Why I Love Mentalism

I fell in love with magic when I was over 40 years old.
This, of course, is not typical of magic which usually
attracts its adherents young.  But it was a very particular
type of magic - mentalism - not magic in general which
suddenly swooped down one evening and captured my
heart.

And it was sudden.   Very sudden.  In fact I fell in love
in the space of a single routine:

Used Car Salesmen
(Note:  This is the American version of the same routine,
which I saw in its original British form, which I prefer,
but which I couldn't find on-line.)


In the original British version, the piece is accompanied
by Derren Brown speaking on the techniques he used
to tell truth from fiction - even when the liar stays silent.
I was hooked by a single question which always grabs
me in the best of Brown's work:

Is the mind really capable of this?
And the same question in inverted form:
Is the mind really vulnerable to this?


A new way of exploring what it means to be human
opened up to me at a time when I really needed
something new, because the world seemed to be
steadily growing smaller.

It came at a time when I was disappointed by the
inability of my latest feature film, Black Mail, to find
an audience and so build my career as a writer-
director on the comparative success of my previous
film, Nightingale in a Music Box; at a time I was
frustrated in my attempts to get a new film or theater
project off the ground; and at a time when my heart
was being broken by the prolonged dying of a 
beloved brother.  


Mentalism opened a new horizon and made the world
bigger again.   It had nothing to do with psychic
phenomenon, which held no interest for me; it had 
everything to do the with the mystery of being human. 
The secrets it brings to light are not altogether pleasant,
for instance we are endlessly manipulable, but they do
inspire wonder and the realization that we have capacities
to be explored that we have been too lazy to look into.  

Three Filmmakers

John Ford
The Searchers

Nicholas Ray
Bigger Than Life

Hurt McDermott
Nightingale In A Music Box

Indie Film's Week of Winners and (Mainly) Losers

This is the most difficult week of the year for
American Filmmakers, the week Sundance
announces its picks for next year's Festival.

Of course for a few hundred filmmakers,
including those with shorts and documentary
makers, it's a wonderful week; but for thousands
more it's a disappointing week.  The chance to
gain a little attention for their labor of love has
been denied them.

And beyond the filmmakers who applied in
a specific year and did not get in, there are
tens times more who applied in previous
years, failed to get in and know their
work is unlikely to ever get even the little
attention an unsuccessful film at Sundance
will get.  (Full Disclosure:  I do NOT have
a full submitted to Sundance presently. )

Nassim Nicholas Taleb suggested in The 
Black Swan that all prizes, such as the
Pulitzer and the Nobel, be abolished,
because luck plays such a large role in
who wins and the prize hurts a much
larger number of worthies who never
win or receive attention than the few
who do.  I admire him for admitting the
psychic pain of losing out to others is
real for artists and not pretending it's
petty or doesn't matter. 

His critique seems to apply to Sundance
as well, which for many American independent
filmmakers divides the winners from the losers.
And in ways that don't always seem based on
merit.  Certainly having well known actors
in your film gives it a better chance to get
in Sundance than any other factor.

Those small films that do sneak in do so on a
combination of factors, including luck.

The year I came close to getting in
with NIGHTINGALE IN A MUSIC BOX -
I know, because I was warned to make
sure my print was ready - I knew someone
who worked at Sundance who made sure
John Cooper looked at it personally.

Still to admit chance plays a role in who
gets in - and how could it not with so
many entrants for so few spots - does not
negate the good Sundance does in widening
the opportunities for lower budget films.
It's only right to admit that it does so at
a high psychic price for myriads of
disappointed American filmmakers who
find the week before Thanksgiving the most
painful of the year.

Jack Aubrey, Master & Filmmaker

Strangely enough, the best series of books on
the life of a film director - as opposed to the craft -
are Patrick O'Brian's  Aubrey-Maturin Sea Saga
set during the Napoleonic Wars.

Being a captain of ship at this time of total
naval war is a lot like being a director in this
time of total media saturation in that time is
neatly divided between the times you have a
command (a film) and the times you don't.

