New job, new plugs

Started a new job last week. It’s the first real office job I’ve had in a while. I have a desk with drawers for the first time—my own, not shared—a bulletin board, lots of office supplies and, again, first time ever, an inbox. Since my whole life is one giant inbox, I never thought that this simple plastic tray would become a symbol of stress for me, particularly at an office I only spend, at best, six hours a day. But it has. Particularly when a whole network of people pass by my desk and continually refill it.

That aside, the job isn’t that bad. It ain’t creative, of course, but there’s substantial computer work involved, so I get to feel relatively evolved. It’s the best money I’ve earned for a part time gig in… again, “ever” comes to mind. The hours are relatively flexible and the pressure pretty low. It isn’t working out of the house, of course, and that’s the chief drawback. Fortunately, I’m kept busy, so I don’t have a lot of time to think about all the things that aren’t getting done—writing, editing, stuff for Sirens, stuff for my PR work—while I’m trapped there. Even if there were downtime, it’s an international company, so outside emailing is not only prohibited, but impossible. So I wouldn’t be able to get anything else done there regardless.

I get to escape around 1:30-2:30 every day, but by the time I get home, I’m fried from all the brand new procedures I’m learning. Nothing I can use anywhere else, but stuff that has to fit in the great yawning skull-organ nonetheless, so it takes me a while to get back into the swing of things once I walk through the front door. To keep myself sane, I focus on the money, and remember that Amy has been doing this for us for ten years. If they make me a good full-time offer, money-equivalent, this might be where I spend my day. How I’ll get writing done, should that be the case, I’ll never know. I’ll have to work that out somehow when the time comes.

With that off my chest, I have some plugging to do:

First, Amy and I recorded some commercials for Dr. Horror’s Erotic House of Idiots—still one of the funniest Indie movies ever made. You can hear those HERE. The director and co-writer (with Brinke Stevens!), Paul Scrabo, is one of the coolest guys I've ever met in the business and this movie was a real labor of love for him--imagine having to shoot a comedy on September 11, 2001, while knowing that the world is collapsing around you! That is exactly what he, Debbie Rochon, Trent Haaga, Michael Thomas and Conrad Brooks went through on that infamous day!. If you haven't checked this movie out yet, the terrorists have truly won.

Second, I had the opportunity to visit with a quartet of guys who are making a documentary about the 40^th anniversary of Night of the Living Dead. I got to see the original Latent Image offices, where Romero and company worked their magic back in the ‘60s, and I got to stand in the very basement where young Karen Cooper (Kyra Schon) murdered her mother (played by Marilyn Eastman).Fangoria put my first piece online. There might be some print to follow later in the year.

A Feast of Flesh was officially announced by Bloody Earth Films last week. You can see the listing on their site by clicking HERE. Bloody Earth (a division of Camp Motion Pictures) will be taking Amy and I around to a few shows as guests, which will be very nice. I’ll keep everyone posted here as those come around.

Splatter Movie will have an official tie-in with Sirens of Cinema. We’re prepping a limited-edition DVD that will be offered only to subscribers. It’ll consist of a featurette and a teaser that will never be seen in this way ever again and once they’re gone, they’re gone. So if you’re dying to see some of this ridiculously gory and surreal movie, and have been putting off getting a subscription to Sirens, now’s the time to stop procrastinating. Check out the special 2^nd Anniversary Issue of Sirens of Cinema, on sale in September. More information should be up at sirensofcinema.com very soon.

That’s all that I had on my mind. I’ll try and update again over the weekend, should something fun and exciting come along.

Black Wednesday (no racism intended)

Been an odd week.

It started well (or, maybe, last week merely ended well): we wrapped Splatter Movie, ending not with a bang or a whimper but more of an "OK, I guess we're done". Having captured all the footage, I found only one small insert needed due to a continuity error. Otherwise, it's all fine—much of it is actually beautiful, courtesy of Jeff's lighting and the natural photogenic qualities of both the Hundred Acres Manorand our cast. Now all we need to do is finish editing.

Sunday we briefly assisted Nic Pesante on his short film, which gave us the chance to catch up with Rich Conant (Absence of Light) and Debbie Rochon. Then we went to Amy's family reunion and ate way too much.

Monday we decided that it was too nice a day to work, so we both took half-days. We went to Oakland and checked out some of the vintage book stores, then had lunch with Debbie and took her to the airport. Following that, Amy, Jeff and I returned to the Manor to shoot some publicity stills and fulfill our contractual obligation by shooting a video installation for their opening room. I won't mention who donned the very creepy "living skin" mask and the old suit for the sequence, but he was amazing. A true thespianic genius.

