the power of Cloud Atlas

“Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others. Past and present. And by each crime, and every kindness, we birth our future.”

If you believe this, Cloud Atlas is a powerful experience. Epic and audacious. Exciting, mystifying, moving. I'm not surprised that it's polarized audiences: this is not a movie that you're used to seeing, and to really connect with it you'll need to discard your cynicism. If you can do that, this movie can give you ideas that might even eradicate cynicism from your palette altogether. Maybe we need more of that. We absolutely need more movies like this. 

The Wachowskis are back--not in the same way they exploded into the zeitgeist with The Matrix, a perfect sci-fi action thriller--but in the way they blew our minds by molding entertainment around ideas, reaching deeper and farther than most filmmakers making big budget movies would be able to go. Cloud Atlas interweaves the stories of six different characters, set in different times and places throughout the past, present and future, connecting them with symbols and sounds and souls. Each story is from a different genre: there's a mystery thriller, a sci-fi adventure, a comedic farce, a tragic love story. There are incredible acting performances from a troupe of accomplished actors all playing multiple roles. It's a puzzle box of connections that taps into the mythic power of images, music, and editing. 

I haven't read David Mitchell's novel. It's been on my Kindle for months and now I can't wait to read it. It must be even more profound. We acquired language to solve our basic problems, without realizing that language itself is a problem--truth is something we can't describe but can only understand when we're in its presence. The creators of this humanist symphony show us truth. The argument here is that we will be presented with choices throughout our lives. Each choice represents potentiality. Not simply for the direction of our own lives, but the direction of our collective future. They hammer this into us again and again until we know it in our bones. 

My initial reaction leaving the theater was conflicted. That was a great movie, I knew that. But I didn't feel like it was "the best movie ever", like some of its critical adherents have been claiming. I had to think about it further. I was supposed to go to a friend's Halloween party, but I went home. I found myself reading reviews, Internet chatter, listening to the Cloud Atlas sextet again and again. I felt sad, for some reason, and I couldn't shake it. I went to sleep early and dreamed about the movie. I can't get the music out of my mind.

This movie reminded me that we are significant and matter in ways we can't understand. It's easy to think the world is meaningless. We have access to all this knowledge that dispels a lot of the magic and myth our ancestors believed in. But we are not omnipotent, we are limited by our minds. We are part of a complex system outside our understanding. Atoms drifting in the solar winds, somewhere in space and time.

See this movie in the theaters and talk about it. It may be challenging but it won't be boring--three hours long but always entertaining. Even if you end up not liking it, I think you'll be glad you gave it a chance.

choosing the adventure

Aside from poker, writing and storytelling have always been my major obsessions. In between finishing BOOM and writing Season Two of The Micros (writing episodes, but no production plans yet), I've managed to make a significant shift in my professional habits--from online poker pro to writer. This basically amounts to writing a lot, creating training exercises for myself, developing my ideas, and consuming/thinking about/discussing a hell of a lot of movies, television, plays, literature, and video games. It's fun.

Recently I wanted to power up my knowledge and enhance the quality of my ideas, so I've been taking some Coursera courses, which have all been really sweet experiences. I just finished one on Fantasy and Sci-fi, and I'm currently engrossed in The Odyssey for a Greek/Roman mythology course. Coupled with the massive volume of incredibly good anime I've been watching (Cowboy Bebop, now Code Geass), I'm itching to write something new.

So as luck would have it, last night I stumbled on inklewriter. Its a free piece of software that allows writers to develop really nice looking, Choose Your Own Adventure style stories for iOS/Kindle. I have a pretty cool idea for a military SF/action-adventure/mystery story that seems like it would be fun to try in this format, so I am diving in. This kind of stuff is the frontier of modern storytelling--emergent narrative--and I am psyched to see what I can do with this tool. I might post stuff about this little experiment along the way, but my goal is to finish by Thanksgiving and share it here. Maybe that 's an ambitious goal, but if it's not challenging and exciting it's not worth doing, and this seems like it's both. 

I have no expectations other than a complete interactive short story--its not going to be a masterpiece, but we'll see where it leads.

on distributing a movie

By far the most common question we get asked about the documentary is: when and where can I see it? Our answer has typically been, and still is, something along the lines of: "we don't know, but stay tuned." That's a pretty vague answer, but movie distribution is a long and complicated adventure that we're only just beginning to embark on. For now, I'll keep it simple and touch upon some of the basic steps.

