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runenc03 · 4 years

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Til the light goes out (and after) - part 1

Writing date: I started in October ‘20, got scared by the amount of personal issues I put into “the reader” and procrastinated. I eventually finished in January ‘21, lol.

Genre: Angst, I guess? But not too badly, it’s fine.

Warnings: Insecurity (to everyone reading this, you are worthy!!)

Word count: 3.6k words

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"I remember when I reached the age of 25 and I had this jarring quarter-life crisis. I felt like I wasn't at all where I wanted to be: I wanted to be deeply in love and almost married to my soulmate. (...) I also wanted to be a publishing author. Yet I was single, and had never put a book together, even after writing hundreds of poems, journal entries, and essays in my life. I felt like I was just wasting my time, and that felt terrifying. That was three years ago. I look back at that time in my early to mid twenties so differently now. I see many beautiful poems written. Deep conversations with cherished friends. Night walks, early morning walks. Dinners with my family and birthdays, going around the table saying what we love about each other. (...) None of it was wasted. It was beautiful, and the life I had lived was so meaningful and precious. I wish I could go back, and tell myself that, so the younger me could appreciate each moment, rather than comparing where she was to where she wanted to be."

~Katherine Cimorelli Straneva

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"I think Miss Swann over there should have the role."

Your hands stopped their movements to free you from your pirate costume, and you looked up. Your entire group of colleagues was staring at you, expectantly.

You see, you worked at a theme park, and it was just about the most amazing job ever. Every holiday period, it opened its gates, ready to shower people of all ages in everything magical. You were part of the actors crew, which basically meant that you acted out entire stories at fixed intervals and filled the rest of your time with walking around the theme park in costumes, doing small acts on your way. Often you ended up improvising, dancing with your guests, and of course posing for pictures. If you could, you would live in the theme park. Really, there was just something so entrancing about the atmosphere there, the music coming out of the lanterns beside all the roads, the roller coasters, the beautifully decorated buildings. A big part of the magic was because of the work you and your crew put into your characters and its stories though, you shouldn't underestimate that, which was exactly the reason you weren't too keen on taking the lead role in your next story. The pressure to create the biggest part of the magic was something you didn't know you could handle.

"I'm...not too sure about that. Ariel always plays the lead role, why shouldn't she now? I've never even done a lead role."

'Ariel' was one of your colleagues you were probably the closest with. She was funny, kind, and seemingly good at everything she did, acting included. Her real name wasn't Ariel, but you never called each other by your real names. It was like a tradition within your crew to call everyone by the name of the character they were currently playing. Seeing as she had had the lead role in your newest play, a crossover between Pirates of the Caribbean and The Little Mermaid, her name had been Ariel for the past two weeks, and yours had been Elizabeth.

Your friend wriggled herself out of her tail, her eyes still on you. A smirk was playing around her mouth, and your stomach gave a swirl. She had actually meant it when she proposed to give you the lead role.

"Because, dear Elizabeth, you wrote the play, and you did so beautifully! Your talent is ridiculous, and I think the entire thing is going to come across as much more honest if you play the biggest part in your own story. Isn't that logical?"

The other members of your crew nodded in agreement, and while you couldn't help but smile at their faith in you, the nerves in your stomach grew. You started to untie the laces of your pirate boots as you voiced your concerns.

"I'm not too sure about that. It's a love story, remember?"

The grinning on Ariel's face turned into a warm smile, but her eyes showed determination, and at that point you knew that you had lost this particular battle.

"I remember, and I also remember that you're the biggest romantic out of all of us. Come on, we all know you're going to be fantastic."

Another colleague of yours spoke up, telling you that he'd been in awe of the script you'd written, and another joined, claiming she'd even cried a little at the end. Your doubts slowly folded themselves back up again.

"The story belongs in this place, just like the lead role belongs to you, Elizabeth."

The words were spoken by the most timid guy in your crew. He never talked in your plays but provided the music in them, and even though he was terrific at adding that extra touch of magic to your stories, he never contributed to conversations about their content. You thought he just didn't really mind, as long as he could play his music. If he was willing to speak out loud about it, it must mean you really were meant to follow your crew's judgement.

You smiled, a blush blossoming on your cheeks, and you knew your eyes twinkled when you finally gave in.

"I'll do it."

_______________________________________

"Hey!"

You plopped down next to the music guy in your group, feeling extra cheerful today. You would start rehearsing the piece you had written today, and now that you'd been able to get over the initial insecurities you'd had, you felt really excited about this first rehearsal.

"Good morning, Jade."

You grinned at your brand new name, rummaging through your bag. Tossing aside a water bottle and some elastic bands, you found what you were looking for. Your eyes scanned over the words, making sure you had taken the right document out of the stack you had brought with you, before stretching out your arm in the direction of the music guy. He looked in your direction questioningly. Your grin turned into a warm, although somewhat insecure smile.

"If you're okay with it, your name is Sam from now on."

He read your script in silence, a small smile appearing on his face.

"Who says I can even act?"

"Who said I was able to play the lead role of my own story?"

He threw his head back in laughter, and you watched, surprised you were able to get such an exuberant reaction out of him.

Your alarm chose that exact moment to go off, the bright letters "START REHEARSAL" instantly reforming the knot in your stomach. You frowned at yourself. Weren't you over it by now? It was time to start the whole thing and you were still nervous, for God's sake.

"Hey, you'll be fine. Even better, you get to kiss the guy everyone wants to marry. You should relax more, maybe you can enjoy acting again then."

You tore your eyes away from your phone and onto Sam's face. His comment didn't help at all, and your face must have shown it, because his eyes went from warm to panicked, and your guilt punched the knot of nerves in your stomach. What a mess you'd made of all of this, already. You managed to send a tired smile in his direction, trying to salvage as much as you could from whatever it had been that had made him open up to you a bit.

"Thanks for trying to calm me, really it means a lot. I think I'll calm down once this rehearsal is over though. Are you ready? You're in the scene I want to start the rehearsal with."

He nodded again, awkwardly showing you the flute he was holding, and followed you to the middle of the room where you beckoned everyone to come join you so you could start.

Taking one last deep breath, you started.

"Hi everyone! As you know, we're starting our rehearsals for my story today. If everything went well, you've all received the script for the character you're playing. I actually wanted to start with one of the last scenes,..."

Everyone nodded at you encouragingly throughout your little speech, and as you realised that these were all your friends who genuinely cared about you, you felt the knot in your stomach slowly untie itself.

The first scene you rehearsed was actually the ultimate confrontation between the good and the bad in your story. Your friend Ariel, whose name was now Ruby, played the villain in your story, and you played Jade, the lead character. This scene basically consisted of the fight between Ruby and the main character's love interest, Dante. The story situated itself in the medieval times. Dante had come to Ruby's tower to rescue Jade, who he believed was kidnapped by Ruby, but upon arriving, he - and the park's visitors - would discover that Jade wasn't actually kidnapped and Ruby had made it all up. Then, Jade would realise everything just in time to go up to Ruby's tower as well and rescue Dante, instead of the other way around. What could you say? You'd always been a feminist at heart. Dante was played by a great friend of yours, and you'd actually written this piece thinking he could play the male love interest, while Ariel would play the female lead role, but things had, evidently, taken a turn. The two of them had been friends way longer than you'd been friends with any of them, and even though the three of you were really close, you couldn't help but marvel at the chemistry the two of them had, something you and Dante would very much lack, or at least that's what your insecurities made you believe.

However, you didn't want to rewrite the entire thing just so you wouldn't have to play each other's love interest, and you had showed the script, including the initial cast, to everyone anyway, so it wasn't really something you could get out of without a whole lot of awkwardness.

The rehearsal started off well enough. Ruby was, as you'd expected, really, a brilliant villain, and apart from some minor corrections from you, everyone executed the script exactly the way you had in mind. You were starting to believe in this.

That was, until the very end of the play, in which Jade and Dante would get all cute because of the whole we-just-survived-a-villain-attack-and-thought-we'd-lost-each-other situation. You thought you'd mentally prepared yourself, really, you had, but apparently it hadn't been enough. The awkward tension was palpable, your own movements, usually so fluent, were now stiff, your rigid body seemingly forgetting how your limbs worked. No one said anything about it, but you felt it and you know the others did too.

And you tried to pull out of that awkward moment, tried to chase your insecurities away, you really did, but they seemed to cling to you, and the longer it lasted, the worse your mood became. When you almost fell off of the stage because you'd instinctively set a step backwards when Dante had tried to pull you into his arms, you knew you couldn't continue like this.

Hastily, you grabbed your jacket, quickly telling everyone you would have a 15-minute break and that they'd done a good job, before hurriedly walking out of the building, and into the cold.

_______________________________________

The wind quickened your tears, and you angrily wiped them away before they could hit your neck, mad at yourself for allowing them to fall down. You knew you'd had to get back inside your rehearsal room eventually, and while everyone had a good image of what you were doing, you weren't looking forward to letting them see the evidence.

Most of all though, you felt vulnerable. Vulnerable because you had failed, and because everyone had witnessed you doing it. Vulnerable because your biggest insecurities had just come true.

"Hey, what is up with you?"

You looked up, watching as Ruby flopped herself down on the bench you were sitting on, turning herself so she was completely facing you. She wore an expression of confusion, and worry.

You let go of your eye contact, your eyes drilling holes in the soil beneath your feet. You owed her the truth. In fact, you owed your entire crew the truth. Being completely honest with yourself, you knew that was the only way this play would end up being a success. You took a deep breath.

"I'm just....not equipped to play Dante's love interest."

You couldn't look at her, too ashamed, but her voice conveyed honest surprise, which, in turn, made you surprised. Didn't she realise how obvious it all was?

"What are you talking about? You were fine until you had to reunite with Dante, and if you didn't like physical contact or if you were extremely hesitant for anything romantic, I'd agree with you and say you should probably focus on roles you are very good at, but you, you're a hopeless romantic at heart, and you like physical contact. Why is it so difficult then? I'm not making fun of you, I genuinely don't understand."

You scoffed, too caught up in your own head, annoyed at her lack of understanding.

"How can you not? I've never had a boyfriend, and that explains everything. Don't you see? It's not that I don't want to play a character that's in love, and I'm sure that if I managed to calm down I'd even enjoy it, but whenever I come close to Dante I feel like "forever single" is practically inked on my forehead."

You had, by now, managed to look at your friend, your annoyance chasing away a bit of the previous insecurity and shame. Her face morphed into a look of understanding, and you didn't know if that made you feel better of worse.

"I know it's a bit intimidating to play Dante's love interest, and I know that, like, everyone wants to date him, or at least gushes about how good-looking he is, but that doesn't mean that you can't play his love interest. Stop thinking you're too ugly to be around beautiful people."

If you hadn't been feeling so terrible, you might have literally facepalmed. Maybe you should've seen this coming, but Dante being known as the Adonis of your group really was the least of your worries.

"Wait...what? No, this has nothing to do with him being attractive, you know he and I are only friends. In fact, I think you would be great as his girlfriend, I would totally ship that. Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that he's just a friend and it's not about playing his love interest, it's about playing someone's love interest in general. I just...what if it looks completely stupid? I know it looked stupid now. I can imagine all these cute things in my head, but then when I have to execute them, the only thing I can think about is that no one wants to do this with me in real life, and that just...I don't know. You all one by one find the love of your lives, or at least good partners you're happy and in love with, and it...it just makes me wonder if I'll ever be good enough to have that myself, as well."

"Oh, honey..."

You felt Ruby's arm wrap around you, her hand stroking your back, and you eyes filled themselves with tears again. She wasn't a physical person and therefore didn't like touching people, but she did now for you because she knew that you were. The tears started falling again.

"I mean, I knew you were ready to have a boyfriend, or like, to commit to someone and be in love with them, but I didn't know you were so insecure about not being in a relationship, and now I wish I'd realised that earlier. But you have to realise that while you're insecure now because you think no one is going to want you, you're going to be insecure about not deserving a boyfriend when you have one. Trust me, the insecurities don't go away, they just change. I guess what I'm trying to say is... don't wait for that moment that you're someone's girlfriend, the insecurities aren't going to magically disappear then. Now's the time to work on them. And, this shouldn't matter, but for the record: I fully believe that you are very worthy of being someone's girlfriend, and when the right person comes along, you'll give your all, because that's who you are, and it'll go a lot better than most of the relationships you wish to have yourself now. For now though, just have fun. You get to kiss Dante and make lots of bratty girls jealous!"

You chuckled at her attempt to cheer you up. You were really grateful for her. The two of you were complete opposites, and her radiance sometimes made you insecure, but right now, with her words, you believed yourself a worthy person again, and that meant more than you could express.

"That's what Sam said, too."

Ruby's eyebrows went up at lightning speed, her eyes wide.

