Home.

First day back in the saddle. New York was a lot of fun – finally got to met some folk I’ve known only online for a couple of years. Lots of photos to throw at Flickr and some stuff to blog about, but for now it’s enough to be back in my office and writing again.

Lots to catch up on – we’re almost ready to start shooting the Slingers sizzle, the pilot has a new second act and the other shows are starting to take shape… I mentioned we have Steve Barron on board as director now, right? But more about all that later.

I’m moving this blog to another hosting service and will amp up my output here once I’m settled in again. Also moving to my new iPhone 3GS and ditching my old mobile number. If you need the new number drop me an email or DM me on Twitter.

Right… back to it.

Working on an extensive redraft of the pilot script for Slingers. Could be seen as an odd move as the current version has been so well received, but I think we can give it a little more oomph. Been knee deep in great movies and TV shows recently  (none of them particularly new which is sort of telling) and quite a few meetings. Felt we were treading water for a while there, but things continue to head in the right direction and have picked up speed again.

Also getting my New York head on for the trip in a week or so. Staying here, but not sure where we’ll be shelved yet.

Speaking of New York and great (older) movies…

Hell. Yes.

Now back to crossing the streams in Final Draft.

Jeff Pulver has kindly asked me to speak at the #140Conf in New York in June.

I’ll be speaking about some of the stuff that Twitter has allowed me to do over the last 12 months or so and learning what a whole bunch of other interesting folk have been using it for. I’m hoping to get a better overview of the possibilities that such  a disruptive platform offers and not make too much of an arse of myself.

I’ll also probably talk about some of the people Twitter has helped me work with:

Top image: Sylvester and Tweetie by James Cauty

Bottom image: Steven Spielberg by me.

I vaguely remember watching Shamus as a kid, but like Prime Cut I somehow blanked out the best parts. I remembered one scene where he finds the body of his friend (Burt’s friends in the seventies had it rough – remember Cartetaker and the light bulb bomb in Mean Machine?), but that was about it. How could I forget he slept on a pool table, picked girls up with lines like, “Do you fool around?” and kicked so much ass.

I should qualify that he kicks a lot of ass for the first half of the movie – it goes off the rails towards the end which is a real shame. There’s a great running chase sequence early on that these days would swap realism for some nifty parkour, but instead we get Burt doing all of his own stunt work as he leaps and mostly falls off things. Great stuff.

This leapt out at me too:

I still find it jarring when the Twin Towers make an appearance in a movie, but this small glimpse in particular had me pausing the movie and checking Wikipedia to see how old the towers would have been when this movie was being made. The film was released in ’73 and has a copyright of ’72 while Wikipedia has this shot of them going up in ’70. It’s interesting that the bands of yellow that adorned the construction are still partially in place in the screengrab. I need to make some time to watch Man on Wire I suppose…

When I was a kid the idea of actually going to New York was about as likely as nipping to Moon Base Alpha, but now I’m a frequent visitor (just to the former, alas) it still comes into focus for me through the movies I grew up with rather than the experiences I have there. That said, hanging out with fire fighters at 2am in an honest to god New York fire station probably trumps repeated viewings of Mean Streets.

Private detectives were a bit of a mainstay for me as a kid too. I was talking about the benefits of working freelance just the other day and it struck me that I have almost the same lifestyle as Jim Rockford because of it. I meet interesting people all the time, saunter into bars anytime I damn well like and also make do with off-the-rack, low-budget, slightly tacky clothing.

People try to kill me a lot less, but I tend to see this as an advantage.

There’s a lot of talk on Twitter about rock stars – something that has never sat easy with me as most rock stars are total cunts. What I’m slowly discovering is that we’re a loosely connected group of gumshoes and that suits me fine. I’d rather be a (private) dick than a cunt any day of the week.

One of the TV things I may get to breathe some life into in ’09 is a police procedural thing. I’m suddenly thinking it makes a lot more sense to make it a P.I. kinda deal…