the sky holds you in

do you see anything on my head?

2007-07-10T17:33:00.000-07:00

the answer is no. know why? because my hat is off to jesus beltran, writer-director of the grass grows green.

hearing about a successful* filmmaker with a background in engineering is even more exciting than hearing about one from ohio. a lot more exciting, really. none of us choose where we’re born, but engineering to film is a strange path. so i like knowing that mike judge did a little cube time before getting into animation, or that primer’s working-in-the-garage scenes felt right because director shane carruth has been there.

still, is anyone truly surprised to hear that the creator of beavis & butthead was an engineer? in some ways it would be surprising if he wasn’t.

but there’s not a hint of the geek world in jesus beltran’s the grass grows green, a simple, elegant, character-driven short. the film (available on iTunes) does the seemingly impossible, taking on the most political of subjects without falling into any of the usual “political film” traps.

catch a great interview with beltran on the new blog PrizeWriter.

* successful, adj. having finished a film of any length that i personally liked.

frenzied

2007-07-07T18:29:00.000-07:00

twenty-nine days and 20,025 words after the starting pistol, the script frenzy site attached a “winner” banner to my profile. i was beat--there had been some serious catching up in that last week--but i had a completely new script.

it took me a couple of days to even look at what i’d written--20,000 words is one thing, but how many would be worth keeping? but now i’ve moved my new script over to sophocles, which makes it a “real” script in my workflow. (i wrote the june script in scrivener--script frenzy just felt like more of a mac thing than a windows thing. go figure.) i’ve been through the new script a few times, had a week to process the frenzy, and am editing like mad.

so what did i learn?

regular writing rocks the free world. yeah, this should go without saying. if you wanna be a writer, you gotta write. but before the frenzy i had never tried the word-count trick. and i loved it. before june was even over i was working out ways to add doable but aggressive freewriting to my regular schedule, eventually settling on a goal of 500 new words every other day. (20K in thirty days works out to 667 words a day, which can get painful if you let a few days' quotas stack up.)

you can write some decent stuff under the gun. my june script was flabby--what do you expect when you’re rewarding word count--but as i’m editing it down, i’ve only gone back to my pre-june script twice for content i missed in the new version. i’m rewriting a lot in this pass, but this script is so much closer to what i mean than any previous attempts.

there is no one screenwriting tool that does it all. june really solidified my attachment to the two writing tools i use. i still think of sophocles as my “real” screenwriting program. moving my 20K to sophocles this week and formating it there made it an official script in my mind. meanwhile, scrivener has become my freewriting tool of choice. all of my notes are there, and i’m using it for my 500-word assignments. somehow even the process of booting into windows to port things from one tool to the other feels right--a change of environment for a different type of writing. now if i could only stop typing apple-C in windows and ctrl-C on the mac side...

i kind of like my characters and their world. and thank goodness. they're going to be with me for a while. more on this in future posts, i'm sure.

breathing life into green

2007-05-29T11:41:00.000-07:00

it’s every director/producer’s worst nightmare: you and your dp are packing a few things up after the last day of a rough shoot. the cast and crew have already gone home, and you’re making sure the pile of equipment you’re returning to the rental house tomorrow isn’t mixed in with her pile. she’s packing her very cool eclair 16mm camera into its case, dusting everything off as she goes. you’re looking around for your slate (which belongs in neither pile of equipment) when you realize there’s been a long pause between bursts of canned air. you look up just as the dp says

uh oh.

she thinks the magazine may not have been in right. for the whole shoot.

a quick explanation of what this means: the magazine is the part of the camera that holds the film. magazines are designed to fit right up against the gate, where each frame is exposed, and if a magazine is not in right, you could have a few problems: the film could get all jammed up and ruined (we were in the clear on this one), the film could be completely exposed (nothing but white frames) from light coming in through the edges where the magazine should attach, or the film could just be wildly out of focus.

welcome to the first minutes of postproduction on my first 16mm short, green.

i had wanted to shoot something in 16, to have a film that projects well to a large screen, and to get a feel for working with real film, the delicate, moody substance that it is. i was certainly getting a crash course in the latter.

fast forward a month, allowing for processing the film without transferring it to video, skipping out to ny for a friends’ wedding, checking every reel on the negative with a lightbox and loupe and seeing that we do have images (much celebration), finding a local post house that will do film-to-tape transfer for only 800 feet, and scheduling time at an edit suite to transfer the images from tape to a hard drive. finally it’s time to see these hard-won images, and…

uh oh.

