and who the Hell do you think you are?...

A dear, long lost friend of mine who I've only been able to renew contact with thanks to the Internet, had a look at my Blog and asked me if I was still an aspiring film director. Truthfully I'm too cynical now to aspire to much of anything...I did tell him that if pushed I might consider myself an aspiring screenwriter.

What I am, at present, as I told him; is an electronics assembler and tester. I work for a firm which is a leading manufacturer of head-end equipment for wireless; cable television, Internet, VoD & VoIP...at least I think that's what we do.

Countless years ago I dreamed of a career in film, but even at the outset I was more interested in Art Direction and Cinematography and had hopes of breaking into the biz from one of those angles.

After veering off of my carefully chosen path into the cul-de-sac of animation with its inherent reductionist mode of film making I soon discovered that if a picture is worth a thousand words I'd rather write the thousand words than draw one more @*#&ing! picture...

However, it was many more years 'til I finally started to write my still unfinished script...if anything I've said or will say comes across as arrogant...Please accept my apologies in advance...any writers' presumption that they have something to say worth listening to requires a certain degree of over-confidence to begin with...I'm starting to think that all creative endeavours are a thankless task to the creator...it's no big news that lots of writers hate to write, painters hate to paint etc., but still, they just have to do it...

my incredentials...

The following is from a letter which I sent to the Director's Guild of Canada a couple of years ago when it looked as though;
a.) I might be able to join in some very minor capacity without jumping through hoops and signing away the souls of my loved ones to Beelzebub;
b.) it might actually be worthwhile for reasons which I've long since forgotten...

...it has occurred to me that part of this also comprises the "back story" to Manila Envelope.

Thank You for your call re my query regarding membership. Thank You also for your candidness and encouragement. The following letter was written from; what I hope you’ll appreciate is a somewhat jaded perspective and before I contacted your office. I include it here only because it is the most up to date summation of my on again off again career...so be warned...

To whom it may concern,

I am writing to ask you most sincerely if there would be any point in my seeking to apply as an associate member of the guild; or, if I even qualify.

In 1977-78 I attended the London International Film School in the U.K., and subsequently returned to Vancouver where I hoped I might break into the local film biz. Being neither pushy, nor well connected, I quickly discovered that the union was virtually impenetrable. I was even advised by the film liaison officer for the B.C. government, that I could, in a desperate pinch, try to get in by joining a “farmers” local, i.e., somewhere out on the prairies.

I did luck out however, when I met an American art director, who was working on a Paramount Pictures project entitled “All Washed Up”...later released as “Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains”. This gentleman aware of my need to accrue some recognized work experience, took me on as his assistant.
I should point out that this was frowned upon by a local union man, who coincidentally was foisting a rather attractive young lady on the art department at the same time!
This was all so long ago that I suspect the parties concerned are long since retired from extensive and rewarding careers in the industry, the likes of which I, myself, can only dream of!

I've never seen Ladies and Gentlemen the Fabulous Stains; it is now a Cult film...LANGUAGE WARNING



I do have fond memories of going to a wrap party at a chic Vancouver restaurant with a beautiful actress friend. John Lydon also starred in the film and was there; he was very pleasant, not rotten at all...

I had, during this period applied to whatever, I.A. locals would respond to my requests for applications. In 1980, while still living in Vancouver, I was accepted into the Toronto Camera Local as a second assistant cameraman. Obviously I was thrilled...I packed up, and headed to Toronto. I arrived to discover that I and a host of other hopefuls had been duped. (Including an Argentinean guy I’d gone to Film School with in England!)
The local was in desperate need of funds (our dues) as they were engaged in a legal wrangle. At that time, the Toronto camera local was part of New York...Wow!, technically I belonged to the New York local...and, look Ma, no Green Card!
The Toronto people, quite rightly, wanted a separate charter; hence the sudden intake of members and their hard, cold cash; ($1800 in my case, borrowed from my Mom, on top of all my moving expenses etc.).



You can't get job without a ticket...and you can't get a ticket without a job...and you can't get a job without a Green Card...not so much a note of bitterness; rather a symphony of resentment and contempt! (and yes; that's my real name...or is it?)

After a year of working in a picture framing shop...how apropos...and one day of work shooting camera tests in a dusty corner at Magdar studios with a surly camera operator (who shall remain nameless), I returned to Hooterville, en route to Australia.