When you don't have a film (a ship), everything
becomes about obtaining your next project (command);
and then when you finally get a project, you are not
so much in control - at least not if your budgets are as
small as mine were on NIGHTINGALE IN A MUSIC
BOX and BLACK MAIL - as in a dance with chaos.

Ship's captains of that time were in a similar position
of having absolute authority - but only authority to
improvise in dealing with the chaos that the sea,
the weather and the enemy dealt their way.   

Of course in the end, both captains and directors are
held responsible for the final results as if they really
did have control over the process.

Those made to be captains and filmmakers would not
trade the life for any other.

The first of the series is MASTER & COMMANDER.

We Don't Learn to Swim

                                                  .
Only God controls his thoughts, Catte,
She said to me.  The rest of us
Are the creation of our thoughts,
And we swim in their consequences,
Our reactions the waves we ride
Until we are pulled under, and
No light penetrates, and
Even the surf is so distant
It sounds intelligible.


                                                

The Roasted Swan

?                                                  ?!

Those of you who know Carmina Burana know there is
a Black Swan in it, actually a white swan roasted black:

The Roasted Swan

Neither the surprised bird nor Carmina Burana shows
up in Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan, but
this doesn't stop the book from being the perfect gift for
the young filmmaker or novelist starting out into a career
in which randomness (or luck, if you prefer) plays a large
role.  Taleb has caught the artist's predicament very well,
covering everything from how rewards are doled out to
artists in a less satisfying manner than to accountants
to the real toll the success of lesser artists exacts from the artist
struggling with  lack of recognition and the knowledge that
there is a very real chance - a strong probability if one is
honest with oneself - that not only will he or she neither get
the money nor attract the many attractive people attracted to
success, but that the work itself, that for which all else has been
sacrificed, might well vanish into a void too.

By Black Swan  he means a highly improbable event,
say 9-11 or a stock market crash.   People in power and
insurance executives fear Black Swans, but obscure artists
chase after them.  For filmmakers, even getting into a film
festival is a highly improbable event if they have no
actors the public has heard of.  The one Black Swan I have
managed to catch is winning the Jury Prize for Screenwriting
at Slamdance in 2004 for  NIGHTINGALE IN MUSIC
BOX, which I also directed.   

This was the only one of my four features to make any
splash on the festival scene, eventually winning several
more prizes and playing European festivals as well.
Slamdance receives over 5,000 submissions per year with
about 3,0000 of of them being features.  They show under
30 features, meaning getting shown there at all is by
objective measure a highly improbable event. 

It leads to Park City, but it did not lead to fame and fortune,
and my next film BLACK MAIL has had the same difficulty
all my films previous to NIGHTINGALE had even getting into
a festival.  What's the difference between NIGHTINGALE'S relative
success - you can buy it on Amazon after all! - and the
obscurity of my other films?  Taleb would argue that it's as
likely to be a question of luck as of the quality of the movies
themselves.  To say I was lucky with NIGHTINGALE is not
to deny its quality, but just to say the first reviewer had to
like science fiction, or be in a good mood that day to even
give the film a chance.

Taleb's concern with randomness and luck reminds me
of Boethius and his Consolation of Philosophy, a wonderful
book whose Wheel of Fortune shows up in 24 Hour Party 
People.   Taleb also finds some consolation in randomness,
especially since the internet now gives the obscure thinker
or artist a place to wait in the antechamber of success for
the work to be discovered.*  This is because work can
survive basically forever in digital form on the net.  He
uses the term long tail to refer to this relative permanency
of any work now, no matter how obscure, and says of the
long tail:  "the world is made no less unfair for the little
guy, but it now becomes extremely unfair for the big man.
Nobody is truly established."

In other words, those at the top of the wheel will come
down when it turns again - thereby creating room at the
top - and so those of us who feel we have not yet
received the attention our work deserves can pray,


Oh, Fortune, turn your wheel one more time!


---                ----                      -----

*Of course it could turn out to be the antechamber
of further obscurity too.   There is no way to tell is
one of his points.  The insecurity is not only
frustrating but over the course of a lifetime injurious
to the health of the artist, Taleb argues.

I want to stress that I can not comment on his
economic advice, which is what he is best known
for.  I just do not know enough about it.