movie Archives | Numéro Cinq

One of the postcards available at The Museum of the Emotions Store, a location in ASPHALT, MUSCLE & BONE – a film by bill hayward

I love the synopsis of bill hayward‘s new film asphalt, muscle & bone.

A something restless and still, unexpected and empty. The morning launch moors at The Fat River Hotel landing. The Woman in Room 43 of The Fat River Hotel looks out the window of her room. The Man in Room 124 of The Fat River Hotel looks out the window of his room. There is dancing in the Ballroom of The Fat River Hotel. The daily delivery of bread and salt goes missing from The Hotel kitchen as soon as it arrives. A burnt world awaits the visitors to The Museum of Emotions. Radio traffic, letters and messages. Trees. Watchers. Wind.

But then, equally, you have to admire the haunting panache of the location titles: The Museum of Emotions, The Orchard of Burning Apples, The Plutonium of Incubation, Outlaw Lands where even God has not been — the words send a frisson of delight and anticipation down your spine. Bill is now posting scenes and script snippets online from time to time at his blog at billhayward.com — or as he says “scenes that may or may not be in the film.”

the blog posts are a home for the “words,” the “visuals” will be the film….kinda like: you want “words,” they’re on-line – you want visual, gotta see

the film….ie. the project is made up of words and visuals, but in this case, the words are not given the usual priority over the visuals…(ie…write a story and build a visual world around it)…trying to make the evolution of the process as visually organic and predominant as possible…i’m making sets and scenes and then seeing what happens

when i turn the lights, cameras and actors on…

to quote francis bacon, “if i knew what I was doing, why would I bother doing it?”…

— bill hayward

Visit hayward’s blog and be tantalized.

Here is another first for Numéro Cinq: A full length film script from R. W. Gray (who earlier appeared on these pages as the author of the stunning short story “Crisp”). Not only do we have the original film script for Alice & Huck (who else publishes movie scripts these days?) but we also have an excerpt from the movie, teaser and fan videos. This is a wonderful chance for readers to compare script and the made movie (you can get the complete DVD here; the IMDB movie page is here), a chance to see words embodied in the actors’ gestures and words (a transformation of text to stage that is always a mystery to me). Alice and Huck is a delightful, whimsically romantic love story of close encounters, near misses and second chances.

Robert Gray was born and raised on the northwest coast of BC, and received a PhD in Poetry and Psychoanalysis from the University of Alberta in 2003. He is the author of two serialized novels in Xtra West magazine and has published poetry in various journals and anthologies, including Arc, Grain, Event, and dANDelion. He also has had ten short screenplays produced, including Alice & Huck and Blink. He currently teaches Film at the University of New Brunswick in Frederiction.