I
Like To Work It Work It
Hey,
you guys are a big part of my work day, and I'm curious, what does the average
work day look like for members of your writing staff? Watching movies/DVDs,
reading books, etc.?
Joel
A. Williams
Editor
Keith Phipps leads off the response:
I commute to work, usually on a
crowded bus. If I'm working on a book review or a music review or a Box Of
Paperbacks entry, I'll usually read/listen to what I'll be writing about, but
otherwise, I like to reserve this little space in the day to consume culture on
my own terms. (I don't know that anyone out there is clamoring for my take on
John Steinbeck, the author I've been revisiting lately, or the awesomeness of
Nick Cave and Warren Ellis' score for The Assassination Of Jesse James By
The Coward Robert Ford, the album I've been listening to somewhat
compulsively.)
When I get in, I do Videocracy first
thing. (Yes, that's usually my voice providing the collective "we" and the
too-abundant typos, unless I can pawn the duties off on Scott Tobias.) From
there, I sort through the latest batch of e-mail, then just try to keep all The
A.V. Club's plates spinning at once. With Tasha Robinson and Josh Modell, I
keep material flowing for both the print and web editions. With Mike Greer, I
work on ways to improve the website. With everyone on staff, I work to develop
new features and figure out what direction The A.V. Club should take.
(What should we cover in TV Club? Should we do more book reviews? Should we
erase all "firsties" comments, or is that just kind of mean? Would, as Nathan
Rabin suggests, Dolph Lundgren make for a good Random Roles subject?)
After Tasha makes it look pretty and
puts all the misplaced commas where they belong (including my own), I also comb
over every line of every piece of content that makes it into the national
edition of The A.V. Club (what you read here, plus the
non-local content in our print editions). Fortunately, that's a pleasure, since
I work with great writers. And oh yeah, when time allows, I do some writing
myself. Sometimes I have to make time allow. A daytime film screening means that
much more work for me when I get back. And, as this A.V. Club thing grows, I
never get to write as much as I used to, but if I gave it up entirely, the job
would get a lot less fun. At the end of the day, I try to put out any remaining
fires, and then it's back to the bus and back home, where I try—and, as
my wife will crossly attest, usually fail—to ignore work until the day
starts over.
Contributor
Noel Murray chimes in:
As
one of the few A.V. Club writers who lives far from any of the home
offices—and the only one with small kids running around the
house—my day is mostly self-structured, though big chunks of it are
affected by whatever my family needs me to do. I have a first grader and a
pre-schooler, so I once I get them dropped off at their respective
institutions, I'm pretty much racing the clock until I have to go pick them up
again in the mid-afternoon. I typically catch up on e-mail and RSS feeds early
in the morning (while watching an old movie or new TV show off the DVR), then
try to get some writing done before lunch.
After
lunch, I'll watch a movie or DVD I've been assigned to review, if it's not a
heavy deadline day, or do some more focused writing and editing if copy is due.
(That is, unless I've got an interview scheduled, in which case I'll be pacing
the floor nervously and doing last-second research.) After I pick up the kids,
I'll typically listen to music and make notes while they play in our front
room, then get started on dinner before my wife gets home.
After
dinner and bathtime and storytime and bedtime, my wife and I watch TV, and if
I'm doing a TV Club entry, I'll work on that; otherwise, I'll surf the net and
maybe make some notes for upcoming inventories or blog posts. After my wife
goes to bed, I usually put an old movie on and try to finish any writing I
didn't get to complete earlier in the day, or I'll crawl into bed and read a
book or comic I'm going to be writing about. I rarely get to sleep before
midnight.
So
no commute for me, but it's a full day of watching, listening, reading, and
writing, with very little downtime.
Denver editor and music contributor Jason
Heller:
6:30 a.m.: Wake up, put on my makeup, walk in the
cold, dry darkness of Denver to A.V. HQ while listening to Neurosis on the
iPod. If the weather's nice, substitute The Eagles. (Yeah, The Eagles. Shut
up.)
