to put on the best show possible, which is their product after all? How many of the have the courage to abandon any pretence of relying on fickle ticket revenue and shift budgets accordingly? How many theatres get smaller in a responsible and orderly fashion? How many theatres have given up specializing in their own marketing and let others with more experience handle that service? Inditex is a firm that does not spend a single dime on advertising and yet Zara has gone from being a Spanish brand to being a global one. What does that tell us about marketing?
I agree that not-for-profit theatres are not for-profit enterprises. They should not be as ruthless about maximizing profit or as focused on quarterly shareholder value. But there are a lot of best practices in the business world that could make a real difference in not-for-profit theatre and we owe it to our staffs, to our patrons, and to our communities to find them and apply them.
Tuesday, June 11, 2013
Sunday, May 26, 2013
Of Coins, Bit and Culture
Update: @ddower and @Pollyckarl have made themselves available on
Twitter recently, to answer questions about Culture Coin that have
cleared up a few things. The first is that the Business Unusual contest
specifically requested "half-baked" ideas, ideas that are unfinished,
undoubtedly to prevent organizations from editing themselves out of a
good idea. The second is that they are two incredibly smart, engaged,
and approachable people who truly want the community to develop ideas
together. This post has been edited to reflect all of that.
Fair warning: I am not an economics blogger. But I read a bunch of them on the regular (Matt Yglesias, Joe Weisenthal, better known as @TheStalwart, Ezra Klein and Wonkblong in general, Ryan Avent and The Economist in general, and Free Exchange in particular - you get the picture). Caveat emptor.
If you are a theatrical bent and you are at all engaged with social media, then you may have noticed HowlRound on Twitter, talking up voting for Culture Coin, their Business Unusual contest entry (side note to ArtsFwd: this is 2013 - frames are dead, dead, dead, please stop using them). I encourage you to read the proposal, a heartfelt plea for new thinking on connecting resources with users and rewarding sweat with "sweat equity." I am wholly on board with the premise that there are underutilized resources in the arts sector, that there are dark resources, latent abilities, spaces, or resources that have not been tapped into, and that nearly everyone in the arts sector is underpaid. It's an open question what direction exactly Culture Coin is going to take on tackling these issues. However, all of this talk about creating a digital distributed transnational currency reminds me of that other digital transnational invented currency, Bitcoin, which can lead to some productive thinking about what Culture Coin should not be.
You may have heard of Bitcoin. It's been in the news recently because its value went nuts, which led to all kinds of snarky econoblogger fun. If you haven't heard, Bitcoin is a digital, anonymous, cryptographically secure, peer-to-peer currency based on hard money theories of value (which is influenced by a school of thought called monetarism), namely that scarcity and durability create value. If you have libertarian friends, ask them about gold. You will get a wonky earful about intrinsic value and you will understand what Bitcoin wants to be (it's all wrong, of course - theatre makers, of all people, should understand that value is a shared collective phenomenon that is not always stable). Bitcoin is, essentially, digital gold. Gold has desirable qualities in a physical currency: it doesn't rust; there's a limited supply of it; historically, everybody wants it. Bitcoin, like gold, is limited in its supply. There will only ever be 21 million Bitcoins in the world. Bitcoins must be mined in order to go into circulation (being "mined" involves your computer doing a complex set of number crunching, kind of like SETI@home or Folding@home, but with less societal value). And finally, Bitcoin can be converted to other currencies at a floating market value, in addition to being useful (that's a strong word, but let's be generous) for purchasing goods and services directly (for the record, despite all the techo-utopian enthusiasm behind Bitcoin, the bulk of the goods purchased with it at this point are drugs and guns - turns out libertarians aren't the only ones interested in a cryptographically secure anonymous transnational digital currency).
It's easy to see the similarities between Bitcoin and Culture Coin, which aims to be a peer-to-peer digital currency as well. However, those similarities end pretty quickly. For example, the value basis of the Culture Coin is the exact inversion of Bitcoin. The basis for "mining" Culture Coins is sweat, i.e. labor, which is essentially infinite, and the money supply is unconstrained. This begs the question: how does labor create capital? When you perform labor in the real economy, you receive wages out of an existing stock of available money, you don't create that money out of thin air in that moment. Libertarians and Bitcoin enthusiasts don't like fiat money because governments can increase the money supply (i.e. print money) to change the value of that money, pretty much at will. Fiat money means that it is always possible for a sovereign to make more money with their magic "Because I said so!" (this is also why no sovereign nation with its own currency can go bankrupt - tell your Republican friends). But that doesn't mean the money created would be worth anything, just ask Zimbabwe (231,000,000% per day!). Culture Coin, if it were truly to be implemented as a currency, is the most extreme version of fiat money ever, where labor itself creates new money, rather than getting rewarded with existing money. There is no precedent for that whatsoever, it's essentially alchemy. If the user base grows and Culture Coin catches on in this scenario, value will disappear the instant it is "created" because the more successful Culture Coin is at convincing people to put in sweat and be paid in coin, the less each individual coin will be worth, undercutting the very purpose of the project: fair compensation.
Bitcoin is also meant to mimic gold in that it intends to be a resource that is left to the collective use of those who adopt it. In other words, there is no central bank of Bitcoin. As a form of specie, it simply is what it is and it doesn't need anyone standing behind it to have value (we've seen that this is not true, of course, but that's the theory). The Culture Coin project has an altruistic motive at heart, fair compensation for market participants, that requires active management of the currency to meet its philosophical goals. Some of these ideas can't be found in the contest entry, but they do show up on Twitter. One in particular catches the eye:
Culture Coin would again be the exact opposite of Bitcoin: instead of having no central bank, its central bank will be every user of the currency. Culture Coin plans to have all users collectively act together and democratically decide on conversion rates and fair compensation for your sweat. You can search for days on whatever search engine suits you and you will not find anyone who has ever attempted anything like that. Digital direct democracy, in and of itself, has yet to succeed or be effectively implemented by its own biggest proponents. No one has ever attempted direct democractic control of a central bank. Ever.We have seen what happens when amateurs help run major financial institutions, though and it looks a lot like the Great Depression. Setting aside major questions about standards of fairness and the workability of the currency, this is a giant governance headache. Huge amounts of resources and time will be needed to work out the theory on this, produce actionable ideas, run the experiments necessary to implement those ideas, learn from those experiments, and then finally convince someone to actually accept a Culture Coin as a form of payment from someone they don't know. Creating a currency is hard work.
