comparisons/ “Heads in Beds” book

Apr. 5: This is what I have learned as I was writing my script.

Comparisons:

People who are enemies have to work together because of a common goal:

It was done on the Alias pilot.  It’s where Sydney learns that she works for SD-6 that was part of the CIA.  In reality, the SD-6 is working against the CIA.  Now she becomes a double agent.  She learns her estranged dad Jack is also a double agent and they have to work together to bring down SD-6.

It was done on Prison Break season 4 where good guys Lincoln and Sucre have to work with bad guys Gretchen and T-Bag.  There were a slew of characters where they had to work together.

It was done on Once Upon a Time, where the good guys and bad guys have to team up together to find the kid Henry in Neverland.

A character complicates the story and has to add to it: I was writing my Rain script and I had created a character where she complicates the story, but she doesn’t add to it.

I have a bad guy and complicates the story and he adds to it.

Don’t make story “too busy”: I watched Degrassi and there are 3 storylines and it’s in 2- part episodes.  The writing is alright.

On Arrow, there are usually 3 storylines in one episode.  Usually 2 are set in the present.  There is 1 storyline in the flashback storyline.

Apr. 6 “Heads in Beds” book: I cut out this article “Anything that you can imagine happening in a hotel has happened” by Brad Wheeler in the Globe and Mail on Nov. 24, 2012.  It was in the Travel section of the newspaper about a hotel front- desk clerk who wrote about his experience working at a hotel.  I have worked at a hotel in room service, and I haven’t experienced his experience.  My experience was positive.  Here’s the whole article:

He’s not only checking you in, he’s checking you out. With his personable, advice-filled book Heads in Beds, one-time hotel front-desker Jacob Tomsky gives the lowdown on the “hospitality” business and what the workers really think of you, the paying guest.

Often in a movie, there’s the scene when someone checks into a hotel room, and there’s the awkward moment when the bellman waits for his tip. Is that a Hollywood cliché, or does it happen that way?

That moment of uncomfortableness is a very powerful tool for a bellman or a doorman. That skilled lingering is an art form. The moment lasts five seconds more than it should, and suddenly “tip” pops into your brain. Doormen do it even more than bellmen, because not everyone thinks to tip the doorman. So he will stand there and just linger, and you can feel the guest having that uncomfortable feeling that there is a gentleman behind their back, floating about.

I never know how much to tip. You mention $2 in the book, but that is that enough?

The bellman would have no anger at $2 a bag. But I would say tipping less than $5 would not be that helpful. So, even if you have two bags, you should round up to $5.

You advise never to tip with loose change. But in Canada, we have dollar coins and two-dollar coins. Would a hotel worker be offended if I flipped them a two-dollar coin with my thumb?

Yeah, you would kind of look like a jerk there. Unless he’s a 10-year-old newsie who just sold you a newspaper and who’s going doff his cap to you and head on down the road. I don’t think an adult is going to want to catch the money you’re throwing at them.

Do you find that guests who book through Expedia or Priceline.com are cheap with the tips? Do you treat them with less appreciation?

The bellman and the doorman are very much aware that discount-seeking guests are not guests who tip.

On the other hand, if I see someone who books through the hotel website, I know they want to stay here and I’ll definitely pay more attention to them, as a valued guest.

But even if you book through a discount bulk-rate service, there are ways a guest can get upgrades or better treatment, right?

Absolutely. If you get thrown onto a property through Priceline.com for example, you should find that hotel and call them. Front desk will call up your reservation, and now you’re speaking to a human being who can find out exactly what room you have. Then, when you come into the hotel, you’re not just one of 56 bulk reservations.

You’re the one who called a week ago. You’ve made a personal connection.

There’s the often told story about hotel guests getting their vacation photos back and finding photographs involving their toothbrushes being used, shall we say, in a non-traditional and unsanitary manner. Is that just an urban myth?

I’ve honestly never done that, but I’ve known hotel workers who have done some pretty disgusting stuff. Would 99 per cent of hotel employees ever consider doing that? No. But there are some really weird people out there in the world. I firmly believe that anything that you can imagine happening in a hotel has happened in a hotel. If you can imagine an employee doing something nasty to your toothbrush, there is a time when that happened.

In your book, you begin in New Orleans as an enthusiastic hotel employee. Things soured by the time you ended your career in New York though. How do you feel about the hotel business now that you’re out of it?