"Wait, he talks? And he told you you'd be a good girlfriend?"

You rolled your eyes, but also noted how you had to fight the blush off of your cheeks.

"No, dummie, he told me I'd be able to kiss the guy - and I quote - everyone wants to marry. I guess he's not wrong, a lot of female visitors do seem to want to faint whenever he includes them in improvs."

Your friend chuckled, and, her laugh being so infectious, you chuckled along with her. Then, when you didn't expect it, she jumped off of the bench, beckoning you to follow her. As she entered the rehearsal room, she yelled that you'd come with her, and as the rest of the group started cheering, you realised that that had been a good choice.

_______________________________________

"Dante, hold on, I'm coming!"

A few of your younger spectators started whispering excitedly as you stepped into view, quickly climbing a long, round staircase to get to platform on which Dante and Ruby were battling. You were busy concentrating on tripping and falling off of the stairs. That had happened once during your rehearsals, and if you hadn't still been in the lower half of the stairs and if Sam hadn't discarded his flute to catch you, you probably wouldn't have been able to play Jade. While that scenario would've actually sounded appealing a few weeks ago, you had to admit now that you loved playing the lead role in this play.

You threw yourself in the battle, pulling just about the bluntest sword out of its holder around your waist, and clashing with Ruby's. Needless to say, Ruby was no match for you and Dante together, and with a dramatic last breath of air - and a smirk only you and Dante could see from so high up - she fell backwards, tumbling down. This part had actually taken quite some organisational talent. Right in front of the platform you were battling on, there was the staircase, while there was some kind of wall behind the platform. Ruby always fell down behind the wall, where multiple thick layers of soft material made her fall softly and unharmed. The visitors, however, only saw her tumbling down the platform, which made for a very dramatic effect. Of course, Ruby, out of all people, loved it the most.

While the enthusiastic applause intensified, you and Dante fell into each other's arms. You separated a bit, and patiently waited as Dante pulled a lock of your hair behind your ear, something that was in the script. Then, he leaned down slightly, pulling you in for a small, but cute kiss. This wasn't your first time enacting the play, and so you'd gotten used to kissing Dante, and even though you both really didn't have romantic feelings for each other and this was only just a play, you found that the enthusiasm during that kiss from both the kids and adults who were watching, had cured a lot of your insecurities over time.

Hand in hand, you walked down the stairs. Beneath you, the crowd started cheering again, and Dante squeezed your hand, smiling at you. You knew he was congratulating you for once again bringing the play to a successful end. Every time the two of you walked down those stairs, he did it, and every time, you were really grateful.

Once down, your entire crew formed a line, taking each others hands to make a collective bow. You were already holding Dante's, and reached with your other hand to Ruby, but to your surprise, Ruby completely dodged it and went to stand next to Dante on his other side. You were about to grin, your hopes at getting them together once more reviving, before Ruby looked at you and sent you a wink. You were puzzled for a second, until you felt your fingers being intertwined with someone else's, a warm, and, let's be honest, a bit of a clammy hand. Normally, your entire crew held hands with closer fingers, kind of a palm-to-palm thing, so this was a surprise. You were quick to turn your head, and looked straight into Sam's warm eyes. He flashed you a shy smile, and congratulated you on your performance. You smiled back, bowing down with the rest of your crew.

When you got home tonight, you wouldn't slip off your smile along with your costume, for you finally understood that you were just as worthy of a fairytale as all the princesses, goddesses and fairies you had played along the way.

#crushxreader #crush x reader #love #themepark #colleagues to lovers #crush #imagines #oneshots #acting #actor!reader #music #musician!crush #theatre #oneshot #xreader

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zoiisworld · 3 years

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"What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though." . I give this book a ⭐⭐⭐/5 rating because I don't have any strong feelings towards it. It won't stick with me forever, I won't think about it in the middle of the night, It didn't make me mad, I didn't hate its guts, it is not that kind of book, at least for me.. If I had read it a couple of years ago, I might have felt passionate about it, but I no longer have that angst in me, I am not angry at the world anymore, in fact I am almost at peace with my myself right now. Holden's character is whiney and self-centred, I know some might find him annoying but it was meant to be this way. He wasn't meant to be a kind, softhearted boy made of rainbows and dewdrops. I kind of enjoyed reading seeing the world from his angry eyes. Talking about the plot, there wasn't one whatsoever. Overall it was a nice little read. ✨Synopsis The hero-narrator of The Catcher in the Rye is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caulfield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days. The boy himself is at once too simple and too complex for us to make any final comment about him or his story. Perhaps the safest thing we can say about Holden is that he was born in the world not just strongly attracted to beauty but, almost, hopelessly impaled on it. There are many voices in this novel: children's voices, adult voices, underground voices-but Holden's voice is the most eloquent of all. Transcending his own vernacular, yet remaining marvelously faithful to it, he issues a perfectly articulated cry of mixed pain and pleasure. However, like most lovers and clowns and poets of the higher orders, he keeps most of the pain to, and for, himself. The pleasure he gives away, or sets aside, with all his heart. It is there for the reader who can handle it to keep. https://www.instagram.com/p/CQ05Ov-LnRW/?utm_medium=tumblr

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flowerflamestars · 4 years

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Hello sweetheart, So for the fanfic ask if you could answer every single one.. That would be terrific. Or at least these : 1, 4, 10, 15, 17, 19..? I'm sorry I just literally want to know everything, thank you, bye ❤️

1. If you’re an author, how many WIPs do you currently have? (Be honest!)

Oh god. Honestly? Fifteen ish, in varying stages of actual progress.

4. What fandom’s/ship’s fan fiction do you read the most?

Deeply in quarantine life now, I’ve been jumping between nostalgia ships and whatever happens to be eye-catching. Currently revisiting the delightful gut-punch of Arin/Kestral (The Winners Curse), @provocative-envy‘s eternally good HP rarepair stories, and wishing I’d ever found more excellent fic for Harrow/Gideon (Gideon the Ninth) and Declan/Jordan (Call Down the Hawk).

Also, I just recently stumbled into the Untamed fandom and my god? longing for days. Give me all the agony.

10. Mutual pining or enemies to friends to lovers? Enemies who wish they weren’t pining. Oh shit we’re friends, but like, mean friends, to lovers.

Both!

15. Post the last line you wrote without context.

I’m going to cheat and drop a full snippet here, with the justification that the whole story is just so, so long:

This time, the view over Nesta’s shoulders wasn’t a sweeping Library landscape. Sunset light filled a round room of stone, every pale, comfortable inch gilded amber. Soft, serene and splendid as Nesta herself sprawled comfortable in the middle of it, what Cassian could only guess was her personal space.

Cassian swallowed the thought that the dreamy light would show every inch of scar on his wings.

He wanted her to count them. Wanted her fingers in his mouth, her hands in his hair, her-

He wanted to crawl across that golden room to her.

If Nesta cared that he was red and staring, it didn’t show.

17. Describe a fic that is still in the ‘ideas’ stage.

Marked, the Nessian soulmark au I wrote centuries ago has always had a tentative sequel? Mor/Elain, soft blushy girls adoring girls, Cassian in the background being a really smug wingman.

19. What’s your favorite character headcanon?

I have way, way too many! But a few, from acotar specifically: Elain isn’t actually a doormat. Nesta knew Cassian was her mate when she was mortal. Cassian had a crush on Az when they were teenagers.

Thank you for the ask, lovely! I am literally always down to ramble about writing :)

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thathijabimisfit-blog · 6 years

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7 suspect Tales of Merfolk in Anime

Log Horizon Before the limited imaginary being recast seafolk as tragic romantic heroes, sirens were creatures you ne'er wished to encounter on the open ocean. recognizing one or a lot of befittingly hearing one meant you and your fellow shipmates earned a unidirectional price ticket to the frigid depths. Mermaids were much more fascinated by luring men to their doom than shacking up with them in a very beachside castle.

Formidable as they were, there ar still dozens of variations of some skilled worker obtaining wise and deciding to pressure one into changing into his better half. typically this concerned stealing one thing from her throughout a vulnerable moment, associate alternate skin or gown, that will enable her to come back to the ocean. Her agency taken, many seafolk went domestic however the story continually ends with them restitution no matter item it absolutely was and ditching their husband-captor straight off. perhaps all the sirens, selkies, and melusines were malicious in response? UN agency is aware of. however it's these legends also as Japan's own distinctive myths regarding ladies of the ocean that provide US the variability of mermaids found in anime.

Mermaid Melody: shrub shrub Pitch Michiko Yokote may be a in style anime author with credits spanning heaps of genres. She's worked on Rumiko Takahashi anime diversifications, The fatal lifetime of Saiki K., and this season's Tsurune. In 2003, she wrote a manga series for the shojo magazine Nakayoshi primarily based loosely off Hans Christian Andersen's the limited imaginary being. That manga, and subsequent anime series, was imaginary being Melody: shrub shrub Pitch. The anime is takes a number of parts|the weather} lost within the Walt Disney version (namely the mermaid's fate to show into seafoam) on the other hand adds a bunch of additional elements as anime is used to do. The heroine Lucia is already a imaginary being aristocrat in her claim however she'll have to be compelled to hone her singing powers to become associate idol with fellow imaginary being royalty if she's reaching to fend off the offensive water demon force. i'm wondering why writer did not place that half in his original story?

Muromi-san Mermaids ar caught in one amongst 2 nets: stunning nonnatural beings or terrific flesh eaters. Muromi-san managed to flee from each and dive deep into slapstick stupidity. I say this with the kindest intentions, however Muromi may be a huge ol' dummy and also the poor guy that reeled her au fait his line is cursed with her. and every one of her outrageous friends and foes. Muromi-san's world is one amongst not simply mermaids, however conjointly alphabetic character, harpies, and yetis. None of those monsters can get in between Muromi and her professed love for Takurō, the miserable guy UN agency needs nothing over to travel back to his peaceful fishing life.

In the blink of a watch, thirty thousand bemused Japanese gamers ar whisked from their everyday lives into the planet of the favored MMORPG, Elder Tale, once the game's latest update—unable to close. Among them is that the socially awkward college man Shiroe, whose confusion and shock lasts solely an instant as, a veteran of the sport, he right away sets intent on explore the bounds of his new reality. log horizon characters

Shiroe should learn to measure during this new world, leading others and negotiating with the federal agency "natives" so as to bring stability to the virtual town of Akihabara. he's joined by his unfortunate friend Naotsugu, having logged sure the primary time in years solely to seek out himself unfree, and Akatsuki, a petite however fierce assassin UN agency labels Shiroe as her master. A tale of fantasy, adventure, and politics, Log Horizon explores the weather of diversion through the eyes of a master contriver UN agency tries to form the most effective of a puzzling state of affairs.

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marjaystuff · 4 years

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The Last Christmas Cowboy

Claiming The Rancher’s Heir

Maisey Yates

Harlequin Pub.

The Last Christmas Cowboy and Claiming The Rancher’s Heir by Maisy Yates are holiday gifts for anyone who reads her stories. During this time of year people need to put smiles on their faces, especially after enduring 2020, and these books do just that.

The Last Christmas Cowboy delves into how people must endure after losing a loved one. Both the hero, Logan Heath and the heroine, Rose Daniels, lost their parents in the same plane crash. Both have survivor’s guilt and wish the crash never happened. Logan losing his mother and Rose losing both her parents shattered their world, which is probably why they became each other’s friend and confidant. Now seventeen years later, they are still broken but are dealing with it differently, even as they work the ranch together.

After Rose decides to become a matchmaker to her beloved older sister, Iris, she confides in Logan and enlists his help. She refuses to accept his assertion that she knows nothing about chemistry until they share an electrifying kiss. The plot has Rose realizing she must decide if she wants the relationship with Logan to change from friend to something more, while he battles self-restraint and desire.

Claiming The Rancher’s Heir is an enemy to lover story. On the surface, Wren Maxfield and Creed Cooper hate each other. But, to benefit both of their wineries, they're willing to set aside their differences and work together. Yet, it is very difficult for both to set aside their animosity and stop trading barbed comments. It becomes clear that both of them are responding with hostility in order to hide their attraction to one another. What makes this story even better is the soul-searching both are doing to try to find the person they truly want to be.

Both these books will have readers’ constantly turning the pages. Per usual, Yates writes terrific characters with great sparring dialogue, not to mention an interesting relationship story.

Elise Cooper: In Claiming the Rancher’s Heir, why an enemy to lover story?

Maisey Yates: I was at this vacation rental, doing research for my next women’s fiction novel. I sat down at the kitchen table and in my head popped the heroine saying the only way I would dance with you is on your grave. I wanted this antagonistic relationship because I enjoy writing that kind of banter. It was a lot of fun to write.

EC: How would you describe the relationship?

