Happy Birthday, Edgar!

And travellers now within that valley,
Through the red-litten windows, see
Vast forms that move fantastically
To a discordant melody;
While, like a rapid ghastly river,
Through the pale door,
A hideous throng rush out forever,
And laugh--but smile no more.

That’s a quote from “The Haunted Palace” by Edgar Allen Poe, who celebrates his 200th birthday today. It was later quoted in “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Does it have any relevance to our current political or economic situation? Nope. Does it have some special relationship with what’s going on at my life at the moment? Not really. But it still gives me chills. It’s writing like this that likely inspired me on my ill-advised path to become a writer.

I’ve always been drawn to Romanticism (you’d have to be to name a blog after an Arthur Machen story, right?) and especially the Gothic Romance. There’s something about decaying castles, forgotten ruins, and other fantastic sights that hit just the right nerve. When I first read Poe in the forced readings of 7th and 8th grades, I thought I was reading the best of the best. The stories were enriched by their age—they felt like authentic slices of an archaic American past; even the very young country, it seems, had a place for ancient ghosts and decayed aristocracy. That first impression has never really changed, though I’m likely more of a Lovecraft man these days.

My early writing, then, was a mess of description and atmosphere. I would go on for pages and pages about a house or field, pouring out every word of description I could think of to bring the place to life. Nevermind that I had no idea who lived in the house, what happened there, or why anyone should care. It was enough to paint a picture with words. In the intervening years of searching for a writing identity, I’ve gone all the way from that flowery prose to free-verse poetry to clipped, dialogue heavy stories, back to overwriting again, on to stream of consciousness nonsense, and just about everywhere in between. But it was always, for good or ill, in the realm of heightened description and heavy sensory imagery that I felt most at home.

I’ve read some Poe recently, and what once seemed the very image of perfection now seems a bit stuffy, overburdened with ostentatious erudition, as Abigail Adams (Laura Linney) might say. Had I continued writing in that vein, I might have been very popular in the 1850s, but I doubt I would have much impact today. But in all that erudition there is a real sense of beauty and, oddly enough, joy in the world around us. People don’t write pages and pages of description anymore, but that spirit, the spirit of using writing to help transform the world into something magical that is the heart of Romanticism, is still alive and well.

In that way, I think, I’ve come to peace with the Romantic in me. Every book about writing will make a point of finding your voice, and that’s certainly relevant advice. The next challenge, however, after you’ve found that voice, is to embrace it and make it work for you. No screenplay will ever get read that has paragraphs upon paragraphs of description, of course (as it should be), but a well written, tight description of a place or person can go a long way towards creating an atmosphere. A screenplay, is, after all, a blueprint for images. “Like a rapid ghastly river…a hideous throng rush out forever…” is, in only a few words, about as visual of an image as you can get. It's not about running from your own writing style, then, in search of the "right" way to write. It's about finding ways to make that style speak to your audience, whoever they might be.

Edgar Allen Poe was born 200 years ago today, and with all the styles and writing philosophies and movements that have come and gone in those 200 years, his stories are still a blast to read. I can’t think of a better birthday present than to tell him thank you for making me a writer—a flowery, ostentatious, old-fashioned, Romantic writer. Really, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

(Actually a better birthday present may have been a cure for rabies, cholera, syphilis, or whatever it is that killed him at age 40. That would probably be more immediately helpful than knowing you inspired some dude living 160 years later. But I do what I can.)

(Unrelated note: Isn't this picture of Poe's mother the most frightening thing in the world? Seriously, right?! No wonder he was so odd.)

Sumer Is Icumen In....

So the other night I was trying to get to sleep, and this naked chick next door starts banging on the wall while singing a wild hypnotic song, asking me whether I’d like to come over and say “How do?”


