Interview with Anne Flournoy

For those who don’t know, Anne is the writer/ director/producer/editor of The Louise Log, a 44 episode series of internet shorts detailing the life of a New York City wife and mother.

I asked Anne the following questions in the hope of gaining some insight into what makes for a successful webseries.

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* Where did you grow up?

  I grew up in rural New Jersey, far from New York City. 

* Where did you go to school?

  Though I 'went to school', nothing much stuck 'til I was out of college and could finally do what I wanted to—which was to learn to draw like Leonardo da Vinci.  Having studied Art History, I did what I'd read everyone in the 19th century had done, and went to Paris. I attended L'Academie de la Grande Chaumiere. Little did I know that this had degenerated into a place for Japanese businessmen-painters to gather and ask the nude models to pose with their legs spread. After a few months, an acquaintance tipped me off that I could audit at the Beaux-Arts and be surrounded by art students like me.

  After a few years I came back to the States and applied to graduate schools to get an MFA. Mercifully I didn't get into Yale. I say mercifully because at Yale, the sculptors were off in one building, completely isolated from the other visual artists. At Rutgers, where I was offered a spot, the sculptors, photographers, painters, ceramists, conceptual and performance artists were all crowded into one building.

"I don’t even have the nerve to wiggle."

  I arrived making large wooden, axe-hewn sculptures, some of which had a problem staying upright. Two of the very sophisticated, second-year students came to me, barely concealing the fact that they were snickering: "You're still making free-standing monoliths??" 

  More than a little insulted, I proceeded to do almost no work for the entire first year except to try and figure out how these conceptual artists could dismiss my work.

  Some of the professors, notably Leon Golub and Geoff Hendricks (a member of Fluxus) made the sheer cliff of my learning curve possible with their encouragement and integrity. By the end of the first year I did a performance which was an organizational nightmare involving all kinds of audio and visual equipment and performers on stage moving (silent film era) cardboard waves, with one or more of them wearing cardboard cutouts of rowboats as 'skirts'. And then all we had to show for the effort was a lousy video taken from the back of the auditorium. It landed me in a darkened room getting migraines and thinking that film looked like the easier, softer way.

* When did you first decide you wanted to write?

  I didn't originally want to write. I hadn't done particularly well at school and didn't think I could 'write'. The need for fake subtitles for my first short was my first foray into it and then in wanting to make a feature, I just figured: 'Gotta do it. No one's going to send me a script.'

"Rejection enhances my self-esteem."

  A poet friend recommended a life-changing book which gave me a way to write without a lot of hemming and hawing or even using sentences. Writing the Natural Way by Gabrielle Rico.

 

* Your character, Louise, exhibits Woody Allen-type insecurities. Is that a New York thing, a conscious choice of style, or just you?

  Hmm. I don't know if insecurities are a New York thing. I'm not the most confident person I've ever met but would like to think that whatever issues Louise has are like mine on steroids.

* Ten favourite movies?

  In no special order:

    Un Chien Andalou, Bunuel

    Vivre Sa Vie, Godard

    Stranger Than Paradise, Jarmusch 

    Why Not, Arakawa

    The Piano, Campion 

    Mulholland Drive, Lynch

    All About My Mother, Almodovar   

    Pulp Fiction, Tarantino 

    Galaxy Quest, Parisot 

    Love Serenade, Barrett

"All I need is a knife... and a bag of onions."

* V.O. was the backbone of the ‘noir’ films of the 40s and 50s, and has been used in movies as diverse as Bridget Jones's Diary, The Royal Tenenbaums, and The Quiet American. Most modern “experts” decry the use of V.O., but I love the way you use it for Louise’s interior monologue.  Have you had many comments about that?
 

  So happy to hear that you like it. It arose as a last minute attempt to salvage the first episode which, with just the picture and the music, didn't seem to be working. A wonderful writer, Lucile Bruce, with whom I worked on an early version of my 'second feature' told me that Emir Kusturica had taught a class at Columbia University's graduate film school. He'd made a point about 'the third thing'. If a scene isn't working with a man and a woman, add a dog. Or a clap of thunder. Etc. I was about five months beyond my self-imposed deadline to make a viral video and it was the end of December. All I could think was that if I didn't finish and upload this Louise Log before January 1st (it was supposed to be a single video) that I could be trying to improve it for months—or years—to come. So I whispered into the macbook and that was that.