MY: Hostility covered up this intense attraction between the two of them. With these shorter books I don’t like to go half-way because there is not a lot of time to get into the nuance of things. In many ways the hero pushed the heroine to change.

EC: How would you describe the heroine, Wren?

MY: She thinks she has it together but really does not. She is smart and polished with a little bit of wildness. Sometimes stubborn, prissy, and controlling, but it is used to cover up the fact she cannot find herself.

EC: What role did her parents play in shaping who Wren is today?

MY: Her parents had a strong expectation of who she is supposed to be. Her father is controlling, difficult, and sleezy. Wren wanted to please him so tried to be the person he wanted. Now she is in a crisis because her father is not the person who she thought him to be. She has to find herself because she was living her life for him, but now considers him an awful person.

EC: How would you describe the hero, Cooper?

MY: Wounded because of his family history. He appears to be a laid-back cowboy type, which is what gets on Wren’s nerves. That is actually a cover because when things happen, he is more in control. Overall, he is rustic, self-confidant, and as with all my heroes he is a shade arrogant.

EC: The role of the setting?

MY: It is set in Oregon’s wine country, which is where I live. They work together to promote the wine trade with events and tourism. It is funny, even though I do not drink, I use wineries in a lot of my books. I wanted to capture the wine country vibe we have in Southern Oregon. There is a spirit of collaboration rather than competition.

EC: The other book, The Last Christmas Cowboy, has a heroine Rose?

MY: She is based on Emma in Jane Austin. I think she means well, but thinks she knows it all. Unfortunately, she misreads situations. She has hope and enthusiasm, an outdoor girl who is impulsive and direct.

EC: How would you describe the hero, Logan?

MY: He is an older hero who wants to do what is right. Loyal, a solid guy, supportive, protective, and caring.

EC: How would you describe the relationship?

MY: He is the best friend of Rose’s older brother. He feels guilty because he is very much attracted to Rose. He respects her as a friend and tries very hard to have a platonic relationship. I have this quote in the book, “Rose had taken something dark and full of guilt and shame and has turned it into the most beautiful moment he could’ve asked for. She had taken his grief and turned it into joy. She had taken guilt and turned it into love. She had taken a broken man and made him whole.” Although Rose also felt guilt and sadness, she channeled it into hope. They found their way out of grief together, with a willingness to help each other heal.

EC: What about Rose’s older sister, Iris. What was their relationship?

MY: Iris was the maternal character. Rose sells her short, thinking she can never find a man. She sees Iris as dependable, and soft, who was always the caregiver.

EC: What about your next books?

MY: The next book will be Iris’ book and titled, The HeartBreaker of Echo Past. It is due out in June 2021. Her hero is a mountain man with a wounded and dark past.

Out in January of next year is Cricket’s book, The Rancher’s Heir. She is the youngest sister of Wren. It is a little bit old school romance. She feels she is much more like the Coopers’ family and thinks maybe she is Cash Cooper’s daughter. She is not. I wrote this during the lockdown and wanted a firecracker kind of heroine. Maybe in the fourth book, I will put in a romance between Cooper’s dad and Wren’s mom.

Also, out in January will be a book I wrote with three other authors: Jackie Ashenden, Caitlin Crews, and Nicole Helm. It is titled A Good Old-Fashioned Cowboy. The plot has four friends who open up shops on main street. They are staying in Grandma June’s house, which is now a vacation rental. They make a pact where no one can use their phones, no technology.

My new women’s fiction comes out in May of next year. It is titled, Confessions From The Quilting Circle. It’s about three sisters who decided to finish their late grandmother’s memory quilt, along with their mother, and how each fabric they select for the quilt reveals family secrets and brings them to a place of sharing their own secrets. I used some of my own family history for this book, so it was a fun one to write.

THANK YOU!!

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sincerelybluevase · 7 years

Text

11 questions tag

I was tagged by @thatginchygal and @beatrix-franklin, thanks guys!

In this tag, you have to answer 11 questions, then think up 11 other questions that the people you tag have to answer.

1Last book you read? Was it good?

The last book I read was The End of the Affair by Graham Greene. It was quite good!

2What are some small things that make your day better?

A nice cup of tea, sunshine, my dog, nice messages from friends.

3Name one album that you can listen to without skipping a single track.

Thirteen Tales of Love and Revenge by The Pierces.

4In your opinion, what is the best Disney movie to come out since Disney’s Golden Age?

I love Tarzan and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I think I’ll have to go with the last one. It is just incredibly interesting. Plus the songs are hella catchy.

5Who is a character from a TV show or a book that you’ve always resonated with?

I’m going to say Shelagh for a TV show (surprise surprise haha). For a book: the I-character in Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. She’s just so painfully shy and overthinks everything…

6Is there a documentary or book that really changed the way you thought about something?

Hmm. Matilda by Roald Dahl taught me that you can be smart and likeable at the same time, haha.

Sally Gardner taught me that I could become a writer. She wrote two of my favourite books (The Double Shadow and I, Coriander). She’s quite terrific; because of her dyslexia, she didn’t learn to read till she was 14. Everybody had always assumed she was just a difficult, wilful child, until a teacher realised that she was nothing of the sort, and taught her how to read. If someone who struggled so immensely with reading and writing can become such a good author, I feel that I might just get there if I work just as hard as she did.

7What is the dumbest way you’ve been injured?

I fell down the stairs at work this summer and ripped a good piece of skin from my leg, just above my foot. It’s still a scar.

8If you could invite any three people from history to dinner, who would you invite?

That is a hard but good question! I think I’d pick Mary Wollstonecraft, Charles Dickens, and Leonardo Da Vinci.

9If you had one day in your life to live over again, which would you choose and why?

I’d pick the day I decided to study German and make sure I’d pick English instead. A lame answer, I know, but it would’ve saved me a year of studying and made me happier in the long run.

10What book impacted you the most?

I can’t possibly pick one. I’ve already named a few in the other questions, but I’ll have to add Till We Have Faces to the list. That book makes me cry.

11 I’m stealing the Desert Island Discs Question: You’re castaway to a remote island you can take 8 tracks, 1 book (You’ve already been given the complete works of Shakespeare and the Bible) and one Luxury item. What do you choose?

1. Work Song by Hozier

2. Better Love by Hozier

3. You’ll be mine by the Pierces

4. In the mirror from the CtM album

5. Queen of Peace by Florence and the machine

6. War ich der Wind from the German musical Dracula

7. Wenn ich tanzen will from the German musical Elisabeth

8. Milady ist zurück from the German musical Die Drei Musketiere

Sad I don’t have more tracks haha, or I’d have picked some more German musical songs and some more Hozier, the Pierces, and Florence.

For a book: Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. For the luxury item: a laptop with charger, assuming there’s electricity on this island 😉

My questions are:

1. Ideal pet?

2. If you could become famous, what would you like to become famous for?

3. If you write, do you prefer fanfics or original work? (if not: do you have a preference for reading fanfics or original work?)

4. What is a book that you’ve read multiple times and never tire of reading?

5. Is there a fashion trend you wish you’d dare to wear?

6. What is your favourite fanfic?

7. If you could choose to remake a film, which one would you pick?

8. Is there a work of art (can be a film, a book, a painting, etc.) you wish you’d made?

9. Are you someone who is always hot or seems to be cold always?

10. What is your favourite ancient civilisation, and why?

11. Imagine there’s a zombie apocalypse. What would be your plan of survival?

I tag @alice1nwond3rland @kienova66 @purple-roses-words-and-love @lovetheturners @turnt4turnadette, @like-an-officer-and-a-sergeant and @acourtofhopeanddreams(hope you guys haven’t been tagged yet!)

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acroamatica · 7 years

Note

5 24 25

5. Books or authors that influenced your style the most.thank goodness this didn’t ask for THE book or author, because that’s an impossible question.

i like to think i don’t particularly sound like anyone all the time, because i try to write in the way that best suits the story i’m trying to tell. my authorial voice is very much subordinate to the character who is narrating and the needs of the story, and thus the actual mechanics of the thing being done may change a lot.

however: i owe an enormous amount to ray bradbury, raymond chandler, dorothy sayers, diane duane, c.j. cherryh, terry pratchett, spider robinson, and douglas adams. all of these fine, fine people write rich, detail-replete, character-driven stories where every detail has been considered and you come away feeling like you know the people in their books, like they could walk right off the page and shake your hand - or you could walk right into the page and find yourself in a world you could live in. and that above all is something i want to emulate in my work. the stories that have stuck with me the most are the books where i made friends.

24. Poetry or prose, and why?

inclusive or! inclusive or! but seriously, do both, and do them as often as possible.

it’s not true that the only difference between prose and poetry is spacing. but what is definitely true is that the lessons you learn from writing one are applicable to the other. i recently finished a terrific book called the elements of eloquence, by mark forsyth, all about rhetorical devices, and it turns out that most of history’s really really good lines have some rhetorical trick to them, whether they rhymed or not being extremely secondary. many of them did, though.

learn about rhetoric; learn about the way things sound together, the music of what you’re doing, and what effect the steps have on the feel of the dance. then throw it in everywhere you can. i wrote so much poetry into whomsoever i shall kiss because the narrator had a poetic sort of turn of phrase. and it worked! or at least i think it did. if you need a sonnet, write a sonnet - but you don’t always need a sonnet to write a poem.

25. Linear or non-linear, and why?

i WISH i was better at writing non-linear. i tried to do something non-linear recently and got about half a dozen scenes into the outline before i realised it wasn’t going to work half as well as if i just did everything in more or less chronological order. and since i invariably write from beginning to end with few detours along the way non-linear doesn’t suit me very well, apart from the occasional flashback. but i’m not in the least opposed to it as a trick when others do it, it can be tremendously well deployed. just not by me at present. :D

(writing asks here)

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fiendmuse · 4 months

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“have ya ever, like... thought about someone so much? like... romantically? all th' stuff ya wanna do with 'em? 've been thinking about kissin' this one person lately.”

#┊❛denji❜┊ heroes don't exist. and if they did i wouldn't be one of them #┊❛in character❜┊ you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours #mood son. big mood.

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konvolutes · 8 years

Video

youtube

February 2017

@ California Theater in Berkeley with Lydia from Paris School of Economics, visiting student of Picketty.

“What white people have to do is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a nigger in the first place, because I'm not a nigger,” he said. “I'm a man, but if you think I'm a nigger, it means you need it… If I'm not a nigger and you invented him -- you, the white people, invented him -- then you've got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that, whether or not it's able to ask that question.”

I knew next to nothing of Baldwin’s political thought and activism beyond the page before seeing this. Terrific film-craft, a collage over a single unfinished text of James Baldwin interspersed with his own voice.

The entire voice-over narration (spoken by Samuel L. Jackson) of Raoul Peck’s incisive documentary is derived from the writings of James Baldwin, whose unfinished memoir and study of the lives of three slain civil-rights leaders—Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr.—provides the movie’s through line. Peck adds a generous selection of archival footage showing the heroes of Baldwin’s project at work and detailing Baldwin’s own intellectual activism at times of crisis. Moving from divisions within the civil-rights movement (including those separating Malcolm X from King) to its unities, Peck also spotlights Baldwin’s analysis of the yet unbridged gap between the legal end of segregation and the practice of white supremacy. (Unredressed police killings of black Americans, as Peck shows, are a crucial and enduring result of that ideology.) The filmmaker cannily cites Baldwin’s remarkable writings about movies to illustrate the author’s overarching thesis, about the country’s tragic failure of consciousness; Peck’s references to current events reveal Baldwin’s view of history and his prophetic visions to be painfully accurate.

I Am Not Your Negro begins with the author’s return to the U.S. in 1957 after living in France for almost a decade—a return prompted by seeing a photograph of 15-year-old Dorothy Counts and the violent white mob that surrounded her as she entered and desegregated Harding High School in Charlotte, North Carolina. After seeing that picture, Baldwin explained, “I could simply no longer sit around Paris discussing the Algerian and the black American problem. Everybody was paying their dues, and it was time I went home and paid mine.”

Especially riveting is Baldwin’s discussion of Poitier in “The Defiant Ones,” a film that divided black and white audiences when it was released, in 1958. In “The Defiant Ones,” Poitier plays an escaped black convict who is handcuffed to a racist white convict (Tony Curtis). Gradually, the two become friends, of a sort, and toward the end of the film Poitier’s character sacrifices his own freedom to help Curtis’s character. In “The Devil Finds Work,” Baldwin points out that black audiences wanted Poitier’s character to abandon his former tormentor, while white audiences thought that his loyalty was laudable.

alongside “O.J.: Made in America” and “13TH,” with which it shares some concerns. This trio of moves present a complex statement on the evolution of racial barriers that have plagued the country over the past century, and the impulses that keep them in place, but “I Am Not Your Negro” casts the widest net.

