Hue's Blog

A great David O. Russell interview

That’s the most beautiful thing that I like about boxing: You can take a punch. The biggest thing about taking a punch is, your ego reacts and there’s no better spiritual lesson than trying to not pay attention to your ego’s reaction. That’s what takes people out of the fight half the time. They get hit and half the reaction is, your ego is saying, “I cannot believe that person just lit me up, how humiliating.”...That’s why I love Bill Clinton. I just love people who can take a punch and pick themselves up and come back...I had a few humbling years, and those years made me a better filmmaker. I write better now, and I see better now cinematically.

The full interview (here) is definitely worth the read.

Product is the new Story

People say a movie is all about story.  I think product is all about story.  A good product affects how you see yourself and the world.  You open yourself up to it emotionally and it rewards the investment.  But telling a story is a specialized skill, like drawing or cooking.  I look to Apple as the clearest example of a company who's products are stories.  This is from an interview with John Sculley, former CEO of Apple:

A friend of mine was at meetings at Apple and Microsoft on the same day and this was in the last year, so this was recently. He went into the Apple meeting (he’s a vendor for Apple) and when he went into the meeting at Apple as soon as the designers walked in the room, everyone stopped talking because the designers are the most respected people in the organization. Everyone knows the designers speak for Steve because they have direct reporting to him. It is only at Apple where design reports directly to the CEO.

Some companies view "product management" as the group that builds what other groups (marketing, sales, account management) want.  Let the designers and product people drive the ship.  Might be surprised what you get.

You can read the whole Sculley interview here.  It gives a nice history of Apple since the early days, as well as a perspective on how Steve Jobs runs Apple.

The Las Vegas Economy

When we were making "Saint John of Las Vegas" we talked about America's Las Vegas economy.  That the American Dream had morphed into the American Jackpot.  If success was 90% showing up than we wanted to leverage showing up to borrow the other 10%.  This review in the Las Cruces Sun is the first to really touch on this theme.

"We can all sympathize with someone like John, who at least has a big, stucco palace with no foreclosure sign in front of it, has a car that's not being eyed by repo, has a job where the cubicles are disappearing as positions and salaries are "downsized," and can — in those few seconds scratching a quarter across a gleam of bronze wax, or leaning on green felt, strategizing like James Bond, can still dream."

You can read the full review here.

Ryan Buynak – One Poetic Sonofabitch

My good friend and punk poet Ryan Buynak just had a great write-up.  It's titled "Ryan Buynak – One Poetic Sonofabitch" and you can read it here.

Ryan's website | Amazon

 

Seth's Blog: Hardly worth the effort

"Laying out the design of a page or a flyer so it looks like a pro did it takes about ten times as much work as merely using the template Microsoft builds in for free, and the message is almost the same...

Except it's not. Of course not. The message is not the same."

From Seth Godin's always insightful blog.  I have found this to be true for everything I've done, from finite element modeling to film color correction.  What people respond to is love in the work, and to love something is to love the details.  Read the full post here.

50,000 Films Is a Very Good Thing

"A study of classical performance attendance by the Knight Foundation gives interesting insight. In an analysis of audiences for classical music, they found the greatest predictor of attendance at such venues wasn’t ticket prices, education or income level, but whether someone had ever learned to play an instrument. If you have musical training, you feel a more intimate connection to the music and you search out many types of music, including classical, to explore its history and its niches.

I believe that likewise, in film, we now have legions of young people who have learned to shoot, edit and make a film. The industry tends to dismiss these as amateurs and complain about the torrential flood of their films, but we might just have the perfect generation -- one that feels a visceral connection to film and wants to explore it more."

This is from a great post by Brian Newman on TheWrap.com.  You can read the full article here.

A nice mention on Inc.com

I got a nice mention in Inc. Magazine's Blog Loyalty – How to Get Repeat Traffic.  You can read the full article here.

Film Critic Roger Moore on "Saint John of Las Vegas"

Roger Moore, one of the country's top nationally-syndicated critics, says Steve Buscemi was "born to play" the lead in Saint John of Las Vegas.  Read the full review here.

Conversation with Brendon Connelly of /Film

"The film is pricked with references to Dante’s Inferno, though certainly has it’s own narrative which requires no knowledge of the Divine Comedy to understand - think how the Coen Bros. and Homer blended into O Brother Where Art Thou. And whereas the Coens’ film stood on the shoulders of Preston Sturgess, the equivalent influence on St. John would appear likely to be Ozu or Milos Forman."

I had a series of conversations with Brendon Connelly, about Saint John of Las Vegas.  We discussed career paths, film grammar, movie financing and the Bellagio Hotel.  Read the full interview on /Film here.

NY Post profile of Steve Buscemi

About Saint John of Las Vegas:

“The lead character was charming and funny and smart, and I understood his need to gamble and being in denial about it,” Buscemi says. “To me, that’s the fun of acting: to play characters that have problems and are complicated.”

Read the full article here.