Tuesday, I had a very good job interview for something that, while not completely up my alley, at least pays more and had better hours than anything I've been doing lately. Then I returned to my marketing job, waiting to hear if I got this new position or not. I was terribly nervous about this because, as you know, Tuesdays and I don't get along very well. But no plummeting pianos came forth (or downward) and we escaped the day relatively unscathed. We celebrated our niece's first birthday (Happy Birthday, Haley!) and returned home, full of pizza and hope.

So far, so good, right? And to think I thought nothing could go wrong since The Muppet Show Season two was released last week!

Wednesday…It would appear that Tuesday had taken the day off and decided to double its efforts on Wednesday. I woke up to discover that one of the companies I do PR for were "no longer in need of [my] services". But would I mind finishing out August. I didn't, since they'd already paid me. It wasn't a nasty letter, or a "you suck" message. This happens. They decided to go with a bigger firm in L.A. and that's perfectly understandable. It still blows, but it's understandable.

At this point, good news about a new job would be very welcome.

It didn't come.

Keeping my head down and my mind focusing on capturing footage, I avoided the internet and the mail box, thus avoiding further bad news. Then Amy called, stuck in traffic due to multiple accidents on rush hour traffic-choked bridges and highways. No one in Pittsburgh can drive, so there is one of these every fifteen minutes somewhere around the city. I told her to call me when she got closer so that I could start dinner. The next call she made was a bad one: the car died. All the warning lights came on, smoke poured out and oil spilled onto the highway. She just managed to ease it over to the side of the road—no shoulder and on a busy interstate. Of course, just about every driver in PA is an asshole as well, so no one moved over for her and she was almost hit a number of times by cars and trucks passing too closely to our dying car. She called the cops to report this—since it's, you know, like a law in PA that you have to move over to avoid hitting people on the side of the road. But for people doing 90 on an interstate, what's one more violation? If you're going to get pulled over for speeding, might as well add vehicular homicide to the mix. What is that? One point on your license or something?

But the car thing is particularly tragic. This 2000 Saturn wagon was the first new car we'd ever bought together. It hauled anything we threw in the back—equipment, con inventory, screen doors—the trunk space knew very few bounds. You can see that car in Severe Injuries, A Feast of Flesh and Retreat. We lived in that car. We drove it to Canada, to Tennessee, North Carolina, New York, Michigan… And after we moved 60 miles away from Pittsburgh, we drove it over 100 miles a day back and forth to work. It passed 200,000 miles a few months back and it was still going strong. It no longer had air conditioning and the vinyl trunk covering has been eaten by the garage, but the body was in good condition and our mechanic was convinced the engine would last forever.

Monday, after our last shoot at the Hundred Acres Manor and, consequently, our last Splatter Movie shooting day, we passed 220,000 miles. Not to anthropomorphize the vehicle, but, the car seemed happy.

After towing it to our favorite Monroe garage, our mechanic, George, informed us that there was a softball-sized hole in our engine. A new engine for it would be more than the car was worth and, quite frankly, we think the car gave us all that it could. And more.

This left us terribly depressed. Not to mention in a bit of a bind—especially if I do end up getting that new job, which would require me, at least occasionally, to have a car of my own.

Thursday morning seemed very grim. It was storming and pouring out. We left the dogs inside and headed for work. We had considered not going in at all, but I had an assignment for Fangoria to cover, so Amy opted to go to work as well. About twenty minutes from town, the rain stopped, the sun rose and the day turned beautiful. Amy got to work and started researching new cars, I headed for my assignment and spent the morning standing on the very spot where all the basement scenes for Night of the Living Dead had been shot. Finishing up my interviews, I went back to my marketing job and immediately got a call on my cell: I got the new job. I start Monday. Barring any catastrophes, I'll be making something close to a decent, regular salary for the first time in my life. The cloud of Black Wednesday hadn't lifted, but they were letting some light in.

Today, we have to find this new car, which requires waiting to hear first if we're approved for a new loan. This is going to mean a car payment—something we haven't had in over a year—and higher insurance. So there goes my nifty new salary, but at least we won't be further behind. I've solicited a couple of new companies about the possibility of writing for them, but haven't heard back yet. (I have no end of cheerleaders when it comes to my writing prowess. Any time I have an ego falter, Amy is there to pick me up; countless others as well. But I can't shake the feeling that if I were really that good, I'd be working a whole lot more…) In the meantime, Sirens of Cinema's 2^nd Anniversary issue is in layout and will be on the stands with a gorgeous Joe Jusko cover sometime in September and I still have one or two other companies to rep with PR, so things aren't as black as they seemed a few days ago.

Still, the sooner this week is over, the better.

Quick things

Off to buy my bi-monthly set of tires and still digesting the news that Mike George of the Pittsburgh Comicon might be a murderer. Of course, we'd heard the news for years--a couple of his past employees have speculated that he was involved in his first wife's execution, but I always chalked this up to "stories we talk about when we're drunk and discussing weird con things". If it does turn out to be true, I think about the times I've shopped at his store, attended his shows... the idea is just chilling.