two of the eight reels are completely out of focus. and these aren’t the relatively easy indoor shots, either. they’re also (mercifully) not the reels with our rottweiler footage. so it could be worse. but we are now missing a fourth of the footage from a precisely storyboarded project, including the first and last shots of the second sequence, and a key scene that wraps up the plot of the film.

if being missing a quarter of the film wasn’t enough, a lot of the good reels have smaller, but still noticeable, focus issues. i don't think you could show this on a big screen.

after a couple days’ despair, i think of a way to rearrange everything to create a variation on the same story with the footage we do have. and the focus issues with the good reels aren’t so noticeable on a computer screen. if i can accept the straight-to-the-net release (kind of a shame for a 16mm project), it just might work.

then i try to cut the footage together. i get real demoralized. i can’t stop seeing how this film should have worked with the missing shots. i even try using the crazy blurry shots, but of course they don’t cut together with the in-focus stuff.

fast forward ten months, allowing for a cast & crew dinner where i have to tell everyone about the footage, a few more attempts to rally and just cut the damn thing together, some good ideas springing up along the way, but most quashed by loads of demoralization. i can’t get past the missing pieces, and i seriously think about abandoning the project. but i really don’t want to be a quitter (funny how much i care about that). slowly, painfully, i cut the images together, using a brian eno temp track (who doesn’t?) and some foley pulled together from soundtrack pro’s stock effects.

then, in a burst of excitement about starting work on my next short, fraud, i realized, that i needed to finish green, and pronto. make it as good as it can be, bless it, and send it on its way. time to find the film i have, no matter how different it is from the film i wanted. last week a friend helped me transfer the location sound to my computer, and after a week of sound design and editing, i had something i could show curtis.

now, if you’re thinking, so you had something you could show your boyfriend, that’s easy—well, you don’t know curtis. i have a reputation for being one of the toughest critics among my friends and fellow playwrights/screenwriters, but curtis makes me look positively magnanimous. he's handed scripts back to me, shaking his head, with the words, "it's not your best work." so the curtis test is usually not the nerve-soothing ego boost most people get from showing works in progress to their sweeties.

but curtis agreed, it’s almost a film. i’ve got some tweaks to make, but it’s pretty much a rough cut.

i am so excited about this.

the quest for less (moiré): part 1, revver

2007-05-11T21:48:00.000-07:00

here's twyndr on revver:

script frenzy starts in 3 weeks and i’m cheating already

2007-05-11T15:10:00.000-07:00

the folks who’ve brought us NaNoWriMo (the crazy event that encourages writers to just jam through writing a novel in a single month) have announced their latest brainchild, script frenzy, in which—you guessed it—participants write a script in a single month. they’re open to screenplays or stage plays, and of course they don’t give a hoot about genre or style, but beyond that they’re kind of particular about what they want you to write during that month. no tv scripts, no movies of the week, no adaptations. of course they have no way to check up on any of these things, but those are their rules. also, you can’t start writing until june 1—you can do any prep work you want before then, outlining, background for characters, but no writing scenes.

so what horrible sin am i committing? i’m going to “do” script frenzy with Sky. in the last few months i’ve realized i need a complete rewrite. i’ve changed the circumstances of one protagonist, the habits and major characteristics of both protagonists, the through line with a love interest—there isn’t a written scene that doesn’t need to be ditched, and a complete redo sounds just right (knowing that i can later mine the old script for good exchanges & moments if i want). i’ve got a hell of a solid outline at this point—i just need a script.

now this is in flagrant violation of script frenzy’s no-adaptations rule. they’re really bent cranking out a brand new script and putting your current projects aside for the month of june. but the last thing i really need is another script on yet another back burner. so i’m cheating. or, more generously, i’m doing something different using their mechanisms to guide the process: script frenzy*, if you will.

here are my rules:

i’ll follow their timeline and word-count goals (20,000 words, all in the month of june).
i’m not going to use or even look at any of the pages i’ve already written. i’m not sure yet if i get to read my current script once more between now and june. i’m thinking i shouldn’t, but i’m also thinking that if i do it should be sooner rather than later.
i won’t claim to have “won” script frenzy. ever.

