I flew up to Oakland yesterday for a lunchtime lecture and Q&A at Pixar. And wow. It’s really nice up there.
If I had to work in an office, I’d work there. It combines everything I like about Dreamworks/Amblin (lunch, toys, a noticeable lack of evil) with everything I’ve read about Google (daylight, servers, smart people on scooters). They even showed me the secret cellar where they mine joy.
My presentation was on Expectation as it relates to story. It was brand-new material that I was trying out for the first time, and I was fairly happy with how it went. Once it’s in a bit better shape, I’ll post some of the lecture on the site.
As frequent readers know, my geekery is almost limitless, so it was great to be able to ask questions about 32-bit color spaces and whether model articulation and prop interaction relied on message-passing. Sample inquiries: If an animated character picks up a can of soda, does that can of soda become part of the character’s domain or does it remain a separate object? (Answer: the latter.) If an explosion casts light, is that handled by VFX or the lighting department? (Lighting will probably get the last word.)
Many thanks to the Pixar folks for good questions and better answers. And a special thank you to Stephan Bugaj and Michelle Lindsey for setting it up.
Screenwriting is generally a career in which you set your own hours and work environment. Like a novelist, the screenwriter can choose to work in fuzzy slippers from 11 p.m. until dawn, fueled by Twizzlers and Mexican Coke (the kind with real sugar). Your employers don’t particularly care about the process as long as the script arrives on time and debatably brilliant.
As screenplays tip perilously close to production, the rules suddenly change. Producers start asking for pages the same day. Directors tell you to stay close, because they’ll have some new ideas they want to add after they talk with the stunt coordinator. You find yourself sitting in an office surrounded by people frantically performing the work of making the movie you scripted.
For Big Fish, my office was a giant classroom in an abandoned high school. For Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, it was a little room at Pinewood Studios with a phone no one could operate. For Titan A.E., it was a half a cubicle at Fox. Regardless of the square footage, I was expected to write on demand. In each case, it wasn’t just small changes, but major new scenes that had to blend into the rest of what I’d written.
Novelists are never asked to do this.
This past week I’ve been in New York, working on an unannounced project that is still a long ways off from production, but facing a Very Big Meeting on Thursday. We’ve been renting studio space at a venue that couldn’t exist in Los Angeles: thirteen little rooms that alternate, hour-by-hour, between karate classes, choir rehearsals, commercial auditions and classrooms for the kids in Billy Elliot.
Number of kids in tears I’ve seen: three.
Number of adults: two.
It’s so different from my normal writing life, in which my only distractions are a snoring dog or the gardeners on Thursday. But the chaos is also kind of exhilarating, a chance to remember that writing isn’t something that only happens in hermit-mode.
Some of my favorite scenes have come out of this process. I think that’s because they tended to have very clear objectives. Meeting with Jessica Lange during her wardrobe fitting for Big Fish, I noticed that she was picking much sexier outfits than I expected. “Sandra wants to look good for her husband,” she explained. That was kind of genius, but I hadn’t given her any scenes that really supported this idea. I wrote the bathtub scene on hotel stationery and showed it to Tim Burton that same evening. That kind of insight only happens on location.
This afternoon, I walked 18 blocks to retrieve an inkjet printer, then cabbed it across town so I could print new revisions tomorrow. I’m not using any of my normal stuff — I don’t usually do “real” writing on my laptop, and hadn’t even activated Final Draft — but it’s reassuring to see that writing is the same regardless of the tools or location.
Tonight, I’m off to see West Side Story. Which is another great thing about being in New York.
I flew to Paris for a meeting this weekend.
That’s absurd, of course, spending 22 hours in the air just so I could sit around a small table with two other jet-lagged people. But it was an important meeting, a kind of reality-check on a project everyone wants to see done right. As a screenwriter, you quite literally need to make sure everyone is on the same page, so sitting down in person makes sense.
And sitting down in Paris is lovely. With my spare time, I took a [Vélib](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velib) bike across the city to check out a future apartment and encountered my very first grifter, whose gimmick (a found ring) was so smoothly delivered I almost wanted to tip him for the performance.
