HPC in the 21st Century

I am pleased to announce that Happy Cloud Pictures is now part of the 21st Century.
Last week, we met with our new investor and executive producer, whose belief in us enabled the purchase of a brand new XL2, complete with two extra prime lenses, glass filters, a wireless mic system and a like-new Senheiser shotgun microphone.

Thanks to my screenwriting skills (not to mention my contract-tweaking skills), we were also able to afford an iMac so I can start honing my editing abilities in the pro format that God intended (the "blood money" I've talked about here before). It was the right decision. My aging PC with its deteriorating Pentium III just wasn't up to the challenge of running Premiere in the manner I required. With Final Cut Pro on the way (which I'll have to teach myself - *sigh*), we'll be unstoppable. Theoretically.

Add to all of that a new Century Stand that I found on ebay and we're filmmakers again! (Yeah, there's a jib arm and mini-crane that I have my eye on, but it's not a requirement right now...)

Just as I vowed last year, 2006 is going to be the year that Happy Cloud Pictures attempts to sell out. We spent far too much time in 2005 working on other people's projects while our own fell by the wayside. It became apparent that in order to do said selling-out, we'd have to upgrade our camera and microphones (hence the above). Now with all of that accomplished, we turned our attention to the appropriate sell-out project to go with the badass equipment.

We'll be announcing it officially in a few weeks, but it looks like we'll be starting with a vampire thriller called Abbatoir. After having studied the needs of several distributors with whom I have established good relationships, we came to the conclusion that vampires are always in. The idea was Amy's. After a particularly frustrating spate of time wasted on another production, we were on our way home and she blurted out, "Screw it! We should just do a vampire brothel movie!"

"And what would it be about?"

She glared at me. "Vampires," she growled. "In a brothel!"

So for the next few weeks, I figured out how to do this type of movie without going the Bordello of Blood route. And I did. And it we work it right, and implement it correctly, it will actually be bloody, sexy, stylish and very good. We're finishing with the casting now. The effects will be provided by our partner, Bill Homan, and Don Bumgarner of Cleveland F/X. I'm feeling very optimistic.

The reason I'm so optimistic about shooting a feature in five weeks with a new camera that shoots in a format I'm not completely familiar with? Two words: High Stakes.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, High Stakes is the short that we shot for JD Casey's Brinke's Tales of Terror. All things considered, it was a simple shoot - four people in a room for the bulk of the story. But because of the time-constraints of one of the actors, we had to steamroll through the script and the various make-up effects in six hours. The total script shot: fifteen pages. Total shooting time: six hours.

We can shoot Abbatoir in ten days. There will doubtless be pick-up days, but it will not be the gruelling two-year production schedule that The Resurrection Game turned out to be.
I feel very good about 2006. As I say this, I am conscious to avoid any white 'x's painted on the pavement.

****

I want to make mention of three things:

My interview with make-up God, Dick Smith, appears in Penny Blood #5, which hit the stands last week. I'm incredibly proud of this piece and Penny Blood is a cool magazine. Buy it. Support the publisher.

Sirens of Cinema #3 is on stands this week. It's gorgeous. It's the best issue we've put out. It looks gorgeous, our new layout artist, John Boone, is a genius. The articles are all tight and thought-provoking. Buy it. Support my publisher. (I'll be premiering this issue at I-CON this weekend in Long Island, btw.)

My good buddies at Secret Scroll Digest, Mike Haushaulter and Carolyn Oliver, hipped me to this new book, Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema by Jamie Russell. Not only is it an awesome book... I'm in it. First, Russell twice quotes from an article I wrote on Night of the Living Dead '90 for Cinefantastique back in 2003 or so. And credits me for the work!

Second, he reviews The Resurrection Game. And liked it. He reviewed the horrible "Robot Epilepsy Theater" VHS bootleg from our early convention days. And still liked it. And he didn't like every zombie movie he reviewed in this book. In fact, he ended the review by wishing that someone with taste would give me money.

I don't know Russell from Adam. It's actually disturbing that I wasn't aware of this book in any way shape or form. I worked hard to build a grass-roots support for Res. Game, so when something like this flies under my radar, it's irksome, despite being a pleasant surprise.
So buy it. Support Russell and the wonderful Harvey Fenton's FAB Press.