Foolishly, I made one last attempt at getting work here before heading to the Antipodes. I answered a small and cryptic ad in the local paper. I correctly deduced that the mystery project was SCTV Network 90, which had just moved to ITV Edmonton. I sat up all night reworking the best pieces from my portfolio and doing some new artwork which I couriered the next day.
I was hired as assistant Art Director.

The first set I designed for SCTV, for Bobby Bitman's Julius Ceaser...



I also designed the soviet mini-cam which appears later in this episode; but it was prop master extraordinaire Bruce McKenna who breathed life into it..Bruce has incidentally gone on to write and direct...his first feature was a charming family film called Saltwater Moose, filmed in his native Nova Scotia and starring Timothy Dalton.

When the two and a half months of work came to an end on SCTV, I was back at square one...The show became a big hit in the States and, of course, had to be relocated back to T.O. I had been offered the chance to go to Toronto, but declined...gee, can’t think why?

During the delay in my departure, my Australian Visa had lapsed and the reissue now had severe restrictions regarding work and length of stay.

I did, however go to Australia; tried to get work in stage, film or television, but ended up working for Hanna Barbera Animation...all within two weeks of my arrival.
It was still my intent to find work in live action, though I was now simply grateful to be working at all. My first priority became staying put in Australia. After a year at Hanna Barbera I was offered a better job at another studio.
Animation layouts, had rather more in common with art direction so I leapt at the chance. I was also fortunate enough to have been allowed two weeks away from that job to do some story-boarding assisting on Mad Max III: Beyond Thunderdome.


with Bill Hanna and the gang; Sydney 1981
(captions to follow)

I fought tooth and nail to stay in Australia, applying for extensions, then appeals with the Immigration Department. After three and a half years my luck ran out. Knowing of my dread at returning to Canada, my employers offered me a job at their newly established studio in the Philippines...a stop gap measure...'til my residency in Oz was resolved one way or another.

While working in the Philippines I gained considerable and varied work experience, not the least of which was trying to finish a show for a client in the States while the U.S. puppet regime of Ferdinand Marcos was being overthrown in a revolution....Difficult to get those animators to fill their quotas when they’re out being tear gassed and lying down in front of tanks...

Returning to Canada in June ’86, I was able to quickly (two years later) parlay all of this accumulated know-how, into a grudging offer of some inbetweening work on the Care Bears Movie...at Nelvana back in beautiful T’rona the Good...to them I was still just some hick from the Snowy Boondocks...

One blisteringly cold afternoon...in Ottawa this time...where I was beavering away on the Raccoons...if that makes any sense...I happened upon the British Consulate. With less than nothing to lose I furtively enquired as to whether or not I could get a work visa. I was assured that I qualified for a Grandparent Entry Certificate and could stay and work indefinitely.

Less then a month later I was once again walking along High Street Kensington in the rain...and not looking back.

Australia scenario redux!; within two weeks in London, I was fortunate, or unfortunate enough, to find work...this time on Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

Like it or not...and I didn’t; I would remain stuck in animation for years to come.

My animation career in the U.K. was book-ended rather nicely by Roger Rabbit at one end and Space Jam at the other. The former was entirely composited using old school methods; hand painted mattes, multiple passes through an optical printer etc. All the drawings in Space Jam were scanned without a cel (or a rostrum camera) in sight, computer composited then scanned onto film.
By 1998, the London animation scene was in tumult; Warner’s had shut down rather suddenly the year before. Numerous “classical” animation projects were on hold, as CGI was taking over. I hadn’t the resources, or the opportunity, to learn computer animation.
Work was scarce, and thus I resolved to make a major career change.
I took a course in fibre optic splicing and testing, but was unable to find work in telecoms until early 2000. When even this work started to dry up in 2001, my situation became untenable.

It was with great reluctance that I returned to Hooterville in late 2001; now with a wife and son; to even less opportunity than my justly cynical self could have imagined.

To summarize, quite simply, I can not offer a great deal of bona fide local experience, nor can I offer much that is relevant and current...a bit of story-boarding on “Body and Soul”. I have neither the time nor the inclination to work my way up through the ranks as an I.A. umpteenth assistant craft service guy to become a clapper loader by the time I’m 75.

