AMOTM

an airplane stuck on a toyota minivan

this miata built by rocket scientists

the mr2 boat

the nyan cat bmw that i think actually played the song at all times

the homer simpson car built by uranium workers

this limo whose brakes caught on fire

the dumbest corolla and supra wearing funny hats

Hannibal (2013-2015)

2x07 || 2x08

so i've said before that i trust jacob and connor and hudson to protect us from the worst mischaracterizations of TLG and i realize i actually mean something very specific about that from my perspective as a director* (*of like. community theater. but listen)

as a director, your job is to make the whole piece, cohesively, come together under a single vision. good directors understand that the way to accomplish that is not by being a tyrant who bends everyone to your whims, it's by choosing collaborators that you trust to co-create the work and deferring to their expertise. great directors understand that actors are also collaborators: they are subject matter experts who have been hired to do the job of bringing a particular character to life. (most directors are not great. most directors treat actors like paper dolls that are there to execute their vision.) jacob has been super clear that he sees it this way, and that he respects and appreciates the vision actors have for their characters. this is an enormous part of what makes the show so fucking good. when we say what did they put in this show, it's actually "trust in your actors as artistic collaborators." you hire someone who knows more about lights than you to do the lighting, you hire someone who knows more about sound mixing than you to do the sound mixing, and you hire hudson williams so that he can understand more about shane hollander than you do, because you can't hold it all in your head

and we could be reassured by the fact that these particular actors love their characters, yes, but it's not just about defending the characters (which they'll probably want to do)-- they have to understand them. smart and good actors don't let you get away with incoherent characterization, because their whole job is to make sense of who this character is, and if the character is doing things that aren't true to who they are, they need to either update their understanding or the script/staging needs to change. and let me tell you, actors are so annoying about this. they're relentless! sometimes i'm like "please stop cornering me to ask why you say this, you say it because it's written in the script, we've been at rehearsal for eight hours and i'm trying to get to the bathroom." but good actors, actors who care, will persist because they cannot give a good performance if their character makes no sense.

this is true even with characters the actor doesn't particularly like. the last full-length play i directed was full of a cast of characters so morally rancid, so motivated by bigotry above all else, that i went in hating most of them. but having the actors there means there is someone whose job it is, someone whose subject matter expertise that i hired them to do, to understand this character. not necessarily to like them! and not to justify their actions in some kind of cheap tragic-backstory way, if they're good actors. just to understand them as a real person and not a hollow caricature that's only saying that because it's written on the page.

He enters the Hollander family, with Mr. Real Estate, Yuna Momager Hollander, and Treasury Department David Hollander, and they take one look at his finances (impulse purchases, sending money to brother, no investments), and they call the family lawyer because “this is an emergency.” They get Ilya an agent who doesn’t suck, contracts that are translated in Russian, and a bribe from shane (read: sex) to stop buying so many damn cars.