Morongo Canyon
Used a brush pen for this sketch in the desert outside L.A. I had to work fast cause my hands were freezing.
Prince of Persia at VGA
Tonight’s Spike TV Video Game Awards 2009 broadcast will include a couple of Prince of Persia exclusives:
- The first footage from Ubisoft’s upcoming game, Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands
- Jake Gyllenhaal introducing a new clip from the Prince of Persia movie in which he stars
I’ll be there, too. Although with the rain, this would really be a perfect Saturday to stay home, watch TV and play video games.
Me and Robert McKee
I took the Robert McKee 3-day screenwriting course a bunch of years ago because I wanted to learn how to write screenplays. I was blown away. I thought he was the most brilliant and inspiring speaker I’d ever seen, possibly excepting the guy who gave my college commencement speech. (I was a computer programmer; I didn’t get out much.)
I was so impressed that a couple of years later, I took it again.
He was word for word the same. That tour-de-force, thirty-minute, apparently extemporaneous example of how to escalate a sequence — the girl jogging through Central Park, or whatever it was? The same. He even paused to take a sip of his coffee at the same places.
I thought: The guy’s been giving this speech every weekend, he’s had YEARS to make up new examples and try them out on an audience… and he still only has ONE??
I walked out at the break and never came back.
Prince of Persia Latest News
How do I keep up with all the myriad developments in the world of Prince of Persia? With Google Alerts. That’s how I just found out that
Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands testament passion the new plot from stylish year’s periodical reboot and go back to the humanity of Sands of Quantify, the games on which the upcoming Jerry Bruckheimer flick is supported.
This shouldn’t proceed as untold of a earthquake to incessant readers of Game Life, who already bed that serial creator Jordan Mechner said early this month that Ubisoft’s City apartment was working on “something that I’m frantic about” and that he due an annunciation soon.
Hot on the heels of the lodging for the Prince of Persia celluloid, Ubisoft has announced that the next Prince of Empire courageous will be usable in May 2010.
Pretty accurate reporting, overall, except I thought what I actually said was “The vodka is good but the meat is rotten.”
Somewhere over the rainbow
When I was seven years old, The Wizard of Oz was my favorite movie.
I watched it every time it came on TV (this was before home video) until I knew the songs and most of the dialog by heart.
I typed up as much as I could remember on my dad’s Selectric, in script format, figuring I’d stage it and charge admission. But there were some gaps.
I took the Manhattan white pages directory from my parents’ bedroom and looked up E.Y. Harburg, whose name was in the credits. The conversation went something like this:
YH: Hello?
Me: Hello. Is this E.Y. Harburg?
YH: Yes…?
Me: Did you write the lyrics for The Wizard of Oz?
YH: Yes, I did.
Me: Can you tell me the first line of the Cowardly Lion’s song, because I didn’t understand it.
YH: “It’s sad, believe me, Missy / When you’re born to be a sissy / Without the vim and verve / But I could show my prowess / Be a lion, not a mowess / If I only had the nerve.”
Me: OK. Also, what does the Tin Woodman sing after “I hear a beat, how sweet…”
YH: “Just to register emotion / Jealousy, devotion / And really feel the part / Just because I’m presumin’ / That I could be kind of human / If I only had a heart.”
I got what I needed, thanked him, and hung up.
In retrospect, from an adult perspective, it does sort of make sense that a Broadway lyricist who’d been blacklisted by Hollywood would, in his 70s, be living in an apartment in Manhattan and answering his own phone in the middle of the afternoon. At the time, being a kid, I just took it for granted. I don’t think I even thought the call noteworthy enough to mention to my parents.
