what's going on

1. I graduated. I now officially have an MFA. Well...sort of. Turns out the "diplomas" we were handed for the graduation photo op were friggin' props, with a little IOU inside saying something like "You will receive your actual diploma in 4-6 weeks." Which seems somehow oddly appropriate.

The commencement speaker for the film school ceremony was Jeffrey Katzenberg, head of DreamWorks, which certainly sounds impressive. But let's just say when it comes to graduation speeches, he is no JK Rowling.

2. I First-Pitched. It went okay. I got a couple of script requests for my thesis script, which haven't led to anything so far, but I'm kind of okay with that, mostly because...

3. I have a writing assignment. It pays money. Okay, not very much, but I think anything more than zero is a step in the right direction at this point. I can't really say much about the project (Hollywood is all secret like that) but it's with a great female director who just made her first feature, and it's a story I'm really excited about.

There is also a chance I may be working on a second project that pays no money (at the moment) but is based on an amazing true story that's perfect for me and would involve some subsidized travel for research to somewhere I've never been that would be very, very cool. Nothing is confirmed with that project yet but if it happens I'll be stoked. Which leads me to...

4. Travel and/or the rest of my life. This much I know for sure: I'll be in LA until the end of June, since that's when my lease is up. I'm also thrilled to report that I'll be back in PALESTINE (inshallah) July 24-August 6, traveling to the West Bank and '48 [Israel] with Interfaith Peace-Builders (and blogging up a storm per usual, of course). I'll also be spending a few days in Jordan on my own at the end of the trip, returning to the US on August 12.

Baltimore is a strong possibility for the 3 weeks between the end of June and my departure for the Middle East. After August 12...who knows????? I still really want to move back to NYC, but that sort of requires employment, which, you may be aware, is not such an easy thing to come by these days.

But in the meantime, some other things I'm excited about:

1. Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo. I'm going to a play! In Los Angeles! They do exist!! Of course the day I'm going, I have learned, is also the day of some giant bike race that's going to cause street closings, oh, pretty much all the way from my house to the theater. Of course.

2. Winter's Bone at LACMA with Q&A with Debra Granik. The more I hear about this film, the awesomer it sounds. Can't. Wait.

i'm alive

Just really busy. And fairly creatively exhausted at the moment, as I struggle to drag all my projects simultaneously across the graduation/First Pitch finish line. Between trying to finish three scripts, prepare my pitch, read a criminally long book for Entertainment Industry class, and go to a reasonable amount of the valuable-but-unhelpfully-tightly-scheduled end-of-year events, I just don't have the brain space for a blog at the moment. You'll hear from me on the flip side, which, dear god, I sure hope is coming some time around May 8.

thesis

I finished my thesis script and turned it in on Monday, once again proving that if you give a writer a deadline, she will work as close up to it as humanly possible.

There were times when I hated this script and just wanted it to go away. But toward the end, I kind of started to like it. At the 11th hour, I cracked a couple of scenes that had been giving me trouble all the way through, and suddenly I not only understood the script structurally but actually started to enjoy writing it.

Funny enough, my attempt to write something "not political" ended up being about many of the same things as my "political" scripts: resistance, and standing up to someone much stronger than you, and making the choice to fight instead of flee, despite the greater risk involved. Those themes were there from the beginning, but the more explicitly I dealt with them, the more I liked the script and the easier it was to write. Thanks are owed to James Cameron (for Terminator) and--you guessed it--J.K. Rowling for helping me work that out.

I keep waiting for the little knot of anxiety that lives in my stomach to untie. It hasn't so far. Perhaps this is because I have about 45 pages of a pilot and a rewrite of another script still to accomplish in the next 5 weeks, and a pitch to prepare by Saturday morning, in time for the first rehearsal for our end-of-year pitching event.

45 pages...there was a time, not so long ago, when that would have seemed incredibly daunting. Now I shrug that off as three solid days' writing.

In other news, Jess finished Harry Potter! I was able to hold off my desire to sleep after turning in aforementioned thesis just long enough to watch her liveblog the final chapters on Monday night.

ways in which usc is a microcosm of los angeles

1. It's huge, sprawling, and mostly flat.

2. It's full of diversity, but everyone is ghettoized in their separate schools, classes, programs, and buildings, so the chances of meeting someone from outside your academic neighborhood/ghetto are rare. If your department is at the north end of campus, you probably never go to the south end. You might not even know what the south end looks like, and if you venture there it will seem confusing and alien.

3. There's no central gathering place, and in the normal place where you might meet someone new--campus walkways and plazas--everyone's too busy zipping to where they're going on their (a) skateboards or (b) beach cruiser bikes (probably while balancing a coffee in one hand and a cell phone in the other while wearing an outfit you'd think would be highly inappropriate for biking) that they're too preoccupied to notice anyone else.

4. In some areas, extremely rich people have paid to build huge, expensive and obscenely ugly buildings that combine the spiffiest state-of-the-art technology with dozens of pointless, minor stupidities like switching which side the men's and women's bathrooms are on on different floors.

5. A large percentage of the public gathering/hanging out space is outside, a fact you don't think about until that one day when it rains.

6. The palm trees are imported. The only difference is at USC, you can pay to have your name put on them.

done. ish.

Grand total for the semester:

3 features (2 first drafts, 1 serious rewrite)
326 pages of script (net)
21 page research paper
2 class presentations
3 talks on Gaza
1 departmental assistantship with plenty of its own charms that aren't appropriate to go into on this blog

It was insane, and at times I became convinced it was physically impossible, but I did it.

Of course, it doesn't really feel like anything's over, since at my last formal commitment of the semester, a rewrite class on Wednesday, I got loads of notes on Gaza Sunrise, many helpful, others eminently frustrating. And I am leaving in four days, to spend four days in Baltimore and then a week in Gaza on the Gaza Freedom March, after which it's back to LA with less than a week before classes start again.

On the one hand, I can't imagine that next semester could possibly be harder than this. On the other hand, next semester I'll be graduating, a thought that conjures up a giant ball of stress and uncertainty that I imagine looking something like the giant ball of evil in The Fifth Element.

I keep waiting for the sense of triumph that you'd think would be due to me for conquering the semester from hell. It hasn't arrived yet.

