Monthly Archives: September 2016

MATT GEORGE

Ha’ena, Kauai, Hawaii—October 31, 2003.

She’d been main a daredevil life for weeks now. And in the end, she had no idea of the trouble she was getting herself into. Swimming beneath the moon, swimming beneath the radar, nevertheless swimming. Always swimming. Hungry for life, for survival. Starving with want. Patrolling the reefs for opportunity, for flesh. Swinging her large head with the regularity of a metronome, propelling her 14 feet of girth with the straightforward pull and intent of a heavily services shewarrior. With her ragged, 14-inch dorsal fin breaking the surface, she’d been bumping into surfers for weeks now. Testing them, feeling their fear, waiting for her time. They seemed such easy prey. Slow, awkward, lounging on the surface like something sick. And at present it was in her path. It was time. Another was here, apart inside the retreat. Alone and frail, and this one looked so small and feeble. She approached her prey inside the side, taking her time, timing the strokes of the thin, pale arm that dipped off the surfboard in a slow rhythm of bubbles. Twenty feet . . . ten feet . . . five feet . . . and with one last savage kick of her huge tail she opened her jaws in a ragged yawn. Taking the thin pale arm in her mouth, she clamped down with over sixteen tons of sawing pressure. As her teeth met, she effortlessly plucked the thing within the body that once owned it.

The bite was so clean and painless that Bethany Hamilton, 13, noticed that the sea had turned red before she realized that her arm was gone at the shoulder. A strange serenity came over her, a warmth, as her body began to scream its outrage. Spurting a deep, vibrant, burgundy-colored blood, she struggled over to her greatest friend, Alana Blanchard, also thirteen, and could only manage the words, I think a shark just attacked me. Alana told her to not even joke of such matters. Then Alana eyes saw something that her mind couldn’t grasp. The bleeding stump where her supreme friend’s left arm used to be. Alana’s stomach revolted and purged twice before she called for her father and her brother who were paddling for a nearby wave.

Imagine the dilemma of Holt Blanchard, 45, who was now nearly a half mile offshore with his son and his lass and a profusely bleeding and fatally injured Bethany Hamilton and a large, dangerous shark somewhere below. After struggling to apply a tourniquet with his rash guard, he at this time had an impossible decision to make. Should he send his children on ahead, across the deep lagoon, to keep them away from a bleeding Bethany? And if so, how could he protect them? Should he keep them close? And if so, could he put himself between them as well as shark if it returned? For one brief moment he even attention of slitting his own wrists on the ragged edge of Bethany’s board and slipping into the sea to await his fate while the other three made for shore. He had no time to deliberate. He made his decision on instinct. Keep the family close, face the danger jointly. He instructed his youngster to keep talking to a quickly fading Bethany while he and his son rigged her leash and began dragging her to shore.

Cheri Hamilton, mother of Bethany, was driving so fast behind the ambulance that the authorities pulled her over. She hadn’t seen Bethany nevertheless, and had no idea about her condition. Frantic, it wasn’t until the ambulance driver called back to law enforcement officers with a walkie-talkie that they let Cheri take a trip. As she mashed the accelerator to the floor, a call came in on her cell phone. It was Holt Blanchard. Cheri asked him how seriously Bethany was hurt. The conversation went like this:

Holt: You nasty you don’t be aware of?

Cheri: Make out what?

Holt: Cheri . . . her arm is gone.

Cheri: (long pause) Gone where?

Tom Hamilton, Bethany’s father, was practically to be put under for a knee operation at the small local hospital when he was informed that the doctors obligatory the table he was on for an emergency. There had been a shark assail on a infantile teenager at Makua Beach. His heart sank. He knew he had single a fifty-fifty chance, since Bethany and Alana were the lone adolescent girls on the island with enough guts to surf the place. He got up and stood in the hallway as the victim was wheeled into the hospital. He held his breath. He would recognize in a second. Alana had dark brown hair; Bethany’s was virtually white blonde. As the gurney turned the corner all the face went out of his chest. The hair was blonde.

It has been widely stated that the tiger shark’s characteristic serrated tooth shape and grotesquely potent jaws have evolved for professional feeding on great sea turtles, whose shells cannot be split with an axe. Called the hyena of the sea, the tiger shark strikes with a sawing motion of its bottom jaw against the razor blades of the profitable jaw. Bethany’s arm was removed so cleanly, with such precision and efficiency, that the operating doctor was confused when he first saw the wound. He wanted to recognize who the son-ofa- bitch was that had amputated without his permission.