* * *

We wrap this weekend. Splatter Movie: The Director's Cut, barring new tornadoes, should be complete by 5pm Saturday, minus perhaps one small effects shot to be obtained later. It's shaping up, however, to be a very good, very bloody and very fucking weird movie.

* * *

Our friend Jasi Cotton Lanier, the "Stuntbabe" who worked with us on The Resurrection Game, Were-Grrl and Severe Injuries, not to mention Fifth City and was the model for Lara Croft in Joe Jusko's painted Tomb Raider Special, shot a terric commercial for Heinz Ketchup. Go to YouTube, watch the cool-ass video ("Tap the Flavor") and vote for it. It deserves to win the "Heinze 'Top This' TV Challenge." It's easily the best of the bunch.

It's a blog! It's a column! It's a microscope under which all are we!

"Random Acts of Mike Watt" was a blog I started back in 2002 and became the title of a series of columns I wrote for Film Threat a few years later. When I like a title, I really like a title.

The blogging phenomenon caught on and things like columns and essays morphed into the "blog" format. We journalists, back in the day, used to fight and scratch and claw to get our own "columns". Now we just go to Myspace and Blogspot, start an account and begin to blather away about whatever comes to mind. The only difference I can see, between a blog and the columns I've had over the years is that I used to get paid for writing columns. Now I'm super-thrilled if anyone reads me at all. (Which reminds me: subscribe to me! Dammit!)

Film Threat has linked to my blog for the past couple of years, but they've since started the Writer's Corner, where we of the elite can post our own blogs, pretend they're columns, and continue to strut our stuff like we're the heirs-apparent to Dorothy Parker and Edward R. Murrow. And some of us are. Most of us are not. It's up to you to sift through the wreckage to determine which is which.

The sad fact remains that the remaining facts are sad.

So, anyway, I posted my first official "Random Acts of Mike Watt" "column/blog" this morning. You can CLICK HERE to read it. It's very grumpy, just to warn you. I'm not saying said grumpiness is not justified, but there you go. I was a curmudgeon at ten, as my parents like to point out. I'm just a rocking chair and a shotgun away from screaming "You kids get off my lawn!" And by "kids", I mean "humanity"; and by "property", I mean "Earth".

A Feast of Flesh news

The movie formerly-known as Abattoir, now completely and from henceforth forever known as A Feast of Flesh, was officially announced by Fangoria last week. Read all about it by clicking this link. Camp Motion Pictures' Blood Earth Films label is putting this out November 6.

As you can imagine, this is pretty exciting news for us. It'll be our first official release since Severe Injuries and seeing it about to go world-wide is just boggling the mind right now.


While I'm not sure at the moment who created the promo art, I can say that the photo was taken by David Cooper, who is also the chiarascuro master who took my icon photo and is the D.P. on Professor Jack and the Electric Club (below).

We'll give you more news as we get it. Stay tuned!

SPLATTER MOVIE update

The Splatter Movie odyssey continues to continue. This past weekend seemed oddly relaxed, perhaps due to the fact that we were all aware that it was our last big weekend. This shoot’s guest star was Tom Sullivan, effects wizard of The Evil Dead and co-star of The Absence of Light. Like Debbie Rochon weeks ago, Tom plays himself in Splatter Movie, so it wasn’t a stretch for him to get into character. He and his nephew, Sean, came in Thursday night, allowing for an easy, leisurely shoot on Friday.

Saturday, as we wrapped Tom’s scenes, we completed a crucial sequence with a Steadicam, thanks to Patrick Desmond. He and Rich Conant of New Illusions Studios came down to help out, making the trek from Ohio to lend a hand. In this sequence, Stacy Bartlebaugh-Gmys, our star from Abattoir, gets hung up a few feet in the air by one leg wrapped in barbed wire. To her credit, she never complained nor batted an eye when six large men lifted her from her ladder perch and helped her into position. Granted, she was more afraid of the ladder, but that’s beside the point.

Sunday consisted of a tricky decapitation attempted with only digital removal. Half the shots in the sequence had to be shot with multiple layers, to be combined later in Photoshop and After Effects. If it worked as well in practice as it did on paper, it should be a fairly sweet – if extremely bizarre – sequence.

Just before that, however, through a series of fortuitous events, we sweet-talked our way into using a cherry picker and got an awesome aerial shot for the opening of the film. Despite my abject hatred of heights, I found myself leaping into the bucket of the crane, belting in and shooting the shot from 60 feet in the air. Two keys: never taking my eye from the camera eye piece and never, at any point, actually thinking about what I was doing. Neither DP Jeff Waltrowski nor Amy could look at me while I was up there and not just because they were in the shot below. They were certain that the second they glanced in my direction, I’d spill from the bucket, the crane would fail and slam me into the ground, I’d drop the camera… None of those catastrophes actually happened and, eventually, I was returned to Earth. It’s not an experience I’d care to duplicate but the shot turned out sweet.

