10. April’s Fool ;P

“Look – I probably should have told you this before, but you see… well… insanity runs in my family… It practically gallops.” – ARSENIC AND OLD LACE (1944)

No comment. *-P

Today – the joke’s on me!  I’ve decided it’s a good idea to ‘make a fool’ of myself (an April’s fool, of course) and share thirteen…’odd’ fancies of mine.  ‘Guilty pleasures’, if you will.  …Whatever you want to call them, these are completely honest, and random, and who knows – that quote about friendship, by Jack Lewis, might come true:

“…when one person says to another, ‘What? You, too?  I thought I was the only one.” – from THE FOUR LOVES

1. PEE-WEE HERMAN (He comes in first simply because his new movie just came out on Netflix, and so he’s been on the brain.  Along with Brendan Fraser’s ‘angelic’ neanderthal in Encino Man, Jimmy Stewart as Elwood P. Dowd (here’s his card 😉 ), and the very excellent Bill & Ted of San Dimas, CA, Pee-Wee resonates with my wiser, more (foolish) optimistic child-self. These guys never fail to delight.)
2. THE TALE OF BUNNY PICNIC (A queer, but endearing offering by Jim Henson, presumably for Easter or Spring that surprisingly grabs me every time with its anthem at the end: When you stand all alone / And you feel the weight of zero in your bones…https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1HAfszHYao)
3. JIM HENSON’S THE STORYTELLER (Gaah!  Jon Hurt!  I love you!!!!!!!  I discovered this series later in life, but it sucked me right back to being a kid buried under a stack of fairy-tale picture-books.)
4. MOONING (It’s funny.  People should do it more often.)
5. A HOT TODDY (Preferably not the plain one with just hot water.)
6. THE PRAGUE FILM ORCHESTRA (So nerdy!  So passionate!  A group after my own heart – and they’ve come along way, over the years.)
7. A VERY SHARP CHEDDAR CHEESE (Sigh!  I’m reminding myself of Ben Gunn, right now…)
8. DANNY KAYE (Simply brilliant comic/entertainer, who may seem quaint now, but there’s really been no one else like him…ever. Best offering/showcase of his talent: The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947).  Sorry, Mr Stiller – you didn’t come close.)
9. DEANNA DURBIN (Yay – a friggin’ talented Canadian!  Again, someone that is perhaps difficult for a modern audience to appreciate fully (unless they have a knowledge of opera or an imagination), but she literally dropped my jaw, as a young girl, with her non-chalant operatics in Three Smart Girls (1936) and other films.  Her best film (in my opinion), which is doubly enjoyable because of the magnificent Charles Laughton, is definitely It Started with Eve (1941).)
10. BATS (One of the most vivid and ecstatic moments of my life thus far was at the Singapore Zoo’s Night Safari, in the ‘Bat Room’, where I walked across a bridge in the dark and bats flew all around me.  It felt like that scene from Chris Nolan’s first Batman movie. Eeeeeeeeeeeee! 😀 )
11. HANDEL’S YOUNG MESSIAH (Apparently it has many haters.  I am not one of those.  I was exposed to it as a kid and loved how it made Messiah ‘catchy’.  To be fair: I have loved both for many years now.)
12. GETTING MY HAIR WASHED AT THE SALON (It just feel so good.)
13. DIMPLES (I have no explanation.  They just do something for me.)

 

Laughing with me,

Cal ❤

8. LEAP DAY

 

HAPPY LEAP DAY!

So…today – calendar-wise – apparently only comes along (maybe) every four years.  This day shall also never come again except for those who will time travel.  I thought I’d make the most of it – do something I’ve been putting off, something that – for me – felt like a leap, and not a leap I could look before.  …Like tumbling down a rabbit-hole, or stepping through a looking-glass…

At the end of last year I toyed with the idea of treating my writing like a part-time job, and seeing if anyone – friends, family, admirers (haha! :P) or believers-in-art-and-in-dreams – would consider partnering with me in some small way, financially, so that I could get Darkly out to publishers this year, and, in the future, maybe some other of my dusty brain-children.  Truthfully, I chickened out.  I wasn’t in the mental/emotional place where I deemed myself ‘able’ to deal with…not-so-much rejection, as people I know (or don’t) questioning my ‘leap’ or the idea of crowdfunding in general.  Also, with the continuing craziness of my life (#2under3) at present, I doubted that I‘d be able to commit to writing every day (or as often as humanly possible.)  I see now that part of this thinking comes from the difficulty I’ve had taking my gifts seriously hitherto – taking myself seriously as an artist and sub-creator.  SIGH.  Excelsior! – right?  …I can’t say if I’m ready for that now, but I’m finally taking the leap.  (!)  As my dear friend (and sister) ‘The Great Tovini’ convinced me: “you’ll be no worse off than you are now.”  Thanks, Tove! 😉

I just had my birthday recently, too, and coincidentally many of the cards I received said things like:

“You are fabulous.  If you ever forget that, please read this again.”

