Cleansed

I’m not a religious person. I used to consider myself spiritual, during my younger, more pretentious days, but when you get right down to it, I don’t know that I have much in the way of a belief system. I believe in Karma, as far as balance goes, and I consider myself to be superstitious, but only because I have the kind of luck that seems to indicate that the Universe likes having fun at my expense. So I will actively knock on wood after I express a hope or a goal. As Swearingen said on Deadwood, “The best way to hear God laugh is to state your intentions.” That being said, I don’t know if I believe in God or if it’s simply a knee-jerk reaction ingrained by years of Catholic school and a devout grandmother.

To counter that, the people closest to me, namely Amy and Bill, are practicing Wiccans. They believe in little rituals that seem to work out well for them. I understand energy and, to an extent, quantum mechanics. I know that “mind over matter” is a truth because of the way energy can be acted upon by other energy. Your mind and will can affect an outcome because it’s a tug-of-war between different waves of energy. In short, “it’s all about your attitude”. It’s not a cure-all, but a positive outlook can affect the world around you in a positive way, if only emotionally.

With all that in mind, Amy helped me conduct a cleansing ritual on Tuesday night. Since it was the night of the New Moon, she told me, it was the perfect time to rid myself of some negativity that has been plaguing me, and us, for the last few months.

I’ve mentioned here that 2005 saw a potentially wonderful business deal go South for us due to the arrogant greed and dishonesty of some folks we were involved with. I won’t go into detail; it’s not worth it and it would go counter to all of our efforts on Tuesday. Suffice to say, money was owed to me for my services and I’d spent a great deal of time negotiating, cajoling, threatening and begging in order to get it. This is nothing new. I’m often owed money and I was very worried that this situation would rival the disaster that Femme Fatale turned out to be just before it was sold to the current owning entity (i.e. that I would never see what was owed to me).

But, to my surprise, my debtors turned out to be men of their words, at least as far as the money was concerned, and my final check arrived. This meant a great deal to us as we could now afford to pay some bills and upgrade our equipment—putting what I was considering “blood money” to positive use.

I made a photocopy of the check and deposited it. When Amy got home, we gathered up all the email received from these gentlemen, all the documents and drafts of scripts, ad copy—anything we could find—and, as the sun went down, we burned it all. With each handful of paper shoved into the fire, we said goodbye to empty promises, to ill feelings, to broken promises and false friendships, and to out-and-out lies told to our faces. We said goodbye to the arrogance we exhibited when backed into a corner; to the wasted time; to the wasted energy; to the anger and bitterness and jealousy and slander and wrongs both committed and inferred. And contempt. And resentment. We burned it all away. It was supposed to make me feel better.

I didn’t though. Not right away. The next morning, though, I felt more positive than I had in a long while. I no longer felt the urge to gripe about the situation or the people involved, or to flap my arms in frustration and rage.

It was over.

The money cleared, plans were made to edge our own projects forward again. I sent emails out to thank them for their prompt efforts and received a short “You’re Welcome” in return.

And now it’s all behind us. Neither party has to deal with the other ever again.

I’ll catch myself going over the events and working myself up again. So there’s still some resentment left in the Pandora’s Box of my psyche, but that’s just wounded ego. It’ll heal over provided I move forward. Of course, I never stopped moving forward, but now I can take bigger strides.

There’s still ill-will on both sides—how could there not be? But now it’s not the main focus of my energies.

So was it the spirituality of the cleansing, or was it the simple, consumer’s approach that the money cleared? Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. I’m free. They’re free of me. All is well again. I’m no more or less paranoid than I was before the problems, and the people who know me in the industry still trust and respect me. I didn’t lose—if anything, I came out ahead.

Whatever it was, I can’t deny that I, like all other humans, need certain rituals. Call it what you want: closure, magick, therapy, placebo, whatever. Even blogs are ritualistic, albeit public. All I know is, I feel better with this behind me and a clean slate in front of me. And ultimately, what difference does it make where this feeling of freedom came from. If it was God’s doing, I’m grateful. If it was Karma, then the balancing act works. Whatever.
I’m free again.

Happy Cloud Pictures returns to filmmaking!

Woke up this morning in enormous pain. I discovered over the weekend that I either need a new cameraman or a time machine.

We spent all day Saturday shooting our segment for JD Casey’s anthology, Brinke’s Tales of Terror. Our short, starring the usual Happy Cloud Pictures suspects (Amy, Charlie Fleming, Bill Homan, Nic Pesante, Tim Gross and Jeff Waltrowski), takes place in a back-room poker game. The best location we could find was the upper bedroom of Amy’s mother’s spare house. This tiny dwelling, where Amy grew up, coincidentally enough, is located on a steep hill in one of the nicer sections of Mount Oliver, across from one of the creepiest cemeteries in existence. The bedroom is roughly fifteen feet long by ten feet wide—not a great deal of room after we loaded in four actors, chairs, a card table and a trio of lights. At one point, I had Tim gripping for me, moving the primary light stand to accommodate my composition, but after a while it became clear that there just wasn’t enough room. Tim was just one more thing for me to frame out, though I really appreciated his help while he was there.

Eventually, it was just me and the actors. I couldn’t even use a tripod for most of the shots and simply went hand-held for the rest of the day. For six hours, I crouched, squatted, angled, craned and boomed with only the power of my legs and spine, using the walls behind for support when I could. Scene was dialogue-heavy, so I had the added pleasure of trying to avoid a room full of loose boards that would creak and overpower the dialogue like sonic booms. Added to my misery was a dying shotgun mike that, I discovered later, had added a hum over every line. This on top of a section where it had been bumped into the “off” position and I hadn’t caught it until after we’d shot four pages of script.

Not nearly the auspicious resuming of our career that we’d hoped.

Now, I’m fairly certain that if I can’t remove the hum in Premiere, a session of ADR won’t be so awful. I have a lavalier mic that works brilliantly, so it’ll just be a matter of getting the actors together to reloop their lines. I shot a lot of coverage and cut-aways, so perfect synch won’t be that much of an issue. We have some investor money coming soon, so we’ll be able to replace the dying Realistic mic with a nice Audiotechnica or a Senheiser (preferably), when we upgrade our camera equipment at the end of next month. Which will mean more for our future projects than our current ones. I just hate the fact that we can never just do anything once (echoes of The Resurrection Game here).

We had plenty of help Saturday, which was terrific. We just didn’t have the room for everyone. Tim, Carolyn Olvier and Shelli were relegated to the freezing downstairs quadrants for the most part (freezing as we couldn’t keep the furnace on in the house—the roar was overpowering and it turned the room we were using into an oven). There was some complaining at the beginning of the day from a few voices that our actors were late—crew call was 10am, actors at 11, but some of our crew don’t understand “pre-prep” time and think that we should be ready to roll film the minute they walk onto the set. But this is a common complaint that Amy and I are used to. The actors all arrived at the time we needed them, and we even had a rare rehearsal session, going through the script all the way. As we’ve learned in the past, it’s best if Amy works with the actors and I work with the crew and technical ends of things. Sadly, with the lack of space, the crew, as I said, became me by about noon, and that’s where all the audio mistakes were made. Ah well. (Oh, and check out Tim's coverage of the weekend at the appropriately-titled Bastards of Horror.)

We had two make-up artists working with us for the first time. Carlos Savant, a former Douglas School student I’d met at Horrorfind last year, showed up on one of his first days back from a very long car trip to his family home in New Orleans. Kirk Owen I’d met through Don Bumgarner and Tom Luhtula of Cleveland F/X and re-met just a few days prior at Don’s place (picking up gelatin fingers and a foam “lead pipe” for key sequences). I was happy to have them, and they quickly caught on to our speed of filming. We had three actors who needed several stages of make-up throughout the day and Bill only had three hours of shooting time before he had to leave for work. He took care of his own make-up while Carlos and Kirk tackled Nic and Charlie (kudos in particular to Carlos’ paint job on Nic—I was certain, even through the camera, that his make-up was three-dimensional until a closer look revealed his wounds to be mere paint! (?!)).

Later, the poker scenes were done and we moved onto a pair of murder scenes. An exhausted Charlie accidentally clocked Jeff Waltrowski in the face while rehearsing. Suddenly, the whole room erupted into something out of the Simpsons (‘Not Lenny! Anyone but Lenny!’) where they all chimed in on who they would have preferred to have seen punched in the face. Nic and I were tied, I think.

A few minutes later, we’d moved onto a gun gag with a live pistol and a prepped ‘blank’ shell (courtesy of Bill and his patented projectile-free blanks)—safe but awful noisy. Everyone was concerned that a gunshot would send a neighbor to the cops. I doubted that. “Not in this neighborhood,” I said, “after only one gunshot.”