Within the confines of a five-minute stretch, he veers from clips of Rodney King riots to Ferguson, Billy Wilder’s “Love in the Afternoon” and Gus Van Sant’s “Elephant” — with Jackson’s whispered narration as the key linking device — addressing both the frustration driving black activism and the broader systematic dysfunction that has marginalized issues of race in society. Peck’s dazzling approach never slows down, but maintains a clarity of vision that’s enthralling and provocative without turning into didacticism.

Baldwin’s sexuality surprisingly left out, despite his other writings on the topic and intersectionality with race. During the ’60s, liberals and radicals alike mocked and attacked Baldwin because of his sexuality. President John F. Kennedy, and many others, referred to him disparagingly as “Martin Luther Queen”; and Eldridge Cleaver, one of the leaders of the Black Panther Party, wrote in his memoir Soul on Ice: “The case of James Baldwin aside for a moment, it seems that many Negro homosexuals, acquiescing in this racial death-wish, are outraged and frustrated because in their sickness they are unable to have a baby by a white man.” In Baldwin’s No Name in the Street (1971), a source from which I Am Not Your Negro draws heavily, the author responded to Cleaver’s attacks against him, but viewers wouldn’t know from the film’s narrative slant how the experience of race and sexuality were closely intertwined for Baldwin.

Backstory of the film

They gifted him Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time” and he was forever changed.

“Since that first contact with Baldwin, I never left him,” he said. “I read everything. He was a constant reminder for me, a constant mentor, a constant companion.”

When Peck began making films -- after being a New York City taxi driver and working as a journalist and photographer, and while he was Haiti’s minister of culture — he knew that “one day I would tackle Baldwin,” especially since he starts every screenplay he writes with a Baldwin quote to help “sustain the whole writing process.” He set out to do just that nearly 10 years ago.

In need of permission from the Baldwin estate — the writer died in 1987 — Peck wrote them a letter despite everyone telling him they were notorious for refusing or ignoring requests. “I have nothing to lose,” he thought.

He received a written response within three days and an invitation to meet with Baldwin’s sister Gloria Karefa-Smart in Washington, D.C. By the end of their meeting, she, a fan of Peck’s 2000 film “Lumumba,” had granted him unprecedented access to the entire estate.

“She chose me, much more than me choosing Baldwin,” he said.

Over the next four years, he ruffled through Baldwin’s many works, published and unpublished. In that time, he had written a number of scripts, for a narrative feature and a mixed narrative-documentary flick, but “all that was not satisfying for me,” he said.

“Deep down what I wanted was how to do the ultimate Baldwin [film], the film that would be bold and nobody could shake up, that would stay forever and make everybody go back to Baldwin and the books,” he said.

It was necessary for him to at least try to have the same impact Baldwin himself had on people and society with this film. But “to be totally Baldwin, I knew I had to set myself back and leave the stage for him, his words.”

The idea for “I Am Not Your Negro” would come only when Karefa-Smart was packing up the estate to send to the New York Public Library. She came across a 30-page collection of notes and that she sent to Peck believing that he’d know what to do with them. The notes were of Baldwin’s unfinished book, “Remember This House,” and provided “the open door” Peck was longing for.

“Remember This House,” the foundation of the film, was Baldwin’s effort to tell the story of race in America through the assassinations of Malcolm X, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Medgar Evers. The filmmaker took the words from those pages and crafted a narrative, voiced by Samuel L. Jackson, that Peck hopes will endure and remain as relevant as Baldwin himself. And in contrast to how most modern documentaries are made, the now Oscar-nominated “I Am Not Your Negro” has no talking heads. The only words are Baldwin’s.

“I made sure every single word was pure Baldwin,” he said. “It was not about how creative I am. It was about how do I make sure it hits the people frontally, without any filter.”

#james baldwin #race #arts #live art #film #2017

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prettypistachio · 8 years

Note

7,14,16,19,20

Thanks for the ask! A sorry has to come first cuz I had to reverse the order to 7-16-19-20-14. Thing is No. 14 went outta control so plz forgive me;)

7: What’s the most hilarious moment to you?

Hanazawa. Teruki. Ochimusha. OMFG. Not only did I learn a new word but it’s Genius humour from ONE. Awesome Idea. Hands Down. The way I laughed that day like no other last year. Just Perfect. Manga and Anime likewise the scene will never be forgotten by me. NEVER.

16: What would be your first or basic psychic skill (telekinesis, pyrokinesis, hydrokinesis, ect)?

HYDROKINESIS. HYDROKINESIS. HYDROKINESIS (explanation why is here)

19: Would you hone your basic psychic skill or try to learn different ones?

Yes. Yes to both. I’d follow in my son’s footsteps: Teru. I’d just learn from everyone and everything. After Hydrokinesis I’d just learn the other three elements and basically become the avatar of this world. Someone has to do it.

20: Would you try to use your psychic powers for personal gain or only if you had to?

It’d be a shame not to use such power, right? Like personal gain to arrive early to places, or maybe flying instead of using transport to save money, or maybe invisibility…for the right purposes ofc. So, yes within reason that it doesn’t harm or kill anyone in any possible way. But I’d love to use my powers freak out my family and friends for fun though. I mean, wouldn’t you?

14: Are there any MP 100 fanfics you HAVE to rec?

Yup, here we go. Bear with me cuz it’s long but it’s not my fault the MP100 fandom has good fics. I kinda feel spoiled. I can’t rec ‘em all. So here’s a few among many.

(Order is: General, Sakuyama, Ekurei, Serirei, Ritshou, and ofc TeruMob)

General

Temporary Accommodations by Originia is superb. Characters in character, dramatic moments, serious moments, intriguing moments. The body mind switch thing between Reigen and…? Yeah, it’s well written.

Three by Ravenesta is extremely excellent. Sensational to me. It has this as the summary on ao3: ‘ The staff of Salt Middle School consider Kageyama Shigeo’s third emergency contact.’ IF you’re not hooked like I was then I don’t know what to say.

Groceries by @crescentmoonrider is also superb. This writer’s background on Teru is extremely thought out well. The way it’s written grabs your attention.

9.8 meters per second by exogenesis is fantastic. The way Teru is explored in this fic is perfect, haunting, and real.

Silver and Gold by Sifl / @onepunchmusical is also fantastic. This writer gives me my quota of Reigen & Teru interaction. The Reigen & Teru with a touch of Mob is exactly what I’m after. I mean it.

ah, young love! by @dreamy–dark by is terrific. Thank goodness this writer brought more Reigen & Teru to mp100. This Reigen & Teru with a hint of Mob is wonderfully written. Love their nosy Reigen. I have no complaints.

This fic by @paperficwriter is splendid. I am a sucker for Reigen when he’s doing his father-role with Mob. The bond between them is so sweet in this.

Sakuyama

Maybe by power (teii) is also terrific. It’s not shippy but it’s not not shippy. It’s awesome. It’s Sakurai and Koyama dealing with things life after Reigen’s badassery, and it touches my soul and makes me want to explore them more. This writer has hooked me on them dangerously well.

Ekurei

1 by slutreigen (pleasejustno) is extraordinary. Don’t let the author’s name fool you but they write these two well. The subtly in the relationship kills me every time. But the banter in this fic 2 …it’s gooood. One day soon I know I’ll end up shipping ekurei.

Serirei

This Place is Big Enough for Two of Us by WritingIsMyCoffee is also extraordinary. The writer’s made it real and it’s gets real in this fic.

flower language by matsunoble is wonderful. Reigen is a freakin’ florist! It drives me crazy. This fic gives me life. Florist!Reigen is the best.

Ritshou

The Time of Change by SpringZephyr is also wonderful. It’s the sweet, real teen-like, funny fic on them I’ve ever read.

Aubade by Ravenesta is amazing. It’s Ritsu, Shou, College AU, Slow Burn and both of them decide to…well, I’m not telling you. Please read this yourself ;)

ANYTHING that is Ritshou by allthingsunrelated OR by krypkaktus (Regndoft) is also amazing.

Terumob [OTP]

Teen Spirit by @potato-eating-intensifies is impressive. The writer wrote one my fav AU’S in MP100. This delinquent!au gives me so much inspiration. Characterisation is handled really well, especially delinquent!Mob. The teen angst and frustration…loved every moment reading it. You should read it too. Like now.

asleep and constantly floating away by theholychesse is magnificent. It’s on-going, and I’m officially addicted, and it has PRE HUMILITY TERU AND MOB. It’s kinda my wormhole!terumob wish come to life. And Mob in this fic is, well…it’s a shock. Read this please. I CAN’T stress this enough.

And Under Your Breath (You Spoke of Innocence) by @terubi is also impressive. Nothing but excellence. So in character for my fav espers.

STANDING ON A BOX FULL OF STARS by @peanut-jars is brillant. Makes me say wow again and again and again. It’s short, sweet, and special. I can not not tell the world about this.

I Need Him by Kinyve is also brilliant. It’s Shou, Mob, and Ritsu crushing on my fav Teru. He’s the wanted protagonist weirdly enough. Growth by Kinyve is brilliant too plus college au, and on-going. One of my favs as you can see.

On The Other Side by tofuandnuts is remarkable. Seriously. It’s like the 1st age swap au on AO3 plus the first one I read, and still great as ever. Characterisation and relationships are handled well. Teen Reigen in this is a freakin’ joy!

Wake by @amaranthinecanicular is a must-read. This age swap AU has the word Hanazawa Shigeo in the summary. How can I resist? Relationships in this fic are gorgeously explored and Reigen is the MVP in this. He’s so precious. Teru’s job cracks me up but it’s becoming a real hc for me now. You can’t persuade me otherwise.

Turning Slowly by sorrow_key is also a must-read. This writer writes Mob like they have the blueprints to hi. The layers added to Mob were killing me. We are like literally inside his head! The addition of Teru and thoughtful use of other characters was beautifully done.

A Half A Spoonful of Sugar by bikeaesthetic aka @kageyamashigeo is worthy of my heart, soul, and mind. One of the first terumob fics I ever ever read. Still fantastic to read again when I’m in need of cavities.

A Way With Words by entrenched is beautiful. I can’t take it. Plus the writer did a series. And the ending? My heart was failing and starting all at the same time.

Heat and Light by classicteacake is also beautiful. Gosh, the way they write just takes pieces of my soul I never knew I had.

Chick Flicks are Poor References for Romance by @fireflysummers is delightful. It seriously seriously is. Characterization for terumob is spot on.

If You Love Me, Won’t You Let Me Know by @one-trash-man is also delightful. Title itself speaks volumes. I was hopeless. I couldn’t resist and I don’t regret a thing. Pretty art goes with the fic too.

how the light gets in by iapetuses is also splendid. One of the tags the writer used was ‘oblivious teru’…That is the kind of swap realisation idea I adore in terumob fics. Let Teru be the clueless one. Btw the ending still kills me.

The end.

#mp100 ask meme #yes i know i took this meme far too seriously #but ppl deserve to know how great they are #and how they've ruined me by just using words #im pathetic