But on the bright side, I finally got around to watching some Battlestar Galactica, and damn is it awesome.

score one for the resistance

Something kind of awesome is happening in my rewrite class, where I'm working on Gaza Sunrise. I can't tell you exactly when the transformation occurred, or precisely why. Perhaps it is the pictures and videos I have been sending out to accompany each new set of pages, of things like the Apartheid Wall and the Kalandia checkpoint between Jerusalem and Ramallah. I sometimes forget that most people have no idea what the Occupied Territories really look like, and the images can be quite powerful. Perhaps it is the fact that after actually traveling there, I am able to be more clear and articulate and unapologetic and uncompromising (yes, it is possible!) about the fact that what's going on in Palestine is resistance to colonial oppression.

But for whatever reason, at some point, people stopped questioning the political positions of the script (or at least accepted that I wasn't going to change them to match their own views of Israel/Palestine), and started actually talking about how the characters operate within the landscape of this world that is very different from the modern United States. And all of a sudden we are talking about the Palestinian struggle like exactly what it is--a national liberation movement against an oppressive, occupying, colonial force--and the political and moral and personal choices one faces in being part of such a struggle. Which is of course what the script is actually about.

My professor (who I think is turning out to be one of my favorite professors at USC so far) said something amazing today about Moira, my protagonist. He called her a coward. For running away. For leaving Palestine after her militant father was assassinated in an attack that very nearly killed her as well, instead of following in his footsteps and continuing to fight. Which, if you think about it, implies some recognition of the idea that to stay and fight--despite the titanic risks involved--is the right choice in this situation, the choice that is not only honorable and brave but necessary for this character's growth and transformation. Which is exactly what Moira herself realizes over the course of the story.

Ha! I thought when he said that. I've got you thinking like the resistance now! But really, this is quite remarkable if you stop and think about it. At least within the confines of this rewrite class, I've won. I've succeeded in portraying these characters, who are involved in armed resistance against Israel, as not terrorists or religious fanatics or some fetishized Other, but as human beings who operate in an emotional landscape that is recognizable and understandable to people who've never been to Palestine and maybe don't even know that much about the conflict. If at the end of this script, I can get you to empathize with Palestinians who choose to stay and fight for their homeland, their rights and their loved ones against Israeli aggression...well, I've done my job, haven't I?

If anything, this semester has just reinforced my belief that the Palestinian cause is actually quite morally clear and easy to sympathize with when you know the reality of what's going on on the ground. Because the environment in the previous class in which I worked on this script was kind of hostile...or maybe un-empathetic is a better word...I think I spent a lot of time in the first draft trying to "complicate" the picture of Palestine I was presenting. When really, as Moira says near the beginning of the script, it's not that complicated at all. Oppressor. Oppressed. Which side are you on?

back to school

This week was the first week of the semester, although it didn't feel so much like a "week" to me, since I have an odd schedule in which all of my classes are jammed into one intense block beginning at 10 am on Wednesday and concluding at 7 pm on Thursday, after which I have five uninterrupted days to either write or screw around (doing things like clearing out half-finished blog posts, for example). I am aware that this schedule will require a level of self-discipline I may not currently possess, since I do, in fact, have quite a lot of work to do this semester. I'm telling myself it will be a good learning experience.

The upside is that if the first week is any indication, all of my classes are going to be fantastic. I have two new writing teachers, for my thesis class and a rewrite class, both of whom seem top-notch and really focused on creating strong characters, which is exactly what I need. Both of these classes are also filled almost entirely with people I've never taken a writing class with, and there seem to be a lot of interesting and diverse projects in each. And my critical studies class with Professor Boyd, about which I've already written one post, promises to be SO AWESOME I think my head might explode. In the first class alone, we talked about the Wolfowitz Doctrine, Blackwater, the CIA's covert interrogation program, and what the 2000 election says about American democracy. It's like candy for mah brain!

On a side note, my sister and I calculated that this is the first time in twenty years that I will be going to school while she is not. (She graduated from college this spring and is spending a year working with AmeriCorps VISTA in our hometown, Baltimore, living in a house and being all grown-up and shit.) Weeeeird...

a class made just for me

No joke, this is a class I am taking this fall.

CTCS 510: "9/11 America"
Professor Todd Boyd

[excerpted from the syllabus]

This course will use "September 11, 2001" as an opportunity to focus on the relationship between politics, media, and culture in contemporary American society.

The course will draw on a list of political and cultural examples, while surveying cinema, contemporary critical literature, and other forms of discourse on a range of relevant issues; they would include issues of nationalism and national identity, globalization, the rise of neo-conservative politics, neo-liberalism, radical Islam, torture, notions of terrorism, the economic crisis, preemptive war, race, class, and gender, information and technology, and executive power.

Required Texts [highlights from a list of ten]
Resurrecting Empire by Rashid Khalidi
Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror by Mark Danner
Hegemony or Survival by Noam Chomsky
The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein

Screening List
8/26: The Fog of War
9/2: W
9/9: The Battle of Algiers (hells yeah I'll watch it again!)
9/16: The Manchurian Candidate
9/23: One Day in September
9/30: Fahrenheit 9/11
10/7: No End in Sight (cheery for my birthday, yay!)
10/14: There Will Be Blood (how does this connect to 9/11? no idea!)
10/21: Syriana
10/28: Paradise Now
11/4: Standard Operating Procedure
11/11: When the Levees Broke
11/18: Three Kings
11/25: In the Valley of Elah
12/2: The Siege

So, yeah...I might have added Rendition to the list, but if the Critical Studies department had said, "Gee, Laura, it seems you need to take another one of our classes in order to graduate. How 'bout we make one JUST FOR YOU?" this is pretty much what would have come out.

For those of you who do not go to USC, Todd Boyd is known as "the notorious PhD," a label which I think he created for himself. He is best known for writing about and teaching a class on hip-hop. I have also been told that he "does not subscribe to The Man's time," which means he is usually twenty minutes late to class. I sincerely hope that is true, since that will be the only way I get to eat lunch on Wednesdays, which, because I've decided to take this class, will now consist of wall-to-wall class time from 10am until 6:20pm. But it seems to me to be a small price to pay to take what is essentially a class on Stuff Inside Laura's Brain.

[Update 8/26: Went to the first class today and it is JUST AS AWESOME as I suspected it would be!]

don't you hate it when...