In all, we’d shot fifteen pages of script in about six hours. I’m a terribly insecure DP, but I was incredibly pleased with the footage, despite the dismayingly persistent hum. Our speed and the results cheered me up immensely. This was the first project we’d shot in over a year (Charlie’s entertaining Cannibal Aneurysm notwithstanding) and I was thrilled—I think Happy Cloud Pictures is back in the groove. (We’ve always shot fast. On The Resurrection Game, we once managed 42 distinct camera set-ups in a single 10-hour day. When I hear about other directors who require twenty-plus takes and only get a page or so shot, I start to feel like a slacker. But moving fast is what keeps our core group coming back, and it’s what has a lot of producers and distributors giving us serious consideration to produce for them. So maybe we’re on to something. All I know is, I like getting done as much as humanly possible. We treat our cast and crew pretty well, even when it’s just the HCP family—we feed them, we try to pay everyone for their time—and we work to make sure no one is sitting around bored for too long. Just the same, by the end of that six hours, my spine was in a square knot, I hadn’t eaten or drunk anything since noon, and I hadn’t gone to the bathroom since I’d left the house that morning. So slacker I am definitely not. Lunatic, maybe.)

But by the time we were ready to leave, the muscles in my back and legs were screaming. My prior rotator-cuff injury courtesy of the post office usually keeps me in pain, but this was above and beyond what I was used to.

The next day, Amy and I drove back into Pittsburgh to sit in on an audition being held by Jeff Waltrowski and Steve Foland (along with their partner, Mike Cinceri) for their next project, The Host. As I loathe and despise auditions (the whole process—holding them, attending them, planning them), I like to piggy-back as often as possible. Out of the dozen or so people we saw during the day, there were about four I really want to work with in the future. Plus, it was cool to hang out with Jeff and Steve for the day, even though all Jeff did was whine about how Charlie actually punched him the day before (kidding, Jeff! Thanks for being a trooper!). To Jeff’s defense, Charlie really nailed him. Of course, if Jeff had had the foresight of attending a Catholic grade-school, he’d have learned how to take a punch in the first place.

Which brings us to today. I’d had all these plans for today—cleaning out the garage, repairing a hole in the garage door created by some woodland creature or other—but when I woke up, I discovered that I could barely walk. My legs and ankles are in agony and my back has me virtually doubled-over. I’m lucky I can breathe at this point.

So this is the sacrifice for some really nice photography.

Now, for our next feature, we’re planning on using this house again, but Bill is in the process of building a little Steadicam for me, so I’ll have some back-support in the future. We won’t have to stay as tight, either. Of course, I’ll be using a new camera on the next movie, instead of my neat, compact GL-1, so I don’t know what adjustments that will require. We’ll be starting off with all new equipment, sound and camera, along with our new light kit, a new Century Stand (yeah, I’m a film geek! Bite me.), all courtesy of a few investors who believe in our company.

But I think I should just come to terms with the fact that I’m not in my 20s anymore. Stuntwork leaves me sore for days, I knew that, but camerawork? I have to stretch before I can do some handheld photography? Who knew?

****
In extremely sad news, Darren McGavin, the great Carl Kolchak, the beloved ‘Old Man’ from A Christmas Story, died this past Saturday. He’d been sick for a long time, so the news didn’t come as a surprise, but I was still harboring the pipe dream of having him as a guest at Genghis Con II: The Wrath of Con. But that won’t come to pass… RIP Mr. M. You’ll always be Kolchak to me.

****
As I hobble around like an 80-year-old man, I’m trying to get stuff ready for this weekend. Amy and I are guests at the Fangoria Weekend of Horrors (special thanks to Adam Malin of Creation Entertainment and Fangoria's Tony Timpone and Tom DeFeo for accomodating us!) Fangoria Weekend of Horrors in Chicago, where the main focus, for us, will be meeting the cast of James Gunn’s Slither. I just conducted an interview with Gunn for Film Threat (I’ll announce it here as soon as it’s up) and the next issue of Sirens of Cinema will profile both Jenna Fischer (Gunn’s lovely wife and the star of The Office) and Liz Banks (Slither’s female lead and Spider-Man’s Betty Brant). But even more exciting will be getting the chance to meet Firefly’s Nathan Fillion. Amy’s actually a little star-struck at the opportunity, which is kinda cute, considering how blasé she usually is at these things (I think Danny Trejo was the last actor she was this excited about meeting).

Just a few thoughts

I sat down to write something specific, but damned if I can remember what it was. I feel like a grafitti-artist with writer's block (ever see a wall covered with "Um... okay, I ... no... wait..."?).

Got the new issue of Sirens of Cinema out to our new layout artist. It was a chore again, but this time the fault lay with having too much content, instead of not enough. For the first time, I found myself faced with having to bump pieces to the next issue. Having had this done to me countless times in the past by countless editors, I now understand the power and rush that comes with having the fate of someone's work in my hands. I should have bumped everything! Just because I could! (Insert evil laugh here.)

I'm kidding! Don't hit me!

Hopefully, we made all the right choices and we'll see the magazine on the stands by the end of March.

Amy and I are working out the final details of Genghis Con II: The Wrath of Con (TM), and finally locked down a date with the hotel. Look for a new announcement and an updated website very soon. (Thanks, JimmyO!)

We're shooting a new short this weekend. It's either going to be called High Stakes or Dead Man's Hand, as soon as we make a decision. It's for JD Casey's upcoming anthology, Brinke's Tales of Terror, starring the inimitable Brinke Stevens. This is the first thing we've shot as a company in over a year, and it was terrific to get behind the camera again last Saturday when we shot a quick sequence of our partner Bill Homan strangling his fiancee, Gwendolyn. It felt natural and right (not Bill strangling Gwen... well, yeah, that too) and I can't wait for Saturday. All of our usual suspects will be on hand - Charlie Fleming, Nic Pesante, Tim Gross, Jeff Waltrowski - and some new artists, Carlos Savant and Kirk Owen, to help us with the red stuff.

Finally, got a new review for The Resurrection Game. It's the closest we've ever come to a negative review, and it's mostly glowing. Everyone keep your fingers crossed - we have it with a new distributor. If they like it, our long, long road has come to an end. And wouldn't that be loverly?

I renew my acquaintence with George Stevens

Last week I was in Big Lots of all places when I came across the DVD of George Stevens: A Filmmaker’s Journey. I snatched it up immediately. Not because I’m a great admirer of the director (though I am), or because it was a great price ($4.99), but because I worked on it. And I wasn’t aware it even existed.

Several years ago, I worked for WRS Film and Video Lab, just outside of Pittsburgh. I worked in the Optical Printing department alongside my good friend, Ray Yeo. I sucked at the job. I sucked at just about everything I did there. I understood the technical aspects of what I as there to do—from printing on the decrepit Oxberry to the monsterous, proprietary Tri-Op (which was designed to put three-strip Technicolor negatives back together), film inspecting, Photoguard (a horrifying chemical machine)—but just couldn’t make the magic happen.

The work environment was miserable. We operated out of a former Armor meat-packing plant. With the constant cloud of chemical hanging in the air, to the complete lack of sunlight in the cavernous building, to the necessary dark and dim conditions, it was like working in a submarine. I was sick all the time—the chemicals, many of them out-dated and some of them illegal to work with—got into my lungs and gave me a persistent cough and would strip the upper layer of skin from my tongue. I had frequent migraines and occasional nose-bleeds. My hands were always shredded from handling the endless rolls of film on the rewind cranks.

But I was surrounded by film.
WRS also had a warehouse that stored original negatives. I got to actually handle the original negatives for things like the original The Thomas Crown Affair, The Magnificent Seven, Night of the Living Dead, Orson Wells’ Othello, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Raven, A Hole in the Head, and The Seven-Year Itch. During the course of my stay there, I remade sections of Vera Cruz and A Hole in the Head. And for a few weeks, I photographed deteriorating sections of George Steven’s original 16mm footage of his time in World War II.

Stevens, who’d directed Gunga Din and Penny Serenade, headed up a “combat motion picture unit from 1944 to 1946” in the Army Signal Corps. His division shot the Normandy landings, and the liberation of Paris. The part that I worked on, pulling sections and rephotographing sections late at night, was the liberation of the Nazi prison camp, Dachau. My fellow co-workers kept referring to it as “the Auschwitz footage”, and though I knew it was Dachau, I started referring to it the same way. This was the stuff that had been used during the Nuremberg trials! It had inspired him to form “Liberty Films” with Capra and William Wyler. Many think that the things he’d seen in Germany were what inspired his attention to detail in character in his later films.

Stevens had shot the only color footage of the War, and sometimes during those late-night shifts in the dark back Optical room, I was the only one in the building. Just me and the horrible Oxberry machine—a pre-war monstrosity itself—chugging away and fouling up, conspiring to keep me later. Now and then I would have to stop the machine and look into the view finder to check where I was, make sure nothing had slipped in the gate. Several of those times, I would find myself looking at the piles of bodies left behind by the Nazis prior to Stevens’ unit’s arrival. I was haunted by just a few of these images, in still form. I can only imagine what Stevens went through, seeing it before the rest of the world in living detail.

I was alone in that room with history.

When I found myself enjoying my job, it was because I was surrounded by all these wonderful films—particularly the original negatives, handled by the artists themselves, the single degree removed from the people who made them. The original Night of the Living Dead—one degree from the people it had captured. That negative had been, obviously, in the room when Romero shot it. And it wasn’t on a television or in a theater, it was in my hands!

Very few of the people who worked there gave a shit about movies one way or another. It was just a job to them. And it was a miserable job, for the most part. The man who owned the place was a crook and a tyrant. The wages were ridiculously low. We were all technicians treated like gorillas. Most folks would have been just as satisfied working on cars, computers, or any other assembly line.