build your own buzz

2007-05-11T11:50:00.000-07:00

i’ve decided it’s time to get my first short, that's why you never drink red, out into the world for real. of course this means i have to figure out what i mean by “for real,” but for now i’m working with the general concept of “out into the world” and uploading it to different services and thinking of ways to direct traffic to it once it’s up somewhere looking decent.

first i uploaded it to jaman, which was recommended to me by lourdes portillo, a great doc director who’s in my jean shelton class. the jaman upload went through, no problem, and i like the idea of sharing the short with other filmmakers (jaman feels geared toward the film-fest/mfa crowd). but i’m not thrilled with how twyndr looks as it streams on their player. and since they’re using their own conversion tool, i’m not really sure how to tweak my upload to look better there. i filled out their form for people interested in “distribution” through jaman, which would involve a better quality picture, but until that’s fixed, i’ve flagged my upload private.

next i added a link from my myspace page to the copy hosted on blip.tv, which is the same one i point to from this blog. that one’s a no-brainer. not like my myspace page is flooded with traffic, but what can it hurt?

last night, i uploaded to ourstage. sometimes i’m so busy asking myself why not, i forget to ask why. i have yet to come across anything good on ourstage—maybe the random server just hates me, but voting between two really terrible shorts (and trying to define which is worse and how) gets depressing quickly. unless they come up with a way to improve the quality of what users see—and i don’t see how they can do that—they’ll never be able to retain voters. maybe that’s okay. what do i know?

as i’m typing this, the file’s being uploaded to revver. i’ve seen clips hosted by them that looked decent (most recently on film flap), so we’ll see how that goes.

next on my list: youtube? but if revver looks good, i might just focus on pointing to that one.

greyhounds website is up

2007-03-20T23:30:00.000-07:00

my friend kelilyn has just finished the website for her short, greyhounds. check out the site at

http://www.mohrfilms.com/greyhounds/index.html

and check out her film at the sf international film fest.

the old drawing board

2007-02-25T13:56:00.000-08:00

had a great meeting with a group of filmmakers yesterday--we're getting together every other week to work on scripts. this time we went through Sky, titled Twice Removed for this round, but i'm still obviously shopping for titles.

after more than two hours of great feedback from the group (thank you, julie, ria, and milena!) i took the train home, kind of daunted by how much more work obviously needs to be done but psyched to realize i have an idea of what all that work could entail. in a moment of gtd clarity i found myself scribbling next actions into my notebook.

gtd? you ask.

anybody who knows me can tell you i'm a list maker. big time. (well, i think i'm obvious about this stuff, but as i typed that i wonder if i don't hide it some. a few years back i wrote a play about a list-making woman (Hit the Muscle), and some of the comments about her organizational habits--i'm guessing they would have been phrased differently had the commenters realized i do something like that myself.)

so when i heard that an organizational guru had based a whole get-it-together plan on crazy detailed to-do lists, i had to check it out. the basic idea is that if you've got everything you want to do, listed in the form of actionable items, on paper then you won't wake up in the middle of the night worrying if you've forgotten something. there's a zen to it. an excuse to indulge my love of checklists? i'm there.

that was about a year ago. since then i've tried different methods of listing--paper to-do lists, plug-ins on my google homepage, an excel spreadsheet. now i'm using kinkless gtd, scripts that run in omni outliner pro that divide tasks by where they can be done, track when things are overdue, and manage recurring tasks.

in all it's been going well. i'm knocking tasks off the list--getting things done. i still have a hard time remembering to look through my in boxes (physical and virtual), but a process that needs a little fine tuning is better than no process, i suspect. also, i've had a few days this week when i worked on the windows side of my dual-boot computer (omni outliner is mac-only)--not sure what to do about these windows-fests, apart from getting in the habit of booting into os x before getting to work for a check-in.

nothing like tinkering with tools instead of tackling the to-dos.

that reminds me, i should copy those next actions from my notebook to my official list.

you're not in your body, honey

2007-02-07T12:20:00.000-08:00

i've been watching a lot of actors' training lately, sitting in on a class taught by jean shelton. she's an amazing teacher, with a finely tuned b.s. detector and a fantastic sense of how to debug performance issues her students are having.

one issue that comes up over and over is the problem of being "in your head" when you're trying to act, which results in, well, trying to act (which usually reads as false and strange to an audience).

