A few images from the first stage rehearsal of “Devils at Play”, courtesy of Ballroom’s Jennifer Trammell. Click here to RSVP and secure a seat for one of the two free performances this Saturday at the Crowley.
Scott Myers from The Black List talks to James DiLapo, the writer behind this year’s installment of The Reading. An excerpt from their Q&A:
“Scott: Let’s talk about your Nicholl winning script “Devils At Play.” Here’s a logline I found for it:
“In the Soviet Union, 1937, a worker of the People’s Commissariat for internal affairs finds a list of traitors, which he thinks is going to be his way out.”
What was the inspiration for this story?
James: I was cramming for a mid‑term for a Soviet history course at NYU. I was reading a book by Robert Conquest called “The Great Terror”. There is a chapter in there where Conquest breaks down what the arrest process was like. When you’re arrested, how many people could you expect to share your prison cell? What were the strip searches like? When you were interrogated, what were the sort of methods they would use?
Reading that, reading the details, I started to see flashes of the story. It was inspiring, but it was a script that I knew would take a very long time to research. I didn’t have the time to devote to this project until I graduated and received the WGAE Fellowship.
Scott: Putting on a conventional wisdom hat, right? You’ve got a period piece set in the Soviet Union in the 30′s. You got a deeply flawed protagonist. There’s a lot of violence, and torture. There’s no real love interest per say. You used flashbacks, which some people in Hollywood aren’t fond of. The conclusion, which is beautifully realized, is definitely not your typical Hollywood happy ending. Were you aware that this script was cutting against conventional wisdom on so many fronts?
James: To be honest, I didn’t think about that. I just tried to tell a story to the best of my ability. I think it becomes problematic for us as screenwriters to create only what we think is going to sell, or only what we think is going to attract attention. It’s better just to write as well as you can, and hope that it creates opportunities for you afterwards. At the end of the day, you just have to tell the stories you want to see on film. That will be your best writing.”
Read the full interview — in two parts — over at Go Into the Story: The Official Screenwriting Blog of the Black List: Part 1 and Part 2.
The Reading takes place this Saturday, 18 May 2013 at the Crowley Theater here in Marfa. Click here for more information and to RSVP for this free happening.
Doug Pullen of the El Paso Times talks with “Devils at Play” screenwriter James DiLapo. An excerpt …
“Set in 1937, “Devils at Play” revolves around Stepan, a detective with the NKVD, the Soviets’ secret police, whose discovery of a list of traitors could be his way out his morally bankrupt world.
“He struggles with whether he’s on the right track, whether he’s working for an evil faction, and in the course of that he uncovers a mystery,” Dilapo said by phone from Los Angeles.
“Devils” tells the story from the oppressor’s point of view, not the other way around. “When you look at this time period in history, the Soviets or the Nazis, it’s usually about what it’s like for the oppressed, not what it’s like to be on the other side,” the screenwriter explained.
“Devils at Play,” which Dilapo completed after graduation from New York University in 2011, looks at “how moral justification works in our heads, how we lie to ourselves to believe in what we’re doing, that capacity for good and evil,” he explained, adding that he looked to books like Robert Conquest’s “The Great Terror” for information and ideas.”
Keep reading in the El Paso Times.
More info and RSVP for this free event by clicking here.
More coverage of Ballroom alumnus Thomas Houseago’s epic exhibition at Storm King from 032c. The excellent “Coming into Form” interview by Cornelius Tittel covers lots of ground, including Houseago’s youth spent brawling in pubs and listening to Joy Division and this excerpt about his landing in Los Angeles …
“You say L.A. saved you.
Yes, to arrive in Los Angeles with nothing but a few friends – it either works or it doesn’t. And it worked. I mean it was tough. I was doing construction work and we had our daughter on Medi-Cal – all that American immigrant stuff!
What is that?
If you arrive in California and your wife is pregnant and you don’t have health insurance, they will help you have your baby, but the process is hyper-brutal. You are given a counselor, because normally if you have just arrived in America and don’t have insurance, you are an immigrant from El Salvador or wherever. I remember in our case they checked us for guns before we could meet our counselor. They told us, “We wanna make sure your baby doesn’t die and your wife doesn’t die, et cetera, et cetera.” You are humiliated and at the same time liberated in an absurd way. But, you know, as soon as we arrived it all started to make sense. I met other artists I could relate to. There was no dogma, you’re never gonna hear John Baldessari saying that one kind of art is better than another, or that a certain artist should not be shown. Like Paul McCarthy, I met him really early and he was always like: “Go for it!” Mike Kelly and Paul really set up a very free, strange, dynamic, exciting atmosphere for younger artists to enter. L.A. is a frontier town with a fantastic wealth of energy and that’s what really saved me.”
Getting the word out about this year’s edition of The Reading, featuring “Devils at Play” by James DiLapo. Click here to read more and RSVP!
