Can we start with cinema. Is your film “Drivetime” about unleashing powers of chaos by using chaos magic? I do not know if I have this right?
Intriguing interpretation. Though I did not intend make “The Drivetime”as a vehicle for chaos magick, I can see how it could be experienced like that. I wrote “The Drivetime” on the heels of kicking an opium addiction while living in the seaside village of Port Townsend Washington back in 1995. Papaver somniferum blooms wild all over the streets about three months each year and I learned everything you need to know about chasing the dragon from Jim Hogshire’s book, “Opium for the Masses” (Loompanics, Ltd). I was desperate to trade up my opium addiction for an endorphin trigger that wouldn’t vanquish my libido. Inspiration hit when my friend Rob Brezsny, the astrology columnist, introduced me to his spin on the term “drivetime” which refers to the psychic overlays linking daytime and dreamtime realities. This drivetime meme exploded in my imagination and got me thinking about the interface between the aboriginal dreamtime and modern-day cyberspace.
I’m at a loss for words as to just how I upgraded my opium addiction to getting hooked on the poetic imagination but that’s what happened. The drivetime was no longer an idea in my head but an all-encompassing reality that needed an outlet besides my body and so, the momentum was on to channel these visions through the multi-tiered outlet of a cyber-fi feature film. My aim in making the film was to proffer for the viewer an experience of the drivetime as I knew it. And so, I suppose maybe I did unleash the powers of chaos using chaos magic afterall.
So, those were the agendas that we were following then. We thought it would be a great idea if comics could be recognized as the wonderful medium that we secretly knew them to be. And when I say “we,” I’m talking about the 50 actual people who turned up at those early conventions, which was pretty much the sum total of everybody in this country who’d ever heard of American comics. But back then our agenda was this progressive notion that, wouldn’t it be terrific if people were to get involved with comics who could make them more adult, more grown up, to show the kind of themes they were capable of handling? So this was the agenda that, 20 years later, I was still following toward the end of my first DC run. [...]
When I was working upon the ABC books, I wanted to show different ways that mainstream comics could viably have gone, that they didn’t have to follow Watchmen and the other 1980s books down this relentlessly dark route. It was never my intention to start a trend for darkness. I’m not a particularly dark individual. I have my moments, it’s true, but I do have a sense of humor. With the ABC books I was trying to do comics that would have perhaps appealed to an intelligent 13-year-old, such as I’d been, and would still satisfy the contemporary readership of 40-year-old men who probably should know better. But I wanted to sort of do comics that would be accessible to a much wider range of people, and would still be intelligent even if they were primarily children’s adventure stories, such as the Tom Strong books.
DPRGRM/Plotlite announced a project today that forges a new path in independent cinema by bringing together real world experience and film in a unique way. ‘Y’ brings an audience inside the creation of a modern myth. The audience will become actual cast members, and be immersed in the story in real time. The film crew will also be part of the story as well as part of the cast, therefore creating a total immersive experience that bridges the traditional proscenium of audience/performer.
The ambitious staging and shooting technique is enhanced by the premise that in the future, government facilities, such the as one depicted in this film, will have to turn to unorthodox means of funding, such as contracting the facility out as the subject of a reality based TV show. The actual crew will be made up of news, reality and documentary style cinematographers and the production will be filmed entirely in the Cinma vrit style.
Written by John Harrigan and James Curcio, and directed by Joseph Matheny, Y is a unique production fusing characters from Curcios second published novel, Fallen Nation: Babylon Burning and Harrigans screenplay GraveLand, currently in pre production.
“With the Star Wars saga officially wrapped up with Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, fans will seek out any remaining sliver of that galaxy far, far away on screen. The Clone Wars animated movie gave them a little bit of light drone lasering action, but what really caught their attention was Kyle Newman’s Fanboys.
Set in 1998, the film tells the story of four friends who learn that one of their number has terminal cancer, and will die before he gets to see the long-awaited Star Wars prequel, Episode I: The Phantom Menace. Thus the gang scheme to break into Skywalker Ranch and steal a rough cut. This celluloid tribute to Star Wars fandom was supposed to hit theaters in August 2007, but distributor The Weinstein Company thought they could turn it into a bigger event. They hired Steven Brill to reshoot scenes with more dirty jokes and nudity, and removed that downer cancer bit. After news of the new version leaked, a grassroots online rebellion was mounted, spearheaded by a group called Stop Darth Weinstein who helped get Newman reinstated to deliver his version of the film, albeit two years later.