the trick, it would seem, is to get out of your head and "in your body," and just act. sort of like throwing yourself at the ground and missing. or, to quote yoda:

do! or do not. there is no try.

now i've been resisting the idea of "method" writing for a solid 10 years, maybe 15. i really don't like the idea that i should have to experience or feel something to write about it (um, ouch). plus, there's the problem of glossing over the left-brain work--without being able to work "in your head," you're going to churn out pages of mush, emotive but incoherent, and probably self-indulgent to boot. but there are obvious parallels between what works for me as a writer and strasberg's method.

it's more in what doesn't work. the head space that's death to an actor (i remember it all too well the few times i've been pushed onto a stage) is the worst possible place to be if you're trying to write even a decent sentence.

so what do you do when you're stuck in the wrong part of your head and you've got to get to work? actors have all sorts of exercises to get back into their bodies, but apart from a few "writing coaches" out there who aren't giving away any secrets, there doesn't seem to be many people trying to use stanislavsky to write. why?

NaNoWriMo tackles screenplays

2007-02-01T13:28:00.000-08:00

since the writing world is too small to completely self-segregate by genre, chances are you know someone who's tried national novel writing month (a.k.a. NaNoWriMo), a 30-day marathon in which writers commit to writing 50,000 words of whatever each november. if you're particularly into deadlines yourself, chances are you've wished they'd do an equivalent challenge for scripts. (50,000 words? what does that even mean to us?)

happily, the good folks at NaNoWriMo are making that wish come true this june:

script frenzy

no details are on the site yet, but i'm interested in hearing more. (by june Sky had better be on draft 2, so maybe i'll be ready to crank out another.)

bartleby

2007-01-30T21:26:00.000-08:00

not only am i having an i-would-prefer-not-to week, but i am trying to bust through it with new software, namely Scrivener, a nifty writing tool from literature and latte, a programmer who professes not to be a software company. it's mac only. (holy cow, have i really made the switch? i typed that "mac only" with an odd indifference, like of course this software i'm using doesn't run on windows. i don't think there's any getting around it, i'm a freaking mac user. but that is a subject for another post.)

so far, scrivener's turning out to be pretty cool. i've had the usual whoa, new software! issues (there's something about dragging links into a blank document that makes it impossible to write unlinked text in there--impossible for me, anyhow) but the workflow feels pretty solid. (oh, man, there's that mac-talk again.) you pull in notes from wherever and then do an index-card sort of thing in the "corkboard" and then go to town.

i've used scrivener for a couple of small projects--not scripts, brainstorming pitches for orange avenue/zest--so the real test comes now, when i pull notes and random bits of research for Sky in to see if i can't rework some major pieces of the project.

will report back in a few days.

surf the afternoon away

2007-01-24T19:39:00.000-08:00

uk writer and script reader bang2write hooks you up with a gazillion articles online:

write here, write now's required reading

great advice or fodder for "productive" procrastination? you be the judge.

then everyone would do it

2007-01-23T21:08:00.000-08:00

there's no way to say this without sounding like a moron, so i'll just say it: writing a decent script is hard. insanely hard.

here's my anecdotal evidence:

i'm now semi-officially meeting with two different writing groups. each has 6-7 writers in it, give or take a few, and in each group i'm talking about people with no small degree of experience. these aren't people who just decided to give screenwriting a try as a get-rich-quick scheme; we're talking experienced filmmakers in one group and seasoned actors/playwrights in the other.

everyone is struggling with something. one gets her characters figured out, but plot--who knows? another can hammer out a plot like nobody's business, but worries that the characters feel like stereotypes. and almost nobody is comfortable with those other pieces that are supposed to magically appear with their scripts: the one-sheet, the treatments, the dreaded log lines.

writing a script is like a decathlon--you've got to be pretty damn good at so many different things.

but if it was easy...

ever heard of plato, aristotle, ...?

2007-01-03T10:36:00.000-08:00

not socrates--sophocles!

