The Writing Life: reflections by a working writer. The Writing Life

Reflections of a working writer, a university screenwriting professor, and the editor of Oregon Literary Review.

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Charles Deemer

Editor,
Oregon Literary Review

MFA, Playwriting, University of Oregon

Writing faculty, Portland State University (part-time)

Retired playwright and screenwriter.
Active novelist, librettist and teacher.

Email: cdeemer(at)yahoo(dot)com

The eagle flies!

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"Can We Talk About Me For A Change?"
Playwright Debra Neff Nathans

Inkygirl
Debbie Ridpath Ohi, a weblog for writers (resources)

Silliman's Blog
Ron Silliman, contemporary poetry and poetics

Maud Newton
literary links, amusements, politics, rants

Darren Barefoot
Technical and creative writing, theatre, Dublin

Rob's Writing Pains
Journey of a struggling writer.

Mad, Mad World
Cara Swann, fiction writer, journalist, "reflections on humanity, random news & my life."

Writeright
Random musings on a writer's life and times.

Flaskaland
Barbara Flaska's compilation of the best online articles about music and culture.

Write Of Way
Samantha Blackmon's written musings on writing (composition and rhetoric).

Alexander b. Craghead: blog
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Rodney Bohen's daily commentary "on the wondrous two legged beast we fondly refer to as mankind." His pen runneth over.

Frustrated Writer
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scribble, scribble, scribble
Journalist Dale Keiger teaches nonfiction scribbling to undergraduate and graduate students at Johns Hopkins University.

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The official blog of science fiction / horror author Terence West.

William Gibson Blog
Famed author of Neuromancer and Johnny Mnemonic: The Screenplay.

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Joe Clifford Faust's "blog of a working writer: tracking writing projects, musings on the creative process, occasional side trips into music, media, politics, religion, etc."

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Official site of occult fiction author Sean-Alonzo, exploring symbolism, alternative history, philosophy, secret societies and other areas of the esoteric tradition.

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Hebrew modern literature at its best, by Corinna Hasofferett.

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The Writing Life
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It Beats Working 9-5
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Stealing Heaven From The Lips Of God
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The Writing Life...
"An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's."
J.D. Salinger

"All my best friends are writers and are dead."
A friend over beer, Berkeley, winter, 1959

"And it came to pass that all the stars in the firmament had ceased to shine. But how was anyone to know?"
The Half-Life Conspiracy

After October 31, 2006,
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The Writing Life II

(Posts archived here are from 01/10/03 - 10/31/06)

 
Saturday, August 07, 2004  

Musing about Moore
Just finished a quick read of the recent book Michael Moore Is A Big Fat Stupid White Man, and it documents many (certainly as many as the authors could find) of the inaccuracies in Moore's films over the years. I was familiar with the way he messed with Columbine but not with Roger and Me. At any rate, Moore believes accuracy is an irrelevant issue because he is writing "comedy," or at least this is what he said in a widely quoted interview with Lou Dobbs, which I happened to see live. But audiences seem to take his movies as being documentaries, and therefore having some relationship to truth. In Idaho recently, a woman who had just seen F 9/11 came away believing Bush was in on the terrorist attacks!

I loved Roger and Me but I think much of this came from believing it was actually a documentary. That it is a work of fiction -- its entire premise is compromised by the actual order of historical events depicted -- pisses me off in a way. When I tried to watch the movie again on cable, I turned it off -- it was far less interesting as fiction, as contrivance, than as documentary. Columbine seemed to me to show Moore more as bully than clown (as in the other), and I was also pissed at him for something he did during a visit to Portland just before I saw the film -- he gave out the unlisted number of a right wing radio commentator so his left audience could call and hassle him. I am no fan of the commentator but I also am no fan of cheap shots and bad manners. At any rate, I found myself feeling sorry for Heston in Columbine, being set up and used so blatantly, and I've avoided seeing the recent one for fear of coming out feeling sorry for Bush! Bush is the last person I want to feel sorry for.

So I'm not a great fan of Moore's methodology. I am a greater fan of Peter Watkins, the 1960s British filmmaker who also made "fictional documentaries." However, he did not act in them, he was not a "personality" (not a muckraker), and he marketed his films as fiction, even though "in form" they were documentaries, rather like the old Cronkite "You Are There" TV series, only with stories about current events. One film, Punishment Park, was about a desert camp where arrested student radicals were sent during the 60s, where they were given a 12 hour head start before being chased across the desert by soldiers -- they had three days to reach an American flag and kiss it before the soldiers caught up with them and killed them. Obviously this was a powerful and controversial film in the 60s -- I don't think it played anywhere except at universities -- and far too many students came away thinking it was true. But Watkins, unlike Moore, never claimed he was writing more than "a story" and invented events, reporting on them in a docu style, rather than taking real events and manipulating them for a purpose, which is Moore's methodology.

A documentary is coming out soon called Michael Moore Hates America, the first of several to come out critical of Moore, although the website for this one claims no Moore bashing but instead an alternative and more optimistic picture of America than the one Moore creates. At any rate, I look forward to it and more varied viewpoints on Moore and on the methodology of documentaries.

I've written a lot of historical drama. I manipulate historical events for my own purposes. I call them "plays," not documentary films (and I suppose Moore calls his movies "films" or "comedies") -- but everyone I deal with has been dead a long time. I try to tell "the truth," which is to say, I try to be true to my understanding of the people and the period involved. I've written more about this in my essay Writing the History Play: Why Dramatists Lie in the Pursuit of Truth.

But I wonder how many of Moore's fans think they are watching documentaries and not comedies?
 Posted by Hello

8/07/2004 04:01:00 PM | 0 comments

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Sketch says, "Happiness is sunshine and a bone." Posted by Hello


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