Austin Journal (part 5)

How I Spent My Austin Vacation

by Steve Barr, AFF newbie

Part The Fifth


Thursday, October 20, 2005

Okay, so I've woken up and gotten a lecture on how not to be a typical screenwriter-conference asshole (which is good, because I've always aspired to be one of the less-typical kinds of screenwriter-conference asshole), and now it's time for the first real panel: The Importance of Genre.

Appearing on the panel is WP's very own Bill Martell, the Robert Towne of low-budgie movies. In case you've missed every single one of his posts on Wordplay for the last three years or so, Bill has his own informative screenwriter website: http://www.scriptsecrets.com/

While Bill was giving the writer's POV on the importance of genre, the producer's POV was provided by Monnie Wills, a VP at Tom Jacobson Productions.

I was still a little drunk from the previous night --

(I was trying a festival strategy that had been recommended to me by several people - you don't get a hangover if you stay a little bit drunk the whole time)

-- but both Bill and Monnie had good things to say about understanding the genre(s) you're writing in, and giving the audience what they expect. It's fantastic if you can *surpass* your audience's expectations, but you shouldn't disappoint them by not giving them the touchstones that they have come to require from any given genre.

From a writer's perspective, understanding the tricks and traps of the genre you're writing in can be a strong tool to manage and manipulate your audience's emotional reactions to the story you're telling. From a salesman's perspective (because salesmanship is a big part of being a producer or agent or manager), understanding and playing to genre helps to "brand" your product, and makes it much easier to sell.

Bill's probably around here, so hopefully he'll correct me if I misrepresented his viewpoint...

That was it for the panels that day. I wandered back to the bar ("wander back to the bar" being my default action) and hung out with some people, but I'm not really clear on who was there or what was said. I think I may have bought a few drinks for people, because that particular bar tab is pretty damn big.

Wordplayers Brady Sylvester and Aaron de Orive live in Austin (though not together (not that there's anything wrong with that)), and while they weren't going to be able to make it to the festival itself, they asked Danny and Brian Anderson and I to meet them for dinner. I was gonna hang out at the Driskill bar until it was time to leave for that, but I heard that one of the festival's sponsors was hosting a party down the street.

Enh, I thought - I'm gonna eat a lot of grub later. I'm all good right here, sitting on my cow-couch and sipping my $8.50 beer.

But then I was informed that the sponsor in question was a winery.
Free booze? Saddle up!

(As an aside, Jeff Kribs, one of my best friends from college (and one of the most talented comic actors I've ever met) now lives in Dallas. I hadn't seen him in over a decade, but I was hoping that he could drive the 100+ miles from Dallas to Austin for a beer. Alas, that wasn't in the cards, but we did get to have a pretty good conversation on my cell phone while I leaned against a ice-cream freezer in a minimart down the street from the Driskill. Good times. Good times.)

The party was v. crowded, but the booze was flowing and they had these great little prosciutto-and-cheese pastry wrap things. The party location was cool, too - they had transparent egg-shaped chairs suspended from the ceiling (which caused someone to make a SOLARIS joke, to which Danny made the observation that only at a film festival could someone successfully make a SOLARIS joke) and one of the rooms in the back was, I shit you not, entirely covered in fur. It was a fur room. The walls, the couches, the tables, everything was furry. I felt oddly at home in this room, probably because it reminded me of my back.

At the party I saw a girl who looked really familiar to me. I found my way through the crowd to her and asked "Do I know you from somewhere?" Only after this sentence had been ejaculated from my yammering gob did I realize it's one of the most common (and least effective) pickup lines in the history of bad pickup lines. I'm sure I turned vaguely purple, and launched into a awkward soliloquy about how that wasn't the kind of thing I meant to say, and I really thought I might know her from somewhere, and I’m married, and sorry if I sounded like I should be wearing a polyester shirt unbuttoned to my navel, with a large gold medallion barely visible through my thick mat of chest hair. I offered to pluck out one of my eyes with a nearby corkscrew as an apology, but she said that was okay.

Turns out I couldn't possibly know her, because she was from Australia, studying for a semester in Washington D.C., and at the AFF on a lark. Her name was Chaydee (I have no idea if that's how you spell it, but that's what it sounds like). Our little core group of Wordplayers would bump into her several times throughout the weekend, so I figured I should mention our fateful introduction here.

A few glasses of free wine later, it was time for Danny and I to go to dinner.

Next: The County Line (feat. turtles and ducks and fish and most of a cow)

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