Now for most men this wouldn’t be much of a problem, but for Edward Woodward’s Sgt. Howie, it is a moment of pure, undiluted terror. Woodward’s ability to make a prudish snobbish British police officer into a character of such sympathy is only one of the reasons The Wicker Man is such a fantastic horror movie. Instead of laughing at Howie for not rushing into the other room to fulfill the luscious Willow’s request, we are right there with him, stuck with the feeling that something is seriously, horribly wrong.

Most horror movies today rely on shock value and gore for scares (though there are certainly exceptions—The Orphanage comes to mind) but The Wicker Man takes time to scare us, slowly plunging us into a world that is at first a little quaint and backwards, then slightly off, then threatening, and finally just out and out evil. There is no blood (though there is plenty of sex—it was the early 70s after all), and things very rarely jump out to scare you, but trust me, you will be scared. The film’s final hopeless sequence of suffering is more frightening than any of the situations cooked up in the entire Saw franchise combined.

The plot deals with Police Sgt. Howie’s trip to the isolated Summerisle somewhere off the British coast in search of a missing girl. Howie is an upright, uptight Christian, who has gone so far as to keep himself a virgin until his upcoming wedding. Naturally, when the inhabitants of Summerisle prove to be sexually liberated nature-worshiping pagans, Howie’s stuffy British sensibilities are taxed to the breaking point. Eventually Howie comes to learn more than he ever wanted to know about the people’s pagan beliefs and practices.

It may be a product of our modern politically correct society more than the intention of the filmmakers, but at on my first viewing of the film I was totally on the side of the pagans. Sure, they were a little out there, but Howie comes off as an intolerant prig for the film’s first act. It only adds to the horror, then, as we slowly learn that these people are even worse than Howie’s worst fears. By the end of the movie I saw him as an unfortunate man who had walked into a nightmare from which he had no real hope of escaping. One of my all time favorite scenes in movie history (and there are many) has to be the moment when Howie crests the beautiful green hill in the film’s climax to come face to face with the Wicker Man. Never was there a more hopeless and heartfelt cry of dereliction than Woodward’s “Jesus Christ!” You can feel the pain and terror in every syllable, made all the worse by the joy of his captors and the film’s grim sense of inevitability. This is not a movie where the hero’s wits and strength come to his rescue.

Most of the film’s cast are Hammer horror veterans, most notably Christopher Lee in the role of Lord Summerisle, head of the island. Partly because of his long tenure with Hammer, Lee has a reputation for schlock that may be justified, but I just can’t get enough of the guy. He considers this one of his best roles, and it’s hard to argue with him. He gets to spread his wings a bit and go beyond his usual role of scary guy with a booming voice—though he of course is that, as well. Lord Summerisle takes a certain glee in the proceedings that remind us that Lee does have real depth as an actor that is often buried beneath lesser roles.


Another star of the movie is the environments themselves. This movie looks as though it was actually shot on location on Summerisle, and there are no outdated special effects to show the film’s age. Instead we are treated to a quaint British village, rolling hills, rocky cliffs, and a decayed cemetery. I’m not sure of the production history of this film or where exactly it was shot, but it is a breathtaking locale. Some of the photography looks a little dated and trapped in the 70s (yes, there are some zooms), but most of the film holds up remarkably well today. Even the music, which in any other context would perhaps date the film, sounds appropriately creepy for this out of the way British village. It has something of a 60s folksy feeling to it, but incorporates a lot of older musical styles to arrive at a very bizarre and unique sound. There’s a fabulous cover of “How Do” (the song I mentioned at the beginning of this post) by the Sneaker Pimps that is certainly worth a listen to get a sense of the enormous role music plays in this film. What’s a pagan island without lots of singing and dancing, after all? Not much of a pagan island in any capacity at all, that’s what!