I woke up at 2:30 this morning, hoping to see the Oscars, but the hotel’s TV didn’t carry them. So I found myself following the action via Twitter (#oscars), letting a thousand strangers tell me not just what was happening, but how they felt about it. ((Twitter’s atomic bundling of opinion and reportage is new. If the telegraph had made it to individual homes before the telephone, we might have had a precedent.)) It’s like swimming in a giant stream of consciousness.
It’s exhausting. I only lasted an hour. But for those sixty minutes, I had effectively outsourced television watching. It was the next best thing to being there. “There” being a television in America.
In a less jet-lagged state, I could probably write more eloquently on the implications of this dislocation. But my hunch — my possible thesis — is that quick flights to Paris and text-watching the Oscars are markers of the same general condition: a frustration that we can only physically be in one place at a time. It’s an unsolvable problem, but the ways we try to compensate for it are telling.
For starters, we move faster. Broadband is ubiquitous enough that when we don’t have it, it feels like going back to outdoor plumbing. My husband was in Asia for ten of the last fourteen days, but our daughter saw him every morning at breakfast thanks to iChat. She is growing up in an age in which no one actually goes anywhere: Daddy isn’t gone; he’s on the computer.
But faster isn’t everything. [An article in today’s International Herald-Tribune](http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/02/20/arts/design23.php) celebrates the Concorde, a plane I never had the opportunity to fly. I didn’t realize it was often twice as fast as today’s airliners: London to New York in three hours. That’s great, but it’s not really transformative in an age when so many things come Right Now. Given its price and relative lack of luxury, the Concorde was ultimately competing against email. Digital won.
Another way we compensate for not being places is through constant communication with folks who are. That’s what Twitter and Facebook status updates do. At an all-WGA meeting at the Shrine Auditorium near the end of the strike, leaders scolded someone in the audience for live-blogging what was being said. Just a year later, that already seems quaint. Of course people are going to be Twittering. Some people can’t be here; why shouldn’t they be included?
The TV show Lost is all about location and isolation. For the first few seasons, the survivors didn’t really care where they were, they just needed to tell someone off-island that they were alive so they could be rescued. That’s shifted in the past two seasons, with all the focus now on reconnecting with those left behind. ((As one might guess from The Nines, I’m partial to the Desmond episodes. The idea of a “constant,” while narratively murky, feels right: you need someone who knows you independently of the present madness or you’re screwed.)) The question of where the island is only matters once you’re off it.
The third and I think most dangerous strategy for coping with the place problem is simple denial. We psychologically stay home, even when we’re gone. I’m doing it at this moment, typing on my laptop while Paris awakens outside. My friend Dan moved to New York to produce a TV show, and says never really saw the city: he had thirteen nights free in four months. He was either on set or on the phone with Los Angeles the rest of the time, and came to see the JFK-LAX flight as a commute.
I see it happening with this generation of college students. When I left Boulder to go to Drake, and when I left Drake to move to Los Angeles, I left people behind. Through phone calls, letters and visits home, I maintained relationships with a few close friends. But ninety percent of the people I knew vanished in the rearview mirror. That doesn’t happen as much anymore. Through Facebook and email, it’s trivial to keep up with dozens of classmates more or less daily.
But is it really a good idea?
Your twenties are a crucial time, and I’d argue that it’s harder to discover yourself — or reinvent yourself — when surrounded by a vast network of people who already have a fixed opinion of who you are. I went to college and grad school not knowing a single person, and while it was a little terrifying, it was also liberating. Decoupled from my previous opinions and embarrassments, I was able to become the 2.0 and 3.0 versions of myself. I could only do that by going somewhere new. By changing place.
I’m packing up to fly home. Before I do, I’ll post this on the blog. But it occurs to me: I have absolutely no idea where the servers hosting this site are located. If I wanted to see the hardware, where would I go? That this question never occurred to me is also telling.