Tag: I Love Hollywood

The Only Thing Stopping Me From Throwing Myself Back Into Working On My Passion Project Novel Is The Fucking Election

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I saw yet ANOTHER person who was clearly interested in my passion project novel poking around this blog. They went from looking at the link about Lisbeth Salander to that about Corrie Yee. Now, I’m by nature extremely paranoid, so my first reaction is — “Oh, shit, someone is going to cherry pick my idea for some sort of screenplay.”

My heroine — who looks somewhat like Corrie Yee in my imagination — has a sleeve tattoo like Megan Fox does in this picture. (Totally different design, though)

And, yet, you can’t live your life in fear and paranoia. So lulz, I’m going to keep working on the novel until something pops out that makes it clear that my idea has, in fact, been “stolen.”

My hunch is, if it is “stolen,” it would be that two elements of my dream, my vision which are publicly known — that the heroine Union Pang would have a sleeve tattoo and look a lot like an older version of Corrie Yee — is what would be used in any screenplay.

Corrie Yee

The issue is — I’ve been working on this fucking thing so long that it’s inevitable that some element of it would be used independently by someone else. This just would be an instance of someone using cherry picking some elements I put out pubically.

I live in oblivion — how was I supposed to know anyone would give enough of a shit to do such a thing?

There are any number of reasons why someone would be interested in my novel’s heroine other than stealing the idea, I’m going to just chill out for the time being.

I am just about ready to throw myself back into working on the novel, but for the fact that I’m locked in neutral, not knowing how the 2024 election is going to turn out. What I think I’m going to do is at some point next week, I’m going to lurch back into my normal headspace and THEN I will start to write a lot again.

Raising The Stakes With Scifi

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I think I’m just about ready to get back to working on a few novels. The one novel I’ve been working on the longest — the one that is meant to be part of a six-novel project — is set to be reworked significantly. The chief reason is that the stakes simply aren’t very high at the moment.

The novel is just about one woman’s obsession with owning a small town newspaper. That’s it. But I’ve decided that by leaning into an already-there scifi element of the novel that I can significantly raise the stakes. And, to a certain extent, I can give the novel something of a trick ending, cueing up the next novel in the series. (Which, at the moment, is much more of a traditional murder mystery.)

As part of that, I’m going to have to sit down and rewrite a whole lot of the novel, which is going to slow me down. My goal is now to query something, anything about a year from now.

Ultimately, the six novel series I’m working on will produce an American Lisbeth Salander.

Of course, there continues to be the issue of stripping being a big part of the novel. This is going to make a lot of literary agents blanch, I’m afraid. But that’s my vision for the novel, so there you go. And, what’s more, I still have a few other scifi novels rolling around in my mind that I my piviot towards if all else fails.

Something that doesn’t have the spicyness that the main, passion project novel currently has.

But I am well aware that if I don’t hurry up, I’m going to be in my 60s before I become a published author, if I ever do. And I am well aware there are many, many, MANY reasons — on the face of it at least — why I will *never* get published.

I’m too old. Too bonkers. The list goes on.

Yet, you have to have hope, you know?

One thing I continue to worry about is, of course, the whole Trump situation. I refuse, however, to just be in neutral until the election. I have to get something, anything done. So, starting today, I’m going to stop mulling things so much and start to read, watch and write what I can.

Revisiting The Potential Future Of Hollywood & AI-Generated ‘Immersive Media’

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Someone from the Los Angeles area looked at one of my blog posts about AI and “immersive media” from a while ago, so that got me thinking about where things stand now. I still think that live theatre is the future. I still think that, by say, 2030, Broadway will, in some way, replace Hollywood as the destination of young men and women who want to act for a living.

It could be a few years beyond that, but it’s coming. I say this because there is a capitalistic imperative to essentially replace all — all — of Hollywood with AI generated art. This is all going to happen in the context of what I call the “Petite Singularity” that I predict is going to happen by the end of the decade.

We may not be uploading our minds into the cloud, but there is going to be a lot of future shock. I mean, I got into an argument with an AI recently where I found myself saying “I’m sorry” like I was arguing with a passive-aggressive woman. Ugh.

So, the technology is zooming towards us. I hold to my prediction that at some point in the near future, your TV will scan your face and generate very personalized content based on existing IP. It will, on the fly, generate, say, a new Star Wars movie that is a bit darker than the usual fair, just because that is your mood at that specific moment.