This is all pretty theoretical, so let me put it into more concrete terms. Let's say I volunteer with several local theatres in DC, doing lighting or whatever they had to hand, and let's say I did that for long enough, that I could use some of the Culture Coins I'd built up to rent a space in Germany (transnational!) for a week for a cross-cultural project I'd been kicking around (something like these examples came up in the Twitter conversation, which I should storify, but haven't yet). That's great! But . . . the people who own that space in Germany have to pay rent. In euro. How does giving them some Culture Coins help them make rent? It doesn't . . . unless you can turn a Culture Coin into euro. But there is already a way for me to labor for a certain amount of time, receive currency in return for that labor (from an already accepted store of value), and then use that wage to pay for goods and services to realize my dream idea; all without creating a parallel economy or a new currency.
What this all boils down to is that Culture Coin is actually still an inchoate nascent idea and it will take some time to develop. To me, it is pretty clear though that it shouldn't develop into a true currency and that even one second spent thinking of it that way is time better spent doing something. To me, there is something far more interesting lurking at the heart of the project than a digital currency. Remember that the impetus for Culture Coin, beyond the fair compensation thing, is the desire to uncover and connect resources, including latent resources, with those who are interested in using them. Fair compensation doesn't actually have anything to do with connecting users with resources. It would be nice to be fairly compensated, but that's a problem with not having enough capital, something that inventing a new currency won't solve. But this resource problem? That can be solved. Indeed, Fractured Atlas has already made a run at part of this problem with their Spaces project. In keeping with the commons ethos, I think the best thing HowlRound can do, would be to leverage that contest reward into a partnership with someone who is already working on part of their problem and extend the work of both.
I moved to Washington, DC in order to get plugged into a vibrant theatre community that was large enough to be doing interesting work and taking serious risks, but small enough to welcome in a complete stranger. I have a couple of projects that I would love to self-produce, but I'm still new to the community (and disconnected from it by my production gig - I think sometimes that I will get deeper into the theatre, only when I step away from running shows). I don't hang around with a coterie of actors. I don't know anyone with a blackbox theatre. I don't know where to go to get the kind of booth you might find in a diner for my set. If HowlRound can put together a web platform that helps me find all of these disparate parts and pieces and use them to put on a show, they will have done me and the entire theatre community a huge service, even if I have to spend my own money to do it. Culture Coin is worth supporting for that reason. I hope they just leave that currency thing to anonymous genius libertarians. And sovereign nations. Because even they can't figure it out.
Fair warning: I am not an economics blogger. But I read a bunch of them on the regular (Matt Yglesias, Joe Weisenthal, better known as @TheStalwart, Ezra Klein and Wonkblong in general, Ryan Avent and The Economist in general, and Free Exchange in particular - you get the picture). Caveat emptor.
If you are a theatrical bent and you are at all engaged with social media, then you may have noticed HowlRound on Twitter, talking up voting for Culture Coin, their Business Unusual contest entry (side note to ArtsFwd: this is 2013 - frames are dead, dead, dead, please stop using them). I encourage you to read the proposal, a heartfelt plea for new thinking on connecting resources with users and rewarding sweat with "sweat equity." I am wholly on board with the premise that there are underutilized resources in the arts sector, that there are dark resources, latent abilities, spaces, or resources that have not been tapped into, and that nearly everyone in the arts sector is underpaid. It's an open question what direction exactly Culture Coin is going to take on tackling these issues. However, all of this talk about creating a digital distributed transnational currency reminds me of that other digital transnational invented currency, Bitcoin, which can lead to some productive thinking about what Culture Coin should not be.
You may have heard of Bitcoin. It's been in the news recently because its value went nuts, which led to all kinds of snarky econoblogger fun. If you haven't heard, Bitcoin is a digital, anonymous, cryptographically secure, peer-to-peer currency based on hard money theories of value (which is influenced by a school of thought called monetarism), namely that scarcity and durability create value. If you have libertarian friends, ask them about gold. You will get a wonky earful about intrinsic value and you will understand what Bitcoin wants to be (it's all wrong, of course - theatre makers, of all people, should understand that value is a shared collective phenomenon that is not always stable). Bitcoin is, essentially, digital gold. Gold has desirable qualities in a physical currency: it doesn't rust; there's a limited supply of it; historically, everybody wants it. Bitcoin, like gold, is limited in its supply. There will only ever be 21 million Bitcoins in the world. Bitcoins must be mined in order to go into circulation (being "mined" involves your computer doing a complex set of number crunching, kind of like SETI@home or Folding@home, but with less societal value). And finally, Bitcoin can be converted to other currencies at a floating market value, in addition to being useful (that's a strong word, but let's be generous) for purchasing goods and services directly (for the record, despite all the techo-utopian enthusiasm behind Bitcoin, the bulk of the goods purchased with it at this point are drugs and guns - turns out libertarians aren't the only ones interested in a cryptographically secure anonymous transnational digital currency).
It's easy to see the similarities between Bitcoin and Culture Coin, which aims to be a peer-to-peer digital currency as well. However, those similarities end pretty quickly. For example, the value basis of the Culture Coin is the exact inversion of Bitcoin. The basis for "mining" Culture Coins is sweat, i.e. labor, which is essentially infinite, and the money supply is unconstrained. This begs the question: how does labor create capital? When you perform labor in the real economy, you receive wages out of an existing stock of available money, you don't create that money out of thin air in that moment. Libertarians and Bitcoin enthusiasts don't like fiat money because governments can increase the money supply (i.e. print money) to change the value of that money, pretty much at will. Fiat money means that it is always possible for a sovereign to make more money with their magic "Because I said so!" (this is also why no sovereign nation with its own currency can go bankrupt - tell your Republican friends). But that doesn't mean the money created would be worth anything, just ask Zimbabwe (231,000,000% per day!). Culture Coin, if it were truly to be implemented as a currency, is the most extreme version of fiat money ever, where labor itself creates new money, rather than getting rewarded with existing money. There is no precedent for that whatsoever, it's essentially alchemy. If the user base grows and Culture Coin catches on in this scenario, value will disappear the instant it is "created" because the more successful Culture Coin is at convincing people to put in sweat and be paid in coin, the less each individual coin will be worth, undercutting the very purpose of the project: fair compensation.
