Yesterday, I earned one. Today, I am taking one. That is all.

The first time I did this, I got a lively case of the hots for one of the actresses in my cast, pursued her with an uncharacteristic boldness while I was still in the early stages of re-assembling my heart after a breakup, and ended up getting embarrassed, ignored, and punched in the groin. Ah, the Theatrical Life.

I’m taking an early bedtime tonight, and have downloaded the sound-mixer Audacity for my laptop. The last time, with my old laptop that was a glorified word processor/porn storage device, I lost two hours driving back and forth to Orange County to mix and burn the music and sound cues on my home desktop. When you only have eleven hours to stage a play soup-to-nuts, you cannot just go giving away two hours to LA traffic. I remember almost crying from the CDs not playing in regular CD players, calling to push back my tech rehearsal so I could give it one more shot, and barely making it in time to smuggle the final working versions to the sound operator before tech period closed.

I keep doing these little quick-hitter jobs, and they do scratch the itch; but they also serve to remind me how long it’s been since I got involved in something bigger. I can’t remember any point in my life when this close to 100% of my creative energy was going solely into writing. Maybe that’s a good thing, or maybe it’s going to drive me mad soon. I do know I jumped at this opportunity, and I anticipate enjoying it. I also anticipate you won’t hear much from me Sunday, while I recover.

That’s a decent result, but at least on this specific script it’s probably going to slow down for the moment – I’ve reached one of the major sequences of the movie and so I’m going to have to step back from the keyboard and spend a little time with the legal pad plotting and outlining what has to get done in the next 8-10 pages, and how to get it done in a way that feels entertaining and organic.

I also spent a little time in that highly-personal script on which I work sporadically. I read through the accumulated pages the other night and surprised myself, because I forgot I had written “GOD THIS SCENE IS BORING” on top of an exposition-heavy dialogue in a cafe that I really ought to just torch. I also caught myself trying to write a Meet Cute (Screenwriting Lingo Translation: A charming or funny moment contrived to introduce two characters to each other that are destined to bond with one another somehow. Most often used in romantic comedies.) I’m getting rid of it. This script is not the place for Meet Cutes.

Actually, all this screenwriting, and that short story I finished last week, is just me taking time off from the novel. I’m going to have to transition back into that so I can finish the next chapter and trigger that payment I’ve got coming – I’m also meeting with my collaborator/patron next week, so the more work I can show, the better.

If Marvel had announced they were re-casting Thor before his first movie was even released, THAT would be a disaster. Re-casting Iron Man would be fatal. This will be more of a hiccup than re-casting Rhodes/War Machine for the Iron Man sequel, but still survivable.

I don’t see this as a financial move – Norton isn’t up in the stratosphere, salary-wise, and he has demonstrated by his choices that money isn’t the primary motivator in his career. There are at least ten actors that fit his profile in terms of visibility and affordability, and no doubt their agents are keeping their phone lines open right about now. As for Norton’s twice-Oscar-nominated talent – that’s more difficult to replicate, but the question is: is that even relevant? His run in the gamma-irradiated stretchy-pants provided a basically pedestrian level of wow, failing to improve either critically or financially over the Ang Lee/Eric Bana collaboration that preceded it. And since The Avengers is going to feature a giant ensemble of heroes and villains and continuity plugs, whatever non-CGI human portrays Banner is likely to have little screen-time.

Still, Marvel decided to turn this into a public pie fight with their press release, so here’s how I see the scorecard for the moment:

Marvel: That press release was not exactly cricket, nor was it exactly smart. The story looks ugly right now; they made it that way by taking public potshots at Norton, and the way they made it ugly also gave it longevity. In the short-term, all the good light is going to fall on Norton in this story. If it gets longer, and if Marvel feels like playing ugly, they could make some mud stick on him, but that doesn’t clean them up, it just makes everyone ugly.