The next day, after word had spread through the islands, Laird Hamilton (no relation to Bethany) called his father, the legendary surfer/fisherman Billy Hamilton and told him if he didn’t tour out and kill this fucking shark, he was going to do it himself. Fourteen days subsequent, much to the outrage of the indigenous Hawaiian people, Billy Hamilton and Ralph Adolescent hauled to the beach a 14-foot tiger shark with a ragged dorsal fin. It took a gutted 5-foot gray shark as bait and a barbed hook the size of dinner plate. Butchering it offshore away from prying eyes, they found no evidence of Bethany’s arm or her watch or the 18-inch semi-circle of surfboard that the shark had taken with it. The shark would have long before regurgitated the irritating fiberglass and foam and probably the arm with it. Nevertheless, removing the jaws and matching them to Bethany’s board revealed a idyllic forensic vigorous to within two micrometers. Aside in the jaws, the single other part of the shark that was saved was a section of its dusky, striped skin. This skin was open to Boy Akana, a local Kahuna, who would fashion it into a ceremonial drum to call on the ancient spirits to calm the seas. Governor Lingle would decree in a public statement that the question was currently closed and that the tourist industry should “just obtain back to normal.”

Seven days successive, Bethany Hamilton pays a visit to Ralph Adolescent’s multiple with Billy Hamilton and her father Tom. She is there to visit the jaws that took her arm. Crouching beside the bloody things from the focus of the lawn, they come up to her shoulder. For long moments the adult men stand around uncomfortably as she curiously pokes at the razor sharp teeth one by one. Then she looks up at Billy Hamilton and asks if she can have some of the teeth for a necklace she would like to make—an amulet to protect her inside future. The males are so stunned that nobody speaks.

Bethany Hamilton, 200 yards while in the spot where the shark that attacked her was caught. Hanalei Bay Pier, November 2004. (Photo, Matt George)

Upon leaving the compound with her Father, Bethany is heard saying to herself, I hope I don’t have dreams.

On the way residence, with a sleeping Bethany next to him among the car, Tom Hamilton begins to hum a tune he hasn’t heard or sung since he was in the U.S. Navy as a adolescent gunner’s mate. His lips travel slightly as he recalls the words of the Navy hymn:

Eternal Father, fit to save,

Whose arm hath bound the restless wave,

Who bidd’st the mighty ocean deep

Its own appointed limits keep;

Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee,

For those in peril on the sea!

Driving on through the rain, the windshield wipers beating monotonously, these are the only words Tom Hamilton can remember. He reaches out to softly take his schoolgirl’s hand in his, but it is not there.

2017 Black List Winners Global Screenplay Competitions

September 28, 2016Uncategorizedgreggscoat1013

Black List Winners Overseas Screenplay Competitions

Argentina Black List Winner – The Little Black Dress
Botswana Black List Winner – Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
Cabo Verde Black List Winner – Gelert and the Last Dog Show
Democratic Republic of the Congo Black List Winner – Comanche
France Black List Winner – Rumours of Fahran
Haiti Black List Winner – Moscow Rocks
Indonesia Black List Winner – Metro2 Moscow
Laos Black List Winner – Lev
Morocco Black List Winner – Lenin’s Body
Netherlands Antilles Black List Winner – Dersu the Hunter
Seychelles Black List Winner – Deuce Four

The Black List, which recognizes the world's best unproduced screenplays as voted on by film executives, has unveiled its international edition today.

Tarantino’s Flag and Countries of the International locations

September 13, 2016Uncategorizedgreggscoat1013

Tarantino’s Shades and Ethnic traditions of the International locations

In addition to the prominence of the body along with the prevalence of provisions, another aspect of Tarantino’s incarnational aesthetic is the director’s well-known interest in visuals, color, buildings, costumes, and characters that reflect the vibrancy and diversity of human way of life.

One way this is expressed is simply the ubiquity of literal color in Tarantino’s movie show. It’s everywhere. The man loves primary colors especially, whether yellow motorcycles (Kill Bill: Vol. 1), vivid blue flight attendant uniforms (Jackie Brown), or red dresses (Inglourious Basterds) and (of course) flowing red blood. As if the lively walls, cars, and costumes weren’t enough, Tarantino also gives his characters and settings lively names: Misters Brown, Blonde, Pink, White, and Orange in Reservoir Dogs, Vernita Green as well as Residence of Blue Leaves in Kill Bill: Vol. 1, and then, of course, Jackie Brown.

Color also manifests itself within the diversity of ethnicities and nationalities represented. From the same way that Tarantino’s film versions are each a pastiche of genres and pop traditions anachronisms, they are also mosaics of race and nationality: Caucasian, Asian, African, Hispanic, Jew, Gentile, European, American, and so on. Tarantino makes a point of rendering this diversity in sharp relief. In Kill Bill: Vol. 1 he calls concentration to O-Ren Ishii’s half-Japanese and half-Chinese site, as well as Sophie Fatale’s French/Japanese heritage. In Inglourious Basterds he exaggerates the Britishness of his British characters (see Mike Myers and Michael Fassbender in the “Operation Kino” briefing scene), the Frenchness of his French characters (see cinephile Shosanna looking bohemian while class and smoking in a Paris café) together with the Germanness of his German characters (see the sloshy beer-drinking of the Nazis inside the Tavern scene). Tarantino’s characters’ names also reflect this celebration of traditions at its most whimsically exaggerated. You can just about smell the magnolia blossoms in a Southern belle name like Lara Lee Candie-Fitzwilly (Django), and you can practically picture the dirndl dress and blonde braids in a Bavarian name like Bridget von Hammersmark.

