Chicks Pick Pix in Nabes and Sticks

Parody of an old Variety headline* which I'll translate for you. Girls choose which movie to see on a date night in neighborhood theaters and small towns. Past tense, of course. All 8,000 screens in America are dark. Film production has ceased, no new product. The world's longest running animation series, in Japan, has gone off the air. Australia's "Neighbours" soap opera, in production 40 years until the corona virus shutdown, might restart with social distancing (no hugging and kissing? everybody in masks?)

Chicks pick pix at home, too. Mom decides which programs the kids are allowed to watch on Netflix or Hulu or Disney. Husbands and boyfriends don't get a vote, unless pro sports are reinvented without cheering fans in the stadium. Current proposals are to use canned music, last year's crowd sound, and pre-recorded cheerleaders shaking their pom-poms for college teams, if colleges decide to reopen with social distancing in classrooms, dining halls, and locker rooms. Coaches are scratching their collective heads how to socially distance contact sports, unless they get a safe, effective CDC approved covid-19 vaccine.

Ahem. After 40 years of research, there's no HIV vaccine, and flu shots are only 40% effective. Let's talk about something else. "Chicks pick pix in nabes and sticks," Adele counsels in the final pages of Chiseltown, warning the film's director that some audience response cards at a Fresno preview screening complained that the star (his ex-wife) was too sexy. Typical Wolf, can't write a novel without erotic excess. The director's home life is decidedly nuts, married to identical twin starlets half his age. I hope you realize that Hollywood is like that and always was. Tinsel Town tolerates unconventional bedfellows and indulges a strange argot.

(* the real Variety headline said: Chick Flix Click In Nabes and Sticks, reporting success of romantic comedies at single screen venues)

Great fun to write Chiseltown, the story of a movie, from first phone call to last. If you're in show business, it might be slightly annoying, 128 pages of satire, screwballs, and skillfulness that results in a low-budget feature film that actually sounds pretty good. I wrote it with love for ordinary boys and girls who devote their lives to filmmaking, always a dice roll, always a team effort, long days and nights with grim obstacles to overcome by creative people who risk their reputations, bonded by the magic of comedy and drama and comradeship.

Four Best Books by Wolf DeVoon

These four books are certainly representative, three novels and a volume of short stories, written during the past few years. There are many more that I care about, but these four in particular were mature and deliberate, as if each might be the last.

Chiseltown is my most recent, the story of a fictional filmmaker and a feature film. There's quite a lot of humor, some mildly adult intimacy, and an accessible narrative of how a "low budget" movie is created and completed, almost always a question of Who Knows Who.

Charity was part of a series (The Case Files of Cable & Blount) told in first person, a parable of privilege, discovery, black ops, and a cryptocurrency caper that destabilizes global banking. I like it because it deals with an important truth, that love is unchosen destiny.

Partners is set in 1975, an icy Wisconsin winter, an intimate struggle of triangles and tragedy. Men are killed. The stakes are as high as humanly imaginable in a war of innocent romance and steely determination.

Four Strange Stories is a collection of dreams, truths, seduction, and a complex portrait of a free society in the future, the widest possible mirror of what I think and feel as a man.

It cost quite a lot to create those works, plus twenty other self-published books, a half dozen screenplays, and thirty or forty miles of film and video. I started as a teenage filmmaker, learned to write along the way. My first job in Hollywood was an original screenplay. The last one was a cubicle at Disney, spending six figures of Mickey's money. I felt it was time to quit the "fillum" business. There are a couple recent video lectures, if you care to see what I look and sound like at age 69.

It stuns me when I apprehend that there's another story to tell, doubting my ability to write another full length novel -- however I am certain of this much: I cannot disown my literary legacy, nor the ideas that I endeavored to communicate, right wrong or purple. Like Popeye the Sailor, I am what I am and that's all what I am.