The all uniformly hated taking their terms working in the warehouse. It’s boring, was the usual complaint. But that’s where I was happiest. Lost among the shelves lined with the movies.

What I couldn’t get across to most people there—what I can’t really get across to anyone now—is that movies are important. They resonate in our culture the way that literature and music used to. Art, even committed by committee, of any form, is important. Movies aren’t fleeting like live theater or sporting events. It’s permanent, and reflects our changing society. It is a mirror of all of us. And even the worst can be wonderful to some degree, if you truly love the form.

In the dark and inconceivably dirty warehouse (dirt, like every other element, destroys film; and the warehouse was supposed to be temperature-controlled, but it always seemed too hot or cold in there), I was among art history. And 90% of the titles I saw, I not only recognized, but usually had seen in one form or another.

Most of my co-workers thought I was weird. For my passion for the movies, for my passion for the job (despite my ineptitude at virtually every position). I had wanted to try my hand in every aspect of the job and had done just about everything there to one degree. I had cut negative, hot spliced, ran the film cleaner, worked in the video lab across the hall, ran the antiquated animation table (I animated the title crawl for John Russo’s ill-advised Night of the Living Dead: The 30th Anniversary—I’d even done some color correction (despite my red/green color blindness). I worked endlessly making new negatives for a horrible and oddly soul-killing Jesus project that a lunatic Christian company had distributed to every company in the world.

And even when I hated being there, part of me loved it. Because movies are important. So I picked up this George Stevens DVD to remind me of my hellish time at WRS. And to remind me of why I make movies (or try to). Not for the financial reward, clearly. But to bring something to life that hadn’t been there before me. To maybe inspire others to do it. To leave my footprint in the sand.

Movies are important.

Eric Thornett

There's something extremely wrong with Eric Thornett. I have a number of theories. My primary one is that he slept in a crib just coated with lead-based paint. Not as a baby, mind you, but as an adolescent. And possibly an adult. I have it on good authority that he slept on the floor as a teenager - not because he didn't have a bed. He did. He just chose to sleep beside it.

Anyway, Eric has an odd fascination with me. And tells constant lies about me. And often mentions me in full, derogatory sentences. Or derogatorily in passing.

Anyway, here are some of his most recent ramblings:

"An Ode to an Empty Convention Room" - where he harasses Debbie Rochon and Joe Bob Briggs.

"Adventures at a Nerd Convention" - where he showed up at Genghis Con and harassed the rest of the people I knew (where the photos for the "Ode" were taken, not so coincidently).

If you check out the rest of his site, you'll see that he's been harassing me for years. If his movies - particularly Shockheaded - weren't so amazing and well-done, I'd probably have killed him by now. Or, at least, hurt his feelings more than I usually do. Plus, there's a post on there that claims to have been written by Klinton Spilsbury, star of The Legend of the Lone Ranger, and if it's true, it can't possibly be something to recommend.
...
It's snowing here... a lot. Not as much as it did in New York, it seems, for which, I'm grateful. Don't like snow... I have the opinion that most human beings are just a hairs-breadth away from cannibalism as it is. So all it would take is a single heavy-snow (or, lets face it, a really long red light) to make them start eating each other. Not that I think that would be a particularly bad thing, but I know for a fact that Americans are too lazy to follow recipes.

I wanted goats!

We finally moved the horses up to our land - well, up to the land across the road from us, anyway. Where they once only had two acres of straight up to run around on, they now have over fifty. Plenty of grazing and hay, with only sheep to share it with. They seem a lot happier now.

Of course, getting them up there proved to be a chore. For one thing, they'd both thrown their halters, forcing Amy and I to trudge through two acres of foot-deep mud to find them (only to locate them at the bottom of the lots, about three feet from where we'd started!). Then putting the halters on them became a challenge as the younger saddlebred had no desire to wear it and would run from us when we tried it.

Miraculously, getting them into the trailer proved easier than expected. I thought sure that would result in a fight as well, but the Appie-Walker, Callie, went right in, following her grain bucket, and the saddlebred, Shadowfax Filly, just followed her.

Our stableowner, John Henderson, loaned us the trailer and drove them up to our neighbor's pasture. I drove up after them and got inside the trailer to untie them from the hitches. Callie trotted right out. Filly, of course, slipped on a new pile of droppings and lost her footing. Her head swung around and cracked me right in the temple. My vision went white and all I could hear were her hoofs pounding against the floor of the trailer. All I could think of was "I refuse to go out like this! Being kicked to death by a clumsy horse!"

By the time my vision returned, I realized that she was nowhere near me and was actually back on her feet in seconds, but I was sure I was going to get further injuries.

Once Amy and John led the dopey beasts through the gate, all was fine. Both horses had their ears straight up, as if to say "Really? This is all ours?" Then they took off running into the valley.

That evening, the constant drizzle turned to snow and bitter, knifing wind. We lost our upstairs heaters for some reason and I can't locate our local plumber to fix things.

Which brings me to today. For the past four months, I've been fighting one thing after another. A producer who owes me money; a publisher who owes me money; writers who owe me pieces for the next Sirens; agents who still don't think our magazine is "important" enough for their clients...

I'm sick of fighting. I'm sick of having to justify myself, my experience, my talent. I know that not everything that be easy, but can't something?

We're more determined than ever to get a few projects produced over the next year. We already have one interested investor, and produce Joe Casey has already employed us to shoot a short for his upcoming anthology, tentatively-titled Brinke's Tales of Terror. But this year is going to be for us. We're not putting anything on hold for anyone else. We saw two projects die and put another two aside in order to help people we thought were friends. Never again. The business has proven itself to be cut-throat, and while I refuse to play the game that way, I won't be nearly as trusting in the future. Or eager to help those who are beneath me.

If you aren't in this business because you love movies and want to bring your own stories to life--but want to make movies because you desire to hang out in Hollywood, the movies being secondary--then to hell with you. Good luck with your endeavors, but count me out. I'm in this business because I fought to get here, I believe in the movies that I've promoted, I believe in the people who have stuck by me all these years. It's time I rewarded those who helped us--and it's time we rewarded ourselves.

Mostly, I want to be like our horses. I want to find someplace where I can just run. I want someone to take us there, show us what we have been dreaming about. I want to turn to them and say "Really? This is ours?" I know it's not going to happen and I know that there's plenty of fighting ahead of us. But I know our own pasture is out there somewhere. Even if we can only play there for a few moments, maybe that, at least, will be enough. At least for a few moments, we won't be fighting.

A couple of links

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The last days of being my current age

Soooo... Thursday, I age a little bit more. Yes, we age every day, but I'll be celebrating the beginning of another calendar year. And while, on occassion, Amy and Bill and I all gleefully point at each other and accuse "You're old!" and then dance in a circle, I don't usually fret too much about the "one step closer to death" factor of getting older.

The only thing birthdays make me do, though, is take stock of what has come before and wonder if I'm as far along as I should be.

When I was sixteen, I was convinced that I'd be a published novelist by the time I'd graduated high school. That didn't happen. In fact, it would be another five years before I published my first short story in a professional magazine (earning me the princely sum of "one contributor's copy"), and another year before I would actually get paid for any of my writing, fiction or non.

By 24, I was having serious doubts as to whether filmmaking was really my forte. But I perservered, with Amy's, Bill's, and my good friend Bill Fuller's help, and we pulled out Tenants, a haunted house story that enabled me to graduate from film school. And, miraculously enough, less than six months later, was sold to SRC Video (although then it was Salt City Video, just before it became Sub Rosa) for international distribution. This launched our careers in the indie scene and made me the only one in my graduating class to sell their senior film for any amount of money. And thanks to its presence on the Campfire Tales DVD, we still get royalty checks for it!

At 25, the three of us decided to throw sanity to the wind and shoot our first feature. On film. And we're still shopping that one around! Leading me back to where I was in film school, wondering if I'm really cut out for filmmaking.

When I question this out loud, as I did at New Year's dinner with Mike and Carolyn, Carolyn questioned me as to what I thought I'd be doing all this time. And I returned to my original high school goal. I really did think I'd be a published novelist by now.

So, recently, I've been pursuing my fiction - or even non-fiction in book form - a little more rigorously, with the help of my friend, Paula Guran, who runs the terrific horror-fiction site Dark Echo, but she's been telling me something I think I've known all this time: the climate is terrible for the publishing industry. Like the film industry--or, actually, worse--the big publishers only want names and formula novels. The smaller houses don't have the resources to promote anything with a unique vision. And in neither case can you possibly make a living at it. Which simply echoes my current situation in the film realm, only I'm more intimately equated with this world and know more of the best people to deal with here.

So, ultimately, there's no sense in playing this game any longer. I am where I need to be, I suppose. Whether I should be further along, well, that's just speculation and hindsight-playing, innit? I got to where I am now through the help of a great many people, Amy in particular, and via the choices I made.

But no one gave us anything. We never waited around for someone to hand us the keys to the city. We worked for it. And this is as far as we are right now. And not to get all Muppety, but the view from here looks pretty good. Sure there are mountains left to climb that are blocking one direction, but I can look back and see what we've achieved so far, and, dammit, we haven't done too badly.

I haven't done too badly.

