The Nines
Sundance catalog is out
The catalog for this year’s Sundance Film Festival came this week, which was my first chance to see what everyone else’s first impression of The Nines would be. The festival organizers write the descriptions for the films, so you’re sort of at their mercy. Fortunately, John Cooper wrote up a very nice blurb for The Nines.
Three actors–Ryan Reynolds, Hope Davis, and Melissa McCarthy–are a delight playing different roles in the three different scenarios that comprise John August’s film The Nines. In “The Prisoner,” a troubled television star finds himself under house arrest with his chipper publicist and disillusioned neighbor providing his only link to the outside world. “Reality Television” is a Project Greenlight-style show tracing the behind-the-scenes tribulations of a half-hour sitcom. And in “Knowing,” an acclaimed video-game designer and his family have car trouble on an outing and find themselves stranded deep in the woods.
Writer/director August is firmly at the helm of this unique film. The three stories are linked to each other on a metaphysical plane, forming a stylish puzzle of coincidences that questions the underlying notions of both life and art. Does the creator have a responsibility to his or her creations? If we shape the lives we lead on any level, why not on all levels? Are we or are we not responsible for our own happy endings?
If you need tidy conclusions to these and other questions films sometimes pose, The Nines may not be for you. But if you love great writing, direction, and performances and are willing to ask questions, The Nines offers an upbeat, as well as enlightening, adventure.— John Cooper
My only correction would be in the first paragraph: Part 2 concerns a one-hour drama pilot, not a sitcom. The hijinks are more harrowing than hysterical. And for the record, he doesn’t mean that kind of “happy endings.” Shame on you.
You can see the printed version with all of the other information as a .jpg or a .pdf. There’s an online version of the entire shebang at the Sundance website.
Seeing The Nines at Sundance
I’m not going to suggest that devoted readers fly thousands of miles to see The Nines at Sundance. But I’m not going to not suggest it.
I’ve long been of the mindset that there’s no reason to go to Sundance unless you have a movie there. I haven’t been since Go debuted there in 1999. I had a great time, but it was a zoo, and my threshold for tolerating crowds, schwag and auteur-theorists drops considerably when wearing a parka.
But the truth is, most of the people going to Sundance aren’t filmmakers at all. They’re simply people who love films, particularly the kind that never see wide release. (You know, the ones that show up on critics’ top ten lists, yet you’ve never heard of.) There are worse places to spend a long weekend — what with the skiing and the dozens upon dozens of excellent films waiting to be discovered. So if you have the interest and means, why not come? Crash on the floor of someone’s motel room. Maybe you’ll meet that special someone who will change your life. Or convince you never to sleep with a singer/songwriter/gaffer.
Now that I’ve possibly convinced you to come, the natural follow-up question: Hey John, could you slide me some tickets?
Um, no. Sorry. In fact, the producers and I are actively scrambling to get tickets ourselves, because the festival allotment is limited.
Advance ticket sales begin January 5th, so the clock is ticking. They’ve recently released a brochure (.pdf, 5.6Mb) describing all of the films in the festival. If you’re signing up for a range of movies and showtimes — the omakase menu, if you will — the odds of getting some good tickets is pretty high. But if you’re trying to get tickets for one specific show, that’s where it gets tougher.
For The Nines, the premiere will be Sunday, January 21st, at 9:30 p.m. at Eccles. It’s a big theatre, but it’s almost certain to sell out. So if you want to come to it, definitely get tickets through the website. Basically, you pay $5 to reserve a place in line — or more specifically, a lottery ticket for your place in line. On January 5th, you get an email with a time that you can sign in to purchase your tickets. A pain in the ass? Absolutely. But it’s the best way to make sure you get a seat.
There are three other screenings of The Nines that week. I’ll be doing a Q&A after the premiere (along with the cast and some department heads), and also after the Monday morning and Tuesday night screenings.
I previously linked to a helpful guide for attending Sundance, but no doubt many readers will have their own recommendations. So, share away.
I heart WriteRoom
For the past few weeks, I’ve been working on the production notes for The Nines. The document will end up being about 20 pages, detailing the backstory of how the movie got made, from inspiration through editing, along with everyone’s bios. It’s part of the press kit for the film, helping the journalists at Sundance remember who the hell was in the movie they saw three days ago.
Ultimately, we’ll end up formatting the notes in Word or Pages, but for raw text I lean heavily on TextMate, which is what I use for all of the writing for the site. It’s unbelievably powerful, if occasionally maddening.1 I have TextMate set to automagically generate a lot of the formating markup, and the tag-wrapping feature can’t be beat. But on a lark, I decided to try a new application for writing the production notes: WriteRoom.
It’s deliberately, refreshingly bare-bones and retro. When you open a window, it takes over your entire screen, including the menu bar. All you see is the words, complete with a blinking cursor. Perhaps nostalgic for my years writing on an old Atari, I’ve chosen a dark blue background with almost-white 18 pt. Courier. Give me a kneeling chair and a dot-matrix printer and I’m in junior high again.
Other writing applications are picking up this full-screen meme — honestly, it’s hard to figure out why it took so long. Apple’s Pro apps (Final Cut Pro, Aperture) have had no qualms grabbing every available pixel of real estate, although they don’t completely banish the common interface elements. (Except for Shake, which also requires a blood sacrifice to Ba’al.)
The big-screen treatment is the digital equivalent of closing the kitchen door when company comes over: Never mind the mess in the sink, let’s have a nice dinner.
WriteRoom 2.0 is in beta, but there’s nothing spectacularly different or better than plain old 1.0. Either version is worth checking out.
As for the inevitable question: Could I write a script with it?
Yes, no, maybe.
I’ve actually had conversations with two gurus of web markup about creating a simplified screenplay markup that could be imported into “real” screenwriting applications like Final Draft. WriteRoom and its ilk support tabs and external scripts, so it’s conceivable to build a system like ollieman’s screenwriting with TextMate bundle.
But for now, I have an actual paid rewrite to be doing, and it’s a Final Draft job. Sigh.
- To wit: If you use command-z “Undo” to fix something you shouldn’t have deleted, TextMate will replace it one letter at a time, undoing each backspace rather than the whole chunk. Apparently, the software creator feels strongly that this is the logically correct behavior, and while I disagree, I fully respect his decision to say, “because that’s how I want it!” ↩