Welcome to the Brizigs LLC Beginning-Of-April post. I thought I’d start off with an update on the free writing workshops that I said I was going to be attending in order to, as I have relayed many, many times here, work on my fiction writing and overall creative abilities.
Well, I stopped going to the free creative writing workshops. This is because I quickly realized these workshops were not very productive. I suppose that’s what I should’ve expected from free workshops, though I remained very optimistic. After all, libraries are good and important institutions! And I’m sure some talented and qualified writers work for them. Plus, I love to not have to pay for things!! But it took attending one in which a free write was followed by “feedback” from the group, feedback which amounted to nothing more than only praise. Everyone was too afraid to be mean, no one wanted to be honest. I realized these were not, as Logan Roy might say, “serious people.”
In order to find the serious people, I am accepting that I will have to pay for a workshop. The people who are really serious about writing and want genuine, honest, brutal feedback, are going to pay to get it. This is an unappealing idea to me at the moment as my negligence about “quarterly taxes” on my untaxed freelance writing income last year caused me to owe an embarrassing amount of money to the IRS, and I did not receive a tax refund. I am trying VERY HARD not to think about this. Anyway, I might try one of these paid workshops, like Gotham Writer’s Workshop or whatever, but I’m not in any rush to throw hundreds of dollars down on something that isn’t necessarily crucial to me and my career and my bank account at the moment. But it would certainly be nice in the future, when the Tax Season Massacre of 2023 is far in the rearview.
I’m also currently working on a piece which I believe some subscribers may have contributed to over on Twitter about Letterboxd rating systems. I received an overwhelming response and there were quite a few DMs I did not accept, so if this is you I’m sorry, but I’m only one person, and I responded to over 50 DMs which will be taken into consideration for the essay I’m planning. The plan is to publish the piece sometime this month, hopefully no later than the end of April. But, rest assured, the wheels are in motion (I’ve already got over 1k words down so it’s ACTUALLY HAPPENING) and it will be up on this Substack sooner or later.
Also, you may have noticed I changed the layout of the site from “Default” to “Magazine.” I’m not sure if I like this better — it’s a bit of a chaotic and jumbled mess. But I do kind of detest how boring the default layout is (so much aggravating white space) and the “Feed of Posts” option is even worse. So I think we’re just gonna stick with this one, at least for a while. Unless everyone hates it or something idk.
What I’m watching…
I am back to watching new seasons of television, shockingly. In between my third watch of Curb Your Enthusiasm — in which I’m truly relishing how much deep kinship I feel towards Larry David now — I am enjoying the fourth and final season of Succession as well as the second season of Yellowjackets. I think that both of these shows are good and entertaining and worthwhile, but I don’t really have much to say about either of them. I don’t think very hard about Succession like many people do but I don’t think much about most television really. Get back to me about my thoughts on television when Severance and The Righteous Gemstones and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia are back. You know — shows of real substance.
I watched a lot of good movies in March (three Jerry Lewis films, Amadeus, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Enough Said, Late Spring, The Piano Teacher, etc.), but I’d like to take the time to shout out a very special film. For a commission I’ve been working on over the past couple weeks, I’ve been watching a bunch of Dracula films (it’s important research). This included a little film called Dracula 2000, and if you’ve never heard of Dracula 2000, well, rest assured, I’m here to fix that.
It’s a movie about Dracula that takes place in the year 2000. It stars a young Gerard Butler as Scottish Dracula (perfect casting), who has been imprisoned in a metal coffin by Van Helsing (Christopher Plummer), the latter of whom has been injecting himself with blood from leeches which he leaves to feed on Dracula’s body. In the universe of Dracula 2000 — one in which Bram Stoker’s novel is canonically real, making this film something of a soft reboot as well as an extension of the original story — Dracula can’t be killed, and Van Helsing has been prolonging his own life by injecting himself with Dracula’s blood in order to study him and hopefully kill home one day. Also, Van Helsing has a daughter, Mary Van Helsing, who is some kind of Mina Harker hybrid (her best friend is named Lucy Westerman), and who was conceived when Van Helsing was full of Dracula blood. Thus, she shares a psychic connection with Dracula, and becomes the object of his desires.
