souljoel

Tornado! and "Indie Heaven"

This morning I submitted two treatments for consideration for the screenwriting workshop the Memphis Film Commission is doing July 18 and 19 at the Paradiso Theater, called Indie Heaven .

One is Tornado, based on the novel of the same name, written by my late grandmother, Juanita Osborne. A very prolific writer (almost 50 novels published), Juanita lived in Memphis most of her life. Tornado was her first published novel, and it is awesome. It was the raciest of her novels -- thus published by ACE. The bulk of her other novels -- Southern Gothic mysteries all -- were published by Avalon, primarily a house that publishes young adult mysteries and romances and such.

My Grandma was a very sweet lady with a DARK imagination. I have long wanted to adapt many of her novels into screenplay form, and I would love to make movies out of almost all of them. Tornado is especially ripe for cinematic treatment, I think, along with, in no particular order, Walk with a Shadow, The Shrinking Pond, and Heiress of Fear. You can find all of her books on Amazon or Abe Books. They are short and weird and very fun. And scary. Think ... Flannery O'Connor meets Eudora Welty meets ... David Lynch.

My Mom and I own all the copyrights to her works, so they are fair game for my screenplay adaptations.

Tornado is about a girl who awakes in an old Southern manse with total amnesia. She was apparently flung there, from wherever her home is, by a tornado the night before. As she struggles to remember who she is, she comes to question the motives of the "kindly" family that's taken her in to recover from the trauma -- physical and psychological -- of the storm.

My adaptation, while trying to remain true to the themes and cool Gothic horror feel of the work, modernizes the tale and changes the setting from a rural former plantation to a Central Gardens Memphis mansion. (All of my grandma's works take place in or near Memphis, another cool thing for Memphis readers.)

The second treatment I submitted is Wishing Well, a story I've previously workshopped with Max Adams, Nicholls Fellowship-winning , Hollywood-produced screenwriter and writing instructor extraordinaire.

So I hope one (or both!) of my treatments is/are selected for this workshop. The producers conducting the thing are super-cool, Barry Jenkins and Mike Ryan, both with some ultra-fab credits to their names. I will enjoy meeting them this Sat.-Sun., and hope to see you all there as well.

New York Film Festival

Opening night of the festival, Lincoln Center, great film: The Class, the Cannes-winning film by Laurent Cantet.

MS .45

                                                                  

Abel Ferrara's Ms .45 is excellent. Just read about it in the Times this week, thought I'd give it a shot, and it is freaking excellent. Zoe Lund plays a mute fashion industry worker named Thana, toiling away sewing buttons and ironing skirts for a sporadically tyrannical designer in NYC. At the beginning of the film she is raped while walking home from work. She stumbles home only to find a burglar lurking in her apartment ... who also rapes her. She manages to dispatch him though (with an iron!), but she's apparently snapped. She drags him to her bathtub, chops him up into manageable pieces, wraps them in garbage bags and loads them into her fridge. She takes the rapist's .45 handgun and so begins a vigilante mission across New York, as she slays any dude who shows the tiniest bit of disrespect to her or any other woman in her field of vision.

I think what sets this apart from lesser chick revenge flicks (aside from the excellent casting of the beautiful and expressive Lund), is the device of Thana being a mute. This forces the director to find visual solutions for every scene. And the pace and look and editing of the movie are so tight and fast and concise that the story moves along with a sense of inevitable dread, giving it an air of the truly tragic and amplifying the horror at every beat.

I don't want to spoil anything here, so I'll just barely touch on the real clincher, a magnificent set piece near the end that takes place at a circus-like Halloween party for fashion insiders. It just gives you goose-bumps it's so incredible ... Just glorious film-making!

Oedipus Rex

                        

Last week I submitted my latest short film, Oedipus Rex, to the Indie Memphis Film Festival. Along with the usual excitement of completing a project and submitting it to a festival, I'm especially thrilled because this is my first project since my ACL injury last February, which was followed by surgery and subsequent months of physical therapy. I want to give a quick shout-out to the people who made this film possible: Bennett Foster, who plays Oedipus in the film; Bradley Kroeker, who plays Laius; Kevin O'Brien, who did sound and helped with lighting; and as always my lovely wife, Jenean Morrison, who helped with all aspects of the production!

I love taking a Greek myth and putting a modern spin on it. The last time I did this in a film was with Orpheus (2005); but this film is quite different. Whereas Orpheus was lush, full of music, and rather meandering, Oedipus Rex is brief, stark and music-free -- a departure of sorts for me, despite exploring some themes which are always interesting for me ...

Here's hoping we make it into the festival; I would love to share this film with my fellow Memphians! Thanks again to the folks who worked with me on this one. This was one of the fastest, smoothest shoots I've ever worked on!

Stay tuned and I'll post some pics from the shoot and stills from the film. And maybe I'll do a trailer ... which is somewhat comical for a film that clocks in at 4 minutes 12 seconds, but, hey ...

The Fugitive Kind/ Wild at Heart

OK, so I feel kind of dumb about this, but before I read David Foster Wallace's excellent article "David Lynch Keeps His Head" from his collection of articles and essays called A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, I had no idea The Fugitive Kind was a major influence for Wild at Heart. The very weird (and highly underrated) 1959 film by Sidney Lumet is not considered his best work, and I had never seen it before. But wow it is pretty freakin' fantastic. Brando is good-but-not-great as the drifter Xavier (he of the snake-skin jacket) who ditches New Orleans and a life of guitar playing and male prostitution to hit the road and find a more respectable life not frequenting "night places". The movie is of course based on Tennessee Williams' play "Orpheus Descending". The really great treat this film has to offer is my absolute favorite performance ever by Joanne Woodward, as Carol Cutrere, a fallen-from-grace southern rich girl who's off her rocker and a free-spirit, hippie kind of slutty saint, the kind of character only Williams (OK and maybe Flannery O'Conner) could write this well. The general gist of the story is that there is great evil lurking behind the kind faces of southern small townspeople, and Brando had better git while the gittin's good with his high-fallutin' talk and fancy ideas and pretty face and gee-tar musings. But he won't because it's a tragedy and his ill-fated affair with married shop-owner Anna Magnani (surprisingly only sort of good in this part) is as ill-fated as ill-fated can get, woo-doggie. So watch it for the weirdness, Woodward, the excellent photography, the sort of half-baked philosophy and darkness of it and to see the seeds of the much-better-stuff to come from the incomparable Lumet. And the Wild at Heart stuff, of which there is plenty, from Brando's Sailor-like Xavier with his snake-skin jacket, to the on-the-road stuff with Woodward, and all the fire symbolism.