Gets Emotional, Fires Back

I’ve worked on the internet since high school, and been part of the so-called “new” media since I began at the Huffington Post in 2010. I’ve lived in New York since 2008 (and grew up right outside of it). I’ve seen the industry and city both slide toward a particularly insidious kind of oligarchy, featuring a smiling faux-progressivism that celebrates its inclusiveness while constantly raising the bar for entry. I’m lucky to have a job that I like now, but nonetheless, I’ve seen a lot of insane stuff. It’s been amazing and distressing to watch, and this screenplay, Going Viral, is how I’ve coped. 

This is the first act. The rest can be read here. I’ve never put more thought or care into a story in my life. My dream is to turn it into a graphic novel (or movie, ha!). So if you know someone who’d like to partner up and illustrate it, please tell me! And either way, please let me know what you think! 

Pictured: Me after a whirlwind Sundance experience

I got back from Park City late on Tuesday night, after a crazy five days of seeing movies, talking to people about movies, and writing about movies (and sleeping a few hours per night). Here are the stories I wrote about the movies I saw.

Manchester by the Sea: This family drama starring Casey Affleck, Michelle Williams, and Kyle Chadner was maybe my favorite film at the festival. Along with my review, I spoke with writer/director Kenneth Lonergan about making the film, too. He is a very smart, thoughtful man who, despite a reputation for being somewhat cranky, was quite talkative and open.

He said this, among other things:

I wanted very much to do a movie about someone who doesn’t turn out to be OK in the end. I personally don’t need to see a story about a person that starts up miserable and ends up worse. I don’t know what that’s about, so I didn’t want to do that. But I also feel that life can be so hard on people, and people everywhere, no matter what their situation, can undergo such painful experiences and sorrow. And the truth is that many people don’t recover and don’t bounce back and they’re not OK. And I don’t like the lie that they just need a second chance to flourish and be a playground and suddenly they’re smiling and everything is fine. People carry around a lot with them, and not everyone can recover.

Birth of a Nation: The debut of a massive new talent. Actor Nate Parker (Beyond the Lights) wrote, directed, and starred in this drama about Nat Turner, and the slave revolt he led in 1831. It’s not a perfect film, but boy is it urgent and searing and important — especially right now. An excerpt from my story: 

The backlash to the second straight year of all-white Oscar nominees in the acting categories has been loud and at least superficially effective, with major stars boycotting the ceremony and the Academy moving to drastically diversify its body of voters. And while the underlying problem won’t really change until the film industry begins to make movies that reflect the rich color palette that is modern America, it is impossible to ignore the role that journalists and awards prognosticators play in helping to shape the awards season narrative — often, long before any of the movies deemed contenders are even done with production, let alone seen by critics.

There aren’t many buzzed-about contenders for 2017 just yet (the 2016 show is still a month away), so let the campaign for The Birth of a Nation, a socially conscious and urgent film that also seems tailor-made for the Oscars, begin.

Holy Hell: An incredible documentary by a guy named Will Allen who spent 20 years in a disturbing cult. He was the group’s unofficial filmmaker, so he had hours and hours of tape from the inside. After escaping, he began to try to understand what he went through, and spoke with several fellow ex-members for the film. In our interview, he was so calm and had such a seemingly healthy perspective, I almost didn’t believe it. Here’s how he explained it to me:

It’s like anything; you have to pull yourself out of it and move forward. You can’t stay broken forever. I think the work we all did on ourselves, meditating all the time, all that sense of learning how to deal with your personality in relation to the good and the bad, I think we all learned how to do that. And I think that was good. And the trauma and the PTSD that everyone went through, it’s taken them years to get out of it. And all in different ways. Going to college, running away, whatever it took. And we’re all loving people who really want to best for everyone. And so I don’t think everyone’s going to stay stuck in that.