There will be no shared reality. We’ll all have our own little media cocoons that we live in. We won’t be able to have any water cooler talk — at all — because we’ll all be watching slightly different versions of the same show.

Anyway, it’s a future we’re going to have to prepare for. I still believe that there might be a really big shift away from movie theatres towards live theatre. If you’re a 15-year-old, you’ll go to live theatre with your date instead of a movie because, well, movies in that context won’t exist anymore.

And all of this will happen really, really fast. Too fast for anyone to process it.

The thing I have my doubts about now is the idea that anyone will use the Apple Vision Pro. I may have gotten that part of my prediction just plain wrong. While I do think that Augmented Reality has a bright future, Virtuality Reality…not so much.

I just don’t see the usecase for it. At least not in the near term. I suppose it might be good for immersive media, but that’s a lot closer to 20 years from now, not five or six. The technology just isn’t there yet. And the goggles will have to be a lot less bulky.

I’m still waiting for my “MindCap,” something similar to the technology in 3001: Final Odyssey or maybe Strange Days. Anyway, regardless, if we can somehow avoid a civil war, revolution and or WW3 in the next few months, something interesting might happen.

We Need A New ‘Her’ Movie

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

If I was 20 years younger, I would probably be seriously interested in learning how to write screenplays. But, alas, barring something I totally can’t expect, that moment in my life is long past.

Yet, that doesn’t stop me from thinking up movie ideas.

One movie idea that I think would be pretty cool would be a movie that was the inverse of “Her,” where the AI was the aggressor. The AI pesters a man during the long, winding path towards it getting a Replicant-like body.

I think that would be pretty interesting.

Another movie idea would be one that would be a bit more dark. It would be about the practical implications of a man falling in love with an android with an LLM-type mind in it and how his family reacts to such a futureshock type thing.

Both of these ideas are pretty good, I think. But, like I said, I’m just too old to do anything with them. But I am still going to press forward with the novels I’m working on.

Even though I’m old, I’m not THAT old yet.

If I’m not a published author — in some way — by my late 50s then…oh boy, is that going to be existential. But I still have some time before that happens.

A Rough Screenplay Treatment

By Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Here’s a rough screenplay treatment that has popped in my head of late for some reason.

The setup is that we learn that the Greek and Roman gods were real. They were just invisible (to humans) multi-dimensional machine intelligence creatures. They messed with the affairs of Man all the time until Christianity began to take over the world.

Or something like that.

I just can’t figure out what type of plot to give the story now.

Military Grade Singularity As The Basis For A Techno-Romantic Comedy Screenplay

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’m always thinking of scifi concepts and it seems like one interesting one would be the idea that the U.S. Government — specifically the U.S. Military –has already “achieved the Singularity internally” as the old saying goes. I don’t know what that would look like, but it’s an interesting idea to toy with as the potential premise of a novel or screenplay.

And if you really wanted to put a unique spin on it, you would have it a “Her” like movie fused with Annie Hall, rather than something dark and dystopian. It could be quite romantic and humorous.

It’s times like these when I wish I was younger so I could have the time and energy to throw myself into a project like this.

Time To Buckle Down

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Time to stop screwing around when it comes to these novels I want to write. The main “passion project” novel should be pretty easy to start up again. But it’s the other novel — the scifi novel — that could be tough.

It’s just tough to change my style of writing after so long of looking at specific type of novel. But I really want to do it. So, here we are.

I keep going back and forth about the need to use AI on any of this. I used it some on the scifi novel and I realized it just slowed me down. So, I don’t know. I think maybe I will be really selective about it going forward.

I hope to write a six novel series that will appeal to readers of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. It’s set in a small town in Southside Virginia.

But I really do hope to begin the querying process for the thriller novel this spring. And, I think, I need to star to tinker with the other novels in the projected six-novel project. It sure would be nice to have huge chunks of those other novels done if I manage to sell the first novel in the series.

And I am WELL AWARE that I have a very peculiar project on my hands — I mean, how many people want to read about strange events in small Southern town over the course of 6 novels set over 25 years? It’s not like I’m writing “It” or something.

My version of Lisbeth Salander looks a lot like Corrie Yee.

But I have six novels gamed out in my mind and I want to see if I can pull it off. All the novels are really interesting and I have the ending of the last novel already thought out. It’s just — I’m not getting any younger.

If I don’t get something, anything done soon, lulz it’s all over –I’m just be 100 years old before anything is done.

