Team Filthy

If you go to our old blog at www.mikeandtimschneider.blogspot.com you can listen to music that was in our original draft of THE SURFACE. Tim often writes to music, and at times we place music cues within our scripts. We removed them from the draft that went out because we felt like they got in the way of the tension and intensity of the reading experience. The songs, which can be streamed at the old blog, are in the order they appeared in the script - typically they're placed at big moments. For example, "Honey, Honey" by Feist was timed with Grant and Kate first seeing the cloud of gas appear over downtown Chicago.

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Today, while I was putting together my notes on THE LEGEND OF MARY PIKE at, surprisingly, one of only two local Starbucks I was approached by a guy who handed me a flyer for www.scripped.com

Apparently, this is a site that acts sort of like Final Draft on the web, i.e. you log in and you can write your script on IE or Safari or Firefox and the website properly formats it, all for free - instead of having to pay upwards of $100 for Final Draft.

Now I am already a Final Draft user - and have been for about ten years now - so this doesn't help me out tremendously, but I do think it's a cool option for kids or people who might not want to drop three figures on a piece of software. This is a great way to keep their scripts formatted and to keep them writing.

If you need to, check it out. And if you're writing a movie, keep writing, but make sure that shit is hot.

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The always insightful Fareed Zakaria has a new show on CNN on Sundays at 1pm ET / 10am PT.

Watch it.

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Yeah, I know - if you read THE SURFACE this week you probably wouldn't think that I'd post something from the Fox TV show So You Think You Can Dance...but that's exactly what I'm going to do. For me it's inspiring to see the choreographers challenge themselves and one another each week and uplifting to see when their routines are successfully pulled off. It's the kind of short term reward - and reminder of why you do what you do - that you don't often get when you're writing movies.

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In the midst of our team at Benderspink working on selling THE SURFACE, a light-hearted post that also acknowledges one of our influences: Pharrell Williams. After the jump, Pharrell's thank you 'graph from the new N*E*R*D record, Seeing Sounds, in stores today...

"First and foremost, Thank You Master for my soul. To our families, our team and our fans.

thank you for joining us in this ride of learning about ourselves, learning about you and musically jotting it all down. Man, we are speechless, the shows have ALL been so rad!!!! We intend for you to listen to this while jogging, on long drives, commercial plane rides or simply at gatherings filled of interesting debaters and great thinkers... And then of course, there is you, the listener in the singular. This was made precisely with the intention that you would take your next shower with the lights off. The lights off and constant flow of water promotes the main affects of Synesthesia: Seeing Sounds.

Later dude."

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Is it funny that in my last post I said, "We don't talk about other people's movies on this blog too much" and then I proceed to make a second post, on the same day about another person's movie?

Okay, so there are better places to get comedy.

At any rate, I watched Catch-22 for the first time in my life two days ago. Sadly, it was on the small screen...although it did allow me to listen to an exceptional commentary between Steven Soderbergh and Mike Nichols. A couple of things from it that are worth noting:

Nichols said that during the shoot, he often felt things were going poorly because he wasn't worried, he was in a kind of trance - a trance that, later on in his career, he learned to trust.

Also, where Nichols and Soderbergh talk about how the movie has no subtext - what I wished they talked about more was how Nichols directed the scenes then. Was his direction merely based on appearance and tone? It's an interesting thing to think about, especially for me since all of our decisions are based on the motivations of characters, i.e. subtext.

I recommend it. The movie is a perfect example of the kind of movie - a very expensive art film - that rarely gets made today.

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An interesting piece in The New Yorker, by Malcolm Gladwell - depicted here, pre-afro - that suggests scientific innovation is accomplished collectively, throughout time, while artistic creation is singular and of the moment.

Read it here

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Chester French is a couple of white boys who are signed to Star Trak, the Neptunes label at Interscope.

Show is Thursday, June 5th. We may or may not be there.

www.myspace.com/chesterfrench

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