I miss all my co-workers. You spend more time with them than you do with your family. I miss the excitement of the job. But the reason I was working in the hotel was so I could pay rent, which allowed me to write. Today, with the publishing of my first book, is the greatest day of my life.

So, it’s bittersweet. I miss my friends. But I hope people really enjoy my book, and I hope they learn from it and it makes them laugh.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

BOOK EXCERPT

Want to raid the minibar – for free? Hotel clerk turned author Jacob Tomsky shares one (highly unethical) way to do it in Heads in Beds: A Reckless Memoir of Hotels, Hustles, and So-Called Hospitality by Jacob Tomsky (Knopf Doubleday).

Here is the plan. Check in at the desk and make a strong request for a non-smoking room, possibly mentioning allergies (but don’t go overboard and annoy the agent, please). Refuse help from the bellman (that shouldn’t be hard for your cheap ass), and go up to your room unaccompanied. Immediately open the minibar and shove every god-damn item into your suitcase. Take it all. Then smoke a cigarette on the bed and gaze out the window. Afterward, call down to the desk and complain about the heavy smoke smell in the room. Request to be moved. I mean, it smells like something just smoked in here. The front desk will send a bellman up with your new keys, and – not that he has been informed, nor would he care – should he pop his head in, he too will smell the odour. Go to your new room, close the door, and get fat and salty and drunk on your suitcase of snacks. The hotel will never trace that minibar to you. Moving rooms in the system, when it’s done the same day you check in, leaves almost no trace, no overnight confirmation that you actually ever occupied the suite.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/travel/what-goes-on-behind-the-scenes-of-your-hotel-a-former-hotel-clerk-tells-all/article5585932/

disk/ It Follows movie review

 

 

This is on my www.badcb.blogspot.ca:

 

Feb. 28 Disk: On Feb. 18, 2015 my Memorex blue 3.5 floppy disk stopped working.  I bought this back in 2002.  I will give it points it lasted 13 yrs.  Now I will recycle this disk at Staples.

 

Calculator: While I’m at it, I will recycle my calculator.  The equal sign doesn’t work.  The equal sign rubber button doesn’t work.  You can still get an equal if you press the plus sign button.  I might as well recycle it.

Mar. 29 It Follows movie review: I cut out this article “Supernatural killer will scare you witless” by Chris Knight on Mar. 28, 2015.  I got these emails promoting this film because of my blog.  I saw the trailer and it looked pretty good.  This movie was given 5 stars by Knight.  Here’s the whole article:

There’s a filmmaking lesson to be found in the title of this supremely effective horror from writer/director David Robert Mitchell; one that applies to all genres. Simply set up an effective and arresting premise, then let the plot play out by the rules you’ve created. Successful storytelling? It follows.

The film’s basis is simple: What if the D in STD stood for Demon? That’s what Jay (Maika Monroe) discovers after the first time she has sex with her new boyfriend (Jake Weary). What’s transmitted isn’t a disease but a kind of condition, apparently uncureable.

As the boyfriend explains (shortly before he disappears; seems he only wanted her for one thing), Jay is now being tracked by a relentless, supernatural killer. Only its victims can see it. It can look like anyone, friend or foe or stranger. It will walk calmly toward its prey, but it will never stop. Imagine a medium-speed zombie, but fixated only on you.

If it kills her, it will then go after the now-missing boyfriend. Her only hope, he tells her, is to pass it along to someone else and hope they do likewise. So there’s an element of another old terror staple, the chain letter. Send it to someone else, or something bad will befall you.

 

Maika is at first skeptical, but several near brushes with the thing convince her it’s for real. She enlists the aid of her sister (Lili Sepe), her torch-carrying pal Paul (Keir Gilchrist) and the neighbourhood ne’er-do-well (Daniel Zovatto), who among other things has a car and access to a cottage outside the city.

Such a simple storyline would suggest — perhaps even invite — a similarly unexceptional filming style, but part of what makes It Follows so beguiling is the care and craft that went into it. Fashions and vehicles suggest a 1980s setting, and the characters watch even older movies on TV, but there are modern elements as well; Jay’s sister is reading Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot on an e-reader that looks like a makeup compact.

Then there’s the sound design, ranging from near-silence to freight-train and wind-tunnel noises that practically assault the listener. The score, meanwhile, is an electronic mix that sounds as though the Vangelis music from Blade Runner had been remixed by the team behind The Shining – or perhaps by the ghosts from The Shining.

