For a little over two years I’ve been struggling with how it feels to be liked and hated with such intensity, and usually by strangers. I tried to say I didn’t care, but I obviously did. Looking over blogs of the past few years, since I’ve been blogging a journal for 6 years or so, you can clearly see someone who cared a lot what other people thought of himself. Things have changed though.

I love books on filmmaking. I devour a few books a month on the topic. Half Price Books and Amazon.com used are my new best friends. I can find rare and hard to find books for next to nothing. This week I’m getting two used books that I’m looking most forward to.

My long dormancy will soon end. I’m about to embark on several projects and all of them have their individual challenges. I hate that word “challenges”, at least the way it has replaced the word “problems”. Regardless, your faithful narrator has a full plate and none too soon.

The home video store chain HOLLYWOOD VIDEO just went under. The death toll must be ringing for BLOCKBUSTER VIDEO soon. This is not good news for the independent filmmaker. The business model of the video store has been decimated by the mail order DVD service like NETFLIX and video on demand services, also NETFLIX and AMAZON.COM. What that means to the indie filmmaker is that one of our biggest revenue sources has just faded away into dust.

One of the most simple, yet effective ideas in a score was exemplified in the LETHAL WEAPON scores, primarily by Michael Kamen with Eric Clapton on guitar and David Sanborn on saxophone. What made the themes and melodies ingenious was not the brilliant musicians, but the concept of having the guitar and melody represent RIGGS (Mel Gibson’s character) and the saxophone represent ROGER (Danny Glover’s character). Each had a distinctive melody and instrumentation for their differing characters, and when they come together in the story, the melodies and instruments complement each other perfectly.