So now, at a year older, heavier than I was in college, with Reed Richards hair, I can look out at the year ahead of me. We've been hired to shoot a short by the end of March, and we have at least two new movies we're going to try and shoot before we undertake Genghis Con, PA, yet again. And I'll continue to buck the odds and try and get something book-length published, with no help from my agent. I'll continue to make Sirens of Cinema the best magazine I can. I'll continue to cover and profile indie movies that I believe in made by people I care about.

And I'll continue to write odd, "Chicken Soup for the Psychotic" blogs like this, no doubt. (Because it seems like there are more than a few people who actually pay attention when I talk, which is more than what I used to have - so maybe I actually have something to say every now and then.)

A year older, and I'll perservere. (Because I'll never be as old as Bill!)

THE RESURRECTION GAME news on Fangoria online

Thanks very much to Michael Gingold at Fangoria for posting news about The Resurrection Game. Now, if everyone takes a deep breath and thinks really good thoughts for us, we'll finally find a distributor for this wonderful albatross.

The New Me

As most people who know me know, 2005 was a series of ball-kicks, professionally-speaking. Two of the biggest coups of my writing career came with very similiar disasterous consequences (though the first case should have taught me to prepare for the second). On the other hand, both were opportunities I couldn't pass up, and, I hope, made me smarter and stronger. They certainly made me, and Amy, exceptionally motivated to get our own projects off the ground again, and take another step towards our goal of making Happy Cloud Pictures a successsful, professional filmmaking company.

But about a week into 2006, I was still feeling the claw-marks of the previous year. And I decided that a change had to be made. I read somewhere that the easiest way to spark an internal change is to make a change externally. So I did something I once vowed to never do: I cut my hair.

The choice was obvious. I've had the same hairstyle and trademark length for seventeen years and it would have been eighteen next week. A lot of the people in my life have never seen me with short hair - Amy's entire family for one - and most of my family has been begging me to cut it for nearly the same amount of time. Ultimately, though, I did it because I wanted to. It was time for a change.

(When Were-Grrl had its Pittsburgh premiere, it was at a monthly film review called "Film Kitchen" and the other film playing that evening was a documentary a young woman did during her work-study in Dublin, Ireland. She had every opportunity in the world to document her trip, the differences in cultures, etc., but, instead, she chose the narcissistic route and focussed on her decision to shave her head. The entire documentary was about this decision and the event itself. (Quite frankly, it was a waste of time and videotape.) My decision was not this radical, and I'm not trying to give it as much weight.)

Now, I've said on countless occassions, when people suggest that I dye my ever-increasing gray, or get my hair styled, or hand me bottles of facial moisturizer, etc., that "being me doesn't require my full attention". I don't like to spend hours blow-drying, primping, moisturizing, etc. I'm not Patrick Bateman. I don't skin-peel, I don't loufa, I don't use astringint, I can't do 1,000 sit-ups at four in the morning, nor would I attempt any of it.

Ultimately, the decision had little to do with the haircut itself. I needed to break out of the self-destructive cycle I'd been stuck in between 2003 and 2005. I need to stop seeing everyone I meet as a friend, trusting them implicitly. I'm in the wrong business to be that naive. And I need to stop seeing professional decisions as either attacks from their end or crucial lines-of-death on mine. I have to remind myself to be careful and not become one of those I dealth with in 2005: folks whose egos outweigh their talent and their experience. Art and commerce can co-exist on the productions I can control, and I have to - to quote the old Irish saying - "Have the strength to change the things that I can, and the grace to accept the things I can't. (And the wisdom to know the difference.)"

The positive aspects to come out of 2005 are: as disasterous as the business-dealings I had were, they weren't financially disasterous. They were only damaging to "Mike Watt the Artist", and unless you are a complete narcissist, the artist aspect can be the easiest one to repair. If I chose the battles wisely, and I believe that I have, I'll have closure - financial, at least, if not emotional (for either Amy or I) - with 2005 in a couple of days.

And, as always, I have a couple of irons in the fire for 2006, and we're waiting to see how they pan out. It's already been a banner year for Sirens of Cinema and we've only begun putting the issue together. 2006 will see at least two original productions from Happy Cloud Pictures, in addition to a work-for-hire project pitched to us from someone who has never steered us wrong in the past (but at the same time was smart enough to offer us a contract).

Of course, I'm not attributing any of this to the haircut. I didn't do anything mystical. But I know that I see a different-looking person every time I look in the mirror. And right now, that's enough to remind me that everything changes. In order to keep up with evolution, I should be changing too.

My "end-o-year roundup"

Because Eric Campos over at Film Threat is an amazing human being, he got my end-o-year round up posted today, complete with pretty pictures. This piece details my adventures on the convention circuit from September to November of last year, complete with my Genghis Con, PA, overview.

Please let me know what you think. There's a lot of blood on those pages.

Visit said article here.

A few last-minute links

Just a couple of new links to entertain you before 2005 is but a bitter memory.

First is the hilarious Cannibal Aneurysm. Written and directed by Happy Cloud Pictures' Charlie Fleming, starring Bill Homan and crewed by Tim Gross, Jeff Waltrowski, Amy Lynn Best and myself. It's proof that Bill left alone in a room is funny.

Second, a ridiculously perverse interview with Necro-Phil, conducted by Zombie-A-Go-Go. Too wonderful for words.

As I writhe in pain...

Passing another kidney stone. Yay. I made a doctor's appointment for tomorrow, which I loathe and despise. It's not that I fear doctors; I just hate all the time that's wasted waiting around for them to come in and say, "You're sick; take these; pay the receptionist."

But while I writhe in pain, I'm also happily under the influence of my last painkiller (left over from a root canal several years ago, found way in the back of my medicine cabinet). And as anyone who knows me can attest to, I'm a happy drunk. One of those "I love you, man!" type of drunks, which is a direct contrast to my normal personality.

So I'm watching The Devil's Rejects, watching my friends Messers Haig and Moseley playing the most reprehensible humans ever depicted, feeling odd and sentimental. And I'm scanning my friends on this list, feeling the same.

As wretchedly sarcastic as I can be in person, you know where you stand with me. Amy likes to say, 'It doesn't matter what he says to you, if Mike is talking to you, he likes you'. And it's true. I don't bother with people I don't care for. The people I'm closest to don't have to question my loyalty to them. (Yeah, the Happy Cloud Pictures way of showing affection is seeing how quickly we can make the other person cry, but the more vicious we are to you is, generally, in direct proportion to how much we like you. Ask Jasi "Stuntbabe" Lanier some time about her trial by fire on Were-Grrl.)

Not sure where I'm going with this, except to say that I have a lot of amazing friends and I'm grateful for each and every one of them.

... Finally, the second issue of Sirens of Cinema should be hitting the stands this week. Check out Barnes and Noble and dig the cool Kong cover by Michael Apice. Content includes interviews with The Ladies of Serenity and Mirrormask, a new Pretty-Scary article by Amy, a Rapturious set report by Debbie Rochon, and a cool Three Queens for Kong article by my father, Bill Watt (with incredible art by Liza Biggers).

We're right in the middle of putting the third issue together now, for sale in March. Check out issue two and have a Happy New Year!

What this season means to me

It's almost as if the holidays snuck up on me this year. Pre-Genghis, that's all we were focussed on. Then, all of a sudden, it's two-thirds through December and we'd barely cracked the shopping. Every year, we vow to have a leaner Christmas and every year we end up spending more than we either meant to or actually have. Every year, I split the time between grimacing at the endlessly-repeating Phil Spector-style mall soundtrack of carols and making fun of them. ("Later we'll have some fucking pie/ and do some caroling..."; "You better not shout/I'm telling you why/Santa Claus is fucking a clown").

We have the usual argument of "Happy Holidays" vs. "Merry Christmas", only this year it seems to be a federal issue (hot on the heels of a bizarre "Intelligent Design" argument that has William Jennings Bryan wishing he could be deader). While it usually doesn't bother me one way or the other, I was a little irked that the only stamps I could buy at the Post Office were the "Madonna and Child" (not Ciccone, you Philistines). I made a crack that my friends would be surprised to see these coming from us and the clerk roared with laughter. "Right, a Jewish household sending the Virgin Mary on cards!" To which I just smiled and stared at her, wondering how she got Jew out of "Watt". Of course, if I copped to being an Athiest married to a Wiccan, I'm sure we'd be run out of town, so I let it go. Fine, according to this clerk, I'm Jewish.

Adding to the stress of the season comes with the frustration of people taking two weeks off around the holidays, meaning that most of my (hopefully) upcoming business deals are on hold until January 5th. On top of that, lost packages, long lines, idiots at the stores, people trying to run you off the road because there might be snow sometime in the next few hours.

Having no affinity for wrapping presents, having no idea what to get people I've known for years, having no idea what I did to make me feel like my spine is jutting through my back while I wrap said presents, having a fit because something we'd just bought was sucked into the house minutes after we arrived home, having no time to decorate and then feeling guilty because we didn't...

And then, I take a minute and realize that I actually like the holidays. I was raised on Christmas, so that's what we celebrate, religious preferences aside. I like Christmas trees. I like the classic specials. I like 24 hours of A Christmas Story. I like creating ridiculously inappropriate Christmas cards. I like the soundtrack to A Charlie Brown Christmas and own it on CD. I like A Muppet Christmas Carol and am grateful that it's finally available in widescreen.