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Just so you know

'Chiseltown' is completed. It is an intensely personal story, although it has nothing to do with me personally, as odd as that may sound. It's about a fictional filmmaker and a movie, from the first phone call to the last. That's how movies are made. I suppose it's not so different in other walks of life. Somebody calls, you do something, there's another phone call to find out if they liked whatever it was that you did. A producer calls, a movie is made, and then there's another phone call from a preview screening to report average Jane and John Doe audience response, in Fresno traditionally. Audience cards don't matter. What matters is whether the movie made them laugh and gasp and cry real tears, because movies should do that.

Along the way, 'Chiseltown' presents a detailed, accessible education in filmmaking, how a script is written and funded and translated into actors and location shoots and sound stages with forced perspective to create a convincing night exterior scene, or an apartment, or a repair shop. Bruno Heckmeier is making a low-budget movie. There are severe obstacles to overcome. He has an unusual home life. There's an enormous amount of comedy for light entertainment purposes. Some of the story is serious literature. Some is slightly adult.

I found that I cared very deeply about the 7 or 8 principal players in this story. There are many more bit players, and if it seems unusual to have so many characters, please consider that the movie Bruno makes involves a production company of fifty skilled professionals, stunt men, two very capable stars, and an unusual supporting cast. It's a very short schedule, six weeks to organize it, six weeks to shoot everything, and six weeks of post production. Trust me, that's working at lightning speed.

It's a personal story in two respects. I had to write the movie for Bruno to make. And I had to live in Bruno's shoes (and those of all the other characters) with honesty, humor, drama, and a deep understanding of the men and women who call themselves "show people," no matter what their specialty or contribution to a motion picture is. Camera grip, driver, bookkeeper, electrician, set decorator, or seamstress -- they are people who sacrifice much to work a few weeks on a movie, a collaborative art that cannot be created without them. I've done many "below the line" production jobs for an hourly wage, in addition to "above the line" writing, producing, and directing.  You have to take my word for it. Directing is a high privilege.

It's done by lots of different men and women. 'Chiseltown' is directed by a talented, goofy, warmhearted, intelligent middle aged guy who got stuck on Poverty Row doing low-budget movies, while others did studio pictures with an average budget of $75 million. Bruno has to conceive and execute a feature film on 1/5 as much money, and he wants it to succeed, not only at the box office, but critically as well. Being an "indie" confers a great deal of freedom. No studio moguls, Teamsters, or IATSE work rules. The whole of Los Angeles as a locale, in a "period" setting that's fun to shoot.

I always experience emotional awe when I've finished a story. 'Chiseltown' is in a class of its own, among all the stories I've written, among all the fictional characters that I loved and still love, of course. The story of making a movie is a personal confession of my lifelong passion.  'Chiseltown' is a movie I didn't get to make, and it's deeply gratifying to have directed its fictional creation. Many of the characters are based on people who I knew and worked with and loved.

Please buy a copy (less than $5 at Lulu) and review it. Thanks.

http://www.lulu.com/shop/wolf-devoon/chiseltown/paperback/product-24225665.html

Brother can you spare a half a million?

Okay, I'm old, in poor health, probably uninsurable. So was John Huston when he made The African Queen. Directors are cocooned and pampered by producers, assistant directors, unit managers, drivers, script girl, and a personal assistant. There's always food and coffee on the set, always a place to lay down and rest between set-ups. I know the material inside out. I don't need big stars or special effects. We'll shoot in Vancouver or Colorado or Texas to pinch pennies and put more money on the screen, earn a fat tax incentive by hiring local people. It's not rocket science. Gritty action and boy meets girl is the easiest genre to shoot, also the easiest product to sell internationally. There's money in the budget to debut at a festival and screen 35mm prints in L.A., London, and New York, to hook a distributor. I'm perfectly at ease with actors and crews, editing, rerecording, scoring, color timing, and final mix. Screenplay was copyright protected at the Library of Congress, and I'll throw in four novels with the same characters for a sequel or television series. Nice franchise, a modern Nick and Nora Charles.