Although, you can scratch the surface and the anger is right there, like it was yesterday. So it’s not like it’s gone; it’s just that what you’re doing is giving power to him, by focusing on that person, you’re not moving anywhere. So we had to stop focusing on him, although it was hard for me for the last four years making the movie. But now I’m ready.

Christine: A dramatization of an American tragedy that has been somehow forgotten: Florida TV news reporter Christine Chubbuck’s on-air suicide. Rebecca Hall (Vicky Cristina Barcelona) plays the depressed newscaster, and told me in an interview about how she tried to understand someone few people ever knew, from just biographical details and some anecdotes.

I don’t think it was a question of, which of these things made her depressed,. All of these things would have made anyone depressed, but they would have gotten over it. She didn’t have the chemical equipment to get over it. I don’t know what the real Christine Chubbuck was diagnosed with. Probably some depression and there was some medication sometimes, but there was very little information. But I read the script and made the executive decision to diagnose her, with the knowledge of modern psychiatry, as a borderline personality.

Southside With You: I didn’t know what to expect from a movie about the Obamas’ first date, but it ended up being a delightful, Before Sunrise-type outing. I spoke to the director before its premiere, and while the film does reference the future more than he suggested it would (young Barack gives a speech at a community he organized that seems like a prototype of his 2004 DNC address), the filmmaker still made for a fascinating interview.

Tanne visited and then filmed at Altgeld, the low-income housing project where Obama often worked, which helped inform the character and story. One resident’s mother worked closely with a young Barack when he was a community organizer. Her anecdotes delighted the filmmaker: “She said that all of the women, including her mother, were in love with young Barry,” he said. “All the women were fawning over him, and all the men were jealous.”

Weiner: A documentary about former Rep. Anthony Weiner’s run for New York Mayor in 2013 — and, more importantly, the sad media circus that it created.

Swiss Army Man: Known as the Daniel Radcliffe Farting Corpse movie, this innovative film rewards patience; it has much more to it than dead Harry Potter jet-skiing across the ocean propelled by his flatulence. Although I loved that part, too. My thoughts on it here.

Virtual Reality: It’s been the Next Big Thing in film for a while now, but finally, the immersive technology seems like it’s on the cusp of bunse for consumers. I tested out some of the cool new projects, some of which are available to consumers now (if they have Google Cardboard).

Tallulah: A decent shorthand for this pretty decent drama would be Dark Juno, given that it’s a reunion of Ellen Page and Allison Janney in an examination of modern motherhood.

The Lovers and the Despot: Maybe the craziest part about this doc about two filmmakers who were kidnapped in the 1970s by Kim Jong-Il is the fact that they were given creative control to make movies that didn’t necessarily have to glorify the brutal North Korean government. The dictator was THAT big of a cinephile. Of course, he was still an absolute monster, but it’s an interesting wrinkle.

Toy Story blew minds with its computer animation when it hit theaters 20 years ago, but the groundbreaking animation studio’s newer work makes it look quaint. Just look at the evolution of Woody, from the first two third Toy Story, as well as the incredible life-like vistas of The Good Dinosaur, below:

Here is my long oral history on the making of Captain EO. Somehow, this story hadn’t been told, despite being an epic, big-name production. The space adventure short film/music video starred Michael Jackson, produced by George Lucas, and directed by Francis Ford Coppola for Disneyland. It’s a wild, crazy story — with some heartbreaking moments, like this one:

One day, we were both sitting on the steps, eating our lunch, silent for a little bit, and I say, “Michael, let’s pretend I’m a genie. I come down to earth and say, for all your goodness and kindness, I want to grant you three wishes. So what would they be?” And Michael thinks a little bit and says, “Wow, nobody’s ever asked me that before.” And then he says, “Well, my first wish would be to have my childhood.” And for wish No. 2, he said he would like to go to a mall without having to buy it.

It’s ironic because I work at Yahoo, which owns Tumblr, and thus I spend most of my day writing my articles in a field and dashboard exactly like this one, but I am very terrible and being on Tumblr, personally. It was a huge platform and community for me in the early days (2009-11 or so), but as I’ve branched out into longer journalism and making films, I’ve gotten bad at Tumblring my own personal thoughts. I guess Twitter has a lot to do with that, too, but Twitter mostly just makes me sad.