Directed by Wes Craven’s thrice Scream editor Patrick Lussier (the film was executive-produced by Craven), what more could you want from a turn-of-the-century Dracula film than nu-metal, embarrassingly obvious Matrix allusions, tons of Virgin Group product placement, Jonny Lee Miller, Gerard Butler as the weirdest and possibly horniest portrayal of Dracula, and an unreal plot twist in regards to Dracula’s origins that I won’t spoil for you in this newsletter. Dracula 2000 needs to be seen to be believed and I can’t recommend it enough.
What I’m reading…
Speaking of Dracula, I’ve finally finished the book. 400 pages is a lot of pages, sure, but because I read slower than a normal person (and also it gets a bit boring as it gets closer to the end) it took me almost three months to finish. An overall good read, but for the rest of the year I’m manifesting more page-turners for Brianna.
I’m now onto Cinema Speculation, which I’m very excited to read. I really enjoyed Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood novelization and I think Tarantino is a good and distinctive prose writer. From the first few pages I’ve read so far of Speculation I’m enjoying reading his writing on the films he loves and his life spent loving those films, plus it’s funny to hear his real-life voice come through in this kind of writing. I’m glad to be getting to this book months after it was first published so I don’t have to go online and see peoples’ opinions about it without asking for them!
What I’m listening to
I detest podcasts, but few weeks ago I got hooked on the Always Sunny Podcast following the conclusion of my umpteeth rewatch of It’s Always Sunny. If you’re a longtime, huge Sunny fan like myself, I cannot recommend the Always Sunny Podcast enough, hosted by the show’s stars/creators/writers Charlie Day, Rob McElhenney, and Glenn Howerton. Essentially, each episode of the podcast focuses on an episode from the show starting with the season 1 pilot, but it veers occasionally from this format and the discussions vary wildly. It’s the best kind of podcast format, i.e., the pleasure of listening to real-life pals chatting and having interesting, funny, and irreverent conversations.
Aside from the fact that it’s wonderful to listen to these lifelong friends shoot the shit, rib each other, and reflect on their pasts, it’s a fantastic look at the artistic process and filmmaking. The Sunny guys pretty much had no idea what they were doing when they started making the show, they didn’t really know about filmmaking or television show writing. But they wanted to create something together, something true to them, and despite the litany of roadblocks they faced, they believed in the art that they were making, and, now, here they are. There’s also a lot of really wild behind-the-scenes tidbits, like actors they tried to have on the show that didn’t work out (Samuel L. Jackson, Ray Liotta, Sean Penn), budding actors who auditioned (Dave Bautista), and other projects that never got off the ground (unrealized Rob + Paul Schrader screenplay).
I think this podcast is really an essential text to if you’re a budding creative, especially a writer and/or filmmaker. Something Charlie Day said in one of the earlier episodes stuck with me because it’s an issue I grapple with constantly. I don’t like to use the phrase “imposter syndrome” because only the most annoying people you’ve ever met use it, but they discussed imposter syndrome and just having that feeling like you don’t know enough, that you aren’t experienced or smart enough, and that other people must know better than you. And Charlie just said something along the lines of “no one really knows what they’re doing, so just do it anyway.”
Odds and Ends
Got a question? Comment? Something you’d like to see me write about? A complaint? Do you want to be really mean to me? Leave a comment below or shoot me an email with your nasty words (and maybe your sweet and kind ones too).
Dionne Warwick: Elvis Presley did me a big favor in Las Vegas
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjFnYn_vn_o
Had to comment for the solid Dayman meme. Also, going to add Dracula 2000 to my watchlist