the high life

     Yesterday's passage from Detour:  Hollywood reminded me of something.
     Emphasizing the importance of being open to ideas from the people you're working with, the author wrote, "It doesn't matter how many hours, days, weeks, months, or years you've spent prepping your film, you will not have thought of everything."


You will not have thought of -- everything.


     When I was working as a lobbyist, the board of directors requested a meeting with a certain state official to share ideas about education and school funding.  When I phoned him about it he said, with an air of weariness, "Whatever ideas they have, we've already thought of them."

     Aahh.

     Lololol.

     'All thoughts in existence on the planet, I've already thunk 'em...'

     Evidently, our state official had not heard the film director's theory about "suspend your ego" and listen to others.

     And -- actually, he did meet with us.
     (Ha -- funny memories...).

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     When I imagine stories I am usually thinking of words.  But I love movies as well, and there it's pictures, moving pictures -- images, angles, visual sequences, traveling camera -- that tell the stories.  They call this telling the story "cinematically."

     Filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) once observed, "In many of the films now being made, there is very little cinema:  they are mostly what I call 'photographs of people talking.'  When we tell a story in cinema we should resort to dialogue only when it's impossible to do otherwise."

     He wants to see the story more than hear it.


     Sometimes I think about how some people are more visually oriented, and others more spoken-word or music centered.  
     
I was thinking of a friend who is very visual in her experience of the world.  I thought if she were given a choice of having to spend a week in a plain bare room with books and music CDs or to spend that week in a beautifully appointed room without books or music but she could bring paints or a craft project, she would choose the beautiful room.

     I would probably choose the plain room with the music and reading material.

     Considering ways to develop my visual appreciation and abilities in that area, I watched a documentary about a photographer, Slim Aarons:  The High Life.
     It's good.

     Mr. Aarons took the picture of Jackie Kennedy that's at the top of this post.

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