Break a Leg

Well folks, we have officially stepped foot into the uncharted waters of our new dramatic endeavor, Lurker. Like Yuri has mentioned, there is apparently a website in development, and we have drastically changed the model by which we are producing this new series.

I won't re-tread stale ground here, or at least not today anyway. Suffice it to say that we will not find ourselves with Lurker in the same position we did with Break A Leg: held hostage by a global audience of pre-tweens (that's most of you, right?) and not making any money. 

No no, no sir, no ma'am. Not on my watch.

With Lurker we want to have an audience and make some  actual money, with the ultimate goal of course being to be able to quit our day jobs and do this full time. In that Candyland scenario our adoring fans would get to see real content from us on a truly weekly basis, rather than a semi-weekly basis after months of out-takes and blooper reels.

Yuri and Vlad just write so damn slow. Oh, and our jobs and shit want us to be there working for them like we said we would.

So what are some other differences between Break A Leg and Lurker? I'm glad you asked! I've prepared (and by prepared I mean I'm making this up as I write) a short list called "Compare and Contrast", you know, just like in school?

The sames are of course myself, Daniela, Alexis, and the entire crew. That's Justin, Dashiell, Dustin, Hillary, Hugo, and whoever else bothers to show up and help out. For Your Imagination is still somewhere around here, kicking dust up and looking for change underneath the couch cushions (every little bit helps!). We are essentially using the same camera and shooting in the same format, though with some essential differences (more on that later).

Or how about more on that now? The main difference between Break A Leg and Lurker is a visual one. Using duct tape, glue, some ingenuity, and a spinning mirror, Justin and Dashiell have fashioned an attachment for the camera that allows them to use any standard photography lens. This allows us all sorts of creative visual options while shooting, including the Holy Grail of optical image capture, Depth Of Field. Allow me to illustrate with a (highly redacted) still shot from our recent shoot:

Click me to make me legible.
You see how the background is blurry and the black squiggles are in focus? The squiggles are mostly Microsoft Paint, but the background is all San Francisco. That's depth of field.

The trade-off is that we require shitbuckets more light now in order to get a quality image. By way of illustration, our recent shoot of 3 1/2 pages of dialogue took 6 hours. For the first time in my entire life, I am not exaggerating. We could easily shoot in half the time before. 

One important new difference: Sammy! I wasn't too sure about Sammy at first. All I knew about him was that he operated some fetishist-comedy mailing list that my wife had trouble removing herself from. As it turns out he's not a bad guy, though he finds Kristin Wiig hi-larious and that troubles me a bit.

So there you have it! If you would like a higher resolution version of that picture for your desktop just let me know. It may require more redacting though.

I was recently invited to attend an acting workshop for a new version of Shakespeare's The Tempest.  It was run by an independent theater company in Sebastopol caled The Independent Eye.  Now, one thing you should know about Sebastopol is that it is where alll the hippies went.  They have signs posted banning nuklear weapons and styrofoam within city limits.  The Whole Foods there is always crowded.  On average, the men have longer hair than the women.  It's that kind of place.

The concept for this workshop was to mix Shakespeare and puppetry.  Now, puppetry can be pretty interesting to watch - if done right.  I think there is a convention in a lot of theater to over-embelish actions and charicatures, where you feel like the fact that it's a surealistic sort of genre is basically crammed down the collective throat of the audience, and that it is easier to do this when working with puppets than it is when it's just people and a set.  Additionally, I think it takes a certain kind of outlook to resist the instinct to over-act.

The people running the workshop didn't have this kind of outlook.

One of the things that always makes me squeemish about theater is the word "experimental".  Now, I understand that no progress can be gained without trying new things, but there have got to be times when somebody looks at what is being tried and says "Just because we can doesn't mean we should."

The space that the workshop was being held in was basically a garage converted into...well, a workshop, with the walls painted black and the floor carpetted.  Half the space was filled with racks and boxes holding various puppets, which were pretty much just heads with a draped cloth "body".