They should want to squash this, and the only way to do that is to introduce the new Hulk, do it quickly, and make it a chatter-worthy enough choice to turn the conversation so this flap doesn’t shadow the new guy’s efforts. One option would be a casting coup, which is difficult for the screen-time reason mentioned above, but since Joss Whedon is all-but-confirmed to direct, an actor who has logged time in The Whedonverse would provide an instantly appealing alternative storyline. Or they could go for the headline-grabbing counter-intuitive gamble that hits brilliantly. They pulled off one of those with Robert Downey, Jr., but The Avengers is a unique project – it’s tough to think of another mini-studio that even has the creative opportunity to put all their intellectual property eggs in one tentpole basket like this, much less the capital to gamble on it. With a gamble that big, you want to reduce the number of medium-sized gambles you’re making within it as much as possible.

Norton’s reps: Brian Swardstrom is doing exactly what any good agent (and Swardstrom is a VERY good agent) has to do right now – pick up his biggest, meanest bat, stick a couple of nails in it, wrap it in some barbed wire, and start swinging. Norton presents unique challenges as a client (more on that below), and Swardstrom has to be thinking long-term viability. His client is still relatively bankable on the small-to-medium-sized films he favors. But to be publicly, humiliatingly dumped from something this big – especially after you have accepted the characterization that he really wanted to be a part of it – can have a poisonous effect around town, especially in an era when star salaries (and the financing calculus that assigns values to all these names) are under ruthless assault. Swardstrom has to defend his man, and is earning his money today. I can’t fault him his actions in the slightest.

Norton: Norton wins by clamming the hell up right now. This development peels back the curtain on what, until now, has been a problem only in the Los Angeles Basin: the man is a genius, but he is a genius With a Reputation.

I have not met the man, and will say with no caveats that he is tremendously talented. All I have to offer is scuttlebutt and hearsay – most of it bubbling up from newspaper articles over the years, as well as vague things you hear in the Hollywood knitting circles: That he insists on re-writing every script in which he’s going to act. That he becomes impossible to deal with if he is not acknowledged as the smartest person on the set. That he treated Paramount with rude disdain over enforcing their contract with him in order to cast him in The Italian Job – that’s a long and obscene story that you can go find if you want.

I have no direct knowledge of any aspect of His Reputation – could be he’s a misunderstood sweetheart, and I don’t want to say that the above is gospel truth because no one person knows if it is or not, and I don’t like the laziness of trading in assumed knowledge which is actually just a rolling dung ball of gossip.

But what I have noted over the years is this – filmmakers who work with him once, don’t work with him twice. See for yourself. In two dozen movies over a nearly fifteen-year career, only one director, John Curran (for whom he starred in The Painted Veil and the upcoming Stone), has ever cast him in a second movie after directing him. That’s an insane anomaly. Russell Crowe is a volatile, challenging perfectionist known for running roughshod over unprepared directors, but Ridley Scott keeps calling and Crowe shows up every time. Christian Bale got to be a fifteen-minute laughingstock over his Terminator: Salvation set tirade, but Christopher Nolan has not only kept him in the Batman cowl, he cast him in The Prestige, his between-Batman-s movie. Downey used to break into peoples’ houses on drug benders and went to jail; and Hollywood forgave all and had its happiest day when he achieved both health and fame.

Norton is on a par with these guys creatively. Absolutely. So when you are that talented, how much of a pill do you have to be that filmmakers aren’t fighting to have you back?

D.C. Comics: If they want to score the public bitch-slap of the year, they will announce Edward Norton starring in a Martian Manhunter movie next week.

Alfred Hitchcock made some classic movies that were essentially expensive foreplay. They were movies that floated over their plots, and used the tools of Hollywood cinema to work the audience into states of laughter, excitement, and arousal, to “play them like an organ” as Hitchcock himself said. We all know what the last shot of North by Northwest meant.

The majority of modern movies have no interest in foreplay. Pornographers show more patience. But Knight and Day’s director James Mangold (Walk the Line, 3:10 to Yuma) has frequently demonstrated an affinity for the classical approach – his movies look totally contemporary, but they feel richer and savvier. Here, in a globe-trotting spectacle starring Tom Cruise, Cameron Diaz, and a McGuffin that’s literally heating up by the minute, he puts some lessons from Hitchcock to use in making a movie that is not as great, but far better than its plot.

