Dance to That Which One Is Created For

[collisionwork]

Off and on work at home and at The Brick. As the ClownFest has progressed, there has been a little less each week for B and I to do, and now our work is pretty much over and done, except for the Clown Funeral on Sunday (where, I have just now been told, I am to play the Voice of God). Then, Sunday night, I've agreed to light one of the shows from this festival in its run over at The Kraine, so that'll be a last little job to do before we go off on our 2-week or so vacation in New England.

So the time off and at home has involved research into the history of marketing and branding for Invisible Republic #3, reading The Complete Peanuts, and watching old Thriller episodes for relaxation. Unfortunately, the more I watch Thriller, the less it becomes relaxation fodder and the more I want to do something like that, so I'm getting more ideas that may just be taking me down a dead end that I shouldn't bother following.

I kinda love the idea of trying to put together a modern version of one of those black-and-white 1960s horror anthology shows that I'm such a fan of -- besides Thriller, I think happily of One Step Beyond, The Outer Limits, and of course The Twilight Zone and in a slightly-different but connected way, Alfred Hitchcock Presents. A web series that could be done cheap, in DV, with a gothic air yet modern setting. All in Brooklyn (don't know why, but I like the idea of limiting it to the borough). Maybe call it Avenue X or something like that . . . suggestive of mystery and location but not TOO specific (Gravesend would be too on-the-nose). I'd want to kind of be the "John Newland" of the series, as story editor/showrunner, on-camera-host, occasional actor, and general supervisor (though instead of directing all of them, as Newland did with One Step Beyond, I'd rather DP/edit all of them, to keep them visually and tonally consistent). I've been raiding online archives of PD horror stories, to see if there's anything there that could be usefully adapted to such a project.

The problem with this good idea for a project (and why it may be a dead end) is that a great deal of what interests and fascinates me in the style of these inspirational programs is dependent on the conditions under which they were created, that is, in 35mm black-and-white film on Hollywood backlots, with the kind of control and support that comes from backlot shooting -- as well as original music scores composed by the likes of Jerry Goldsmith and Bernard Herrmann and performed by talented studio orchestra players. Shooting under more documentary-like conditions on Brooklyn streets and locations, no matter how well-controlled, wouldn't have the same "otherness" that was a big part of the effectiveness of these shows.

On the other hand, I could experiment a little and see if I could find a style that works. After all, I was most inspired towards a project like this by watching Thriller, rather than Zone or Limits, which I've watched over and over for years without any desire to do anything similar. The noirishness of Thriller was the inspirational part.

Zone, despite its frequent darkness, still takes place in an Ordered Universe, where things are basically right and good and the Dark Things are definite aberrations -- very much a part of turn-of-the-60s New Frontier thinking. Limits is basically a neutral, scientific landscape, where things just happen because that's how it works - things just happen. Thriller is a TV extension of the noir world -- a dark, chaotic place where Fate puts its thumb down on the good and bad equally, and violence, fear, and despair are the real state of humanity, bubbling below the surface, and any sense of order is a temporary illusion. This appeals to me as a tone for a modern version of one of these shows. Perhaps it would work in the combo artifice/realistic tone of something like Touch of Evil. I'll have to see what looks right.

Outside of that, I'm also compiling a playlist of songs that suggest dance pieces to me, for potential use in Invisible Republic #3.

