» On 2/16/2025 05:34:00 AM Mountain Standard Time, Alan wrote:
2025 Oscar Nominated Screenplays w/Trailers. 

Original Screenplays:
Anora by Sean Baker -- WINNER
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/25469615/anora-read-the-screenplay.pdf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1HxTmV5i7c
The Brutalist by Brady Corbet, Mona Fastvold
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/25479235/the-brutalist-read-the-screenplay.pdf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdRXPAHIEW4
A Real Pain by Jesse Eisenberg
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/25450252/a-real-pain-read-the-screenplay.pdf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2et8Vpu7Ls
September 5 by Tim Fehlbaum, Moritz S. Binder, Alex David
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/25453399/september-5-read-the-screenplay-3.pdf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Azud40CQ3IE
The Substance by Coralie Fargeat
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/25444991/the-substance-read-the-screenplay.pdf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNlrGhBpYjc

Adapted Screenplays:
A Complete Unknown by James Mangold, Jay Cocks
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/25476291/a-complete-unknown-read-the-screenplay.pdf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdV-Cs5o8mc
Conclave by Peter Straughan -- WINNER
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/25444705/conclave-read-the-screenplay.pdf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JX9jasdi3ic
Emilia Pérez by Jacques Audiard
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/25448400/emilia-perez-read-the-screenplay-spanish.pdf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4h7j_EcZ5fU
Nickel Boys by RaMell Ross, Joslyn Barnes
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/25475201/nickel-boys-read-the-screenplay-2.pdf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2qZ429rUZw
Sing Sing by Greg Kwedar, Clint Bentley
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/25451485/sing-sing-read-the-screenplay.pdf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3dXc6P3zH8

Streaming Emilia Pérez: https://www.netflix.com/title/81901696

 
» On 2/14/2025 09:45:00 PM Mountain Standard Time, Alan wrote:
Student # ±22 (a Valentine's Day story). 

When I arrived at Michigan State University in 1969, the size of the campus was intimidating. Two miles or more, from corner to corner. Forty thousand students. Classes scheduled from eight in the morning to ten at night.

While leafing through the MSU phonebook, I noticed there were a lot of Bairds. This was a new experience for me. I had always been the only Baird, in the six school systems I attended. When I looked closer, one of the female Bairds had a student number that was only 22 away from mine. In a universe of six-digit student numbers, that was quite unusual.

So I called her up. I was real smooth: "You don't know me, but your student number is only 22 away from mine, and I think we should go for coffee." Apparently, K was as adventurous as I was, because she chuckled and accepted. We got along pretty well, and started a romance that lasted nearly four months. I couldn't afford to fly home to New England for Thanksgiving, so she invited me to drive with her to her family's home outside Chicago. I got along with her folks pretty well. Her dad loved to pun, and punning was one of my specialties. So we all chuckled. A lot.

When K and I arrived back at MSU, she said, "You know, if we got married, I wouldn't even have to change my name." We both chuckled, but that's when I suspected the end was coming soon.

A few years went by, but I never forgot K. In fact, during one of my cross-country hitchhiking trips to California, I dreamed about her. At the time, I was nearly freezing to death in a blizzard, at an I-70 rest area outside Topeka. The next morning, I looked her up, and her family was now living less than two hundred miles north of the interstate, so I made a screeching right turn and spent several hours hitching up into Nebraska. When I got close, I wangled her work phone number from her mom, and rang her up. I said, "Your student number is only 22 away from mine, and I think we should go for coffee." She chuckled, then replied, "Well, I'd have to ask my bank manager for permission. He's my fiancé." So we both chuckled, and I made a screeching U-turn, back down to the I-70 in Kansas. 😉

K had a well-defined Relationship Roadmap implanted in her brain:
1) empinning - receiving the boyfriend's frat pin;
2) friendship ring - receiving a special ring from the boyfriend;
3) engagement - receiving a diamond ring from the boyfriend;
4) marriage - self-explanatory, involving a wedding ring.

While I was just floating heedlessly through my freshman year, happy as a clam, she was secretly hatching a plan for bending me to her will. When we returned from Chicago, K sat me down for The Roadmap Talk. Since I hadn't pledged a fraternity, she graciously allowed me to skip over step #1, but she was intent on extracting my high-school graduation ring from my hot little grasp. It was too big, of course, so she spent several days winding yarn through it, to make it snug on her finger. She wore it proudly, and showed it to all her friends. After we broke up and she returned the ring, she saw it on my finger, and asked me how I removed the yarn. "Scissors," I replied. She smiled bitterly, and said, "Do you know how many hours I spent, winding that yarn onto your crappy ring?"

And that's when I knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that I had pulled the ripcord just in time. 😉

PS: I proposed quickly to the next MSU woman I dated, but she put me off for 11 years. Then we were married in a hot-air balloon over Napa. A few months later, we got a divorce. 😉

PPS: Anikó and I both have 3 weddings under our belts. We celebrate our 25th anniversary in June. I've been told that true love is sorta like a fairy tale. Some folks find their happy ending in the first person they meet. Others have to fight dragons. And some need to kiss a lotta frogs. 😉

Labels: msu

 
» On 2/12/2025 12:05:00 PM Mountain Standard Time, Alan wrote:
My Lorne Michaels Story From Pagedom, 1978. 

Saturday Night Live was doing a cold open in the 8H entrance, the long hallway that goes from the elevators to the studio door. I saw my chance to get on TV, so when Lorne wandered into the hall a few minutes before air, I bravely accosted him: "Do you mind if I stand in that doorway over there?"