Tarantino’s globetrotting cinema hall relish the anthropology of place, even if it is “place” as filtered through the fantasies and genres of cinema and pulp novels. His films are about Los Angeles through the lens of hardboiled crime classic tomes and 1950s Hollywood; Tokyo through the lens of anime, samurai, and yakuza crime movie show; Europe through the lens of spy and dogfight movie theater; the American frontier as filtered through John Ford and spaghetti westerns, and so on. It’s not that Tarantino isn’t enamored with the places and cultures themselves—he is—still he’s even superior enamored with the way that window films has explored, exaggerated, remixed, and mythologized them.

Tarantino’s love of place and traditions also manifests itself on a bigger material level in his love of buildings, production design, and memorable set pieces. The director’s preference for episodic portrayal lends itself to the building of elaborate scenes and sequences (or “chapters” as he often calls them) that are supported by the scaffolding of memorable physical spaces. From Pulp Novels we vividly remember the vibrant colors and Hollywood pastiche of Jackrabbit Slim’s. From Inglourious Basterds we recall the “Operation Kino” tavern as well as motion picture theater that is the setting for the show’s explosive climax. In Django we have the epic “Candieland” plantation, where the final fifty or so minutes of the film join in out (before the plantation is spectacularly blown to smithereens).

In a manner bronze of|similar to|a dead ringer for|a twin of|in the bronze that of Wes Anderson, Tarantino often takes time to explore the spaces of these all set pieces with his camera, floating through walls, above ceilings, and below floors to immerse the viewer while in the space. While in the Domicile of Blue Leaves in Kill Bill: Vol. 1, Tarantino establishes the space at length by successive various characters around, giving us a journey of the Japanese restaurant/bar before the bloodbath begins. A similar thing happens inside climactic chapter of Inglourious Basterds, when Tarantino’s camera watches Shosanna put on her makeup and then (from above) sees her hiking from her apartment out to the balcony overlooking the foyer bustling with doomed Nazi revelers.

Whether it be Col. Sanders white suits, cotton fields, and Spanish moss paying homage to the Antebellum South, the music of Ennio Morricone celebrating Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns, or prolonged car chases glorying in 1970s grindhouse window films, Tarantino’s videos are full of a colorful, exuberant embrace of the eccentricities and diversities of human way of life. Better than just a celebration of pastiche, reflexivity, and irony, Tarantino’s dvds are earnestly in love with the quirks, colors, songs, sayings, celebrities, superheroes, myths, histories, and imperfections of man. In this they are deeply human, grounded while in the messiness of life, death, and everything in between.

Who can forget the famous dinner scene in Pulp Ebooks, at Jackrabbit Slim’s, where John Travolta and Uma Thurman order menu items like the Douglas Sirk steak (complete “bloody as hell”), the Durwood Kirby burger, and also the $5 Martin and Lewis shake? Or the climactic engagement between the Bride and Bill in Kill Bill: Vol. 2, which prominently features Bill making a sandwich, all set with mayo, mustard, and Bimbo bread sans crust? Or the fabulously wrought tavern scene in Inglourious Basterds, where beer, biersteins, and bubbly abound?

It’s one thing to include materials as a prop in a movie; nearly every movie has it somewhere, normally sitting on tables uneaten all the way through dialogue scenes. Yet Tarantino’s camera takes special concentration of provisions. It pauses for a close-up on the delectable apple strudel and then pauses once again when the waiter plops a dollop of cream on it. In Jackie Brown the camera takes special attention of coffee being poured into a mug. In Django the camera takes a moment to zoom in on Dr. Schultz pouring a golden, refreshing looking draft beer and then scraping off the excess model.

Sometimes equipment is just a conversation article, as within the famous “Royale with Cheese” dialogue scene between Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) and Vincent (Travolta) in Pulp Novels. Other times it is a representation’s trademark, as in Ordell’s cocktail of choice (the screwdriver) in Jackie Brown, or Calvin Candie’s white cake and coconut cocktail, or Stuntman Mike’s greasy nachos in Death Proof. Frequently supplies is associated with the rare customs or commentary of pop customs being mined at the moment: sushi inside Tokyo sequence of Kill Bill: Vol. 1; rice right through the Pai Mei training sequence in Kill Bill: Vol. 2; apple strudel with the Nazis and 33-year Scotch with Lt. Hicox in Inglourious Basterds; sweet tea and bourbon cocktails in Django Unchained; and so on. Goods is a interesting, sensuous part of way of life, and Tarantino loves way of life.