Notes From the Road

Happy Monday!

I’m a little off schedule because I spent a week on the road, starting with a few days in my hometown, followed by a couple of days in Nashville. I took Ellie along with me and I think I finally optimized my dog traveling protocols.

Step one started with the strike. One day Julie saw how much stuff I was shoving into the pockets of my jeans and suggested I get a sling bag. I resisted because I’m a big guy and I felt like the last thing I needed was to add more bulk to my mid-section. But as the days wore on I did find it irritating to dig into my pockets for my wallet, keys, gum, inhaler, phone, AirPods, and on occasion, my pinball token pouch. (Yes, I have a pinball token pouch. Three, actually.)

I went back down the rabbit hole of “every day carry” YouTubers and watched a bunch of reviews on sling bags before deciding on one. The minute I put it on I knew Julie was right. It’s so much easier to pack it up in the morning and so much more organized and efficient throughout the day.

Since Ellie’s carrier counted as my carry-on I couldn’t take anything but my sling bag. It was big enough to fit all my stuff along with my journal and a bag of treats. When I got to security I put it in the tray, kicked off my slip-on Skechers and put them in the tray, then carried Ellie through the metal detector. Once we were through I slipped back into my shoes, slung the bag over my head, grabbed her carrier, and we were ready to go. So easy, so efficient, and it only took me six years of flying with her to figure it out.

I realized that this is a prime example of my fundamental operating system, the code that runs my software, at work. When I was home I had a conversation with my parents that got me thinking about this idea.

My dad’s fundamental operating system is based on seeking freedom. He’s always working to be free of constraints, whether that’s at work, his faith, or just how he spends his days in general. One of my go-to lines about my dad is that he marches to the beat of his own drummer, except it’s not a drum, it’s some musical contraption he’s built out of things he scavenged around town. His nickname is “the stuff whisperer” for a reason.

My mom’s fundamental operating system is service, or helping other people. When I was in elementary school she enrolled in nursing school at the local community college and for decades she worked as an RN at various hospitals around the area. Now she’s the director of the county health department. My whole life she’s taken care of other people, starting with us. I can’t tell you how many times a friend or family member came over to the house to have her give them a shot, take their blood pressure reading, or get her opinion about a weird rash. That fundamental operating system is at work in her personal and professional life.

I think mine is novelty. I’m forever in search of the new. That goes for work, food, life experience, even something as simple as figuring out the best way to travel with my dog. I’m always looking to overhaul or reinvent my processes and protocols, which is probably not news to you if you’ve read this newsletter for any length of time.

That drive to explore and experiment is the fuel for my creativity. It’s a bit of a blessing and a curse because on some level it means I’m never satisfied, or at least I’m not satisfied for very long. It also means I’ve learned to get comfortable with certain kinds of risk.

If you had to boil it down, what do you think is your fundamental operating system? It’s an interesting way to think about yourself, or your characters. The people who teach the Hero’s Journey talk a lot about the normal or ordinary world but not enough about the character’s fundamental operating system, which is basically another way of saying their nature.

I think this is why we get a lot of movies that open with alarm clocks ringing followed by a few pages (or more) showing the protagonist’s daily routine. We often learn what their life is like but not really who they are.

In between hanging out with the family we took a quick drive out to Lake Vesuvius, which is where I really learned to love the outdoors. I went there hundreds of times when I was young, for church picnics, day camps, cub scouts, family reunions, the junior high hike around the lake, senior skip day, and on and on. When I was in my twenties my dad picked up a couple of kayaks and we started exploring the backchannels.

It’s a place I associate with wonder and awe and I got a little taste of it this trip. We saw white-tailed deer, terrapins, crawdads, black furry caterpillars, a beaver, bluegill. All the greatest hits. Even a couple of hours in nature does wonders for my brain.

On the flight back to LA I spent some time watching the first ten to fifteen minutes of a few movies without sound or closed captioning, just to see what I got purely from the images. One of them was the latest ANT-MAN movie, QUANTUMANIA. The other was CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON, an all-time classic that I haven’t seen in at least fifteen years.

I’m going to talk spoilers for a moment, but only about the first few minutes of each. Also, keep in mind that I’m not comparing these movies. They’re totally different, obviously. This is just what I took note of as I was watching them, to see how they were working on me.

The opening scene of QUANTUMANIA shows Michelle Pfeiffer’s character in the quantum realm. Some scary stuff happens, then she meets Kang before it smashes to the opening titles.

Next, it reintroduces us to Scott Lang, played by Paul Rudd. From this early scenes I got that he was enjoying his newfound celebrity as an Avenger, that he wrote a book, and that his teenage daughter got arrested. There’s some father-daughter tension, maybe because of his time away.

