Elon Musk’s Guide to the Galaxy and much moreΝβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ 
James Pillion
 

MY FAVOURITE THINGS | Time in a Bottle

β€œThis is how civilizations decline. They quit taking risks. And when they quit taking risks, their arteries harden. Every year there are more referees and fewer doers. When you’ve had success for too long, you lose the desire to take risks... We don’t want to eliminate every risk. Otherwise we will never get anywhere.”

β€” ELON MUSK
 

I woke up to an email this week congratulating one Dr. Pillion on being admitted as an honorary Doctor of Philosophy. It took a hot second to realize the recipient was none other than me. When I was first accepted into a screenwriting PhD program five years ago, I couldn’t quite believe my luck. Getting the opportunity to pen an original script on a full scholarship. In next to no time, that honeymoon feeling was swallowed whole by existential dread. Just how in the hell was I going to deliver a 40,000 word exegesis of original research? The undertaking often left me moping about like some spoiled toddler. Yet the Sisyphean nature of the process also taught me a valuable lesson on why blissful ignorance can be your greatest friend.

Here’s my October playlist to get you on the good foot.
 

Elon Musk’s Shadow Rule πŸ—ž

With every passing year, I find myself mutating into an unashamed contrarian, especially as the β€˜truth’ becomes more and more unfocused. Ronan Farrow’s comprehensive critique puts this new frame of mind into clearer focus. While Farrow makes a compelling case for Musk’s swollen ego, I personally love how an immigrant has effectively put the most powerful economy over his knee. Be it in satellites (Starlink), rocket ships (SpaceX) or electric charging stations (Tesla). The worst thing you can accuse Musk of is being a sore loser. In fact I can sleep better at night knowing a temperamental brainiac is running the show. A man-child whose entrepreneurial ferocity and velocity is slowly reshaping civilization into his favourite science fiction series.

 

Little Richard: I Am Everything πŸ“Ή

There is so much to savour in this heartfelt ode to Little Richard. While it falls short of Brett Morgan’s Moonage Daydream, spoiled by too many visual bells and whistles, Lisa CortΓ©s offers fresh perspective on the roots of Southern queerness. Colourful characters like Sugar Foot Sam from Alabam, Billy Wright and Esquerida who went a long way to shaping the artist. To think his first hit record, Tutti Frutti, was penned in tribute to the gifts of anal sex is nothing short of glorious. Yet for all his earth-shattering success, and seismic influence on rock and roll, Richard Wayne Penniman was a man of extreme contradictions, slave to a guilty conscience. One has to wonder whether this tragic conflict is what made his music burst at the seams.

β€œHe was very, very good at liberating other people through his example. He was not very good at liberating himself.” β€” Jason King
 

The Accusation πŸŽ₯

The recent allegations around Russell Brand, categorically laid out in this Guardian podcast, brought Yvan Attal’s recent film into stark relief. Adapted from Karine Tuil’s novel Les Choses Humaines, it explores the very public fallout between two families over allegations of rape. Beyond the immersive window into the French legal system which appears, on the face of it, to mete out justice with rigour, Attal interrogates the gray zone of perspective. Charlotte Gainsbourg and Matthieu Kassovitz are superb as grieving parents, former lovers pitted against themselves by their children. I love the way this #MeToo narrative left me with more questions than answers.
 

Getting Away With It πŸ“š

Steven Soderbergh knows how to tell a story from A to Z. So much so that the independent filmmaker can’t help twist the form this way and that. As divulged in his diary extracts from 1996 alone, he works the festival circuit with Schizopolis (which he stars in) and Gray’s Anatomy (which he directs), tests Nightwatch (a film he co-wrote), performs a rewrite job (Guillermo del Toro’s Mimic), pens a screenplay, sues Scott Rudin over a failed film project, produces an interview book with English filmmaker Richard Lester (featured herein), and mounts Geniuses, a play in Baton Rouge. The bizarre compendium had me howling in catharsis.
 

The Rest Is Politics πŸ“»

This Adam Buxton interview with English comedy legend Jesse Armstrong turned me onto this two-part series on the 20th anniversary of The Iraq War. Hosted by Rory Stewart, a UK diplomat, and Alistair Campbell, former Director of Communications to Tony Blair, it unpacks their shared legacy in the whole affair. Campbell, whose drive (and temper) was inspiration for Peter Capaldi on Armando Ianucci’s The Thick of It, comes off like a new man. Whose hubris has softened with time and perspective. I was captivated by Stewart’s assessment of his legacy, a 30 year old diplomat whose interim role governing an Iraqi province ignited a three-day siege on his Nasiriyah compound.
 