1) FILM FESTIVALS

Film festivals are basically carefully curated smorgasbords of independent cinema. You submit your film, and if the festival deems you worthy you screen to their audiences of festival-goers, film fans, critics and other industry movers and shakers. Festivals can often be the best way to start expanding awareness beyond just your friends, family, community and core audience on the Internet. Building greater and greater awareness is a crucial part of the overall gameplan--think of a movie like any new type of product a company wants to launch. You have to get people interested, excited, engaging in conversation, until it all builds to a critical mass that can hopefully crossover into the mainstream.

If your movie plays well at certain festivals, you may start to see interest from buyers in distribution rights. There are all sorts of distribution rights: theatrical, non-theatrical, VOD, television, DVD, educational, and digital rental/download are some of the big ones. These buyers have access to the biggest audiences and specialize in delivering your movie directly to the most interested eyeballs. So for our project, film festivals are the first step. If we sell the movie, the where/when question gets answered in conjunction with the dealmaking. One of our top priorities is making sure that the film is released in a timely manner, and hits a global audience.

2) TOUR

Depending on how they perform at festivals, some filmmakers may choose to go on tour! Think of this as an extension to the awareness-building. Here you're taking the movie around the country and playing to audiences most excited about seeing it. Kind of like a band goes on tour for a new album, but instead of filling concert venues with music we'd be filling theaters and conference rooms with an online poker movie. 

3) DIGITAL/DVD RELEASE

This usually comes last if you crush at festivals and sell all your rights for MEGA BUCKS!!!, but depending on how things play out this could happen sooner. Some filmmakers have been conducting interesting experiments in delivering their movies direct-to-fans and cutting out all the middlemen and red tape. The Internet has had a majorly awesome impact on creating and distributing content, and seeing as how Taylor and I are very much cut from the cloth of online poker players, Internet creators and entrepreneurs, we are totally psyched to see what kinds of strategies we can come up with to push the envelope. How could you create a feature length online poker movie and not have a badass online component, amirite?

Anyhow, I hope this sheds some light on the subject for those curious. We may be finishing up work on the movie itself, but there's still a long road ahead. When/where can you see our movie? We don't know yet, but stay tuned!

BOOM documentary blog

Ryan, Taylor and I are crawling out of the filmmaking abyss with a nearly finished movie. This is a wild combination of emotions for all of us.

We went into production almost two years ago, but since putting up our trailer in May 2011 we've been mainly radio silent. Our reasoning was simple: we consider ourselves really lucky to have the chance to tell the "story of online poker" on a cinematic scale, and we didn't want to screw it up. This is everyone's first feature and despite possessing a variety of useful experience, there are tons of lessons you only learn in the heat of battle. It turns out turning 300 hours of footage (even when you've carefully planned out what to shoot and why) into a 80-90 minute documentary is an incredibly difficult task. 

We originally planned to look at online poker with a certain focus: the evolution of poker as a game thanks to television and the Internet, and the evolution of the poker playing professional as he moved out of the card room and into the living room. We decided to follow three different pros to achieve this (Danielle "dmoongirl" Anderson, Tony "Bond18" Dunst and Martin "AlexeiMartov" Bradstreet), but Black Friday complicated the story hugely, and it took us some time to figure out the right way to address the impact within the movie. I'd like to say that we "cracked the code," but Ryan and I are so deep in the forest at this point, endlessly analyzing the minutiae of beats, scenes and sequences that it's tough to judge how good it is. I like this Woody Allen quote:

"I have an idea for a story, and I think to myself, my God, this is a combination of Eugene O'Neill, and Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller … but that's because [when you're writing] you don't have to face the test of reality. You're at home, in your house, it's all in your mind. Now, when it's almost over, and I see what I've got, I start to think: what have I done? This is going to be such an embarrassment! Can I salvage it? All your grandiose ideas go out the window. You realise you made a catastrophe, and you think: what if I put the last scene first, drop this character, put in narration? What if I shoot one more scene, to make him not leave his wife, but kill his wife?" 

Neuroses aside, we have shown early edits to a small group of people and reactions have been very positive. So this weekend we mail our tempered optimism and an advanced cut of the finished documentary to the Sundance film festival for consideration. No matter what happens, our ultimate goal remains to get this movie to as wide an audience as possible (likely in 2013)... but it would be SWEET!!! to world premiere at Sundance in January. Time to cash in all that Micros Rungood!

The idea that there is a world coming in which people will be watching a complete version of the movie is incomprehensible. Simultaneously it feels like this will be immensely satisfying, like we're samurai, surfing a hundred foot wave onto a poker table to topple Howard Lederer's stack.

Hahaha! Making a movie is nuts. I hope it doesn't suck.