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Brendan Hughes

Brendan Hughes

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Six Ways to Pass as Privately Educated

November 24, 2013

private-school-kidsDirecting is a trust fund baby’s game. Are you a trust fund baby? If so, good for you. Couldn’t happen to a better person. Seriously. Furthermore, go fuck yourself. While you yourself may be talented and friendly, your kind, with its consequence-free paradigm, dilutes the talent pool in the entertainment industry and has an undue influence on the American narrative — which is why, in the 1970’s, movies were about urban, interesting looking, colorful people, and today, they’re about suburban, dead-souled superheroes. And thanks to “unpaid internships,” your ilk will maintain its stranglehold on the industry for generations to come.

I am not so fortunate. I had three strikes against me as I embarked on this profession. Number one, I am publicly educated. Number two, I am Irish Catholic by heritage, meaning one look at me and every person thinks, “I’m going to colonize and oppress the living shamrock out of that people-pleasing leprechaun, just for the hell of it.” Number three, I am interested in the happiness of others. Numbers two and three are related, baked into my motherboard, and problems I’ll contend with for life.

Number one, on the other hand, could have gone another way.

My high school was extremely traditional. How traditional? It was founded in 1635. Six years of Latin. A strict adherence to 17th century educational principals of discipline, rigor and gratuitous suffering. If you raised your hand, you had better have the right answer or you get the hose again. In the hall? Where’s your lavatory pass (that’s right, lavatory)? Hard work was king. Colorful complexity, as a desirable trait, was, in the eyes of my instructors, a notch below rabies. Lunch break was 19 minutes long. Lollygag time did not exist.

And here’s the lesson one takes away from this. If you speak, spit out the right answer fast and get out of the line of fire. Go along. Do not be noticeable for fear of a misdemeanor mark. This is, obviously, fantastic training for the bottom of any number of executive food chains.

My wife, on the other hand, went to a private boarding high school only 25 miles, yet several centuries, north of my own. At her school, probing complexity was the name of the game. An interesting and deep answer was prized higher than a correct one. Students probably rode around in golf carts or were carried on sedan chairs by lower classmen. All enjoying the overwhelming message: I am a complex person and my complexity has value.

At dinner parties, when you find yourself bored to tears by a person’s long-winded answer to “how are you?” chances are they went to private school. That other guest, who got everyone else talking but left without divulging so much as their last name? Public. And it bears mentioning, the one who snuck off to go to the bathroom but really was doing all the dishes? Parochial. God bless those poor bastards.

To be a director, in this industry that is now overrun by Thad Claddingtons the Thirds, who only feel comfortable hiring their own, we must learn to pass. All the blonde, white-slacked, yacht-treading villains from 1980’s John Cusack sex comedies grew up to become agents and development executives and we, the John Cusacks of the world, only too excited to be granted the right to work, have been tossed outside the gates.

Luckily there is a way back in. A secret body language taught to and understood by only the privileged. And here I am to blow the whistle on it. I humbly present: Six Ways to Pass as Privately Educated, or… Six Secrets to High Status Body Language, or… Six Methods to Put Peasants in Their Heads…