(but for some reason i can't get vizzini out of my head this week--thank you, wallace shawn.)

sophocles isn't just the name of the guy who wrote antigone, it's also the name of my favorite screenwriting program.

for ages i stuck with my own word templates (years of tech writing have left me with an absurd comfort level with ms word tweaks), and swore i'd never fork over the money for final draft or its ilk. then i won a copy of gorilla software at an sf cutters meeting last year and started playing with a trial copy of frameforge, and got this crazy idea that i needed final draft because it pipes into software that expects "industry standard" scripts.

for the life of me, i couldn't use final draft. it does this crazy thing where the pagination gets screwy and you can't see the line that's at the bottom of the page (older versions of word used to do this, like word 2.0 or something). and the famed index cards aren't tied to the script in a way that makes sense to me. weird things happened when i saved files. these strange bugs kept coming up--and not just in windows, but on a mac, too. i couldn't believe that this program "everyone" uses was so half-baked. $183.50 down the drain.

but then i found sophocles. it's like this program was designed for me, the screenwriter who knows enough about computers to be driven mad by software that doesn't work.

one of the biggest innovations in sophocles is that the program doesn't force you to look at your script in official script format on the screen. this may seem weird at first, but think about it: you don't need a script to be in a narrow column with courier font until you're printing it out. sophocles lets you look at your script in any font you want, with dialog stretching across the window so you can see more than a couple of lines at a time. the program also estimates running times for scenes and the whole script, so you don't need to keep on top of the one-minute-per-page estimate (unless you want to). when you print, sophocles converts the whole shebang into the right format. excellent.

then there are these great tools for analyzing what you have written. you can see an outline, of course, and notes you've added for each scene--obvious stuff. but sophocles will also tell you who has the most lines in the script, and how much any two characters interact with each other. it will list all of your settings, and how many scenes take place in each. you can find out how long your average scenes are or how much dialog you have compared to stage direction. and that's just the start.

you can print straight from sophocles, export to pdf, or export to rtf, which you can import into final draft if you're set on tagging. i only use final draft as a staging area for getting scripts to other programs or other people who only have final draft--never for actual writing.

and, yes, i boot into windows just to write--sophocles is pc-only. (yay, boot camp!)

the original plan

2006-12-22T14:44:00.000-08:00

found this today--the first list i made of parameters for the script:

90pp script: runtime of 86-90 minutes
5 or 6 locations max
women lead actors
room for contemplative shots, visual expression
must be okay to shoot it in HD
script takes place in less than a week (fewer costume changes)
outline first (okay to sketch scenes as they come, too): 75 actions
write treatment before script finished

as i read the draft so far (printing it now), i'll have to see how far i've strayed.

the saga so far (part 2)

2006-12-21T14:04:00.000-08:00

after outlining and lots of time staring at cards and post-its tacked to the massive corkboard in the kitchen (if you think that's nerdy, wait til you hear that sometimes we switch the corkboard out with an equally huge whiteboard), i had enough of a plan to start filling in dialogue. this is the fun part--seeing and hearing the characters.

at first, it's insanely easy--i'm cranking through scene after scene (of course, i've already seen them all as i hacked through the outline) and thinking everyone should outline--what fools we are for attempting free-form writing of any sort.

then my paid-work workload goes into overdrive and i completely stall out. this is last july--my first inklings of this script were in january, so six months have passed. i've written enough full-length plays to realize that crashing with two-thirds of a script is pretty typical for me, not at all the death of the project, and that it's usually well after a year has passed since my first crack at character work. so i'm not doing so badly.

in late summer i start up with a great writing group--playwrights mostly--and get the chance to hear the first 45 pages of my script out loud. boy, is it rough.

in the fall i rustle up the energy to rewrite what i have so far and completely gut a subplot, replacing it with a more energetic through-line.

in october i write a fluffy short about abby, a supporting role in the feature. in theory, i'm writing a short a month, always starring one of the characters in sky, but on a tangent so i can do character work outside of the outlined scenes. (november's short was for another project--more on that in another post--which will probably take up the rest of december, too. but january should get me a short for daniel, another supporting role.)

there was some more editing and headway in november, but there were also two vacations, a nasty sinus infection, an intense tech writing gig, a family visit, a couple of days of marathon xmas shopping, and then a new laptop, which i'm still moving into slowly.

which brings us to today. i've got 2/3 of a feature that i need to sit down and re-read, and then re-write.

should be doing that now, really.

that's why you never drink red

2006-12-10T13:58:00.001-08:00

Click to Play

a little version of my first short.

the saga so far

2006-12-09T12:16:00.000-08:00

last january as i'm finishing post on my first short i realize that the script i'm working on can't be the first feature i shoot. (lots of characters & locations--including essential scenes on street corners in nyc; a tv show inside the film--all sorts of production tricks that would kill a first-time director.)