One thing I’d like to bring up for the education of other indie filmmakers out there: when Amy and I arrived at the site on Sunday, we discovered that all of the power was out. Saturday, the Department of Public Works was installing new telephone poles and making a god-awful amount of noise, but they didn’t disrupt the power. Sunday, they were still installing and, at this point, were disrupting power. Fighting down the panic of having to cancel the indoor shooting (already made complicated by the ongoing construction going on at the Hundred Acres Manor), we were just about to go up to the workers and ask if power would be restored when a woman in a little sports car drove up, leapt out and started screaming at the guys working. We couldn’t make out what she was saying, but there was much arm waving and hysterical body language. After a minute, she stomped back to her car, slammed the door, gunned the engine and peeled out of the parking lot. This presented a terrific opportunity for us to not do that. Instead, we brought the guys doughnuts and water, talked about the weather and asked how things were going. The foreman volunteered the fact that the power would be on in a few minutes and to let them know if their noise interrupted shooting.

The morale of this story: don’t be a dick. Most people are generally interested in being helpful. If there’s a result you’re looking for, and the people before you are the most likely candidates of helping you achieve that result, not screaming at them tends to make all the difference. The second morale: be on the lookout for dicks and try to time your non-dickhead approach to directly follow their inappropriate behavior. There’s no better opportunity than looking good in comparison to someone worse. With so many assholes in the world, with so many terrible filmmakers/athletes/etc., sometimes showing up and not being horrible is all the effort needed. Not taking part in the World’s Biggest Cocksucker Competition, an on-going reality show, is usually the smartest move.

Anyway, we’re in the home stretch on the film now. For all intents and purposes, we’re about three days away from completion, and we’re not even talking three full days. One day of scene and two half-days of pick-ups. Then we’ll have a finished film. One that some people will be completely unable to make head or tail of, one that many others will find both satisfying and pretentious at the same time, but ultimately, one that people will look at and say “Only Happy Cloud Pictures would have done this movie.” (“Would”, not could. The distinction is considerable.)

So make sure to keep checking both the Splatter Movie Myspace and the Amy Lee Parker Tesseract Myspace. Fun stuff is coming all the time.

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Tippi Hedren is loose in the ducts!

Two weeks ago, Amy and I took a break from killing ourselves on the Splatter Movieset and turned towards killing ourselves to get to New Jersey in time for the Fangoria Weekend of Horrors.

Like the Chicago show, the Jersey Fango is a great time and a terrific opportunity to network and catch up with friends. Unlike the Chicago show, we don't make a lot of money and the crowds are a lot thinner. Theories abound to explain this. The best one seems to be that the fifteen Monster Manias held throughout the year and the two Chillers draw attendance away from Fango. It's not like the golden days of the early 2000's when people had money. Gas tanks must be fed and at a higher price! Otherwise, the Eldritch God Dick Cheney will awaken, rise from his subsea slumber lair and shoot us all in the face.

Anyway, we like the show, profits be damned. So, Friday morning, we drove our six-plus hours to Secaucus, arriving around 11:00 in plenty of time to set up and relax before the 2:00 early-bird entrance time. Except the second we stepped through the door, we heard from line-dwellering friends (I'll Bury You Tomorrow's Alan Rowe Kelly and Art and Alana from Ultra Violent Magazine) that Creation Entertainment, the company in charge, will be opening the doors at noon to accomodate the demand. Our three-hour window vanished before our eyes.

Check in, rush upstairs, change clothes, sponge off the road dust, rush downstairs, find the registration, find our table - hi, hi, hey, good to see you, what's happening? what the fuck did you do to your hair? Tony Timpone? Passed him in the lobby. Good to see you. Not that way, I hate that guy. Hi, just a sec, be right back.

Our table was actually in a really good spot. We were in a corner, at the rear of the room, against a wall, between a loading door, an indie company promoting a movie called Closet Space (I believe... it's been two weeks and I'm old, sue me!) and our best friends at Pop Cinema (including the incomparable Paige K. Davis, filmmaker and organ grinder monkey Henrique Couto, and my good friend of nearly 15 years, Justin (Skin Crawl) Wingenfeld). Which was just awesome.

Then, as we began setting up, we heard a terrible scratching, screeching noise. At first, we thought someone had on some sort of odd sound effects record and put on the "Birds" track. A small rain of debris fell next to us and we looked up - there was a bird's nest just inside the drop-panel ceiling, under the sprinkler. There were holes in the wall between our room and the parking lot (the whole hotel was a disaster, incidentally - crumbling ceilings and walls, stains throughout) and the birds found this just lovely. Beneath the sprinkler, on the floor behind our table, a collection of twigs, dust and powdered bird shit had accumulated.

