Thursday, January 13, 2005

The Capture of Grizzly Adams

Yesterday it was in the mid-60s, with flooding everywhere. Yes, rub your eyes, faithful reader, and read this again--just a few short days ago we were huddled around a fireplace and watching our frozen trees crash into the yard, yesterday was short-sleeve weather. Now Brad Pitt and Jennifer Anniston have broken up, another sign of the apocalypse. Rain of frogs pending.

This is what I bought with my last $50 of Christmas money, purchased off of Amazon.com today over lunch:

Extreme DV at Used-Car Prices: How to Write, Direct, Shoot, Edit, and Produce a Digital Video Feature for Less Than $ 3000 by Rick Schmidt

Rebel Without a Crew: Or How a 23-Year-Old Filmmaker With $7,000 Became a Hollywood Player by Robert Rodriguez

Signal to Noise by Eric S. Nylund

Distraction by Bruce Sterling

On the Rez by Ian Frazier

The Manga TPB Madara - Volume 1 by Eiji Otsuka

and the CD The Other Side of Time by Mary Fahl

Stash for the next ice storm, methinks.

Give me a shout at johnoakdalton@hotmail.com.


5 comments:

Joe Sherlock said...

I have the original "Used Car Price" book by Rick Schmidt - while there was good pre-production info in it, too much of it talked about filmstock and such, which didn't do me any good being a video guy. It will be interesting to hear how he's updating things for the digital video age.

I reread "Rebel Without a Crew" every year or so - while it rambles a bit it is very inspiring. Not so much because of a lot of step by step kind of instructions, but the plain old gumption and excitement that Rodriguez had when making his movies and managed to capture on the printed page.

My two cents.

- Joe

The Furnace said...

And now it's snowing again and headed towards 5 degrees outside. If Kerry had been elected I'd say it's the apocalypse, but since W is God's Chosen One...

John Oak Dalton said...

Schmidt's first "used car" book, as well as John Russo's "Making Movies," were early inspirations for me. Have never read Rodriguez's book and know that several people re-read it every so often, as you have indicated. The others are for fun.

John

Anonymous said...

Hey, John-

Have you been able to catch Primer up there. GREAT (though confusing) film. I absolutely loved it and was shot on a bear budget. I hope it does really well.

Adrienne and I caught it in Indy one weekend we were up before an orthodontist appointment and then we traveled 2.5 hours south to Paducah, KY to their kick-ass art theater (go figure - check it out here, Maiden Alley Cinema) in order to catch it again (this time with a former Lawrence Livermore engineer in tow, aka Adrienne's Dad, to help figure it out).

Loved it even more, but still confused about parts of it. The beauty and agony of a good time-travel yarn, I suppose.

Jim

John Oak Dalton said...

I'll keep my eyes peeled for this one. Love time travel stories.

John