Anyway, in the interest of coherence and my own personal archive as I get older and more senile, I wanted to link my old Tumblr with this new and barely used one. So here’s a link to Jordan’s Heart Sucks, which I started this as a blog about my 2009 heart surgery, though it later developed into a more catch-all type journal.

Millennials: A Love Story (About an iPhone)

As a journalist whose living is dependant on keeping up with the maddening pace of news and ever-shifting winds of human sentiment on the internet, and then spends most of his “unplugged” moments either reading a Kindle or writing side projects, I’d estimate that I spend about 18 hours looking at my phone or computer per day.

It’s a nightmare.

As enriching the internet can be — I read incredible stories, search just about every topic that pops into my head, discover art, and talk with my friends — I find there are diminishing returns. When I’m out in the “real” world, I find my nose buried in my iPhone, searching for some sort of authenticity, while the most alive city in the world passes by my stupid face. I also end up half-listening to my girlfriend, who is by far more interesting than anything I could read online, and cares infinitely more about me than anyone who is reading and not fav’ing my tweets.

So I made this short film, to satirize myself and everyone else in my generation with this horrible addiction. And to shame myself in the future; when I reach for my phone in the middle of a real experience, I’ll remember that I made this video making fun of that very same (and awful) tendency.

One ironic note: I shot it entirely on an iPhone. I’m prepping for some bigger short films to shoot early this fall, with bigger and (sadly) more expensive equipment, but I wanted to get out there and just make something, which has become my credo. One of the benefits of the iPhone is that it provides solid starter equipment that allows creative people to go out there and be creative. I bought a Steadicam Smoothee to keep the phone balanced, though I haven’t yet purchased the very cool Moon Dog Labs anamorphic lens that they used on the film Tangerine, which you should go see in theaters now.

This is my new short film, about living with OCD.

More specifically, it is a short film about obsession, desperation, secrets, and the absurd things about which we can’t help worry. It’s a dark comedy about how the mind works — or fails to work. And it’s based on 25 years of first-hand research.

I spent a few months on this, between writing and directing and producing and editing. I love making movies first and foremost, and at first, I wanted to write something about the human thought process, because in most movies, the only indication that someone is thinking is a pained or poignant look on their faces.

As often happens, this project ended up being much more personal; it’s not autobiographical by any means, but the spirit of everyday urgency, uncertainty, and frankly, absurdity, is very true-to-life.

I interviewed him on Friday, and it sounds like he’s in for director Guillermo del Toro’s big screen adaptation of the classic Disneyland ride.

“We’re talking about it,” he said. “That’s my favorite ride. Haunted Mansion is a whole world, it’s not just a ride, so I feel like in Guillermo’s hands it could be amazing.”

Helen Mirren

Jon Stewart, on the constant cable news hysteria that blows up breaking news, and the march of progress over time.

Here is the first trailer for the Martin Luther King Jr. film Selma. It looks awesome.

I spoke with director Ava DuVernay about the film, which was produced by Oprah. The timing of this movie could not be more pertinent. An excerpt:

She is feverishly working to finish the film, which opens on Dec. 25, and has spent much of postproduction keeping one eye on her movie, and one on eye on the recent events that have unfolded in Ferguson, Mo., where the struggle on the ground eerily recalls the situation King faced decades ago.

"It really just proves that these issues are on a continuum," she said. "Until we really understand where they started and what’s happened, they’ll just continue to happen. I was grappling with the footage in the editing room: On one screen, I’m looking at my footage, and [then] I turn my head and I’m watching CNN and MSNBC on the other [screen], and I’m seeing the same thing. A whole small town that had to face an aggressive police force and had to grapple with, ‘Do we throw rocks? What do we do?’ We just went through Selma again, collectively."