A friend of mine did something kinda snippy today and didn't apologize though she definitely should have known better, especially after having it pointed out to her. So I had some fun and made the following graph. Where do YOU fall on it?
No one should ever have to choose between doing the right thing and being happy.
It's a variation on what's sometimes called a Hobson's Choice (though Wikipedia has just informed me that it's more correctly called Morton's Fork). It's also pretty similar to Sophie's Choice.
I was reading this article, where the author says, "Psychologists assumed that their patients wanted to be happy, failing to notice that, for many people, being good is more important than being happy." Made me realize something. Wherever society is immoral, its members must choose between being good and being happy. You must make the choice, though it's a choice you should never have had to make. The rule holds regardless of the size of the society; it can be as small as two people or as large as everyone.
What's wrong with a world that forces this kind of choice? Keep reading.
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A couple of years ago, I played a joke on a new friend. Instead of laughing about it, she accused me of harassment and breaking and entering. Granted, it wasn't a very funny joke, but I wasn't aware the penalty for a comedian bombing was so severe. So I'd like to post a warning for any practical jokers out there: never, never play a joke involving somebody's car, house, or computer without getting notarized forms signed in triplicate that they're planning on getting the joke.
First, a little background. This was not the first time I planted a joke grenade on someone's computer. Allow me to describe just three prior offenses.
In college, back when "sound cards" were brand new and nobody but geeks like me knew how to record or play sound on computers, I changed my friend's computer startup sound. He was ahead of the technology curve himself and had managed to hook it up to his stereo, so the next time he booted his computer, he got blasted with a deep-voiced recording of God instructing him to fill his disk drive with potato chips. (For the record, he denies following the instructions.)
A couple years later, my girlfriend was running sound for a play that was being performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. I'd rigged up a system for them to run the sound cues off of a laptop computer–way ahead of its time back in 1997! When she got to Scotland and booted it up, the joke grenade deployed and she got a very cute romantic animated message from me.
A few years after that, I installed a widget on my brother's computer so when he booted up, he got HAL9000's eerie red light on his desktop, reporting loudly that all systems were functioning perfectly.
If you haven't detected the pattern yet, let me describe it bluntly: these jokes are not very funny.
But they're kinda cute in their own way. They're just stupid little joke grenades. They're mildly subversive, in a spirit of fun, and you wouldn't think someone would respond to one by suggesting she might file a harassment suit. Right? Then keep reading.
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A couple of months ago, I started writing a long post about the movie Expelled. I made the mistake of assuming there were but a handful of sane voices in the meeting-place of public opinion, and that I needed to join them to be heard above the crowd cheering on this insidiously dishonest movie. But when I showed up at the meeting, the crowd was jeering and the filmmakers had already been laughed out of the room. My humble services were not needed–much to the relief, I'm sure, of those who would have received them.
So I just slapped together this list of links so you can enjoy the saga if you like. For those who are curious about the Expelled kerfuffle (a polite term deriving from the Latin word "clusterfuck"), I include the following one-paragraph synopsis:
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My Sundance screenplay, All of Creation, featured among its themes the importance of science to understanding our world and finding meaning in it. In fact, the slot I took at the Sundance lab (talked about in this post) was created by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which advances science and science understanding in the popular media. I've always loved science, but only recently realized that it is under systematic attack by religious fundamentalists posing as scientific thinkers. I still remember watching Inherit the Wind as a kid in the late 1980's, thinking what a great movie it was and how lucky the world was to have outgrown such astounding stupidity as Creationism. It's still one of my favorite films–and favorite plays–but it's since come to my attention that the rabble-rousing inanity has resurged under the laughable sheen of Intelligent Design, or ID for short.
These IDiots, like the obscenely rich coiffed televangelists of our nation, leverage the great wealth they've accumulated from hoodwinked believers and spend it on very professional public-relations efforts to garner public sympathy for opinions which get laughed out of courtrooms and scientific journals because they are so effortlessly demonstrably false.
I've had some success with my screenplay about science, and have begun writing another and have already applied for one grant on its behalf (as documented in this post), so I think I have a certain responsibility to counter this tent-revival of infectious ignorance. I'm going to write about the new farce of a film, Expelled, and to do so I wanted to do a little groundwork to provide one small example of the kind of IDiocy I'll be referring to therein. So here goes my first crack at the debate, in the form of a rebuttal to an excerpt of a piece of ID propaganda:
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It's become popular to make fun of Hayden Christensen. And why not? He killed Anakin Skywalker. With brow furrowed in angst and lightsaber blazing as blue as his poster-blue eyes, he destroyed the Anakin we once knew and replaced him with Darth Emo.
