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Pizza


Justin Hayward

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So, I made a pizza from scratch last night. I’m not a cook in the sense that I went to school for it or anything like that, but I do enjoy making stuff every once in a while. I figured pizza would be easy. I’ve seen it made and I’ve eaten a ton of it. Dough, sauce, whatever topping, and cheese. That’s pretty much it.

 

It was okay, not bad, but not good. I would have been better off just ordering one. Thing is, I was a bit surprised that it wasn’t very good. I figured its pizza…

 

It got me thinking about filmmaking in general. You grow up with a passion and drive to make movies, so naturally you must be one of the good guys, right? Certainly better than most of the crap we see in theaters. I mean, why would you be so excited by something you’re not great at? So, you assume only the best.

 

Then you actually make something and you find out you’re just okay. Sure, you try to justify it all sorts of ways (they just didn’t get it, I didn’t have enough money… whatever), but in the end the film has to stand on its own. Not on what a pain it was to make.

 

Of course there are the few that actually are naturally really good and the more I work, the more I’m impressed by them. Next time I’ll leave the pizza making up to Lou Malnati.

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Well stated Justin.. however, with the right instruction and after a lot of practice, you could make a heck of a Pizza!... or Film!

 

Your pizza story reminded me (on a totally different level) of Brian Regan's routine on Pop Tarts... if you have not seen it.. get Brian Regan's DVD 'I walked on the Moon'! Hilarious!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :lol: and the beautiful thing is that you can watch that routine with ANYBODY.. including children!

 

Brian Regan

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The other viewpoint would say that you just didn't have the right recipe. There are winning pizze recipes and there are movie recipes such as "take a bunch of good-looking upper teens and send them camping with a serial killer, add equal parts sex and brutal murder, bake until you're rich."

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The other viewpoint would say that you just didn't have the right recipe. There are winning pizze recipes and there are movie recipes such as "take a bunch of good-looking upper teens and send them camping with a serial killer, add equal parts sex and brutal murder, bake until you're rich."

 

 

 

:lol: .... sad but true!

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Yes, but it’s the execution of the recipe that counts. ;)

 

Yes, though some would argue that you need a decent oven to make pizza right, so the tools you use also matter...

 

Pizza and filmmaking do have similarities -- the ingredients seem basic yet each of them has to be good or else the final outcome will be mediocre. The principles behind the making of it seem simple, yet execution is also critical. Tools are basic but also critical.

 

And like pizza, the general public likes it so much that they'll even eat up the mediocre ones.

 

In a conventional oven, I seem to have more success making the Chicago-style deep-dish pizzas from scratch rather than the thin crust type.

 

Tonight I made an odd pasta dish, based on remembering something I had at Italian Kitchen in Vancouver, which was pasta with cabbage, potatoes, and sausage, with garlic & olive oil, a little reduced chicken broth. Now the first time I had it at this restaurant a year ago, they used a type of chorizo, but when I went back in January, they switched to italian sausage.

 

I used a little bit of soy chorizo I had in the fridge -- I find that the chorizo seasonings (the Mexican chorizo, not the hard Spanish chorizo) are so strong that soy chorizo isn't much different in taste than the traditional pork chorizo. Anyway, a little chorizo tossed into the sauted cabbage and potatoes, garlic (I also added a few white beans), then tossing in the pasta, adding some fresh chopped basil at the end (just because I had it in the fridge and needed to use it up), well, it came out pretty good.

 

I'm not sure what that has to do with filmmaking other than you reach a point where you go beyond recipes when you know your ingredients, just as you reach a point where you can go beyond the rules of filmmaking when you understand the principles behind the rules.

 

However, not every experiment is a success, either in filmmaking or cooking. I think you have to judge your failures individually and determine if they were noble ones out of striving to achieve something special, ones that were out of your control, or ones out of a failure of nerve. The last one is the hardest to live with.

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I think those unplanned ingredients that work out can equate to the happy accidents we all welcome.

 

To take your oven metaphor further, David, one could point out that fine pizzas can be made in old woodburning analog ovens and in fancy, new digital electric or gas ovens. In both cases, the oven did not make the pizza.

 

As we go, this pizza/movies metaphor seems better and better.

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I think there are a lot of similarities between food and film culture in general. I've been watching a lot of "Top Chef" lately and there's a lot of talk about "honoring the ingredients", "keeping it simple" and "executing perfectly" as keys to successful dishes. Good dishes are often the result of a brilliant interpretation, layering of complementary or contrasting ideas, and bold choices. And really, really bad dishes are also often the result of bold choices, combined with terrible lapses in judgment. ;)

 

David's story rings true for me. Knowing your ingredients and how those flavors taste together frees you up to experiment with a new ingredient that elevates the whole dish, and similarly knowing your stock, lenses, lights, colors, etc. can free you up enough to try that new filter, or underexpose the stock, or bake the negative in an oven, something that makes the look of a film suddenly soar. It's interesting to me that some filmmakers will stick with only a few "ingredients" throughout their body of work, creating variations on a single theme and perfecting that one "flavor", while others continually strive to expand their palettes, often making terrible mistakes but occasionally creating something truly new and wonderful.

 

I've also been reading chef Daniel Boloud's book "Letters to a Young Chef" and it is startling how much of his advice applies to young cinematographers working their way up the ladder as well. The two industries really do have a lot in common.

