Today, I bought a computer. Again. For like, the ninetieth time of my life. I don’t just buy computers. I collect them. Yeah, I’ve got a Franklin Ace 1000 (c. 1982) in my storage room. So what? It’s a passion.
In celebration of my latest purchase, I’ve decided to leave all of the serious bloviating behind for a bit and talk about gear.
I love gear. When you hang around people who work with gear, nothing’s more interesting to me than to hear them descend into their patois about their gadgets and gizmos and preferences and hates. I’ll sit and listen to two DP’s talk about the merits of one bit of ground glass over another, one light meter over another, one camera body over another. I’ll listen to grips talk about clamps. I’ll listen to the wardrobe department debate stitch rippers. I really don’t care. I just enjoy the minutia of gear.
We writers don’t really have specific gear, but why should that stop us from having fun? I present to you my List Of Screenwriting Gear. Some of it is cheap. Some of it is expensive. I use all of it.
We begin, naturally, with the laptop. Specifically, the one I purchased today. This is the 17” MacBook Pro, the perfect fusion of OS X and Windows XP operability. It’s sleek and light with a beautiful keyboard feel (and a lovely keyboard sound), a spectacularly bright and clean LCD wide enough to hold two script pages side-by-side, and boy howdy is it fast. Laptops are essential for screenwriting, because our job hopefully takes us places. I’ve got a ThinkPad that I used to use when I needed to run something in XP. It’s plastic and lame, with a cheap feel, cheap keyboard and a dismal LCD that looks bad in any condition and from practically any eyeline. If you’re a screenwriter, treat yourself to the proper tool. Now that Apple has switched to Intel chips, you don’t have any excuse.
While you’re at it, consider making a proper home base for your laptop by hooking it into an Apple Cinema Display. Protect your carpal tunnels like Craiggy does by using an ergonomic keyboard. If you’re not used to a split keyboard, it might feel weird for about a day. You’ll thank me later. Finally, tack on the King Of All Trackballs, the Expert Mouse.
By the way, I’ve been using the same damned square piece of neoprene as a wrist rest for about ten years now (it’s getting a bit nasty). Can anyone point me to SOMEONE who sells these things? I don’t want a jelly pad. I want neoprene. A square. About an inch thick.
We may use our brains for a living, but that doesn’t mean we can neglect our spines, or even worse, our asses. Like everyone else, I sit in an Aeron chair. No other chair matters. But what about a desk? After much searching (in a desperate attempt to spend as much as possible on a computer desk), I purchased the Biomorph Maxo. Apart from being massive, it has a split level keyboard platform that is freely articulating and independently adjustable from the desktop (i.e. the distance between the keyboard and the desk is not fixed). Combine that with a chain-drive crank to raise and lower the desk in its entirety, and I’m in love. Be warned; it’s not fun to assemble. Having done it, I’d recommend shelling out the extra dough to have the company assemble it for you in your home. Be further warned; it weighs more than Saturn. Literally. I checked.
I know a lot of writers enjoy listening to music while they work. I’m not one of them. I prefer silence. If I can’t have silence, I prefer a total cacophany. As long as I can’t pick out specific noises, I’m fine. Sometimes I use my Bose QuietComfort headphones to drown out the sounds around me, but I also like to use a simple Sound Soother, which offers me a choices like crickets (annoying), heartbeats (too Poe-ish) or white noise(just right).
I have two printers. The first is my workhorse, pictured at right, the Brother HL-1440. I love this thing because it’s cheap and stupid. For around $125, you get a reliable printer that gives you black and white text at fifteen pages per minute…and that’s it. Nothing else. That makes me happy.
Of course, if I want to go totally mobile, I’ve got a Canon Pixma ip90. Ted turned me on to this little sumbitch. It’s totally portable, operating off a battery and bluetooth. It works. It doesn’t work perfectly, but when I’m on the soundstage and I feel like printing out five pages of dialogue, it sure beats handing my laptop over to a P.A. with greasy hands to go run it over to the office, connect it to a printer, call me on a cell phone ten minutes later to ask me why it’s only printing one page, yadda yadda.
But hey, I promised you some cheap gear, right?
Any real success I’ve had as a writer has been when I stepped away from all the fancy stuff and used this thing on these. They’re not sexy, but I’d be lost without them.
Posted by Craig Mazin at 02:17 PM in Miscellany