At first, this was funny. I mean, at most shows that are NOT Cinema Wasteland, we're used to being shit on figuratively. Now we were being shit on literally. We shook our heads, hung our posters, displayed our new issues of Sirens of Cinema (on sale now wherever Sirens of Cinema is sold!), and sucked it up. The nice thing about Creation Entertainment-run shows is that the head of security, Tammy, has become a great friend of ours over the years. She's awesome. She saw the bird shit. She went ballistic. "Tell the hotel, right now, to clean this up. This is a health hazard."

Oh, yeah. Bird shit isn't healthy to breathe or be around. Yeah, the little winged rats are cute, but they're teaming with mites, fleas, all sorts of unpleasantries. And these bastards were also loud.

So I politely (yes, politely - I can be polite! Go fuck yourself!) asked the nice something-Americans behind the hotel desk to send maintenance to vacuum up the pile of disease we were sharing space with.

Sometime Saturday afternoon, after two more requests and a mention of "health code violation", a two-man team of custodians arrived with a push broom and a dust pan. Away went the now-large pile of bird debris into the garbage - a receptacle located exactly four feet away on the other side of our table.

By this time, we'd hung a sign on the wall that said "Yes, there is a bird's nest in the ceiling", having grown tired of answering the question "is someone playing a sound effects record back there or are those real birds?" The avian shrieking wasn't helping our sales, that's for sure. Every now and then, the squawking would get so loud, I'd bang on the ceiling with a poster roll, yelling at them to shut up and feeling like the grumpy old guy downstairs. It usually resulted in silence for ten to thirteen seconds. Then they'd start up again. Every third time I tried it, I'd bump one of the panels and get a face-full of nest as a reward. That was fun.

In between the bird-battles, we got the chance to catch up with fine folks like Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni, star of Argento's eagerly-awaited The Third Mother, who contributed to the new issue of Sirens; Scooter McCrae, master of weird horror like 16 Tongues and my underpaid composer; Tabitha and Mom Sharon, who run Corpses by the Bunch, who had their own woes to deal with; Anthony and Karen from East Coast Kitty. I met Stan Winston for a moment. He signed my Pumpkinhead DVD (for f/x wizard Eric Molinaris' birthday) and shook my hand before I was punched out of line, Time Bandits-style, by his After Dark handlers. We had a nice evening's dinner on Friday with Debbie Rochon, mere hours before she had to fly to Italy. Intrepid Fango editor Michael Gingold swung by (and we joined his nibs, Scooter, and about a thousand other people from evil clown movie 100 Tears for dinner on Saturday - a nice, intimate affair). We showed folks the Professor Jack and the Electric Club trailer I'd cut. We thrilled folks with some sneak footage from Splatter Movie. We drank to kill the pain caused by the incessant squawking of ceiling-dwelling sparrows.

That afternoon, one of the customers passed out in the aisle and hit his head on a table. Amy went to help him up and he latched onto her arm, wouldn't let her go. He was disoriented, had been drinking, and didn't know his own name at first. About an hour later, the paramedics from the hospital across the street finally arrived. The man, Bob, couldn't tell anyone his address or even how much he'd had to drink. Another man, who first identified himself as Bob's "handler"--then "friend", then "neighbor", then "a guy who drives him to horror shows"--just wanted to take Bob home. Bob was dehydrated and his blood pressure was through the roof. The paramedics, with Amy's help, got him into a gurney and wheeled him out of the room - almost taking Amy with them, as Bob still wouldn't let go. These are the adventures of my own personal Wonder Woman.

Saturday night was spent with our friends from Digger Films, the French Canadian film crew. Steve, Dave, Hugo and their buddies P.H., Johnny, T-Bag and Nova (these are all nick-names, of course; French Canadians all have Klingon names unpronounceable by their U.S. neighbors). T-Bag, incidentally, was not this magnificent man's real nickname. He told me, in a very noisy bar, to call him "T-Man". I didn't hear "man". So he was amazed when I replied, "You really want me to call you that?"

It got even funnier, later, when I realized my mistake. Not that I corrected it. The hilarity increased when the others discovered what "tea-bagging" actually was. I convinced the others not to tell him until they were halfway home. He was a lot bigger than I am.

(Unfortunately, he was told the truth towards the end of the evening. Somewhere along the line, we'd picked up a guy from Rhode Island who insisted there were fifty-two states in the Union: Washington D.C. and "East Virginia". As a result, I referred to him as "52" for the rest of the night. I like giving nicknames. It's a source of power. It was, of course, 52 who broke the news to T-Bag, feeling sorry for the poor, lost Frenchie. The joke was on 52, though, because T-Bag thought that was just as hilarious as the rest of us did. So there, 52!)

