Humongous: a Theory

Wouldn't it be cool if Fifi, Max's boss in Mad Max, turned out to be be the guy who would later call himself Humongous?

Think about it: they're both big, muscular, bald guys with raspy voices and a taste for leather who're used to giving orders.

It makes a lot of sense. After Goose's demise, and watching Max go off the deep end, Fifi might well have been feeling the strain. When civilization collapses and the gangs rule the roads, he decides if you can't beat 'em, join 'em, so he takes a page from Toecutter's play book and starts a gang of his own.

Remember how a couple of the gang members in Road Warrior drove cop cars and/or dressed like cops? I always figured it was happenstance, but who knows...?

Of course, there's no indication whatsoever that this is true. It's not like Humongous does a spit-take when he first sees Max. And they were played by two different actors: Roger Ward played Fifi Macaffee, and Kjell Nilsson played Lord Humongous, Ruler of the Wasteland, the Ayatollah of Rock'n'Rolla.

But it's not like the same character can't be played by different people, a la James Bond or Jason Vorhees.

And Max and Humongous never quite see each other, do they? While Humongous is menacing the tribe, Max is handcuffed and out of sight. Wez gets a good look at Max, he doesn't offer Humongous a detailed description. Later, when Max is driving the truck and Humongous shoots at him - think about it, the truck's far away, there's broken glass obscuring the cab, etc. And in act three, Humongous hangs back and lets his gang do most of the fighting. When the truck slams into Humongous's vehicle, it's from the back.

Speaking of that cool gun Humongous has... isn't that exactly the kind of thing you'd expect Fifi to have lying around that shitty little apartment of his? And it comes in a nice wooden box. Couldn't you see it as a gift for meritorious service?

Man, that would be so awesome if Humongous was Fifi.

Happy Halloween!

Samuel L. Jackson to Play the SHOGUN OF HARLEM!

Dude, read this article.

All I gotta say is... you can stick Citizen Kane up your ass, The Last Dragon is one of the best movies ever made by anybody, ever.

Done Part Two

I finished the screenplay adaptation of FRANKENSTEIN'S MONSTER.

It was harder than I thought it would be, and took a bit longer, and the first draft is this big, unwieldy animal. But it's done - always the first step - and now I have a draft I can hack at until it's semi-readable.

Writing an adaptation is its own sub-skill of screenwriting. I've only done one before... back in film school, I wrote an adaptation of THE MASTER AND MARGARITA as an exercise. I found it was mostly about cutting and cutting and cutting, stripping the words down to the core A-story, then building back up from there so the A-story is told well in a cinematic fashion.

I got cocky 'cause FRANK is an adaptation of a novel I wrote. But a novel is a novel, and a script is a script... the job is still the same. You get a lot of luxuries in terms of keeping characters and subplots if the underlying property is massive. For instance, every little character and bit of business from the Harry Potter series makes its way on screen. And if the book's too long, they just make two movies to fit it all. If you're not J.K. Rowling, however, some shit's gotta go out the window.

Meanwhile, I'm working on the fourth draft of the treatment for DEAD RIGHT THERE, which'll be the next script. Every incarnation of the treatment takes us one step closer, until it finally becomes the story we'd like to see play out on the screen. But I always find new stuff when I go to script - either new little problems I missed in the treatment stage, or just little "wouldn't this be kinda cool?" moments. You don't shut off your brain when you're writing, no matter what it is.

I ordinarily write a lot, but 2008's been a fuckin' year, man... I wrote DEMON and THE CASTLE -- both scripts -- then FRANKENSTEIN'S MONSTER the novel, just finished FRANK the script, and I'm hoping to have a first draft of DRT done by the first.

What can I say? I'm hungry as fuck. And I'm gonna keep writing and producing until some of this shit gets on the screens.

A Bird-Eating Spider

Dear God.

Back when I worked at Noah's Ark, we sometimes got a Peruvian Bird-Eating Spider. They looked like black tarantulas the size of a catcher's mitt.