The saga wasn’t all bad for Newman. He met his wife, Jaime King, on the film. She plays a Las Vegas escort who plays Jedi mind tricks with one of the boys. The online support from fans who just wanted to see the original version also warmed his heart. However, the morning of his press junket in Beverly Hills, Newman was already visibly exhausted. The day was just beginning, but the journey to bring Fanboys to the screen was nearly over. All he had to do was keep his posture up on the sofa and answer questions about Weinstein as diplomatically as possible.”
I came across a snippet in Sci-Fi Wire about a couple of producers closing in on a writer for a film based on the Ouija Board. Guess they forgot about the series of Witchboard movies from the ’80’s. This one may turn out to be good, but the movies that I’ve seen recently haven’t impressed me much. (Then again I haven’t had the time to watch very many.) What’s next? Some marbles and Pik-Up-Stiks become animated and seek revenge? Tarot cards come to life and start the revolution? GI Joe zombies??…
“Platinum Dunes producers Brad Fuller and Andrew Form told SCI FI Wire that they’re close to hiring a “very high-level writer” to begin drafting a script for a Ouija-themed movie, tied to the Parker Brothers’ “spirit board” game.
“I don’t think we’ve closed the deal, so I can’t say, but we’ve got a very high-level writer to write that, and we start writing it, I think, within the month,” Fuller said in an interview over the weekend in Beverly Hills, Calif., where he and Form were promoting Friday the 13th.”
(”Closing in on a writer for Ouija movie: The signs are auspicious” via Sci-Fi Wire)
(Related: “Turn your ipod into a Ouija board” via Cnet Uk)
We would talk at great length every time Alan started to script an issue, he’d run by how he thought it might be broken down, then I’d give him my suggestions on that, and then based on the various thing we were talking about – we would both go off into reminiscences, and speculations about how we came through music to comics to childhood experiences to vague feelings about things – somehow we’d come back to the topic of Watchmen again, and this stuff, largely contextual and largely sort of, er, mood as much as anything, would find its way into the finished comic book. We just talked and talked a lot, and then Alan typed and typed a lot and I drew and drew a lot. And then John Higgins – I shouldn’t leave him out – he coloured and coloured a lot, and I very much would talk things through with him, and then just leave him to his own devices. I think good collaborations are like that; you have to trust what the other guy’s going to do, have him put into it, stir the pot, throw in what you’ve got and leave it alone.
Another Philip K. Dick movie is coming soon: Radio Free Albemuth, starring Alanis Morissette as Sylvia, Jonathan Scarfe as Nicholas Brady, and Shea Whigham as Philip K. Dick himself.
“Eliza Dushku has more going on than just her much-talked-about starring role in television guru Joss Whedon’s new upcoming series, Dollhouse.
The Bring It On beauty just told me she’s co-producing a movie about the life of Robert Mapplethorpe, the late photographer who caused national headlines with his controversial homoerotic work.
“Literally this week after quite some time, we finalized the deal with the Mapplethorpe estate,” Dushku told me at Gatorade’s G-Gym at Sundance’s Village at the Yard. Dushku’s brother, Nate, will star as Mapplethorpe, who died of AIDS in 1989 at age 42.”
A subset of the rule that the Elect will survive is that survivalists survive, that bunkered individuals or remote farming communities or whatever have an edge, and that when the crazy starts, it’ll be the people holed up in the hinterlands who will survive and that the rule we can observe all through history — which is that these people are simply prey to larger, better-organized groups — suspends itself for the duration (unless a savior is needed to fight off the Humungous and his mohawked thugs or something — see #2 above).
But real apocalypses are sordid, banal, insane. If things do come unraveled, they present not a golden opportunity for lone wolves and well-armed geeks, but a reality of babies with diarrhea, of bugs and weird weather and dust everywhere, of never enough to eat, of famine and starving, hollow-eyed people, of drunken soldiers full of boredom and self-hate, of random murder and rape and wars which accomplish nothing, of many fine things lost for no reason and nothing of any value gained. And survivalists, if they actually manage to avoid becoming the prey of larger groups, sitting bitter and cold and hungry and paranoid, watching their supplies run low and wishing they had a clean bed and some friends. Of all the lies we tell ourselves, this is the biggest: that there is any world worth living in that involves the breakdown of society.
