joshua chamberlain

Category: film

  • epic times

    As film critics and Internet users do their annual retrospective on the films released in the last year, I’ve noticed a common theme: complaint about runtimes. There seems to be a consensus that many movies these days are entirely too long (Oppenheimer, Killers of the Flower Moon).  But for stories…

  • start with the soundtrack

    If you’ve been paying attention, you probably know I’m working on a movie. I’m still writing it. It’s roughly ninety pages of a final draft document, a hundred or so post-it notes tacked out on my bedroom wall, a series of scribbles in a few different notebooks, and about eighteen…

  • the water we swim in

    A few months back, Fall Out Boy dropped a cover of the Billy Joel classic, “We Didn’t Start The Fire,” but with verses rewritten to describe news events from the past thirty years. Detailing everything from the Kurt Cobain’s suicide to Trumps dual impeachments, the song is sprawling in its…

  • brushes with nonexistence and performing vulnerability

    There are times I worry the things I say aren’t all that deep. This almost always stems from comparison of some kind, which is, of course, unhealthy. Comparison is the thief of joy, as the old saying goes. But in a late-stage capitalist hellscape like this one, comparing ourselves to…

  • hoarding

    I’m a hoarder, but probably not the way you think. I don’t hoard clothes or magazines or collectibles or senseless junk. I hoard the things I create. Let me explain. A few years back, while working at a theater company, the Artistic Director told me about a critical inflection point…

  • times like these

    I was ruminating this morning on which Bayside record is my favorite. If you’re a regular around these parts, you know I have difficulty trying to define “favorite.” Most emotionally resonate? Best technically? Worth returning to? Ultimately, I realized comparing one Bayside record to another is a fruitless task. Despite…

  • show your work

    I’ve always been a believe in Austin Kleon’s idea that you should show your work. Don’t just share the finished product, share the process of making it. Document every step. Invite people into the process. Have conversations. Therefore, that’s what I’m doing… I just started writing a screenplay for a…

  • how do you define “favorite?”

    Every so often, I’ll stumble across a director’s list of favorite films. Some of these things are well-documented: Spielberg’s love of John Ford, Kubrick’s love of Fellini, and Tarantino’s love of just about every film ever made. Seeing such a list makes me pause to think about what films would…

  • the music videos that made me

    My last semester of college, I took a class on MTV. Sounds crazy, but it was one of the capstone credits for my major in American Studies, a discipline I always tell people was like majoring in sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. In all honesty, American Studies was more…

  • “do your early stuff”

    I’ve been writing stories since I was a little kid. It’s a popular myth in my family that at six-years-old, after seeing a behind-the-scenes special about James Cameron, I decided to make my own version of Titanic. I made storyboards, asked my dad to be the camera man, and shot…