February 2009: Other Stories
For the last few weeks of the year, I’m going through stories I saved, but never posted. Today stories from February 2009:
* The LA Times with a fun piece: “Movie catchphrase 101 including the derivation of lines like “He’s just not that into you,” “Here’s Johnny!”, “You can’t handle the truth,” and “Show me the money.”
* In February, I ran across a documentary in the making “The People vs. George Lucas”:
Why have so many Star Wars fans turned against him [Lucas] to decry the release of the Special Editions and the Prequel Trilogy? Why is George Lucas the constant target of bloggers, critics, and self-proclaimed devotees?
THE PEOPLE VS. GEORGE LUCAS aims to answer these questions, and to partially deconstruct the cultural legacy of a man whose life, feelings, and creative impulses remain largely shrouded in mystery.
Here’s the movie’s trailer:
* Around Valentine’s Day, I naturally visited one of my favorite screenwriting and movie blogs Living the Romantic Comedy. And there I found a great post by Billy Mernit re one of my favorite comedies Groundhog Day including this great anecdote:
Danny Rubin recounts the following in his illuminating interview accompanying an early draft of the screenplay in Scenario (Spring ’95 issue, regrettably out of print). He talks of having been hired, fired and re-hired to work on the script, and when he, his wife Louise and kids were preparing to move from Los Angeles to New Mexico, getting a call from Bill Murray:
He says, “Do you realize that the day after tomorrow is Groundhog Day?” — “Yep.” — “And do you realize that between the director, the producer, the star and the writer of this film, nobody has been to the festival at Punxsutawney? Doesn’t that seem wrong to you?” And I said, “Absolutely. And I think you should go, I think that will be a great thing.” And he said, “I think we should go.” And I said, “Bill, that’s a really nice offer, sounds like fun, but I’m moving, I’m moving my family, we’re up to our necks in boxes, I can’t just abandon them and go off to Punxsutawney.” And he said, “Well, think about it and call me back. Here’s my number.” When I got off the phone, Louise asked who it was. “Bill Murray,” I said. “He wants me to go to Punxsutawney tomorrow.” And she said, “Cool.” And I said I’d told him I couldn’t do it. She said, “Are you nuts?” So I talked to [the studio] and they said, “We’ll pay for the move, we’ll get someone to help pack, we’ll fly out a friend of your wife’s to help her move in so you don’t have to be there.”
This level of support was very nice, and I embarked on the most surreal adventure of my professional life. All of a sudden I’m flying in a private plane from the middle of nowhere to the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night with Bill Murray and we’re talking about the script. We landed somewhere near Punxsutawney at 2:00 in the morning. And there were fans out there waiting for him — it was supposed to be a secret…
Rubin goes on to say that he used a lot of what he saw on that trip in the script.
I meant to post a link to Billy’s blog — but I didn’t. Now I make up for it.
* Finally I found this poem by John Updike called “Tossing and Turning:
Tossing and Turning
The spirit has infinite facets, but the body
confiningly few sides.
There is the left,
the right, the back, the belly, and tempting
in-betweens, northeasts and northwests,
that tip the heart and soon pinch circulation
in one or another arm.
Yet we turn each time
with fresh hope, believing that sleep
will visit us here, descending like an angel
down the angle our flesh’s sextant sets,
tilted toward that unreachable star
hung in the night between our eyebrows, whence
dreams and good luck flow.
Uncross
your ankles. Unclench your philosophy.
This bed was invented by others; know we go
to sleep less to rest than to participate
in the twists of another world.
This churning is our journey.
It ends,
can only end, around a corner
we do not know
we are turning.
Tomorrow more gems from the past year as we visit some stories I found in March 2009.