7 a.m.: After getting to the office (I'm one of those
freaky morning people), I plow through dozens of e-mails from publicists. Best
one so far today: "Seth Walker swings, rocks, boogies, and plays lowdown blues
all in one set, all on one record!" Then I coordinate with my interns and
freelancers to make sure I've got a steady flow of copy coming in. Like a lot
of The A.V. Club's
city editors, my priority is putting together my local A.V. section. I have to proof
the paper before it goes to print, conduct interviews, write features, and plan
future local sections. Terribly exciting, no?
11 a.m.: Time for my Newswire shift. This can be
excruciating. After cruising around looking for funny and/or interesting
stories to regurgitate—ahem, recontextualize—I do a quick couple
minutes of research, stretch my remedial HTML skills to the breaking point, and
craft a little news-nugget for our readers to waste their lunch breaks commenting
on. As astute A.V. fans may have already noticed, any stories about Star Trek, Watchmen, Ian MacKaye, or Bruce
Campbell are pretty much guaranteed coverage during my Newswire shift.
Noon: Siesta! (Read: Taco Bell-induced coma.)
2 p.m.: Mail! Yes, every day is Christmas at The A.V.
Club.
I've been a full-time music writer for five years now, but I still get giddy
every time I tear open a big pile of free CDs, books, and comics. I take notes
as I unwrap my presents and prioritize what I'll be listening to/reading first.
Then I take all the glossy promo photos (e.g. Akon and Gwen Stefani) to my
coworker Rob, who is charitable enough to laugh as if I had done something
funny.
3 p.m.: If I'm lucky enough to have most of my local
duties wrapped up for the day, I'll work on national A.V. stuff. For me, that means
writing reviews of comics and CDs. Often I'll pack up the laptop and hit the
coffee shop. It's a great way to review music. There's something about all that
external stimulus—big windows, streams of people, the smell of espresso,
the crazy dude in the corner reciting the opening lines of A Tale Of Two
Cities over
and over—that really helps my writing process. Of course, I don't read
comics at the coffee shop, for the same reason I wouldn't be caught dead
looking at MySpace or Pitchfork in public. I may be a loser, but I've got a little pride.
5 p.m.: My brain usually shuts down soon after 4 p.m., but
sometimes I'll get a wee burst of inspiration and pump out a blog entry for the A.V.
website before the day is done. I have a backlog of ideas—most of which
(like my epic yearlong series about emo split 7-inches of the '90s) totally
stink—but sometimes a random promo CD or reader comment will prompt me to
puke up a couple thousand words of solipsistic crap. Hey, it's a blog, after
all. It's pretty fun to be able to break out of journalist-mode and rant about
whatever dumb thing pops into my head; sparring with our lovely commenters, of
course, is another bonus. (My apologies to the one guy I threatened with a
skull-fucking last week. I meant that in the warmest possible way.)
6 p.m.: Eat. Sleep. Rinse. Repeat.
Film editor and writer Scott Tobias:
What's a typical day in the life of an A.V.
Club
writer? To my mind, there isn't one, just a random assortment of reviews,
edits, and pop-culture consumption penned in only by the guardrails of hard
deadlines. Frankly, there are times when I long for the structure of a 9-to-5,
punch-clock, data-entry job that never changes, just so I can live within
well-defined boundaries. Then I remind myself that I spend my days watching
movies and TV shows, reading books, interviewing artists I (mostly) admire, and
writing for a publication that I would read avidly even if I were a wage-slave.
As our editor Keith Phipps likes to say, we're not exactly working in the salt
mines here.
Still, the days and weeks are filled with enormous
challenges, and it's a job you often bring home with you. Sometimes you have to
catch up with the craptastic Alien Vs. Predator to feel well-informed
enough to review the even lousier sequel. Sometimes you have to abandon your
family for an evening screening of Code Name: The Cleaner. Sometimes you end a
brutal five-movie day at a film festival by writing a 1,500-word blog post, and
then you do it all again a few sleep-deprived hours later. And through it all,
there are deadlines staring you in the face, and you're utterly worthless if
you miss them, no matter how brilliant you might be as a wordsmith. It's a
great job, but in the end, it's just a job: If you can't push that boulder up
the hill every week, your profound insight into Jeff Fahey's filmography isn't
going to save you. Flakes need not apply.