Sunday, I was not hung over. Miraculously. I was tired and desperately wanted to go home, but that's normal Sunday fatigue. My table was still over-run by bird mess and they seemed even louder today. Tammy had finally run down someone from Creation to witness the tragedy. Majid, the talent co-ordinator, was outraged. He demanded that housekeeping do something. Tammy insisted that I get my hotel room comped. The hotel didn't want to do either of those things. My fear was they would kill the birds, but by wildlife laws, they're not permitted to even move the nest. Finally, the same two custodians showed up with a plastic bag and draped it over the sprinkler inside the ceiling to prevent further mess.

This pissed the birds off even further. They started moving to the exposed hole in the wall, poking their beaks out and squawking at us with visible outrage. So, great, we go from lung disease to tetanus shots from beak-punctures. Yay.

I was very grumpy at this point. Irrationally, I was thinking this was a respect issue. That they'd stuck us in the corner intentionally - ha ha, wouldn't it be great if Mike and Amy got shit on all weekend? I knew this wasn't true, of course, but when you get into a pissy mind-loop, it's difficult to free yourself from it. While browsing the Pop Cinema table, an actress I don't particularly get along with, but never had anything against, appeared beside me with a ratty-looking entourage. They started heckling Chainsaw Sally, the star and director of which happen to be, of course, really good friends of mine. The actress agreed and tossed the DVD aside with derision. I smiled at her and pointed to one of her movies. "You were really good in this, by the way," I said.

She rolled her eyes. "Yeah, thanks."

I pointed at another one. "And you really sucked in this."

Her jaw hit the table. I gave her a bigger smile and walked away.

Bitch.

Anyway...Majid, still outraged, took us up to see one of the heads of Creation to rectify the situation personally, even though it wasn't Creation's fault or responsibility. It was, however, Creation's show, so I thought a personal apology would be nice. With the show in full swing, though, including a couple hundred swooning middle-aged James Marsters fans, no one else from Creation could be spared. We did end up getting our hotel room comped. This vanished expense actually pushed us slightly into profit! So we spread the love and bought stuff from our vendor friends.

The highlight of Sunday was breakfast with Justin. He's my oldest "adult" friend. I've known him since 1991 and we've seen each other through some extreme highs and lows, got each other jobs, gigs, acted in each others' movies. Since he moved to New Jersey with his wife, Trinity, and Amy and I moved to the farthest reaches of PA, we don't see each other that much. Now he has a beautiful new baby (Reagan Poe), a slew of good reviews for his movie Skin Crawl, we have our company, farm, horses and dogs and cats - it's hard to find time to just sit and talk. Breakfast was cold and late but the company couldn't have been better.

The drive home, as usual, was long and painful and seemed to take forever. Sundays, regardless of the show, always suck. It's filled with goodbyes and packing and exhaustion. Sundays should be banned from conventions, as a rule.

Still, I can't say that we weren't treated really well, particularly by Majid, Tammy and her daughter Amber, and their compatriot Chris. Fangoria always hosts a good show, regardless of the turn-out, and I'd be lying if I didn't say I wasn't looking forward to next year, regardless of the wildlife. I'll just bring an umbrella next time. And possibly all of the cats.

So very tired...

Is it appropriate that "Once in a Lifetime" is playing as I write this? "Letting the days go by / Water flowing underground..." I'm staring at the daunting task of recapping the last three weeks of my life when all I really want to do is go back to bed.

As all right-thinking people who read this blog know, we're in the midst of shooting our new production, Splatter Movie: The Director's Cut, yet another odyssey-sized epic attempt at selling out and failing miserably, judging from the gorgeous footage rife with subtext. All the folks at the Hundred Acres Manor - Ted, Tom, Damon, Ethan, Brandon - have been stellar, upstanding folk who are virtually bending over backwards to accomodate us, even when it puts a crimp in their own busy schedules.

The weather, however, hasn't been as friendly. Last weekend, in particular, it hit about 90 degrees. The Manor, for all of its courtesies, isn't air conditioned - nor does it need to be in October, when it's open to the public - so it's difficult to get air flowing through some of the narrow hallways and the crowded make-up room.

Still, that gripe aside, the shoot has been nothing if not interesting. First, kudos and a big shout-out to our make-up team recruited by Eric Molinaris: Jimmy, Brandon, Scott, Steve, Luke, Collin - you guys are awesome. Lorena, our lead glamour make-up, is also particularly awesome. Special thanks to our other folks: Mike H., Carolyn, Jeff, Matt G., Aaron, Nikki, Nic, Catherine, Jon and our PAs, Jordan and Dan. And if I forgot anyone, trust me, I have more thanks to go around. I'm a very thankful guy.