I mostly look to the periphery for an idea of what dystopias will look like, so my favorite dystopian movies are movies like Salvador, Hotel Rhwanda, and City of God. One sci-fi dystopia that I like is Children of Men, because it seems to be based very much on the reality of the periphery.
“The special Halloween double issue of Rue Morgue magazine included a number of interesting features, as usual, but one which caught my eye was a description of a new documentary on titled Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown (Wyrdstuff Productions, 2008). This fim was directed and produced by Frank Woodward, and after getting in touch he graciously and enthusiastically talked about this production.
TheoFantastique: Frank, thanks for making this great documentary, and for allowing me to screen it for this interview. How did you come to develop a personal fascination with Lovecraft and how did it lead to this documentary coming about?
Frank Woodward: I first became aware of Lovecraft like most people, I expect. It was the Call of Cthulhu role playing game, mainly the monsters within. I’ve always been a monster fan and who could resist the tentacled beasties in CoC. That led to my reading some of the major stories… Call of Cthulhu, Pickman’s Model, Rats In The Walls. I have to admit, though, that my Lovecraftian knowledge was basic.
The desire to make a documentary was a more recent one. I occasionally produce DVD extras for Anchor Bay. There was discussion of doing a short bio of Lovecraft for the Re-Animator special edition. It didn’t happen for various reasons. By the time that decision was made, however, I had done quite a bit of research on the man. In some way I experienced what many of the people who’ve seen the documentary experienced. I was reminded how much I enjoyed Lovecraft’s work and wanted to throw myself headlong into learning more. Making this documentary was almost like a college course. I think that’s how all documentaries should be made. They should be a journey of discovery. The desire to learn all you can is why you bother making the film in the first place.”
The “overwhelming shock” of his father’s death caused Mallett, now 63, to “just disconnect from reality,” he says. So when, at age 10, he started building a jury-rigged jalopy, based on the gyroscopic contraption on the cover of the Classics Illustrated version of H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, it might have seemed as if he had gone over the edge.
But the next decades only saw Mallett’s focus on his mission intensify with laser-like precision. He devoured every book on Einstein he could find. He boned up on differential equations and tensor calculus. And by 1973, at Penn State, he’d earned his Ph.D. Moved by the intensely personal nature of his quest, Spike Lee announced this past summer that he’s currently writing a screenplay for a movie “‘ which he’ll direct “‘ based on Mallett’s book, Time Traveler (Thunder’s Mouth, 2006).
Brilliant Noise takes us into the data vaults of solar astronomy. After sifting through hundreds of thousands of computer files, made accessible via open access archives, Semiconductor have brought together some of the sun’s finest unseen moments. These images have been kept in their most raw form, revealing the energetic particles and solar wind as a rain of white noise. This grainy black and white quality is routinely cleaned up by NASA, hiding the processes and mechanics in action behind the capturing procedure. Most of the imagery has been collected as single snapshots containing additional information, by satellites orbiting the Earth. They are then reorganised into their spectral groups to create time-lapse sequences. The soundtrack highlights the hidden forces at play upon the solar surface, by directly translating areas of intensity within the image brightness into layers of audio manipulation and radio frequencies.
I’m a little late with this one. R.I.P. Michael Crichton.
“Science Not Fiction was saddened to learn of the death of Michael Crichton yesterday. His 1969 novel, The Andromeda Strain, alone would have been enough to make him a science fiction legend, but he turned out string of taut technothrillers, even equalling The Andromeda Strain’s iconic status with 1990’s Jurassic Park.
His greatest strength was in his ability to imbue his novels with a sense of authenticity; The Andromeda Strain was littered with realistic screenshots and computer printouts and came with a detailed (and entirely fictional) bibliography. Jurassic Park has become the cultural point of reference for discussions about biotechnology, cloning and genetic engineering. If Crichton had a weakness, it was his fondness for the theme which repeats over and over in his novels: technological hubris. Some advanced technology is confidently promoted by scientists as progress toward a better world. Unexpected side effects or interactions that the scientists overlooked in their dash to the future manifest themselves, and things get pretty messy from that point on (and to be fair, usually a really fun read.) But each time, it is implied that anyone who is not an overreaching scientist or an idiot would have known to leave well enough alone.”