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thewebofslime · 5 years

Link

As soon as Keith Raniere was arrested and charged with sex trafficking and a bunch of other charges, it became inevitable that there would be a slew of books, movies and podcasts about him and his sex-slaver cult. Keith Raniere sitting inside a Mexican police vehicle on March 26, 2018. It is our last known photograph of the Vanguard. Treasure it. That’s because the underlying story had all the elements that make for a good story: SEX Hollywood actresses, SEX, money, SEX, dead and missing women, SEX, a cult – and, oh yeah, SEX. And that’s exactly what’s happened. ***** Escaping the NXIVM Cult So far, only one film has been released – Escaping the NXIVM Cult – a made-for-television docudrama that first appeared on the Lifetime network on Saturday, September 21st. It was re-broadcast last night – and for those of you who still haven’t seen it, you’ll get another chance at 12:00 Noon on Saturday, October 5th. Those who have seen the film have generally been impressed with the portrayals of the main characters – which, per Lifetime’s perspective, are Catherine Oxenberg, Keith Raniere, and India Oxenberg. Andrea Roth played Catherine Oxenberg in the Lifetime film Given that this movie was based on the novel written by Catherine – Captive: A Mother’s Crusade to Save Her Daughter from a Terrifying Cult – it is certainly not surprising that those would be the three main characters in this movie. Peter Facinelli played Keith. As Entertainment’s review of the movie indicated, “Instead of telling of telling the story of how (Allison) Mack became one of the leaders of the group that resulted in her pleading guilty to racketeering and racketeering conspiracy charges, viewers actually saw the true-crime case play out from Catherine Oxenberg’s perspective as her daughter India became brainwashed by the group. Dynasty actress Oxenberg used her own memories and writing from her book Captive: A Mother’s Crusade to Save Her Daughter from a Terrifying Cult as well as all the research she did into NXIVM for the movie’s plot”. Jasper Polish played India Because the movie only covers the timespan from when Catherine and India first attended a NXIVM training seminar until when India breaks from the cult following Raniere’s arrest in Mexico, it leaves out much of the cult’s 20-year history. There’s no mention. for example, of Gina Hutchinson’s supposed suicide, Kristin Snyder’s disappearance, the break-away of the NXIVM Nine, the Times Union award-winning series on Raniere and the cult, or the many local officials who were bribed or intimidated into allowing the cult to become an international criminal enterprise. The film also conflates various events – and just makes up others in order to streamline the story. I say that not to be critical but simply to forewarn Frank Report readers that have not yet seen the movies to understand that it is a “docudrama” and not a “documentary” (A docudrama is generally defined as “a dramatized television movie based on real events”). Catherine has made clear on several occasions that she had no control over the content of the film – and given Lifetime’s reputation for maximizing the use of “creative license” in making such films, no one should be disappointed that it does not always portray what happened in real life. The fact that this film brought some much-needed attention to the real-world dangers of cults like NXIVM is reason enough for people to watch it. Trina Cokrum plays Clare Bronfman. Amy Trefry as Lauren Salzman Lauren Salzman Sara Fletcher played Allison Mack. Allison Mack A Few Quibbles Notwithstanding my support for the film, there are a few things that I wish Lifetime had done a better on. Such as: I wish the film had given more credit to the role that Frank Parlato played in taking down Raniere and NXIVM. While it does show Catherine calling Frank to seek his help in getting India out of the cult – and the two of them discussing the difficulty they both faced in getting law enforcement officials to do anything – it totally omits the role that Frank played in putting together the dossier of incriminating materials that Catherine eventually delivered to the authorities. I also wish that the film had made it clear that, although frustrated with the lack of response from law enforcement officials after he had broken the story of the brandings that were going on in DOS, Frank never once thought of giving up on his quest to take down Raniere and NXIVM. Scene from Lifetime movie showing Frank with Catherine To the contrary, the lack of any response to his initial reports on the brandings only spurred Frank on to keep digging into the story – and coming up with the names of more and more women who had been duped into getting branded with Raniere’s initials on their pubis. It was Frank who would-be defectors were calling at all hours of the night – and asking for advice on how to escape from Raniere’s clutches. It was Frank that others were calling to provide him with the names of more branded DOS women. It was Frank who worked so closely with New York Times reporter Barry Meier to ensure that there was factual evidence to back up every detail in the story that Barry eventually wrote about NXIVM and DOS. And, unbeknownst to many, it was Frank who had arranged for the story about NXIVM and DOS to be published in another major newspaper if the New York Times had procrastinated much longer. ***** More Serious Criticism While many have lauded the movie and came away with the notion that it was Catherine alone who took down Nxivm, others who were deeply involved with the fight felt they got the short shrift or worse were portrayed insultingly. This does not include Frank Parlato who said, when asked about his ridiculously diminished role, “It’s only a movie”. But some of the people who really deserved credit – such as Bonnie Piesse – who worked hard to get Catherine to understand the danger India was in and Mark Vicente, who had a huge role in the take down of Nxivm, [both of whom were side by side with Catherine in most of her brave endeavors] were represented very poorly and in a most unflattering light. It could be called in some respects a slap in the face to those who made all the difference. [Sarah Edmondson also comes off rather foolish in the film.] Yet these were the people who did their best to help her rescue her daughter and without their help and Frank Parlato’s help, India might still in Nxivm and Raniere still branding women. You wouldn’t know it from the movie. At the end of the day, her critics say, Catherine might have done more to protect some of her friends and see to it that they were represented more honestly. Though Catherine has said she gave up creative control – it is probably true that before making the deal with Lifetime, she could have insisted on some protection from distortion of her work. While she has gained some glamour and renown from the movie of “Catherine single handed takes down the cult” – some of the very people who made it possible were hurt and insulted. What does that augur in the real world of authenticity? You make yourself more famous, but you hurt your friends who in real life actually saved you? Kristin Booth who is 45 plays Bonnie Piesse in the Lifetime movie. Piesse is 36 Bonnie Piesse Sean Skerry plays Mark Vicente. Mark Vicente Upcoming Documentaries For those who prefer more fact-based presentations, there are several upcoming documentaries about NXIVM and Raniere that will, hopefully, be much more fact-based than the Lifetime movie. These include the following: Beyond the Headlines: Escaping the NXIVM Cult with Gretchen Carlson – A&E: This already aired on September 21st right after the Lifetime movie – and it included terrific interviews with Catherine and Frank. We’re still looking to see if this might be rebroadcast sometime soon. Catherine Oxenberg and Gretchen Carlson NXIVM: Self-Help or Sex Cult – E! Hollywood Story: October 6th – 10:00 PM (EDT The Lost Women of NXIVM – Investigation Discovery: Dec. 7 The Vow – HBO 8-part series: Tentative airing in January 2020 In addition, we have also heard word of three other documentaries that may be coming out next year. One of those is being considered by the BBC – and the other two are on French and Australian television. ***** Books & Podcasts Sometime soon, we will be publishing our reviews of all the NXIVM-related books that have been released to date (There are also at least two others being written right now). If any readers would like to share their thoughts on any of those books, please send an email with that information to Frank at [email protected]. And, as always, if you have a tip that you’d like to share with Frank – either on the record or anonymously – you can reach him at 716.990.5740.

#TheWebOfSlime

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fashiontrendin-blog · 6 years

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Was Caroline Calloway the First Instagram Influencer?

http://fashion-trendin.com/was-caroline-calloway-the-first-instagram-influencer/

Was Caroline Calloway the First Instagram Influencer?

Caroline Calloway is a 26-year-old from Falls Church, Virginia, with over 850,000 followers on Instagram. She is famous for something that didn’t really exist until a few years ago: a personal brand. However, she doesn’t like to think of herself as one — a confession she shared as we sat on the floor of her one-bedroom apartment in the West Village, surrounded by color-coordinated books, fresh flowers tucked into empty Martinelli’s Sparkling Apple Cider bottles and charred palo santo sticks.

An aspiring writer determined to score a book deal, Caroline saw something in an up-and-coming app called Instagram that many people at the time did not: opportunity. She started posting the first chapters of a would-be memoir in lengthy captions across a series of Instagram posts and quickly amassed a legion of readers who hung onto her every word. Posting intimate personal details on social media is now commonplace, but when Caroline first started sharing stories about her life, her friends and her romantic relationships, it was different. Unique. A bit scandalous, even.

I spoke with her about all of this, including her coveted book deal — which she scored to the tune of half a million dollars, only to subsequently back out of the contract. Below, her as-told-to story.

On When She Started Taking Social Media Seriously

I joined Instagram in 2012, when it was just starting to become more mainstream, but the climate was totally different from what it is today. People forget how different it was. A typical photo and caption would be an aerial shot of your breakfast with the caption “#valencia” and that would be considered edgy. It was unheard of to share that you were having a bad day or were in a bad mood on Instagram, much less any extensive personal details about your life.

I was starting to learn about photography at the time, and I found it fascinating that the criticisms for why photography couldn’t be taken seriously in the late 1800s were identical to what we saw then with social media: the idea that it’s technology, that it’s science as opposed to art, that it’s too democratic to have artistic merit (i.e., anyone can buy a camera, anyone can make a Twitter account, etc.).

Now, two centuries later, every major museum has a photography collection. It goes to show that just because something is new and unfamiliar doesn’t mean it can’t be a medium for art. Once I drew this connection in my head, I started taking social media’s potential more seriously.

On Why She Decided to Write a Book on Instagram

I always knew I wanted to be a writer. I was constantly underlining things in books, trying to improve my craft, trying to get coffee with people who had interned with literary agents so I could get a literary agent. I had no idea Instagram would play a role in helping me achieve that. I just had the overwhelming determination to do whatever I could to make it happen. I’ve always been convinced that I have stories to tell and that I would be successful at telling them.

I started playing with the idea of writing a book on Instagram, and people thought I was nuts. Just imagine nowadays if someone told you they were going to build their writing career with a small, up-and-coming app that major news sources and brands don’t have a presence on. Everyone was like, “No, that will never work.”

I began by writing an autobiographical story that carried across multiple Instagram posts and introduced different people in my life as “characters.” I know that sounds strange, but think about what it’s like when you follow people on Instagram. You become invested in their lives and the people in them — their friends, their romantic partners, their coworkers. They’re like characters in one of your favorite books, except even better because they actually exist.

Once I thought about that, I realized one of the main assets of Instagram as a medium is that it’s a lot like reading a novel, but it’s also interactive. You can click on the handle of someone who is tagged in a photo, you can comment on a photo, etc. I thought about that great quote Holden Caulfield says in Catcher in the Rye — “What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.” With social media, it finally can. You can talk to the author. You can talk to the characters. You can see who they’re interacting with and what their worlds look like because they’re inviting you into them.

Another thing I did that was unthinkable back then was post about things that weren’t happening in real time. When I started sharing the story of my relationship with my ex-boyfriend Oscar, I told it slowly because I knew I wanted to sell a book about my life, and I understood that I couldn’t give away the whole plot. It took me two years to cover a period of ten days. With each installment, I let my readers get to know the characters. I would stretch out the narrative by saying things like, “Two years later, when things were so hard, we would look back on this moment with fondness.” A formula that worked really well for me was pairing beautiful photos with sort of sad or lonely captions.

My ultimate goal was to get a book deal. I didn’t know much about being a writer except that it involved book deals, and that they were important to get, and that everyone told me I wouldn’t be able to get one. Growing up as a creative kid, I received a lot of that kind of feedback. There were so many small moments with relatives or friends or teachers when I was like, “I’m going to do this,” and they were like, “you won’t make money” or “good luck with that” or “that will be hard.” I was determined to prove them wrong.

On Finally Getting a Book Deal

Flatiron Books offered me a book deal for half a million dollars in 2015. I promised a memoir where the only thing that happened to me were boyfriends and where the climax of my entire life experience to date was boy-related. The whole narrative arc was about my relationships with three different boys. For the record, no one forced me to write the proposal the way I did. I was simply caught up in my own ambition, and I lived in a world where I saw (correctly, in my opinion) that if I wanted to get the most money possible, this was the book I had to sell, so I sold it. I received around 30% of the money from the deal upfront.

It wasn’t long before I realized the boy-obsessed version of myself I planned to depict as my memoir’s protagonist was not one I could stand behind. I think there are a lot of people who would have written the book anyways and taken the money, but I couldn’t do it. So my choices were: write a book that wasn’t really about me — that was just about boys — and get lots of money, or back out of the contract and owe lots of money. I chose the latter, and I’m working on changing my business model so I have the income I need to repay them.

I had already spent my entire book advance at that point. I mainly spent it on rent for the apartment I shared with my boyfriend at the time in London, and on meals. At one point I just started giving it away to friends. The money meant nothing to me. I didn’t feel like I’d earned it and I loathed myself for how I’d gotten it. I had drifted so far from all the reasons that made me love writing and love art and made me want to be a writer in the first place, and it paralyzed me — artistically, emotionally and personally.

When it became clear to my publishers that I didn’t want to write this book, they withdrew from the contract. I more or less stopped posting on Instagram at that point. It was a really painful time for me. It was so hard to have come so close to something that I had dreamed of my entire life and trip over the finish line, but the idea of spending the rest of my life signing copies of a memoir that wasn’t about the real me broke my heart.

Backing out of the deal felt like losing a part of my identity. I started questioning everything. If I don’t have a book deal, am I still a writer? Am I still an artist? How do I define myself? Ultimately, one of the greatest gifts of getting out of it was having to find the personal strength to realize that getting paid a lot of money doesn’t make me a writer. Having a book deal doesn’t make me a writer. I am a writer simply because I have the desire to say, “This is what I am.”

On Having a Personal Brand and Being a Public Figure

I don’t like thinking of “Caroline Calloway” or “Caroline Calloway the Instagram Presence” as “brands.” However, as an artist and as a creative person, it’s both my responsibility and my right to support myself so that I can make the things I want to make. I acknowledge that in order to do that, it behooves me to understand and respond to the ways other people might see Caroline Calloway as a brand, and to act accordingly. Even though I don’t see it in my heart this way, I understand why I must in order to be the best businesswoman that I can be. I need to support myself.

Making a living this way isn’t always easy. People begin to feel like they are owed details of your life. They judge you when you share them, and they judge you when you don’t, and that is very difficult. Instagram is a medium that pairs seductively well with perfection, both in terms of what we like to consume on it and the standards we hold ourselves and others to on it. Maybe 200 or 300 years from now in the Shakespearean way that English evolves, there will be a word for the mixture of disingenuousness and sadness and loneliness you experience when you are portraying your life in a way that is not true to how you feel in the moment.