“You get 32 wishes my deareo.”

“Never stop dreaming.”

“You are a whole year more incrediblerer.”

“I hope you find a well this year. *(even if you can’t see one on the horizon…it’s there.)*”

I feel like I need to believe – even if everything I feel and ‘see’, at present, seems bleak (or black) and only just endless desert.

So here goes… Today I leap, and launch my Patreon site.  If you’re curious or compelled to – go visit (with my grateful thanks).  Otherwise, go leap, yourself!  There’s no better day than February 29th…or March 1st…or……!  (JUST DO IT.) 😉

For those of you still hanging out on the edge of the stair, I’ll end with this great quote from a beloved film, Heart and Souls (1993):

HARRISON WINSLOW:  Who came up with this ridiculous concept anyway? Resolve your entire life in one bold stroke? What if I fail? And I will. I’ll fail. I’m telling you. I always fail. Then my whole life will be a complete failure.

THOMAS REILLY:  No offense, Harrison. But you died a failure because you never tried.

Cal ❤

3. Gifts? …

Sometimes it’s hard not to fancy that ‘everything’ in my life is not just a grab-bag of mistakes (failures) and random acts and happenstance, but rather pieces of a puzzle – or elements of a single purpose (though, more likely, several purposes.)  😛  This is my convoluted way of saying: sometimes I look back on my life, and – with the right lens – it all makes sense.

This is how I feel as I approach the task of finally completing Darkly in novel form.

Just the other day I was explaining to a former colleague (and close friend ❤ ) how Darkly is the kind of story I could have only written as a nineteen-year-old (and the 19-year-old that I was!), and yet, even then I knew it was something more…something much deeper, wider, and more complex than I had hacked out, so ingenuously, in a few months of evenings.  For years I struggled to discover that ‘blueprint’ for the story’s larger self, and even when I did (for the most part), I knew myself to be, concerning it, inadequate.  Discouraged as I was, I had the reluctant wisdom (hope, more like) to suppose that if I waited and lived long enough, perhaps I might be ‘one day’ fit to return to the work that is Darkly.  I now can only hope that this is the time.  I feel is is.  Darkly doesn’t daunt me, like it once did.  And Help has been coming to me. 😉

It’s hard for me not to digress here (as I already have!), but two authors/souls/minds/people who have ‘taught’ me how to think (encouraged or inspired me to exercise my mind and intuition/imagination, and to not be ashamed of that) are Madeleine L’Engle and C. S. “Jack” Lewis.  Their writing, as assuredly for many, many others too, reaches me on a level beyond ‘teacher’ (or mentor), which I would dare describe as ‘communion’ (or perhaps friendship).  L’Engle and Lewis come from very different backgrounds, generations, and even dispositions than I, and I have only encountered them through their writing (and the writings of others), but there is an intermingling of our lives nonetheless.  Time and Space bow and let us pass to meet, and participate in whatever it is we are a part of.  I know that to be true.

That being said, not too many days ago, I was scanning my bookshelves (in early ‘spring cleaning’ mode) and came across a softcover by Lewis that I thought was one of his novels (Till We Have Faces.)  I had forgotten the title.  It was actually a scholarly work of his, tracing the allegorical love poetry of the Middle Ages from its epic Greek and Latin ‘roots’ to, well, specifically Edmund Spenser‘s The Faerie Queene, but more generally to the nineteenth century, and beyond. (The Allegory of Love, 1936.)  I have no recollection as how I came to have a copy of this epic ‘study’; I assume it was given to me by my well-meaning mother, or a friend.  In any case, it was precisely what I needed, heading back into Darkly.  I took it off my shelf out of curiosity, began reading it to put my mind into a nearer state to the ‘voice’ of Darkly‘s fictitious originator – J.R. George (my own mash-up, plus some, of the authors listed in the previous post) – and hiked my way through it, highlighter in hand, once I realized that this book was truly a missing piece of my education.