This last shoot revolved around Tiffany Warren Yarborough and Sofiya Smirnova. Sofiya came in from Chicago to play herself playing herself. She's basically the "survivor girl" of Tesseract, the movie-within-the-movie. In Tesseract, she also plays an actress making the movie-within-the-movie-within-the-movie, which is called Splatter Movie. So she had a lot of screaming to do. Because we are the folks we are, we doused her with stage blood just prior to her screaming. It made the scream real. Sofiya also got the opportunity to beat on our Grendel character with a latex baseball bat. Which was not fun for the actor playing Grendel. Not fun at all. He still has bruises. Weep for him.

Tiffany is playing an actress named Brenda. If you've been in the business for more than eight minutes, or have gone to any horror convention, you've encountered a person like Brenda. She's the "gonna take the horror industry by storm, you ain't seen no one like me!" type o'gal. She backs this statement up with the false confidence that only comes in a bottle. Since Tiffany is the exact opposite of this type of bravado display rack, she had some work to do creating the bitchy, slutty, annoying actress. But she did so beautifully.

So those were good things.

Not good things: aside from the weather, we had our very first - and I mean very first no-show in ten years of filmmaking. For some reason, we had a hard time filling an admittedly thankless role of a second obnoxious actress to play off of Tiffany's Brenda. Our first choice dropped off the face of the Earth. Our second was asked incorrectly by an associate (both of them have since forgiven us). Finally, we turned to a blind recommendation - something we are always hesitant to do. We didn't know the actress in question, so that was a wild card, but she was suggested by a very good friend of ours, and that lowered the risk in our minds. This new actress answered email promptly, was good at communicating, did not sound like a drooling idiot on the phone, asked questions about the character. In short, she was doing everything right.

Friday night, she called Amy to double-check call times. We confirmed we'd reimburse her travel.

Saturday, she was due to arrive at 10:30. By 11:00, we figured "traffic". We weren't ready for her yet anyway, so no big deal.

By 1:00pm, she still wasn't answering her phone. We knew she was not going to be playing with us. And, for some reason, I wasn't bothered by this. We asked the crew for recommendations, got a couple more, but it was Nic who came through. A good friend of his - who co-starred with Amy in (don't laugh) Marty Jenkins and the Vampire Bitches - Ashley, didn't live too far away and was ready to jump in. She showed up just at the point when we were ready to start the scene, looked over her lines, dove right in. (And when you see the scene, you'll understand why I used the word "dove") Amy took all of this in stride as well and just adjusted her directorial skills appropriately. That isn't to say that threats of corporal punishment were not leveled... All the good directors use that as leverage though. So we're told.

Now, again, this should have driven us into a wave of panic, but we were truthfully too busy and way too fucking hot to really worry about it. Tiff was staying with us for the week. We knew we could recast during the interim if it came down to it. It wasn't a big deal. It could have been a big deal, however, given different circumstances. But we had things under control. I guess it helps to work under the worst possible conditions for a decade.

But, again, we've lost locations, we've been escorted from premises, we've had to reshoot 40% of already-shot footage when lead actresses move to Greece, we've been through re-writes, retitling, late-comers, heat stroke, missed opportunities, lost investors and post-poned projects, but we've never had a no-show. Now, things come up. Problems arise. Personal shit always rears its ugly head at the worst possible moment. When it happens, you call. You don't email someone thinking they'll get it eventually. We're understanding folk. Be honest with us.

Still, it worked out for the best, so there's no reason to bitch, is there?

I spent the bulk of yesterday fighting with my Mac and my deck but ultimately captured the four hours of footage shot (roughly an hour on four tapes, three cameras - we're not that good) and the majority is gorgeous, thanks to Jeff Waltrowski's lighting and all of his, Jon's and (particular shout out) Aaron Bernard's fancy camera work.

So we have three days until we have to return. The heat, as I mentioned, is supposed to break to a nice, comfortable 75, which will be a nice temperature in which to torment Rachelle Williams and Elske McCain. Then it's a weekend with Tom Sullivan. Then, we should have the majority of the film complete. Save pick-ups and reshoots, hopefully minor. I'll keep everyone posted.

Back to work. Miles to go before I sleep. And I should probably eat something today.

Sometimes I write recaps just to remember what I've done...

Today will be largely spent packing and getting ready for the Fangoria Weekend of Horrors in New Jersey. Despite numerous emails from various Fango and Creation heads promising otherwise, neither Amy nor I were ever added to the site as guests or otherwise. But it's okay, we were thanked for our continued support. There's no reason to be bitter about it, however, at least not on Fangoria's end. Everyone over there - magazine, radio, comics and television - has been very nice to us so there's no cause to complain. People who go to the con will find us, invariably. Still, sometimes it's fun to get your shots in.