There has been endless talk about a sequel to the movie, but it has been stuck in development hell since before development hell was a phrase, and though it has at various times looked as though something was going to happen with it, I’m not going to hold my breath. The idea would reunite Christopher Lee and the original’s director, Robin Hardy, but I feel like too much time has passed to revisit it now. (There was also the disastrous, unwatchable, heaven-cursed remake staring Nicholas Cage that I am only mentioning in the spirit of dire warning. You know you’re watching a bad movie when you are informed that a character’s legs are broken by his offscreen exclamation, “My legs, what are you doing to my legs?” Now imagine that line in a whiny, Nicolas Cage voice and you’ll understand just what level of travesty we’re dealing with here. But I digress.)

Unfortunately the film doesn’t quite survive in its original form. There are supposedly reels and reels of film worth of lost footage floating around in a basement somewhere. What remains is a short theatrical cut and a longer, 100 minute version that has all of the available missing footage restored. I myself have a spiffy two disc version of the movie that originally came in a numbered wooden box. I’m not sure if this is still available, but it has both versions and several good special features that discuss the process of discovering the missing footage and making the film. There is certainly a wooden box free version of the 2 disc set that is still available, which is definitely the way to go.

The Wicker Man is the kind of movie that would probably never get made today (and perhaps that’s for the best, considering the remake). It is slow, lacks a lot of action, and has no gore to speak of. It is also the rare horror movie that tries to go beyond the regular quick scares of the genre to something more substantial. It is a serious look at religion, it’s successes and failures, and in a lot of ways a criticism of the western idea of the victorious hero. Sgt. Howie ends up utterly doomed through no fault of his own, and for me those were always the best kinds of horror stories. The Wicker Man is an odd movie for sure, but the film’s final images will stay burned in your brain long after the DVD has been put away. It doesn’t get much better than that.

2008: It's Finally Over!

What will I remember about this year? Obama won the Iowa caucuses, Heath Ledger died, Diablo III was finally announced, The Dark Knight came out, and Obama got elected. Then a few other things happened in between. Personally I graduated film school and was released out into the unsuspecting Los Angeles public.

I was going to do a list of my favorite movies or songs or TV shows or books or video games of the year, but there are so many of those out there that mine might feel a little redundant. Obviously I fell madly in love with The Dark Knight, but who didn’t? I recently got to see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which I thought was one of the most atmospheric films I’d seen in years. But here I am talking about my favorites. Ultimately it’s hard for me to judge things like that—I’ve loved movies since I could comprehend them, and except in cases of exceptionally horrible movies (I’m looking your direction, The Happening) I’m happy just to be in a movie theater in the first place.

That's something to keep in mind when things get rough trying to get anywhere in Hollywood. As anyone who’s ever made any effort at succeeding in the film industry knows, it’s difficult out here, and I think this year has been especially so. Luckily there are a lot of film school friends out here with me in the same boat, and we struggle along together.

When I was driving home from a set at around 4am earlier this month, I stopped at a light on Hollywood and Vine. I had never seen any part of LA so free of traffic before, but at that moment I was the only other car, the only other human being, in sight. It was raining (also rare in LA) and I could just make out the rain clouds drifting over the mountains. There was a neon-light Christmas tree on top of the Capitol Records building: something you would never have noticed inching through the intersection in the usual line of cars. For just a small moment, it felt like I had Hollywood all to myself. It’s easy to beat up on Los Angeles (and fun!) but there are tiny moments when it becomes quite beautiful. For most of us out here, there’s simply nothing else in the world we’d rather be doing than working on movies and TV shows. It’s important to hold on to the small little moments that help us to remember that.

Here’s hoping for a better 2009!

(I can’t help it. More great movies: Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Wall-E, Iron Man. Still very much want to see Let the Right One In. And about a dozen others—it seems like I never get to see half the movies I want to in a year. There are always new ones coming out to get hyped up for!)

Merry Christmas!

