Since her death in 1979, the woman who discovered what the universe is made of has not so much as received a memorial plaque. Her newspaper obituaries do not mention her greatest discovery. […] Every high school student knows that Isaac Newton discovered gravity, that Charles Darwin discovered evolution, and that Albert Einstein discovered the relativity of time. But when it comes to the composition of our universe, the textbooks simply say that the most abundant atom in the universe is hydrogen. And no one ever wonders how we know.
- Jeremy Knowles, discussing the complete lack of recognition Cecilia Payne gets, even today, for her revolutionary discovery.
It’s been a year since I first posted this, but today TimeHop reminded about Cecilia Payne and I thought that qualified as an automatic reblog.
Abraham Lincoln - Purchased today in Glendale. Set aside for future reading.
Five Hardest Books To Read
Staggering page numbers, an infinite amount of strange and fascinating characters buried in almost as many digressions, technical and obscure theoretical findings…that’s what these masterpieces are all about. If your idea of a good (and in my opinion with these works, great) read is a true intellectual challenges that affords the careful and diligent reader with some pretty amazing ideas/insights, then bust out the reading glasses and try not to strain your brain. Understanding any one of these books on a first read might just be an exercise in futility, since I think the authors themselves might not even understand them fully, but they’re all great in their own way.
I’m not sure when I’ll be able to get started on this list - but I suppose writing it down is the first step. Any recommendations on where to start? Has anyone reading this post read any of these books: The Way of Love, Ulysses, The Sound and the Fury, Violence and the Sacred, or Gravity’s Rainbow?
I have that big book with the notes I took, and then I go and I put lots more observations and notes. Then I begin to go through that and summarize the part that I thought was useful. And quite naturally you’ll see that the parts fall away, or that you have too many characters, so you know that you have to eliminate some or combine some. Working on it this way, from the outside in, being more specific as to what you think… then when you finish that, you are qualified perhaps to try to write a draft based on that notebook.
This list of 10 recommended books from Herzog and Aronofsky has been collecting dust in my Tumblr drafts for weeks now; the original list actually had an 11th book from Hemingway, but, for what ever reasons, I don’t have much interest in reading Hemingway right now.
- Making Movies by Sidney Lumet
- The Writers Journey by Christopher Vogler
- Easy Riders, Raging Bulls by Peter Biskind
- The Ragman’s Son by Kirk Douglas
- Hitchcock by Francois Truffaut
- Georgics by Virgil
- The Warren Commission Report
- Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais
- The Poetic Edda translated by Lee M. Hollander
- True History of the Conquest of New Spain by Bernal Diaz del Castillo
I’m still finishing up Sculpting in Time by Tarkovsky - but I am hoping to immediately move on to one of the above books; if I had to narrow down the books that I feel interested in currently, my first 2 picks would be: Hitchcock or Writers Journey; and the Writers Journey has actually been recommended to me by more than one person, so that pulls some weight next time I’m at the North Hollywood Library.
To refer again to my own experience, I must say that a prodigious amount of work went into editing Mirror. There were some twenty or more variants. I don’t just mean changes in the order of certain shots, but major alterations in the actual structure, in the sequence of the episodes. At moments it looked as if the film could not be edited, which would have meant that inadmissible lapses had occurred during shooting. The film didn’t hold together, it wouldn’t stand up, it fell apart as one watched, it had no unity, no necessary inner connection, no logic. And then, one fine day, when we somehow managed to divise one last, desperate rearrangement - there was the film. The material came to life; the parts started to function reciprocally, as if linked by a bloodstream; and as the last, despairing attempt was projected onto the screen, the film was born before our very eyes.
America is not broke. Contrary to what those in power would like you to believe so that you’ll give up your pension, cut your wages, and settle for the life your great-grandparents had, America is not broke. Not by a long shot. The country is awash in wealth and cash. It’s just that it’s not in your hands. It has been transferred, in the greatest heist in history, from the workers and consumers to the banks and the portfolios of the uber-rich. Today just 400 Americans have the same wealth as half of all Americans combined. Let me say that again. 400 obscenely rich people, most of whom benefited in some way from the multi-trillion dollar taxpayer “bailout” of 2008, now have as much loot, stock and property as the assets of 155 million Americans combined. If you can’t bring yourself to call that a financial coup d’état, then you are simply not being honest about what you know in your heart to be true.
via Zadi Diaz
Battlestar Galactica - Series Bible. 53 typewritten pages by Ronald D. Moore.
High on my reading-list is Moore’s outline for Battlestar Galactica - building a long-arc story is one thing, that process can be unique for each person; but if you want to see how to piece together an ambitious series outline, these 53 pages are invaluable.
Since her death in 1979, the woman who discovered what the universe is made of has not so much as received a memorial plaque. Her newspaper obituaries do not mention her greatest discovery. […] Every high school student knows that Isaac Newton discovered gravity, that Charles Darwin discovered evolution, and that Albert Einstein discovered the relativity of time. But when it comes to the composition of our universe, the textbooks simply say that the most abundant atom in the universe is hydrogen. And no one ever wonders how we know.
