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Daily Prompt: Casting Call

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The WordPress Daily Prompt for September 4 asks, “You’ve just been named the casting director of your favorite television show (or movie franchise). The catch: you must replace the entire cast—with your friends and family. Who gets which role?”
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Molly Bloom in “Ulysses” is James Joyce’s beloved wife, Nora Barnacle. This bit of casting was no secret, even while Joyce was at work on his masterpiece. Several voices in T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” are said to be quotes of some of his wife Viv’s statements, and some women’s lines in the poem were written to meet her editorial suggestions. Thus she knew till her dying day that she was in a great work of art.

These are two of the exceptions in literature. Many characters in famous books, plays, films, and poems are “based on” people from their creators’ lives; imagine the havoc that would be visited on those creators’ lives if the real people knew which creations they may have been the inspiration for …

What if Gollum was based on a schoolmate chum of J.R.R. Tolkien’s? Upon learning of this, that person would never have let Tolkien leave the house without forcing him to rewrite every scene Gollum appeared in.

Say that “The Matrix” franchise is your favorite set of films and your family and friends learned that you were hired to “imagineer” a re-boot, at least for a writing assignment like this one. Every one of your nephews and brothers-in-law would be texting and instant messaging you, auditioning via annoyance for the part of Neo. No work on the reboot would even get started as you handled all the messages, and you would be fired.

An even more difficult conversation: How do you, a happily married and suddenly important casting director in your imagination, explain to your wife that she is not your Trinity?

Everyone who hears you are a writer/casting director/stagehand imagines himself the hero of your forthcoming Hollywood epic. Today’s question from the Daily Prompt prompters presupposes that being something important like the casting director is what matters to family and friends who learn you are going to Hollywood, even only in your mind. I once worked with someone whose best college friend wound up as a personal assistant to a famous, Oscar-winning director. It was a strong enough connection (read: college friendship) that my co-worker actually attended the Oscars a couple times and met some famous famous people. It was not a strong enough connection to get movie ideas sent to this busy Hollywood director, or auditions booked with him or his people, no matter how many attempts I watched people make. (We were clerks in a college bookstore, and when this matter became known every so often, impromptu auditions would happen at the checkout line. I did not audition, as I was too busy trying to unimpressively impress the writers who would come through.)

Everyone thinks of himself as a star in movies they are not making.

I have experienced this in reverse, too. A couple of years ago, a friend of mine and I were introduced to a film actor. My friend has a life story about which everyone says, “That sounds like a movie.” Upon hearing it, the film actor said, “That sounds like a movie.”

“How soon can you come out to Los Angeles?” he actually asked, out loud, with words. “I will be there next week, shooting” (insert name of television show) “and I’ll talk with” (insert name of famous famous actor whom he knew very well) “before you come out here. Of course,” (famous famous actor whom he knew very well) “will want to play YOUR part, but I will let him believe this, so it will get fast-tracked.” We exchanged phone numbers and handshakes and hugs and my friend and I got to work. “I will be back here in New York the week after next and let you know how it went,” our friend told us. “Be ready to fly out at a moment’s notice.”

I was sure that I was going to be in Los Angeles for the first time ever in a matter of weeks. I wrote an outline and emailed it to our important but close personal actor friend Captain Hollywood. No reply came. I expanded it into the bare-bones start of a film treatment, probably a very unprofessional one, but does the look of a PDF matter when the story “sounds like it ought to be a Hollywood movie?” Captain Hollywood was going to handle the formatting, anyway, and also serve as our personal key to unlock the Golden Door. No reply came to that work, either, and the promised return from our friend “a week or so from now” came instead six months later. (His television show had been picked up for a full season, so he had been busy.)

When we saw him again, he did not mention our shared project. I half-heartedly brought it up, and he replied, “You’re still working on that? I remember that one. That’s a good story. It sounds just like a movie. If you get anyone’s attention in Hollywood, maybe I can help you find a place to stay.”

Daily Prompt: A 1000-Year Project

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Five hundred years from now, Jem Finer’s Longplayer project will have recently passed the half-way point in its 1000-year-long performance.

Longplayer is a musical composition that is calculated to take precisely 1000 years to perform from beginning to end and has been in performance in England continuously since midnight on December 31, 1999. This means it has been going nonstop for 14 years and 246 days as of today, September 3, 2014. You can tune in at any hour and listen. In my limited understanding, the composition is six pieces of music that are interlinked, with each one serving as a trigger to start some of the others at set intervals. They overlap. They trigger each other. The calculation provides that these intervals will allow for the first-ever repetition of music at midnight on December 31, 2999.

If you do listen in live, you will notice that you are not encountering anything like a “tune” or a piece of a song; for reasons that are very understandable, this is slow. This is not hum-able. You may only hear a note or two, made by someone touching a Tibetan “singing bowl”—a very ancient instrument—and then a shift up or down from that note. And then that note drifting into silence. It is a human-made project that is attempting to become environmental and outlast its creator(s).

One of the challenges for any 1000-year-long project is the knowledge that we can not anticipate what technologies will be in use a millennium from now, which languages will be common and how they will develop, or how to make certain that the project will not be forgotten, soon or in 1000 years. Less than 15 years after its launch, I currently own a laptop that does not recognize the Longplayer Live app (get on it, Google Store); thus the anticipation of technology is hugely important and it must be ignored all the same.