Cruise is – his interstellar flights of public behavior notwithstanding – a real movie star, and has also been nominated for three Academy Awards. Neither of these achievements is an accident. As an action hero we have watched him do (forgive the pun) the impossible; his performance in this film is a high-wire act that capitalizes on that history, riffing on his mad self-confidence in the face of ridiculous perils, but also bringing with it a wistful quality that wasn’t there in his Top Gun days. Watch him in a conversation with the pretty misfit June Havens (Cameron Diaz) that goes on longer than most movies would allow, longer and more intimate than a character of his expediency normally deems necessary. He has more urgent things that ought to be on his mind, but (forgive the pun), there’s something about this girl.

His character, Roy Miller, is a lethally-skilled super-agent who has gone rogue. His former partner (Peter Sarsgaard), his former boss (Viola Davis), and a bushel and a peck of soldiers and assassins and arms dealers, are all after him and an item he has stolen called “The Zephyr”, which was invented by a misfit genius barely out of puberty (Paul Dano) who really likes trains.

Miller takes advantage of lonely singleton June, using his charms and her luggage to smuggle The Zephyr past airport security. She’s not aware she’s doing him this favor, but responds to him like she’d gladly do much more. Sadly for her, Miller’s pursuers see their conversation, and with their extra-legal impunity and ticking-clock panic, decide that they may not know who this June is, but arresting and interrogating her would be a safe, clean course of action, and killing her possibly safer.

Miller saves her from an airplane filled with assassins using mostly his bare hands and the items available on normal commercials flights. This is a complicated fight. But we are always aware of the geography, the active participants, and the weaponry. Most fight scenes can’t get any of that right, but Mangold manages more, the sequence has rhythm and surprise and a sense of humor. I feel such gratitude for a filmmaker who has both the skill to do something correctly, and the desire to go beyond that in order to truly entertain.

Maybe that’s why the advertisements for this film have been so uninspiring – it is Mangold’s scenes and sequences that add up so effectively, and that can be harder to convey at the blinding editing pace of a commercial. There’s a splendidly tongue-in-cheek gag that involves a bullwhip and the frame lines of the camera itself – it plays out in a way that’s so swift and funny you don’t get to consider how complicated it must have been for the cameraman; or for that matter, the guy who is supposedly using the bullwhip. And see again his accomplished sense of action geography in a climactic chase scene involving motorcycles, cars, and running bulls.

Diaz has a more difficult time than Cruise – early on her June is an object of the filmmakers’ whims, neurotic and haplessly panicky, swept stupidly along by the tide of events. It’s a crucible of indignity, as Miller has a running habit of drugging her and changing her clothes while she’s unconscious (college campus police have a term for that). But as she crosses continents by boat and plane and train – Miller blows through exotic locations faster than James Bond – she transforms, acclimating herself to life in his world. And then we get to see the ignition of a mad glow of her own; and that’s when the movie truly becomes a delight.

Even when characters talk about what The Zephyr is and does, there’s a casually ludicrous quality to the conversation. For all the bullets and blood spent over it, what really matters about it is it brought Miller and June together. And that it is hot. In one scene it melts the ice in a champagne bucket, and I have to believe the sound team spent a long time figuring out just how suggestive they could make that little hiss of steam. What you feel at the end of Knight and Day is that it really is well past time these two had sex. Don’t be embarrassed – that’s how you’re supposed to feel.

I really do hope this is the last one. Toy Story 3 has a scene where young Andy (voiced by John Morris) is emptying his childhood bedroom, preparing to leave for college, and his mother sees the bare floor and walls and is overcome with emotion. And we remember right in that instant that this very bedroom, back in 1995, is where we as moviegoers first met Woody the cowboy (Tom Hanks), Space Ranger Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen), and all their joyfully neurotic toy friends; but also where we first met the animation company Pixar, and the whole concept of a fully-digital animated film.

For a long time, Toy Story was the only world Pixar re-visited, the only movie in its acclaimed roster to get a sequel. That is about to change, with the likes of Cars and Monsters, Inc. now set for the franchise treatment. Andy’s departure as a grown-up young man could truly mark the end of the first generation of Pixar – no longer a rambunctious start-up but the industry’s dominant creative and financial institution.