Craig Baldwin, director of Tribulation 99 and Spectres of the Spectrum, is screening a new movie about Jack Parson, L. Ron Hubbard, Margaret Cameron and Aleister Crowley called Mock Up ON Mu.
SF360: Back in the ’60s, dimwit journalists would ask McCartney and Lennon what they wrote first, the music or the lyrics. In your case, do you write a script and find the footage to illustrate it or do you have chunks of footage you love and invent a narrative to fit them?
Baldwin: The question is always asked after every one of my films. It’s a process. If I just dive into my archive, I wouldn’t get out of my archive. There has to be kind of a map, a direction. The script was not written when I shot the [original] material. I found the story of Jack Parsons, as a myth, as a schematic, as a way forward. These subject areas/ or themes would be included: the occult, the aerospace-rocket stuff, mind control, all this brain stuff that’s obviously a parody of Scientology, desert landscapes, military-industrial, the moon/outer space. Without a script, even though I knew the story, you can go out into the desert and shoot people looking into the meteor crater. It’s mythic, adds scale, is cinematic. So the two come toward each other”‘the accumulated ideas you have and the accumulated materials you have. I probably should have been a little more in control of my material. The best model for me was the underground film”‘this is a term you hardly hear anymore”‘you go out with people who may or may not be paid actors and you just generate ideas in a great location. I did that with Spectres too. Went down to the Salton Sea and got some good shots. It’s not a realistic movie, it’s a series of ghostly gestures. It’s all shot without sound, and you add the voices later. It is this idea of a personal commitment and a personal engagement with the project. Would I be a painter if I didn’t like to paint? That’s preposterous. There’s a certain amount of that in filmmaking, Filmmaking is absolute masochism, just so you know. Sometimes you have to burn some film that you’ll never use. You just have to be generous with yourself, and with visual possibilities.
The moviemaker, who was attending the Rome Film Festival on Thursday, said he has written 60 pages of a novel, but besides ruling out that it would be a horror or science fiction, offered few details on the project.
“Based on the pages I have written we found publishers all over the world, which is very terrifying to me,” Cronenberg told reporters. “It’s at a very delicate phase right now, so I can’t really talk about it. It’s not like Stephen King, I don’t know what it’s like but you wouldn’t call it a horror or science fiction novel at all. But what it is exactly, well, I don’t know yet.”
I’ve been a big fan of Gary Larson’s “The Far Side” for as long as I can remember. His “outside the box” comics of silly reactions that monsters, animals, insects, aliens, and even vegetables might have in reaction to us human beings pulls me out of my reality tunnel and makes me laugh, and sometimes more importantly, is a reminder not to take everything so seriously. Now a DVD set of “Tales From The Far Side”, an animated series that appeared on TV in 1994, is available.
“Almost everyone has seen a Gary Larson Far Side cartoon in a newspaper or on a T-shirt, mug, calendar, or greeting card. But if you weren’t watching CBS on the night of October 26, 1994, you missed Tales From the Far Side, an award-winning animated short film that you’ve probably never heard of. Yes, that’s right: the Far Side was animated. Twice. And it’s brilliant.
The first short film premiered as a Halloween special in 1994, where couch potatoes and animation buffs like me saw it and were never able to forget it. The program was never broadcast on television again, but it did make the rounds at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival, where it took the Grand Prix. Three years later, a sequel (aptly titled Tales From the Far Side II) never even made it to television.
Both short films are comprised of a series of vignettes in the visual style of the print comics, with a haunting musical accompaniment by jazz guitarist Bill Frisell (who has featured some of the scores from the soundtrack on his disc Quartet). The tone ranges from the slapstick to the macabre, humorous to depressing, and even has some live action cow action thrown in there.”
“With Hollywood hitting up comic books for blockbusters, a new comics publisher is looking to India for ideas. “The world is increasingly realizing that India is a source for creativity and great ideas, not just a back office to execute them more cheaply,” said Gotham Chopra, part of the management team at Los Angeles-based Liquid Comics.
One of the first projects for the publisher will be bringing its Ramayan 3392 AD (pictured) - a colorful, 21st-century re-imagining of Indian literary epic the Ramayana - to movie theaters. Liquid has teamed up with Mandalay Pictures and 300 producer Mark Canton for the film, which has a planned release date of 2011. Liquid sprang from the ashes of Virgin Comics, a shuttered enterprise from Richard Branson and the Chopra family that was meant to hammer the dense narratives of India and Asia into graphic novels for the American mainstream and beyond. Chopak and other members of the Liquid management team undertook the buyout of Virgin Comics to continue the quest at the new company.