Associate Editor Tasha Robinson:
I'm with Scott: There's no typical or average day
for me, except in the broadest sense that I spend eight or nine hours of every
day in the office, sitting in front of a computer. Like Keith, I commute (on
the train rather than the bus), and I try to reserve that time for reading, but
these days, I'm just as likely to be working on my laptop on the trip in.
Apart from that, and the occasional daytime
screening (more than half of the theatrical-release films I see for work screen
for critics at a downtown private venue) which requires me to trek away from
the office, there's no fixed structure to my day. I generally go in with a
plan—write this review, watch this film, edit these three
documents—and then it rapidly comes apart amid all the little demands of
the day. For instance, today I've been exchanging e-mails with prospective
freelancers, scheduling our next few book reviews, requesting books from
publishers, discussing an upcoming feature interview with Managing Editor Josh
Modell and hunting down contact info for the interview subject, researching and
assembling this week's Ask The A.V. Club column, gathering images for upcoming
reviews, checking the website for errors and problems, sorting through incoming
press releases, assigning tasks to interns, answering writers' questions about
style quirks, fact-checking reviews, and assembling and editing next week's
print content. I perform most of these tasks in a given week, but apart from
the editing and fact-checking, I don't necessarily do any of them every day, or
in any particular order.
With all that happening in the office, I pretty
much never watch films or read books while I'm here during the day. There are
too many administrative demands and distractions. Generally, I read on the
commute or on the weekends, and I watch movies at home. I write in the office
when I'm under extreme deadline pressure, but generally I prefer to do that at
home, too, when there's more time and space to think. As a result, my work days
tend to be sort of fluid and lengthy, especially when I have a lot of writing
assignments on my plate. While I understand the mental image that we all spend
our days lying around in hammocks, eating grapes and chortling over various
forms of entertainment, the fact is that we're a small group of people putting
together a massive amount of media every week, and we all wear a lot of hats at
once, and our office is pretty much an office like any other—full of
people sitting quietly at desks frantically typing—apart from the
frequent pop-culture discussions, the Rock Band sessions at lunch and
after hours, and the mass giggly Taste Tests of weird foods. Oh, and the fact
that while everyone tends to be kind of stressed and overworked much of the
time, we're also generally all pleased as hell that we do what we do for a
living.
[pagebreak]
The
Angel Made Me Do It
I
was wondering where the angel on one shoulder, devil on the other shoulder
thing started. Vague guess: Cartoons?
beachbum13372
noelmurray090970 responds:
Actually, it
comes from Islam. According to the Koran, the "Kiramin Kitabin" sit on the
shoulders of every human being and keep track of our good deeds and our bad
deeds, and report back to God. Some also believe that these "recording angels"
guard against demons and subtly influence behavior, and that you should never
spit to the right, lest you hit your "good" angel. You're correct that cartoons
helped codify this concept into the iconic image of the angel on one shoulder
arguing with the devil on the other, though the image appeared initially in
print, before showing up in animation.
The
Mutant Mash
First
off, big fan. You guys never fail to impress, and ever since the first time I
read this feature a long time ago, I've had a question in mind for you all.
Here goes: In the early to mid-'90s, I'd guess, I remember watching a movie one
night with my younger sister and cousin on Cinemax. Details are sparse, but
what I do remember is, it's in the vein of the "kids get lost, end up at a mad
scientist's lab, and the next thing you know, one by one, they're being turned
into mutants of different sorts" kinda movie, only it wasn't scary at all.
