Todd Terwilliger

Chumming the Tepid Waters of Creativity

2010-04-09T01:17:27Z

T.S. Elliot, or somebody who looked a lot like him if you looked at him in a certain way, told me once that April was the cruelest month. Given the temperature the other day in New York City was ninety degrees in the shade, that the city had bypassed Spring all together for a sweltering August, I was, in that moment, almost faint and weak from thirst, inclined to agree. “By god,” I thought, “soon it’ll all be a- a-” “A wasteland”, ersatz Elliot answered, “exactly my point. Breeding lilacs and all that.” I don’t know anything about that lilacs bit, I’m a writer not a gardener. What I did know is that I was already behind in my Script Frenzy daily, weekly, and hourly quotas.

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Post tags: logline, script, script frenzy, scriptfrenzy-2010, stan lee, zombies

God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen

2010-03-19T19:21:52Z

I was sitting in a small church in Black Rock, Dundalk, Ireland, staring down at a hymn sheet. It was Christmas Eve and I was looking intently at the lyrics to “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen”.

I’m sure I’d looked at the lyrics before (it was always one of my favorite hymns) but, just now, it struck me that I’d always read it as “God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen” which was wrong but that’s what I’d always remembered and though I ought to have been following the rest of the lyric and letting nothing me dismay, I was, in fact, deeply dismayed, since I’d just found out a short time before that a friend of mine had passed away.

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Post tags: christmas eve, death, friends, god rest ye merry gentlemen, ireland, online, saint patricks day

That Long and Long-Winded Road

2009-12-16T18:46:41Z

I’m sitting here, drinking a cup of Gold Kili instant Chocolate Latte which, frankly, tastes in the neighborhood of chocolate but nothing near a latte, and I’m wondering about this impromptu seven month hiatus I’ve found myself on. There must be a reason, right? Some deep movement in my emotional, sub-conscious tectonic core? No… At least, I don’t think so. That’s the short answer. I have longer answers, of course.

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Post tags: 2wkfilms, film, galactus, tumblr, twitter, welcome back kotter

On Night’s Plutonian Shore

2009-06-09T20:05:10Z

I was halfway across the Brooklyn Bridge when the rain came down in earnest. It slashed down in horizontal slices that rendered my umbrella mostly impotent. Only a full-body parka or a diving bell had any hope of keeping me dry and I had neither on hand. The Manhattan skyline was dissolving in low-hanging murk. The Statue of Liberty was an old gray lady lost in a fog. It was only natural that my mind wandered, as my body plowed through the wet, towards darker, if slightly drier, climes.

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Post tags: air france flight 447, brooklyn bridge, david carradine, manhattan, michael hutchins, statue of liberty

Dear Diarrhy

2009-05-28T20:27:26Z

I’ve come to a decision. I do not like the term, “blogger”. I don’t know what, exactly, a “weblog” is but I don’t like it. Okay, I know what a weblog is as a practical matter but what is it, really? I’m not logging webs or webbing logs. I’m not keeping a log of the web nor keeping a web of a log. I’ve seen logs, loafs, bars, and loads, and my interest in them is, at best, tangential. The only webs I’m interested in are the spun-out lairs of the spiders in my bathroom and what interest I had in those I have already expressed. No, whatever currency the term “weblog” had with me is spent. I must define myself elsewhere.

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Post tags: blog, blogger, diarist, diary of anne frank, hack, journalist, scrivener, shelley winters, spiders, weblog

Walkabout

2009-06-01T19:32:43Z

For the past few weeks, I’ve exchanged my morning subway ride to work with a walking commute. Even though the time spent in transit has not changed overmuch (on average walking takes me ten to twenty minutes longer), the experience is a completely different animal. Without having to worry about practical matters such as jockeying for subway car position or perfecting proper platform placement for an incoming train, my mind can wander to more esoteric planes, asking questions like, for example, why is that woman screaming in the middle of the street?