I hope everyone's had a great holiday. I've always loved this Casper David Friedrich painting, the imaginatively titled "Winter Landscape with Church." It's very Romantic, very tranquil, and just a shade spooky. Perhaps it's not the most Christmasy picture in the world, but I can easily imagine myself trudging through the snow to the far distant church, stopping to notice the neglected crucifix amid the trees. Paintings can easily convey emotions and feelings that are difficult or impossible to express in words, so I'll just let the picture do the rest of the talking for me today.

Great Games: Vampire: The Masquerade--Bloodlines

If only real Los Angeles were more like the city in which Vampire: The Masquerade—Bloodlines is set: Dark, depressing, dangerous, with supernatural evil lurking around every corner. Well, perhaps real L.A. is a bit like that, but the world of Bloodlines is so memorable that in a lot of ways it seems more real, and sticks with you more, than the real thing. I’m writing about it now because, even four years after it came out it is still one of the most atmospheric and well designed RPGs out there. It’s a shame so many people missed out on playing it.

Jeanette Voreman, the game's unofficial mascot. She owns the Asylum club and is absolutely insane.

Bloodlines is based on the popular PnP role playing game Vampire: The Masquerade, which I have never personally played. I have been assured by people in the know that it is infinitely superior to the similar but lamer Vampire: The Requiem, which has replaced it. I think there has been a trend towards overly romanticizing vampires recently (starting with Anne Rice and right on down the line to Twilight) but the world of VTMB does a good job of representing all vampire types, from the super-emo Toreador to the bestial Brujah to the hideous Nosferatu. And here’s a quaint idea—the game is actually different depending on what kind of vampire you pick. Unlike a lot of modern RPGs (*cough* Oblivion *cough*) there are different dialogue options, abilities, and sometimes even quests available to you depending on your vampire clan. The aristocratic Ventrue, for example, can talk or influence their way out of most sticky situations, while the deformed Nosferatu must lurk in the shadows and are attacked on sight if they encounter humans. Granted, the game becomes a dull combat slog-fest towards the end (more on that later) but the first two-thirds are phenomenal in giving the player multiple character-driven ways to solve problems.

A mansion in the Hollywood Hills. I wouldn't mind living in a place like this someday. With or without the vampires.

For me, if you combine “vampires” and “RPG” you’ve already got a deal (I also enjoyed the earlier VTM PC game, 2000’s Redemption, even if it was a little rough around the edges and light on the RPG elements) but this game creates an atmosphere that makes it unforgettable. The combat and game control are actually slightly clunky, but that’s easy to overlook when you’re walking around a fully realized version of Los Angeles, meeting some of the most interesting and well written characters in computer game history, and playing through some of the creepiest and disturbing environments. The haunted Ocean House Hotel in Santa Monica or the flesh-covered mansion in the Hollywood Hills have to rank among the most frightening things I’ve experienced in any media, including books and movies.

Outside the Ocean House Hotel, one of the creepiest experiences in gaming history.

Then there’s the unforgettable moment near the end of the game where the player gets trapped in Griffith Park Observatory with a very hungry werewolf while a wildfire rages through the hills. All the while the lights of downtown L.A. are visible far below—it is the sum of moments like this that make VTMB one of the greatest games of the past several years. It has probably even earned a place in my all time top ten. With anything that really sticks with you over the years, be it a book or a movie or a game, you don’t really remember the act of reading the book or watching the movie or playing the game, you remember the experience of being there.

Inside the Ocean House. It gets worse from here.

There are only a handful of games that have ever totally succeeded in transporting the player to another world, but games like Vampire Bloodlines prove that it is certainly possible.There’s still a lot of stigma in mainstream thought with calling a computer game a “work of art”, but with a select few so much care, thought, and passion goes into their creation, and the end product is so successful, that it is difficult to call them anything else. Unfortunately the game’s development house, Troika, closed forever after the publication of this game in November of 2004, and the gaming industry has suffered for it.

Just like real Hollywood. Without the cars.