so i need a new script. i spend most of january thinking of new-project ideas. totally from scratch--the dreaded what-do-i-want-to-write-about freewrites. who could i write about? (and since i can only have a few characters, this takes special importance--can't let characters drift in and out of their own volition.) and then i get to outlining. really. outlining before writing. it's an amazing idea.

making my blog

2006-12-09T11:59:00.000-08:00

i'm not sure about the wisdom of starting a blog for a project that's not even in first-draft form, but this project's been kind of backwards from the start (which might actually be forward, depending on your pov). might as well embrace it.

show, don't tell

2006-04-10T14:45:00.000-07:00

This is an old rant, probably best suited for a blog:

Attention screenwriters: voiceover is a cheat. Sometimes it’s unavoidable, and every now and then you can make it work in your favor, but as a general rule:

If you can’t come up with a way to show something on a screen, maybe the thing you’re writing shouldn’t be a film.

I’m not proposing MPAA regulations–rated HV, for heavy voiceover, or MV for moderate voiceover?–but at the very least movie critics should warn us about this stuff. How you can give a positive review when a film hasn’t quite been written is beyond me.

So in lieu of professional warnings, someone needs to compile a list of voiceover offences so that we can avoid those wasted trips to the theaters and video stores.

Why bother with dialogue or visuals when I can just quote the novel?

Fight Club
Here’s a strange case: heavy voiceover at the start of the film, and then there’s that section more toward the middle where Ed Norton explains the things Brad Pitt does (remember the catering and projectionist stuff?) that’s not voiceover, but a direct address to the camera, which worked so much better. And, given the nature of the situation, I think they needed some voiceover to pull it all off. Still, half of it could have been easily pulled out.

Jesus’ Son
Apparently this film got much better at the end. I didn’t make it that far.

Personal Velocity
Nonstop voiceover, from a man who has nothing to do with the film, including gems like, “She felt the ambition drain out of her like pus from a lanced boil.” The worst offender I’ve seen to date.

The Virgin Suicides
I spent the entire movie trying to figure out which one of those boys was supposed to be narrating the thing. That and making a mental list of synonyms for “vapid.”

Wonder Boys
Few things are more off-putting than Michael Douglas’ voice emanating from nowhere, pointing out the obvious in every scene.

Is voiceover less tiresome in another language?

Amélie
It’s stylized, and clearly intentional (as opposed to pure laziness), but there is an awful lot of it.

Y Tu Mamá También
The first time the narrator interrupted this film I thought I was in for a torturous two hours, but I think the writers pulled this one off by giving the narrator distance from the main characters and a touch of omniscience.

Voiceover Success Stories

Election
Proving yet again that rules were meant to be broken, this film effectively uses dueling voiceovers.

Pride and Prejudice (BBC mini)
Darcy’s letter (episode 5?) is just that. He wouldn’t say those things out loud, yet the information must be conveyed to Elizabeth and the audience. Bonus points for giving the novel’s famous opening line to a character.

The Singing Detective (BBC mini)
Voiceover is the only way to ease the transition between fantasy (that the main character is writing as we watch him) and reality.

i heart skype

2006-04-09T14:43:00.000-07:00

Better yet, make that, “I Want to Heart Skype”–because the jury’s still out.

Skype should be solving a handful of phone issues at once:

My cell phone doesn’t work at my house. The reception’s so bad that the phone doesn’t even ring half the time. Of course, if I’m anywhere besides home, my cell phone is the best way to reach me.
When it comes time to put a phone number on anything official like a script or DVD, the land line is a bad choice (because who knows how many eons could pass before someone wants to call), but again the cell phone doesn’t work half the time. And did I mention that it swallows messages for weeks at a time? Great.
Long distance providers (for the land line)–I can’t even deal.

So with Skype In and Skype Out combined, I can make as many long distance calls as I want, through the Internet, for cheap. And I can set up a local phone number the forwards to both my cell and land line, letting me answer the call with whichever happens to be working at the moment, also for cheap. Awesome, right?

Yes, but the first call I get through the service doesn’t connect. My phones both ring at once–hooray–and I pick up the land line, and Hello? Hello? Hello? I can’t hear a thing.

Wrong number, maybe. We’ll see.