  In answer to your question, people seem to love it or hate it.

* The Louise Log starts out as a small Woody Allen-esque show, then it gives a bit of Dr Who skip as Phineas morphs into another body, then it expands into a Seinfeld or 30 Rock type of story, with a single person struggling to maintain a grip on reality while others around them seek to distort it. Is that the future for Louise? A Jerry Seinfeld or Liz Lemon anchor role?

  That's an interesting analysis! As you can see, the first two seasons have been more about putting one foot in front of the other than about executing a grand plan. The guiding principle has been to give Louise 'obstacles', to have fun and (since the 4th episode) to find a balance of the internal monologue and the exterior life. I feel that 2-3 character scenes and a very simple story arc work best with my sensibility and the under five minute format I love. If you want to compare recent episodes of The Louise Log to two of the most popular shows on television, please be my guest. 

"What did we go over in June with your therapist?"

* For years, budding screenwriters in Australia have been pushed toward writing (and making) short films. With the success of Italian Spider-Man, that push has been redirected toward making webisodes. Do you have any advice or warnings for inexperienced wannabe filmmakers?

  Hmm. Okay. From my experience I'd say two things are really important.

  Figure out a way to tell your story as cheaply as possible. It usually takes time to find your audience and if you blow all the money you have on the first five or ten episodes, you may not be able to hang in there as long as you need to. 

  The second thing is about length: ask yourself 'How long should this video be?' If someone had asked me this, I would have thought that they were 1) a picky accountant-style person, or 2) just not that bright. Only four years of hits and misses has convinced me that this is a very important question. And there are two factors to consider: the filmmaker's particular gift and the story (not the script... the story). 

  Some people have epic imaginations and gifts and are straining at the bit to be able to upload thirty minute videos to YouTube. Others, and I put myself in this category, are miniaturists and do best with very short pieces. I'm sure there's a third category of people who can do both but... haven't done an exhaustive survey on this.

  The second sub-factor of 'the story' has to do with the arc. Some of The Louise Log episodes are much less successful than I think they could be because I slavishly tried to cram what we'd written as 'an episode' into one episode. (I think Episode 23 should have actually been three really really good episodes instead of one that's sub-par.)

"Ever thought of a web series? ... It’s cheaper than therapy."

* What do you think are the essential elements of a good web series?
   I was recently given some excellent advice by Eric Mortensen the Director of Network Programming at blip.tv. "Scripted' content is (with rare exceptions like The Guild and Anyone But Me) having a hard time getting masses of viewers. The more you can give the viewer a sense of great immediacy—like that of a newscast—the better." He didn't use the example of LonelyGirl, but the blurring of the lines between fiction and non-fiction, which that show accomplished at first, is what I took from his suggestion. 

  Humor is supposedly hotter than straight drama. And getting to the point in the first ten seconds, OR LESS, matters. No fancy title sequences, no meandering— BOOM. Grab the viewer's interest and let them know what you're up to. You've got only a few seconds before they'll be getting skyped or messaged by a real life friend. Which brings me to the last suggestion: develop characters which can compete with their own real world friends, who your viewers will care enough about that they'll put their life on hold to watch your show.

  This is so much easier said than done. I've put some resources which have sustained me through the tough times on the website at http://anneflournoy.com/tools. 

"Now we’re gonna need the raw milk..."

* Can you tell us any interesting facts or trivia about your show? Any funny stories?

  The Louise Log (season 1) was supposed to be my second feature. I rewrote the script for years and finally 'put it on the shelf' when Delta Airlines lost all the carefully gathered notes I'd collected from smart people for the 'last rewrite'. I only started the first episode in an attempt to make a thigh-slapping viral video to get the attention of Hollywood executives. It was humbling to discover how hard it is to make a thigh-slapper. Only after four episodes did I realize that I was going to have to gut my script of its juiciest moments to tell the only story I wanted to tell.

  As far as the funny stuff, it's so painful I can't bear to recall it right now. There's one video of bloopers that gives an idea of the level of problems we've faced: http://thelouiselog.com/one-minute-reels-trailer-bloopers-etc/  (There are two videos here—you have to scroll down. It's called 4 Tips From the Masters.)

* What’s next for Anne Flournoy? More webisodes, a feature, the great American novel, or something more interesting?