This past summer, my ex Oscar’s new girlfriend made a troll account about me. I wish I could say that when I saw the account, I had so much kindness and peace in my heart that it affected me not at all, that I anointed her on the forehead with oil and said, “Go in peace my child, I care not of this.” But that wasn’t the case. I was so angry and scared. She followed my dad’s private Instagram account, which I don’t even follow (he’s a really private guy; he shrivels like a slug under salt with public attention). He had 11 followers. One of them was her. She also followed all my other ex-boyfriends, all my family members, all of my friends.

I burst into tears. I was so upset. I called Oscar to ask him why she did this. If I’m being totally honest, I was calling him from a mean-spirited place. I would be lying to you if I said I wasn’t feeling vindictive, especially because she denied even creating the account, and Oscar believed her. She said it was a glitch in the system. That whole dramatic phone call — just having him believe her over me — was incredibly hurtful. So I posted on my Instagram Stories on what had happened. My followers were immediately up in arms. Their reaction was validating because I was so, so angry.

The next day, though, I woke up with a lot of regret. I wanted to take everything back. I started wondering how Oscar’s girlfriend must feel, and I felt so badly that hundreds of thousands of people knew what she had done — because of me. It really started to snowball into this thing where people were saying she was crazy and evil and bad. I decided it was important for them to know that I have flaws, too, so I decided to tell them that at the very end of my relationship with Oscar, I kissed someone else. I also told them I had been addicted to Adderall for about three years, and that I had only recently gotten off of it. I wanted to illustrate to them that people are human, and that there is more than one side to every story.

On Doing Sponsored Posts

I used to think I would never do sponsored posts because I wanted so badly to be taken seriously as a writer and as an artist and worried about what people might think if I monetized my Instagram. There is so much shame surrounding the idea of being an influencer and the idea of accepting money for being an influencer. People make a lot of judgments, but I’ve come to accept that. Like I said, I need to support myself.

I knew I wanted to be really transparent from the beginning about how I was approaching paid partnerships. When I decided to start doing sponsored posts, I posted about it publicly on my Instagram, and I shared my rates with my followers, which isn’t something I’ve seen anyone else do.

I immediately learned that I should be charging more, because I had a huge influx of asks for things I wasn’t interested in, even though they could technically pay my rates. Honestly, even when I raised them, I still got asked to do things I didn’t want to do. I don’t want to do, like, Fit Tea or hair gummies or those sort of things. It would be hypocritical of me to sit here and talk about how firmly I believed in getting out of a book deal with a sexist plot and then post an ad for appetite suppressant lollipops. It’s really hard being a girl in the world. I don’t want to contribute to that in any way.

On Meeting Fans

I get recognized in public about once a week. Maybe less, maybe more. It’s different with every person. Everyone reacts differently. One person burst into tears and that was the hardest for me to react to. I think I started crying, too. The thing is, all the fans I’ve actually met in person have been really normal people I genuinely want to hang out with. I’m probably happier to meet them than they are to meet me. A few weeks ago, I invited a fan to my apartment for dinner and cooked her dinner. I was like, “Come over.” And she did, and it was so great.

Her Advice For Young Girls Navigating Social Media

Try to shut out the noise of what other people think. Take serious stock of what parts of social media really excite you, whether it’s writing captions, or the experiences you end up having when you’re trying to take some photos, or being behind the camera, or drawing and taking a picture of that. Listen to yourself. Figure out exactly what aspects of the creative process lights you up inside and arrange what you make around those truths. After all, you never know what’s going to be hanging in a museum two centuries from now.

7 PHOTOS click for more

Photographed by Edith Young.

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investmart007 · 6 years

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NEW YORK | Philip Roth: a generation's defining voice

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NEW YORK | Philip Roth: a generation's defining voice

NEW YORK (AP) — In the self-imposed retirement of his final years, Philip Roth remained curious and removed from the world he had shocked and had shocked him in return.

He praised younger authors such as Ta-Nehisi Coates and Teju Cole, and confided that he had read “Born to Run,” the memoir by another New Jersey giant, Bruce Springsteen. He followed with horror the rise of Donald Trump and found himself reliving the imagined horrors of his novel “The Plot Against America,” in which the country succumbs to the fascist reign of President Charles Lindbergh.

But Roth, who died Tuesday at age 85, was also a voice — a defining one — of a generation nearing its end. He was among the last major writers raised without television, who ignored social media and believed in engaging readers through his work alone and not the alleged charms or virtues of his private self. He was safely outside Holden Caulfield’s fantasy that a favorite author could be “a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.” He didn’t celebrate romantic love or military heroism or even consider the chance for heavenly justice.

The meaning of life, he once said, paraphrasing his idol Franz Kafka, is that it stops. “Life’s most disturbing intensity is death,” he wrote in his novel “Everyman,” published in 2006.

Best known for works ranging from the wild and ribald “Portnoy’s Complaint” to the elegiac “American Pastoral,” Roth was among the greatest writers never to win the Nobel Prize. And he died, with dark and comic timing, in the year that the prize committee called off the award as it contended with a #MeToo scandal. He also died just minutes after the book world had concluded the annual Pen America gala in Manhattan and on the eve of another literary tradition — Wednesday’s annual induction ceremony at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which voted Roth in more than 40 years ago.

“No other writer has meant as much to me,” Jeffrey Eugenides, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and a new academy inductee, wrote in an email Wednesday to The Associated Press. “No other American writer’s work have I read so obsessively, year after year.”

Roth’s novels were often narratives of lust, mortality, fate and Jewish assimilation. He identified himself as an American writer, not a Jewish one, but for Roth, the American experience and the Jewish experience were often the same. While predecessors such as Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud wrote of the Jews’ painful adjustment from immigrant life, Roth’s characters represented the next generation.

Their first language was English, and they spoke without accents. They observed no rituals and belonged to no synagogues. The American dream, or nightmare, was to become “a Jew without Jews, without Judaism, without Zionism, without Jewishness.” The reality, more often, was to be regarded as a Jew among gentiles and a gentile among Jews.

He was a fierce satirist and uncompromising realist, committed to the narration of “life, in all its shameless impurity.” Feminists, Jews and one ex-wife attacked him in print, and sometimes in person. Women in his books were at times little more than objects of desire and rage and The Village Voice once put his picture on its cover, condemning him as a misogynist. A panel moderator berated him for his comic portrayals of Jews, asking Roth if he would have written the same books in Nazi Germany. Jewish scholar Gershom Scholem called “Portnoy’s Complaint” the “book for which all anti-Semites have been praying.” When Roth won the Man Booker International Prize in 2011, a judge resigned, alleging the author suffered from terminal solipsism and went “on and on and on about the same subject in almost every single book.” In “Sabbath’s Theater,” Roth imagines the inscription for his title character’s headstone:

“Sodomist, Abuser of Women, Destroyer of Morals.” Roth’s wars also originated from within. He survived a burst appendix in the late 1960s and near-suicidal depression in 1987. For all the humor in his work — and, friends would say, in his private life — jacket photos usually highlighted the author’s tense, dark-eyed glare. In 2012, he announced that he had stopped writing fiction and would instead dedicate himself to helping biographer Blake Bailey complete his life story, one he openly wished would not come out while he was alive. By 2015, he had retired from public life altogether.

Roth began his career in rebellion against the conformity of the 1950s and ended it in defense of the security of the 1940s; he was never warmer than when writing about his childhood, or more sorrowful, and enraged, than when narrating the betrayal of innocence lost.

Acclaim and controversy were inseparable. His debut collection, published in 1959, was “Goodbye, Columbus,” featuring a love (and lust) title story about a working-class Jew and his wealthier girlfriend. It brought the writer a National Book Award and some extra-literary criticism. The aunt of the main character, Neil Klugman, is a meddling worrywart, and the upper-middle-class relatives of Neil’s girlfriend are satirized as shallow materialists. Roth believed he was simply writing about people he knew, but some Jews saw him as a traitor, subjecting his brethren to ridicule before the gentile world. A rabbi accused him of distorting the lives of Orthodox Jews. At a writers conference in the early 1960s, he was relentlessly accused of creating stories that affirmed the worst Nazi stereotypes.

But Roth insisted writing should express, not sanitize. After two relatively tame novels, “Letting Go” and “When She was Good,” he abandoned his good manners with “Portnoy’s Complaint,” his ode to blasphemy against the “unholy trinity of “father, mother and Jewish son.” Published in 1969, a great year for rebellion, it was an event, a birth, a summation, Roth’s triumph over “the awesome graduate school authority of Henry James,” as if history’s lid had blown open and out erupted a generation of Jewish guilt and desire.

As narrated by Alexander Portnoy, from a psychiatrist’s couch, Roth’s novel satirized the dull expectations heaped upon “nice Jewish boys” and immortalized the most ribald manifestations of sexual obsession. His manic tour of one man’s onanistic adventures led Jacqueline Susann to comment that “Philip Roth is a good writer, but I wouldn’t want to shake hands with him.” Although “Portnoy’s Complaint” was banned in Australia and attacked by Scholem and others, many critics welcomed the novel as a declaration of creative freedom. “Portnoy’s Complaint” sold millions, making Roth wealthy, and, more important, famous. The writer, an observer by nature, was now observed. He was an item in gossip columns, a name debated at parties. Strangers called out to him in the streets. Roth would remember hailing a taxi and, seeing that the driver’s last name was Portnoy, commiserating over the book’s notoriety.

With Roth finding himself asked whether he really was Portnoy, several of his post-Portnoy novels amounted to a dare: is it fact of fiction? In “The Anatomy Lesson,” ”The Counterlife” and other novels, the featured character is a Jewish writer from New Jersey named Nathan Zuckerman. He is a man of similar age to Roth who just happened to have written a “dirty” best seller, “Carnovsky,” and is lectured by friends and family for putting their lives into his books.

In the 1990s, he reconnected with the larger world and culture of his native country. “American Pastoral” narrated a decent man’s decline from high school sports star to victim of the ’60s and the “indigenous American berserk.” In “The Human Stain,” he raged against the impeachment of President Bill Clinton over his affair with a White House intern. “The fantasy of purity is appalling. It’s insane,” he wrote. Near the end of his writing life, Roth was increasingly preoccupied with history and its sucker punch, how ordinary people were defeated by events beyond their control, like the Jews in “The Plot Against America” or the college student in “Indignation” who dies in the Korean War.

“The most beautiful word in the English language,” Roth wrote, “‘In-dig-na-tion!'”

By HILLEL ITALIE , By Associated Press – published on STL.News by St. Louis Media, LLC(R.A)

#Holden Caulfield's fantasy #Korean War #New York #Philip Roth #President Charles Lindbergh #Ta-Nehisi Coates #TodayNews

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lorrainecparker · 7 years

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ART OF THE CUT with Oscar Winner Alan Heim, ACE

Alan Heim is the former President of American Cinema Editors and is the current President of the Motion Picture Editors Guild. His first gig as a picture editor was The Sea Gull (1968). He has edited for a slew of the best directors in the business, including Sidney Lumet, Mel Brooks, Bob Fosse, John Hughes, Milos Forman, Barbra Steisand, Tony Kaye, and Nick Cassavetes. Heim is an Oscar winner for Best Editing for All that Jazz and was nominated for an Oscar for Network. He also won or was nominated for several ACE Eddies and Emmys.

(Normally I am careful to clear all photographs and image in my articles, being careful to credit photographers and copyright holders when necessary. In this article, most images are pulled from the internet. If you own the rights to one of these images and wish me to pull it or credit it, let me know.)

HULLFISH: Was the last thing you cut a documentary? Or have you cut any documentaries?

HEIM: I have but the last thing I edited was a film about Hank Williams about a year and a half ago (I Saw the Light) which I had a great time on actually. It was picked up by a distributing company sight unseen which is very unusual. From the beginning, I said the cut is too long. I was hired late because the original editor never started the film due to an injury, but by that time it was five weeks into the production and I was way behind. They finished shooting around Christmas and I finished and I called the director and I said I think the film is really terrific but it’s three hours and 20 minutes long. He said, “no problem.” Well, we never got it short enough and it’s partly the pacing. I know a lot of people who saw it and really thought it was wonderful. On the other hand people say it was too long. So we finally went back into the cutting room and took out about 10 minutes which was not enough but it was a lovely movie, and if that’s going to be my last movie, I don’t mind at all.

HULLFISH: One of things that brings up to me is the social engineering aspect of being an editor. How do you deal with the director in knowing when to push harder or to know that you can’t push too hard?

HEIM: Don’t get me started.

HULLFISH: The whole point of this interview is to get you started.