New (Old) Review of THE RESURRECTION GAME

Jason Pankoke is a good guy.

I mean that. He's always been in our corner and he publishes this terrific magazine called Micro-Film, which, if you're not getting, you're the poorer person for it. Seriously, it's that good.

We got the rare opportunity to hang out with Jason and his Eye-Trauma gang this past weekend. I'm going to snag him to write for me at Sirens as well. Because that's what we do in this industry: we cannibalize our friends.

So, Jason's alright. And I'm not just saying that because of this:

THE RESURRECTION GAME (rough edit)
by JaPan

Thank you! Here's something that doesn't creep out of the horror film underground every day - a certified crowd pleaser with lots of action, yuks, and grue! Although viewed in an extremely rough stage, THE RESURRECTION GAME delivers a budget-minded bang from Pittsburgh, PA, trio Mike Watt, Bill Homan, and Amy Lynn Best.

In the near future, we discover alcoholic ex-cop James Campbell (Ray Yeo) performing private eye-type jobs for hire, watching monitors in his dingy apartment as techie Tick Rowan (David Schremp) does the legwork to set up surveilance cameras. Prior to his seclusion, Campbell helped organize the government's National Organization of Exterminators (NOE) to deal with a zombie plague run rampant before turning solo as the first independent gun for hire. Thinking himself an "activist" for the cause, he eventually lost the nerve and retired.

A horror novel writer named Christopher Pope (Ted Hoover) contacts Campbell, complaining about how the zombie masses have destroyed his career - why should people read his books when the real thing lurks around in the backyard? Pope offers the man $1 million to discover the cause and the cure for the Infestation, which indirectly gives Campbell a new lease on life.

With hacker help from Rowan, the square-jawed Campbell hunts down another recluse, Dr. Emily Zarkoff (Kristin Pfeifer), a biochemist who had been developing a revolutionary cancer treatment for the AMA before receiving the boot with little explanation. Campbell reasons that her research had a relationship with the beginnings of the Infestation, and as if their meeting had been foreshadowed, an assassin (Mike Watt) breaks into Zarkoff's house. Thus begins a chain reaction that backs Campbell, Zarkoff, and freelance exterminators Sister Bliss (Best) and Simon McForman (Homan) into a web of deceit stemming from the omnipresent commercial monolith, Godcorp.

This quest/conspiracy hybrid makes for a satisfying opus because it blends genre conventions with a vibrant energy that invites us to kick back and enjoy the ride. Similar to how Matt Giaquinto and company introduced theological issues in THE GOOD BOOK, director/writer Watt carefully reveals details throughout THE RESURRECTION GAME to keep audience interest. Although some of the plot threads will confuse those not paying attention - particularly when Campbell and Zarkoff discuss an underground hacker movement, an element otherwise not depicted in the movie - the movie doesn't bog down because of it. Maybe the one element sorely lacking is a sense of scope; after all, this Infestation did take over the entire United States, correct? One or two pinpoint depictions of this reality would have made the peril seem all the more insurmountable.

THE RESURRECTION GAME also minimalizes technical gaffes that many in the micro-budget arena seem prone to repeating. The numerous action scenes move at a reasonable clip and rarely reveal the fakeness of the fight through awkward choreography. The zombies are incidental for a change, so moonlighting make-up guru Homan and his team wisely downplay the rotting skin effects to save up for splatter that often drenches the cast to hilarious effect. It remains to be seen how Nicholas Sportelli's cinematography will hold up, but it looks like Watt took great care to make his shot selection dynamic, compromised only in real-life enclosed settings.

On the acting side, Campbell's detached air contrasts nicely against Pfeiffer's Gillian Anderson-like warmth. The Sister Bliss/Simon McForman tandem provides comic relief without wallowing in too much camp, while Watt's assassin gleefully brandishes guns, swords, and more lives than a kitty cat. In supporting roles, Francis Vetri oozes appropriate smarm as the shadowy Executive in charge of hunting down Campbell and Zarkoff, Hoover's horror author echoes Glenn Shadix's fey interior decorator from BEETLEJUICE, and Shremp's hacker would feel right at home with THE LONE GUNMEN. Cameos from B-movie sirens Debbie Rochon and Roxanne Michaels [aka Jasi Cotton Lanier] liven up the satirical satellite programming (a la STARSHIP TROOPERS), along with a puppet horror host called "Necro-Phil" who's good for a few rude laughs and thankfully not over-used.