...you start to revise something, and it's like you start pulling at one little thread, then you realize that thread is connected to this whole damn sweater of a screenplay?

The process goes kind of like this: Okay, I got some excellent notes. I know I need to strengthen this element. Ooh! I could add this. Oh, but then I'd have to change that. And if I change that I have to change THAT. And I really like THAT...and THAT is pretty central to this character's arc, which I spent so much time carefully lining up, and...oh, goddammit all to hell! I'm going to forget this and entertain myself with some Lolcats instead.

It's when you see whole chunks of the screenplay starting to shift like so many precarious Jenga blocks, and have no idea if you're pulling out the right pieces, that you start to get nervous, and really miss the nuggets of wisdom from certain teachers who probably could have helped with this situation, had you been organized enough to get them the script just a bit earlier in the semester.

signs i will like my thesis professor

My thesis class got to meet our professor for the first time on Thursday. She's been an unknown quantity for a while since she was (gasp!) busy making a movie, so none of us really knew what to expect from her, beyond the fact that she is (to my knowledge) the only female feature writing professor at USC. I can't speak for the rest of my class, but the following things seem to be definite positive signs:

1. She has a super chill, down-to-earth, calm energy.
2. She puts a lot of emphasis on character development.
3. She differentiated between "ideas that come from your head and those that come from your heart/gut/some other part of your anatomy"--the latter being more rewarding to work with.
4. She described her film taste as "European."
5. She stressed that the main thing we should come out of grad school with is a strong sense of our own unique voice as a writer. I kind of think I'm well on my way to this already--I've got my box, as my TV teacher would say--but I'm very happy to be working with a professor who articulates this as a clear goal.

Do I have any idea what I'm going to write for my thesis script? Hell no! I'm trying not to think too hard about it quite just yet. But I'm already excited about next year.

this is really hard

The end of the semester is rapidly approaching, which means the real world looks depressingly closer from this side of the first half of grad school. It also means that while I've already written what feels like a million pages this semester, I have about half a million more to write.

One thing that's proven to be a lot harder than I thought is writing my spec episode for Dexter. A spec, for the uninitiated, is basically a fake episode of an existing TV show that you use to show your abilities as a TV writer. While people do sometimes sell their spec episodes to TV series for production, more often it serves as a good writing sample that can help get you things like an agent or a TV staff writing job.

We're required to take either a comedy or drama spec class in order to graduate, and drama spec is a pre-requisite for the original dramatic pilot class, which I do very much want to take. Our teacher is wonderful, and is also the first female writing teacher I've had at USC, and she worked on Battlestar, which makes her cool. And I like Dexter a lot--in fact, watching almost every episode of the series has made me really appreciate it as an original and well-written show.

But goddam. Writing a spec is really friggin' hard and I do not like it.

Some people find working with a pre-existing world and set of characters to be easy and a lot of fun, which is I guess what makes them good TV writers. But I like creating that stuff myself, so for me trying to write someone else's world is roughly akin to some painful dental procedure.

I want to do a good job, because I like my teacher and have learned a lot from her, and because people who can get me jobs may actually read my spec. But I'm pretty sure it's the last one I will ever write.

the end

I finished the first draft of Gaza Sunrise and sent it to my professor at 2:56 am this morning.

(I am still trying to decide if I think the title is cheesy or just right. It does sound a bit like a drink...but I really wanted "Gaza" on the title page, and if you read the script I think it kind of fits.)

I realized after I sent it that I hadn't typed "Fade Out" or "The End" after the last scene...and then I wasn't sure which one to type. I finally settled on "The End," although of course it's only a first draft, so it's really just the beginning.

This isn't the first time I've completed a feature script, but it is the first time I've completed one that I think is any good. Of course, many things will probably change in subsequent drafts, and there are still a few places where I knew scenes were running way too long, but it was pretty cool to scroll through 112 pages and realize that things were generally in the places they were supposed to be and think, hey, this is starting to be a movie.

During our break in TV class last week, one of my classmates, a second-year, was talking about how she was reluctant to send out material she'd written as a first year, because she felt she had gotten so much stronger as a writer during her thesis year. I feel like I've already learned enough in this semester alone to make my brain explode. Who knows what I'll learn next year?

I'm going to write a longer blog post at some point with more details about all the things I learned through writing this script, particularly my thoughts about writing political and true-life stories. (I feel like I have enough opinions on this now to teach a class on it...a class which would probably be fascinating only to me.) Some of these things I learned in feature class, others I learned in Script Analysis, and many I taught myself along the way. (But I guess that's part of grad school too--knowing enough to know what you need to teach yourself.)

But by far the most important thing I learned from this process was to not let anyone talk you out of writing something you want to write. I came very close to giving up on this story at the beginning of the semester, since so many people were telling me it was a bad idea and couldn't be done. But luckily, I have a character flaw by which, as soon as people start telling me I can't do something, I have to prove them wrong. (Not surprisingly, my protagonist also possesses this quality.)

Early in the semester, this idea was used as an example (in TWO classes other than my own) of something not to write. Well, I wrote it. I was the first in my class to finish, and, while it's certainly far from done, I am proud of how it turned out.

I think Moira Shaheed would approve.

problems of humanity

Once again, the argument came up in my feature class that my Gaza script is not "balanced" because it has no sympathetic Israeli characters. This argument has come up before, and I am often tempted to shout "that's not the point!" and be done with it, but I realize that that is not a very persuasive way to win anyone over to my point of view.

However, the persistence of this argument highlights some of the unique storytelling problems I've faced when writing this script. The core issue is this: when the way you see and understand a particular world is very different from--in fact, almost diametrically opposed to--the way it is perceived by the majority of Americans, how do you bridge the gap?

With Israel/Palestine, the first hurdle is a basic problem of misinformation. The US media constantly tells us that the Israelis are the victims in this situation, that they are under attack, that they have "a right to defend themselves." Their army is called a "defense force"--what could be wrong with that? We are constantly encouraged to sympathize with Israeli suffering, with victims of suicide attacks, with kids growing up under Hamas rocket fire in Sderot.

The Palestinians, for their part, are terrorists at worst, and passive victims caught between warring extremists at best. They are "othered" at every turn. We are told that they live in a culture of martyrdom, that they teach their children hate, that they would drive the Jews into the sea if they could.

