Physical Media Booklet Essay: Being scholarly about movies that don’t exist

It’s okay now to talk about what I wrote about for Sean Abley’s zine PHYSICAL MEDIA BOOKLET ESSAY. Sean’s pitch was along the lines of: “You know how some movies show fictional movies within them?” Examples: the soap opera in Twin Peaks. The movies Meryl Streep is seen filming in Postcards from the Edge. There are many many more examples. So Sean’s idea was to have his writers write 2,000 word essays, along the lines of a Criterion or Vinegar Syndrome booklet essay, for a 4k edition and/or restoration of a film that does not exist. He had this idea, and he reached out to a couple of writers, and asked if we’d be interested.

This was such a fun and funny idea, and I’ve had writer’s block for months now. I’ve got family things happening, I have not been at all well, and also I think I’m just tapped out from the last two years. But enough is enough. I jumped at the chance to do this fun random thing. Something different. The project was, essentially, fiction. And I haven’t written fiction since I wrote my script in 2009, and before that … I wrote a novel in the early 2000s called The Enchantment of Things, which naturally never saw the light of day, but I was very engrossed in writing it. I never write fiction anymore. So … basically making up a fake movie and then pontificating on it as though it exists in our world … sounded hilarious.

We each chose a movie-within-a-movie, something existing within the confines of another movie (or television show), that does not exist in our world.

Here is our Table of Contents:

I chose to write a lengthy “erudite” essay about Living in Oblivion, not the 1995 film directed by Tom DeCillo – one of the great films about film-making and such a ’90s New York staple – but the movie they’re seen shooting in the film, which is also called “Living in Oblivion”. So Catherine Keener plays a fictional actress, and I built out her entire biography in my piece. I created out of whole cloth the entire filmography of the director Nick Reve, played by Steve Buscemi. Literally every crew member, down to the gaffer, I created a biography for them. I wrote about a fictional not-real film as though it is real and I created this whole world including made up academic dissertations, scholarly quotes from scholars who do not exist, and made-up rabid fan bases on made-up Reddit boards. I chose to make the fake Living in Oblivion a “lost” film, only seen by a handful of people in a tiny film “festival” held in a basement in Bushwick. The reels disappeared at the festival wrap party. The film was never released, but its reputation in the intervening years ballooned, with all kinds of rumors proliferating about the shoot and what the hell happened. I made references to the Orson Welles’ cut of Magnificent Ambersons and Erich von Stroheim’s 9-hour version of Greed which only twelve people in the history of the planet ever saw. Coleridge and “Kubla Khan” makes an appearance.

Look at that title, absolutely dripping with bullshit.

As I worked on it, I actually started believing my bullshit. I wanted to see this fictional film. I believed in the lost reels. I hoped they’d turn up. The whole thing was so random and so fun. It felt like an acting exercise and it’s been a long time since I’ve done one of them.

Reading everyone else’s essays has been hilarious and awesome, because everyone is so smart, everyone just went with the ridiculousness. Sean was a grand master of ceremonies. Physical Media Booklet Essay was his brainchild and he made it happen! You can purchase the zine in Sean’s store. Over the next couple of weeks, interviews with each writer about our process for this will roll out on Sean’s podcast so I’ll be sure to link to it.

Let’s hear it for Living in Oblivion, the fake one and the real.