The workshop was being run by Connor and Elizabeth, who introduced themselves as "life partners".  At first, this threw me a little bit because I usually only hear the term in regards to gay couples.  I mean, I just didn't think it was necessary.  It was obvious they were living together.  It's like two people walking hand in hand and pointing out to people "this is my boyfriend."  Good for you.  How is this relevent?  Connor has long, white, bushy hair always slightly in disarray.  Elizabeth has blonde hair and that sort of weathered look that only a truly organic lifestyle can provide.  Both were extremely soft-spoken, which to some people, to me, is just fucking annoying.  They had us do several vocal and physical warm-ups which involved moving randomly and making sounds that supported the movement, which I have always hated, but always tolerated because it's just part of theater.  I have my own ways of warming up.  For instance, on that day, I had just come from an hour and a half of ballet practice.  I was pretty friggin warm.  SO, eventually we had 10 people in a tiny space moaning and flailing all over the place like a pack of possessed epileptics.  We did one other excercise where we had to think of a traumatic moment in our lives and speak out loud to the circle things we would like to say to that moment or like to hear from that moment.  Then we had to improvise one of the other actors moments without quite knowing the context and that actor got to direct how they wanted the moment to have happened rather than how it did.

Finally, we got into some basic puppet technique, which was pretty interesting.  But that was the last half hour of the 3 that the workshop had been scheduled for.  Now I'm all for learning new things and trying new stuff, but when I show up to a 3-hour class and I'm looking at my watch before 10 minutes has passed, I begin to consider the possibility that maybe this isn't quite one of the chances I should have taken.  Of course, the Catch-22 there is: you'll never find out that you shouldn't have gone unless you go.

There are supposed to be about 12 more of these workshops that will then lead into the actual production of The Tempest.  Right now this process threatens to contain a lot of the things I hate about theater.  The dinger here is that there are some people involved that I really enjoy working with and would feel somewhat bad about leaving them to put up with that stuff by themselves.  I'll have to think about it.

Happy Jenday

Break a Leg has a chatroom! Come talk to your fellow fans and yes, creators, writers, actors and crew of Break a Leg will all periodically appear too!

Enjoy! Just go to the Episode or the Board section of the site.

The new fall season has finally more or less arrived here, and on some networks is well underway.

First of all, let me say this: the writer's strike really fucked a lot of networks, shows, and viewers. Not just when it happened, the biggest problem at the time is nobody really cared that it was happening. The worst effects are being felt now.

Put it like this: when NBC places a full-season order for Knight Rider, what that tells you is the mid-season replacement options are even worse. I shudder to think from what a full season of Knight Rider is actually sparing us.

Now see, that last sentence is grammatically correct but it just makes no sense to me.

There are a few shows that returned in decent shape, a few more that returned in terrible shape, and a few more that just shouldn't have returned at all. None came back strong, that's for sure.

Returning Shows

The Office - People are saying it's lost the magic, but I'm still laughing. Pam in New York is really annoying and makes no sense, but the show as a whole is surviving that well.

Desperate Housewives - Jumping forward five years is an interesting and daring choice to dust off the show that wasn't really getting dusty yet. It hasn't really lived up to the promise of the premise though, with most characters just doing the same stupid shit they always did. Overall, still enjoyable, if not just a touch weaker.

Pushing Daisies - This is where it starts to hurt. Ummmmm... I stopped watching after two episodes, and I think I deleted the Season Pass on my DVR. If I didn't, I will when I get home. Remember the episode last season with Paul Reubens? Me neither, it was boring and I skipped it. That's what this whole season has been like. The characters and the style are still wonderful and magical, but the plots are boring and worthless. Plus, how long can we really care about the relationship between two people that can't touch one another? Sorry.

Survivor - Kidding. No writers, no strike, no problem. Still watching, will probably watch until Jeff Probst goes to ground in some tropical jungle and kills the entire cast slowly over 39 days with the camera crew watching through night-vision footage. He will then crown himself the winner. Awesome.

Lost - Dear god, please be good. Last season raised the bar on amazing.

24 - We know this will be ridiculous, and we'll watch anyway.

Burn Notice - You should be watching this. Season Two should be about over. I'm waiting to get it on DVD and power through, same way I did with Season One.

BSG - Can't wait to see how this turns out.

The Sarah Connor Chronicles - I don't even know what to say about this. I just.... don't know what to say.

Did I forget any returning shows?

New Shows

Life On Mars - I'm watching this, every week. It's kind of like I don't care whether I watch it or not, but once I turn it on I'm really into it. The entire cast is superb with special props to the lead, Jason O'Mara. It's a cop show and Lost, plus Harvey Keitel. What's not to love? It's a little broad sometimes and the "cop" aspect of the show could use a little work, but overall it's worth the time.