  There's so much of Season 2 shot and waiting to be edited... What I had thought was going to be Episode 24 has become 24-27 and maybe even 28. So it's really unclear when we'll finish editing and uploading Season 2. I'd love to shoot at least one more season of The Louise Log but that's as far ahead as I've thought.

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This interview was followed a year later by One year on..., which deals with Hurricane Sandy and Anne's plans for the future.

A heist movie...

I love a good heist movie. A Fish Called Wanda, The Asphalt Jungle, The Bank Job, Charley Varrick, Flawless, The Good Thief, Heat, Heist, Inside Man, Mad Money, Ocean's Eleven, Out of Sight, Quick Change, Rififi, Ronin, The Thomas Crown Affair, Topkapi, Un Flic, The Usual Suspects, and all the others. So much larceny, and... uh... moral lessons learned.

The heist technique used by Jules Dassin in Topkapi (1964)...

... was borrowed by Tom Cruise for Mission Impossible (1996).

Back in 2005, Eddie Murphy suggested making an all-black version of Ocean's Eleven. Why not? How about a cast that included Jamie Foxx, Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock, Tracey Morgan and Chris Tucker?  I'd watch that.

And so a process started. Six years later Tower Heist, starring Eddie Murphy, Ben Stiller, Alan Alda, Casey Affleck, Matthew Broderick, and Tea Leoni, is due to be released this weekend.

What happened to the all-black cast?  Gone. Lots of things got in the way of that idea. You can read the full story here in the LA Times.
 


The most interesting aspect to me is the number of writers who took a crack at what, on the surface, sounds like a simple writing job. Writing credits go to Ted Griffin, Jeff Nathanson, and writing partners Adam Cooper & Bill Collage, but the script was also revised by Russell Gewirtz, Rawson Marshall Thurber, Leslie Dixon and Noah Baumbach.

Maybe writing a good heist movie isn't as simple as it sounds.

 

Tom Keith, "Tune In Tomorrow", "Radio Days", and "A Prairie Home Companion"

When I was a kid, we didn't have TV. We had something that might have been better; we had radio. In particular, we had radio serials, such as Superman, Tarzan, The Shadow, Blue Hills, The Muddle-headed Wombat, The Search For The Golden Boomerang, and the Argonauts Club. Radio had a powerful ability to suggest so much; the rest was up to you. If you had any kind of imagination, you could fill in the picture yourself. 

The people who did most to assist in this process were the sound-effects people. They did whatever it took to create sounds that reminded the audience of the mood or sensation the story required. Monkeys, car crashes, automobiles, piranha, you-name-it. (You'd be amazed at how vividly kryptonite could be conjured up in the imagination of a ten year-old boy by certain sounds.)

One of the best depictions in movies of the old-time radio sound-effects guy can be found in Tune in Tomorrow (1990). The film was released in Australia as Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, the title of the novel by Mario Vargas Llosa on which the film was based. It's one of my favourite examples of a movie adaptation that's better than the original book. Peter Falk, Keanu Reeves, Barbara Hershey. Check it out, but bring your imagination with you.

Tune in Tomorrow

Another movie which captures the spirit of the golden age of radio is Radio Days (1987), by Woody Allen. Set in the period before and during World War II, it includes a serial based on The Shadow, and features a musical score consisting of songs from the 1930s and 40s. The cast include Julie Kavner, Dianne Wiest, Tito Puente, Larry David, Danny Aiello, William H. Macy, and Mia Farrow and Diane Keaton (the only time those two appeared in the same Woody Allen movie). In this screen shot, Wallace Shawn is playing the part of The Masked Avenger on radio.
 

Wallace Shawn in Radio Days

A Prairie Home Companion (2006), Robert Altman's last film, tells the story of the final broadcast of a radio show. It has an unlikely cast, including Lindsay Lohan, Woody Harrelson, Tommy Lee Jones, Kevin Kline, Garrison Keillor, Lily Tomlin and Meryl Streep. The sound-effects man, both in the movie and in real life, was Tom Keith. He could produce sounds like "gunshot volleys" or a "singing walrus" on command. 
 

Tom Keith in A Prairie Home Companion, channeling a peacock for Meryl Streep.

Last Sunday, Tom Keith passed away at the age of 64.  R.I.P.
 

"Perks, The Musical"

You were wondering, right, about what Broadway wannabes do in their spare time. Apparently they write, film, and perform in their own webseries.

Created by Tom Diggs, directed by Bill Oliver, music by Jason Michael Snow, lyrics by Mishaela Faucher, and cinematography by David Kagen, Perks has a huge crew for a short.