For those of you unfamiliar with his performances in Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, I will summarize some notable comments by critics:
"Christensen plays Anakin as if he were a brooding, whining brat forever on the verge of a teary-eyed tantrum." –Christopher Smith, WeekInRewind.com
"Anakin, as embodied by Christensen, is the kind of needlessly moody kid you might see getting punched out in a Dairy Queen parking lot." –Paul Tatara, CNN.com
"Part of the problem is Christensen, whose breakout role was playing the young Anakin Skywalker in the recent execrable 'Star Wars' installments, and who has never managed to project anything but a sullen air of lazy entitlement." –Ann Hornaday, Washington Post
Before I talk about Stop-Loss, I have to talk just a bit about Hayden Christensen. First of all, let me be fair. The problem with Star Wars was the lack of directing and writing talent, not the lack of acting talent–poor Hayden wasn't the only one George Lucas humiliated onscreen. Nevertheless, for some reason Hayden continued his misunderstood writhing in other films, like Jumper, which was best described by Andrew Pulver of the Guardian as being a series of "tortured love scenes for Hayden to glower through." You know how Michael Jackson is the guy who started everyone moonwalking? How Marlon Brando is the guy who introduced believable performances into film? Well, Hayden Christensen is the guy who brought emo to Hollywood.
It may well be that you can't fully understand Stop-Loss until you understand this. It may be different for you, but for my own part, if it hadn't been for Hayden, I might not have seen why Stop-Loss was such a terrible movie. I would have hated it without the important step of knowing why. Fortunately, I do know why, and I'm gonna tell you.
This morning I woke up to my phone ringing. I'd been up late working on a new website–I haven't been writing on the new screenplay lately because I decided to make some money for a few months first so I could afford to concentrate on it. The call was from Lacy Pearman, the vice-president of development at Dreamworks. She was calling to offer me $180,000.
When I was at Sundance, I met a guy, Renardo, who worked at one of the little coffee shops in Park City where all the famous people go in between screenings. He was on break and had picked up a flyer for my movie Moving which I'd strategically left on tables in shops and lounges and screening rooms. I got to talking to him about it, and we struck up a conversation about movies, which he loved as much as I did and wanted someday to make himself.
Well, Renardo eventually made his way to LA and became a script reader, then a member of a development team, then a producer, then an assistant to Lacy back when she was with Universal, around the time they were working on "Charlie Wilson's War," written by one of my favorites, Aaron Sorkin. When one of their subsidiaries offered us our $20,000 distribution deal I mentioned in an earlier post, word filtered up and it jogged his memory. He asked for some of my stuff and I sent it, not expecting anything in response.
Well, Lacy was out in New York pulling together some East Coast talent for a sequel to "Charlie Wilson's War" about the repurcussions in Afghanistan of America's intervention there against the Soviet Union in the 1980's–a theme strongly hinted at in the ending of the film but never actually addressed. Apparently, Aaron Sorkin wanted to do it himself but is busy working on a West Wing feature film idea, and is having trouble getting Martin Sheen onboard, because (and this is just scuttlebutt) he is working on some bigger-budget projects to help pay for his son's legal bills over the past decade or so, which nearly bankrupted him. So my buddy Renardo sent Sorkin my screenplays, and he loved them and recommended me to Lacy personally.
This is Lacy's first big project at Dreamworks since leaving Universal, and I've been offered it! Plus the possibility of a three-film development contract if the screenplay hits certain milestones. I'll probably be moving in a few months.
I was cast in Glengarry Glen Ross, which opens tonight at The Generic Theater and runs till Feb 10. You try keeping up with a blog while rehearsing a play and see how it goes. I'm playing Kevin Spacey.
The Dave Matthews Band played the welcome picnic during my orientation week at the University of Virginia. They were beginning to attract attention for their regular Tuesday night gigs at Trax, which by my third year there was a statewide phenomenon. But at the time, they still played picnics and fraternity parties. I thought they were neat, but didn't stay long since I had yet to develop the ability to interact with strangers my own age. What I remember about that day was the crazy guy in the straw hat playing violin.
Three years later, I was pitching him my music video ideas.
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