Swimming Upstream

For the past few months I have been shipping my undergraduate senior film to festivals all over the country, and when I heard that one of my former NYU professors, Sharon Badal, had just published her first book, Swimming Upstream: A Lifesaving Guide to Short Film Distribution, I picked it up and began to read.


I am halfway through the book now which is a collection of short conversations with and essays by a variety of producers, directors, and distributors currently working in the industry today. The essays are categorized by "swimming lesson", from "Learning to Float: The Buyers" to "How I Learned to Swim: Filmmaker Survival Stories", with interludes from Badal which introduce and tie the chapters together.

Although I wasn't sure going in whether or not I would learn anything new, I am happy to say that the essays explore a wide range of experiences and points of view - words of wisdom and words of warning. Swimming Upstream recognizes that everyone has an opinion, and fortunately, there's still plenty to learn directly from the experts and the independents, without a textbook editor as a middle man. The essays as a collective cover the wide range of distribution options for short films, from festivals to the Internet, and from getting an agent to dealing with distributors.

As one of the two official short film programmers of the Tribeca Film Festival and a film professor at NYU, Sharon Badal is worth listening to as well, and at the end of the book she shares her own experiences and warns against some of the cliches that are best to avoid in short films, including:

• beginning with a quote by a famous person
  
• first shot of an alarm going off and someone waking up
• pan-across-a-mantle of photographs under the opening credits
• shorts guided completely by voice-over narration
• use of repetitive/montage sequences

Badal watched an astounding 1600 short films out of the 2400 submitted to Tribeca for the 2008 Film Festival alone. But despite overexposure, Swimming Upstream makes it obvious that she still manages to love them.

'Til Our Dreams Come True, We Live on Avenue Q

I saw the Tony-winning Broadway musical Avenue Q for the third time today. As always, the show was brilliant, the puppets and their puppeteers as lovable as ever and well-deserving of my newest blog entry.

For anyone who grew up watching Sesame Street (or watched their kids grow up watching Sesame Street), we have all been conditioned to associate puppets with kids learning life lessons, from how to count, to maintaining personal hygiene, to treating others with respect. But what about adults who made it through their Sesame Street years but still have their own harder life lessons to learn? Don't we get puppets too?


The good news is that in 2003, Broadway recognized the glaring lack of educational puppetry for adults and brought us Avenue Q, a satirical homage to Sesame Street with a cast of characters in their 20s and 30s (some fuzzy, some not) who live on Avenue Q in an undisclosed outer borough of NYC. There's the recent college graduate, the kindergarten teacher with a dream, an out of work therapist, the struggling comedian, an Internet addict, a slacker, an investment banker, and even a former child star - all middle-class Americans struggling to find purpose in life.

As the characters cheerfully sing their life lessons, we learn them too:

• There's nothing you can do with a BA in English.
  
• Everyone's a little bit racist.
  
• Some people will never find their purpose in life.
• The Internet is really, really great for porn.
• The more you love someone, the more you want to kill them.
• You can be as loud as the hell you want when you're making love.
• If your roommate claims to have a girlfriend who lives in Canada ... he's gay.
• Don't listen to Bad Idea Bears. They have that name for a reason.
  

Granted, some of these lessons may be a bit racy, but they're mostly true.

What's really wonderful about Avenue Q, though, is not just that it's hilarious and brilliantly written, but that the entire show is wrapped up in genuine warmth and sincerity, an earnest love letter to Sesame Street and to the millions of working-class people struggling to find happiness in their own day-to-day. It's impossible to resist.

Rating: 10/10


Lyrics to live by, because it's the way life is:

What do you do with a B.A. in English,
What is my life going to be?
Four years of college and plenty of knowledge,
Have earned me this useless degree.

I can't pay the bills yet,
'Cause I have no skills yet,
The world is a big scary place.

But somehow I can't shake,
The feeling I might make,
A difference,
To the human race.