Bitcoin is also meant to mimic gold in that it intends to be a resource that is left to the collective use of those who adopt it. In other words, there is no central bank of Bitcoin. As a form of specie, it simply is what it is and it doesn't need anyone standing behind it to have value (we've seen that this is not true, of course, but that's the theory). The Culture Coin project has an altruistic motive at heart, fair compensation for market participants, that requires active management of the currency to meet its philosophical goals. Some of these ideas can't be found in the contest entry, but they do show up on Twitter. One in particular catches the eye:
Culture Coin gets co-created & democratically run by—ALL—artists & culture makers. Read/Vote it up @artsfwd goo.gl/PGRCF #newplay
— HowlRound.com (@HowlRound) May 22, 2013
Culture Coin would again be the exact opposite of Bitcoin: instead of having no central bank, its central bank will be every user of the currency. Culture Coin plans to have all users collectively act together and democratically decide on conversion rates and fair compensation for your sweat. You can search for days on whatever search engine suits you and you will not find anyone who has ever attempted anything like that. Digital direct democracy, in and of itself, has yet to succeed or be effectively implemented by its own biggest proponents. No one has ever attempted direct democractic control of a central bank. Ever.We have seen what happens when amateurs help run major financial institutions, though and it looks a lot like the Great Depression. Setting aside major questions about standards of fairness and the workability of the currency, this is a giant governance headache. Huge amounts of resources and time will be needed to work out the theory on this, produce actionable ideas, run the experiments necessary to implement those ideas, learn from those experiments, and then finally convince someone to actually accept a Culture Coin as a form of payment from someone they don't know. Creating a currency is hard work.
This is all pretty theoretical, so let me put it into more concrete terms. Let's say I volunteer with several local theatres in DC, doing lighting or whatever they had to hand, and let's say I did that for long enough, that I could use some of the Culture Coins I'd built up to rent a space in Germany (transnational!) for a week for a cross-cultural project I'd been kicking around (something like these examples came up in the Twitter conversation, which I should storify, but haven't yet). That's great! But . . . the people who own that space in Germany have to pay rent. In euro. How does giving them some Culture Coins help them make rent? It doesn't . . . unless you can turn a Culture Coin into euro. But there is already a way for me to labor for a certain amount of time, receive currency in return for that labor (from an already accepted store of value), and then use that wage to pay for goods and services to realize my dream idea; all without creating a parallel economy or a new currency.
What this all boils down to is that Culture Coin is actually still an inchoate nascent idea and it will take some time to develop. To me, it is pretty clear though that it shouldn't develop into a true currency and that even one second spent thinking of it that way is time better spent doing something. To me, there is something far more interesting lurking at the heart of the project than a digital currency. Remember that the impetus for Culture Coin, beyond the fair compensation thing, is the desire to uncover and connect resources, including latent resources, with those who are interested in using them. Fair compensation doesn't actually have anything to do with connecting users with resources. It would be nice to be fairly compensated, but that's a problem with not having enough capital, something that inventing a new currency won't solve. But this resource problem? That can be solved. Indeed, Fractured Atlas has already made a run at part of this problem with their Spaces project. In keeping with the commons ethos, I think the best thing HowlRound can do, would be to leverage that contest reward into a partnership with someone who is already working on part of their problem and extend the work of both.
I moved to Washington, DC in order to get plugged into a vibrant theatre community that was large enough to be doing interesting work and taking serious risks, but small enough to welcome in a complete stranger. I have a couple of projects that I would love to self-produce, but I'm still new to the community (and disconnected from it by my production gig - I think sometimes that I will get deeper into the theatre, only when I step away from running shows). I don't hang around with a coterie of actors. I don't know anyone with a blackbox theatre. I don't know where to go to get the kind of booth you might find in a diner for my set. If HowlRound can put together a web platform that helps me find all of these disparate parts and pieces and use them to put on a show, they will have done me and the entire theatre community a huge service, even if I have to spend my own money to do it. Culture Coin is worth supporting for that reason. I hope they just leave that currency thing to anonymous genius libertarians. And sovereign nations. Because even they can't figure it out.
Thursday, May 23, 2013
Of Mechanics and Ferraris
This post is dedicated to the mechanics of theatre (as is this little ditty, in a way).
What you think of your mechanic depends almost entirely on what you think of your car. If you are a regular commuter, you probably think of your car as an instrument, essentially, a commodity, something completely fungible and interchangeable. You also probably don't know your mechanic. In all likelihood, you don't have a regular guy or gal at all. Jiffy Lube, or Mr. Tire, or whoever suits you fine for the regular stuff and for the other stuff? Whatever AAA or the insurance company (yours or theirs) recommends is fine. The fact that your car has to be repaired at times is annoying. The machine is just a machine, you are reluctant to spend any real money at all, and when you do spend any serious amount of money, it is with much grumbling and great regret.
But if you own a Ferrari (you're welcome), things are quite different. For one thing, you can't take it to just anybody anymore. There aren't millions of Ferraris in the world. Very few third party manufacturers make parts for such a high end automobile. The number of mechanics qualified to maintain a high performance vehicle in peak condition is way smaller than the number who can replace any old fifteen dollar oil filter (it sinks from thousands to tens). You also understand that a Ferrari is a fine piece of kit, expensive to purchase and to operate. You don't begrudge the running cost, because it is simply part of being a member of an exclusive club, the kind of club where you don't bother listing the prices of accessories. That means you know your mechanic, you probably know them by name, you visit them regularly, and you pay them extremely well for their specialized knowledge and ability. You acknowledge the importance of their work in making it possible for you to do ridiculous things (again, you're welcome) with your car.
