Thursday, May 2, 2013

"I'm rewriting the necktie scene without the necktie"

I love movies, just not always the movies people love.  I love to find a movie I can consume, learn the lines, spot the foley errors, memorize props & just generally work my way into the quirks.  One of those movies is not Tootsie.  Oh I like Tootsie, but the only part of it I ever internalized was Bill Murray's line:  I'm gonna rewrite the necktie scene without the necktie.  This has become one of my mantras (you can have more than one, right).  Also it works right into my firmly held belief that the most important thing about, well, anything, should be eliminated, even temporarily, so we can all get a good look at the infrastructure.

Does this sound too.....esoteric?  It doesn't have to be, the thing not there is the basis of lot of humor.  I give you Wile E. Coyote running off the edge of a cliff, still running, the realization there is no infrastructure & then the fall. See how that works?

My favorite absence is having a birthday today (yes, voids have birthdays - why not).  Let me set the scene.  We have a bestseller beach read, summer slasher fare being made into a movie & a young director who has shown so much promise there is almost no way he can live up to the hype.

It is an ensemble cast; let's meet them: the main character was played by an actor who was not the director's choice but wanted the part & at least he wasn't Charlton Heston who also wanted the role & was being forwarded by the producers from Universal Pictures, the other two "leads" were not cast less than two weeks before shooting was scheduled & then finally young actor who turned the role down over & over & over again until his last movie looked like it would crash & burn & now he is just grateful for the job & lastly a Bond villain, who had turned in one of the most impressive roles of any career as a different kind of villain & was now supposed to be the good guy.  Most of the other roles were filled by locals as the whole thing was on location in a not exactly remote but not exactly accessible location, with two infamous exceptions.  Except for the primary female roles which were being played by a stuntwoman who was willing to work in the nude & the wife of the president of Universal Pictures, the studio producing the movie.

So here we are May 2, 1974, in the middle of not-nowhere but not-easy-to-get-to either.  & they put the clockwork shark in the water & he sank like a stone.  & then a fin got bent & it only swam in circles.  Not one of the three models ever worked as planned.  No one knew they would never work of course, so everyday everyone implied a shark thinking it would be added later.  Making the absence of a shark one of the highlights in a movie about a shark.  Happy Birthday, Jaws

& lastly lets make that the word for the day:  esoteric.  Use it in a sentence & BE esoteric.

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