I have written a screenplay and am a card carrying member of the Australian Writer’s Guild. (at least they let me join!)
I would very much like to get my project off the ground as a co-production, and am working towards those ends at present.

If nothing else, I have had a great deal of experience working with some amazingly talented people, from all over the world. I am not stupid (I'm sure that this letter has opened up that debate).
Despite what you might think from the tone of this letter, I don’t have an “attitude”...other than a dislike of needless bureaucracy. I have nothing to lose.

Bloomsday

Must note here, if only for the sake of doing so, that today is June 16th...yesterday I bought the DVD of Before Sunrise to complete my set...I bought the sequel (Before Sunset) a few days earlier...I watched them both last night...got a kick out of the fact that the day the first film takes place is June 16th!

I first saw Before Sunrise on television when we where still living in London...caught it by chance very near the beginning...the couple arguing on the train...I was instantly hooked!...what a gem!

Manila Envelope AKA Mr. Greens' Manila Envelope...My Unmade Movie

What this Blog was supposed to be about...

back in 2004 I finally knuckled down and hammered out a screenplay...which although more nearly complete than most of my other creative undertakings is still a work in progress...this Blog was meant to be a showcase for the script, my designs and other ideas relating to the film. Lest you think I have a problem staying on topic let me assure you that it is my intention to post the script on it's own separate Blog(s)...but here's a short treatment...

Manila Envelope

After three and a half years in Australia, Canadian animator Christopher Green’s immigration difficulties have become insurmountable. His employers; Tinsel Toons Australia Pty Ltd., offer a solution. Christopher is dispatched to the company’s newly formed Manila studio, to head up the layout department.
It’s the autumn of 1985, and Sydney has been subcontracted by NooTrak Cartoons (U.S.A.) to produce the first season of “HoTW: Heroes of the World”, at its Philippine studio.
Chris takes a quick trip back to Canada, before flying to Manila via L.A., for a meeting and to collect some material from the client.
A junior secretary in Sydney, has erringly booked Christopher a ticket in Philippine Airline’s exquisitely luxurous “Mabuhay” class. Off to such an auspicious start Christopher arrives in Manila, with a feeling of relief and disappointment, to find that he’s already been demoted to assistant dept. head. Former colleague Antonio Charot is an incredibly talented artist; kind, worldly, but surprisingly, quite hopeless in his capacity as Chris’s new boss.
The next ten months will prove to be something of a trial by fire. Christopher will struggle with office politics; a language barrier, falling in love, and actually having it reciprocated.
His best friend, Rob, will have a serious mental break down, for which he’ll be hospitalized and returned to Australia.
All of this is the least of it however, when set against the last days of the Marcos regime, and the original People Power Revolution, which set off a swathe of movements around the globe that would change the rest of the world forever. Christopher will also finally finish scene 101.

a few disparate thoughts...

In hind sight I don’t think I’ve ever given up on anything so much as merely lost interest. There’s a fine line between the required amount of saintly patience and futile pursuit of anything particularly difficult, and sadly the location of that line often doesn’t become known until well after the fact; if ever.
Failure then; is a matter of perspective. If a machine part breaks with catastrophic results it could still be the case that it has already performed well beyond its original design spec. The point is; that a life lived on the brink can’t be judged by such limited standards.

Fish out of water...everything that crawls, walks, runs and flies owes something to that first audacious, Cambrian Era beach bum!

It’s not love that makes the world go ‘round; it’s a gravitational distortion of space time that makes the world go round---and be round for that matter!

Tangequels

(Tangential Sequels)
You film buffs will know that Hitch was fond of employing a device of his own invention which he called the "McGuffin". I was never a big Hitchcock fan, so I'm sure that there are better examples, but the one that comes to my mind was in one of his later flicks...maybe Family Plot...I'm not sure (this post is actually starting to sound McGuffinesque); to wit; We open on a street scene; the camera follows a man walking a dog...(Hitch himself if I recall in one of his walk-ons)...we've established that he's a character of interest...or is he?...No!, it's the guy that just fell to his death from the balcony in the BG...the man walking the dog was the McGuffin...a Red Herring by any other name...which brings me to the somewhat similar concept of Tangential Sequels...call them Tangequels (but remember I coined the term here first!)...a Tangequel takes a character, script reference (preferably, but not necessarily obscure), or related set of circumstances and goes off on a whole other tangent.