So, on the first, most basic level, this script is an act of affirmative action of humanity--giving Palestinian characters not just humanity, diversity and individuality, but agency. I didn't just want to make the point that, contrary to what the media would have us believe, the Israelis are the oppressors and the Palestinians are the oppressed. That is only half the battle. Just showing that the Palestinians are oppressed, occupied, and suffering is not, in itself, a radical artistic statement. But to show them as people who are actively fighting for their liberation, in many different ways, and to invite the audience to sympathize with that struggle, is indeed radical.

In screenplays, characters don't fully come alive until they face conflict. That means they must be trying to do something and encounter an obstacle. The way they deal with that obstacle is what makes us identify with them.

If your protagonists are Palestinians trying to break the siege of Gaza, it is pretty clear that your antagonists are going to be the IDF and Shabak (the Israeli secret police--there isn't really an equivalent organization to compare them to in the US.)

As a screenwriter, one faces the problem that these two organizations are not exactly the greatest representatives of Israeli humanity. It is, honestly, a bit hard for me to care that much about humanizing the IDF when my imagination is stuffed to the brim with tale after tale of savagery, humiliation and deliberate cruelty from Operation Cast Lead.

I realize that as a writer, I am facing the exact same problem that Palestinians face--how do you teach your children that not all Israelis are violent occupiers when every Israeli they've ever seen is holding an M-16? This is a reality of life in the Occupied Territories--and one of the goals of my script is to help people understand that world.

Of course I know that not every Israeli soldier is an inhuman beast. (Although the fact that I feel I have to actively state this shows how far the discourse has been tilted in Israel's favor.) Yes, of course, they are people, individuals with feelings, and I'm sure many of them have doubts about their actions in the Territories from time to time. But they are also cogs in the machinery of one of the most vicious and prolonged occupations in modern history--and that has a concrete effect on their humanity, on how they act as individuals. The IDF, like any army, puts a lot of effort into driving out any scrap of empathy in its soldiers, since their mission is to kill and oppress another group of people. And it largely succeeds. If you need further proof of the depths of dehumanization of Palestinians that the IDF allows (and, I would argue, encourages), just read this article from Ha'aretz--if you can stomach the whole thing.

There is another difference between the IDF and almost any other modern army, which has to do with the nature of Israel as a colonial settler state. The IDF's mission is not the same as, say, the mission of US soldiers in Iraq. The mission of the US army in Iraq--in a broad sense--is to enforce the United States's imperial control over the Middle East and its oil. This benefits US corporations, who make a profit, and the US state, which gets leverage over anyone else who needs foreign oil (almost every country in the world, but most importantly Europe and the rising economic powers of Asia.) This is a mission which, I would argue, is not in interest of the US soldiers themselves. In fact, it is directly against their interests--since their government is sending them to kill and die to secure profits and power that they (the US soldiers) will never see. In fact, I would argue that the ordinary Americans who serve in the US army have more in common with the ordinary Iraqis they're being sent to fight than with the people who control the government that's sending them to do the fighting.

But in Israel, the situation is a bit different. Because the mission of the IDF is to defend Israel as it currently exists--as a colonial state for Jews only. Israel was formed by driving out 750,000 non-Jewish indigenous inhabitants, to create a Jewish majority in a land where there hadn't been one before. As long as Israel exists as a state for Jews only (which, more often than not, has really meant white European Jews), the Palestinians will be a threat by their very existence. The Israeli army's mission will only be complete when every Palestinian is either ghettoized and completely subservient (impossible, in my opinion), driven out of historic Palestine (a very possible, but incomplete solution), or exterminated (the final solution, one might say.) Of course, only the most right-wing fringe elements of Israeli society will come out and actually say this--but those fringe elements are gaining increasing traction.

There is really only one historic parallel to this situation I can think of, which is the formation of the United States. The IDF acts, not so much like the US Army of today, but quite a bit like the US cavalry of the 1800s, which spent the better part of a century slaughtering the native inhabitants of the middle part of the North American continent, forcing them onto reservations, and stealing their land for use by European settlers.

This is an important point, because the citizens of a colonial settler state are somewhat different than the citizens of any other state. Israel is a very peculiar entity, because, unlike almost any other state in the world, its citizens are bound together by a common interest as colonizers in someone else's land. The citizens of Israel benefit from direct aid by the United States, which subsidizes modern roads (on which Palestinians cannot drive) affordable housing and modern infrastructure side by side with places like Gaza, in which many neighborhoods still lack sewage systems. The Israeli state secures the most fertile land and the majority of the water in a desert climate for its Jewish citizens, and, by and large, keeps Israeli workers' wages high by preventing competition from Palestinian workers who could almost certainly be forced to work for less. (Although this has been undercut somewhat in recent years by Israel importing cheap labor from Asia and Eastern Europe, so afraid are they to let Palestinians have even the crappiest jobs in Israel.)

This is the secret that keeps Israeli politics sliding further and further to the right, that makes Israel's poor the most right-wing section of the population instead of the most radical, and that allows Israel to conduct genocidal operations like Cast Lead with hardly a peep of protest from its own population, many of whom are themselves the descendants of the survivors of another genocide.

Of course, this does not mean that individual Israelis cannot work for peace with justice and feel compassion and solidarity with the Palestinians--many of them do, but they are a brave minority. And any Israeli who wants to fundamentally change the situation has to reckon with the fact that their state is based on the racist exclusion of the majority of the historic population of the region, and that no lasting peace will come without addressing that fundamental problem.

What is the point of going into all this, since I'm certainly not going to take time out from the action of my script to discuss the class nature of Israel as a colonial settler state? The point is that how you understand the world affects how you make art about it. I am just not going to write about the two sides as if they are equal, because I do not believe them to be. On one side, you have colonial occupiers, armed with the most modern military technology in the world and subsidized by billions of dollars of aid from the most powerful nation in the world, the United States. On the other side you have people who have been expelled from their homes and made refugees (sometimes several times over), forced into camps, walled in, thrown in prison for things as minor as displaying their nation's flag, besieged by air, land, and sea, denied the most basic degree of political sovereignty, and had every aspect of their lives and livelihoods relentlessly attacked, but who have continued to fight back for 60 years, despite being vastly militarily outmatched.