Chopra talked with Wired.com about Liquid’s birth, a new wave of Indian comics artists and the challenge of bringing an ancient Sanskrit epic to the silver screen.”
“Pete Takeda’s book An Eye At The Top of The World has reportedly be optioned for a movie, and will be coming to the big screen soon, according to this story over at RockandIce.com. Producers Steve Schwartz, Paula Mae Schwartz and Nick Wechsler have purchased the rights to the true story and intend to make it into a fictional film.
The book, which I reviewed back in May of 2007, deals with a CIA plot back in the 60’s to install a nuclear powered listening device on Nanda Devi in a remote region of India. The device was suppose to watch the burgeoning Chinese nuclear program and watch for test of their atom bombs. After months of extensive training, a climbing team went up the mountain carrying the device, but near the top, bad weather set in, so rather than carrying the heavy device back down the mountain, they elected to lash it to a rock, and return in the spring to complete the mission.
When the team returned several months later, they discovered that an avalanche had swept the device off the mountain, and it was never seen again. Presumably it was deposited thousands of feet below in a glacier. Over time, the area was closed off, and rumors arose that the mountain was radioactive. The nuclear power plant had more than four pounds of plutonium in it, enough to poison everyone on the planet, and the theory is that it was broken open on the glacier, and may be moving towards Ganges River, home to millions of people.”
“Remember those Choose Your Own Adventure books from way back in the day? You know, the ones that read non-linearly and offered choices like:
If you decide to start back home, turn to page 4.
If you decide to wait, turn to page 5.
Of course you do. Well, director Chris Lund has done us one better: The Outbreak is a choose your own adventure film about-you guessed it-a zombie outbreak. Visit the site and as you watch the movie, you’re presented with choices you have to make in order to move the plot along. Depending on what you choose, a different sequence in the film is cued up. Decide on the right course of action, and you live on to the next sequence. Make the wrong choice, of course, and you die a brain-munchingly gruesome death.”
“As I searched Amazon.com for reading materials related to the fantastic to add to my wishlist the description of Monster Theory: Reading Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 1996) struck me as intriguing: ‘Explores concepts of monstrosity in Western civilization from Beowulf to Jurassic Park.’We live in a time of monsters. Monsters provide a key to understanding the culture that spawned them. So argue the essays in this wide-ranging and fascinating collection that asks the question, What happens when critical theorists take the study of monsters seriously as a means of examining our culture?
‘In viewing the monstrous body as a metaphor for the cultural body, the contributors to Monster Theory consider beasts, demons, freaks, and fiends as symbolic expressions of cultural unease that pervade a society and shape its collective behavior. Through a historical sampling of monsters, these essays argue that our fascination for the monstrous testifies to our continued desire to explore difference and prohibition.’
Monster Theory is edited by Jeffrey J. Cohen who is associate professor of English and human sciences at George Washington University. Dr. Cohen agreed to discuss the collection of essays that make up this book, and in particular his contribution to the volume.”
The usual shit talking about Hollywood plus an update on his current projects, including:
There’s also a huge sort of reference book of magic that he is toiling on with contributions from notable artists and writing peers. It delves into Kabbalah, astral projection, seance, tarot, practical applications of magic and deep research into the origins of magic history, such as the true beginnings of the Faust tales. Talking about the book, the skeptical shaman of comics sounded positively giddy, especially for a parchment wizard trapped in a crass digital age.
“Magic is a state of mind. It is often portrayed as very black and gothic and that is because certain practitioners played that up for a sense of power and prestige. That is a disservice. Magic is very colorful. Of this, I am sure.”
I didn’t know that David Cronenberg is directing an opera based on his 1986 remake the of the Fly.
DEFAMER: Why does it seem like all your movies are in some way obsessed with the human body?
CRONENBERG: People don’t pay enough attention to the body. My understanding of life is very existential. I think that we are our bodies. There’s nothing else, and when we die, that’s it. No afterlife. I’m very anti-religious because religion tends to disembody you. There’s an emphasis on your spirit, or where you’ll be when your body’s gone, and that’s misleading. I think the world would be a better place if it we admit that’s not the case.
