From this week's Charleston City Paper:

Lights, camera, Gibbes

Following the success of last year's inaugural Night of Short Films, organized by City Paper contributor Nick Smith, the Gibbes Museum of Art is reprising the event in May, and they're looking to make your movie part of it.

Whether your interests lie in dark humor, the gentler touch of romance, horror, or even foreign language film, any genre is welcome as long as it's original.

Taking place on the evening of May 4 in the rear courtyard of the Gibbes, the second Night of Short Films will mix the visual with the virtual by making the event concurrent with the Janet Biggs exhibition of video installations Like Tears in Rain, on view in the Gibbes' Rotunda May 4-Aug. 12.

Smith says films should fit a theme of "freedom of expression and free will" this time around. Entries are welcome on DVD and must be received by April 10.

There's no submission fee, and the previous Night of Short Films supplied refreshments and a free screening of the winning flicks, making the project a mission worth any movie buff's time.

So get writing and start those cameras rolling. For more information, contact the Gibbes Museum at 722-2706 x38.

Just finished reading Midnight Express, Billy Hayes' acount of his imprisonment in a Turkish jail for trying to smuggle a wee bit of hash out of the country. I shouldn't be spending any time reading at the moment, what with deadlines and all, but this book was so compelling that I read the whole thing in a week (that's fast for a slow reader like me, who likes to linger over every word like a foot fetishist cruising a shoe store).

I checked out the book because I wanted to see how Oliver Stone had adapted it as a screenplay (filmed by Alan Parker in the '70s). It's very different. Who could have imagined back then that Stone would twist the truth in his quest to tell an entertaining cinematic story?

I also say Stone's student film, Last Year in Viet Nam. It's grubby and mistake-laden enough to keep me hopeful about my own endeavors. No, I'm not going to remake JFK, but I wouldn't mind taking a crack at The Hand - Stone's early directorial effort starring Michael Caine and a crawling, bodiless killer mitt.

Why not, with all the horror retreads that are around these days? (I still haven't the stomach to watch John Carpenter remakes - I love the original versions of The Fog and Assault on Precinct 13 too much).

Computer woes

Don't you just love computers? They have made our lives so much easier, make us wiser with instant access to worldwide knowledge, speed things up with instant access... until they go wrong.

For me, weeks of work were lost with one pop of a file. I've had to redo a lot of the editing I'd been working on this year. However, although I haven't slept in days and the work is painstaking, the end result will probably be better because of the wipe.

I used to get excited towards the end of writing my novels and forget to save as I wrote the last chapter. Time after time, the little Amstrad word processor I used would gobble up all the pages as if it wanted to break my little heart. Still, I'd stoically rewrite the last chapter (at least) from scratch. I like to tell myself that the second draft was always better.

So it is with movie editing - the second version is tighter and more cinematic. I hope. But this go round, I'm saving my work each time I edit a shot.