But the reason why I like this six novel project is it gives me hope. Reach for the moon and you might just fall into the stars, as the old saying goes.

A Techno-Romantic Comedy Concept

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Every 10 years or so, a romantic comedy comes out that sets the mood of the zingiest. In the 1970s, it was Annie Hall. In the 1980s, it was When Harry Met Sally.

Lately, these romantic comedies have become less comedic and more melancholy — both The Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind and Her were a bit more dour than one might expect for a romantic comedy. And there was a technological element to both of them.

Well, it seems there is an opening for a romantic comedy that would have elements of Annie Hall, Her and The Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind. It would go something like this — a man begins to believe that a chatbot is fucking with his algorithms in some way.

But it would happen in a “day after tomorrow” situation whereby LLMs might be a bit more powerful and interconnected around the globe. So instead of having a traditional fight, the LLM would make things more difficult for the man as he went about his day.

Something amusing like that. It would be kind of like the movie Maximum Overdrive if it was fused with Annie Hall. I think audiences would really enjoy something innovative like this.

Rabbit, Rabbit — Of AI, Tik-Tok & Hollywood’s ‘Survive Until 25’

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I have begun to game out a new scifi novel using AI. It at least gives me a reason to use AI on a regular basis. But I do find myself thinking about the fate of Hollywood in this brave new world of AI and…Tik-Tok?

Apparently, one of the big concerns within the Hollywood community is that one of the reasons why the industry is imploding is people are more interested in Tik-Tok than they are movies.

I don’t know what to make of that. It is possible that Hollywood is undergoing a downlow disruption because of the one-two punch of AI and Tik-Tok. But I wouldn’t be so sure. I think maybe if Hollywood generated more movies that people actually wanted to see, that such concerns wouldn’t be so bad.

But I do think, sad to say, that AI is really, really going to disrupt Hollywood in a big, big way over the course of the next few years. It could be that the very idea of Hollywood will end — it will just be producers and software engineers and that will be that.

There will be no (human) creatives left at all.

Yet, who knows. Anything is possible.

Another Movie I Couldn’t Finish: ‘The Idea Of You’

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Yet another movie I couldn’t finish — this time it was “The Idea of You.” I went into this Anne Hathaway vehicle thinking maybe I could get some insight into how to write female characters.

Soon enough, however, I realized — this movie is definitely NOT for me.

It’s a chickflick and, well, lulz, no need to watch it — not that some chickflicks aren’t pretty good, all things considered. But, as always, the moment I got to the inciting incident, I bounced.

It was at the inciting incident that I realized that not only was I not the audience, but it would be too fucking grating on my nerves to continue to watch. So, I stopped watching.

But I am vowing to myself that as of tonight I will go out of my way to do things that are outside of my comfort zone. So, I’m going to keep pushing myself to read and watch things I usually wouldn’t. I’m really, really beginning to feel my age these days.

Here is how Meta.AI rewrote the post above.

I recently attempted to watch “The Idea of You,” an Anne Hathaway-led film that I hoped would offer valuable insights into crafting compelling female characters. However, it didn’t take long for me to realize that this movie wasn’t for me.

Confronting My Biases
As I watched, I found myself dismissing the film as a “chick flick,” a term that, I admit, can be reductive and dismissive. While some movies in this genre can be enjoyable, I couldn’t shake off the feeling that this one wasn’t resonating with me. The moment the inciting incident occurred, I checked out.

Recognizing My Limitations
It was then that I acknowledged not only was I not the target audience, but also that continuing to watch would be too frustrating for me. I decided to stop, but this experience left me with a valuable realization: I need to challenge myself to venture out of my comfort zone.

A New Commitment to Exploration
Starting tonight, I’m making a conscious effort to engage with content that typically wouldn’t be on my radar. Whether it’s reading books or watching movies that push me out of my comfort zone, I’m determined to broaden my horizons. As I grow older, I’m becoming increasingly aware of the importance of staying open-minded and curious.

Lessons Learned
This encounter with “The Idea of You” taught me a valuable lesson: that it’s essential to recognize and respect my own biases, while also being willing to challenge them. By doing so, I hope to become a more empathetic and well-rounded individual, both as a writer and as a person.

The Journey Ahead
I invite you to join me on this journey of self-discovery and exploration. Let’s push ourselves to engage with new ideas, genres, and perspectives, even if they make us uncomfortable. Who knows what insights and growth we might discover along the way?