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Today is May 25th, the real “Star Wars Day” commemorating the film’s release (and not the date derived from a stupid pun). That people still devote much energy to it—passionately, learnedly and yes, childishly—30-plus years later is astonishing. I don’t think any other film comes close to having the kind of lasting cultural impact that Star Wars has.

So today I point to the late Mystery Man on Film’s detailed and insightful survey of the various drafts of the screenplay. scripts through the tortuous paths of its  drafts. Because all filmmaking begins with a FADE IN, and there is often undergoes a tortuous journey well before the lights go down.

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Mike Bonomo is at it again, this time with a lovely little short called “Echo.” Although its style is cool and meditative, heightened by a well-paced ambient score, the film is unapologetically romantic—a poem about lost love and nostalgia (literally, “our pain”). Indeed, it brought to mind some of the more touching sequences in Memento and The Sixth Sense:

Mike also wrote and directed another fantastic short called “Never Again,” which I shared a few weeks back. Keep an eye out for Mike. The guy’s a real talent.

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I never was a huge Twilight Zone fan, probably because as a child of the 70s and 80s, I lived off a TV diet of shit-coms, cheap cartoons and less-than-basic cable. Hardly any well-paced, smart and suspenseful storytelling Rod Serling’s celebrated series was praised for. (The truly awful 1983 film adaptation didn’t help.)

Then as an adult, I’d catch a few episodes on late nights or during the occasional TZ-athon. While I enjoyed them, it wasn’t a show I’d actively seek out. But thanks to the bounty that is Netflix the entire series is available for instant streaming in HD.

So I’ve made it a point to watch the series, and will be posting thoughts from time to time on certain episodes. Stay tuned.

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May 1st marked the 70th anniversary of the release of Citizen Kane, the film that tops all those “best-of” lists (and for good reason) and has probably been given more critical attention than any other film in history.

For those of you somewhat new to the whole Kane klatch, DB Grady provides a solid overview of the film and its legacy—the usual about the technical innovations, how the film didn’t resonate audiences at first, that it was Orson Welles’s high water mark, and so on. But as Jason Kottke aptly states, the film’s profound drama and thematic strengths are often overlooked:

Citizen Kane is The Beatles of movies, not just because of its universal influence and acclaim, or because it really does live up to the historical hype, but because on top of its arty aspirations, what it really wants to do is entertain the hell out of you.

Also, if you’re watching it carefully, the movie’s self-reflexiveness hides and reveals a devastating history of media. You’ve got CFK, accidental heir to a fortune based on “oil wells, gold mines, shipping, and real estate,” who trades it all for a communications empire: newspapers, radio stations, paper mills, opera houses, and grocery stores, only to be pushed to the margins after a failed political run in favor of the next generation: magazines and movies, the trade of the newsreel producers who try to track down the labyrinthine origin of “Rosebud.”

More than any other film, Citizen Kane told me there was an undeniable artistic power in cinema, which is why the film—and its controversial legacy—resonate with me still, 70 years later.

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More wise words (and pictures) from cartoonist Austin Kleon. Here Austin recaps a talk he gave about creativity and writing, a kind of illustrated guide, or a manifesto of sorts if you’re into that sort of thing:

1. Steal like an artist
2. Don’t wait until you know who you are to make things
3. Write the book you want to read
4. Use your hands
5. Side projects and hobbies are important
6. The secret: do good work, then put it where people can see it
7. Geography is no longer our master
8. Be nice (the world is a small town)
9. Be boring (it’s the only way to get work done)
10. Creativity is subtraction

I loved this list. Austin raises some thought-provoking notions that at first glance seems counter-intuitive. Or even at variance with our often misguided beliefs in what creativity is supposed to be. But creativity thrives in the spaces between what we think we know, in areas that aren’t raked over and made flat, clean and monotonous by too much critique.

I’ve written about his second point before, and I’m taking #4 to heart by making my screenwriting more hands-on meaningful by crafting it around handwritten cards, and taking a step away from the linear,  type-written distance of the computer.

Mr Kleon strikes again. He’s got a great site, a new book and more.

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Filmmaker Mike Bonomo recently shared a link to his fascinating film short, “Never Again.” It really is a gem for what it doesn’t explicitly reveal—instead it demands the viewer pay attention in order to parse context and find meaning in the few short minutes during which you see events unfold.

It has no dialogue, yet it manages to tell an intriguing story. It’s engaging in a discomforting, but satisfying way. Repeated viewings revealed certain details. Clues, perhaps. And while I’m no closer to knowing the complete tale, it is one very well told.

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A Barcelona-based design group has developed OmmWriter, an elegant word processing program to help scribes do more meaningful clickty-clacks and less window browsing. This latest version is called Dāna, and it’s completely free:

I admire how stunningly simple the interface is — the few options in the free (ie light) version let you choose from a few fonts, backgrounds, keystroke clicks and ambient sounds. (PC users are out of luck, for now.)

Yeah, the whole project is a little bit cliché-Buddhist. But Ommwriter does elevate the keyboard-and-glowing-rectangle experience to something approaching the sublime.

[h/t Scott @Go Into the Story]

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He’s done masterpieces. He’s done flops. You can’t deny that Francis Ford Coppola is an artist, making films that, whatever their success, were always ones he wanted to do. And not always without contention, conflict or just plain bad decision making.

In this fascinating interview, Coppola lays out a new paradigm for filmmakers — forget about trying to make money. To those in the industry (not mention those desperately trying to break in) it may seem that there isn’t much choice. But Coppola isn’t being flippant; he says it means taking risks. A lot of them:

An essential element of any art is risk. If you don’t take a risk then how are you going to make something really beautiful, that hasn’t been seen before? I always like to say that cinema without risk is like having no sex and expecting to have a baby. You have to take a risk.

You try to go to a producer today and say you want to make a film that hasn’t been made before; they will throw you out because they want the same film that works, that makes money. That tells me that although the cinema in the next 100 years is going to change a lot, it will slow down because they don’t want you to risk anymore. They don’t want you to take chances. So I feel like [I’m] part of the cinema as it was 100 years ago, when you didn’t know how to make it. You have to discover how to make it.

This is more than a typical “fuck you” to the Hollywood system. He’s essentially saying, “Figure out how to make the films you want.”

Perhaps that means keeping the day job, finding what little scraps of time available to devote to the craft. A constant struggle, to be sure. But if you actually get to do something you love, that should be reward enough, right? Right??

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Ah, the Criterion Collection, that trove of art-house cinema and arguably the greatest team of video case designers in the world. Their cover art entices, intrigues, and in some instances, is much better than the films it advertises.

Someone has taken cues from the unique Criterion aesthetic and has published wonderful mocked-up video cover art for such groundbreaking films as Hudson Hawk and It’s Pat: The Movie. They’re all great studies in style over substance, just like the films they illustrate.

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Thanks to internetting, I’ve connected with Chicago-based indie filmmakers Jessica King and Julie Keck, aka King is a Fink. They’ve been hard at work on a film currently in production entitled Tilt, a thriller directed by Phil Holbrook and shot in Phil’s hometown of Brainerd, Minnesota.

Anyway, they launched a crowd funding campaign, and I was pleased to contribute what I could. How often do you get to help out a great little film being made in Brainerd? And coming from such fascinatingly creative group of people?

So with my donation, I was allowed to request of the filmmakers a reenactment of a scene of one of my favorite movies. Here it is:

Ah, karma. I love it.