But that is not the top end of what mechanics can do. For that, you have to look at pit crews, or well, you know, real pit crews. Drivers routinely thank their pit crews. They also routinely throw them under the bus, but that comes with the high stakes territory. The constructors and engineers involved with Formula 1, in particular, are extremely important. But they work with the best mechanics and crew members in the world. You could be the best engineer in the world, but if there isn't a machine shop in the world capable of doing what you want, it will not matter at all. Those crews are paid well, they are part of a world famous team. They didn't design the car. They don't race the car. But they sure do make it run.
"Yes, but when are you going to talk about theatre?" asks the impatient reader (but not too impatient, thanks for making it this far). I would love to be able to drop the mic right here. "I've been talking about theatre all along: technicians are mechanics!" Unfortunately, I can't and to see why, we have to take step back for a moment.
Theatre is experiencing the same wrenching transition from a hard-fought past into an unknown future that all creative content companies are right now. The business model of regional theatre is collapsing because there are fewer theatregoers and because of generational shift away from the culture of subscription toward a single-ticket world. As an added bonus, the rising cohort has now been scarred by years of economic hardship. All of this difficulty spawns a lot of discussion, some of it more practical than others. I read quite a lot of it. Almost none of it mentions technicians at all. The discourse of theatre and the arts is dominated by people who work in the artistic department, a group that is very often housed in a building entirely separate from the theatre. Whenever anyone talks about the future of theatre, it is always cast in terms of enabling the artists or changing our relationship with the artist. That is a problem.
Take HowlRound's CULTURE Coin proposal. It is a radical proposal to change the way that sweat equity is rewarded and recognized. They start with the presumption that theatre artists are underpaid and are therefore trying to create a community where the sweat equity of the artists is valued and becomes a medium of exchange (which is only slightly harder than re-inventing the wheel; it's just democratically inventing a currency from nothing, with no central bank - that should sound alarms). At certain levels of theatre, particularly small professional theatres, this makes sense. The lighting designer will, in fact, turn a wrench, the sound designer will install the speaker cluster, the scenic designer will take up a screw gun and get to work. The reason that happens is that the theatre company cannot afford to pay the designer a living wage (or a wage at all), let alone hire a crew to do the work the designer lays out. There must be a way to reward them for that sweat, right?
I invite you to think about what that proposal presumes about technicians. Thought about it? The answer is that it presumes those people don't exist. Nowhere in that proposal will you see mention of anything other than artists: no technicians, no administrators, just artists. In order for CULTURE Coin to work, you have to assume that the people who are doing the work want to be paid in a way that lets them transform sweat into cultural participation. There is no place in that model for somehow who paints sets, gets paid, and then goes home. In this model, it is presumed that the people putting in the sweat equity want to be regarded as artists. Some designers have to do that sweat work, but not all of the people doing that sweat work are designers, directors, actors, or any other type of artist. The worldview of so much of the thinkers of theatre is hermetically sealed - it contains only art and artists. Despite the generous assumption that the people putting in the sweat equity are artists, it doesn't quite cut both ways. It is nigh on impossible to cross the boundary between technician and artist. It is possible to conceive of an artist who has to do mechanic things, but a mechanic who wants to do artistic things? That's literally unthinkable within the current discourse.
We have now come full circle. The technicians who make theatre run are treated like commuter mechanics. We are considered interchangeable, utterly fungible, possibly unnecessary, and only begrudgingly considered part of the theatre landscape. Theatres across the country want to we could let that Check Engine light ride, just for awhile. It's not really important, right? They have no input into how the car is driven. But the reality is that technicians perform a highly specialized task that few people can do well: they are the Ferrari mechanics, not Mr. Tire wrench monkeys. Conceptually, this leaves us with two possible paths. One path leads to a future business model where theatre companies will stay resolutely focused on the artist and not-for-profit theatre companies will not own or operate their own theatre spaces. That money pit be dealt with by companies that are totally focused on that goal alone. There are a number of theatres who would benefit tremendously from divesting themselves of property and all the expensive problems that come with it. The other possible path is that the future of theatre will include the people who actually turn wrenches, mix sound, rig flying scenery, hot glue candlesticks from nothing, whipstitch hems (apologies to the costumes and wardrobe) in a new way. Philosophical decisions will be made in a way that respects them as artisans. Concentrated efforts will be made to cultivate them as a resource to be drawn on, not just in the moment when something needs to be done in tech RIGHT NOW. The barriers between production and artistic will come down making it easier for technicians to become artists and administrators. That would be revolutionary.
What you think of your mechanic depends almost entirely on what you think of your car. If you are a regular commuter, you probably think of your car as an instrument, essentially, a commodity, something completely fungible and interchangeable. You also probably don't know your mechanic. In all likelihood, you don't have a regular guy or gal at all. Jiffy Lube, or Mr. Tire, or whoever suits you fine for the regular stuff and for the other stuff? Whatever AAA or the insurance company (yours or theirs) recommends is fine. The fact that your car has to be repaired at times is annoying. The machine is just a machine, you are reluctant to spend any real money at all, and when you do spend any serious amount of money, it is with much grumbling and great regret.
But if you own a Ferrari (you're welcome), things are quite different. For one thing, you can't take it to just anybody anymore. There aren't millions of Ferraris in the world. Very few third party manufacturers make parts for such a high end automobile. The number of mechanics qualified to maintain a high performance vehicle in peak condition is way smaller than the number who can replace any old fifteen dollar oil filter (it sinks from thousands to tens). You also understand that a Ferrari is a fine piece of kit, expensive to purchase and to operate. You don't begrudge the running cost, because it is simply part of being a member of an exclusive club, the kind of club where you don't bother listing the prices of accessories. That means you know your mechanic, you probably know them by name, you visit them regularly, and you pay them extremely well for their specialized knowledge and ability. You acknowledge the importance of their work in making it possible for you to do ridiculous things (again, you're welcome) with your car.