Fittingly enough for this discussion, this week in Script Analysis, we watched what is perhaps the most brilliant political film of all time, The Battle of Algiers. I wrote in an earlier post how, despite the fact that many people laud the film for its even-handedness, The Battle of Algiers very carefully and consciously aligns the audience's emotions with the Algerians from the beginning. The sneaky genius of The Battle of Algiers is that it's constructed in a way that allows some people to think it is even-handed, when it was actually conceived as a consciously anti-imperalist project and a calculated defense of the right of oppressed people to resist by any means necessary.

Algeria (like its parallel at the other end of the continent, South Africa) was also a modern settler colony, and it is quite interesting to see how the French settlers are presented in the film. One of the unique features of The Battle of Algiers is that crowds can be analyzed as characters in the film. In class, we discussed how the Algerian crowd, which can also be identified as "the Algerian people" (in a somewhat abstract, Maoist-inspired formulation entirely appropriate to the era) has a character arc. It grows and changes every time we see it. Specifically, it goes from being passive to being revolutionary--a really brilliant way to externalize on film the radicalization of a society. The French crowd, however, is a one-string character, which is defined in our class as "a character who does the same thing each time we see them." The thing that the French crowd does is react with misplaced, racist rage. It does not change, grow, or learn anything.

There is one notable time that we see the French crowd as something other than a racist mob--in the scenes where large numbers of civilians are about to be killed by three female bombers. Right before the bombs go off, we start to see close-ups of individual faces--men, women, dancing teenagers, a kid eating an ice cream cone. The effect of these shots is quite deliberate and unambiguous--to make us question the morality of the violent actions we know are about to happen. But I would argue that the effect is not just to humanize the French, but also to humanize the Algerians. We see what these three women see, and we feel the moral quandary at the exact same moment they do. We are seeing the humanity of the French through the eyes of the Algerians--and this helps us understand the bombers not as psychotic, unthinking terrorists, but as people with humanity who have decided that this is the only way to win their freedom.

Of course, the parallels between my film and The Battle of Algiers only go so far. My film does not take place in, say, Jerusalem, in an environment where Israeli and Palestinian civilians live side by side. It takes places in the Occupied Territories, where Palestinian civilians live side by side with Israeli soldiers. The characters are not engaged in attacks on Israelis at all--it could be argued that their act of resistance, although it involves high explosives, is completely nonviolent. (Which is, of course, one of the things that attracted me to the story in the first place.) If any of these elements were changed, it would certainly effect how I presented both Israeli and Palestinian characters. (Paradise Now, by the way, is a film that has almost no Israeli characters in it at all and still does a brilliant job of problematizing the actions of its Palestinian protagonists.)

There is another difference between my film and The Battle of Algiers, which is that mine is not an ensemble piece. That is a conscious choice on my part. Also in Script Analysis, we discussed how the primary effect of creating a script with one central character with a drive is to heighten emotional identification with that character--which is, of course, exactly what I want. I want my audience to identify with a Palestinian militant. And I don't think that is too much to ask.

In connection with our discussion of The Battle of Algiers, our teacher touched on something which I have long believed to be true, which is that the great power of film is its ability "to extend the reach of human imagination"--to allow us to share and understand the emotional journey of, say, someone who might otherwise be dismissed as a terrorist.

I decided early on in the script that one of the main ways I was going to help people understand the world of the Occupied Territories was simply to show it--to show daily life there by following our characters through this world. I wanted the audience to see this world the way my characters see it, which is also the way I see it. It's a world of checkpoints, closure, siege, walls, air strikes, raids, prison and collective punishment--but also a world of family, solidarity, courage, resistance, love, and hope. In short, a world worth fighting for. When you see and understand this world the way they do, I don't think it is very hard to identify with the drive to blow up a wall and open a border. In fact, I think it feels like something fundamentally, deeply human--the instinctive desire to resist oppression that resides in all of us.

filming "jack's last date"

Everyone in my class at USC (except two sneaky people who got exemptions) has to take a required production class this semester called 507. (For some reason classes at SCA are universally referred to by number instead of name.) We're grouped in teams of five or six people, and over the course of the semester we shoot a short project, which is basically a scene in one location, and a long project, which is a short of up to ten minutes, rotating crew positions on each project. A ten-minute short may not seem like a "long project" until you start to film it. Then you realize just how long ten minutes can be.

People tend to either love or hate this class, depending on how much they love or hate physical production. I love it. Probably the single most important thing I've learned from 507 is that a lot of production is looking at something on the page and saying "Well, that's clearly impossible. Okay, let's figure out how to do it." Shoot a two-character scene in an elevator? That'll never work. Well, my group did it. Fake a subway station with an on-campus location for a scene that ends with someone jumping in front of a train? No way! Another group in my class did it, and it worked beautifully. When you start out, things like permits and white balance and Avid seem overwhelmingly complex. But when you actually start working you realize a lot of this stuff is not as complicated as it first seemed, and if you have good material and good actors and a good crew, making a movie can actually be fun.

For our long project, my team selected a script I wrote last semester called "Jack's Last Date." I submitted this script to 546, the graduate production class, and it made it through the first round, but didn't end up getting selected. I'd purposely made it very easy to shoot--three actors, minimal and easy-to-find locations, no crazy effects. It was designed to be technically simple but dramatically interesting--which apparently is not what grabs the attention of USC production students. So I thought, why not just film it ourselves?

I have a lot of love for this little script, perhaps because I'm terrible at writing things that are short, and I felt this was the one short script I'd produced last semester that I was really happy with. It had all the things I think a good short should have--it was only 10 pages, but offered a lot of emotional range for the actors to play with, it told a big story (really, the most important moment in the main character's life), and it was still very "me." Of course, that means that Jack, the protagonist, is a serial killer. It's a dark comedy. Sort of.

I knew a lot would depend on getting good actors who were excited about the script, since the piece really hinges on four or five two-character dramatic scenes. We were incredibly lucky to find a fantastic cast. Danny, who played Jack, and Karly, who plays Katie, the woman he's supposed to kill but ends up falling in love with, were the very first people we saw at auditions. They read together and just knocked it out of the park. They had great, natural chemistry, which was very important since we have only a few minutes of screen time to build their connection with each other. Danny was perfect--disarmingly sweet, charming, slightly awkward, with a wonderfully expressive face--exactly what I wanted. The director and I spent a long time debating between casting him and another actor who was also very good, but very different. I pressed hard for Danny and after filming I'm convinced we made the right choice.