The weirdness continues with the cinematography, which includes the occasional handheld (and one wheelchair-held) camera, but mostly involves rock-steady, wide-angle shots that have us peering into the distance to try to glimpse something we know is out there, coming.

 

Monroe is an appealing audience surrogate, adding to the list of strong female characters in horror films of late. (See also The Babadook, The Cabin in the Woods and last year’s thriller The Guest, which coincidentally also starred Monroe.)

Frightened yet resolute, she’s trying to reason her way out of this mess while rebuffing the virginal Paul, who offers to receive the curse from her – a sacrifice with benefits, as it were. For once, the age-old horror-movie metaphor of sex=death is played straight, without winking or irony.

All of this takes place in the interstices between urban, suburban and rural Detroit, a city with many a dark, uninhabited space in which a demonic sprite — or its intended victim — can hide. The ghost-town boulevards add to the film’s sense of dreamlike disconnection.

 

It’s worth mentioning a particularly disconcerting image, in which Jay’s follower, having assumed the body of a giant, unfolds its body like a lawn chair and clambers into her room from behind a friend who’s oblivious to its hulking presence. I don’t like horror films as a rule, but the ice-cube-down-the-back shiver I got from this scene convinced me to watch this one twice. I wanted to follow it, too.

http://news.nationalpost.com/2015/03/26/it-follows-reviewed-lay-me-down-to-rest/

 

David Mitchell: There is an interview with the It Follows filmmaker.  It’s called “Superbly creepy film based on a nightmare” by Chris Knight on Mar. 28, 2015:

David Mitchell suffered from a recurring nightmare as a child. It was simple yet terrifying; he would see a figure walking toward him from far away. “I knew this was some kind of a monster that was coming to hurt me.”

He could run from it. He could even walk from it. “It wasn’t hard to get away from it,” he says. “But I knew deep down that it was always walking closer.”

Mitchell, 39, hasn’t had this anxiety dream for years now. But others may start to, thanks to his new film, It Follows, which takes its chilling premise from those long-ago night terrors.

It Follows stars Maika Monroe as Jay, a young woman haunted by a creature that literally won’t stop until it catches and kills her. It can look like anyone, so Jay must fear the approach of strangers and friends alike.

Oh, and somehow she “caught” this demon through a sexual encounter. That wasn’t part of Mitchell’s nightmare, but “at some point I started adding to it, connecting it to something that can be passed on through sex,” he says. It was a way of connecting characters physically and emotionally.

It’s a simple premise, which might be why it works so well. Twenty-one-year-old Monroe, who also appeared in the thriller The Guest last year, also helps sell the concept. Mitchell says he knew she was right from their first meeting.

“It’s up to Mika, in those moments when these crazy things are happening, that we really believe this character exists,” he says. “It would be so easy for it to fall into B movie territory where it’s just screaming. And she has that. She can do the soft, subtle, gentle performance that a lot of the film needs, but then also take it to these crazy, chaotic places. And we go with her.”

Mitchell is a fan of the horror genre. “Creature from the Black Lagoon is one of my favourites,” he says, and also lists John Carpenter and David Cronenberg as influences. But the film has resonated even among non-fans, this writer included.

“I’ve heard that from a good number of people,” Mitchell confirms, “connecting to this even though they don’t like horror.”

Part of that no doubt stems from the sympathetic main character. But Mitchell, whose first feature was the critically acclaimed The Myth of the American Sleepover in 2011, put a lot of careful craftsmanship into It Follows.

To begin, he selected production design elements from a few different eras. So there’s a 1980s vibe, especially from the vehicles, “but there are some modern things as well. To me it’s a little bit outside of time.”

The score, too, refuses to stay still: “It moves back and forth between beautiful melodic pieces and things that were sort of musical controlled noise at some level, and it reaches points of being nearly an assault.” He cites Blade Runner as an inspiration on that.

“And not just music but the sound design beyond that,” he notes. “We put a lot of energy into crafting really small sounds in the film. There are really delicate moments: a little bit of wind here; the sound of a lamp.”

Then there’s the cinematography, which is unusually calm for the genre; here Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is raised as yet another inspiration. Mitchell would often choose a lens with a wide field of view, he says, “to suggest to the audience that you should be looking in the background.” Fittingly, that feeling may even follow people out of the cinema after a screening of this superbly creepy film.

http://news.nationalpost.com/2015/03/24/love-hurts-director-david-mitchell-on-the-sexual-terror-of-it-follows/