I think the main thing we need to focus on is mental health.
other Altadena stories, I am not a journalist (anymore), and caricaturing Huxley
¿What you heard?
^The video lag is my fault, not yours. Had to bootleg this with a spotty screen recording. Sorry!
Nearly nine months and exactly 14 more dead later, Rupert Garcia sits alongside other survivors on directors chairs at Laemmle Glendale Theatre #1, where I ask something Max Goldwasser didn’t.
Rupert answers…
I am receiving Rupert’s response as a personalized call to action.
Among the four Los Angeles Artists At Work, I am the only one specifically assigned to “explore the role of the arts in health and wellbeing at the individual and community level.”
What Rupert is telling me is that I need to be conducting this exploration in Altadena.
Outside the theater after the Q&A, I share with Rupert my rough ideas for making Aisha Been Altadena next year, and he loves the concept but suggests that, instead of just interviewing adults for the project, I should also have the eight-year-old child actor that plays Aisha interview another child as well since the stories of fire-impacted youth are yet one more underreported Altadena narrative.
What you doin’?!
Even though I’m posted up here in these theaters treating film screenings like press conferences, I am NOT (as I keep on having to remind myself) a journalist… anymore.
In the past, I’ve allowed myself to get stuck in my screenwriting through time-wasting attempts to keep everything factual in my screenplays.
However, SCREENWRITERS DON’T DO THAT!
The all-caps is for me. Not y’all. Sorry. Didn’t mean to shout.
In my more recent brainstorm seshes with ChatGPT (or Chatianna as one of my friends calls it), I’ve been trying to shift from checking to see if something is factual to asking if it’s plausible, a distinction that has allowed me to tap into a whole new world of creative freedom.
What you seen??
THE ADVENTURES OF ELMO IN GROUCHLAND (1999) is the lowest-grossing Muppet film ever, and it probably has something to do with the fact that its antagonist, Huxley, enters like this…
A classic case of caricature, but the wrinkle is I actually really like this character.
It could be because he’s self-consciously cartoonish. It’s the very adjective he uses to describe his evil helicopter.
Or perhaps because his mine, mine, mine monologue simultaneously reminds me of colonists, Veruca Salt, and what I say to my cat when he’s whining for pieces of my food.
Or maybe, or maybe — I don’t know, but anyway, it makes me even more confused about caricatures but also even more excited to watch Gabby’s Dollhouse: The Movie (2025), whose villain seems like she likely has the same dark upbringing and twisted backstory as Huxley.