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Good dishes are often the result of a brilliant interpretation, layering of complementary or contrasting ideas, and bold choices. And really, really bad dishes are also often the result of bold choices, combined with terrible lapses in judgment. ;)

 

Count me in for the latter…

 

Although, I heated up the leftovers and they were pretty good. Go figure that one out. :blink:

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To take your oven metaphor further, David, one could point out that fine pizzas can be made in old woodburning analog ovens and in fancy, new digital electric or gas ovens. In both cases, the oven did not make the pizza.

 

A basic home oven doesn't get hot enough to properly cook a pizza crust.

 

To get the crust crisp outside while staying chewy on the inside, one needs a very high temperature.

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Guys, while there are some interesting parallels here, there is an old Muslim saying (which is ironic because it is analogy in and unto itself) that analogies are the tools of the devil.

 

I've heard many convincing analogies and arguements used to "prove" why the Garden of Eden had to be real (even though it was a badly plagiarized Babylonian fable about Gilgamesh in the Garden of Eden).

 

To take the analogy one step further, keeping that all in mind now, I know people that swear they CAN tell the difference between wood-fired stoves, and charcoal and gas, and electric stoves. I knoow a guy that will never cook anything for HIMSELF in a microwave, but takes a "devil-may-care" attitude when cooking for othesr because most "commoners" can't tell the difference. Were I to have that fine a palette for food, which I don't, I would want to pass along the same fantastic tastes to those who weren't as refined as I.

 

My one oven-fired (wood) pizza, that I had at a Holiday Inn in Canada, believe it or not, I definitely did like the smokey texture of more. Keep in mind now, that anything that is burned in any way is carcinogenic, like cigarette smoke, though. I have similar troubles with throwing out 50+ feet of film as "waste" or people not recycling film and chemistry, or shooting stupid stupid poop on film when poor indies are struggling to scrape enough money together to FINISH their movies.

 

To summarize, I cannot tell the difference between analog vs. digital recordings, but I can tell the difference between LP and vinyl. IDK what process or "Ingredients" are involved with one vs. the other, but remembering that often times the final product is compromised, I'd want to put as much good stuff in a dish as I could (if someone else were keeping it warm until it got served) to add in as safety factor. So, maybe be a little bit paranoid and fore-thinking about it and realize that some people are more critical than you are and ultimately you are putting together something that hopefully will stand the test of time and bespeak the century in which we live.

 

Food is in the now, but film speaks the the future. It is as much a testament to reality as it is a testament to how those of us who live in the here and now experience said reality.

 

To blatantly plagiarize & paraphrase Don Draper from Mad Men, "There is the rare opportunity to connect with the customer on a personal level: Nostalgia. It's delicate, but it's there. [. . .] [MOVIES] take us to a place where we YEARN to be again. Around and around and around, and back home again."

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To carry the pizza and film analogy a bit further: Some of the best pizza on the face of the earth is at Mata's Greek Pizza in Anniston, Alabama. Founded by a retired Greek couple from Lowell, MA who moved to Anniston to be close to their medical professional daughter in her first real job (very Greek thing to do). After a while they got bored and went looking for something to do. The wife had always made a very Greek flavored pizza at home so the husband bought a run down restaurant, a fortune in real bread making gear (everything in the kitchen said "Hobart" on it),...and within weeks of their opening you couldn't get in the place on weekends.

 

The magic inqredients? They use Wisconsin brick cheese on the pizzas which adds a little aged cheese taste, a really well worked out dough recipe (When Mata still made the bread she would get upset if the customers didn't all the bread, including the crust...and query them as to what was wrong), and a lot of the toppings came from something Greek, like the meatballs were a Greek recipe.

 

Recognize the common strain with film-making? They were totally invested in what they produced, used the best equipment available, used elements to make the pizzas that were part of their culture and well understood by them...and they got upset when the customers (critics) didn't like what they were producing.

 

And the husband liked to teach, much like many film-makers, but not without teasing. I knew he made his own Greek salad dressing (which was to die for) and asked him what was in it. He told me he wouldn't tell me how to make it but he truthfully answer any questions I asked him about it. He became the Greek Salad Oracle to me. I finally got there, some of the ingredients are obvious, good vinegar, olive oil, and others. A trick with the oil was to mix it about 50-50 with regular salad oil, his opinion was that olive oil is a bit too strong for salads. Obviously oregano, white pepper, salt, etc. There were a couple of ingredients that I feel I have to honor the Oracle's bargain...ask me if something's there and I won't lie.

 

PS: I did most of my growing up and went to grad school in Chicago, I've eaten in the original Uno's and Due's and know what great Chicago style pizza is like...but like Mata's the most. (You didn't know there was once a Due's? Uno's was more of a bar and Due's was more of a family restaurant.)

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A basic home oven doesn't get hot enough to properly cook a pizza crust.

 

To get the crust crisp outside while staying chewy on the inside, one needs a very high temperature.

 

I had no idea that I have a prosumer oven.

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...But what if you're a vegan?

 

This thread cracks me up in so many ways. I <3 cine.com!

 

I have to admit that one of the best meals I ever ate was a homemade meal prepared by a vegan friend of my wife's. The most memorable dish was a salad prepared from freshly picked day lily buds. Yummy!

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