Inspector Burgundy
I am pleased to announce the release of the 2012 Writer / Editor's video cut of "Inspector Burgundy". I wrote this in 1978 for a color studio class exercise while a student at the CalArts School of Film/Video; Mitch Eakin filmed it in 16mm shortly thereafter; I received the footage from Mitch several weeks ago; had it transferred; edited it (including a few video effects, a little reframing, plus music and this and that - I've always been Mr. Auteur, or an auteur type, or whatever exact status you feel I should be permitted to entitle myself when it comes to creating, bugger off, imaginary demon police of artistic license!).
So I'm pleased to announce the release of "Inspector Burgundy", at Archive.org:
http://archive.org/details/InspectorBurgundy
In a future blog I plan to go into several miscellaneous extemporaneous details that seem to possibly regard "Inspector Burgundy", though they sort of clutter up the landscape.
One important detail to be discussed: My well-supported but very complicated basis for concluding that Will Ferrell - whose work has frequently been influenced by my material, and in serious ways, which I have discussed in my blogs here or there - decided upon his character's name in "Anchorman," Ron Burgundy, in order to inside-reference / mimic my character's name, Inspector Burgundy. I have no problem with this, but will not make my discussion of this part of this announcement. I'm merely making a reference. Not a detailed explanation, because this is the announcement, okay, so I hope we all understand that.
It being that "Inspector Burgundy" has now been resurrected 34 years later, or has been born 34 years later, whatever, I am considering (though not seriously), as an alternate, more audience-grabbing video title, renaming it, "The Implacable Veneer of The Implacable Veneeroid Invader" (if this sounds familiar, re-read the title of this blog article!). A revision of this nature would be more likely to occur if I get trouble from the people who own the song I use in "Burgundy", Dan Hicks' and Tom Waits' "The Piano Has Been Drinking". Should that happen, the new title for the video would legitimize outerspace sounds / outerspace music to replace that song.... although, hmm.... such a substitution could very possibly undermine something at the video's very core. Should I be faced with this issue, I imagine I might need a year to weigh the factors, or two, definitely no more than 33 years....
Real Play Money Of The Future
I also am pleased to announce a new comedy sketch idea I've posted to Archive.org, "Real Play Money Of The Future":
http://archive.org/details/RealPlayMoneyOfTheFuture
SNL found no value in "Play Money" on the show of the week it was created, in terms of finding usable fragments from it, as they tend to do with my material. This time around Saturday Night Live appears to have instead picked up on something I posted to Facebook earlier that day (an alternate general tendency we also find occurring as an unconscious act in our patient, SNL). That day on FB I made a reference to a screenplay I wrote back in the '70s entitled, "Joel's Baby," which is primarily about a parent trying to track down his child put up for adoption at birth 15 years earlier. SNL did a sketch about someone once put up for adoption being reunited with their biological parent on a talk show. And so, again I find SNL doing something that in and of itself could never be construed as signifying anything beyond "it is what it is", unless its perfect fit quality in relation to a pre-identified (by me) context is known.
On their most recent show, it is possible (hard to say) that the piece they did with Steven Spielberg contained inside references. I did not "submit" anything for this show, but this doesn't always stop them.
The laser cat piece with Spielberg (as I have often discussed and demonstrated in my blogs, I am a very significant influence on Spieberg) made me think of the laser cat piece they once did with James Cameron. In my discussion in an earlier blog of the Cameron laser cat appearance on SNL, I correlated, to something I submitted for that show, the part where Lorne Michaels expresses that the only reason he is willing to go along with an idea he finds dubious is on the strength of Cameron's insistence. Then, in the Spielberg laser cat appearance, Lorne Michaels responds in the identical way - great reluctance, but at the insistence of.... Then, for the ending of the Spielberg laser cat piece, I observed something that occurs in my often-referenced "Gosk" video (inside-referenced and an influence upon innumerable major films, TV shows, etc.), a character looking up to an alien spacecraft and shouting at it. This identical bit from "Gosk" is something I have mentioned, in previous blogs, as part of Gosk's influence on Cameron's "Avatar". I would never say that, in and of itself, such an action must necessarily have originated in "Gosk". To learn the actual basis for my conclusions regarding Cameron, please see where I discuss this in previous blogs.
