Richard Kelly Talks about his movie Donnie Darko

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A short but interesting interview with Director and screenwriter of Donnie Darko, Richard Kelly. Donnie Darko, for me, belonged to a special class of movies that I ran across playing late at night on HBO and I immediately knew I had to watch again with friends. The movie assembled a quirky spookiness and a subversive flick to the ear of rigid normality in what is really a strange world.

I miss the time where there truly were cult classics that traveled under the radar so much that you never heard of them until you stumble across them during a channel search on TV at 2am. The excitement of bring something you enjoyed to friends confident that they’d probably never heard of it either. In a lot of very important ways, those days are gone. Sharing links aren’t the same.

More interviews about movies and screenwriting at the Austin Film Festival’s On Story site.

Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time

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Emmy-award-winning director Robert B. Weide started work on a documentary chronicling the life and stories of author Kurt Vonnegut in 1988. Some 32 years later, Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time will be released next month on November 19, 2021.

Through the many years of making the documentary, Weide developed a close friendship with the late author. Filming as the opportunity presented during the three decades, Vonnegut spoke of life, laughter, depression, and friendship — the karass we build through impermanent lives with those we care most about.

Handcrafted Blog Posts

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Reading all the steps Cory Doctorow takes in composing a blog post made me feel like a wimp when I grumble under my breath about having to stop to hand-edit markup on something I’m posting. Doctorow’s process is… intense. But he’s been at it for twenty years, and no matter how he publishes, he always has interesting posts.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/13/two-decades/#hfbd

Cory Doctorow by Gage Skidmore under Creative Commons

Cory Doctorow by Gage Skidmore under Creative Commons

Building the Monkey House

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Credit: WNET-TV/ PBS via Wikimedia Commons

Credit: WNET-TV/ PBS via Wikimedia Commons

I just finished reading an essay by Gregory D. Sumne called Building the Monkey House: At Kurt Vonnegut’s Writing Table. Using several drafts of Vonnegut’s short story Welcome to the Monkey House culled from the author’s papers, Sumne illustrates Kurt Vonnegut’s writing process through analyzing the evolution of the story from draft to draft. It proves fascinating to see how dramatic the story morphs with each version, and how much material fell away to arrive at the classic story. Sumne’s essay is included in Welcome to the Monkey House, the Special Edition, along with the final version of one of Vonnegut’s signature pieces of writing.

Professor Sumne also wrote a book about Vonnegut’s writing called Unstuck in Time: A Journey Through Kurt Vonnegut's Life and Novels. I think that will definitely be a future read.