I came across this article about the artist Tony Romano and his new show “a fist full of flies,” currently showing at the Diaz Contemporary gallery.
Says the article:
His past film work has both elided storytelling, and extracted it from unlikely sources. For 2007’s Goodnight, My Love, Romano offered an aerial view of Toronto, circling in a lazy spiral as the city shifted from dusk into darkness; the whole thing was set to a sadly sweet, mandolin-plucked version of “The Maple Leaf Forever.”
Meanwhile, 2006’s Last Act took the near narrative-free – one would assume – script of a pornographic film and re-created it scene-by-scene, minus the naughty bits. The result is the tidy arc of a surprisingly tender story, pulled off guilelessly and without a hint of irony.
His new show features collages of discarded Hollywood movie posters. As you can see from the one I’ve posted, it includes the familiar crimson scrawl of Apocalypse Now to advertise a movie featuring a terrier riding the back of a friendly dolphin.
As an exercise:
Choose a movie from a different genre from your own. If you were asked to combine them, how would the new story look? What’s changed? Is your main character different now? How about your villain? Have you had to add characters? Or drop them? Does your title still work?