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Dear Son…

April 11, 2019
Dear future son, During your first week of college, you'll have chosen your courses and will have to go to the college bookstore, if such a place still exists. Mostly it will be sweatshirts and stuffed mascots, but perhaps some craggy old fart will force you to buy an actual biology textbook made out of tree. You will find it on the shelf, and you will gawk at the price. $600. Or Units. Or whatever currency is now, point being, it will be more than you thought. I, your old man, will have been pretty stingy with you growing up, so you already know you'd sooner get blood from a stone than that kind of scratch from me. Dejected, and angry at the concept of core curriculums at state schools, you'll leave, fists frustratedly shoved into sweatshirt, looking at ground. You don't have any friends here yet, so you're all alone with no one to entertain your grousing. But then you look up, and a beautiful girl sitting behind a table sustains eye contact with you... and smiles. You are lonely in this moment, as I already mentioned. You are in a new place, and are basing way too much of your self-worth on the facial expressions of strangers. You have the unfortunate arrogance of a teenager, so you don't even realize how vulnerable you really are right now. But son, when this happens, and it will exactly as I described it... run. Do not, under any circumstances let her engage you. Doing so will create a mess you could still be cleaning up 20 years later, when you are 38, as I am while writing this, with an APR of 20%. Son, she works for a credit card company. She has been carefully selected based on personality and magnetism and placed precisely into the eye line of dejected young boys like yourself, stalking out of the college bookstore, furious at how broke you are. She is there to offer you the illusion of free money, just for being you. Just for having a name and a social security number. You're walking toward her, as the waves of egotastic tingling come over you, and she continues to hold your gaze, but think carefully about this: if you had a credit card, borrowed a tiny bit here and there, and always paid it off right away, then they wouldn't make any money off of you, right? It would be a horrible business model. They only make money when they get you to borrow money you can't pay back. The juice starts flowing. They get their tentacles on you. They are loan sharks. Or, loan squids. Before you know it—seriously, you see two movies, splurge a little on a date, finally buy that iBrain and you are FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS IN DEBT (please adjust this for inflation from 1992 to 2031). And you're still as broke as you were walking out of that bookstore. But now you owe them, every month, an amount of money that you can barely afford. And that amount you owe them never goes down, no matter how many payments you make. Then they've wrapped their tendrils around you and pulled you to the bottom of the sea to feed on you slowly. Then you miss just one little payment because February has 28 days, then your credit score plummets, then all of their friends can also make ridiculous money off of you and you'll have severely limited your ability to ever have any free time or to backpack through Eurochina with you buddies this summer, because you have to scramble every month to pay back these faceless tall buildings. Don't do it, son. Don't get a credit card. Or better yet, get one, buy one thing for ten dollars, pay it off, and put it in a drawer forever. Twelve financially wretched years after your idiot father destroyed his credit by talking to that girl behind the table, I finally figured out how to start gradually climbing out of the hole: by jerry-rigging my online bank account to pay these jackals weekly instead of monthly, so it hurt a little less. I was paying the same amount, ultimately, but didn't carry the psychological wound the monthly payment did (and now I never forgot because it was automatic). I could get my head around parting with $35 a week much easier than $140 a month. Then the balance finally started to creep down. Then I'd inch up the weekly payments, and get more confident. Then I used the online banking to pay all my bills this way. Then there was only one number I had to keep track of. Then, after five, or Christ it might have been ten years, I finally paid it all off. I haven't missed a payment on anything in five years. But my APR has only gone down to 20% from 29%. It's a game, son. And the rules are: be suspicious of tall buildings, watch and learn how they rig the game, then beat them at it. Set up your credit card to automatically pay a small utility bill every month, then set up your bank to automatically pay your credit card, and zero out without even keeping track. Then watch the good credit history grow. Living cash-in-cash-out can suck when your friends are out galavanting on plastic. But you should avoid buying on credit at all costs. And never, EVER buy future sewage on credit. Buying something on credit is paying triple. Buying something on credit is giving future you the middle finger. But future you is older than you, and deserves respect. Instead, get the coins out of your couch, buy an onion, make soup and have an evening in with a library book. You'll be smarter, less poor, and you won't get a beer gut, which will be the subject of my next letter. We are very proud peasants in this family, kid. Restaurants are for millionaires. Love, Your future dad
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Behind the scenes of Chronicles Simpkins Will Cut Your Ass [slideshow].

April 11, 2019

[portfolio_slideshow]

Turn Your Body Into a Lightning Rod, Part 1: Imagination, Eyes, and Tongue

January 24, 2012

Introduction

Very occasionally throughout my career I have taken small roles to attempt to stay in touch with the task of acting, and found it utterly confounding and deeply, deeply difficult to relax into.

As a man with scoliosis, I know body tension. If I even mention a certain stressful teacher I had in high school and then reach for a high shelf, blam, there’s an icepick in my back. When I teach or direct actors, I can often see with the naked eye that there are imbalances in tension all over their bodies. It’s as if the transverse muscle, in the pit of the gut, is where all the emotion comes from and it’s got to get past three check points on its way out: the stomach, the shoulders and the jaw. And if an actor is clenching one of those (like I do) for reasons beyond his control or awareness, perhaps in a very understandable attempt to remain civilized and control the emotions trying to blast their way out of him, you can bet he’s got an energy leak somewhere else, like blinking too much, or shifting his weight, or over-endowing props. Which then leads to unwanted, undirected energy belying his performance.

