being max
February 3, 2013
There is a total —
Ongoing battle here, Max vs. Max. Every single over the top successful website I know of that is book/seminar/arts oriented features the person. Not the book not the movie not the venue not anything inanimate, but, the person. And every time I put up a photo of me I fucking hate it.
I’m sure part of that is the flinch factor. For a really long time because of stalker crap, I never put up a photo, and never put up where I would be, at any given time, ever.
For a really really long time.
It’s kind of non-logic based if you consider I started out dancing and acting. I was a performer. I love performance. I love the camera. It is a serious love affair. But, maybe some of this comes back to why I love performance, or why I first loved performance.
In a performance, you are not you. You are, for a brief period of time, someone completely other. And I think that is where my first love of dance and acting came from. That moment when you are not you. You are something else, something wonderful or terrible, dancing on that stage or acting in that part – that is not you, that is something else, and, most times, something grander than you while you are there. I have never burned brighter than I do on stage. I never will. It is being human fire.
I have this book and I am supposed to put up a photo of… me. Not the phoenix dancing. Not the doll come to life dancing. Not the comedic mad scientist’s assistant making people laugh or the horrifying ex-wife on stage who will ultimately drive a man to put a bullet through his skull. Not someone else on a stage or screen or in front of a camera at all.
Me.
It is difficult being me. I am not human fire. I am just me.
the art of war
August 23, 2012
I’m having this conversation with some friends. They are making a movie.
My friends are also creating a comic book for the movie — or in more polite terms, a graphic novel — as a pre-launch ad campaign.
It’s a smart idea. Get it out there, get it circulating, get people knowing and talking and seeing and thinking about it. My friends figure they will break even on the comic too so it is free advertising hitting comic cons.
But they’re talking about this other guy. This guy who was pre-vamping for a film and made a comic book and never put the comic book on the market. He just printed up copies and gave them to studio suits and industry people, and never ever sold the comic. Sort of a fancier cooler kind of story board, that. And a collector’s item since there were only a very few in existence and you could only get them as a gift, they were not for sale. And my friends are saying this journalist one time hit him with this question, “You created the comic, you had it all graphed out and whatnot, printer friendly, ready for market” why didn’t you ever sell it?
And the filmmaker didn’t answer the question.
So we are sitting there. My friends are puzzling over why. And so am I. And then I know —
If he had put the comic book on the market, while he was selling the film? Industry people would have wanted to know the sales numbers and would have walked away if those weren’t high enough. So he made that book a gift, a special thing, that only some people could get, that wasn’t even available for sale. And he never had to answer the question “Is this a best seller?” in a meeting.
Smart guy.
where the art work comes from:
that is chess by nestor galina