Here's the pilot of Perks, The Musical. The title is taken from the book The Perks of Being a Wallflower. (Don't be put off by the slow start. It builds.) Enjoy.

blip.tv    Facebook    Website

Write for yourself

Life is a journey, not a destination. As someone smarter than me once said: Take time to smell the flowers. Many of the wannabe screenwriters I know are desperately hoping to break into Hollywood with their next script. They keep one eye on the page and the other on the market. In the latest Done Deal Pro newsletter, Dave Trottier (author of the helpful The Screenwriter's Bible: A Complete Guide to Writing, Formatting, and Selling Your Script) was asked about “what sells in the market?” He responded by saying this:

First of all, almost nothing sells. That fact tends to skew the data so it’s hard to make any real statistical analysis of what sells. If you exclude sequels, remakes, book/video game/comic book adaptations, and other branded properties, the original material that sells shows no real trend other than this: buyers buy scripts that are like the most recent surprise hit movie. Everyone wants Bridesmaids today. When I broke in, everyone wanted the next American Pie. These scripts don’t always translate into movies that get made or successes at that, but that’s the way buyers think. Again, the key is the surprise hit. Everyone knows that Transformers will perform. But when a movie comes around that surprises the studios, it forces them to reconsider their buying pattern and chase the trend.

Note, however, that this applies to the very small number of original scripts they buy. Statistically speaking, the odds of you writing that trend-capturing script is so small that you are better off writing something that interests you and making sure you have a good sample.

"Almost nothing sells." Life is short. Don't waste it.

Xander Bennett (author of the stimulating Screenwriting Tips, You Hack: 150 Practical Pointers for Becoming a Better Screenwriter) made this wise observation:

Why would anyone be crazy enough to write a screenplay in a genre they don’t like? There are plenty of reasons, most of them stupid. Writers sometimes get weird notions in their head, like “Hollywood is only buying comedies right now, so I have to write a comedy to have a chance on the spec market” or “Horror is cheap to produce, so there’s a chance a small production company will buy my script if they think they can shoot it for nothing.”

Here’s why that makes no sense:

It’s a waste of time. At least a month to develop the idea, the characters, and the outline. Probably at least two months to write the first draft. Let’s be generous and say two months of rewrite work to get the script up to a decent standard. That is five freaking months. Do you really want to be living and breathing a project you don’t like for five months? That’s five months of forcing yourself to be funny when you don’t feel funny, or forcing suspense when you’d rather just kick back and write a romance.

I don’t know about you, but that would drive me insane. And at the end of it, all you have to show for your efforts is a script you don’t love.

Screenwriting (any kind of writing, actually, even blogs) is time-consuming. It takes over your life. If you're going to give yourself to something, it might as well be something you enjoy. Don't write to please others, write what you find interesting and rewarding. Maybe it will sell and maybe it won't. Truth is, it probably won't. All the more reason for you to have some fun along the way.

"Bestsellers"

Here's the start of a series, created and written by Susan Miller, which deals with a group of five modern professional women — Zoe (the tech entrepreneur), Jules (the HR consultant), Nina (the mommy blogger), Taylor (the travel consultant) and Abby (the accountant). What they have in common is that they belong to the same book club, where they discuss more about their own lives than those of the characters in the books they’re reading.

One of the interesting things about this series is that the money for it came from a bunch of companies who are desperate to impress professional women with just how caring-about-women they really are. I saw this shortly after I watched the first episode of a show called Easy to Assemble, which was paid for by Ikea. It is about an actress who gets a job at... Ikea, where she demonstrates Ikea products, and eventually goes to Ikea headquarters in Sweden. 

The point is, Big Business today is desperate to give the appearance of being people-friendly. If you play your cards right, maybe you can get a decent budget for your webseries from some corporation that wants to sell stuff to people. Now, what's this series called?

                                                Official Website

Scary movies

What is it with scary movies? Lots of people love them, but not me.

The first scary movie I remember seeing was in the mid-60s. We didn't have a TV, but the lady across the road, Mrs Easton, did. She invited us over to watch The Secret Garden (the 1949 version) in B&W on Channel 6. Early on, Margaret O'Brien is in a huge, creepy old house, when she suddenly hears the sound of a boy screaming and screaming and screaming. I had nightmares about that for years.