On the witnessing side, as human beings, and as audience members, there are a million languages of the face we don’t realize we already speak. When an actor blinks too much, or blinks not in a way that the character would blink given his dialogue, something bugs us, and we decide we don’t believe them. When an actor acts like he’s listening, rather than truly picturing the imagery of what is being said to him, we see his face tense into handsome listening face, and we stop rooting for him. And finally, given that (I believe) we think in images, not words, if an actor has not connected deeply with the images within his own dialogue, and is not using his tongue as a paintbrush to paint these images onto the mind-canvas of the listener, we hydroplane along with him, over his moments, unaffected.

To combat this, I have devised, over the years, the above handy-dandy diagram of the human body while acting. A treacherous landscape of tension-moguls forming and releasing. Blocking the path of the emotional truth as it emerges from its home in the pit of the gut, where our weakest muscles are, that are only deployed when we cry. Beginning with the imagination, and working counter-clockwise, I will attempt to double-click on the human body, that it might be deployed in its entirety to our artistic ends.

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¡Hola! ¿Qué tal, Mexico City?

November 22, 2011

A long layover afforded us a constitutional in the neighborhood surrounding Benito Juarez Airport. Benito Juarez was the first full-blooded indigenous president of Mexico. There has yet to be a full-blooded indigenous president of the United States. Advantage: Mexico.

It is here that I discovered not only do my shoes match the buildings and trucks, but the donuts are the best in the world.

Photos: Emily Topper née Topper.

 

The Human Slouch Towards Narrative

February 12, 2012
Spending the week at the American Film Market, and watching $800 million worth of narrative morsels whiz around the beaches of Santa Monica, can make you think many cynical things about what makes a movie popular. It reminded me of this old graph I created five or six years ago to try to encapsulate all human consciousness on one piece of paper. Here's my stand-up performance in Wellfleet on August 28, 2010 discussing it:   It seems like we all start within the A ring, the story you tell yourself about you, or, The Ring of the Narcissist: your mirror face, your hopes for the future, circumstances that you assure yourself are not your fault, your memories, and the impact you notice yourself having on a room. Then we enter the B ring — the story you tell the world about you, or, The Ring of the Braggadocio — your photo face, what you choose what to wear, the angle you hold your spine, your behavior in traffic, how long you take to answer questions, and how many stories you tell in which you are the hero or the victim. The C ring — the story the world tells you about you, or, The Ring of the Consumer — is all advertising, movies, magazines, and media. You are the center of the universe, it all tells us, and you are going to need equipment. Like toothpaste. The D ring — the story the world tells itself about you, or, The Ring of the Paranoiac — feels like a cage if you focus on it too long: your credit score, gossip about you, photography of you that you don't like, your nation. The D ring feels so much like a cage in fact, that very few people venture past it to the glorious E ring — the story you tell the world about the world, or, The Ring of the Participant — the art you make, your carbon footprint, how you will participate in the world, and what you give away. It's all about where you put most of your preoccupations. When I put on clothes in the morning, are they to assure myself I'm okay looking? To assure others I'm successful? To sport the latest brands? To give the finger? To not get fired? Or to keep me warm while I tend my planet? The truth is, I think, if you focus on the story you tell the world about the world, it will influence all the others, and your life will inevitably improve. But if you get trapped in the psycho-emotional rat's nest of the inner circles of self-consciousness, and spend all of your time pursuing sensations (e.g. the sensation of being famous, or being correct, or mighty), you will have missed out on incredible opportunities to contribute a verse to the great human experiment. When I get caught up in the movie of my life—and start to dwell on what people might think—I try to remember... No one is watching. The cinema is empty. And it is such a relief. Oh, and the oomphalos (Greek for navel) is the unknowable belly button of existence. That's the one in the middle. The actual you enshrouded by all this narrative tomfoolery. The you anyone would fall in love with, if only they could see it. And download a pdf of the above chart here.
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Wellfleet: Where a fisherman knows when his boat is an autumn.

June 18, 2010

If a fella were to be making a movie fer himself in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, he might be wise to consider this little snap for the opening credits, mind.

A Lesson at Classon Avenue on the G

May 25, 2010

¡Ganas!