When I was younger, computer games had a certain mystique about them that regular console games just didn’t possess. They were often more complex and adult oriented, and some of my favorite games ever are PC games from around 1994-2004—hopefully I’ll get the chance to write about some of those in the future. Computer games used to come with giant boxes filled with good stuff related to the game: A giant instruction book with lots of story and lore content perhaps, or a map of the game world, or a piece of game art or some combination of the above. Ultima Online, for example, came with a beautiful cloth map of the world. By the time VTMB came out, this was mostly a thing of the past, and the game was just a small box with a case of game DVDs inside. But the content of the game easily recalled those earlier titles, when games were made in small, dingy offices by a handful of developers who cared deeply about the game’s world and characters. It’s not that games aren’t still made with this attitude (see, recently, The Witcher) but they are few and far between.

A portrait of Jeanette and Therese, owners of The Asylum, with their daddy. There was some stuff that went on.

It’s almost as if VTMB knew it was the end of the era, since the “3^rd act” of the game is unpleasantly modern in its reliance on twitch combat and action. Instead of role-playing options, the last few sections of the game are filled with room after room of repetitive combat. Storytelling and character development take a back seat. It’s disappointing, for sure, but I’ll cut the developers a bit of slack—endings are notoriously difficult to pull off, even more so when the first bits are so good. Games are a lot like books in that they take several sittings to get through. If they are good, I often spend the time I’m not reading or playing thinking about the characters, about what might happen and where the story will go next. Rarely can any conclusion live up to the expectations I set for it, but it’s enough that something can get the imagination going.

True as all that is, the game’s ending is still weak.

VV needs a script stolen. Is there something wrong with me that even beautiful computerized women can boss me around? There's probably something wrong with me.

Other than that, the game had just about everything going for it. Great graphics (even now, the character models, especially the faces, are quite attractive—just check out Jeanette and VV), memorable quests, an engaging storyline, fantastic characters, and an appropriately creepy and atmospheric soundtrack. Unlike the ever present WoW, which came out at the same time, Bloodlines is pretty hard to find anymore, but if you can get your hands on it it’s absolutely worth it. If you’re a fan of vampires, RPGs, or just great games, it’s hard to do better.

You'll be visiting the Asylum club a lot during the first part of the game. They play good music, and it's owned by a pair of hot sisters--dangerously insane hot sisters, but hot nonetheless.

In fact I just might play it again now. I can think of few better ways to pass your time than drinking blood, getting involved in Vampire politics, blasting zombies with a shotgun, sneaking through a haunted hotel, and digging through the graves of Hollywood celebrities. Seriously. Play this game.

Places I'd Love to Visit: Sighisoara, Romania

In Los Angeles, everything has a sort of depressed sameness. Unlike even east coast cities, everything is relatively new and sprawls out in every direction without any semblance of a plan. I’ve always wanted to travel more (so far I’ve only been out of the country once) and when sitting on the 405 in hour two of a twenty mile trip it’s easy to start fantasizing about better places to be.

I’m sure I first heard about Sighisoara in reading about Vlad the Impaler years ago, but I’ve only recently come across some photos. You can almost picture the dirty medieval streets filled with assorted craftspeople ambling about in the shadow of the clock tower, or a horseman riding through the dark Transylvanian forest at night towards the imposing citadel. Being the birthplace of Dracula sure doesn’t hurt the coolness factor, either.
Most of the town is essentially unchanged since the 15^th century, and like any good medieval town Sighisoara has its origins in a Roman fort that originally stood on the site. There’s a lot of great medieval German and Eastern European architecture here, which gives it a slight feeling of otherness that even similar Western European towns lack. So few sites in America have anywhere near the history of your average European town (especially on the west coast), and there are probably at least twenty I hope I can get to sometime in my life. There are countless other Dracula-related or otherwise interesting sights just in Romania alone.
The Middle Ages is an easy era to romanticize (in reality, things were probably pretty gross), but looking at some of these photos it’s not hard to imagine that life without endless traffic and a Starbucks every block might be a nice change of pace.