This is way creepier, 'cause it looks like a huge, mutated version of a normal orb spider you might find in any garden.

Thanks to Jane Tara for sending me this.

I consider it just one more piece of evidence that Australia is a bizarre place just a step or two shy of Skull Island.

My only hope is the person who took this picture promptly put down the camera and got a flame-thrower.

More Ratner and Conan

According to this article on aintitcool, the rumors about Brett Ratner directing the new Conan movie are true.

A Picture Says a Thousand Words

A Spider in My Coffee

I have a Mets coffee cup. I'm not a particular fan of the Mets -- or of baseball, for that matter -- but it's a gift from a client (thanks Alan!), and I am a fan of gifts and clients.

While drinking from said coffee cup this morning, I noticed an odd smudge on the inside rim. Thinking at first it was just a patch of errant grounds, I stuck my finger in to get rid of it.

And stopped.

The smudge was a dead spider.

To make matters worse, it was on a part of the cup that was in a direct trajectory towards the part from which I was drinking. Which means that I spent who-knows-how-long within a millimeter of having a spider in my mouth.

The little fucker drowned in hot coffee, a painful way to go. Good. Though the coffee I was drinking passed across its dead, horrid body on its way into mine.

One might expect some jumping up and screaming on my part; or, at least, some shivers of deep, existential dread. But I just kinda washed it out and poured more coffee. Because this bizarre event was so huge, so horrible, my brain went all the way around the moon and came back again to calm acceptance that we live in a fucked-up world where spiders like to hide in coffee cups while people (in this case - ME) are just trying to get some work done. It was exactly what I might imagine it would be like to come home, get undressed and find a bullet hole in your hat... a close call moment to which you can only react with a curious, "How'd that get there?"

It wasn't a big spider. It was a yellow garden spider, the kind that, back in Chicago, we used to call banana spiders. (Real "banana spiders" are tarantulas). I'm sure there's a long Latin designation for this common species, but I don't give a shit. It's dead. How -- or why -- it got in there, only the spider gods shall know.

Hopefully this burns off my shitty karma for the day. Maybe the whole week. And I will say that, looking at the bright side, I got off a lot fucking luckier than I could've... There is an alternate universe version of this morning's events that involve me finding a live spider in my mouth while holding a steaming cup of coffee in hand, and the scene that would have unfolded from there.

Between shit like this, and getting attacked by birds of prey (which, thankfully, hasn't happened in a while), I think it's safe to say that the animal kingdom enjoys fucking with me. One of several reasons I stopped being a vegetarian.

Hardly Any Sleep

Someone in my building decided to blast their TV until four in the morning.

And I mean blast -- full volume, all bars on the screen.

Everyone in my building went berserk. The situation escalated from "Could you please turn down your TV?" to "Turn off your TV!" to "SHUT THE FUCK UP, ASSHOLE!!!" Someone ran outside and banged on the guy's window. But whoever it was either chose to ignore the violence, or had cranked up the tube and passed out.

Then someone's car alarm went off at seven this morning. It was one of those fun situations in which everyone thinks it's someone else's car going insane, so it takes a long time for the right person to a) realize it's their car, b) get their ass outta bed and shut it off.

So today's coffee day.

I Have a Demon in My Office

Or, to be accurate, a picture of a demon.

We got a promo poster from the German release of Demon Keeper. It's fucking huge over there. They retitled the novel to Daemliche Damonen, which apparently translates to "Stupid Demons." It has a new character on the cover. Rock 'n' roll.

On the movie side, we're looking at directors.

Robocop's Sweet Ride

Check this out.

I would've preferred a dragon or something, but whatever...

Robocop is like chocolate or explosions. Add him to almost anything, and it becomes that much more awesome.

Frankenscript and BLOW-UP

It hit page 35 last night in the screenplay adaptation of the novel.

Along the way, I'm finding cool bits of business, better and more visual ways to pull off some of the scenes. Which makes me think I should've done a rewrite of the script before I worked on the novel. But, then again, in that case, when I got around to the novel, I'd be fleshing out a bare-bones story, instead of finding new paths through a novel's worth of character and plot.

