My mother and I watched Manhattan last night, and it occured to me that if writing, directing, and acting in a movie makes it a vanity piece, then just about every movie Woody Allen has made has been a vanity piece. If an actor wants to do more than act, wants to create something original, or to take on a theme the major studios won't buy, does that make it a vanity piece? I did a bit of googling and was happy to find this snip of a review of Maze from the New York Observer: "...The best kind of independent filmmaking to shame the somnolent mainstream...." Thank you very much. So it's "independent filmmaking" not a "vanity piece". What distinguishes the one from the other?
Off topic--
I've had this blog for about 4 and a half years and have only once written about a dream. Mike is the only person whose dreams I like to hear about; I find it annoying and tedious when anyone else starts in with "I had the craziest dream last night..." But I want to record a dream I had in the wee hours of the morning because I don't want to forget it, and there's nowhere else I record dreams since I stopped keeping a pen-and-paper journal. There were fairies in my dream last night. Fairies. Five of them. They were about 10 inches high and had wings, but they didn't look misty or ethereal as they do in fantasy art; they were solid. They wore clothing that was highly decorative but neither wispy nor sheer. It was fairly form-fitting but not tight or revealing; you wouldn't want sleeves or what-have-you flapping around as you flew, would you? The leader was a female with short hair, and she spoke to me. She said "You are the one. Do what it takes." I have no idea what that means. I had a semi-lucid moment in which I thought "Oh my god, fairies! Now I know they really exist."
The fairy moment was embedded in a dream in which my late husband and I were trying to install water pipes in the ceiling of an apartment so we could cultivate a garden or something. Neither of us had a clue as to how to proceed. Typical. He was being his usual self-absorbed, difficult self. No sentimentality taints my memory of him in my dreams.