Scott’s daughter and her grandpa made some kind of device together to study the quantum realm. Something about the device freaks Michelle Pfeiffer out - she’s obviously traumatized by her time there - and she tries to get them to shut it down. But before they can shut it down there’s an accident and everybody gets sucked into the quantum realm where they encounter what look like different species of aliens. That’s where I stopped.

What I mostly got from that opening, without hearing any of the dialogue, is that it’s a decidedly breezy tone, there’s a little tension in the relationship between Scott and his daughter, but I didn’t get any real sense of the characters or the emotional stakes. It was basically all plot. It didn’t seem like there was anything weighty being discussed in the scenes, it seemed like mostly banter.

There’s a pretty big question raised that no doubt the movie is going to answer - will they make it home from the quantum realm? Because it’s Marvel, not David Lynch, I’m sure the answer is yes. The other big question is, what was Michelle Pfeiffer so afraid of? I assume it’s Kang but only because I know he’s the big bad of this new phase.

This isn’t a knock on the movie, I haven’t seen the whole thing, but nothing in that opening hooked me on a deeper level than, “Hey, it’s fun to see Paul Rudd playing ANT-MAN again.” The tension between Scott and his daughter seemed to disappear by the time she shows them the device.

In contrast, not much happens in the opening scenes of CROUCHING TIGER but Jesus, it hooked me all over again. In the first scene, legendary swordsman Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun-Fat) returns to a small village to see his old friend, Shu Lien, played by Michelle Yeoh.

From the moment she hears his name, her expression changes and you can feel the full weight of the history between these two characters. There’s a beautiful moment where she comes through the doorway and pauses for a split second, almost like she wasn’t expecting him to actually be there and his presence stops her in her tracks. You can feel it in his body language and see it in his soulful eyes. These two people have a deep affection for each other. You can also tell that whatever they’re talking about in this scene is heavy. He’s haunted by something and she’s deeply concerned for him.

Li Mu Bai asks Shu Lien to deliver his Sword of Green Destiny to a mutual friend and benefactor. Shu Lien accepts it and takes it with her on a trip to Beijing, where she hands it over to their mutual friend. She also meets Jen, the young daughter of a wealthy governor, who is due to be married soon. That night, a thief breaks into the mutual friend’s house and steals the Sword of Green Destiny, which kicks off the first big set piece. The action is so stylized, so beautifully shot and choreographed, that it still feels thrilling all these years later. I stopped this one here.

CROUCHING TIGER doesn’t waste any time setting up the relationship and the stakes between Li Mu Bai and Shu Lien. They are clearly in love with each other. He entrusts his legendary sword to her care, then it gets stolen by a thief with extraordinary abilities. Will she get it back? Will he be angry with her? Who is the thief? Could it be the pampered young rich girl?

ANT-MAN has the benefit of the history the audience has with these characters. Anybody who buys a ticket is likely already down with the MCU and inclined to give the filmmakers the benefit of the doubt for a couple of hours. They have time to build to a satisfying story.

I haven’t earned the “trust me” card, so this was a good reminder to follow CROUCHING TIGER’S lead and start laying those emotional cards down in the very first scene. And it can’t just be in dialogue. It has to be in the eyes, the body language, the blocking, all the little details.

I realize I’ve been obsessing over openings lately but the longer I do this the more I feel like getting people invested as fast as possible is half the ball game.

Here’s a link to that opening scene from CROUCHING TIGER, if you’re interested. Watch it with the sound off!

Before I wrap it up I want to tell you about my friend Tony Teel.

We met during my first summer at Wagon Wheel Theatre in Warsaw, Indiana. Tony was a cook at my favorite hangout, a a beach volleyball bar called Spike’s. We struck up a conversation about movies one night and pretty soon I was regularly closing down the bar, drinking Red Stripes, and talking story with him.

A few years later, the owner, Scott Woods, opened an adjoining restaurant called Noa Noa and made Tony the sushi chef. He was a natural. In the early days I requested a roll with a few of my favorite things. Tony added his special twist on it and they added The Mickey Roll to the menu. It’s still on there to this day.

One night, way back in 2001, I told Tony I was going to make a low budget indie film and asked his advice about an editing program. His advice was, “I just built an editing system, I’ll do it.” For the next ten years we worked on a ton of stuff together. If you remember the “Fuck Murch” story, that was with Tony.

He’s wildly talented, an artist and a technician.

All that time he’s also been dealing with muscular dystrophy.

He met a wonderful woman from Louisiana and moved down there to be with her. I had the honor of performing their ceremony in the middle of a brief rain storm in Biloxi. He and Jenny have a beautiful family.

Unfortunately, Tony’s muscular dystrophy landed him in the hospital recently. A friend set up a GoFundMe to raise money to offset the significant costs and help with future needs and modifications they will have to make to their home. If you have the ability to contribute it will be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

Click here for Tony's GoFundMe page!