- Jeremy Knowles, discussing the complete lack of recognition Cecilia Payne gets, even today, for her revolutionary discovery.
via wikipedia
She attended St Paul’s Girls’ School and then won a scholarship to read botany, physics, and chemistry at Newnham College, Cambridge University in 1919. Here, her interest in astronomy was sparked by Eddington’s lecture on his eclipse expedition to Africa to photograph the stars near the eclipsed Sun as a test of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
She completed her studies, but was not awarded a degree as Cambridge did not grant degrees to women at that time. After meeting Harlow Shapley, the Director of the Harvard College Observatory, who had just begun began a graduate program in astronomy, Cecilia Payne left England for the United States in 1923. This was made possible by a fellowship to encourage women to study at the Observatory. The first student was Adelaide Ames (1922) and the second student was Payne.
Why Won’t [the Internet] Save Indie Film?
Earlier yesterday Ted Hope twittered a link to the Top 12 post of 2010 rundown on Filmmaker Magazine - I sent all 12 post to my Instapaper queue, as I had somehow managed to not read a single one of the listed post, but - one that caught my eye was an article by Anthony Kaufman titled Why Won’t Kickstarter And Twitter Save Indie Film?. I’m not really quite sure why of all the film-related post written between the months of January and December that this stood out on anyone’s radar in particular, but it was amazingly frustrating to read. I was surprised to later find that Kaufman is fairly young, at least young enough to know better, not the 70 year old disgruntled film-vetern he first appeared to be.
I’m going to list a few of my favorite snippets from the post:
via The Filmmaker Magazine Blog
Internet-enabled DIY filmmaking-and-distribution model is far from guaranteed. At this early stage, the successes are few and far between.
“I think it’s completely overwhelming and totally worthless,” says [Joe Swanberg]. “I don’t think a Facebook message or a Twitter update translates to asses in seats.”
“Doing the distribution took a lot of precious time away from our other projects,” says [Mynette Louie]. And the team’s Kickstarter campaign to help fund self-distribution failed, garnering just $1,430 of a $5,000 goal. “We [were] sort of relieved about it,” Louie adds, “because we were dreading having to ship large posters and signed DVDs to [our contributors].”
It is possible I’m reading this entire post all wrong, perhaps for every counter-argument made against Kickstarter / Twitter / Facebook / a.k.a., the Internet as a whole, there shouldn’t be an assumed argument in favor of traditional marketing and distribution for indie film. It does read that way - but in his defense, Kaufman is never specific on why the internet, when compared side-by-side with an assumed traditional marketing and distribution approach, why the internet fails. Apparently, it just fails.
In no particular order of misinformedness, I’m going to start with Joe Swanberg and his claim that twitter and facebook updates don’t translate into audience - even if we ignore the reality that just 5 years ago Google was the top referrer of traffic, compared with today and Facebook being the top referrer of traffic, i.e., people now control distribution - aside from that, what does this say about the importance of word of mouth? Or does word of mouth just not count when it’s online?
Then there is Mynette Louie, quoted as being actually relieved when her own Kickstarter campaign was unsuccessful - I have yet to see her film, Children of Invention, and I’m sure it’s a wonderful independent film, but I’m sorry, if you, as a storyteller, are too damn lazy to directly communicate and build a real relationship with your audience and supporters, then you really have no place on Kickstarter or Facebook or Twitter or any other number of sites built for doing exactly that. Considering that Louie wasn’t ready to snail-mail DVDs and posters directly to her audience, *even* when her audience paid her in advance to do just that, I think it’s safe to say she and the team behind Children might not have put their full-effort into promoting their Kickstarter campaign.
And now for my favorite bit of wisdom from Kaufman:
“…successes are few and far between.”
It’s hard to tell if by “success” Kaufman means financially, or in theatrical release, or something else - but success for a filmmaker working outside of traditional studios is like any ambition in life, you get out what you put in. There is a reason that months before Avatar or Transformers is released, everywhere you look you see billboards, TV spots, action figures, cross promotion with cereals and drinks and fast-food and coloring books; there is a return on investment, RIO, for what these major studios put in to promotion. So, yes, in a very narrow sense, what Swanberg said above about “asses in seats” is correct, an individual tweet or update will most likely not translate into an additional ticket-sale for your film. It requires a consistent and honest level of engagement to build an audience - and I mean that mostly for indie storytellers, honesty isn’t necessarily an important aspect of promotion for larger studios.
“…DIY filmmaking-and-distribution model is far from guaranteed…”
What in the hell has ever been guaranteed in filmmaking? What golden age model of filmmaking and distribution is Kaufman comparing the internet with? Because I wasn’t aware there was a guaranteed era of filmmaking in Hollywood until the Internet came along and pissed on everyone’s parade.
The progression of the Internet has been *the* closest we have ever come to a guarantee in not only filmmaking but storytelling as a whole; there is no gamble of hit-or-miss pitch meetings with producers on the Internet, there is just you and the story you are passionate about sharing, and access to the entire world and a mass of people who might just being willing to invest their time, energy and even budget behind your film if you only care enough to build a relationship with them.