HEIM: (laughs) One of the things you have to realize about being an editor is it’s two thirds psychological, maybe more. You are between the director’s vision and idea of what he shot and what he really shot. You are the conscience of the director in a way. So there’s no point in being dishonest with directors because two things will happen: They’ll either dismiss you – I don’t mean “get fired” but they’ll just not listen, or it’ll just start off on a nasty foot. So you just try and protect the director. Look, I don’t want to seem particularly vain about it because I don’t have the right answer half the time either, but the director usually thinks that they’ve got it. They’ve nailed the shot. They’ve nailed the scene. And they often don’t. And to be able to turn the director and let him see your vision is incredibly important. Fosse (director, Bob Fosse) referred to me as his collaborator and I think that’s just the best compliment coming from a guy like Fosse.

Director Bob Fosse on the set of All That Jazz

He also said I was his conscience because everybody wants to get that last little frame of what they think is wonderful, but maybe it’s the frame before. As an editor, you have to be kind of neutral. You have to be a neutral observer. You have to protect the material. You have to protect the actors and sometimes you have to protect the director from his own instinct, or from the producer. That’s a situation that can be unpleasant.

HULLFISH: I haven’t had that problem before. Sounds like a precarious position.

HEIM: You learn things. Even test screenings. You learn something if you listen. You’re always learning. That’s what I love about the business. I was cutting a pilot and a friend was down the hall cutting a series for HBO and I walked by her room and I see a couple of three people outside the suite in suits. It’s cliche but they were… and I poked my head in and said, “So are you getting a lot of notes?” And she said, “I told them the other day that if they are going to give me notes they have to go outside the room write down the notes.”

I was on a movie called Grey Gardens – we were ready to show the film to the head of the studio – Colin Callendar – and Colin was not available so our producers kept sending this stuff back up to HBO for notes, but there was no way the people at HBO had the authority to give notes so at a certain point, I said, “I really don’t want to fight with this anymore.” and Lee Percy came on and he finished it and we had a shared credit. I think Lee’s finished two movies that I started on… maybe the other way around. Notes: Sometimes they’re good and sometimes they’re bad.

HULLFISH: You mentioned screenings, and sometimes the notes from them can be strange from audience members, but there’s a tremendous value to just being in the screening and feeling things in a different way with a real audience, right?

HEIM: I did a really bad comedy called Beer years ago, and Bob Chartoff was the producer, of Chartoff/Winkler, the Rocky pictures. He and Winkler had broken up and I knew this was a bad movie, but I wanted it to work. And I figured Chartoff would be interesting. So we had a screening for Orion Pictures, they were our producers, and I kept telling the director and Chartoff that the film had no ending. It was kind of a disaster. There was a lot of funny stuff in it but for no reason and it got mean at the end, really mean-spirited. So we had this meeting and the director, Patrick Kelly, who was well over six feet tall and enormous. He is the kind of guy who wears sandals in the winter, you know, an American flag bandana down around his head, very tall. And Chartoff was a very tall thin man and Chartoff was sitting next to me at the screening and the audience absolutely loved the movie for about 50 minutes maybe an hour and Chartoff, every time there was a big laugh, he would give me a shot in the ribs, which I probably still have bruises from. And he would say, “See?” and I would say, “Wait.” And at the end of the movie we all wanted to crawl out of the theater. Two of the screening cards – which I kept for a long time – somebody had added an extra column after good, fair, poor: they’d added “shit” and checked it off all the way down. On another card, the card asked: “What did you learn from this movie?” – It was a comedy for God’s sake – and somebody wrote: “Don’t ever take free tickets to a movie.”

HULLFISH: OK, let’s go a little more highbrow. Let’s talk All that Jazz. I was talking to Dody Dorn about how much she loved the famous pencil snap with no sound as – spoiler alert – as the Joe Gideon character has a heart attack. Can you talk me through that?

Roy Scheider as Joe Gideon in All That Jazz

HEIM All the actors sitting around doing the table read, they were being cued to laugh. And it wasn’t very good so Bob got in a comic for the second day of shooting. Everything took a long time on that movie. Bob got in a comic and that guy was actually telling jokes and that didn’t work either. And it just seemed like we had a laugh track going and it didn’t seem right. So at some point, and it was probably Fosse’s idea, but I probably started to fade out the track. So we just took it all out and we put in the loud sounds but they’re the kind of sounds you would hear when you’re having a panic attack. Sometimes you don’t hear anything, and sometimes putting out a cigarette sounds like gunshots. Cracking the pencil was like that too, it just worked. So we left it like that.

Fosse and Dustin Hoffman on set of “Lenny.”

When I worked with Fosse when he came into the cutting room we would re-work scenes and we never put them down until we were happy with them. Later, when we had the whole picture, we might go back and do a couple little things, but every scene we tried to polish as much as possible to get the most out of it. Which is why I was on some films for 14 months with him. Every day was an adventure, absolutely every day.

HULLFISH: I wrote an essay about how – with pacing and rhythm – we can learn from other arts and Fosse was obviously a dance guy so did you have a common language of rhythm and pace? Is that overthinking it?

THE FAN, Lauren Bacall, Maureen Stapleton, 1981, (c) Paramount

HEIM: A film I did after All That Jazz was called The Fan, with Lauren Bacall. I met the director and we had a nice talk. Everybody thought he was way over his head. A commercial director, who became much better later. First day of dailies, they were cripplingly slow. it’s an epistolary novel that takes a form of letters that the guy who writes to this stage star that he’s obsessed with. So we have him on the steps of his tenement in Manhattan and he’s reading a letter and he’s actually reading the letter, and it’s deadly dull. At the end of watching dailies the crew did something I’d never seen before. They all applauded, but I didn’t applaud. So he turned to me and said, “How come you didn’t applaud?” and I said, “It’s very slow and I’m really very worried about that.” And he said, “I come out of commercials I can get everything down to 60 seconds.” I said, “This is a movie. You’ve got to get it to 90 minutes.” After that he didn’t trust me at all until I showed him a couple of cut scenes and he said, “Oh, I see what you were talking about.” And he started to pick up the pace of the movie and we were able to beat that down. That might’ve have been the worst thing I ever said to a director.

HULLFISH: How do you get that beat down to a proper pace? A lot of people say that a movie has its own rhythm, so what do you do if the rhythm is that slow and it shouldn’t be?

HEIM: I know what you mean. Back in New York we used to say that the actors talk too slow. Movies of the 30s and 40s people talked fast as hell. And they filmed 70 to 80 minutes long and they stepped on each others lines, but it was rehearsed and it was crisp, and you might not like it but it moved things forward. Then there was a period when the actors – and directors – tended to be kind of indulgent. You can’t make the actors talk faster. I discovered that you can basically take a love scene, and if you overlap the dialogue, it seems like an argument. That’s not a great trick but I’ve done it – or close to it – when I want to pick up pace.

I loved working with Nick Cassavetes because he would go over with the actors and say, “Stop acting. Just know your lines and be fast between takes.” So we would tighten the hell out of it. A film I did with Cassavetes was The Other Woman. If you look at it closely you’ll see that that Cameron Diaz is out of sync a lot. Because we just cut her words together. She and Nick did not get along, and Nick and I both felt we just want to make it better. And if she doesn’t know her lines when she comes on the set let’s just make her say the lines so we cut around it. Those films are really tight cutting. It’s hard to do. If the actors are slow, you just get stuck. I love molding the performances. That’s the raw material. I look for the best takes and I try very hard to protect the actor’s integrity. I look at dailies first. By noon I’m usually looking at the dailies and I will know which takes I want to use. And then if I sat down with the director in the evening and he didn’t like any of the takes that I liked, then I knew that means trouble down the line. I would always use the best take in my mind that the actor has done. And sometimes the director would say, “Why did you use that one? Why didn’t you use this?” To get back to what I was saying about The Fan – I was cutting a sequence with Lauren Bacall, who’s not much of a dancer. And we had to protect her from her physical stuff. So one night, a friend of mine, asked me if I would come over and run the film with them. My wife came along and we had a great time, but they could pick up on the fact that I was stopping her just before she fell off. So the choreographer came in one day and after I got the sequence put together and ran it. He looked at me and said, “You know I couldn’t figure out where you were cutting when I looked at All That Jazz, and now I see you don’t cut on the beat. You cut near the beat.” That’s true. To cut on the beat is kind of wooden and I wasn’t aware that I was doing that. I just cut where it seemed comfortable with the movement. When I started working with Fosse. I discovered that the choreographer’s job is different than a stage choreographer: It’s to guide the audience’s eyes around the screen. So Fosse used a lot of close ups of body parts, feet and hands, but there was always this intention to keep the flow going. The first thing I did was Liza with a Z and people said it was too much cutting. To this day I don’t agree. That’s where I learned a lot of stuff. That’s when I learned how to cut musical numbers and I really loved doing it. It is the same with a dialogue scene, you really have to lead the audience in cuts. When I was a sound effects editor, an editor named Aram Avakian (who edited Mickey One) was a brilliant editor and had a great visual sense. He was very smart. I was working as a sound editor on The Group and he came up behind me, and it was a dinner scene of two people talking, and he said, “That’s a great cut.” I turned to him and asked, “Why is that a great cut?” And he said, “Because it just seemed like two people talking. Look at it again.” So, I rolled it back and forth and I told him I didn’t see it. He says, “Look at where the direction of the fork is now and then when you cut you come back and you move the other way.” And suddenly I learned all I ever had to know about physical editing. It was kind of amazing because I never thought of that. The motion from one carried over into the next take. It can’t always happen, but when it does it is thrilling.

HULLFISH: You said one of the things about cutting musical scenes was to try to have the flow of the motion of one shot lead the audience’s eye to the next cut.

HEIM Paul Taylor, the modern dancer and terrific choreographer had specials on PBS. Somewhere he learned the idea that movement should go from one shot to the next. Most specials you don’t see that. He’s got dancers running around the stage like crazy but there’s always a flow. I found it thrilling. I met Fosse back in New York. I was doing a lot of television as a sounds effects editor and I’ve done a little bit of picture cutting, and I got a call from a guy named Kenny Ott. He was a well-known line producer in New York, and he asked me if I’d be interested in working on a TV show with Bob Fosse and Liza Minnelli. I said “sure.” So I went up to meet Fosse at the Broadway Arts studio. It’s a little space. By the way, the Broadway Arts Studio is the one that’s replicated in All That Jazz.

My late wife had seen Cabaret and I hadn’t got to see it yet. I wasn’t really a fan of movie musicals. So I met Fosse. He’s in the middle of the room, and all these dancers are hurling themselves around us. We’re talking in the middle of the room. I’m not a musician but I was a music editor. We talked for a while and I got no sense of whether I was going to get hired or not, but I loved the energy in that room. I just loved the dancers. They would come sliding right up to our feet, and the room was filled with heat and sweat – running around, motion, and color. After that I went over to the Ziegfeld – saw Cabaret – and I came home that night and I told my wife, “I want him to hire me. I really want to work with this guy.” And it worked out. That led to Lenny and Lenny led to All That Jazz and that led to some other stuff, then Star 80 and then he died.

HULLFISH: I remember seeing Star 80 when I was fairly young and found it very disturbing.

HEIM: Oh boy, oh boy was that a disturbing movie! We were finishing All That Jazz and Bob came up one day and he said, “I found the next film I want to do.” He gave me a copy of the Village Voice, which is where the article about Dorothy Stratten came from. I read the article, and thought it was perfect for him. It’s this Svengali-like figure with a lot of women and a lot of degeneracy. He was in show business all of his life and the guy – the husband of Dorothy Stratten – he was a hanger on. He was kind of a guy looking to make his career on her. Fosse had a lot of contempt for show business He also loved it. Which I think is a line from All that Jazz. “I love show business, I hate show business.” That’s all he knew… that’s not true. He was a very bright guy. Very well versed in psychiatry and many things and he hung with good people: Paddy Chayefsky and Herb Gardner and a whole bunch of New York people. That’s really how I ended up doing Network. I’m pretty sure Bob suggested me to Paddy even though I had done two films with Sidney, it’d been several years in between.

To get back to the question about screening: after a day of shooting, having the crew go into a theater and watch the dailies… you learned a lot just from sitting there. Directors never said much to me, but you learn something just from being in the room. You’re sometimes there till midnight. In Chicago sometimes with John Hughes, later than that. He’d shoot all day and into the evening. One night my crew and I got a late call that said “John’s not going to be in until midnight.” So we went to the movies.

HULLFISH: So you started screening dailies at midnight?

HEIM: Somebody told me that they did a TV show where they’d shoot all day and then the director would come in and work with the editor on the previous day’s material. So that puts you into midnight or early morning. It’s crazy. It’s a young man’s game.

HULLFISH: When did you switch from editing on a Moviola or a KEM to Avid?