Their latest film finds them re-trenching on safe ground after more daring spectacles like WALL*E and Up. For much of its running time it is charming, it is imaginative, and it is beautifully rendered by the artists, who take full advantage of the resources purchased by 15 years’ success without violating the aesthetics established by the episodes made in more primitive times. We meet new toys, and enjoy some fast-paced laughs and thrills. But it feels mostly like a succession of gags and adventures featuring characters we already love rather than anything urgent or fresh. It’s only in its ending that Toy Story 3 becomes a very good story, and I will talk more about that in a moment.

As it opens, Andy’s mother (Laurie Metcalf) is insistently broaching the uncomfortable topic of what to do with his toys. Few of them remain, and they have lain unused in his toybox for many years. Woody, devoted Woody, believes that, as Andy’s toys, their mission is to always be there for him should he ever want to play with them again, and if that means a life in the attic with the Christmas decorations, so be it.

But a series of mishaps both drives a wedge between Woody and the other toys, and sees them inadvertently donated to the Sunny Side Day Care Center. To Buzz, Jessie (Joan Cusack), Bullseye, Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head (Don Rickles and Estelle Harris), Rex (Wallace Shawn), Hamm (John Ratzenberger), and Slinky Dog (veteran character actor Blake Clark, subbing for his late friend Jim Varney), it has the look of a toy’s paradise – endless play with an eternally-renewing supply of children. A Barbie Doll belonging to Andy’s little sister Molly (and voiced by The Little Mermaid herself, Jodi Benson) has arrived with them, and at last meets a Ken (Michael Keaton). Sparks fly at Ken’s Dream House.

Of course there is much more to Sunny Side and its folksy alpha toy, the plush Lotso Huggin’ Bear (Ned Beatty), and soon pleasures give way to toy-scaled terrors. I am not sure which Sunny Side denizen is creepier – the baby doll enforcer with the droopy eye, or that cymbal-clanging monkey in the security room. And so our heroes, with Woody’s help, scheme an escape that involves such inspirations as exploiting Ken’s wardrobe fetish and (you must see to understand) bringing a tortilla to life. Buzz, as he often does, finds himself in personality conflict.

Things turn far more perilous than you might guess – by the end these toys are facing real literal death, and doing it with an amazing kind of courage. The makers of Toy Story 3 have not forgotten that we bond with these characters through their suffering. Even its villain is seen as not born bad, but as someone who was wounded deeply by a misfortune that could befall any toy, and nursed his anger about it until it changed him.

Toy Story 3 is enjoying incredible success right now in a disappointing summer at the multiplex, and I am sure there will be immense pressure to capitalize on the possibilities for future sequels inherent in its emotional ending. I believe that the ending is rather extraordinary, but only if you see it as the true conclusion of the story.

Here is why: this has always been the story of Woody, and his attempt to pierce the mystery of the life of a toy – like so many he strives to understand how best to fulfill the purpose of his existence. First he helped to teach Buzz, as they went from rivals to best friends and Buzz discovered he was not a real Space Ranger, about the virtue in inspiring the imaginations of children, and starring in their play. Then, in the even more provocative and moving second film, he was essentially forced to acknowledge his own mortality – and chose the finite joy of being Andy’s plaything, knowing at any time he could be abandoned or forgotten or destroyed, over immortality as an ever-preserved but never-touched exhibit in a toy museum.

This third film shows the bill from that choice coming due, and the screenplay, by Oscar-winner Michael Arndt (writer of Little Miss Sunshine), achieves poignant release because it once again finds Woody making a devastating choice, one only he can make. How could you produce a Toy Story 4 after this? Toy Story 3 shows Woody achieving true enlightenment within the toy philosophy – and with no lessons left that need learning, we should respect his maturity by letting him go. We’ll always have that bedroom.

