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Josh Knox

Just Joshin' #199 (Movies)

Published about 1 month ago • 5 min read

Family Photo:
At the Movies

Calvin's friend had a birthday party at the movies, so we all saw Super Mario Galaxy together. I will spare you the spoilers, but the movie plot was about as nuanced as an 8-bit videogame.

The kids loved it though. And watching them watch the movie was magical.

The movie watching experience itself has greatly improved since I was a kid, whether or not the content has. The chairs are packed with electric motors that unfold them into beds. They have a little red button that turns everything into a heated seat. Dolby Vision + Atmos use the latest technology to create a vivid, immersive viewing, bouncing movie sounds at you from every direction.

That wasn't part of the princess-saving-plumbers experience back in my day:

video preview​

Movies, even bad movies, can be magical. Some of my favorite childhood memories are times my dad took us to the movies. At home, we just finished reading The Invention of Hugo Cabret, which is about the magic of movies and early cinema.

Like all stories, movies shape us. Great movies shape us to be more like the people we want to become, by presenting us with people we should or should not want to be as models. I keep a list of List of Great Movies I hope to rewatch with Calvin and Lawrence someday...mostly when they're older.

Here are my top 5 movies:

  • Shawshank Redemption
  • Good Will Hunting
  • Saving Private Ryan
  • Interstellar
  • The first 5 minutes of Up.

What are your top 5 movies?

Dad Joke:
Action Movies

Source: Twonks​

Highlights:
Making Movies

​Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig​

The Chautauquas were pushed aside by faster-paced radio, movies and TV, and it seems to me the change was not entirely an improvement.

​The Anti-Social Century by Derek Thompson​

In the 1930s, video entertainment existed only in theaters, and the typical American went to the movies several times a month. Film was a necessarily collective experience, something enjoyed with friends and in the company of strangers. But technology has turned film into a home delivery system. Today, the typical American adult buys about three movie tickets a year—and watches almost 19 hours of television, the equivalent of roughly eight movies, on a weekly basis.

​Imitate, then Innovate by David Perell​

[C]reators consume art differently than consumers. They’re far more intentional in what they consume. Consuming art is productive work for them. Directors watch movies not just to be entertained, but also to see how they’re made. Consciously or not, they’re developing their own mental Pinterest board of ideas to borrow and build upon in their own work.

​On Taste, Part 3 by Julie Zhuo​

Watching a hundred movies will probably teach you a thing or two about good filmmaking, but you’ll learn ten times that if you see those movies through the lens of those at the top of their discipline. Which movies did they consider great? Which didn’t they? Why? How do they approach their work? What truths have they uncovered? What are some common criticisms lobbed in their direction? (Hey, they’re human too.) This is precisely why universities exist. Because learning from the best is the best way to learn.

​Hacker Mindset by Henrik Karlsson​

In March 1991, Robert Rodriguez, then 22 years old, decided to write and shoot three feature-length home movies to gain experience making full-length films, in case he ever received an offer to direct a real one. Nine months later, having finished El Mariachi, the first part of his planned trilogy, Rodriguez found himself in the office of Robert Newman, a Hollywood agent. Watching the trailer Rodriguez had cut, Newman, who would go on to sell the movie to Columbia in a deal worth $1.8 million, asked: “How much did it cost [to make] again?” “$7,000.” “Really? That’s pretty good . . . most trailers usually cost between $20,000 and $30,000.” “No,” Rodriguez said, “the whole movie cost $7,000.”
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​How do people develop a hacker mindset?​
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When Rodriguez made his first feature film at 23, he had already spent a decade making home videos, editing them by using two VCRs, so he could play the raw material on one and record the bits he wanted on the other. By working hands-on, guided by his own needs, he had learned the details of the work and how things could be manipulated in such a way that his films looked good even if he had no crew or budget.
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In an appendix to the diary, he writes:
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The most important and useful thing you need to be a filmmaker is “experience in movies,” as opposed to “movie experience.” There’s a difference. They always tell you in film school and in Hollywood that in order to be a filmmaker you need to get “movie experience” so you can work your way up in the business. The reasoning being that by working on other films, even as a production assistant, you get to see firsthand how others make movies. Now, that’s exactly the kind of experience you don’t need. You don’t want to learn how other people make movies especially real Hollywood movies, because nine times out of ten their methods are wasteful and inefficient. You don’t need to learn that!
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“Experience in movies,” on the other hand is where you yourself get a borrowed video camera or other recording device and record images then manipulate those images in some kind of editing atmosphere. Whether you use old ¾” video editing systems, VCR to VCR, or even computer editing. Whatever you can get your hands on. The idea is to experience creating your own images and/or stories no matter how crude they are and then manipulating them through editing.
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That is, you want to avoid learning the conventional wisdom about how something works—which is always simplified and filled with false walls—and instead focus on getting into very close contact with the actual nuts and bolts by doing everything yourself. That is how you will learn to understand the system well enough to “see through” it.

​Designing a Process for Creation by Julian Shapiro​

Instead of pursuing originality, your goal should be running a good process at a high frequency. Now we're focusing on something we can control. Over time, you aim for all of your work to be good, but you only expect some to be original. You don’t chase it; you put yourself in a position to capture it.
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What people really want is something that just resonates. This is important to understand: you rarely change your audience’s lives by giving them something original. You change their lives by making material so captivating, clear, and actionable that—for the first time ever—they pay attention to a topic or idea they had always ignored. This is why your "unoriginal" work still has so much merit. People don’t want originality as much as they think they do. If they did, they wouldn’t watch the same superhero movies and crime shows every night
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Lean into making bad work Along your journey, it'll be necessary to create bad and unoriginal work. That's inseparable from being a craftsperson. Because a craftsperson doesn’t care about the quality of any one piece of output. They care about iterating a process to produce increasingly better work over time.

​Flounder Mode by Brie Wolfson​

“The people who become legendary in their interests never feel they have arrived,” [Kevin Kelly] said. When he talked about the power of passion and obsession in that process, I asked him if passion is enough. “Enough for what?” he asked, somewhat rhetorically. He had an impression of what I meant. “I think one of the least interesting reasons to be interested in something is money,” he said, and cited Walt Disney. “We don’t make movies to make money. We make money to make more movies.”

iamJoshKnox Highlights:
Night Shift

​Night Shift | iamJoshKnox​

I submitted a piece to the SLO Nightwriters writing contest.

Contest Instructions: Write a maximum of 2 pages of dialogue that follows a story arc — beginning, middle, and end. Minimal non-dialogue content—no more than stage directions.

Want to Be Interviewed?

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Until next week,
​iamJoshKnox​​

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Josh Knox

Hi! I am Josh Knox. Read more of me here: 👇

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