But that is not the top end of what mechanics can do. For that, you have to look at pit crews, or well, you know, real pit crews. Drivers routinely thank their pit crews. They also routinely throw them under the bus, but that comes with the high stakes territory. The constructors and engineers involved with Formula 1, in particular, are extremely important. But they work with the best mechanics and crew members in the world. You could be the best engineer in the world, but if there isn't a machine shop in the world capable of doing what you want, it will not matter at all. Those crews are paid well, they are part of a world famous team. They didn't design the car. They don't race the car. But they sure do make it run.
"Yes, but when are you going to talk about theatre?" asks the impatient reader (but not too impatient, thanks for making it this far). I would love to be able to drop the mic right here. "I've been talking about theatre all along: technicians are mechanics!" Unfortunately, I can't and to see why, we have to take step back for a moment.
Theatre is experiencing the same wrenching transition from a hard-fought past into an unknown future that all creative content companies are right now. The business model of regional theatre is collapsing because there are fewer theatregoers and because of generational shift away from the culture of subscription toward a single-ticket world. As an added bonus, the rising cohort has now been scarred by years of economic hardship. All of this difficulty spawns a lot of discussion, some of it more practical than others. I read quite a lot of it. Almost none of it mentions technicians at all. The discourse of theatre and the arts is dominated by people who work in the artistic department, a group that is very often housed in a building entirely separate from the theatre. Whenever anyone talks about the future of theatre, it is always cast in terms of enabling the artists or changing our relationship with the artist. That is a problem.
Take HowlRound's CULTURE Coin proposal. It is a radical proposal to change the way that sweat equity is rewarded and recognized. They start with the presumption that theatre artists are underpaid and are therefore trying to create a community where the sweat equity of the artists is valued and becomes a medium of exchange (which is only slightly harder than re-inventing the wheel; it's just democratically inventing a currency from nothing, with no central bank - that should sound alarms). At certain levels of theatre, particularly small professional theatres, this makes sense. The lighting designer will, in fact, turn a wrench, the sound designer will install the speaker cluster, the scenic designer will take up a screw gun and get to work. The reason that happens is that the theatre company cannot afford to pay the designer a living wage (or a wage at all), let alone hire a crew to do the work the designer lays out. There must be a way to reward them for that sweat, right?
I invite you to think about what that proposal presumes about technicians. Thought about it? The answer is that it presumes those people don't exist. Nowhere in that proposal will you see mention of anything other than artists: no technicians, no administrators, just artists. In order for CULTURE Coin to work, you have to assume that the people who are doing the work want to be paid in a way that lets them transform sweat into cultural participation. There is no place in that model for somehow who paints sets, gets paid, and then goes home. In this model, it is presumed that the people putting in the sweat equity want to be regarded as artists. Some designers have to do that sweat work, but not all of the people doing that sweat work are designers, directors, actors, or any other type of artist. The worldview of so much of the thinkers of theatre is hermetically sealed - it contains only art and artists. Despite the generous assumption that the people putting in the sweat equity are artists, it doesn't quite cut both ways. It is nigh on impossible to cross the boundary between technician and artist. It is possible to conceive of an artist who has to do mechanic things, but a mechanic who wants to do artistic things? That's literally unthinkable within the current discourse.
We have now come full circle. The technicians who make theatre run are treated like commuter mechanics. We are considered interchangeable, utterly fungible, possibly unnecessary, and only begrudgingly considered part of the theatre landscape. Theatres across the country want to we could let that Check Engine light ride, just for awhile. It's not really important, right? They have no input into how the car is driven. But the reality is that technicians perform a highly specialized task that few people can do well: they are the Ferrari mechanics, not Mr. Tire wrench monkeys. Conceptually, this leaves us with two possible paths. One path leads to a future business model where theatre companies will stay resolutely focused on the artist and not-for-profit theatre companies will not own or operate their own theatre spaces. That money pit be dealt with by companies that are totally focused on that goal alone. There are a number of theatres who would benefit tremendously from divesting themselves of property and all the expensive problems that come with it. The other possible path is that the future of theatre will include the people who actually turn wrenches, mix sound, rig flying scenery, hot glue candlesticks from nothing, whipstitch hems (apologies to the costumes and wardrobe) in a new way. Philosophical decisions will be made in a way that respects them as artisans. Concentrated efforts will be made to cultivate them as a resource to be drawn on, not just in the moment when something needs to be done in tech RIGHT NOW. The barriers between production and artistic will come down making it easier for technicians to become artists and administrators. That would be revolutionary.
Thursday, May 2, 2013
Criticism is Not a Four Letter Word
I’ve been eavesdropping on the online conversation
about criticism in the arts for awhile now (thank you, HowlRound). Every
year, there is a panel at the Humana Festival (like this one) dedicated to assessing
the state of theatre criticism. I find the conversation both frustrating and
fascinating. I find it fascinating because criticism was my jam as an academic (and all the real philosophers are critical theorists these days - I dare you to find philosophy seminars devoted to anyone born in the twentieth century). It's a frustrating conversation because I also happen to be a huge fan of the work being done at Grantland, a place where sports and popular culture meet. That’s a bad
description. I’d say that the insight Bill Simmons had (perhaps
unconsciously) is that sports culture is popular culture. And you should have a
website devoted to the smartest people covering all of the narratives in
popular culture and that this should include everything from NBA shot charts to the most interesting things happening in tabloids today to instigating some
excellent gonzo journalism (if the only thing you get out of this blog is reading this Brian Phillips piece on the Iditarod, we are all winners). Everyone should take Derby day to read
Hunter S. Thompson’s seminal work on Derby week to be reminded of what
great cultural journalism looks like. With all of these Grantland contributors doing such outstanding work, it is bizarre to listen to theatre critics lamenting the death of reviews in print. So, if you want to know the state
of criticism in the arts, Grantland is the state of the art and drama
critics are the superannuated 18th century model.