Do you see?  Help does come!  And Help I didn’t even know I needed!  Isn’t that always the case? …

…Without delving into further babble about such things :P, here are a few random quotations from The Allegory of Love, for you (because it‘s fairly awesome,  and I will have to talk or write about it more, sometime):

Humanity does not pass through phases as a train passes through stations: being alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind.  Whatever we have been, in some sort we are still.  Neither the form nor the sentiment of this old poetry has passed away without leaving indelible traces on our minds.  We shall understand our present, and perhaps even our future, the better if we can succeed, by an effort of the historical imagination, in reconstructing that long-lost state of mind for which the allegorical love poem was a natural mode of expression. (p.1)

Behind us is that almost unimaginable period, so relentlessly objective that in it even ‘reading’ (in our sense) did not yet exist.  The book was still…a speech; thinking was still…talking.  Before us is our own world, the world of the printed or written page, and of the solitary reader who is accustomed to pass hours in the silent society of mental images evoked by written characters. (pp. 64-65.)

“At every moment we are reminded of something in the far past or something still to come.” (p. 81)

“All plain styles, except the very greatest, raise a troublesome problem for the critic.  Are they the result of art or of accident?” (p.203)

“And if you object that dead men do not really talk – and I can see no other objection – you will be well advised to study any subject rather than poetry, where the naïve realist can never succeed.” (p. 284)

“In the medieval allegories and the renaissance masks, God, if we may say so without irreverence, appears frequently, but always incognito.” (p.356)

“To read [Spenser] is to grow in mental health.” (p.359)

Cheers!

Cal ❤

2. A Little Background [Part I]

I’m going to be transparent here, and share seven ‘chief’ influences…or…’origins of inspiration’, for my original screenplay of Darkly, for anyone who may be interested in that sort of thing.  (I picked seven simply to tie in with the parts of ‘my’ fairy tale, 😉 even though what are listed below are pretty much the main ‘seeds’.)

1. The Princess Bride by William Goldman [screenplay/film & novel]
2. The Snow Queen by H. C. Andersen [book]
3. Willow by Bob Dolman (& George Lucas – story) [screenplay/film]
4. The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood by Howard Pyle [book]
5. The Plays of William Shakespeare
6. Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie [novel]
7. C. S. Lewis, George MacDonald, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Kingsley and Lloyd Alexander [the writers & their writing]

*The ‘Coloured‘ Fairy Books by Andrew Lang [collections of fairy tales]

Some of these – such as the coloured fairy books – come from my very young childhood, and others I encountered in my teens (e.g. Shakespeare and Tolkien).

Cal ❤

1. Here We Go!

Welcome to my blog!  (Yes, it’s me, Cal aka C. R. Trute… 😉 )

Straight out of high school, the only thing I really wanted to do was: make movies. After writing and producing my first short film, I discovered that what I actually really wanted to do was to make movies that told stories – stories that meant something to me, stories that seemed to have been placed in my hands to tell. For seven years I pursued this passion, doggedly, until I unexpectedly met (and married) a very special man, and we began a family of our own.  …LOVE will do that, I guess!

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​(Nearly) five years later, we share two beautiful, dramatic daughters, who are finally emerging from the baby stage. I’d very much like to return to my passion (or ‘first love’ – if you will), now that I have a little more time on my hands… only in a different format – one that is, perhaps, a bit more practical for the time being. The novel.

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​Over a decade ago, when I first took a crack at writing a feature-length screenplay (oooh, ahhh!), I came up with a 100+ page script in the veins of ​The Princess Bride and ​Willow, called Darkly. While it proved impossible to realize on a low-budget, independent scale, Darkly did earmark itself as ‘literary’ and ‘remarkable’ to nearly all the people who were involved with it. Since that attempt to bring it to the screen, in 2004, I definitely toyed with the idea of turning it into a novel. By 2010 I began that effort, but with other projects on the go, I only got about a third of the way through. ​ To date I have a little less than half of the manuscript completed and would love to finish it off.  It deserves to see the light of day!  (…Yes, it really is that awesome.)  Anyway, this is my new year’s resolution for 2016: to take a crack at finally bringing the whole of Darkly to ‘life’, in literary form.  Who knows – someday I might be lucky enough to have another shot at making it into a film or mini-series…  (My fingers will always be crossed!)

Please, if you haven’t yet read any of my scribblings and are curious to: check out my writing samples, which follow.  The first is from my 2008 screenplay The Nature Boy.  The second is from a shorter script I wrote for fun in 2010, called The Imagi-Nation.  The third sample contains some poetry from Darkly (the incomplete manuscript).

crt_ws15-TNB  |  crt_ws15-TIN  |  crt_ws15-POE

Hopefully, in the next couple of months, I’ll be posting a few chapters of Darkly, so far, if anyone is interested in seeing what it’s all about.

Until very soon (I hope!) – my kindest regards,

Cal ❤