Some samples from Alan Spearman’s tweets from Haiti:

diplomats check out the crumbled national palace as naked women give themselves bucket baths and dogs eat trash across the street. queasy.
about 10 hours ago from OpenBeak

they have to improvise a lot here. three eagle scouts are on the team. crile is definitely corporal radar o’reilly. temp. just above hell.
about 15 hours ago from OpenBeak

way hot in O.R. team jokes they could maintain sterilization by operating in the nude. pulling on this man’s junk. ouch! joking 2 maintain.
about 15 hours ago from OpenBeak

p.s. thanks “sunny” for the cipro hookup. god knows what we inhaled today.
8:20 PM Feb 10th from OpenBeak

Every job has its secret, and the secret to his job was this: there was no penalty for destroying what need not be destroyed. Things left undestroyed, however, were full of the potential to end careers – both his and the careers of those above him. It was rarely the obvious that slipped by. Egregious misdeeds were either exposed by whistleblowers or erased in the field. In the few rare instances that photographic evidence or transcriptions of obvious crimes or criminal errors crossed his desk, he destroyed them immediately. Pictures of blood, reports of bodies, catalogs of burnt vehicles, maps of ruined homes, descriptions of weapons of any sort, recordings of crying bystanders, video of wounded soldiers… these could not be removed quickly enough. But would he notice that one man talking to two others is wearing boots issued only to Iranians? Would half of a seemingly senseless phone call connect to a hand-written note in a manner that exposed a conspiracy? He could not be sure, and so he would destroy them both.

More lessons from Savage County: .2 – Watch out for snakes, 1- The middle ground sounds boring but is actually strange (this is about money), 2 – The answer to the first asking of the question “Is this enough blood?” is always “No.”, 3 – This is fun

To compensate for not keeping a production diary and for not doing the Q&A and panel at Indie Memphis, I decided to write: 66.6 Lessons Learned on Savage County. (I added the decimal to the devil’s number because while I learned a ton, I don’t know that I can get all the way to 666 lessons learned, and I know you don’t want to read that many).

Another passed-on idea that I’m reposting because I still think it holds water: a game show that rewards players for their ability to lie convincingly, not about personal information (a la “what’s my line?”) but about facts. It’s pure bluffing – poker without the poker. It’s called “Million Dollar Bluff.”
As always, would love to hear what you think, whoever you are.

“The English Lesson” tells the story of a wormy, closeted momma’s boy who gets his comeuppance from a Croatian gangster and his sex-starved wife. There’s not a likable character in it and a very large part of me wishes it had been my thesis project at UCLA.

You can download the pdf here or scroll down. I promise that (I think) it’s funny. I want somebody to make this film.

A while back, I was invited to participate in a think tank about mobile/entertainment put on by Nokia. I pitched to them an idea that I still really want to see happen: the idea that an intelligent video camera (like Nokia’s N95) could become the filming media and platform for self-generated first-person documentaries.
First-person documentary is a bit of an obsession of mine. I’m making a documentary on my friend, Fi, and 90% of the footage is stuff he shot. His self-filmed DV is far more interesting, raw, …

I spent the better part of the 4th of July weekend with Fi and Jon working on our documentary: This is Fi. You really should click into this entry to see the resultant photograph.

While she was alive, he had hated her car: a white 2004 Buick LaSabre, as generic as his coupe was particular. It was sluggish. It started, stopped and turned with flabby, gelatin imprecision.