Jackie, who plays Jack's manipulative mother (who's a figment of his imagination but appears on screen) was also one of the first people we saw at auditions and was by far the best. Her interpretation of Mom actually ended up being fairly different from what I had in my head, but it totally worked and was delightful to watch. She could be gleeful and seductive one moment, cold and calculating the next. When the climactic scene between her and Jack wasn't packing the dramatic punch we needed, we asked her to ad lib and DAMN! Out came the most blistering torrent of emotional abuse you could possibly imagine--which actually worked better than the lines I had written, while still being completely consistent with the character. She's supposed to be the manifestation of all the foul things in his psyche, and boy did she deliver.

Watching actors play with your words and find things you didn't even know were in there is probably one of the most fun experiences in the world. We only had one rehearsal before we were going to shoot, and the actors weren't even off book yet, but it was still an absolute blast. The only problem was that I kept wanting to direct, and I'm sure my many interjections and notes on the performance annoyed the hell out of the actual director--especially when I had different opinions from him.

That one rehearsal made me realize that I really want to direct my own work. There is nothing more satisfying than finding the thing that unlocks the drama of a scene for an actor and suddenly seeing an emotional world that previously existed only in your head come to life inside another person. I found myself pulling out a lot of tricks from Nina Foch's class, and also from Ted Braun's 514 class, of all places.

We were again lucky that the actual shoot went pretty smoothly--thanks in a large part to the tireless work of Joan, our fearless producer, who not only drove all over the city getting permits and fake blood and prop weapons (including a very realistic-looking prop rock) but was kind enough to let us shoot the majority of the film in her apartment. In the long list of things that could have gone wrong, almost nothing did--everyone showed up on time, the actors knew their lines, it did not rain when we needed to shoot in Griffith Park, no one fell down any of the park's incredibly steep hills, no equipment broke, the sound recorded clearly even when Jackie and Danny were screaming at each other, and we shot the whole thing in about a day and a half. Of course, not everything was perfect, and not everything was exactly the way I would have shot it, but after watching the dailies I'm confident there is a movie in there.

Taking 507 has made me realize two important things: (1) I want to take more production classes, and (2) I want to direct something I wrote. Unfortunately, I don't tend to write things that can be shot in a modern-day urban environment on a budget of approximately zero. So one of my goals for the summer has become writing a feature that's easy enough for me to direct myself (not this summer, but soon) but still representative of my aesthetic. I don't have the idea yet, but the wheels are turning. I'd also love to write a few more shorts, since there are a lot of opportunities to get shorts produced at USC, and I need to brainstorm some ideas for the webisode class I hope to take next semester. And start thinking about my thesis. And come up with some TV pilot ideas, although there's only one I really want to write. In conclusion: lots of writing. And somewhere in there I'm supposed to be taking a class and doing an internship and learning how to drive.

Onward!

lessons learned from the battle of algiers

SPOILER ALERT: If you're in Script Analysis at USC this semester, we will be watching this film in a few weeks. If you want a totally pure first viewing experience, stop reading now. If you want to get a jump on the analysis of a truly great political film that kind of hits you over the head the first time you see it, read on.

As I've indicated before, I'm writing a script for my feature class that takes place in the Gaza Strip. It's based on true events that happened in early 2008, when militants blew an enormous hole in the 20-ft-high wall separating Gaza from Egypt, temporarily breaking the siege that Gaza has been under for the past going-on-three years.

Last week, my feature professor told me to re-watch The Battle of Algiers. I think it was because he thought my Gaza script was not "even-handed" enough, which is a polite way of saying I am too sympathetic to the Palestinians. As it so happens, The Battle of Algiers is one of my favorite films, and one of about 12 movies I actually own. It is, quite simply, one of the greatest political films of all time, and there is a lot to be learned from it about the art of political storytelling. It's a film that packs a huge emotional punch the first time you see it, especially on the big screen. Re-watching it was a delight, since the second time around, I got to appreciate just how well-crafted it is.

As an added bonus, the Criterion Collection DVD has to be the best special edition DVD in the universe. It is absolutely packed with fascinating extras, not all of which I've been able to go through yet. In addition to a GREAT interview with screenwriter Franco Solinas, the super-fancy 56-page color booklet that comes with the DVD contains this fascinating little essay by film critic Peter Matthews, which is helpfully reprinted on Criterion's website.

As it turns out, Matthews's essay addresses a number of political questions and debates that have come up around my script, either in class or in my head as I'm figuring out how to tell the story.

One of the most interesting things to be learned from Matthews's essay is that the filmmakers originally envisioned the protagonist of the film as a Frenchman who would be played by Paul Newman. He would portray a French reporter and former paratrooper who comes to Algiers, sees the violence of the French troops in action, and comes to sympathize with the Algerians.

You can kind of see that this could have been an OK movie, probably something along the lines of The Quiet American, which is a film I like a lot. But it would most definitely have been the story of a white guy "set against the backdrop," as they say, of a revolution. And it would not be anything nearly as powerful or unique as The Battle of Algiers turned out to be.

Early in the discussion of my story idea, there was a suggestion made in class that I change my protagonist from her current incarnation (a half-white, half-Palestinian woman who grew up in the Occupied Territories, but has been away for many years) to an American who gets radicalized and ends up helping the Palestinian resistance.

This is not, inherently, a bad idea. In fact, it has the advantage (if you are making this movie for an American audience) of locating the protagonist in the same position as the viewer. I seriously considered taking this note for the better part of a weekend and tried valiantly to recraft the story with an American at its center before realizing that the whole thing just fell apart thematically and emotionally for me if I did that. And here's why.

My story, like The Battle of Algiers, is not a story about fighting for liberation. It is a story about fighting for self-liberation. One of the things that makes The Battle of Algiers such a decisively radical film is that it shows the successful struggle of an oppressed group of people for their own freedom. No one is fighting on their behalf, and no one needs to, because they are capable of organizing and liberating themselves. Keep in mind, this is a film that was most definitely made for a western (in this case, European) audience.

Peter Matthews's essay also takes issue with the idea that The Battle of Algiers is "even-handed," just because it shows both sides carrying out acts of terrorism against civilians, and because it shows the suffering inflicted on both the French and the Algerians as a consequence of this war.

