Cynthia Hawkins

Now available for pre-order, the Routledge anthology The Participatory Cultures Handbook for which I contributed a creative nonfiction essay about a San Antonio, Texas family completing work with volunteers on their Habitat for Humanity home.  Many thanks to editors Jennifer Jacobs Henderson and Aaron Delwiche for including me and to Antoinette and Henry and all at Habitat for Humanity San Antonio for letting me share their stories.

So, maybe you’ve wondered where I’ve been the past few days.  Funny story.  Not long ago, a good friend of mine asked me for a list of films she might show at the “apocalypse party” she was throwing to celebrate her 2012 birthday.  I came up with a decent list initially, but I decided what this really warranted was a sprawling infographic of end-of-the-world films, researched on at least three poster-board mock-ups and one improvised three-dimensional miniature rendering in Fritos and Duplo blocks. (This is sort of like the time my parents asked me to transfer their Super 8 films to DVD and I made a Star Wars tribute film featuring an animation of our station wagon as a spaceship.  It’s also sort of like the time Richard Dreyfus built Devil’s Tower out of mashed potatoes.)  I should note that This Is How The World Ends … At The Movies is hardly comprehensive because I wanted to leave room for robot doodles and so forth.  Hopefully, though, you’ll still find a few of your favorites on here.  You are most certain to find Gary Oldman and Jesus.  Enjoy!  (Click image to enlarge it on Flickr.)

New at The Nervous Breakdown:

It all began when Joe Daly found himself thinking of Brion James.  You know, the bug-eyed replicant in Blade Runnerwho gets kind of nervous when he takes tests.  This led to Daly’s stellar list of the ten greatest character actors of all time, which led me to add five of my own in commentary – including Chris Cooper, John Hawkes, Mark Strong, Clancy Brown, and Brian Cox, in case you’re curious.  It would seem, though, that neither of us found ourselves thinking of women in these sorts of roles.  At first I reasoned, “It’s because there aren’t any!  All the good supporting character-centered roles are written for men!”  Then I had a vision of Joan Cusack in Say Anything pausing in the chaos of her young single-mom-hood to remember how she used to be fun.  Then I couldn’t stop thinking of great female character actors in more substantial roles than this little blip in the Cameron Crowe classic.  So, without further ado, here are ten great female character actors for your consideration …. read the rest here.

Special thanks to Stymie Magazine for hosting a fun and fabulous reading at Chicago’s Theory Sports Bar on AWP weekend recently.  Here I am reading a squashed-down version of my brand spankin’ new creative non-fiction story, “Sport of the Future,” scheduled to appear in full in Stymie’s spring “Feminine Perspectives” issue.  There’s video, but my voice is little (and I thought I was yelling) and the background noise, not so much — so you’ll just have to imagine me saying: “I’m gonna snap your chin-up bar in half with my Chuck Norris hands!”

photo by J. Elizabeth Clark

New Years Resolution: update blog in a timely manner … starting right after I post this news of a piece that ran almost a month ago.  But if you love film and you love to write and you love writers in film, this one may have been worth the wait.   Thanks to Ryan Rivas for including my Ten Lessons of Fictional Writers in Film on the Burrow Press Blog in December.  The following is only the first lesson.  Check out the rest here and have a look around Burrow Press while you’re at it.

Funny Farm

In Funny Farm, Chevy Chase plays a writer who moves to the middle of nowhere in order to jumpstart work on his manuscript in solitude.  When he’s finally done, he rents a hotel room, chills champagne, hands his wife his manuscript, and sits with his hands folded together in anticipation—watching intently, reading her facial expressions as the pages turn, leaning to check whether or not her laughter erupts in just the right places.  Lesson?  Don’t do that.

You can now get your ebook copy of Writing Off Script: Writers on the Influence of Cinema right here.  A very special thanks to Simon Smithson at Calavera Books, each of the phenomenal contributors and interviewees, book cover designer Steven Seighman, and book trailer producer Vernon Lott for all of their hard work and support.  I’m thrilled to share the result of their efforts with you and to see just how much we can raise to help replace the Joplin High School JET-14 students’ studio equipment, field cameras, and supplies that had been destroyed in the May 22 tornado.  So go buy it!  I promise it’ll be $4.99 well spent.