The
basic challenge for theatre critics has always been how to get past the
popular misconception that the primary work of the critic is to review
shows. The problem with that is that the only thing people know of
criticism are the reviews because that’s the pretty much all newspapers
will print about a theatre show or a movie. This is bundled up with the fact that far too few people understand how awesome live theatre is in general, and not just in New York, or at your local roadhouse. In the modern world,
newspapers are no longer sufficient for people who truly love something, even newspapers acknowledge that. The New York Times has ArtsBeat and the Washington Post has WonkBlog and Grantland exists. Conversations are moving more quickly now than ever and criticism is really about fostering and facilitating that conversation.
Only at its most basic level is criticism is about judging the quality of a work.
This is much more important in theatre than in film reviewing, because
there is so much more theatre being produced than film and with far less
money. To truly appreciate cultural artifacts, it is often necessary to
understand the components of the form, what its elements are, and how
they work together, especially when dealing with challenging work.
That’s an educational function and it is to a certain extent necessary,
but it isn’t the soul of criticism and, even if it was, it is impossible to do this well in print in the context of a review. This function could and should be moved to a network of content about theatre making, very similar to HowlRound or 2AM Theatre, but with the theatregoing audience in mind, not theatre makers.
Sunday, April 14, 2013
The Latest in a Series of Experiments
Because precisely no one asked for it and I need some feedback here is the script, tentatively called Blackout, the latest P.I. film. It's a bit . . . different. Very Dame-centric. I'm looking to film it (haha, record it) this summer.
Comments welcome.
Comments welcome.
Friday, April 12, 2013
You Watch Television?!
You're right. This is a new thing. I didn't used to watch television. I occasionally enjoyed the extremely time shifted pleasures of seasons past (Doctor Who, Psych, Burn Notice, Top Gear, 30 Rock) when they finally hit Netflix. But it turns out, I had severely misunderstood the state of On Demand. In my defense, I haven't paid for cable in three or so years and three years ago "On Demand" meant straight to video crap, renting movies, and nothing else. If you wanted to timeshift a show, you had to know which one that was going to be and record it your own damn self. My sister, a proud homeowner now, inadvertently clued me in to the new world order. On Demand now means that ALL of the regular television shows have been DVRd already and you can pick and choose je nach Laune, as the Germans say (or might if they were translating an American expression into German, let's roll with it), which is awesome in its brilliance (and it took years for them to figure this out because . . . ).
Knowing of the existence of On Demand's in season vault is great and it will change my TV watching habits, but it will not help me with the cultural void that developed over the last couple of years (the lacking access to cable years). I have deliberately kept myself out of the conversations of Mad Men, Walking Dead, Breaking Bad, House of Lies and every HBO show worth watching, which is, frankly, all of them. (A note to HBO, if you are listening: Make HBO Go available to people who aren't subscribers. I don't buy cable in my household, but I would happily give you money to watch your amazing shows. Every month.) I consider that a good thing. If you are someone who cares about those shows, you don't need to listen to me.
But now that I have cracked the On Demand code, I feel like there are shows out there that I can get in on the ground floor on, shows like NBC's Hannibal. What I understand from those in the know is that NBC has no idea what to do with this show, it's in the Thursday night death slot (the one that used to belong to E.R. - oh, how the mighty have fallen), and it might get cancelled once the initial run has aired. It makes you feel bad for Bryan Fuller. Fuller is responsible for Wonderfalls, Dead Like Me, Pushing Daisies, and Heroes. Not one of those shows lasted for even three full seasons. So, just be forewarned: Hannibal will be cancelled soon.
Which is a shame because Hannibal is AWESOME. I don't use those capital letters lightly. Thomas Harris is responsible for bringing us the character of Hannibal Lecter and the universe that grew up around it. His novels, Red Dragon, Silence of the Lambs, and Hannibal, inspired four movies, a musical (I wish I was kidding) and now a television show and, you could argue, created the serial killer/profiler as a genre. Silence of the Lambs is one of the greatest films of all time, a document so complete and authoritative that it is impossible to explore those characters any further. Hannibal, the movie and the novel, attempted it and failed. Even Ridley Scott directing Julianne Moore couldn't add anything substantial to the Lecter/Starling story. But then you have Red Dragon.
Red Dragon is the back story of Silence. It's primarily about Will Graham, a profiler who was so empathetic that he could solve murders from inside the murderer's head, that he could think the murderer's thoughts. That's a compelling character that you could explore forever, right? And then on top of that, we get Hannibal Lecter, the brilliant sadist serial killer who helps Graham catch these killers. That's a dynamic that has automatic tension to it, it's just too juicy. So juicy, that you've got two movies that try to deal with it, mostly unsuccessfully (Manhunter succeeds far more than the dull and obvious Red Dragon - I'll take Michael Mann over Brett Ratner any day of the week), and now, we have the medium necessary to explore the complete complexity of this dynamic: television.
Television allows David Slade (Hard Candy - do yourself a favor, watch) and Bryan Fuller to take their time, to let the dynamic unfold in front of us, with that delicious sense of inevitability, that wonderful suspense that Hitchcock talks about: watching the time bomb under the cafe table tick down inexorably to that final explosive moment. Hugh Dancy is great as Will Graham, who has been invited as a kind of idiot savant, who has little or no social skills, no use for social niceties, and who is clearly damaged by the use of his empathetic gifts. The show lets us into the Graham's world, to his torture, by re-enacting the crime scenes with Graham as the killer. It's highly stylized and totally immersive. But the real brilliance of the show is casting Mads Mikkelsen as Hannibal Lecter, an actor who is the polar opposite, in terms of technique, as Brian Cox and Anthony Hopkins. Mikkelsen is a master of the subtle, cold, and calculating. He is outstanding in Casino Royale, but he has some Danish language work that is also brilliant, particularly the Dogme-95-lite piece, After The Wedding. Mikkelsen is a total . . . er . . . pleasure to watch. He is understated but always masterfully present.
