RED LIGHT BYTES: Updates Dossier (11-4-2024)
All The Latest From The Frontlines of Our Metallic Future...
Willkommen, Bienvenue, Welcome!
It’s great to be back, and on the eve of the most pivotal day of the year: Tuesday. While this edition of the newsletter will be going out later than planned (thank to the end of Daylight Savings for that), rest assured we’ll still be having plenty of fun during our truncated offseason, including some stuff I’ve been wanting to do for a long while.
I won’t be rolling out the full red carpet of projects this time, but I will share an update on what we’re doing here. The typewriter’s running hot, Kevin’s cooking up some more exciting art, and the stories (I hope) will fulfill those ambitions mentioned last month. To tease you all a bit, here’s the layout design I sent Kevin for the new Urban Avenger story. It’s more a structure for paneling than the action of the story, but the use of elements from posters for car-chase classics like Bullitt and The French Connection does highlight some of what we’ve got planned this winter.
Besides that, I do want to focus on what my October was like, as I’ve had a bit of a breakthrough in my own personal attitude about my work here and parts elsewhere. This won’t be a self-help confessional, nor a boresome treatise on my life offline, but a simple reflection on what set the ball rolling on all of this. What got me back to reading more, writing more, dreaming more.
It all starts with a certain film from a certain legend.
Whatever you’ve heard about this picture, it’s probably true (give or take a few libelous news stories). Francis Ford Coppola, the titan behind some of America’s greatest motion pictures, entered what he called a “film student” phase after retiring from the business with 1997’s The Rainmaker. A period of purebred experimentation, no-holds-barred, with pauper’s budgets but unlimited freedom. Having been away in the wilderness so long, it is no wonder why 2024’s Megalopolis turned out as opulent, intense, bizarre, beautiful, and downright unprecedented as it did.
An epic and wholly unorthodox retelling of the Catilinarian conspiracy as a battle between utopian dreamers, short-term pragmatists, and greedy conspirators in a Romanesque vision of America. The man put up $120 MILLION of his own grape-fueled dollars, was able to cast top talent from across generations, recruit incredible artists behind the camera, all while still engaged in that experimenter mentality. Critics were left baffled, influencers incredulous, it’s a box-office bomb…and I fucking love every frame of it.
And he’s going in for SECONDS!
I caught it at the top of October while it was still in theaters, and it hasn’t left my mind in the intervening month. Even after washing it down with one of Coppola’s bona fide successes, Apocalypse Now (a righteous experience in its own right). Even after returning to my glutinous consumption of short subjects, music, and literature. Even after laying out plans for global conquest of the magazine market. That shit has haunted me for all 31 days and then some. In my restless dreams, I see that film…Megalopolis.
I did a full review the moment I got home from the cinema, but I think the reason it has stayed with me isn’t just the tilt-a-whirl experience of watching it for the first time in the theater, but of seeing someone given over to their work completely. That film, however you receive it, is one made with tremendous love and care. A love of its chosen medium, of other mediums, and of people.
The fact anyone of Coppola’s octogenarian stature can produce something that electric, that wild, and that earnest, is something I can only dream of doing when I hit his age. And it made me realize, after having spent the month soul-searching, learning, and creating, that this the career I was born for. I want to create, and create with a full-throated ambition and passion. It may not be perfect, it may not please everyone, but so long as I find satisfaction my many trades, I’ll have lived and died a happy man. That is something I will always thank Megalopolis for helping me realize.
Enough of that, though. Back to work! As always:
May God Bless You & This Force. Be Seeing You, Soldiers!
Let Coppola make movies the way he wants to make them. Even at his peak in the 1970s he had to put up with constant crap from the studio executives who thought they knew better about making movies than him. About the only time he would have been happy working as a director for hire was when he was directing "Tucker" for George Lucas in 1988, since Lucas had been his apprentice in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
And part of me still wishes that he could have managed to make Zoetrope into a true rival of the other studios in the '80s like he wanted. We could have had and still have another United Artists for all the mavericks to make their movies without the bean-counters interfering.
Something new involving cars? And *classic* cars, too?
Woo-hoo!