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...