One possible Tangequel would be a Klingon adaptation from Shakespeare alluded to in Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country...a text for a Klingon Hamlet exists, published as part of the Shakespeare Restoration Project, undertaken by a dedicated group of scholarly Trek and linguistics fans...

When I first saw Disney's Holes I thought that a Western based on the tale of the outlaw Kissin' Kate Barlow would have made a great Tangequel...and vehicle for the oh so very lovely Patricia Arquette...

Remember all those humans who stepped off the Mothership in Close Encounters?...we see most of them in silhouette...no certainty as to how they're attired...what if one of them had been whisked away from Renaissance Europe and returned to modern Wyoming?...that'd be some debriefing and reaclimatisation...where and how and how long did they live on another planet?...living amongst strange creatures with a technology akin to sorcery...then returned to Earth to live amongst humans long settled in the "New World" , again with magical, but less sophisticated technology.

How about Ed Chigliaks movie?...Tangequel to the T.V. series Northern Exposure...maybe Woody Allen could co-direct it.

Last but not least where's the Wyld Stallyns album which features the cuts that finally brought peace to mankind...or the Rockumentary about Stallyns Bill and Ted?

Paalam sa iyong pag-yao

Yesterday, my son informed me that Yoyoy Villame had died, it came as a sad shock to the Hyperbolic Hyperborean as I had had a chance to see the ebulient troubadour here in my own remote neck of the woods only last fall but didn't go...alas, mostly for want of money as I was still out of work at the time...more later...

R.I.P. Yoyoy



Please bear with me, this will all make more sense as and when I'm able to get back to my postings...

Forward (from the unfinished, unpublished intro to the book of the film of the...)
The following started out as a screenplay which, after gestating for well over a decade was finally blurted out over the space of many weeks beginning in May 2004. At this writing, I am still toying with the idea of trying to shoot a few scenes to use as a pitch to potential investors. I am much encouraged by the recent upsurge in the success of independent films. Also, we have reached a point where almost affordable digital video technology renders image quality comparable to, if not better than super 16mm, on a standard sized cinema screen.

There are nay sayers, and rather than be put off by them I’m energized by the challenge...There are after all a million good reasons to not even try to make a film...the trick is in finding the one reason to continue to try...I’m not so sure that even within a huge, well established studio that the process of getting any particular project “greenlit” doesn’t vary greatly from one picture to the next...oftentimes the stories of how films get made are better, or at least more interesting or amazing than the films themselves...hopefully if this project ever comes to light it won’t disappoint...

When friends and family continually prompted me to write a book I was reticent. I felt that I had to stick to my guns; I had, after all, already written a script...because I wanted to make a movie! Although, truthfully, I wouldn’t have even started had I not convinced myself that my only goal was just to finish a script. Curiously, the confidence gained in finishing 132 very imperfect pages, was enough to shift those goal posts; and the notion of actually bringing this project to fruition once again seized my thoughts and was keeping me awake at night. The idea of returning to square one; tearing it all apart and trying to rewrite it in novel form was onerous. I wrote a script, partly as a compromise to begin with, precisely because I wanted to tell the story, but I didn’t care to, or feel that I could write a novel/memoir. I had scenes in my head that I wanted to see shot the way I’d imagined them. I had recounted some of these as anecdotes, often many times over, others less so, and still others kept as secrets until they were laid bare on the page.

It occurred to me some months later that perhaps I could assemble all the material I had collected, including my own writing, research text and images, storyboards, designs, etc. and attempt to publish it as a ready made “kit” for making this film. The end result would not be unlike those numerous “making of” or “art of” film books that have become so much more popular over the last few decades. The only significant difference being that this would be a making of book for an as yet unmade film. It’s also a neat, and as far as I know, an as yet untried marketing strategy. Furthermore, even if it was self published (admittedly a strong possibility); properly bound and printed, it could be a very handsome and comprehensive proposal document, and/or press kit...it could even include an EPK on CD. In this latter instance, it needn’t even be expected to sell as a book; merely be used to drum up interest and hence, although more expensive to produce would only be published in a small edition...and of course if successful, then well worth it. Producing a book might also be a good crash course in tackling...on a smaller scale...some of the problems of producing a film.