I seriously hope that, when the dust settles, Mike Watt and his production team find success with THE RESURRECTION GAME and continue making movies. It maybe says something that Watt chose to include numerous visual references to NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, George A. Romero's seminal horror film classic also shot in Pittsburgh and an early example of a privately financed indie film making waves. May THE RESURRECTION GAME enjoy a similar fate 35 years later.

THE RESURRECTION GAME. 2001, 16mm, Color, 94 minutes. D, W: Mike Watt. P: Amy Lynn Best, Bill Homan, Mike Watt. S: Ray Yeo, Kristin Pfeifer, Francis Veltri, Amy Lynn Best, Bill Homan, David Schremp, Mike Watt, Ted Hoover, Roxanne Michaels, Debbie Rochon. Prod: Happy Cloud Pictures. Reviewed on VHS.

What a good, fair review, yeah? Now prove your mettle and pick up a copy of Micro-Film. The new issue is hot off the press!

Back and sorta caught up

So our trip to and from Chicago was rife with airline disaster (not "oh my God, we're gonna die!" disaster; more like "your flight has been delayed, please remove your shoes and hat, turn your head, cough, provide us with a urine sample, we know you're white but you're wearing black leather, please hop on one foot and sing the Canadian National Anthem."). There were problems with tickets, a rush to find seats on other planes, a few inches of snow that made it impossible to return, etc.

I hate flying. It's not the crashing I mind; it's the inconvenience and wasted time.

But the show was terrific. We got there just as it opened, so there was a lot of mad scurrying to get checked in, cleaned up and downstairs to set up our table. We started selling things before we'd even gotten the suitcase unpacked! The place was a lot more crowded than the previous show in New York, which made it both more and less successful than before.

More: more people meant more money for us, of course, but also meant happier vendors all around. And happier vendors make for happier neighbors. Case in point: the gentleman next to us wasn't doing that well, selling vintage autographs and lobby cards, so he wasn't happy. This wasn't the fault of the show, and it didn't make him unpleasant. But he was bored and frustrated and we felt bad.

Less: because of the immense lines, Amy and I missed meeting Nathan Fillion. Creation has a weird set-up that we're not used to. They generally do Q&As with their bigger guests and then have autograph sessions with the guests hidden from view behind curtains in the ballrooms, preventing you from even getting a glimpse at your star. The Slither panel was packed and the lines -- with people called up row by row, starting with the expensive "gold pass" holders -- were tremendous. As far as I know, not everyone in line even got to meet Gunn, Fillion, Banks, Rooker, Henry, Fischer and the two sad and anonymous producers (they weren't anonymous; I can't remember their names and I'm feeling oddly lazy right now) before they were all shuttled off across town to a special screening of the upcoming gorefest.

Which left us feeling sad and empty inside. Fortunately, we were still basking in the glow of Rooker molesting Amy in New York, so it took the hurt out of it a bit (like urinating on a jellyfish sting). (BTW, become Grant Grant's friend and maybe someday Michael Rooker will molest you too!)

I did get to meet Stuart Gordon, however, and got both him and writer Dennis Paoli to sign my coveted Re-Animator laser disk. So that made me do a little happy dance. I also got to horn in on a conversation between Mick Garris (Riding the Bullet) and Paoli about the luck directors have if they're given the opportunity to write their own screenplays. It was a neat little inside tidbit that I wouldn't have had otherwise had I not been standing at the Anchor Bay table and waiting patiently for Gordon finish directing a trio of fans in a scene where one guy is eaten by another guy's hand (pretending said hand is a rat).