But great actors and good style aren't enough to make this show work, though it helps tremendously. It's going to come down to the monsters these guys are hunting down on a weekly basis. Harris may have invented the the profiler/killer rules, but modern science has come to understand something about those early profilers: they were full of crap. Most serial killers are not loner white men who have trouble keeping a job. Many of them are dedicated family men and pillars of their community (which gibes with what we know of pure evil from . . . you know where, that place and the thing . . . do I really have to go there?). The first killer in the series is a family man killing girls like his daughter because she is about to leave the nest. Immediately, we know that we aren't going to be stuck with run of the mill psychos and loners. No Jame Gumb, no John Doe, no Dahmer. We are getting a great look at a very interesting dynamic and new look at what we think of evil.
So, yeah. I'm all in on Hannibal.
Knowing of the existence of On Demand's in season vault is great and it will change my TV watching habits, but it will not help me with the cultural void that developed over the last couple of years (the lacking access to cable years). I have deliberately kept myself out of the conversations of Mad Men, Walking Dead, Breaking Bad, House of Lies and every HBO show worth watching, which is, frankly, all of them. (A note to HBO, if you are listening: Make HBO Go available to people who aren't subscribers. I don't buy cable in my household, but I would happily give you money to watch your amazing shows. Every month.) I consider that a good thing. If you are someone who cares about those shows, you don't need to listen to me.
But now that I have cracked the On Demand code, I feel like there are shows out there that I can get in on the ground floor on, shows like NBC's Hannibal. What I understand from those in the know is that NBC has no idea what to do with this show, it's in the Thursday night death slot (the one that used to belong to E.R. - oh, how the mighty have fallen), and it might get cancelled once the initial run has aired. It makes you feel bad for Bryan Fuller. Fuller is responsible for Wonderfalls, Dead Like Me, Pushing Daisies, and Heroes. Not one of those shows lasted for even three full seasons. So, just be forewarned: Hannibal will be cancelled soon.
Which is a shame because Hannibal is AWESOME. I don't use those capital letters lightly. Thomas Harris is responsible for bringing us the character of Hannibal Lecter and the universe that grew up around it. His novels, Red Dragon, Silence of the Lambs, and Hannibal, inspired four movies, a musical (I wish I was kidding) and now a television show and, you could argue, created the serial killer/profiler as a genre. Silence of the Lambs is one of the greatest films of all time, a document so complete and authoritative that it is impossible to explore those characters any further. Hannibal, the movie and the novel, attempted it and failed. Even Ridley Scott directing Julianne Moore couldn't add anything substantial to the Lecter/Starling story. But then you have Red Dragon.
Red Dragon is the back story of Silence. It's primarily about Will Graham, a profiler who was so empathetic that he could solve murders from inside the murderer's head, that he could think the murderer's thoughts. That's a compelling character that you could explore forever, right? And then on top of that, we get Hannibal Lecter, the brilliant sadist serial killer who helps Graham catch these killers. That's a dynamic that has automatic tension to it, it's just too juicy. So juicy, that you've got two movies that try to deal with it, mostly unsuccessfully (Manhunter succeeds far more than the dull and obvious Red Dragon - I'll take Michael Mann over Brett Ratner any day of the week), and now, we have the medium necessary to explore the complete complexity of this dynamic: television.
Television allows David Slade (Hard Candy - do yourself a favor, watch) and Bryan Fuller to take their time, to let the dynamic unfold in front of us, with that delicious sense of inevitability, that wonderful suspense that Hitchcock talks about: watching the time bomb under the cafe table tick down inexorably to that final explosive moment. Hugh Dancy is great as Will Graham, who has been invited as a kind of idiot savant, who has little or no social skills, no use for social niceties, and who is clearly damaged by the use of his empathetic gifts. The show lets us into the Graham's world, to his torture, by re-enacting the crime scenes with Graham as the killer. It's highly stylized and totally immersive. But the real brilliance of the show is casting Mads Mikkelsen as Hannibal Lecter, an actor who is the polar opposite, in terms of technique, as Brian Cox and Anthony Hopkins. Mikkelsen is a master of the subtle, cold, and calculating. He is outstanding in Casino Royale, but he has some Danish language work that is also brilliant, particularly the Dogme-95-lite piece, After The Wedding. Mikkelsen is a total . . . er . . . pleasure to watch. He is understated but always masterfully present.
But great actors and good style aren't enough to make this show work, though it helps tremendously. It's going to come down to the monsters these guys are hunting down on a weekly basis. Harris may have invented the the profiler/killer rules, but modern science has come to understand something about those early profilers: they were full of crap. Most serial killers are not loner white men who have trouble keeping a job. Many of them are dedicated family men and pillars of their community (which gibes with what we know of pure evil from . . . you know where, that place and the thing . . . do I really have to go there?). The first killer in the series is a family man killing girls like his daughter because she is about to leave the nest. Immediately, we know that we aren't going to be stuck with run of the mill psychos and loners. No Jame Gumb, no John Doe, no Dahmer. We are getting a great look at a very interesting dynamic and new look at what we think of evil.
So, yeah. I'm all in on Hannibal.
Saturday, March 2, 2013
Shaking Off the Post-Oscar Blues
The Oscars are finally, mercifully, over. We can all stop thinking about 2012, the movie year that was, and get pumped about what is going to happen next, now that everyone has moved on. I don't care to predict what I will want to see in October or anything. The movie year has seasons, too, so I want share five movies that I can't wait to see in the Post-Oscar/Pre-Summer Tentpole season. Arbitrary cut-off date: May 3. Summer movie season used to start Memorial Day Weekendendend. But they are releasing Iron Man III on May 3. Clearly, the summer silly season starts then.
One caveat, I didn't want to waste anyone's time with movies that are all going to see anyway. I don't need to tell you about Oz the Great and Powerful. It's Disney, they've been pounding on your door for a while. Also, horror movie fans and Sam Raimi fans already know about Evil Dead, no one needs me for that (or for anything really, I'm just thinking about it, it's what the internet is for: shouting into the void when it all gets too pent up inside). Anyway, I'm trying to look between the arthouse and the blockbuster here. Nothing too snobbish (I am a snob so some of it is going to be, you know . . .) and nothing too obvious.