I love It's a Wonderful Life. I play the "George Bailey" game on a regular basis - it's thereputic. (For those who live on tropical islands and have never seen the Capra classic, the "George Bailey Game" is the mental exercise where you picture life if you had never been born. Figure out what things would be like for those around you if you'd never been there to touch their lives. It's a terrific way to feel good about yourself, if only to justify your own existence. If you're an unselfish kinda sucker, you'll also play the game wherein you remove a good friend from the equation and see how empty your life would be without them.)

I like the Chuck Jones version of The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. I have an affection for the cheesiness of the Rankin/Bass Rudolf. I even dig the cynical Christmas specials that crop up, like Dennis Leary's A Merry F*ckin' Christmas and MadTV's Raging Rudolf.

I like getting together with friends and family. I love the fact that we can stymie our family into giving us gift cards, so that Christmas seems to last a few weeks longer. I like coming home with Best Buy bags filled to the brim with all the DVDs I hadn't gotten around to picking up all the previous months.

Yes, it's too commercial. Yes, there's a lot of pressure. Yes, there's a lot of rushing around, spending too much money, blah blah blah.

I like giving gifts to those I love. I like having the excuse to do it. I like that it signals the end of what is usually a very long year. I like that cynicism and innocense can go hand-in-hand during the same season and neither feels out of place.

All in all, I like the Christmas Season. And I'll like it even more when it's over.

New time-waster and a new Christmas gift to one and all

So, Amy gave me the link to Yahoo Avatars. After about half an hour, this is what I came up with:

Looks just like me, dunnit?

We spent a terrific weekend with JimmyO and April Burril, along with their daughters, Lilli and Willow, and a good number of the Chainsaw Sally allumni, like Shawn and "Far Away" Leslie (my nickname for her - long story). We drove down to Baltimore to join them for their Yule Celebration. It was the closest thing to a vacation we'd had all year and it was just fun. All we had to do was hang out and have a good time. (Quite frankly, it was just weird.)

The closest we came to feeling the pressure of responsibility was doing a bit of Christmas shopping at this amazing store we tripped over called "Wonder Books and Video" in Frederick, MD. It's one of those places you could lose yourself for hours. A dusty, claustrophobic, endless maze of books and DVDs. If it weren't for our having to meet up with Eric Thornett and Jason Russler (of Shockheaded fame), we might not have been able to drag ourselves out of there.

So in light of the holiday season, I decided to post two more bits of my past creativity:

And to All a Good Night is my idea of a Christmas card. In fact, it was my and Amy's Christmas card a few years back. It's demented and sick and horrifying. Just like the holiday itself. The picture was designed by Bill Homan and colored digitally by Amy.

The Sponged Stone is my requisite take on A Christmas Carol, using Scrooge as a character. He's paired up with a recurring character of mine, Jefferson Taz (cool character, dopey name), a supernatural private eye that I've used in a couple of stories. It's probably not hard to figure out the inspiration for this one.
They're short and they go down easy. Let me know what you think if you get the urge to check them out.

PFC Everyman - or, back when I was a dirty, stinking liberal

When I look back at my career as a writer, I consider PFC Everyman as the very start of things. I was still in college when I wrote the one-act play, inspired by my disgust at the Gulf War and the rumors of the renewed draft. Of course, the Gulf War took place in 1990-92, so you can't say that my ire was that great. In reality, the play was more inspired by my love of Warner Brothers cartoons more than anything else.

But I wrote it and submitted it to a local playwriting competition - the Pittsburgh New Works Festival, which had been around for only a couple of years prior to my submittal. PFC Everyman was just one of ten plays chosen for the festival, and would be granted a week-long performance by the theater company that chose it - in this case, Pyramid Productions. It would be directed by a man who would become my good friend and theater mentor, Ted Hoover. (Happy Cloud Pictures fans will recognize Ted as "Christopher Pope" in The Resurrection Game).

Ted and I sat down and slogged through four more drafts of this play. Anyone who knows me knows that I hate to write more than two drafts of anything, and this was a hell of a sobering experience. My ego was exploding to have my first play produced, only to have it punctured by the news that it wasn't yet good enough for the stage. Ted and I argued, and he always deferred to me, while, at the same time, managing to convince me to do what he thought would be best for the script. Ultimately, he was right, and I owe the final draft's structure entirely to him. The original draft was all over the place and had no real method to the abject madness.

So PFC Everyman had its run, the third installment of a three-play evening, three weeks into the four-week run of the festival. Under the way the New Works Festival was set up, the audience members who attended every play could vote on the best one of the festival. Those votes would be tallied up and awards were granted at a special ceremony/dinner at the end of the month.

It was the first event Amy and I attended together. We'd only been dating less than a year at this point. I was happy to see that PFC Everyman had been nominated in every category except "Outstanding Performance by a Female Lead", which was fair because we didn't have a female lead.

By the end of the evening, we had either won or placed in every single category, which included "Outstanding Performance by a Director", "A Screenwriter" and "Outstanding Production". I was all choked up when I accepted the award - a giant glass arrowhead called "The Donna", after the Festival's founder. I actually proposed to Amy for the first time during my acceptance speech (which I hadn't prepared, because I hadn't expected to win).

This launched my brief but successful career in theater. After that, I penned one more one-act (which won a national championship) and a short 10-minute play which again won a "Best of" performance.

And then I dried up completely. I never wrote another play again, because I stopped relating to the theater. My head and heart became firmly entrenched in filmmaking and I have rarely looked back, save in fondness.

Ted continues to write and direct some outstanding pieces of work (he's an outstanding piece of work himself). Most of the cast went on to do other things - for a while, Mia Price was a Radio City Rockette. One of the actors who had to bow out of the production did so for a role in the Jean-Claude Van Damme film, Sudden Death, which was shooting at the same time. I didn't blame him. I haven't heard from him again since, either.

Looking back at the play, I'm still entertained by it. A lot of the jokes are terribly forced. Some of them are ripped off from Beetle Bailey, while others are ripped off from Bugs Bunny and the Three Stooges. It's ridiculously heavy-handed in its satire and about as relevant today as it was then. Which is to say, as relevant as you want it to be.

Is it good? Probably not. Is it funny? I think it is. Is it as scathing and revealing as I thought it was when I wrote it? Not in the slightest. When I first wrote it, I thought it was just scandalous, particularly in its views of the church and homosexuality! What a pioneer I was!

I'm less liberal in my thinking now than I was then. Actually, I was less of a liberal than I was an idealist, though I was just as cynical about the military, government and religion as I am now. Nowadays, I consider myself to be an extremist in both camps - favoring capital punishment almost to the point of making mandatory; pro-choice; pro-Gay Marriage; pro-environment; anti-government; pro-Arts; anti-Hollywood...

I've included a link to the play here. You'll have to download Adobe Acrobat if you don't already have it (which is unfathomable to me as I believe that program is coming bundled with newborn babies these days). If you happen to be part of a theatrical troupe and, for some ungodly reason, you find enough merit in it to actually want to perform it, just drop me a line. The rights are available. At any rate, if you decide to check it out, let me know what you think.

Dying...

It's raining slush and ice outside. And I'm dying. Whatever cold is going around right now, I have it, and it's killing me. I've already been out to feed the horses, and of course I forgot to pick up medication for myself, because all I could think of was getting home and going back to bed. And I would have done just that, except the cold has settled in my back, making it difficult to lie down.

Which is just as well, because I have to announce the winners of the first Hollywood is Burning Screenplay Competition today and finish writing up the requested critiques. (I'm amazed at how many people requested the critiques... out of fifty-some submissions, only five people didn't request the critique!) I've already announced the second contest, an all-horror one as I got tired of the endless slush of very bad comedies and dramas. (Oh, my GOD, there were some lousy submissions!)

And to top it all off, something died in my office. I think it's in the chimney, of course, and impossible to get to. So, yay, I get to inhale decomposing animal for the next few days. Longer if the temperature remains cold.

So, there it is: my misery laid out for all to see. I will now graciously accept donations of money and chocolate chip cookies.

(Yeah, there are a lot of plusses happening today, but you know how it is when you're sick: you tend to focus on the negative...I'll post more positively tomorrow.)

Back to the grind...

After typing this for about half an hour, good ol' reliable Myspace decides to give me "sorry, an unexpected error has occurred". Gee, thanks.

So here we go again, let's see if we can recapture the magic here...

People are starting to post about their experiences at Genghis Con. My good friend and editor-in-chief at Sirens, Rick Danford, posted this over at the House of Horrors.

Our wonderful friends JimmyO and April Burril, without whom little of Genghis would have been possible, posted these pics over at the Chainsaw Sally site (movie coming soon to a rental house near you! Stay tuned). Our equally good friend Ryli Morgan and Mark Baranowski posted these over at Ryli's homepage. So it would appear that everyone (save three disgruntled individuals) had a great time. For me, it was a five-day blur of stress with brief pockets of overwhelming gratitude.