For me, it was a rerun of my childhood. When I was three or four years old, and younger brother Ray was two or three, we lived in a cold house in Wangaratta (where Nick Cave was living when he first heard the Leonard Cohen recording that changed his life, so he tells us in the documentary, I'm Your Man). What warmth there was in the house came from a portable kerosene heater. My parents kept a kettle on top of it to minimise hot water costs. One day, Ray the toddler pulled the boiling water down over himself. For years after, he had nightmares in which he would scream and scream and scream. We shared a room, which meant I shared his nightmares. I've never understood why anyone would pay to listen to a child screaming.

Janet Leigh in Psycho (1960)

The second scary movie I remember seeing was an old British, B&W, Jack-the-Ripper, gaslight-and-fog, murder-mystery thing on late-night TV one hot summer in about 1969. It was school holidays and we finally had a TV. Mum was indulging herself—one of the few times I ever saw that happen. She was sitting up late, enjoying being scared, but too scared to do it alone, so I had to sit up with her to make the fear tolerable. 

I forget the details, but there was a terrifying figure who materialised out of the fog and stabbed nubile young women to death in a welter of blood and screaming. Whoever-it-was-we-cared-about in the movie placed a premium on walking in the fog, but shrinking into dark doorways at pivotal moments in order to avoid joining the list of casualties.

The sight of her hiding triggered another return to childhood for me. I used to hide from my father, a violent alcoholic who abandoned us when I was nine. He was a Polish-Russian refugee who'd seen the Nazis march into Warsaw in 1939. He was sixteen at the time. He never talked about it, but if you take a look at the end of The Pianist, you'll get an idea of what life was like at that time. His mother had escaped Russia after the communists took power and started killing people. She knew what was coming at the end of the war, and told him to flee westward. 

He spent a year dodging the German army and the American army and the British army, until he made his way to Paris. Once there, the only way he could earn a living was as a boxer. Trouble is, he wasn't good at it. He suffered a cut eyebrow early in his career. The cut reopened every week as he turned out in losing fight after losing fight for the entertainment of Allied soldiers on R&R. I suppose the alcohol helped sooth his sufferings. 

Fenella Fielding and friend in Carry On Screaming (1966)

He made a new life in Australia, married his English teacher, and had a bunch of kids.     I was the first-born son. His lost years, his frustrated hopes, his accumulated dreams, devolved upon me. And all he required was that I be perfect.

Yeah, right. 

If he ever felt I'd failed him—and he felt that frequently—he would take an electric extension cord, double it over, and thrash me with it. I learned about terror from my father. In later life I hitchhiked across Australia, and lived and worked in many strange places. I've worked in psychiatric institutions. I've been face-to-face with angry psychopaths and paranoid schizophrenics. I've had people try to kill me. I've had bad trips on LSD. I've found myself at the mercy of drunken bikies in the outback, strung-out heroin addicts in big cities, and weirdos who picked me up on the road and wanted me to participate in exercises I didn't fancy. I've been afraid many times, but I've only gone down on my knees and begged for mercy once in my life. That was before my father, when I was nine years old. He walked out shortly after.

 

Paranormal Activity 3 has taken a swag at the box office lately, so experts are popping up in the media to explain why. One article appeared in Science + Religion Today on the subject of: Why Are Some People More Attracted to Scary Movies Than Others? Written by Stuart Fischoff, a professor of psychology, it opens with the comment that:

Movie monsters provide us with the opportunity to see and learn strategies of coping with real-life monsters should we run into them, despite all probabilities to the contrary, sort of covert rehearsal for … who knows.

Assorted zombies in Shaun of the Dead (2004)

After that unpromising beginning, the article goes on to discuss what he considers the major factors in the appeal of horror movies. They are: lifestyle, age, gender, personality, and physiology. To paraphrase, if you're young, aggressive and live a boring life, you're likely to love horror movies. 

In another recent article in The Daily Beast, called Why Our Brains Love Horror Movies, Sharon Begley tells us that horror films appeal to people who like predictability, neat endings, and a clear-cut moral code; and to young couples who are trying out frightened-woman/strong-protective-man roles for later in life. The more scared she becomes and the braver he remains, the happier both parties appear to be.

It's an interesting fact that, while horror movies make big money, they almost never appear on lists people make when asked to name their top 25 favorite films, presumably because horror films don't leave people with happy memories.

Me? I'll stick to action/adventure and romantic comedy, thanks anyway.