The crossing between Rio Grande Village in Big Bend National Park and the village of Boquillas in the Mexican state of Coahuilla was closed in May of 2002, part of a shutdown of traffic across the US-Mexico border in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks. Despite the efforts of a number of activists to re-open the crossing in the style of automated facilities like those found on the US-Canada border, the port of entry at Boquillas stayed closed, fueled in part by the debate over immigration and the explosion of violence elsewhere in Mexico.
As a result, Americans were forced to forgo tacos and beer after a day of hiking or rafting in the park: An idyll documented most famously by Robert Earl Keen on the titular song from his 1994 album, Gringo Honeymoon:
Meanwhile the residents of Boquillas were left without access to groceries or the basic educational and medical resources that they had come to depend on from their American neighbors in Rio Grande Village on the other side of the knee-deep river. While RGV is a few short hours on well-maintained roads from Terlingua, Presidio, Marfa and Alpine, the nearest Mexican town to Boquillas — Melchor Muzquiz — is five hours away on rough dirt tracks. The nearest port of entry between Ojinaga and Presidio is at least a 10 hour drive.
The tourist dollars that were the backbone of the local economy disappeared and Boquillas’ population shrank from 300 to just under 100 people, turning the already impoverished village into a harsh laboratory for many of the ideas explored at the first Marfa Dialogues in 2011, namely a demonstration of the the effects of strangling long-established cross-border exchange between neighbors and families.
That changed on April 10, 2013 when, after years of delays, the crossing re-opened as an automated class-B port of entry. Hundreds of Americans made the trip over to Boquillas in the month that followed. Here’s our primer on the coverage the crossing has received since then:
“Our story begins here, at Manhattan’s East Village, at a small club called Plant Bar. Inside, you’ll find James Murphy, a 32-year-old musician, DJ and sound engineer who believes his chance of success has already faded from view. Little does he know he will go on to form LCD Soundsystem, one of the most popular and loved bands of the decade.”
Great mini-documentary about DFA Records, home to our pals YACHT, LCD Soundsystem, The Rapture, The Juan Maclean, Nancy Whang, Black Dice, Sinkane and many more. Now I just want to listen to DFA bands all night and dream about taking over James Murphy’s exquisite life (cruises, peanut butter, fedoras, tuxedos). All hail DFA! Long may you run.
(Please email us at wearenerds@www.ballroommarfa.org to find out which LCD Soundsystem song is our favorite, how we ordered The Rapture’s “House of Jealous Lovers” Insound Tour Support Series Vol. 9 back in 2001, and our secret, mildly passionate history with Hey Dude.)
As I Went Out One Morning at Storm King is “the first large-scale presentation” of Thomas Housesago’s work. As part of the documentation of this monumental undertaking, the Los Angeles-based sculptor took part in a wide-ranging Q&A with Nora Lawrence, including some interesting observations on his time in Marfa as artist-in-residence with Aaron Curry.
“I was included in a residency at the [Marfa] Ballroom. Me and Aaron Curry were doing a show together. Something about being out there in West Texas, and yet you’ve also got this massive figure of [Donald] Judd there. Anyone going to Marfa is either filming a movie or going to see Judd. And me and Aaron were processing a lot of weird stuff. I had met Aaron very early on in my life in L.A. We were removed from our life in L.A., put in this desert with Judd–so that kind of brought out this extreme behavior in both of us that was very, very alcoholic. We were drinking from morning ‘til night and in this weird room in Marfa. I think what I was doing was processing all these pieces that I had kind of hidden. I was making a series of felt works almost as this kind of degenerate behavior, almost like going back to being a kid. We were sort of acting out all these kind of weird arguments like we we’re kids, like getting mad at each other…it was an odd thing. That really was like a long, drawn-out performance. And the “felty”—I was making it with glue, just like when you’re a child you’re doing these crafts. The desire that both me and Aaron had was that we were going to do that show, then destroy a lot of that work—just light it up, boom, move on. You can almost say Judd is the end of something. And we were playing out this thing of being infantile, young artists messing with this whole idea of Judd, this shining example…”
Keep reading at Storm King.
Houseago’s joint residency with Curry took place here at Ballroom Marfa in the spring of 2009. Their time culminated in the Two Face exhibition, and the accompanying limited edition prints.
The New York Times takes a look at what itinerant Far West Texas personality and Design Build Adventure honcho Jack Sanders is up to, with plenty of Marfa coverage thrown in for good measure. Some choice advice from “Lessons in How to Play With Fire“:
“Never panic,” Mr. Sanders announced. “That’s pretty critical. Sparks are flying. It’s loud. People get into trouble from overreacting to the sparks. Don’t be self-conscious about an idea, that’s another one. Things take place right beyond your comfort zone. And right beyond that is injury or death.”
karthik pandian
Indian Country
May 2 – May 26, 2013
Opening: May 2, 6-8PM
Karthik @ Vilma Gold
This exhibition is co-presented with CineMarfa, an annual film festival in Marfa, TX that foregrounds the intersection between film and visual art. Please visit cinemarfa.org for their complete 2013 schedule.
More info at Michael Strogoff.