It was the first time I had ever said anything to The Great And Powerful Lorne. He didn't reply, but looked at me with a bemused smile and quietly walked away. A few minutes later, stage manager Joe Dicso was counting down from 10, and noticed me standing in the doorway. He pointed his finger at me and waggled it, indicating that I should get out of camera range. I whispered to him, "Lorne okayed it."

And that was how I got my precious three seconds of national exposure on SNL. 😉

UPDATE: With SNL50 nearly upon us, there are a lotta great Lorne stories in this article:

https://www.vulture.com/article/snl-future-after-lorne-michaels-leaves-retires.html

And here are 3 of my faves:

Michaels invited Dave Chappelle to host at a moment when Chappelle’s jokes about trans people had made him a lightning rod. A non-binary member of the writing staff told producers that they preferred to sit the week out. Michaels didn’t have a problem with it, but “Page Six” blew up the story when it reported incorrectly that multiple writers were boycotting. During dress rehearsal, Chappelle told a joke about the situation. “The papers got it wrong,” Chappelle said, according to SNL staffers who watched the performance. “Only one person has a problem, but the paper got confused because that person is a they.”

Michaels is so infamous for blithely dropping the first names of his famous friends into conversation that when he mentioned Cher during a lunch with Steve Martin and Kevin Nealon, Martin stepped in to quip, “Cher who?”

“With Lorne, you always feel like there’s an NBC page hanging upside down in the closet with his blood slowly draining into him,” a person who has known Michaels for years said.

Labels: acbpage

 
» On 2/09/2025 08:05:00 AM Mountain Standard Time, Alan wrote:
The family that flies together... 

Tap images to enlarge:
1990Feb03, Tehachapi, CA:
Me & The Bro (Chris), takin' the ol' jalopy out for a spin.
Facebook: facebook.com/10160542203247477
Sailplane: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grob_G103

The top certificate (front & back, which shows Orville & Wilbur Wright) is actually 3 FAA Private Pilot licenses: (1) Airplane, Single Engine Land; (2) Glider, Aero Tow; and (3) Glider, Ground (Winch) Launch. When a pilot has both 2+3, the FAA truncates them into a simple "Glider." The round blue DoT logo (upper right) means the holder is qualified to fly by reference to instruments.

The bottom certificate (black logo) is a Ground Instructor, Basic.

1975: My brother and his instructor, our Dad, on the day of his first glider solo. Chris was the youngest person in the country (14yo) to achieve this feat. What a kid!

Chris now has the same licenses that I have, plus an FAA Mechanic license, Airframe & Powerplant. Yep, he flies 'em and fixes 'em.

Another pic of Chris from that article.

Chet & Chris:
1972, July - Schweizer sailplane.
1981, June - Cessna airplane.
Flight instruction from father to son.

After I spent ten years fighting my father tooth and nail when he forced me to fly powered planes, he finally found a small soaring club that provided a lot of enjoyable family-outing weekends. Chris and I worked on accumulating enough hours for our flight tests, Chet would go up with one or the other of us, and Ma would sit contentedly in her lawn chair, watching her men have fun in the sky. I think it was one of my Dad's proudest moments, when Chris and I earned our glider ratings on the same day. I went on to get 3 more FAA licenses, and Chris carved out an amazing career in aviation. But it all started two decades earlier, when Chet took a huge risk and sold one of the freezers from his tiny grocery store to buy a small used airplane and take some lessons. (Pic: Xmas 1989, giving Ma a ride in the Grob @ Tehachapi, 2 years after Chet passed.)

Also: The Last Lesson.

Labels: fam

 
» On 2/01/2025 12:05:00 AM Mountain Standard Time, Alan wrote:
Writing after retirement. 

Norman Maclean was born in 1902 and eventually became an English professor at the University of Chicago. During his teaching career, he wrote very little - one book of military instruction and two scholarly articles. After his wife Jessie died from cancer in 1968, he retired in 1973 and finally published "A River Runs Through It and Other Stories" in 1976, at the age of 74.

The book was rejected by every large commercial publisher to which Maclean sent it, including one that turned him down on the basis that it contained "too many trees." It was eventually published instead by the University of Chicago Press in 1976 and was the first work of fiction published by them.

In 1977, the Pulitzer Prize committee for Fiction recommended the book be awarded the prize for that year. The Pulitzer Prize Board, which has final say for awarding the prize, chose to override their recommendation and decided not to award for fiction that year. Award-winning novelist Pete Dexter wrote in 1981 that the board called it "a lean year for fiction" but speculated about their true reasons: "I know just enough about the Pulitzer people to guess that what happened was that one of them noticed the trees too."

In 1976, the same year the book was published, Oscar-winning art director Richard Sylbert optioned the film rights to it. However, the option gradually lapsed and Maclean became distrustful of Hollywood, with any further attempts to option the novella, including one by Oscar-winning actor William Hurt, being met with immediate reluctance from Maclean for the next ten years.

Robert Redford, who had read the book in 1980, said he was "immediately captivated by it," appreciating Maclean's depiction of the American West and feeling a strong connection to the Scottish immigrant protagonists, being of Scottish-Irish heritage himself. Over the course of six weeks, Redford and Maclean met thrice to discuss the former's vision for a film adaptation. Maclean was impressed, granting Redford an option which allowed Maclean first-draft script approval. However, Maclean died in August 1990, before production even began on the film. Redford directed the 1992 movie starring Craig Sheffer, Brad Pitt and Tom Skerritt. In 1993, it was nominated for three Oscars, and won one.