Matthews argues that The Battle of Algiers is not even-handed at all, and re-watching it with an analytic eye, I understood exactly what he meant. In fact, it is a relentlessly, deliberately partisan film that consciously works to align our sympathies with the Algerians from the very first frame.

What is the first scene of The Battle of Algiers? It's the aftermath of an interrogation. The subject of this interrogation is an old man: toothless, thin, nearly naked, who has quite obviously been tortured. His torturers are French soldiers in uniform. At one point as many as half a dozen of them pack into the frame. The visual distinction between oppressor and oppressed could not be clearer. (Like I said, the replication of imperialism on the level of the individual.)

In the very next scene of the film, a seemingly ludicrous number of French soldiers pour into the Casbah, the Arab quarter of Algiers, and surround a house where revolutionary leader Ali La Pointe is hiding. Ali is one of the heads of the FLN, an Algerian resistance organization, and during the film we will see him do or organize some quite violent things. But when we first meet him, he is hiding in a crawlspace with another man, a woman and a young boy, surrounded by French soldiers who are threatening to blow up the house with everyone in it. (This is not, incidentally, the scene depicted in the screen shot at the top of this post. The first time we see Ali, he is unarmed.)

What is the point of these scenes? I would argue that they are essential in locking in our identification with the Algerian protagonists of the film. They invite us to feel the intense oppression of colonialism for ourselves. If you were treated like this, you would fight back too.

A similar dynamic is at work with the French civilians (although one could argue that settlers are not really, truly civilians) who, indeed, pay a high price for participating in their nation's colonial projects. Many people who watch this film remember the scenes depicting the bloody aftermaths of bombings in the French quarter, in which we are encouraged to feel quite sympathetic toward this terrorized population.

But the French of Algiers are not always shown to be totally innocent. The first time we see them, they appear as a suspicious, racist mob that gets Ali La Pointe thrown in jail. Here, again, we're invited to see the French settlers as the Algerians see them. It's another racist mob that leads to the mistaken arrest of an old man for the shooting of a police officer...an event that in turn prompts an enterprising police captain to take matters into his own hands, setting off a chain of escalating violence that will claim the lives of some of those very people who were so quick to finger an Algerian who we, the audience, know is innocent of any violent activity.

Although the film positions the French as victims of violence just as deserving of our empathy as the Algerians, there are really very few well-developed French characters. There is one notable exception: Colonel Mathieu (a fictionalized composite of several real French officers) who is in charge of the counterinsurgency operations in Algiers.

Mathieu, the only character in the film to be portrayed by an actor recognizable in Europe, really only has a handful of scenes, but they're so memorable I have found myself returning to him as a character model over and over again. If Ali La Pointe is the personification of the Algerian resistance, then Colonel Mathieu is the embodiment of the cold logic of occupation. He is not hateful. He's not even particularly racist. He is a rational, intelligent man who sees exactly what needs to be done to break the resistance in Algiers and is willing to do it. He's smart enough to know that in order to defeat an enemy, you must see him as your equal--a person like you, with fears, hopes and desires, and understandable, logical motives for his actions.

Like many good antagonists, Mathieu is the filmmakers' opportunity to tell it like it is. When confronted by a reporter about allegations of torture, he replies calmly. There is only one question to be answered, he explains. "Should France stay in Algeria? If the answer is still yes, then you must accept all the necessary consequences." And, of course, he's right. One couldn't ask for a more succinct elucidation of the logic of imperialism.

The genius of The Battle of Algiers is that it's able to show both sides of the argument, while still be completely unequivocal about who is right. There is no doubt that the filmmakers believed the Algerians to be completely justified in resisting colonialism by any and all means necessary. If they hadn't, they would not have made the movie. I don't think anyone makes a political film without being on one side or the other--which doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't show the weaknesses, contradictions and flaws of the side you support, or the justifications and humanity of the people on the other side. It just means that it's not really possible to be "even-handed" when you're telling a political story--nor should you try.

basically, i want to be the intellectual love-child of trotsky and george orwell

This is how my brain works.

I was researching Palestinian Christians for the feature I'm writing this semester. I noted that although Christians were no more than 20% of the population of mandatory Palestine (and now make up a far smaller percentage of population of that region), a seemingly high number of prominent Palestinian politicians, intellectuals and artists came from Christian families. Among them: George Habash, founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (the political organization to which my protagonist's father belonged); Edward Said, probably the most famous Palestinian intellectual as far as the English-speaking world is concerned; and filmmaker Hany Abu-Assad, director of Rana's Wedding and Paradise Now.

Then I started thinking about how, maybe, Palestinian Christians were a bit like European Jews, a minority group that also produced a disproportionately high number of writers, intellectuals and fighters for social justice, from Rosa Luxembourg and Leon Trotsky (born Lev Davidovitch Bronstein), to the thousands of Jewish members of Europe's Communist and Socialist parties and trade union organizations (like Amira Hass's parents) most of whom have been forgotten by history. How before WWII, the stereotypical assumed political orientation of European Jews was not "Zionist" but "Communist." How these peoples' awareness of their status as a minority frequently led them to be the first and fiercest fighters for equality and social justice for all people.

Then I started thinking about how tragic it was that this radical European Jewish tradition was basically liquidated during the Holocaust. The Nazis, smart enough to understand where their most powerful enemies lay, first attacked the organized left and the trade union movement, so that when they proceeded to full-scale genocide, there was no movement capable of opposing them.

Then I started thinking about how so much of what we learn in school about the rise of Nazism in Germany is either inaccurate or distorted, and how generations of American high school students have been led to a warped understanding of both history and humanity because of this. Every American high school student learns about the Holocaust, but almost no one learns that Germany was on the brink of Russian-style workers' revolution not once, but THREE TIMES between 1918 and 1923, and it was not until the last revolutionary attempt failed, leaving Germany in economic turmoil and the left lacking credibility, than fascism started to gain popularity. I took an entire semester-long course on the Holocaust in high school and didn't manage to understand that reality. I even remember reading a famous quote from Hitler--"I will never forgive the Jews for what they did on November 9, 1918"--without realizing that November 9, 1918 was the date of the German revolution that overthrew the Kaiser and hastened the end of Germany's participation in WWI.