Looking back, it was simply wonderful to see an entire room filled with virtually every friend I have, both in the industry and outside of it. Our families were mingling with people we new first from movies and then in person. There were folks I'd known for close to twenty years (Justin Wingenfeld and Bill Hahner, I'm looking at you!) and people I'd only gotten to know and care about over the course of this year (Ken and Pam Kish, Tony and Abby at Xploited DVD, Jeff and Pam Fugate...). Again, with the few minor exceptions, I can't think of a single person who was indispensible and responsible for making Genghis Con the success it was. At some point, I will most likely post a huge, long, sloppy "thank you" list, doubtlessly forgetting many people in the process. So please accept this blanket "thank you" in the meantime. (And very special thanks to Heidi and Bill Homan... you know why and thank you again!)

The past few weeks, far from being relaxing, have been taken up by Cam Romero's debut, The Screening. While Amy hasn't shot much yet--they're concentrating on getting a lot of the complicated action sequences out of the way first (which isn't a bad idea)--some amazing stuff has already been shot with Debbie and Alan Rowe Kelly. And I can say, without reservation, that the effects team are some of the most professional, talented individuals I've ever met. Benzy, Nate, Kevin, Midian, Dustin, Max and Liz, (and anyone I missed)--here's to you guys! I look forward to exploiting you in the future!

Between all of that, I'm spending the bulk of my time finishing up the first Hollywood is Burning screenplay contest so I can announce the winner by December 15 and make way for the second one. Because, you know, I'm insane.

And once that's done, I can turn my attention to a new screenplay, Shudder, based on an original story by Matt (Vicious, Loaded Dice) Green. I've never adapted someone else's story before (not to any great extent, anyway) and I'm actually having a good time with it. If all goes well, this looks to be our next production, possibly to start in January.

After a tremendous amount of problems, Sirens of Cinema #2 is out the door and at the printers. Look for it on the stands later this month. We may have possibly outdone issue #1 with this one! It sports a beautiful Kong cover by the amazing Michael Apice, and contains stuff like "The Women of Serenity", a fantastic piece on Mirrormask by Heidi Martinuzzi, a brand new Pretty-Scary article by Amy, a Rapturious set report by Debbie Rochon, and an overview of the Kong ladies by my father and film scholar Bill Watt (with a beautiful painting by Liza Biggers accompanying it).

Dead Men Walking hit the shelves a few weeks back and has been garnering mostly-positive reviews. People seem to dig the gore but think the acting is pretty weak. The reviewers have been kind enough towards the script end, which makes me grateful for that; it keeps the villagers away from the door. I'm told it's selling and renting pretty well, actually, so that's a good thing. What the hell--it is incredibly gory!

So with Genghis out of the way, and Thanksgiving already having come and gone like a jackhammer, we only have Christmas to look forward to. It's going to be a lean Christmas, too. NyQuil and Tic-Tacs for all. And then, a week later, it's over. 2005 buried in a shallow grave, two bullets in the back of its skull (which is how I like to usher in the New Year--intimidated and quaking in it's booties). It was a ball-kick of a year, to say the least, though infinitely better than its Marquis de Sade-emulating predecessor, 2004.

If the groundwork we laid this year comes to fruition, there should be plenty to look forward to in 2006. New productions (including a follow-up to Amy's sexy documentary, The Spicy Sisters Slumber Party), new website overhauls, the possible official release of The Resurrection Game (keep your fingers crossed!), and, perhaps, should the madness overtake us yet again, Genghis Con, PA 2006. Because, you know, we're insane.


Amy's all tilty (photos by Mike Haushaulter)


Sign by Tom Sullivan


Jim Steinhoff with our official banner (by Roger Beckett, designed by JimmyO)


The "Women in Horror Panel" - standing: April Burril, Debbie Rochon, Amy Lynn Best, Heidi Martinuzzi, Gigi Fast Elk Bannister; seated: Debbie D, Lilli Burril, Dan Best (he just wanted to be in the picture), Brinke Stevens, Ryli Morgan. Not pictured, Syn DeVil. Large white face in foreground: The Pretty-Scary Film Festival Award-Winner Devi Snively.



The Happy Cloud Pictures panel - Charlie Fleming, Amy Lynn Best, Necro-Phil, Bill Homan, Mike Watt, Bill Watt.

Genghis Con - an overview

This is the first chance I've had to breathe since Genghis Con closed on Sunday (Amy hasn't even had a chance yet). Our duties technically ended on Monday, after we got our guests back on their planes and trains. From there, it was pick up the dogs, drive an hour home and collapse for the rest of the day.

It's tough to judge a show as "success" or "failure". While we may have fallen short of our financial goal (though not by much), by Sunday, everyone said that they had a great time and hope we do it again next year. We drew in a little more than five hundred people for the whole weekend, which is terrific for a first-time show, or so we're told. There weren't too many problems (two unhappy dealers and one snotty "guest" who left an hour after she got there) or disasters (lack of promised karaoke (for which we apologize - technical difficulties) and Amy's DVD player stolen from the screening room - thanks to whoever did that, btw!). While it was stressful, it wasn't unmanagable.

There are too many people to thank for this last part. The entire Happy Cloud family came out to lend a hand and we'll be eternally grateful for that. If anything, Tim Gross claims that it was the best weekend of his entire life, so how can we argue with that? So I guess we'll add this to the success end of the spectrum.

Maybe Monday I'll be able to concentrate further and do a more detailed account of the weekend. But for right now, I'll just say thank you to everyone!

Mom! The Abyss is staring at me!

It seems that every post starts out that way. "I haven't posted in a while because I've been busy..." Which is definitely true. But as God is my witness, I don't know where the time goes.

There will be days where I sit for nine hours in front of this computer, sending out press releases for Genghis Con, writing articles, answering email, whatever, and look up around 6:00 and realize I haven't eaten or moved all day.

I think H.G. Wells got it wrong. Morlocks didn't become the way they did because of a lack of technology, but the opposite: too much. The pansy-ass Eloi with their spinning discs - feh! They're the techno-illiterate. The Morlocks were the ones who had DSL and were plugged into the blogsphere! That's what made them the pasty, no-sunlight, zero-muscle-tone, grunting-in-communication, bad hair, bad teeth, club-weilding fiends that they were!

I hiss when the sun hits me. And while I can still lift heavy objects, I don't quite have the muscle tone I did ten years ago. I finde myself communicating in grunts on occassion, but that could just be because I've been married for six years.

I spent the last two weeks or so writing the new draft of Cam Romero's 24 Frames Per Slaughter, which is no longer called that, but I'm not sure if I can talk about it further. The movie is very different from what we started out to make. It's a lot wilder, and strangely, given my penchant for on-screen violence, a lot more brutal. They start shooting in a few weeks, and everyone's heads are spinning. I'll fine-tune his latest polish today and see where that gets us. If we all survive the process, it's going to be a hell of a movie!

On top of that, it's just been Genghis Con controlling my life. We ran into some last-minute catastrophes yesterday that Amy quickly resolved between heart attacks. We knew something would happen last-minute. It's just the nature of the business. But that's what's consumed our waking and sleeping life. But in a week and a half, we get our lives back. Until then, however, in the words of Frederich Nietzche, age 10, "Mom, the abyss is staring at me!!"

One final word about Genghis Con. I do an awful lot of complaining about this business. I rail and shriek about the disloyalty, the backstabbing, the phoniness, etc. And in the midst of all the dirty-dealings and just plain insensitivity, I miss the people that surround me.

Amy is the real genius behind this show. To be perfectly honest, false humility aside, I haven't done a great deal. She's the one who organized it from start to finish.

And beyond that, Genghis Con is happening because of all the people who are coming, our personal friends, who believe in us and have helped us out every step of the way. We couldn't have done it without the love and support of our guests and our staff. Which is why I refer to our company as the "Happy Cloud Family".

And I don't know what to attribute this to. While Amy can occassionally make Julie Andrews look like Hitler, I, however, am not usually the most pleasant of people to be around. I never set a hobo on fire, but I'm not world-famous for my tact, either.

So whatever the reason, I just want to extend my thanks to everyone. (If you want a near-complete list, visit the Guest page of the website. A full list will appear here soon, but I don't want to leave anyone out, so I'll wait.) If our dreams were contagious, I'm glad of that. And I'm grateful for all the support!

Thank you.

Designed by JimmyO

A quick update, then back to the grind

Got back from The Halloween Horror Picture Show in Tampa. It was a fun trip, despite a ride in a plane smaller than a phonebooth and weather that made you feel like you were hanging out inside someone's mouth. Amy was one of the hosts of the day, along with our friends Debbie Rochon and Brinke Stevens (and our new friend Denice Duff). There were some promoting problems on the part of the venue, but I won't go into it here. You'll have to wait for December's issue of Sirens of Cinema for that. (And speaking of such things, the new issue is out, so if you haven't picked yours up yet.... well, I can't think of a way to shame you into it - it's too early. Just go buy one. If you can't find it in stores, buy it off the site. Buy two, just in case.)

I'm immeshed in multiple rewrites on Cameron Romero's first feature, 24 Frames, though I'm told that title will be changing soon. The project keeps getting bigger by the day. I'm relying on the producers to keep this from becoming Apocalypse Now. (I'm kidding... Cam hates the smell of napalm, whatever the time of day it is.)