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Post tags: brooklyn bridge, city hall, manhattan bridge, subway, tribeca

Terminal Illness

2009-05-26T16:17:32Z

Bless me, readers, for I have sinned. It’s been a month since my last confession. Over a month, actually, but what a busy, busy month it’s been. I’m still chewing over my Cannes 2009 experience- the meat of it still churning slowly through my digestive tract. In the meantime, over the long weekend, I watched Terminator: Salvation and could only conclude my viewing with a single thought: when did John Connor become a complete and monstrous prick?

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Post tags: great man theory, helena bonham carter, lord humongous, master blaster, mcgyver, michael biehn, michael ironsides, richard dean anderson, salvation, save the cat, star trek, tango & cash, terminator

Whither, Twittiquette?

2009-04-20T18:26:14Z

I got into an argument with a gentleman last night over twitter. I had posted a tweet about his application (which I hashtagged) in which I questioned certain aspects of that application. Inevitably, sometime later, he responded. A few back-and-forths later, he tried to dismiss me as a troll. Now I’ve been around the internets long enough to know the cold, slime-slick claw of a troll when I see it and this wasn’t it. Besides, how can I be trolling in my own feed?

Let me say this first: I don’t begrudge a man who wants to defend his own creation. I most certainly would do the same. I appreciate that twitter is a medium through which he could address me both personally and in the larger context of anyone else interested in him or his product. That being said, what I found distressing was his attempt to paint me as some sort of skulk by suggesting that if I post, in my own feed, something negative about his creation, I’m somehow interloping into his inviolate demesne.

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Post tags: conan, messageboards, thirteenth warrior, trolling, twitter, vikings

A Whisper from the Dark

2009-04-13T16:28:31Z

Things have been quiet lately around here, the sort of eerie quiet that inspires tales of death or, in my case, extreme apathy. However, in this particular case, nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, things are slogging steadily ahead here at Terwilliger HQ. Like Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory after Slugworth’s betrayal, the gates are closed but the chimneys, productively and, perhaps, ominously, are still billowing with a hidden feverish activity.

First things first. I haven’t talked about it in a long while but the short film I wrote and my sister directed, The Power of Freedom, will be heading to the Cannes Film Festival. We’ll both be tagging along with it, more or less- her more, me less. Last week she cut the trailer for it:

Feel free to watch it (and rate it!) directly on Vimeo and YouTube.

As part of this Sherman’s march to Cannes, I’m trying to put together a little podcast roundtable about the fest. My sister has been once already. This will be my first of hopefully many trips.

To that end, I have been busy as a beaver trying to write a full-length script to take with me. As I hope to sell this little gem, I can’t share too much about it now save that I think I’ve got a pretty good premise (I really like it anyway) but I’ve got a LOT of work to do between now and the festival to whip it into shape.

In totally unrelated news, I just saw a trailer for Valhalla Rising, a Mads Mikkelsen powered Viking movie. It looks good. Then again, Severed Ways looked good and we all know how that turned out. Hope springs eternal.

Technorati Tags: cannes 2009, mads mikkelsen, severed ways, the power of freedom, vikings, willy wonka

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Post tags: cannes 2009, mads mikkelsen, severed ways, the power of freedom, vikings, willy wonka

Counting Cabs

2009-04-03T18:08:35Z

I spent most of last night ensconced at the Brooklyn Public House which is, depending on who you talk to, either the best or worst new edition to my home turf of Fort Greene/Clinton Hill in Brooklyn. That it is a sign of the times for the neighborhood, no one questions. What it means, on the other hand, is up for debate, fierce debate. This is the chief problem with divination, ever since the first disheveled Homeric sage squinted his eyes into a muddle of thrown bones or a strange bird formation: one man’s vision of a divine face is another man’s vision of a lumpy Abe Vigoda. What the devil does it all mean? Everybody sees something different. This only is beyond a doubt: the neighborhood, it is a’ changing. You don’t have to venture inside the latest gastropub to see it, it’s there in the street. Just look at the cabs.

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Post tags: abe vigoda, brooklyn public house, clinton hill, dumbo, eye of sauron, fort greene, ghostbusters, new york times, park slope, williamsburg