P.S.: While the feature Toy Story 3 might not represent a risk on the part of Pixar, it is preceded by an animated short, Day & Night (directed by Teddy Newton), which is ecstatically radical. It is more of an experience than a plot, personifying and contrasting the sounds and rhythms and activities of light and dark on Earth in a way that is so conceptually tricky yet dumbfoundingly simple that I will leave you to be astounded by it for yourself. I saw it in an audience of children who were captivated into silence – they understood immediately. It carries a beautiful message of understanding and embracing that which is not like us, and as a final means of underlying its point, does so by marrying Pixar’s trademark 3D brilliance with…old-fashioned 2-D hand-drawn art. An absolute triumph.

But a lot of hidden clutter has been swept away. I delivered a great feast to the paper shredder yesterday as I went through the desk drawer where I’ve been stuffing “records” for years with only the most sporadic attempts at organization. Just to show you how haphazard my filing has been: some of the folder tabs were still the ones written by Wrong Fiancee #2 – I broke up with her in 2004.

What didn’t help my scattery brain at all is that while school did teach me about the musical circle of fifths and the symbolism of the character name “Muley Graves” in The Grapes of Wrath (hint: He’s stubborn and doomed), it did not teach me how long I should hold onto financial records in modern American society. Mathematically, this is not only simpler to learn than the quadratic equation, but far more useful to most people. But this time, rather than just lament my lack of knowledge, I went and looked it up for myself.

I was hanging on to A LOT that I did not need. Cell phone bills, old receipts, pay stubs – I found one dating back to my job at the Peoria Journal Star; in 1999.

These numbers tell a shadowplay story of my life over the last decade. They tell me about the guest lecture income I used to get from Columbia College, all those business lunches in Century City and Beverly Hills, the phone calls I made late at night to certain numbers, the celebratory havoc created when I sold the screenplay, the long dreadful crash that followed. They describe my travels, my relationships, the places I worked – it would be easy to start thinking it’s an amazing record of my existence, and maybe shouldn’t be so hastily shredded.

But really they’re just numbers and data – they’re only useful to the extent that my personal memories can vibrate them to life. And my memory will only last so long – already it leaks and compresses and re-interprets as it tries to crush my lengthening life into a useful summary equation.

All these receipts say is that I saw a movie at such-and-such theatre on such a date. But that conveys nothing about the experience, about what the movie was, who I was with, and how did both make me feel. For that, we are all much better enlightened by the review I wrote of that movie.

By the end of the day yesterday, I was filled with an immense gratitude that I blog. I know there’s maybe 10-15 people at most who even read this stuff with any kind of regularity. But even if no one read, it is so enriching to me to have these stories and pictures at my fingertips – each captured in all the myopic hackish awkwardness of the moment. It is better than a record that I existed, it is a reminder that I lived.

And, in the spirit of the old saying that the furthest you can go into a forest is halfway, I think there’s a special fatigue and despair that sits at around 30-40% of a task. Nothing worth doing won’t have asked a lot of you by that point, your initial momentum is spent, and you are a long way from getting that boost from the sense that the end is near.

I haven’t finished a major writing project in a year-and-a-half, and I am sure that contributes to my overall restlessness and dissatisfaction. I am fighting a strong impulse to go audition for a local production of The Odd Couple tonight, just because the desire to feel like I’m working on something TANGIBLE is so strong in me right now, and I would feel it more potently if I were working with others rather than alone with my keyboard every night. The waitresses at Rockin’ Crepes not only recognize me, they remember my favorite dessert crepe (The “Skid Row” – Chocolate and Marshmallow). And that’s delightful, but it’s not like they’re actually helping me tow this boat. A team effort sounds awfully satisfying.

But even if I auditioned and actually got cast, a six-week rehearsal schedule for a play would effectively eat all my writing time; of which I have precious little already. I don’t know if I can justify that to the guy paying me to work on this novel, even if he has never complained about my rate of progress so far.

Progress: I turned in a new chapter on Thursday, and have now completed just over 29,000 words. I’m aiming for a first draft of about 75,000 words. So that puts me at about 40% done. The screenplay Adam and I started has 33 pages out of hopefully 100-105 – about 30% done. That sci-fi screenplay I’m dusting off has 42 pages out of 100-105 – about 40% done. Ghost Light and the ultra-low-budget idea Adam and I want to write are both about 10% done.