As I'm working on the script, I'm writing notes to myself on the novel. I'm gonna stick 'em in my back pocket for now, depending on the notes I get from the agent.

Last night, I watched BLOW-UP. Yeah, yeah, I know... I went to film school, how could I have never seen this famous classic, blah blah... By watching so many horror and martial arts movies, I have some weird holes in my film-watchin'. Thanks to the magic of Netflix, I'm plugging these holes, one-by-one.

I fuckin' loved it. What a great movie. It's like a French New Wave movie directed by an Italian neo-realist and set in '60s London. Very arty and stylistic without being show-offy in a way that you don't really see in movies anymore, and sexy as h-e-l-l, man. It's funny, because I could clearly see this movie's DNA was one of the several donors that created Austin Powers. There are looooong sequences without dialogue, in which the hero starts to solve a mystery by blowing up pictures he took in a park. The way Antonioni strings the photos together to create the scene is nothing short of masterful.

I dig that we never get into the hero's head... like everyone else in his life, we can only make guesses about this guy by what he says and does. There's no Hollywood bullshit like him sitting on the edge of his bed and staring at a photo of his dead wife with a tear running down his face or anything. He's just the grooviest cat in swingin' London, but he's not a shallow idiot, either. The movie unfolds as if we're seeing it through this guy's lens.

Watching this flick, I felt the same way as when I finally watched BREATHLESS and read some Bukowski... like, why the fuck did I wait so long? Was it really necessary for me to watch HALLOWEEN IV a full decade before I got around to BLOW-UP? Why've I spent so long with this weird reticense over certain movies, writers, whatever?

But... what the hell, I can't beat myself up over it, I fuckin' watched the thing. Though now I'm plagued my the thought of: what other brilliant, awesome movies have I skipped over the years while watching teenaged girls get their heads chopped off, instead?

I'm gonna have to check in with Uncle Ebert...

Got $15,000?

Then you can blow up a house in Louisiana.

I've been doing some legwork on an action-thriller we're planning on shooting in Louisiana. One of the scenes calls for blowing up a suburban house. But how much will that cost?

About fifteen grand, is what I'm hearing.

But most of that cost comes from the location. If we wanted to blow up a house that's away from everything, like in the swamp, it'd only cost about three grand.

Lemme tell ya something... there'll come a day when I have serious, ridiculous, Gomez Addams-level cash. And, when that day comes, I'm gonna be blowing up houses in Louisiana and filming it... just for fun.

Frankenstein's Monster: The Script

Last night, I started working on the script adaptation of my novel FRANKENSTEIN'S MONSTER.

I've lately spent so much time in novel-writing mode that getting back into screenwriting was a bit of a gear shift. I never thought I'd come to a moment when writing a script felt kinda weird, but there ya go. I got over it pretty quickly... I have a lotta screenwriting muscle memory built up by now.

It's doubly odd because the novel is a very loose adaptation of a script I wrote back in film school, so the basic idea/story has gone from a script to a novel and now back to a script again. I can definitely say it's improved along the way... the original was a big pile of jumbled craziness. Back in film school, I thought I was audacious. Now I realize I was just being a goof. But there are a couple of scenes that are almost completely unchanged - the inciting of Adam showing up at the yard sale, for instance, and Thunderfoot and his ninja attack.

The script should take me about a week if I don't fuck around.

Meanwhile, I'm working up treatments for the next thing. For a while, I thought it was gonna be DEAD RIGHT THERE. But the reps are looking for an action-comedy, and there's not much room for laffs in DRT, which is a straight-up action-thriller in the RUN mold.

I've got a couple of ideas. Just a matter of fleshing 'em out...

DRACULA: THE UN-DEAD in Publishers Weekly

They announced it! Here's the article.

Done.

I just turned in the edited first draft of FRANKENSTEIN'S MONSTER to the reps.

Hooray for me. Let the drinking begin.