Knight Rider - see above, way above, like the third paragraph.

The Big Bang Theory - A new sitcom, which makes it an endangered species. I accidentally watched some of this and was not, I repeat not, trying to poke out my eardrums with an ice pick. As far as your traditional sitcoms go, it was funny and charming. If traditional sitcoms are your thing. They are not my thing, so I hated it.

Gary Unmarried - I really like/liked Jay Mohr. If you haven't seen Action then you haven't watched TV. It's a spiritual prequel to Break A Leg that was cancelled (as are all the wrong Fox series) too soon. This new show is, again, a traditional sitcom (tell a joke, hold for laughter, follow that up with a zinger!), but Mohr is pretty irresistible. The kids are not annoying, which is another in the plus column. Studio three-camera sitcoms are not really my bag anymore as I said, but this one is worth checking out if you're into that sort of thing.

That's about my rundown. These are only the shows that I have seen or am a fan of, so I've left out a lot. I'm not Tim Goodman, I don't have four TVs! Append the list in the comments with your favorite shows or tell me what an idiot I am for having an opinion at all.

So, I work in a sign shop.  My primary position is as a graphic designer, but I also serve as a secondary salesman.  Our shop is set up so that when people come into the show room, they encounter the two primary salespeople.  I sit in a section in back where I can see the show room through a window.  If there aren't enough people up front, I step up to help with customers, either in person or on the phone. 

Every so often we get somebody that comes into the shop that is nearly beyond help.  I had one of these today.

Our showroom has a pretty wide variety of the kinds of signs we make.  For instance: there are samples of all the different A-Frame signs we make.  These samples have the prices clearly printed on them.  So, when this one lady came in asking about the A-Frame prices I politely pointed to the signs and pointed out that the prices for each sign were listed there.  The lady proceeded to walk over to one, point at it adn ask "So how much is this one?"

Ah, one of those.

English was obviously her second language, so I could understand a bit of a communication barrier there.  But it wasn't so bad that I didn't think she couldn't understand what I was saying. I told her that the sign was $x, just as it said on the sign.  She pointed at another one and asked how much that one was.  I told her, still as polite as I could be, that it was $n, just like it said on the sign.  She then went into relating a tale of wonder and woe to me that she had called earlier and asked about the price of a sign and whoever she had talked to said they were around $37 or so, and why was the price I was giving her now so much different from what she was told over the phone.  The way she was talking about that conversation suggested to me that prehaps whoever she had talked to on the phone may have misunderstood what she was talking about, so I, in turn, suggested the same to her. 

Just one other saleperson and myself were at the counter at the time, and she asked if it was either one of us that she had talked to.  We quickly established that it wasn't, and maybe the guy she had talked to was at lunch.  She then demanded to know why he would give her a price that was so inconsistent with the information she was currently being given.  I stated that not having been party to their conversation, I could only suggest, again, that perhaps they other salesperson had misunderstood what she was asking about.  It happens.  Simple mistake.

She went back over to the signs that we had already determined by spoken testament and by the printed text on the signs themselves had cost $x and $n respectively, and she repeated her request for the cost of each sign.  I repeated that, just as the signs said, they cost $x or $n, or perhaps even $q if she wanted extra options.  She repeated the story about the phone call, then demanded to know where our wayward salesperson may be off to, and why had he given her erroneous information.

This went on for a while.  Finally, satisfied (or not, as it were) that the prices weren't what she expected and weren't apparently going to change anytime soon, she wandered off.  I went back to my desk.

Then she came back in.

The other salesman got to deal with her this time.  I tried to stay out of her sight just so I wouldn't have to deal with her, though, with her powers of observation, there wasn't much risk of her noticing me, even if I was standing on her head.

I have a hard time fathoming how it is that people like this have successful business careers.  Is it luck?  Is it the fact that people get so annoyed with them that they just give up and give them what they want?  It's people like this that make me feel that we have too many safety laws in this country.  We have almost completely managed to do away with natural sellection, and people like this are allowed to breed.  We need more chlorine in the gene pool!  Darwin must be rolling over in his grave.  Maybe if their was a higher chance of death inherent in our lives we would learn to enjoy life a little more and not focus on all the stupid bullshit.

Or maybe people would scrabble even harder to get their stupid, greedy, little hands on everything in their reach.

Either way, there would surely be shorter lines at the DMV.

Happy Jenday!