Sketches of Frank Gehry

Watched Sydney Pollack's lovely doc Sketches of Frank Gehry, about his friend the famous architect. Gehry is probably most famous for the Guggheim museum in Bilbao, but he has houses all over LA among other places.

It's a fascinating look into an architect who's broken lots of architect rules and developed new processes for creating buildings that don't look like anybody else's.

I was struck by a bit where Gehry recounts how someone asked him how he could like a mall like Santa Monica Place, which he designed, and the iconoclastic houses he's dotted around Venice and Santa Monica. He said he didn't like Santa Monica Place, he did it for the money. His friend told him, "then stop it!" At which point Gehry realized he had to stop architecting for money. At which point he realized that he wasn't going to be able to support most of his staff of 45 people, but he still had to quit grubbing for commissions.

You have to be brave. Gehry spent years flirting with bankruptcy after that decision. Now he's, uh, Frank Gehry, architect of the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao.

(I remember watching Day for Night in college and thinking that if only I'd seen it when I was young, I'd have gone into show business, but now it was too late. I was being sensible. After kicking around Paris for a year, a girl I had a crush on told me I needed to go into films because my sensibility was so visual. Instead of going into p.r., which was my sensible plan. So I stopped being sensible. I'm not sure I've been truly sensible since.)

One thing that struck me was what a fun, lovely man Gehry is. He laughs. He tries to see it from the other guy's point of view -- when he reads negative criticism, he says, he "tries it on for size," not in an intellectual way, not in a marching-orders kind of way, but just as another perspective. And as often as not he'll put his model aside and try something completely new.

And what do you know? He makes fun, humane architecture.

Compare that with Louis Kahn, who comes across in another arch doc My Architect as a nasty, cold piece of work, who made nasty, cold pieces of architecture, like the mausoleum-like Scripps Institute.

The most important lesson, I think, is the creative carnage Gehry is willing to inflict on himself. He keeps coming up with new versions of his buildings, even after the client is very happy with what he's got. He's never completely satisfied. You have to be able to kill your darling. You also have to be able to actually finish is one of the hardest. The balance is a difficult one, but what makes innovative people successful, I think, is having both the willingness to sacrifice the good for the best -- looking for excuses for creative carnage -- but also the determination to actually close and the willingness to risk failure.

It's About the Work

It took shaving her head and getting photographed whacking at a car with an umbrella in the middle of the night, but Britney Spears finally gave me a reason to care about her: she has a problem.

(A story, in my book, is generally: (a) a person with (b) an opportunity, problem or goal (c) who faces obstacles and/or an antagonist, and (d) has something to lose (jeopardy) and (e) something to gain (stakes). And I do love a story.)

This WaPo article claims

If the 25-year-old pop star were to try to come back, he said, she would have to apologize, show some introspection, beg forgiveness for crumbling in front of us all, even if it is the fault of the culture that makes child stars grow up too fast.

But no. She doesn't have to apologize. (Except to the owner of the car, obviously.) She never had a responsibility to her fans to be a regular joe. Or even a good Mom.

(She has a responsibility to her kids to be a good Mom. But that's between her and them.)

What she has to do to come back, and to save herself, is focus on the work. Somewhere she seems to have forgotten that she is a pop star because she's a singer. Being a pop star will not save you. But music can save you.

Just go back to the studio, work long hard days making songs perfect, play small unannounced dates once in a while, and remember that only the music will survive. The music will start to fill the hole in your soul.

For me, it's my family, but before I had the family, it was the writing that kept me relatively sane.

Okay, that's enough caring about Britney.

The Invisible Massacre

Most DVDs these days prevent you from fast-forwarding or skipping the FBI piracy warnings. Math question: if this wastes 10 seconds of 100 millon people's time, oh, say, 6 times a year, how many people's lives have the idiots who cooked this up completely wasted? And shouldn't they go to jail for spiteful endangerment?

What is the point of these, anyway? Does anyone really believe these warnings convince anyone not to pirate? Or that you can't prosecute people for piracy unless you have first forced them to sit through the warnings?

And don't get me started on studios forcing us to sit through their distribution logos, or forcing you to skip each preview individually before they let you access the main menu.

Where can I buy a DVD player that short circuits all this vicious nonsense?

This Is A Single Piece of Paper

That's just crazy. (Via The New Yorker.)

Two Billion Eyeballs?

When are the Oscars going to stop claiming the transmission is seen by a billion people? This New Yorker article debunked the number two years ago. Not that it ever had any basis in reality. Or even common sense. Just arrogance.

Sophocles 2007 Beta

Martin of Sophocles writes:

We're in the process of beta-testing our combined screenwriting / pre-production app (Sophocles 2007). We'd love to hear any thoughts or ideas you might have for future versions as well. You can pick up the beta at our website. Or have a look at our Wikipedia article.

Let My DVD Go!

The Oscarcast piqued my interested in Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion; then the IMDB plot summary piqued it some more. But the darn movie isn't out on DVD. Will someone please release it? It won Best Foreign Film of 1970, for heaven's sake!

Bye

Q. Why do characters in television and film NEVER say "goodbye" or likewise when ending a phone conversation? It just seems unnatural.

It's a convention. It would take up, oh, 2-5 seconds that could be spent on story. What's the point? There's lots of things we don't show on TV that are part of real life, but it's a convention that, for example, no one ever has to go to the bathroom. (Except for Roger Avary.)

Characters on TV don't say "hi" on the phone either. And it wouldn't add any if they did. TV is a compressed reality. There are loads of conventions that take a small bit of verisimilitude away in exchange for avoiding a lot of shoe leather. For example, on TV, the news is always on when you need it -- and it only relates relevant news. Because no one wants to watch the character veg out for half an hour until the news he needs comes on. The audience understands it's a short cut. They probably don't love it. But they live with it because the alternative would be boring!

(Incidentally, this is why touch tone phones and caller ID were really invented: to speed scenes up!)