Quite the opposite. My little sister was very young, and even she was laughing
throughout. Other odd details I remember are that it had some sort of
late-'80s, early-'90s B-list heartthrob in it as the main character/hero, and
there was a character named "Stewart" or "Stewie" who was a big nerd with
glasses, red hair, and buck teeth. He gets pushed out of an airplane in the
beginning (this scene was a reference point for my sister and I for years) and
ends up mutating into a Hulk-ish version of himself at the mad scientist's lab,
becoming one of the final villains. In the end, I'm pretty sure the police show
up and restore order, as per usual. Certainly lacking on the details here, but
I'm sure others out there must have seen it. Please help. My sister and I have
been trying to find this movie ever since it first aired that one night. Thanks
in advance! Keep up the splendid work!
Everett Bacon
Sean O'Neal is happy to stay splendid:
You're talking about the underrated Freaked (1993), a Troma-esque
spoof starring Alex "Bill S. Preston, Esq." Winter. (Did Winter count as a
heartthrob? Probably for somebody.) Winter also co-wrote and co-directed the
film along with Tom Stern—who went on to do Saul Of The Mole Men, That's My Bush!, and The Andy
Milonakis Show—and
Tim Burns. Winter plays a smug actor in the Jason Priestley/Luke Perry vein who
agrees to be the spokesperson for a toxic chemical company. After he
accidentally gets sprayed with the company's product, he ends up as a mutant
freak trapped on a farm run by Randy Quaid, along with his best friend Ernie
(a.k.a. Blossom's
other brother) and activist/love interest Julie, played by '90s heartthrob (for
a nanosecond) Megan Ward. Some of the other freaks are played by Mr. T, Bobcat
Goldthwait (in voiceover), and the Butthole Surfers' Gibby Haynes. Even
Winter's old partner Keanu Reeves shows up uncredited as "Ortiz The Dog Boy."
(Brooke Shields and Morgan Fairchild also make cameos.) The character you're
remembering, "Stewie," is an obnoxious kid who follows Winter around begging
for an autograph at the most inopportune time—although his transformation
into a mutant actually [spoiler alert!] ends up saving the day. All in all, it
isn't as bad as it sounds: There are lots of decent throwaway lines and sight
gags (better than anything Troma has put out lately, anyway), and the whole
thing has a sort of reckless punk energy that keeps it from dragging. It was
recently reissued in a surprisingly
reverent DVD edition with lots of deleted scenes. Check it out.
Stop
Dragon My Heart Around
I
was a big watcher of Cartoon Network in elementary school (in the early '90s),
and next to The
Pirates Of Dark Water, my favorite thing was when they showed movies, which
they tended to do ad nauseam during certain seasons (especially Christmas).
There are two movies in particular I must have watched a million times in bits
and pieces from first to third grade—and my parents remember this
—but a million Google searches have turned up nothing, and I've never
found anyone outside my immediate family who remembers them. Any ideas?
Movie
A was a fantasy that somehow centered around a wizard, his beautiful daughter,
and an awkward young man from the real world who was somehow sucked into a
board game (which was the world in which said wizard and daughter lived) and
turned into a dragon, because why the hell not? The dragon/man went on a quest
to defeat evil—at one point near the end I think he actually dies and is
reborn, which is how he becomes a human again, but there might have been
another, older dragon that actually died. In the last scene, our hero returns
to the real world and the wizard's daughter (who was in love with him) leaves
the board game to be with him. I remember the animation being very dark and
kind of sketchy, in a pretty way that stuck in my mind—reminded me a
little of the animated Lord Of The Rings, which I saw around the same time. They
showed this movie ALL THE TIME.
Movie
B was only on around Christmas, and was about a little goblin prince (part of a
clan of goblins that lived in a cave in the mountains) who really hated his
nasty, evil family and wanted to be good. The goblin ran away from the
mountains, met a little girl with blond braids (the entire thing was very
Scandinavian) and a pair of gnomes, husband and wife with tall pointy
hats—and (long story short) eventually converts to Christianity and becomes
a gnome through the love of Jesus. (His ears either became pointy or lost their
pointiness, which showed that he wasn't an evil goblin any more.) The entire
story was narrated by the former goblin/current gnome, who lived in a mouse
hole in the house of the blond girl he met earlier. Young as I was, the thing
that stuck with me about this one was its overt Christian message and its
similarity in design to David The Gnome—I've even done searches for David The Gnome Christmas
Special, thinking maybe they were one in the same. No luck.