Without an understanding of fascism as a specifically counterrevolutionary ideology--an understanding that fits with the history of other countries, including Spain, Italy, Russia and Chile--the only explanation for why some countries seem to go off the deep end in terms of crazy right-wing racism and genocide is that there must be some inexplicable moral defect in the fabric of these nations. Which is kind of how the Holocaust is taught in America. Why do you think you think every history lesson on the Holocaust starts with the history of anti-Semitism in Germany--which was certainly bad, but no worse than any other European nation? But of course it is taught this way in America, because no one wants to teach American kids that the true counterweight to fascism is not American bombs and imperialism but international revolutionary socialism.

After my brain had wandered through all this and came to the conclusion that I wanted to write a series of short "forgotten history" textbooks aimed at high school students, I went back to the Palestinian Christians and it occurred to me that maybe this whole line of thinking was a tinge Islamophobic. After all, for every accomplished Palestinian Christian, there are tons of equally accomplished Palestinian Muslims, since the vast majority of Palestinians are, of course, Muslim. Then it occured to me that there were some specific material factors which would account for the over-representation of notable Palestinian Christians in the preception of the west. Palestinians of Christian descent are, statistically speaking, more likely to both be allowed to and choose to emigrate to the predominantly Christian nations of Europe and the Americas. And because of Islamophobia in these nations, they are probably more likely to be accepted into the social, political and intellectual circles of the west than Muslims of any nationality are.

At this point, you may be asking what the point of this blog post is. The point is that I'm becoming increasingly aware that I can't separate art, history, and struggle from each other in my life. I've often thought that when researching a creative project, I end up with enough material to write a quite interesting non-fiction book on whatever place/time/movement I've been learning about. But I don't just want to write non-fiction--I want to use this knowledge to make political art as well, not just for the sake of being political, but because I like making art. And of course, all this is tied up with my conception of myself as an activist and a revolutionary and a political storyteller, even if I'm still trying to figure out exactly what I think that means.

I am becoming increasingly clear on what it doesn't mean. I want to make movies, but I don't want to pursue a Hollywood career simply for the sake of being "in the business." I don't want a purely academic or documentary career, either--although I would not be averse to more school (say, a PhD) as long as I don't have to pay for it. And I don't particularly want to be an artist/activist with a day job. I tried that for nearly four years and I don't think it works for me--I lack the capacity to split my mental and emotional faculties like that.

I want to find some way of intergrating all the things I love into a career. Well, duh, of course, everybody wants that! And of course, this realization does absolutely nothing to address the massive debt I will find myself in after finishing film school. Much as I'd like it to be so, it seems unlikely the social revolution will arrive before my loans come out of deferment. But it is a helpful guideline as I make my way through film school and life, as I make choices about what classes I want to take, how I want to spend my summer, where I want to live and what I want to do after I graduate, etc. Deciding that I want carve out my own career path as an independent left intellectual and artist is not a guideline that particularly makes my life any easier. In fact, it will probably make it a lot harder and ensure that I'll either have to be wildly successful or be debt-ridden until I'm 50. But hey, when did I ever want to do something just because it was easy?

reading versus watching

I have one professor who's obsessed with reading screenplays and basically told us on the first day of class that as screenwriters, watching finished films is useless to us. I have another professor who told us on the first day of *his* class (in which we watch a movie every week, then watch it a second time and analyze it) that watching finished films was the best way to learn storytelling and we weren't going to get very much from reading scripts.

Prof #1 (the reading guy) makes a very valid point: you're writing a script, not a movie. No one is going to buy the imaginary movie that you create in your head as you're writing your screenplay; they are going to buy your script. And if you want the imaginary movie in your head to ever have a chance of becoming a real movie, you'd better write a damn good script. Which you can learn to do by reading other scripts and seeing how they work or don't work.

Prof #2 (the watching guy) argues that watching a film is primarily an emotional experience, and that we should be striving to get our scripts as close to the emotional journey of watching a finished movie as possible. He also points out, quite rightly, that "editing is the final rewrite" and that we can learn more about story structure from looking at a finished project that works well than from a script, even a great script, because things often change in shooting, and if the movie is good they should get better.

So who is right? Well, of course, they both have valid points. But after reading a bunch of scripts and watching a bunch of movies, and arguing vociferously with Prof #1 about this question, I have to say that I still lean toward the "watching is better" side of the debate. Of course I think you can learn a lot from reading scripts, and it would be ridiculous to try to be a screenwriter without ever having read a script.

I think reading scripts is entirely valuable for the technical, "how did they write this kind of scene?" knowledge. Certainly, if I was going to write, for example, a big action movie, I would read a bunch of those types of scripts to see how others have done it. What does that huge long chase scene at the beginning of Casino Royale look like on the page? That is certainly essential to know. But I think you can learn just as much about dramatic structure and audience engagement from watching a finished film--perhaps more, since a finished movie has been through the hands of actors, a director, a cinematographer and an editor, who, if they're competent, should know as much about cinematic storytelling as the screenwriter.

There's another argument in favor of watching, in my opinion. We're in the business of moving pictures. Movies may start on the page, but they're meant to be experienced visually--in the theater, on the big screen. Many people have written about how the human activity that's closest to watching a movie is dreaming. We go into a dark room, we stare at a bunch of still pictures, and our brain creates an experience out of them for us. David Howard and Frank Daniel, the intellectual patriarchs of the USC screenwriting program, write about how a movie should be experienced like a "seamless dream." (This is, by the way, in the introduction to a fairly technical book on screenwriting structure.)

I was in New York City for about three days over winter break, and during that time I saw four movies and two plays. And the whole time I was sitting in the audience, I was thinking THIS IS AWESOME. I remembered why I love movies and why I wanted to create them in the first place. I'd forgotten the magic of sitting in a dark room filled with other people and experiencing something beautiful together. Ultimately, film is designed to be experienced visually, emotionally and collectively. Even the best script in the world can't replicate the experience of sitting in the dark and watching a great movie with other people. And I definitely think you can't write a great movie without remembering this experience.

P.S. In the interest of full disclosure, the "watching guy" is my feature writing prof from last semester, and his class basically rocked my world. It's not hyperbole to say that his class fundamentally transformed my writing process in ways that I'm still only beginning to understand. The "reading guy" is my feature writing teacher this semester, and let's just say he has a very different approach. He and I have not gotten along so well this semester--I think we just have very different creative approaches. So perhaps I am a bit biased on this question. But of course, I still think I'm right.