Saturday, February 1, 2014

Week Three: Part One - Whistle While You Work

January 27th - February 1st, 2014

The new part time intern came in this week from NYU. I haven't actually gotten a lot of chance to have conversations with her, but from what I can gather she's pretty cool and in the right place at DAW for the sake of shared fandoms, specifically Joss Whedon, and we'll see what else she's into as time goes on.

A lot of this week at DAW had to do with housekeeping, so besides manuscripts and book reports, I also went through to update the database for quotes, author bios, and book synopses. I also combined some pdfs so that they'd be ready to print for advanced reader copies and bound up with tape, sent out to a select few who would get to review the book before the actual release date--build up hype and such. Smart! Also it would be awesome to be one of those people. New books are great, but there's something so...exclusive about having something that looks enough like a manuscript but ideally is as perfect as the book is gonna get, and you know that you're one of the first people outside The Biz to set eyes on it. It'll be less rare in about a month, but before then it's an uncommon treasure.

Next week sometime, the other intern and I are supposed to meet with the editor to talk about her experience editing books and conversing with authors about their work. I'm really excited about it! That love-hate working relationship between an author and an editor has always sounded like so much fun to me. Hard work, certainly, but also really fun. The kind of people that would go to a pub together and banter sarcastically, but also always have each other's back on stuff.

I also got some practice making sheets for marketing pitches for a couple books coming out this year, just to get a feel for what they're for and what they look like. Basically it's a stat sheet that explains why this book is worth marketing dollars, and why it's cool enough to make bank or better.

I also have some on-my-own-mostly-for-fun reading for the weekend: my supervisor gave me Seanan McGuire's Rosemary and Rue of the Toby Daye series since I'd never read her work before, and she's going to be coming to the office some time in early-mid February. I'm excited, and apparently my supervisor is a huge fan of hers anyway, so she's excited for me, too!

At Torn Page, I think I may actually be done with that script I was writing out notes for. The actor has it now, anyways, and they're going to film some scenes out of it this weekend for publicity, I guess. Or the actor's own notes. It's basically a vignette of an Italian American, written from the recordings of this guy's life story and made into a piece meant for the stage, rather than film.

I also talked to Clark about my goals and such for the internship, and he explained to me what Torn Page really was, what it's "flavor" was--because every studio has its own. He said that Torn Page is meant to be a safe place for actors to learn from other actors who have more experience. There is not meant to be any inferiority complex because of working with, sometimes famous, professionals, because everybody is at the same level of humanity. Clark is also good friends with John Hurt--and I asked: John Hurt apparently is as cool as he seems. Spectacular.

Alex Orlovsky came to my seminar as a guest this week, answering questions about what it's like being a producer of films and what exactly that job means. He produced moves like The Place Beyond the Pines (2012), Blue Valentine (2010), and Half Nelson (2006). Very impressive movies, and I know that because I've heard of them. I don't usually hear about less-than-famous things because the fact that I'm not pop-cultured enough combined with a terrible memory for names does not give me a whole lot to go on. I tried actually watching Blue Valentine before he came to our class, but the internet at the house was so shotty for my computer, I would wait five minutes for the internet to kick back on before it would allow me to watch maybe two minutes of movie. I walked around to three different locations in the house, but after I got halfway through and got kicked offline again, it was time to call it a night. I'll finish it eventually.

Orlovsky also was my brother's professor at SUNY Purchase a few years ago, so that was kind of cool. The gist of what I got from him talking to our class about the movie business was that NYC was a great place to come and live for 10-15 years, and then things might start happening to you; basically all that time is spent making connections so you can actually do stuff. He was really informative, even if sort of depressing about the immediate future, but at least there's hope you'll get somewhere you wanna be eventually.

Yay.

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