In other news, as I mentioned in my last post, I have to major-to-minor coups coming out at the end of the month. The first is this one:



I contributed the story "The Dead Life", which most of you know is an excerpt from The Resurrection Game novelization. There are some terrific stories in here - a lot of cool twists on the zombie sub-genre, a lot of things I wish I'd thought of. The Undead can be ordered here.

Second, coup is this:



This is the zombie movie I wrote for The Asylum. You'd think after this, The Undead and The Resurrection Game that I'd be tired of zombies. And you'd be right. But I think that's just a phase I'm going through right now. C'mon, zombies are the new vampires (or are they the new "yellow"? I forget). And Dead Men Walking can be pre-ordered here, and released on October 25.

Finally, I'd like to mention that the Happy Cloud Pictures website is up and running again after a year-long hiatus. Thanks to Camop, particularly Joel, Joe and Mike. It still has some tweaks to go through, but it's there again. Now we have to get Hollywood is Burning whipped into shape.

Now I head back to polish 24 Frames. If I survive the rewrites, I'll drop a line later.

(Oh, wait, Genghis Con! We just added Tom Sullivan! If you're not busy the weekend of November 18th, you have no excuse but to come down and hang out with us!)

A new proliferation

This past weekend at Wasteland proved that there are periods where, quite frankly, I'm hard to escape. Apologies to my enemies who do their best to avoid me because, darn it, I'm just everywhere.

The new issues of both Ultra-Violent and Sirens of Cinema hit the stands this weekend. Sirens, as I've crowed endlessly about by now, is the relaunch of the title once published by Draculina, now put out by RAK Media and edited by moi. Ultra-Violent is a fantastic once-underground mag put out by Scott Gabby and managing editor Art Ettinger. I have a piece in the latter on my hero Scooter McCrae.

At Wasteland, I ran into another hero, Andy Copp, who informed me that he recently posted positive reviews of our movies Severe Injuries and The Resurrection Game. For which I bought him a beer. But he was attending a screening of his own movie, so I drank it for him. (Because I'm a good friend)

I later discovered that Fangoria was running a full-page ad for the movie I wrote for The Asylum, Dead Men Walking.

Fangoria also ran a piece on the film I'm writing for G. Cameron Romero entitled 24 Frames. So a lot of people came over to ask me who the hell I thought I was writing for George Romero's son? (To which I'd grin and say 'Jealous, much?' and they'd say 'Bitch!' and go right for my eyes.) This single piece managed to get all over the place in a matter of hours, as I found variations of it on at least two dozen movie sites. So... okay, that's weird.
And then I got an email that a zombie anthology I'd contributed to, The Undead, just released its cover art. Which you can see here.

Finally, another friend, Roger Beckett, recently returned from his wedding in Indonesia. He quickly told me that he'd had a meeting with a prominent Indonesian director who had - wait for it - heard of me! That's right, somehow, word of my magnificence has reached Asia. (Or the fact that Film Threat can be read all over the world. I'm sure there are people in Outer Mongolia saying "who does this hack think he is?")

So, there you go. That was just one weekend, for pete's sake! You'd think that, with my being this famous, people might actually know who I am... and would give me presents.

And my universe continues to spin...

Thursday night, I'm sitting at dinner with Amy and Bill and I start feeling this cramp in my back - like I pulled a muscle. Within minutes, I'm doubled over and I can't breathe. I can barely see. With that in mind, we excuse ourselves from dinner and I have Amy take me to the hospital.

As I'm turning blue from the pain and lack of oxygen, I struggle to give the half-listening triage nurses my insurance info. The pain won't let up. It's not throbbing - it's just there, constant and militant in its desire to kill me. I felt like something had wrapped around my kidney and was squeezing it.

That's when I realized what was going on. I made a quick, breathless phone call to Jeff Waltrowski, who had endured a similar ordeal earlier in the year. Jeff confirmed my suspicion: kidney stones.

Oh... yay. A brand new horror to confront as I take a brand new shuffle towards the mortal coil. That's right: I'd hit thirty a couple of years back. The warranty has expired on my body.

About a half-hour later, I lay twisted and gasping on a table back in the ER. I still haven't seen anyone. Suddenly, I'm no longer in pain. It didn't taper off - it just stopped. As quickly as it came.

I gave the knuckle-dragging orderlies another ten minutes. Still no visit, but still no return of the pain. So I got dressed and prepared to check myself out.
That's when the orderlies suddenly realized I was still here. As I prepared to leave. Images of lawsuits dancing in their heads, one hulking brute of a life-giver hastened to find a doctor who would at least talk to me before I exited.

The good doctor, a former extra from Gandhi, drew me a nifty little picture of my kidneys and my urinal tract and gave me a quick session on what a kidney stone actually was, in case I failed to dope it out from its far-from-self-explanatory name. What I had probably endured was something the size of a grain of sand (though as tense as I've been lately, I wouldn't have been surprised if it turned out to be a particle of a diamond) that had passed through the stem. He had the mouth-breather fetch me a urine strainer to catch it. Not being interested in examining this said-grain any further, I immediately forgot the plastic funnel-shaped screen.

Oddly enough, the only thought going through my mind at the time, beyond "Christ, make it stop!", was "can I spend the entire weekend like this?" I had this thought because it was the eve of Cinema Wasteland, and I wasn't about to miss it. I love Wasteland. It's practically the only show I enjoy doing. And kidney stone, unbearable pain, or no, I was going. Which would have made me just oodles of fun to be around, I can assure you.

But as of today, four days later, I am still pain-free. I should probably return to my physician for an ultrasound to make sure there's nothing else rattling around back there. And I'm sure I'll do this sometime after my visit to an oral surgeon, who will determine whether or not I should have my impacted wisdom teeth removed.

And after that, the kidneys and the teeth, I think I'll go in for some elective open-heart surgery. You know, to round off the year.

New Film Threat piece up

In my ongoing responsibility to expose the filthy underbelly of fandom, I give you this piece about Flashback and Twisted Nightmare Weekends. In other news, Genghis Con Pa is still rolling along. Check out the brand-new updated site.

New reviews and a big ol' gripe

Got a message yesterday that a film festival that requested The Resurrection Game, went through all this rigamarole about banner exchanges and cross-promotion, etc., has not only decided not to show the movie, and to not tell me they weren't showing it, but also never bothered putting up any of our banners on their site. After we had promoted their fest on three of ours.

Now, I'm glad I didn't waste the money on a submission fee to said festival, but if they had requested it, shouldn't they screen it? The same thing happened to us earlier in the year and in both cases, mysterious sets of "judges" were to blame for the final decision. Just a crappy thing to do to people, is all I'm saying.

In the meantime, the movie is getting terrific reviews, as evidenced at Cultcuts and Creature-Corner. In fact, I don't think we've gotten a negative review yet (critical, but not over-all negative). While that will probably change at some point, it indicates, at least to me, that we have a good movie on our hands.

So why are all these festivals asking for it, then dropping it at the last minute? It's not too long - they knew it was a feature! And if it is something like, "lack of nudity or gore", I'm gonna be really mad. Horror fans are always shouting about how they want something different and don't want to be "talked down to" by movies like House of Wax, yet the different stuff doesn't seem to catch a break. Maybe I'm wrong... maybe I've been defending "horror fans", when really actually I've been defending the hardcore fanatics: the guys who know their giallo from their hentai.

Not the regular hard-heads of Middle America who rent anything with bloody letters spelling out the title. The ones who seem to not only make up the majority of the "horror fans", but seem to be ruining it for the rest of us...

Shoddy promoters, horror kiddies, or harcore poseurs? Who's to blame here? Who let Cry_Wolf get made?

A cowboy pisses off the wenches!

So, the other day, I wrote about how I set out looking for things to piss me off, in a masochistic exercise in self-aggrivation. This past Sunday, I did the opposite, though accidentally.

Amy and I made the rash decision to head out to the PA Rennaissance Festival, which we've attended sporadically over the past few years, though we were religious about attending back in the days when Taso (Knightriders) Stavrakis and his company did the jousting and the dueling. The last four or five years haven't been that great, and for the most part, the comedians and acts are exactly the same, year after year.

But this weekend was pirate weekend! Charlie and his family were going. It was an opportunity to hang out with them... and a bunch of pirates! Really, who doesn't love pirates?

All the ads say things like "period costumes encouraged!" Charlie and I always joked that this year we'd go as a cowboy and a retro-50s spaceman (hey, they don't actually specify what period you should dress in! It's all implied, and being an American, I don't take too well to subtlety). Well, I upheld my end of the bargain.

I went as a cowboy.

Amy had on her peasant shirt, but skipped the flowing skirt due to the 80-degree weather. I, however, being of heartier stock, had jeans, boots, a leather vest, neckerchief, hat, and a holster (for water). I'd even borrowed a pair of Bill's spurs for good measure!

We got to the fairgrounds and opted to give blood in exchange for free tickets. It would go to helping out the Katrina victims and would also, well, you know, get us in free.

So there I was: a cowboy amongst a sea of pirates and similarly-overheated mideval types, wandering from hackneyed joust to baudy performances by "Wicked Wenches". When I ventured to yon establishment to purchase my customary turkey leg (sadly, they were out), I found myself being glared at by the beveredge wench.

"There weren't cowboys during the Renaissance," she said.

"There wasn't Diet Pepsi, either."