Once Were Warriors πŸŽ₯

Lee Tamahori tears out of the gate with this debut feature, capturing the pain and anguish of Alan Duff’s novel with heart wrenching honesty. From the opening frame, a crane shot tracking from a picturesque billboard of New Zealand to the poverty stricken realities of inner city life, Tamahori sets the score. The Wellington born filmmaker, a descendant of MΓ£ori ancestry, dexterously pivots the kitchen sink drama around the underlying conflict between heritage and promises. While the film straddles a razor sharp line between reality and artifice, Rena Owen anchors the drama as Temuera Morrison twists your insides. One of the best films I’ve laid on South of the Equator. This reunion doco left me all emotional.

 

Hollywood Animal πŸ“š

This Hollywood memoir has had me shaking my head in astounded disbelief. From the get-go, Joe Eszterhas (Flashdance, Basic Instinct) was in a league of his own, a shit-hot screenwriter whose sizeable influence was measured in his six figure paychecks. It was his time as a cub reporter for Jann Wenner’s Rolling Stone that ignited his Hollywood history, a long-form piece on Cleveland trade unions inspiring the 1978 film F.I.S.T. It’s amazing to think that the barbs traded between Eszterhas and Sylvester Stallone (white hot after Rocky) over the film’s origins would sow the seeds of his celebrity. The Hungarian native delivers a magnum opus of an autobiography by simply telling the truth.
 

The Purpose of Life Is Not In The Future πŸ–₯

We’re all guilty of taking life too seriously, especially when it’s not going to plan. As this short clip makes plain, our soul takes the color of our thoughts, and by virtue our choice of words. When we say it’s all running out, we’re unknowingly looking for fulfillment in time (guilty as charged). Yet when we teach ourselves to truly love something, to get lost in our passions, we learn to take back the present moment. I love how Alan Watts doesn’t preach the gifts of meditation to be a better person but to savour life for the sheer hell of it. This ten minute lecture on harnessing Wu Wei, of not forcing anything in life, is ripe food for thought.

β€œNature is a vast celebration of energy.” β€” Alan Watts
 

Inside The Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night πŸ—ž

Nik Cohn’s long-form piece is best remembered for putting John Travolta in a vast array of hip-hugging polyester flares in Saturday Night Fever. It’s easy to see why this Esquire article was snapped up by Robert Stigwood as a star vehicle for the Bee Gees. Cohn’s vivid portrait of youth and the ennui of male angst is particularly palpable. Aimless young men desperate to make something more of their life yet helpless to do anything about it. I love how Travolta channels this vulnerability into the role, as existential self-doubt ruffles his peacock feathers. I’m on the hunt for Mr. Saturday Night. 
 

Jane By Charlotte πŸ“Ή

A nagging thought kept at me as I watched this mother daughter documentary on the final years of Jane Birkin. Just what compelled Charlotte Gainsbourg to share her most intimate relationship with her mother? The answer, delivered in a gentle tone poem of a whisper, struck a nerve. The French actor yearns to arrest the present moment, to grapple with the ravages of time, grief and the burden of legacy. I love how Birkin is an open-book on camera, unsparingly honest about a life lived in the public eye. Gainsbourg’s inspired decision to bring her pre-teen daughter into the resulting story closes the circle. Every ending is a new beginning of sorts.

 

Fred OtashπŸ‘€

When I came across this book review on James Ellroy’s The Enchanters, an immersive look at Marilyn Monroe final months, a shiver went down my spine. I first got lost in the vivid imagination of Ellroy’s Underworld USA trilogy which delivers everything I love in a good book. Glamour, gossip and a good deal of graphic violence. Fred Otash, who heads up his latest book, is the quintessential Ellroy protagonist. A sleazeball former cop turned private eye who was reputed to have the inside scoop on every celebrity under the sun. A key inspiration for Robert Towne’s Chinatown, Otash was unapologetic to the very end, cashing in on his sins with Investigation Hollywood.

β€œI listened to Marilyn Monroe die.” β€” Fred Otash
 

Broken English 🎢 

Marianne Faithfull has long been a footnote in my mind’s eye, the one-time muse to the Rolling Stones. Chris Blackwell’s memoir changed all that, turning me onto this audacious 1979 LP and tuning me into a woman whose unrelenting honesty left me levitating. Faithfull comes off as so much more than an β€˜angel with big tits’, (her manager’s tagline) her acid wit and whisky-soaked vocals proving her worth. With every re-listen, I find something new to sink my teeth into, from her attacks on the Cold War (Broken English) and addiction (Brain Drain) to scorched lovers (Why’d Ya Do It). Faithfull’s legal battles with ex-lovers Mick Jagger and Keith Richards over Sister Morphine surely made great fuel for the fire.

β€œShe sounded like she was telling someone to go and fuck themselves even when she wasn’t.” β€” Alexis Petridis
 

Thanks for reading. To show your support, forward it to someone who’d like it or treat yourself to one of my books.

If you’re seeing this newsletter for the first time, you can read previous issues and subscribe here.
 

WRITING | @jamespillion
FILM | @jamespillionfilm

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Lisboa
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