Chinese Democracy

As I’m sure everyone has heard by now, “Guns n’ Roses” finally released Chinese Democracy last week. After bouncing around in the dark and mysterious recesses of Axl Rose’s mind for something like fifteen years, the album is finally on shelves at a Best Buy near you. I won’t get into a discussion of the merits of the album. Reviews have been pretty good, and personally I quite like the album (including but not limited to the sensitive power ballad "This I Love.") I know it’s cliché to rag on the current music scene, and a little too easy, but for me a decent album from 1/5 of the original Guns n’ Roses is better than 95% of the music currently out there, at least as good as the two albums that beat it to #1 on the US charts. If Chinese Democracy had managed to come out in the late 90s, it might have been heralded as the end of an era. In late 2008, unfortunately, it’s just a sad reminder of how great the band was in their heyday, and how long ago that heyday really was.

When I was a kid, Guns n’ Roses was the coolest band on the planet, period. If you asked a kid in the late 80s to think of the quintessential rock band, odds are they would have pictured G n’ R (after asking you what “quintessential” meant.) I was just a child at the time, and I could hardly run out and buy Appetite for Destruction or even the Use Your Illusion double (priced) album. But I was never far from teenagers who could. A group of teenagers used to hang out under the basketball hoop on a driveway four or five houses up from mine. They would stand there night after night in the summer smoking cigarettes and talking in voices that carried all the way down the street. I was always too nervous to get close, but I would lay out in my back yard listening to the insects chirp in the trees and the voices, unintelligible, but distinctly older and dripping with what I thought was sophistication. Teenagers have a strange aura when you’re a kid. You’re well aware that they’re not quite adults, but they seem so impossibly old and different. They’re adults that still get to have fun—that drive around in cars and go to the movies and the mall whenever they want.

And they got to sit around at night and play their music. All the 80s hair bands were represented, of course, but I’ll never forget the night I first heard the opening notes of “Welcome to the Jungle” ripping out across suburbia, Axl’s unforgettable wail drowning out even the crickets. What I heard coming from the boom box that night was fierce and violent and free, and it belonged to those kids down the street. It’s an unwritten law of the universe that, while we all might love music, you can never quite have a relationship with a song like you can when you’re sixteen. That night I sat on my porch and dreamed of the day when I could be like those teenagers down the street, and this music would belong to me.

I never really grew into one of those teenagers. By the time I was in high school grunge and alternative were already on their way out and N*Sync and Britney Spears were on their way in. So maybe people from my age group can never quite call Guns n’ Roses their own. But that doesn’t mean they didn’t represent everything that made that last generation of adrenaline fueled guitar rock so exciting: The girls, the crazy life style, the long hair, the “I don’t care” attitude. I think a lot of our idea of what’s “cool” comes from the teenagers we know as children, and so for the children I grew up with there was nothing cooler than Guns n Roses.

When people pop in a new CD (or nowadays, download a song) by a favorite band from the past, they’re not looking to find a new favorite song. Nothing, and I mean nothing, connects us to our emotions and memories the way music does. Consciously or not, when people buy a new CD with the Guns n’ Roses name on it, they’re looking to feel the way they felt on those summer nights two decades ago, when the music was brand new and they were a whole lot longer. But the days of boom-boxes blasting out music over dark suburban streets are long gone. Today, Axl Rose is the only original member of G n’ R left, and he’s pushing fifty. For a lot of people, it will be difficult to get past the fact that Appetite for Destruction will never come back. I’m sure there are still people who run out to buy every Paul McCartney album hoping to hear “She Loves You” again for the first time. But if you can get past all that and judge it for what it is, Chinese Democracy is a solid rock album and definitely worth a listen.

Oh, and Axl? If you can’t resurrect the past, can you at least get me my Dr. Pepper? Thanks.