She didn't like that response, but sold me my drink anyway. However, I didn't get "Another five pounds for the queen, huzzuh!" like the guy in front of me did.

A little while later, I was admonished by a sword vendor: "Dude, you're in the wrong time period altogether."

"Yeah," I said, "I got here late."

I had to admit, I was enjoying being the anachronism, but I wasn't prepared for the actual pissed off looks I was getting from the workers. Even those pretending to be the King and Queen of the Fair seemed annoyed by my presence.

Now, I wasn't actually making fun of anyone. I wasn't even pretending to be a real cowboy - just a guy dressed like a cowboy. But I didn't take into consideration that people who travel with these fairs take not only the fair, but themselves, very seriously. So... okay. The bar wenches can refer to themselves as the incredibly demeaning term "bar wenches", and spill out of their wonderfully- to poorly-made bodices, and the "knights" can wander around with their codpieces outthrust, but woe unto you that steps into the realm of fantasy with any sense of irony about you! This is no place for whimsy!

It's like any cliquish gathering, I suppose. Horror fans don't like it when non-horror fans show up. Anime fans don't like people to scoff at them at their own convention. Gamers don't like being shaken down for their lunch money at their own gigs. So I guess my showing up in American Western garb was psychologically depantsing a lot of the Renaissancers.

Which, I suppose, begs the question: why did I go in the first place?

To be perfectly honest, I was in a silly mood. I'm not afforded a lot of opportunities to dress like a cowboy, and I wasn't about to pass this one up. I wasn't there to actually piss people off, but, on the other hand, I'm not sorry it happened. I knew I looked ridiculous, but I wasn't implying that anyone else was. I just wanted to have a little fun. That I wound up having fun at your expense, little miss "no cowboys during the Renaissance", only added to my enjoyment.

Geez, folks. You're saying "thee" and "thou" and selling pretzels on sticks and wearing wool in the middle of summer. Give a cowboy a break!

Searching for comforting rage

With all that's going on in the world these days, I shouldn't force myself to go looking for things to upset me.

I woke up, read the paper, and was gripped with absolute enimity. New Orleans is underwater, thousands upon thousands of people have been left with nothing, countless people dead or injured... and there's looting going on. Not people panicked for clean water or medicine, but folks raiding stores and ruined homes for appliances and clothing, to sell to the victims at high prices, and then justify to reporters and police that they "deserve" the things they stole! And now there's a shoot-to-kill order in Louisiana to prevent such things (to which I say, "Bravo and aim for the brain!")

Because, as a society, there are always new levels of low to plumb. Whatever the horrors we face on a daily basis, there is always someone around the corner waiting to exploit your tragedy for their gain.

Look at the gasoline situation. Because oil rigs were damaged, because there is a coup going on in Nigeria, the price of gasoline - a necessary and vital evil in this society - has skyrocketed over $1.50 more per gallon over the past two weeks. Most of those "in charge" will say that is because the price of a barrel rose because of these problems, etc. But tell me - look me in the eye and tell me - that the oil companies are NOT benefitting from these higher prices. Tell me that there are execs who are not sitting back, puffing on a cigar and hoping that the world-wide misery lasts forever. Tell me that, then tell me another one.

(And hey, all you hard-line conservatives out there who voted our current administration into office, I want you to fix things. You did this. I didn't vote for things to go this way. My guy didn't make it to the White House (but... but... things might still be this bad if HE had been in office... right? Yeah, sure...). So I'm holding all you Red Staters responsible for the current situation in the world today. We are the single most-hated country in the world (sure, we sneer at Luxemborg, but they're not ruining anyone's lives), our "liberation" of Iraq was a land-grab excuse that backfired on us all, we're mocked, scorned, abused and are both directly and in-directly responsible for world-wide famine. Don't throw your fucking flag in my face, don't tell me that if I don't like it I should leave - where is there to go? - don't whistle Dixie, piss on my head and tell me it's raining. Don't blame the war (we started it - yes we did! Don't quote 9/11 at me, either!), don't blame the hurricane, don't blame the Democrats or Republicans (neither party is the real culprit - the current administration is made up of something different entirely), don't blame Pat Robertson and his cry for assassination, in fact, don't blame anyone at all but yourselves. You pulled that lever - you prolonged this agony. Now go and do something about it. If my guy had won on my vote and things were still this bad, I'd be out doing something, trust me. But this ain't MY fault and I'm not footing the bill for it. If you voted Red and you're bitching about the high price of gas, point the finger at yourself. Fuck you - fix this!)

So with all that - and an ongoing family crisis, and friends of mine in severe pain caused by others - what do I do?

I look up Citizen Kane on Netflix to read the bad reviews.

There are reviews that give this movie a single star for its efforts. People bandy about "boring", "predictable", "disappointing", etc.

And there it was: the familiar rage.

Because, really, it had begun to dissipate a tad. I turned the page of the paper and saw just how many people were rallying to help the flood victims down south. Because as loathesome as a civilization as we Americans can be, we do chip in for a crisis. We dig deep when it hits home hard. We put aside being our ugly, Capitalist selves, as a whole, and help out others who are hit with tragedy. We did it for the Tsunami victims, too, so it's not just empathy for the home-grown. Looters be damned - you're all scum and you know it - the rest of the country is heeding the call.

And the gas will eventually come back down to something we'll all consider reasonable, though we'll never see a $1 in front of that decimal ever again. We won't; trust me. But it'll happen. And we'll all start to wise up and clamor for hydrogen fuel cells, which will someday turn Big Oil into Big Hydrogen. And the circle of life - in this case, the snake eating its own tail, for that is our civilization - will go on.

After my umbrage had subsided, and I started to see the good in the world, I just HAD to sabotage myself. I had to go looking for trouble. And stupidity. And arrogance. And yes, there is such a thing as a wrong opinion. And being contrary for the pure sake of things.

But for fuck's sake, there was a review on there that actually used the age-old, Internet message board battle-whine: "It's the worst movie I've ever seen!"

And they were talking about Citizen fucking Kane!

You know what the worst movie they'd ever seen before that was?

The Godfather, Part II.

And that's when my old friend outrage showed up, bags in hand, ready to stay. I had him pull up a chair, and we played "Live, live, die," the rest of the afternoon.

Because these are the clowns upon whose backs we're riding upon. These are the looters in cyberspace. They're ransacking our culture, rather than our goods. They're dumbing down our society and poisoning our collective subconcious with their asinine spoutings. I don't know that there's enough yang out there to counter this yin. I really don't.

And just as they were out to upset people, there I was, feeding into it, begging to be upset. I walked into the trap clearly marked "Trap: Do Not Walk". I did it to myself. Because I wanted to be outraged. I want to know that there are wolves at the door, even if I have to go out and leave a trail of M&M's for the wolves to follow. This is my disease. I was the guy at Roarke's Drift calling up neighboring villages and asking them to send more Zulus.

It's me. I've come to the conclusion that I can't bear to see the forest for the trees. I have to look at the garbage littering the beauty. I have to see what I know I'm up against, even if I have to use binoculars and a road map.

I'm not seeing the generosity; I'm seeing the parasites. I wasn't seeing the five-star ratings; I was looking for the one-stars.

And if I don't stop doing this to myself, I'm going to go mad.

And the only comfort I'll have, as I rest the gun barrel between my teeth, is that I was right all along.

And dammit, that's hardly a comfort!

The Ever-reliable IMDB

I'd like to thank whoever screwed up my IMDB listing. Yes, it was very nice of you to want to help. However, if you're such a fan of the bassist Mike Watt, why don't you know that he and I are not the same person?

If you're such a fan of his, why couldn't you look at the listing - just glance at it - and realize that the frontman for The Minutemen was NOT in Gladiator Eroticus and did NOT write and direct The Resurrection Game?

Yes, I realize that this is the fault of the IMDB for making it very easy for the average keyboard jockey to make updates to any page they wish to. Shame on them for asking for assistance.

But, seriously dude? You're an idiot. And a terrible fan.

For one thing, look at the top of my listing where it mentions my age.

32.

Watt the bassist was in his 20s when he fronted The Minutemen. Shouldn't that tell you something if you're such a fan?

Further down, where it lists my biography, and it mentions the slew of magazines I wrote for - Cinefantastique, Femme Fatales, Film Threat, etc... Are any of these listed in Watt's Hoot Page? Hmm, Captain Fan?

Now, there are a ton of people far less cool than one of the greatest living bassists for me to be confused with. I'm flattered by the confusion, really. I'm sure Mr. Watt is less-so. On the other hand, he probably doesn't get the miscommunique that often. The last time I spoke to him on the Film Threat boards, he had gotten a single email asking him if he were the FT writer, so he told me I could be THE Mike Watt, and he'd be THE OTHER Mike Watt, because, as a bassist, he was comfortable with being in the background.

That was very nice of him.

I don't take umbrage at the mistake. I take umbrage at the fact that you spent a great deal of time messing with something I'd spent a great deal of time putting up. Yes, in the great scheme of things, it's the IMDB, and matters not in this world of high gas prices and wholesale overseas slaughter. But, again, you're obviously a great fan of this man.

So, again, why didn't you know that I'm not him?

Go pick on Bruce Campbell... he's really Glen Campbell, the singer. Or didn't you know that?