Honorable Mentions: Pain and Gain (yay, trashy Michael Bay is back!), Place Beyond the Pines (Ryan Gosling is now required viewing.), From up on Poppy Hill (Studio Ghibli is back). Admission (because Tina Fey).
5. Like Someone in Love - Abbas Kiarostami was forced on me as part of World Film History course. Anyone who has been subjected to it, or it's bastard cousin, World Theatre, knows what a grind those experiences can be. But A Taste of Cherry is truly a classic, outstanding movie by an Iranian guy, which I never would have found on my own. Kiarostami is now working outside Iran (by some miracle). His latest takes place in Japan. I've heard it's beautiful and that no summary can possibly cover how intricate the film is. I'm in. Technically, it's available on demand already. I just hope an arthouse place picks it up so I can see it in the theater.
4. 42 - I'm a sports fan, a huge one, totally head over heels in love with baseball. Jackie Robinson's story is so epic, so important to the history of sport and society, that you really have to try to screw it up. It's just drama. It doesn't always make it to the screen, but I really want this movie to do justice Jackie Robinson and to one of the best sports stories in all of sports history. And Harrison Ford is in it. Not a guarantee of success or anything, but hey, Indy gets the benefit of the doubt.
3. Stoker - The English language debut of the outrageously good Chan-wook Park, the director of the insanely awesome (and by the end of it, just literally insane) Vengeance trilogy, capped off by the brilliant Oldboy. This one looks creepy and mindblowing. I'd watch because of Park, but it has the added benefit of Nicole Kidman and Mia Wasikowska (doing what looks like a Saorise Ronan impersonation. Poor Saorise, stuck making all that money in that terrible movie, The Host. #FreeSaorise).
2. John Dies at the End - I'm cheating on the release dates here. Technically John Dies at the End is already out, but you have to make a real effort to see it, so I'm going to let it stand. Basically, the gist of it is . . . Paul Giamatti's in it. And it was directed by Bubba Ho-tep's own Don Coscarelli (alright, there is a Phantasm or two in there). While we continue the wait for Bubba Nosferatu (along with the Arrested Development movie: both are JUST around the corner).
1. Before Midnight - The last film in the Before trilogy, Richard Linklater's fascinating character studies. Giving Linklater all the credit isn't right. Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy are incredibly important co-creators in these free form real time encounters between two people who only see each other every decade or so. Before Sunset is one of my favorite films of all time. It's so incredible, what essentially one long continuous shot (though if you don't want to, you don't have to notice how brilliant it is, much like Soderbergh's camera work) and one long meandering conversation can achieve. Really desperately looking forward to this one. Also, I cheated, this one is out in late May, well into silly season. I want to see that much, I broke my own temporary arbitrary rules to include it.
One caveat, I didn't want to waste anyone's time with movies that are all going to see anyway. I don't need to tell you about Oz the Great and Powerful. It's Disney, they've been pounding on your door for a while. Also, horror movie fans and Sam Raimi fans already know about Evil Dead, no one needs me for that (or for anything really, I'm just thinking about it, it's what the internet is for: shouting into the void when it all gets too pent up inside). Anyway, I'm trying to look between the arthouse and the blockbuster here. Nothing too snobbish (I am a snob so some of it is going to be, you know . . .) and nothing too obvious.
Honorable Mentions: Pain and Gain (yay, trashy Michael Bay is back!), Place Beyond the Pines (Ryan Gosling is now required viewing.), From up on Poppy Hill (Studio Ghibli is back). Admission (because Tina Fey).
5. Like Someone in Love - Abbas Kiarostami was forced on me as part of World Film History course. Anyone who has been subjected to it, or it's bastard cousin, World Theatre, knows what a grind those experiences can be. But A Taste of Cherry is truly a classic, outstanding movie by an Iranian guy, which I never would have found on my own. Kiarostami is now working outside Iran (by some miracle). His latest takes place in Japan. I've heard it's beautiful and that no summary can possibly cover how intricate the film is. I'm in. Technically, it's available on demand already. I just hope an arthouse place picks it up so I can see it in the theater.
4. 42 - I'm a sports fan, a huge one, totally head over heels in love with baseball. Jackie Robinson's story is so epic, so important to the history of sport and society, that you really have to try to screw it up. It's just drama. It doesn't always make it to the screen, but I really want this movie to do justice Jackie Robinson and to one of the best sports stories in all of sports history. And Harrison Ford is in it. Not a guarantee of success or anything, but hey, Indy gets the benefit of the doubt.
3. Stoker - The English language debut of the outrageously good Chan-wook Park, the director of the insanely awesome (and by the end of it, just literally insane) Vengeance trilogy, capped off by the brilliant Oldboy. This one looks creepy and mindblowing. I'd watch because of Park, but it has the added benefit of Nicole Kidman and Mia Wasikowska (doing what looks like a Saorise Ronan impersonation. Poor Saorise, stuck making all that money in that terrible movie, The Host. #FreeSaorise).
2. John Dies at the End - I'm cheating on the release dates here. Technically John Dies at the End is already out, but you have to make a real effort to see it, so I'm going to let it stand. Basically, the gist of it is . . . Paul Giamatti's in it. And it was directed by Bubba Ho-tep's own Don Coscarelli (alright, there is a Phantasm or two in there). While we continue the wait for Bubba Nosferatu (along with the Arrested Development movie: both are JUST around the corner).
1. Before Midnight - The last film in the Before trilogy, Richard Linklater's fascinating character studies. Giving Linklater all the credit isn't right. Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy are incredibly important co-creators in these free form real time encounters between two people who only see each other every decade or so. Before Sunset is one of my favorite films of all time. It's so incredible, what essentially one long continuous shot (though if you don't want to, you don't have to notice how brilliant it is, much like Soderbergh's camera work) and one long meandering conversation can achieve. Really desperately looking forward to this one. Also, I cheated, this one is out in late May, well into silly season. I want to see that much, I broke my own temporary arbitrary rules to include it.
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