I think we’re seeing the answer here. The major projects on which I am furthest along are nonetheless all in the stage where I have to supply all the momentum. So not only do I think about how long it has been since I finished something big; I have to recognize how long it is going to be UNTIL I finish something big. That’s onerous enough with one major project – to feel it from three simultaneously is plain cruel.

The usual tactic at this point is to pick one thing, put all my energy into it for a time, and see if I can can drag it to where it takes on some energy of its own. I’d like it to be a screenplay, but I keep deferring to the novel, because this nice man is paying me. I have never written a novel before, and we are now at the point where it is longer than any script I have ever written – and thus, longer than ANYTHING I have ever written. So we are truly in uncharted territory. This makes the work scarier and slower.

There’s no easy answer really. Like Tom Waits says, you gotta get behind the mule.

1) Dr. Dre
2) Jennifer Aniston
3) Adolf Hitler
4) Transformers 3
5) Mortgage Modification

You heard it from the Internet itself, people. Transformers 3 is less popular than Hitler.

Update: A simple screen refresh later:

1) Willie Nelson
2) Vlad the Impaler
3) Whooping Cough
4) Low Mortgage Rates
5) Bristol Palin

Somewhere, Jennifer Aniston is having a sad over her fickle fandom.

So I don’t exactly care about the sundered love. It’s the track record that fascinates me. There have now been 14 seasons of The Bachelor in the last eight years, and only one couple forged by that show (not even the four the article claims. One.) is actually still romantically involved. And, per Wikipedia, it’s the one where the Bachelor abandoned the “winner” he had selected (Melissa Rycroft, another future DWTS contestant) after changing his mind and deciding his true love was the runner-up. So even claiming a 1/14 success rate over an eight-year span only counts due to a technicality.

Meanwhile, over on The Bachelorette, there have been a total of five seasons, and two of those couples are still involved – though one of the two came together less than a year ago and are not yet married, so it might be premature to call it a success.

It is not unique to television matchmaking that relationships, both prospective and committed, end. They end CONSTANTLY. Over an eight-year span, I wonder just what percentage of American adults are still with the same romantic partners by the end – 50%? Less? Stars of the show might have the benefit of selecting from dozens of pre-screened, demographically-prime candidates all competing feverishly to show their best side, but it’s clear that the mechanism has not improved on real life for helping people find a “right” partner for the long haul. In fact, it arguably makes it worse – once you’ve tasted the pattern of being flown to exotic locations for network-funded super-dates, surrounded by beautiful singles fawning over you, with millions more admiring you by proxy – how do you settle in for Pizza-and-a-DVD night in your torn PJs with a single mate who is not having their hair professionally done every day anymore? How does all that soft-focus glamour help them negotiate chores for the week?

But if the second of those two Bachelorette relationships holds, we’ll really have a chance to learn something, because that will be 2/5 – a 40% success rate, compared with The Bachelor’s dismal 7%. Does that mean that women, when in a position of power to choose, make better long-term romantic choices? Or do they just commit more to the choices they make?

And the final point of interest for me is that this track record seems to have absolutely no impact on the show’s popularity. American audiences seem perfectly willing to adopt a form of voluntary amnesia, moving from one image of picturesque romance to another without ever acknowledging that THEY’RE ALL FAILING. Getting a rose doesn’t mean the next fifty years are going to be blissful and perfect, and having pretty dates by candlelight don’t make the feelings involved any more true or profound; or capable of dealing with a flat tire or a sick baby.

Does this encourage fickleness? Neurosis? Serial monogamy? The mis-valuing of sculpted romantic “moments” over the qualities that might actually produce a well-functioning long-term relationship? It’s like in all this emphasis on creating what we’ve deemed to be a sufficient level of constant magic we’re actually herding people away from lifelong commitments. Whether that’s good or bad is for our culture to decide, but it is so very curious that this is the outcome of a show built on the premise that TV can script progress to a real-life marriage proposal, with just enough contestants, makeup, and sponsors.