The highlight for me, though, was running into Robert Kurtzman again. Kurtzman, you may remember, is one of the founding members of KNB, who are responsible for nearly every special make-up effect in movies today. Bob took a liking to me somewhere along the line, and while I don't understand it, I'm not about to argue with him, either. We talked a bit about his new movie, The Rage, and we discussed Amy and I visiting the set when they resume shooting in the spring. Then he started introducing me around. Through Bob I met Gary Jones, who directed the fun "zombie pirate" movie Jolly Roger, for the Asylum (and he said nice things about Dead Men Walking, which made me happy), and Robert Dyke, who told me that the DVD of Moontrap would be long in coming. And that made me sad.

But with all these meetings, I finally turned to Bob and said, "Don't get me wrong - I really appreciate you taking all this time to talk to me. I'm a big admirer of yours and this means the world to me. But who do you think I am?"

Two-day shows are rough on a body. We spent most of Sunday commiserating with model Sofia Smirnova, who really hit it off with Amy because she wasn't immediately catty or bitchy to her upon their first meeting (which is more than can be said for a couple of "actresses" who were present at this show). We also got to meet Zoe Hunter, who was there promoting ("This time, it's Witchcraft 13really personal!").

A lot of time was spent hacking through Debbie Rochon's line to say hi, as we hadn't seen her since Genghis Con I. She'd been working herself to death lately, which is nothing new, and by the end of Sunday, we all felt like wrung-out rags. Dragging ourselves back to the airport, we'd actually volunteered to be bumped from our flight just for an extra night's rest. But that wasn't to be.

Fortunately, Amy had taken off on Monday, so we spent the day watching the Oscars (which I'd taped - yes, taped - on VHS yet!) - we cheered for Howard Berger when he won for Narnia (see KNB above) and cheered again when he mentioned Bob and Greg Nicotero in his speech. But beyond that, we remained pretty-much motionless for the day.

Returning from a trip usually means that the next few days are spent catching up. Emailing people you'd run into over the weekend, dropping lines to people you'd missed while you were away, getting work done that had sat for days while you were galavanting off doing God-knows-what.

However, while all the above is true, the last few days yielded satisfying fruit... For one thing, thanks to our new Executive Producer, we received an investment check that allowed us to upgrade our camera equipment. Amy ordered the package yesterday and we'll soon be the proud owners of an XL2 with three lenses! We also bought a Senheiser mic off eBay to replace our old and dying microphone. Add to that a new light kit, a C-Stand (yay!) and a near-future upgrade to Mac, and Happy Cloud Pictures will be a fully-functioning production company. To that end, we're planning on shooting three features by the end of the year. (Stay tuned for announcements.)

I also discovered, while capturing last weekend's footage for High Stakes, that the sound problem isn't as dire as suspected. Rich Conant, co-star of Absense of Light and a talented sound engineer offered to see if he could remove the buzz from some of the tracks, so we're eternally grateful on that end. And it looks like it's going to cut together pretty well, proving, yet again, that sometimes I know what I'm doing. I'm expecting to have this short finished (minus Scooter McCrae soundtrack) by the weekend.

Finally, a nice little blurb from Horror Web about The Undead, an anthology I contributed to last year (giving them "The Dead Life", a short story based on the Sister Bliss/Simon MacForman basement scene from The Resurrection Game. While the writer (who goes by "Bloody Mary" and not a real journalist name - something that irks me for some reason) was pretty cool to the entire book - writing the review as a 'Dear John' letter to the zombie sub-genre - she dug "The Dead Life" in particular, which made me smile. Says "Bloody Mary", " Stories that I thought were brilliant and creative, original and unique. Stories such as: "13 Ways of Looking at the Dead", "The Last Living Man", "Undead Prometheus", "The Dead Life" and "The Graveyard Slot". Oh, and Andre Duza's "Like Chicken for Deadf**ks", that was beautiful."

So there you go. Hooray for our side.

Look for a Film Threat piece on the con in a few days. In the meantime, please visit www.mike-watt.net and The Bastards of Horror.

Mike-Watt.net is FINALLY here! Huzzuh!

Because the world demanded it!

Because the Earth cannot exist without this valuable resource!

Because the children are the future and they can have it!

I proudly announce Mike-Watt.net!!

Now with both consonants and vowels!

Come for the adjectives - stay for the verbs!

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