The second post for today is directly linked with the previous one since it mainly focuses on film, fashion and, well, death.
In January I had a chat with a few friends of mine working for different printed magazines, complaining about the crisis, advertisers and...bloggers.
After a few weeks, these topics became "popular" also at other magazines I collaborated with, so, in March, I started focusing on an idea for a film (to submit it to a film board in Italy in April) that touched upon different themes such as media, power, new means of communication, fashion and death. The film is provisionally entitled Blogging Death and you can download the first few pages of the script by clicking on this link
Download BloggingDeath_2010_byABattista. This is the synopsis instead:
Blogging Death
Things aren’t going well at Embryo Concepts (EC) magazine. A seminal monthly magazine about art and fashion and an arbiter of style, ideas and substance for decades, the magazine (that takes its name from the magazine where Jo Stockton worked in Funny Face) has seen its readership quickly waning in the last few months. What’s worse though is that, together with its readers, also the advertisers are backing out.
Yet this crisis is not to blame on the staff, but on a change in trends: readers seem to favour short image-led features in blog style to the intense features that made EC popular in the 90s. Besides, advertisers are also turning the attention to young high profile bloggers - new style arbiters - easily satisfied by receiving occasional presents and small sums of money to promote specific products.
Worried about the situation, EC editor Meg Thompson summons up an emergency meeting with the staff to talk about ideas to re-launch the magazine with a special issue focusing on the death/rebirth of the printed magazine.
The brainstorming session seems to be rather fruitless, until Valentina, the women’s wear section editor suggests to kill all bloggers. The remark suddenly sounds like a good idea to Will, the photographer, who suggests an entire photo shoot featuring real corpses of young and hip bloggers, entitled “Blogging Death”. How to find the corpses? Simple, the team of editors will turn into a team of rather inventive killers, each going his or her own way to take their revenge upon the bloggers who have stolen their readership and advertisers. Surprisingly, each editor becomes more inventive in staging the murders and a dark past involving some of them emerges.
Like in Mario Bava’s Sei donne per l’assassino (Blood and Black Lace), each death is presented like a different creation from the next season’s collections. Former war correspondent Valentina teams up with Patrick to stage a murder in American Psycho-style involving a Haute Couture gown drenched in poison; music editor Pascal travels back to the South of Italy to speak to a “taranta” expert and kill his victim with an ecstatic trance; Meg, the editor in chief rediscovers instead her links with a long-forgotten relative, uncle Vincenzo, a dangerous mafia boss.
As the staff turns into a team of cold-blooded criminals, the film becomes a commentary upon the state of the fashion industry, journalism and publishing.
Will the “Blogging Death” photo shoot really give a new life to Embryo Concepts or actually "kill" it forever, landing the entire staff in jail?Image: David Bailey, Human Skull with Blue Rose, 2009
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