The anticipation of social customs, too. Five hundred years ago, the English language was undergoing the “Great Vowel Shift,” which brought the language from the Middle English of Chaucer to the Modern English of Shakespeare and Kim Kardashian. “The vowel in the English word ‘same’ was in Middle English pronounced ‘psalm’; the vowel in ‘feet’ was similar to ‘fate’; the vowel in ‘wipe’ was similar to ‘weep’; the vowel in ‘boot’ was ‘boat’; and the vowel in ‘mouse’ was similar to ‘moose.'” English speakers of the era did not know they were a part of a great change; to this day, we still deal with the Great Vowel Shift in some of English’s odd spelling rules and in the accents and dialects that did not shift, such as in Scotland. Linguists did not identify this change until about (“aboot?”) 100 years ago. Might we right now be in the midst of a similar shift in the language, or at the beginning of one, one that linguists will not be able to identify for centuries? Five hundred years from now, will people understand the instructions for performing Longplayer?

To meet the almost certain changes in language and technology, Longplayer’s creators set out to include all such anticipations from the start; they call it a “social and biological strategy of survival.” Whatever new technology comes into existence, the Longplayer project will be available on it (except a Chromebook, obviously). Whatever social rules or laws people of 1000 years live under, if art is still legal, then …

No matter what, the composition is 1000 years long, by design, so if Longplayer is forgotten and then rediscovered, the discovers can pick up the performance from where it ought to be based on calculations.

So can this song to the future that won’t ever leave the here and now last its 1000 years? This is certainly not knowable, but with the amount of attention and support it has gotten in these 14 years, it seems likely it will play continuously for several more generations. Jem Finer has programmed into it as much adaptability as possible.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for September 3 asks, “Five-hundred years from now, an archaeologist accidentally stumbles on the ruins of your home, long buried underground. What will she learn about early-21st-century humans by going through (what remains of) your stuff?”

Certain things may last 500, nay 1000, years. My yoking together Shakespeare and Kim Kardashian in a sentence might wind up as one of them.

Daily Prompt: Little ‘Big’ Man

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The WordPress Daily Prompt for September 2 asks, “In a reversal of ‘Big,’ the Tom Hanks classic from the 1980s, your adult self is suddenly locked in the body of a 12-year-old kid. How do you survive your first day back in school?”

(Like Hollywood movie makers of the late 1980s, the WordPress Daily Prompt prompters appear to be quite taken with the age-transfer/”Be careful what you wish for” theme.)
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“Big” came out in the summer of 1988, and that year I was neither 12, Josh’s age in the movie, nor 30, the age of grown-up Josh (Tom Hanks). I was 19 going on 20, so the movie was really made for someone like me.

Like almost every American, I love that movie even though I have seen it only the one time, in a movie theater (the details are perhaps: Poughkeepsie Galleria, probably with a high school friend, $5 for a ticket). It has a 97% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Being almost exactly between Josh’s two ages means that I was adult sized but with no clue what being an adult meant or—and here is the kicker—what it was going to mean. I knew that 19-going-on-20 felt like being Tom Hanks in the movie and 12-pretending-to-be-30, but minus his good looks and charm.

I was still living at home but working for a living and a college student, single but not dating and falling into epic, private crushes; my frustration tolerance levels were at my all-time low, I think. I had a crush on Elizabeth Perkins after “Big,” but she never responded to my never moving to Hollywood.

todd

Orville A. Todd Middle School. It was a junior high, grades 7 and 8 in the early 80s, and is now a 6 through 8 middle school. That tree was much smaller in 1980.

The year that I was 12 was 1980, and it was around then that the attitude that disquieted me into my adult years began to develop; it was the year I discovered that wherever I was I did not want to be. Orville A. Todd Junior High School was the place, and to this day it is one of the school buildings I dream that I am wandering, as I wrote about recently. It haunts me, which is why it is the photo accompanying this. (What do you mean you can’t see the ghosts in the windows? They’re there.) And I think I just figured out why I have dreams in which I am ever searching for something and it is often in this building here: my locker was frequently (okay, always) on the opposite side of the building from classroom I was next due to visit. Todd Junior High was (is, I would surmise) one long, narrow hallway with a couple bends and staircases that bottleneck the traffic. It was a living nightmare and I dreamed logistical dreams about it even back then.

I had as much difficulty talking with 12-year-olds then as I do now (I am not yet a father); it is an age I do not get, and being 12 did not mean that I got it then, just because I was living it. To be clear, I was no help for myself in this matter at all. I was interested in the news, already had a subscription to Time magazine for most of 1980, started a student newspaper, and I remember conducting a poll of my fellow junior high students regarding the upcoming presidential election, Carter vs. Reagan. (I think J.R. Ewing, Reggie Jackson, or Mork won.) I was no help. I was the only correspondent for the publication; something I certainly relate to now.

So the idea of waking up tomorrow nearing the ripe old age of 12, with one hair growing super-long from my chin but the rest of my face peach-smooth (shaving meant lathering my entire face with my dad’s brush, even my forehead, just to get that one long whisker), with thick plastic-frame glasses that were always one growing pains stumble or bullying shove into my locker away from breaking apart on my nose and requiring “nerd” tape to hold them together, which would result in more bullying shoves into my locker, this does not appeal to me. At age 12, I knew that I was already counting down the days to turning 18 and grown-up-hood, much like Josh in the movie, but six years looked like an enormous trek.

I still suffer from not wanting to be wherever I am, though. I am 45 going on 46 now, but 1988 looks like a more plausible date for me to write or look at than 2014.