If
you can find either or both of these movies, I'll send The A.V. Club cookies.
Elizabeth
You owe Tasha Robinson half a cookie:
Well, Elizabeth, the first one's a slam-dunk.
You're thinking of the 1982 Rankin-Bass animated movie Flight Of Dragons, a feature adapted in
part from Gordon Dickson's novel The Dragon And The George (which supplied the
plot about a man summoned to a magical realm and into the body of a dragon) and
in part from Peter Dickinson's Flight Of Dragons, a faux-natural history book explaining, among other
things, how dragons get their massive bodies into the air. (They're essentially
living hot-air balloons.) It has all the plot points you mention: Yes, there's
an older dragon who teaches the dragon/man the dragon ropes, and later
sacrifices his life to fight evil. There's a princess love interest who's the
head wizard's foster daughter. And the dragon/man is summoned to the magical
realm through a board game. I didn't remember that last part, but since the
whole thing is available on YouTube, it was pretty easy to check:
As to the animation, I wonder if when
you said Lord Of The Rings you were thinking of either The
Hobbit or Return Of The King, both animated by Rankin-Bass in a
very similar style. Flight Of Dragons doesn't actually look all that
much like Ralph Bakshi's Lord Of The Rings, though it is considerably
darker, visually speaking, than I remember it. It's also considerably cheesier.
Dig those voice credits: John Ritter as the scientist summoned into the magical
realm, and M*A*S*H's Harry Morgan as the wizard who summons him. That might explain
why the disturbingly flat soundtrack sounds more like something out of an '80s
sitcom than out of a high-fantasy movie. At least the inevitable James Earl
Jones as the inevitable evil wizard is kinda fun.
As to the goblin movie, it didn't ring
any bells with any of us here at the Club. So clearly, it's time to revive an
Ask The A.V. Club tradition…
STUMPED!
The A.V. Club has no answers
for the questions below, and we haven't heard of Elizabeth's
Scandinavian Christian gnome goblin movie, either. Can you identify any of
these things? If so, clue us in at the e-mail address at the bottom of this
column.
I have asked every nerd I know about this
movie, and no one has any idea what I'm talking about. I saw it when I was a
kid, about 15ish years ago, and it was sort of in the genre of "Bizarre Kids
Movies," like Labyrinth,
etc. I saw it on TV, so it might not have been in theatres. It was about these
little puppet people from another dimension who came to earth and stayed hidden
with this girl in her house in the suburbs, where she was hiding them from her
parents. The puppets looked kind of like Cabbage Patch Kids. The only parts
that I can remember are: 1) at one point, one of the puppet people gets put in
a dryer, 2) there's an evil witch with some kind of magical fruit, and 3) at
some point, the fruit is surrounded by a gate that is lowered. That is all I
can remember. What is this friggin movie, for the love of God?
Kirby
Hey, everybody: I remember reading
in a secondary Star Wars book (as in, not penned by George Lucas) that Boba
Fett slept without an alarm clock, his ninja-like abilities allowing him to
rise from sleep on command. Ever since I initially read it (early '90s), I've
always found this detail absurd and wonderful, and I often use it either
whenever a friend complains about a malfunctioning alarm clock, or in discussions
regarding Boba Fett's awesomeness. Anyway, I was wondering if any of you
remember which book(s) that fact was from. I'm pretty sure it wasn't in the
Timothy Zahn books… Thanks!
Benjamin
I remember catching the tail end of
a science-fiction movie (possibly a short piece) featuring a man playing a
futuristic game of chess on a glass board with stylized chrome geometric
laser-firing tank-like pieces. He was playing said game against a kind of
apelike alien who, when beaten, screamed horribly, and the bearded human
protagonist was beamed outside of some kind of pyramid. It was that weird.
Naturally, I need to know what on earth it was.
Chris
Next week: A kwestion of speling and
a Muppety dance song, among other things. Send your questions to [email protected].