HEIM: 1995. That’s when I moved out here to LA. A bunch of us who were editing feature films in New York were approached by the CMX company – CBS I think it was. They were developing a laser pen editing system which was used for a while and they gave us instructions on how it worked. You had these disks and it came as if you were bringing a cake to a party, but it could only hold 20 minutes of material. So you couldn’t hold a feature film on it. You’d have to stop set up a new thing. And we talked about that. Eventually they used it a lot in television. I was wrestling with whether I should learn an electronic edit system. I was really good on a Moviola and I didn’t even like the Avid particularly. But the last stuff I did on film I did I used an English bench and a motorized picture and track synchronizer. The last few films I did on film I loved that bench, because it was really intimate contact with the film. I only used the Moviola to screen on, then.

HULLFISH: A lot of people liked to screen on a KEM, right?

HEIM: I never did. We did Lenny on a Moviola and Fosse was having trouble seeing the screen, so we did All That Jazz on the KEM. So I would adapt. I preferred the Moviola, I was faster on it. I didn’t have to stretch over those tables.

HULLFISH: So you moved to Avid in 95 because…

HEIM: I was given the opportunity. I was offered a film in San Francisco where the guy would teach me LightWorks and I would teach him film. I was still cutting on film when I got a call to do a Barbra Streisand movie back in New York and Sony wanted me to do it on the Avid. So now I have to learn another system. And Sony said they would give me an instructor. Well they gave me the guy who was doing maintenance on the lot and my assistant and I, she never worked on a film either on Avid. The guy started to turn on the machine, but suddenly he’s called away. So that’s Monday. And so Monday afternoon I went over to the guy in charge of rental equipment and said, look I’m going to New York on Saturday. I’m going to be in the cutting room on Monday. And if you don’t get me an instructor who can teach me, just me, I’m going to insist on the LightWorks. So they got me an instructor from Avid who actually was also an editor and we spent three intense days just stuffing whatever I could into my head. And at one point I remember just putting my head on the keyboard, three or four, in the afternoon on Friday and I said, “That’s it. I can’t do anymore of this.” Most editors I know, of my generation, are not particularly adept at the electronic stuff. But we do try and tell stories and that’s what it’s about. It’s a tool. I liked it, almost immediately, but I may have liked the LightWorks better.

HULLFISH: Thelma is still on LightWorks. Why do you call yourself a storyteller? How does the editor actually tell a story in the edit room?

Bob Fosse and Dustin Hoffman on set “Lenny”

HEIM: Working in film, you manipulate time. The editing process is really the last opportunity to change the story before it goes out into the world. How do we tell a story? It has to do with the rhythm – of the pace of it – you can turn a picture into something completely different, in the editing process, than was intended. You can’t really get away from the script, nor would you want to, but there is a lot of excess material in the script as there always is. So we just try to make the story better. We try to make it more concise. We try and direct the audience to what they should be looking at any given time. Stanley Kauffmann who was a film critic of some repute in New York said, and I paraphrase here, “You always want to watch the person you’re watching. Even if you didn’t know it at the time.” Now that’s what an editor does. Where you put a reaction shot… where you stay on somebody and you don’t cut… you’re trying to lead an audience.

There’s a scene in Network where William Holden follows Faye Dunaway into the kitchen. He’s in a rage because she’s ignoring him. She’s busy with her job and career. He talks about being an older man with a younger woman. And I rarely cut away from him in the performance. The first time I cut away from him is because he flubbed his line. And I cut to her. I found her reaction shot that seemed right, it wasn’t from where it was supposed to be, but it’s her reaction shot. And then I put in a second one because I wanted to see how she was responding. So once I was forced to it, because his performances was so good, and once I wanted to do it. I wanted the audience to see what she was feeling. That’s what an editor can do. The other thing you can do: Beatrice Straight played William Holden’s wife and there’s a scene where she confronts him: How long has the affair been going on and it’s in the kitchen and the kids walk in. It’s two and a half minutes long and Sidney and Paddy Chayefsky and Howard Gottfried – who was Paddy’s partner – and the co-producer said we got to lose it. I said, “No. I don’t think so. It’s a really great scene.” They said, “It is slowing down the picture.” I really argued for keeping the scene. Also, I thought we should tale that scene and put it before William goes off to the beach to that horrible scene where they make love and she just talks about television the whole time. That horrible wonderful scene. In the original script, they were in the opposite order. I said we have to turn those two scenes around and they were adamant not to do it. Finally, our producer, Dan Melnick, was flying to New York, so I said, “Let’s let Danny decide.” So Melnick sees it – he sees the whole picture. Monday morning I got a call from Howard Gottfried and he said “Aaaa-lllllan…” – he kind of sung my name, and you know when people sing your name something weird is going to happen. He said that Danny came up with this great idea to keep the scene and switch the two scenes around. So I said, “You know Howard – I don’t usually say this or anything like this – but that was my idea and you were fighting it for two weeks.” And he said, “Does it matter where a good idea comes from?” And you know he’s right. It was a very valuable lesson. And the scene stayed and she won the Academy Award for that two and a half minutes.

HULLFISH: It was a great performance, but why specifically did you argue for the scene as a storyteller?

HEIM: I loved everything in it, but I also thought it was very necessary. Here’s a guy who devoted his whole life to this television network and his wife clearly played second fiddle to his career, and now it was turned around a little bit.

HULLFISH: And why switch the order of the scenes?

HEIM: If we saw him having this ridiculous sex scene with Faye Dunaway, and then he came home to this strong woman. You would say “What a schmuck.” She knew stuff was going on, but this time she sensed he was in love with her and she confronted him, and he needed that confrontation. It made me very happy to keep it in the movie. You don’t get too many chances to do that, you really don’t. This one just jumped out at me. I knew Paddy Chayefsky is a hell of a writer. Spectacular. So when Paddy is saying that I had to really fight for it. I don’t usually fight for a scene. Usually I do it much more subtly over the course of the edit, if I really feel strongly about it.

HULLFISH: It’s about trusting the process, right? Yes, you can try to force it, but it’s better to just see what happens as context changes and as needs change and maybe the director becomes less attached to the emotion of the shoot.

HEIM: Right. Been there a couple of times.

HULLFISH: That’ a balance, right? You have to have enough ego to know that you have something to say and you’re strong in your opinions, but set enough of your ego aside to be in service to the director. You have to be willing to address notes.

HEIM I took notes from everybody. I mean anybody who had a good idea or what I thought was a good idea or a worthwhile idea, I would take a shot at it. I always tell editors it’s not your movie, it’s the director or the producer or somebody else who owns that movie. You can contribute, this is where the editor comes in. You edit it. You try and correct mistakes. Keep the story and the path it should be on. It’s not your movie. They always say you should do invisible editing, which is bullshit, but it depends. You have to listen to the material. You have to feel the material. I used to think that when I worked with film it was almost like a plastic medium… like if you bend a piece of steel a certain number of times, you’ll eventually break it. It took me a while to feel that with electronic editing, but I don’t think I’ve ever changed what I do, the style. I’ve watched some of my older movies recently and I don’t think I would make many changes in them. I might speed up a couple of scenes. When I cut scenes now, I tend to make them a little bit faster. The other thing that happened on Doc, I was cutting a simple scene with Stacy and Harris playing cards. I’m cutting it on the Moviola. You’d put it in a little black plastic matte and that would give you the aspect ratio. So I was cutting this scene and I had the matte in there and they’re playing cards sitting at a table playing cards. I cut it, looked at the scene and looked absolutely terrible. None of the cuts matched but it’s two guys playing cards. How could this be? So I took the matte off. It turns out they had been changing their vests in between takes. I asked Harris, “What’s the story with that scene where you guys are playing cards and you change your vests?” And he said, “We were trying to mess up the script girl to see if she would would catch it.” Then he turned to me again and he said, “Did you catch the shirts?” And it turns out they were also changing shirts with subtly different striped patterns between takes and I missed it because on a Moviola screen, that’s really hard to see.

HULLFISH: I was just talking to someone about storytelling, and about how a joke is a good way to practice storytelling. It’s really just a short story. You don’t want to ruin it with too much detail or making it too long. Set it up and get to the point.

HEIM: Yes, but there are there are other details too that you need. Mel Brooks would explain it’s not enough to say, “It’s a car.” You have to say, “A Buick with three holes in the fender.” A little detail doesn’t hurt. And it depends on where you put the detail. It’s all in the timing. It really is rhythm and delivery. A friend of mine wrote a book called “The Lean Forward Moment.” Interesting idea that you lead the audience in a certain direction and then you pull the rug out from under them. You push them into the next scene. I hate exposition. Most editors do. And I worked in films where I’ve told the audience something three times – verbally told the audience something three times. They don’t get it. So you cut one out. Now it’s two times and they still don’t get it and you’re cut down to one and that’s enough. They get the second and third time. You’re boring them. They know it, sometimes you don’t even need the first time. For me that would be the ideal filmmaking: information without telling anybody. Just let them discover it. If you can make the audience complicit or make the audience feel something, it’s hard. There’s a lot of visual stuff like Jaws. A shark jumps out from behind the pillar and you don’t expect it. It makes you jump, that’s easy. But to do it in a dialogue scene, and have people follow every word and feel it. That’s that’s hard. That’s rare. I was delighted the first time it happened: when the audience applauds at the end of the opening number of All That Jazz. Because you don’t see audiences applaud, or in the Notebook when people are crying.

HULLFISH: True. You’ve edited for John Hughes

HEIM: John Hughes had that ability to do meaningful and funny. He could reach the audience. His stuff reached on a very elemental level. He was really a good writer.

HULLFISH: Earlier in our discussion you mentioned that we rarely get to cut scenes in sequential order. Almost never. Talk a little bit about that or about scenes where it sounded looked great when you cut it originally, but then, in the context of the film, it changed in some way.

HEIM: When you look at dailies, you’ve got to start somewhere. I look at them and they say, “Well, I want this scene to start on the closeup of the actor.” So I edit the scene based on that choice. And then when you put that scene in context of another scene, maybe you can’t go from the previous scene to the close up of the actor for whatever reason. So then you have to start shifting. Or sometimes you’ll have a scene that says exactly the same thing in a different way than a scene that’s elsewhere in the movie. So you you start shifting. You can’t be rigid. Once you cut the scene, it’s really nice, it’s really good. But then you look at it in context and you say, “I don’t need this or maybe I only need half of it.” These are the decisions you make with the director. But when I do a first cut, I put pretty much everything into it that was shot because I think that everybody deserves to see that. You can’t take it away early. And when you’re trimming a first assembly down from its initial length, sometimes it’s easy to get the first half hour, but when you have to start cutting an hour or an hour and a half, you begin to feel holes. And I’ve never liked gaps in a story.

still from Grey Gardens – Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange

HULLFISH: One of the things that I learned from writing this book was that I needed to let my director see all of the lines in every scene, even if I was very confident that the lines would eventually be cut. It seems like common sense, but I felt like, “If I’m right, then why show them?”

HEIM: The problem is a director has a rhythm. The director knows what he shot. Sometimes they’re wrong. Sometimes they’ll say, “Where’s the shot of the finger? There was no shot there.” Most of the time there is. Sometimes you find something after a slate or something. Fo you, the director knows he shot those lines you took out. So you’re starting off really badly because you’re throwing the director’s rhythm. Later, you can ask, “Do we really need those three lines?”

HULLFISH: I wish I had learned that earlier: the director needs to the scene. I got to see it with and without. The director never got to see it, so he can’t come to the same conclusion, so he never owns the decision. Lesson learned.

HEIM: I don’t know how editors learn that stuff nowadays. Now it’s learning on the job for most people.

HULLFISH: Alan, thank you for a great discussion. It was a pleasure to speak with you.

HEIM: My pleasure as well.

This interview was transcribed with SpeedScriber, which has recently come out of public beta and is now available.

To read more interviews in the Art of the Cut series, check out THIS LINK and follow me on Twitter @stevehullfish

The first 50 Art of the Cut interviews have been curated into a book, “Art of the Cut: Conversations with Film and TV editors.” The book is not merely a collection of interviews but was edited into topics that read like a massive, virtual roundtable discussion of some of the most important topics to editors everywhere: storytelling, pacing, rhythm, collaboration with directors, approach to a scene and more. CinemaEditor magazine said of the book, “Hullfish has interviewed over 50 editors around the country and asked questions that only an editor would know to ask. Their answers are the basis of this book and it’s not just a collection of interviews…. It is to his credit that Hullfish has created an editing manual similar to the camera manual that ASC has published for many years and can be found in almost any back pocket of members of the camera crew. It is an essential tool on the set. Art of the Cut may indeed be the essential tool for the cutting room. Here is a reference where you can immediately see how our contemporaries deal with the complexities of editing a film. In a very organized manner, he guides the reader through approaching the scene, pacing, and rhythm, structure, storytelling, performance, sound design, and music….Hullfish’s book is an awesome piece of text editing itself. The results make me recommend it to all. I am placing this book on my shelf of editing books and I urge others to do the same. –Jack Tucker, ACE

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