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      July 20, 2015Fragments of a Shooting ScriptRyan Black

      v.
      sheets of the past can still be evoked and summoned, writes Deleuze. But the images that are drawn from these are now quite useless because they can no longer be inserted into a present which would extend them into action.
      CUT TO:
      66 EXT. WOODHAVEN – DAY
      It’s mid-July, South Queens. A crowd gathers
      on the east side of 78th Street, a film crew
      works on the west. You stand on the corner
      across from Neir’s Tavern, with FRANKIE
      and JO, trying to spot MARTIN SCORSESE.
      The heat’s an irritant, thick as a police officer.
      To cool off you think of winter, of Christmas
      Eve at Neir’s, your father’s red-faced smiles,
      your mother’s booming voice. You think
      of the cartoon reels and bowling lane,
      the plastic mesh stockings stuffed
      with JOLLY RANCHERS, sheets of sugar,
      a HERSHEY BAR.
         And what you are watching
      is artifice, or the staging of artifice.
      What you are watching is ROBERT DE NIRO
      and RAY LIOTTA in custom suits,
      walking down the block, again and again.
      What you are watching is DE NIRO and LIOTTA,
      preceded by GAFFERS unfurling CABLE,
      a KEY GRIP carrying KLIEG LIGHTS,
      WHITE SCREENS, a BOOM POLE
      with a DEAD CAT, two GRIPS backpedaling,
      pulling a DOLLY, and LARRY MCCONKEY
      strapped to a STEDICAM.
      A TECHNICIAN waves to someone
      OFF CAMERA. No, he’s swatting at a fly.
      Bored, you walk to Sal’s for a slice
      and some garlic knots, but the CAMERA
      stays behind. FRANKIE walks home, wakes
      his father from a nap, and the CAMERA
      doesn’t record this. So what then is the subject?
      JO peering through the crowd, SCORSESE
      blocked by a TRANSISTOR. Can the image
      be its own making?
         In fourteen months,
      you’ll sit in the Crossbay Theater,
      with your oldest brother and three of his friends,
      a weekend matinee, the theater full,
      and the illusion of narrative, of shadow and light,
      summer for winter, Queens for Brooklyn,
      will seem as real to you as the murder
      DE NIRO plots in six seconds of screen time,
      walking 78th Street.
      CUT TO:
      67 OMIT

      from #48 - Summer 2015

      Ryan Black

      “I grew up in Woodhaven, South Queens. The J train cuts through the neighborhood like a watercourse, Manhattan bound, and bends into Brooklyn beside Cypress Pool and a churchyard for the Union dead. And most of my work concerns Queens—its history, both public and personal, real and imagined—and what Joan Didion dismisses as ‘the wastes of Queens’—but the work isn’t corrective. I don’t debunk a mythology or challenge misapprehensions, but try to complicate inherited representations of the borough.”

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