Meanwhile, here's the weekly Random Ten from the tracks sitting in the iPod that haven't been played yet (after I remove these 10, and the bonus track, now down to only 2,699 tracks and 6.2 days of listening!):

1. "Definitive Gaze" - Magazine - Real Life
2. "Death Of A Nation" - Phluph - Phluph
3. "One More Try" - The Rolling Stones - Out Of Our Heads
4. "Dead Man's Party" - Oingo Boingo - Best O' Boingo
5. "Soul Kitchen" - The Doors - The Doors
6. "Roll Over Beethoven" - Chuck Berry - Johnny B. Goode: His Complete '50s Chess Recordings
7. "Water Over the Dam" - National Rifle Association - A Legacy of Conservation
8. "She Has Funny Cars" - Jefferson Airplane - Surrealistic Pillow
9. "Try To Understand" - The Seeds - The Seeds
10. "Hypnovista Trailer" - Movie Sample - The Wild Wild World Of Mondo Movies Music

And here's the video playlist of the above (and for those on Facebook, as always, you have to click through to the original LiveJournal blog to see the videos here):

And here's a playlist of songs that are being considered for Invisible Republic #3. Unfortunately, I could only find live versions of the Yardbirds and Zappa tracks that aren't all that similar to the recordings I'd use (and I couldn't find the Richard Thompson track at all), and I used a live version of the Who track because I like the visuals too much, but here are some possibilities for the show as it stands:

And I'm really really pleased that after being discussed and planned for quite some time, The Brick is finally able to announce The Iranian Theater Festival, next March. This is a Good Thing.

Back to Thriller . . .

Comments

I like arbitrary constraints as a commonality in a series

[justjohn.livejournal.com]

My notion for an anthology was Tales of the Scrimshaw Needle, in which the common thread would be via one very small prop, an ivory needle carved centuries ago on a ship.

With what you're talking about, it sounds like the orchestra would be the most expensive part of the thing. How 'bout a deliberate scaling back of that? A string quartet, or a single piano?

Also, I've wondered about an anthology series with a set cast. They play different parts in the wildly different settings, but each player gets to nod towards other characters they've played -- or will play -- in other episodes.

Re: I like arbitrary constraints as a commonality in a series

[collisionwork]

I think between the various composers/players I know, there could be some interesting scores -- the difficulty would be in knowing in advance which scorer/ensemble would work with each piece (of course, this could be held until later in the process). In listening to the Thriller commentaries, there's some good discussion of how Goldsmith and the other composers worked with small and often unusual ensembles.

I've thought of the set cast as well, but I think in my case that would somewhat happen through practicality, in terms of using the talented actors I know frequently. Thriller winds up almost seeming to have a rep cast, as there are plenty of actors who do three to five episodes, often as similar characters, and I have the feeling anything I do would be the same.

Re: I like arbitrary constraints as a commonality in a series

[justjohn.livejournal.com]

I'll confess I've never seen Thriller and M. Jackson has succeeded in steering me away from the word.

napoleon in Egypt

[(Anonymous)]

One of my favorite things about "Spacemen from Space," by the way, was the Napoleon-like ending, with the Queen being banished to a distant island, but the threat remains that she will decide to come back. (When Napoleon came back from his exile, it was like adding a fourth act to a play that seems to simply rehash material from the third act.)

I think, for this 1960s horror film material, that you could use the Napoleonic wars for the plot structure! In other words, the structure of the story is based on Napoleon, but the verbal and visual style comes from the horror material. Particularly, Napoleon's adventures in Egypt, and especially the way that they were pre-planned with so much academic research by French academicians, seems to have a lot of resonance with current US imperialism, and could give the show a nice rich dose of political content, but without having to refer directly to Iraq or Afghanistan.

Obvious, right?

Re: napoleon in Egypt

[(Anonymous)]

oops, I didn't say who wrote the above. It's from David.

Re: napoleon in Egypt

[collisionwork]

Hee hee.

I think I'd save that for The Return of Queen Oneida, if I ever get to it.

The hope now is to actually expand Spacemen from Space into a 12-episode web series, and while that's big enough that I shouldn't be thinking of the sequel, I've always been interested in the problems of a land after a tyrant is deposed, which could comedically be dealt with in the adventures of the Queen and Planet Ataraxia for sure.

One of the nice advantages to the anthology horror format as a separate project is that it allows you to deal metaphorically with a huge amount of sociological/political/moral issues and themes under various guises (as Rod Serling knew well).