May 8, 2010
I had a Spanish teacher in high school who wore tight, tailored suits and had a shiny dome. He was as short as many of us sophomores (not me), and full of vim and vigor. "¡Ganas!" he used to implore us, as we passed his classroom in other parts of the day. "Desire." He would squeeze his fist hard like the Cobra-Kei Sen-sei instructing us to sweep the leg."¡Ganas, Señor Hughes!" It made me feel like an international spy. What I didn't grasp then is that in adult life desire is indeed manufactured. And for things that could be deemed as arbitrary as homework. To be driven, he told us with one Spanish word, is an active choice we must make everyday. This man from a 1976 Russian Television Spectacular is so driven to delight us that despite (according to the video's comments) the actual lyrics being blocked by the government of the Soviet Union, he can dig down past what might feel goofy to do, and release the magma of delight contained in the notes of the song. And, paradoxically, delight us twice as much. Take that, censorship. This man, and his total commitment to his act, has the ¡Ganas!
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So You Think You Can Dins

April 29, 2010

Jeffrey Dinsmore. Gentleman. Office-mate. America’s protagonist.

Quadrupedante putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum

November 4, 2019

Certain stories have an eerie power over an audience. And the reason is not just what the stories are about, but how they are told. The imagination of an audience can be abducted and toyed with when a director recognizes the relationship between the function of their storytelling, and the form of the story they are telling.

The highest form of dramatic art, if you ask me, is when there is a visceral echo between the protagonist and the audience. The creator of the experience intentionally creates some sort of scarcity for the audience within the story—of understanding, of action, of a particular feeling—and uses this to force the audience into willing certain things to be. The protagonist is lonely, and we are made to feel alone by the storytelling. The protagonist is scared, so we too are scared by sudden horrible things.

In the 2001 movie Memento, for instance, our hero, played by Guy Pearce, has an aphasia of the mind wherein he can't make new memories and thus every twenty minutes or so, he suddenly has no idea where he is. Jonathan and Christopher Nolan create a similar scarcity of understanding in the mind of the audience member by telling the story backwards. Ergo, through the storytelling, they give the audience the very same disease suffered by the protagonist. For my money, this flick, made in 2000,  rang us like a clarion bell into the new millennium, heralding a new kind of storytelling for a smarter kind of audience.

When discussing 2009's Where the Wild Things Are with cinematographer Emily Topper, we were mutually reminded of what it was actually like to be nine (horribly upsetting, traumatizingly emotional, an almost non-stop bummer, but for brief periods of exhilarating fort-building), which Spike Jonze captured by telling a story about an irrational person irrationally. The structure of that movie—let's do this, now let's do this, now I'm upset, now I'm psyched—transfers to us the viscera of childhood.

This is the final and oft-forgot piece of the puzzle in our craft: the use of the style and structure of the storytelling to mainline the story's emotional plasma into the bloodstream of the audience. If the main character feels impatient, make us impatient with your storytelling. And don't wimp out. Make us actually impatient with the story.  in the best storytelling events, function IS form.

And it's an old idea. Virgil and Ovid were no slouches with the quill (chisel?). Virgil once wrote Quadrupedante putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum or “The horses' hooves with four-fold beat did shake the crumbling plain.” Now, say the Latin out loud (Latin is kind of like Spanish, you pronounce it how it's spelled... so just sound it out... Oh, and there's a hard G in "ungula"). Repeat it a couple of times until you can say it well and at an even pace. Do you hear them? Say it in a James Earl Jones voice. Hear them now? It's the horses hooves on the plain! They're embedded in the consonants of the words themselves. The image of the poetry is embedded in the way you say it. It's so exquisite!

It makes me shiver. It makes me want to find a production of Waiting for Godot.

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Guess Who's Coming to Breakfast

April 27, 2010

My father, Patrick Hughes, left the priesthood in 1972 on the same day he married my mother. Then he became a documentarian, producing slideshows that exposed corporate greed, drove down stock prices of the most egregious multinational conglomerates and generally drew the ire of tall buildings and Wall Street.

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Pictures from The Bald Soprano at W.H.A.T.

November 4, 2019

The show I’m directing on the Harbor Stage of the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater opened on Wednesday and here are some pictures:

Jonathan Fielding, who I have cast six times. A genius.
Jonathan Fielding navigates the most awkward silence in Western theatre.
I have cast him six times, and made him grow a mustache  six times.

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The Introduction

Hello! I am a director, an editor, a performance artist performing alt-comedy TED Talk style lectures with music loops, diagrams and preposterous arcana, a professor, a podcaster, and your friend. If you'd like to know more about when I'm performing, visit The Pizzicato Effect.

The Comedy Album

The cover of my comedy album The Pizzicato Effect  

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The Comic Lectures

       

The Short Films

Unpaid Interns from Brendan Hughes on Vimeo.

 

A Lesson at Classon Avenue on the G. from Brendan Hughes on Vimeo.

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