Stamping the X into XMas

Thank God Christmas is over. Aside from the usual trauma and catastrophes I broke an antique chair at my mother-in-law's house which will probably end up at the center of family disagreements for the next few decades or so, surpassing the Thanksgiving when my dad bit into one of my mother-in-law's brownies and broke out his front tooth.

This year, I hauled in some new clothes and Charles Frazier's new book and a few bottles of wine (including one from Coppola's vineyard), and spent an Amazon gift certificate on Philip K. Dick's Flow My Tears the Policeman Said, the Robin Hobbs Liveship Traders Trilogy, and a couple more of those great, great Hard Case Crime paperbacks.

I am chunking along on Primal for a January 1 delivery date. I saw some location photos of a pretty cool cave that will play a central part in the feature, and am working that in.

I have dozed through a few movies but been wide awake during a couple of really good ones, including Marilyn Hotchkiss Ballroom Dancing and Charm School and Little Miss Sunshine. Marilyn Hotchkiss was so good I immediately put it back in and started listening to the commentary track, because I had a couple of suspicions about why things were done, most of which proved out to be true.

My brother got the Star Trek cartoon series on DVD and I proved that there was a character with his name in it, a sore point in his early childhood, according to our mother. In real life, he was named after Eric Fleming, the trail boss in Rawhide.

I played the new Marvel board game, which is fun but needlessly complicated, though I won in a last-ditch battle, Wolverine vs. Spiral, which catapaulted me in points over my middle-school nephew who was making hay with the Hulk. Then I turned around and stunk up Risk 2210 A.D., which is very fun even when you are down to holding Siberia and one or two other places while your brother rampages over the other continents. But like a true rogue state, I kept lobbing nukes at him, a nice added bonus missing in the earlier Risk games.

I'm ready to chuck 2006 aside and solider on to 2007. In the meantime, give me a shout at johnoakdalton@hotmail.com.

Zardoz Redux

I think I am about two-thirds through the PRIMAL rewrite for director Michael Su and chugging along. For those tracking my propensity for writing shower scenes, this one pretty much takes place outdoors where there is no plumbing. So we had to settle for a sponge bath, naturally.

I finished listening to Paul Giamatti read A SCANNER DARKLY by Philip K. Dick, and it was a great audio book. I had picked up the paper version some time ago because SEX MACHINE FX person Leah Sharpe got a job working on the movie version down in Austin, and I figured I would check out the movie at some point. But it just got too depressing, so I shelved it. I came back to it a week or so ago on audio book and really enjoyed it. What I like most about what I call "hippie-fi" is how virtually everyone up until William Gibson wrote NEUROMANCER had no concept of what the wireless, internet, cell phone future would actually be. There are always rooms with huge banks of tape-spinning computers and guys (and women) walking around in plastic jumpsuits open to their navels. Drugs and sex always play a big part, a failure to forecast the Reagan Era. Just think Sean Connery in ZARDOZ, John Saxon in EARTH TWO, and Charlton Heston in PLANET OF THE APES to see the kind of future lantern-jawed, blue-chinned, hairy-chested leading men they were forecasting in the 60s and 70s. Were it that we could return to that (future) past.

I would love to write a screenplay that takes the stance that it was written in the 70s and forecasting the 90s (like A SCANNER DARKLY), then raid a Salvation Army and shoot it with all the sideburns and bell bottoms and plastic ray guns and giant computers still intact. There's something deeply appealing about that.

And I know I could do it, too. I remember shooting a Super-8 short in the early 80s that featured a guy talking on a phone in a car, and having to make sure that you could see the cord trailing off to the dash, because of course if the phone didn't have a cord it would look broken. And I was also the guy that thought CDs would never take off because, after all, they were just little records. Nostradamus, indeed.

Give me a shout at johnoakdalton@hotmail.com.

Bride of Bigfoot

Thanksgiving went well, and by well I mean any Thanksgiving where somebody isn't peeling out of the driveway with their middle finger out the window is a good holiday, our current barometer for measuring such things.

I am always in charge of the post-meal movie, and it is usually hard to find something that appeals to the six to sixty age bracket, but this year I thought it would be easier because circumstances dictated that nobody in attendance was under eighteen. I selected THE ICE HARVEST because it seemed to be a holiday comedy, although the box neglected to mention that this particular John Cusack Christmas movie opened with several extensive scenes in a strip club, for which my wife held me personally responsible. I had to tell her, Just because I have written a few movies that happen to have scenes in strip clubs does not mean I am responsible for every movie with scenes in strip clubs. So we put in RV instead, mild enough for any audience and easy to sleep and digest turkey to.

My hometown of Muncie, Indiana is going to be hosting a reality show called "Armed and Famous" and is about third-tier celebrities getting police training and going out on the mean streets. With guns. Seriously. Check it out here.

Spent a lot of Friday and Saturday morning cooking out PRIMAL for director Michael Su. I noted in working on the rewrite that the monster is referred to as both a yeti and a sasquatch. These are two different things. I knew I was the right person for this job.

Give me a shout at johnoakdalton@hotmail.com.