Very excited to present the book trailer for Writing Off Script: Writers on the Influence of Cinema ahead of our December 1, 2011 release date. Morris Hill Pictures and Vernon Lott created this brilliant little video for us, and I’ll probably be sending them notes of thanks every day for an eternity. Help us spread the word by sharing this trailer with everyone you know.

It’s possible no one will know who you’re supposed to be, but that’s what name tags are for:

Aviators, flak vest, Folgers can of ashes – John Goodman as Walter in The Big Lebowski.

JBJ* ankle tattoo, mom jeans – Amy Ryan as Jackie Flaherty in Win Win.

Mom jeans, plaid shirt, blade, dislocated jaw – Billy Bob Thornton as Karl Childers in Sling Blade.

Missouri accent, knit hat, bag of severed hands – Jennifer Lawrence as Ree in Winter’s Bone.

New York accent, leather jacket, bag of severed hands (frozen) – Gary Oldman as Jackie in State of Grace.

Satin jacket, driving gloves, vacant expression, “A Real Hero” on a loop – Ryan Gosling as the driver in Drive.

Suit, mustache, bowling pins, milk shake – Daniel Day Lewis as Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood.

Bobbed wig, Zorro mask, suicidal goldfish – Audrey Tautou as the titular character in Amélie.

Tux, mustache, garden hose – Harvey Keitel as Winston Wolfe in Pulp Fiction.

Junkie teeth, butchered wig, tiny elderly couple in your handbag – Naomi Watts as Diane Selwyn in Mulholland Dr.

* Did you really have to scroll all the way down here to find out this stands for Jon Bon Jovi?  Tsk tsk.

Supposedly losing-your-teeth dreams mean high anxiety, so it’s no surprise that I’ve had more than a few of them.  Bloody gums, teeth falling through your fingers kind of dreams.  Teeth turning into shards of glass dreams.  Yes, those dreams.  The most memorable of them, perhaps, being the one in which, against my will, I snipped off my front teeth with nail clippers.  Maybe the only sorts of dreams that bother me more are the things-happening-to-your-eyes dreams.  I’m explaining this because in the first few minutes of Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, a film written and produced by Guillermo del Toro, a twitchy old man with a hammer and spike knocks the teeth out of the mouth of a screaming woman pinned under his knees.

In other words, del Toro has my number.  Again.  First it was the eyeballs-in-the-palms creature loping after Ofelia in Pan’s Labyrinth and now this, a film about sinister little beings in the walls, hungry for freshly pried-out teeth.  Directed by Troy Nixey in his first feature film, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark is based on the 1973 made-for-television movie of the same name, which del Toro claims was the scariest film he’d seen as a child. 

Read the rest here.

Here’s a little something new at The Nervous Breakdown about the inspiration behind the direction Writing Off Script: Writers on the Influence of Cinema has taken and my trip to Joplin, Missouri seven weeks after the tornado:

Curbside at the ruined high school, my fingers hesitate at the door handle.

“It’s okay,” my grandmother, sitting beside me, says, “everyone else has been taking pictures.”

With a big inhale, camera in my hands, I’m out on the street, then in the grass, in my wedge-heeled sandals, stepping over gnarled strips of metal.  I’m still holding my breath as I find the school in the camera’s lens, twisting to focus on its row of classrooms opened up like a smashed dollhouse.  My shirt hem flaps in the wake of the traffic, and I want to announce, “Really, I’m here to help.  It just doesn’t look like helping because I’m a writer and this is all I can do.”  With my finger fumbling over the camera buttons, I snap five blind shots, hurry back to the driver’s side, and exhale behind the wheel.

Maybe I’m the worst person to do what I’m doing because I’m having trouble taking a simple picture to show you what I’m doing it for.  I’m having trouble even telling you what I’m doing.  I’ve started this story at least eight different times so far, and none of them began here.

Read more.