At this said Fango show, we're unveiling a brief and very rough look at some new Splatter Movie: The Director's Cut footage. No screening or big fanfare, just something we'll be showing at our table. HOWEVER, if any members of the general public reading this are planning on attending, there's a catch. You have to go to the Splatter Movie page and print out a ticket we created. Present this ticket, and we'll show you the footage. There's some good stuff in there too. We're talking double axe murder here. So print out your Happy Cloud ticket (it's just like a Wonka ticket, only you don't have to eat a slew of Wonka bars to get one. Well, you could if you wanted to...) Either print it from the blog or from the Pics page.

Also this weekend, and you won't need a ticket for this, will see the premiere of a brand new trailer for Professor Jack and the Electric Club. When I say "brand new", incidentally, I mean brand new. I literally finished it yesterday, cutting it to replicate trailers for '50s serials (just as the movie itself pays tribute to those by-gone days of yesteryear).

At the end of this cutting, however, I discovered just how much I depsise iDVD. As much as I love Final Cut Pro and most other Mac-related items, their iDVD is wretched. Regardless of the setting, I wound up with crappy compression on the finalized disc, leading me to believe that cutting on FCP, recording to tape, recapturing in Premiere, making an MPG2 from there and finalizing the DVD in Encore is not the tremendous waste of time I suspected it to be. The DVDs are coming out much nicer in Encore. And, no, DVD Studio Pro doesn't seem to be an option, thanks. Takes twice as long as Encore and I'm not thrilled with the output there, either. Yes, I'm sure there is something I'm not doing or some radio button I'm not clicking, but I'll stick to this method above. It takes a little longer, but it seems to work out quite well. Ultimately, what you're dealing with is a near-Luddite teaching himself to use a telephone. I'm usually happy when things just turn on.

But, anyway, the Professor Jack trailer should be up on Myspace and Youtube next week.

* * *

By now, everyone on Earth knows that I'm a Muppet fanatic and that Jim Henson is at the top of my list of heroes. It's not a secret. I have a freakin' Kermit the Frog tattoo on my left shoulder, for pete's sake. And don't think I haven't had to give a beatin' or two out in the yard to some skinhead who made fun of it during exercise turn-out! K to the F, baby! (God, I'm white...)

So, anyway, it should take nobody by surprise that I jumped at the chance to drive to Washington D.C. because a friend of a friend who works at the Smithsonian as a prep mold-maker was currently on the team prepping a new Muppet touring exhibit and had on hand several original Muppets from The Muppet Show, Fraggle Rock, The Dark Crystal, and even a couple pre-dating those (like Featherstone and the King from The Frog Prince (not, I realized later, taking a closer look at the costumes, Hey, Cinderella, where the characters originated) and Wilkins and Wontkins from the old "Wilkins Coffee" commercials!). Our new best friend Danny had arranged for Amy and I to come in about an hour before the Smithsonian heads of state arrived to start their preparations for the exhibit. Basically, we had an hour to peruse.

So, no sweat. The S.I. folks arrived at ten, we could be there by nine. To make sure, we left at four a.m. It takes a little over three hours to get to D.C. from our house. Plenty of time. Even when we got turned around and I drove in the wrong direction for fifteen miles - not a problem. Plenty of time.

Except that Washington D.C. has the worst traffic on the face of the Earth. We hit the George Washington Parkway at 7:30 and sat, crawling along, for nearly two hours. By the time we arrived and found a place to park, it was ten to ten. And that's when we realized we'd parked eight blocks away from where we should have been.

Now we're running through a particularly horrifying neighborhood, winding our way through a carpenter's strike (where Amy was hit in the back with a rock, presumably by someone who didn't think we were sympathetic enough towards the plight of D.C. area carpenters) and dying from the heat. By ten a.m., it had already hit 80+ degrees. Yay.

We finally got to the center and lo and behold, the Smithsonian higher-ups hadn't yet arrived! There was time after all! Danny quickly took us into a temperature-controlled work room, passing a jacket belonging to one of The Dark Crystal Podlings, and took us into a vault. Okay, vault/work room.

On all the tables, beneath sheets of plastic, were about a dozen original Muppets. Not camera puppets, the ones you find in calendars or posters - these were performance Muppets, used on the shows and in the movies. Danny uncovered a Rowlf first. We were inches away from something donned by Jim Henson and Frank Oz. He was a Muppet Show Rowlf - his face was a lighter color than the body fur - and he was in beautiful shape. Next to him, on a lower table, were Ernie and Bert, also covered with plastic. Beyond them, the King and Featherstone. Across from them, placards made up for various Fraggles and Dark Crystal props.

Then Danny opened a cabinet. And took out a Kermit. He'd already been mounted on a styrofoam base to hold his shape and fitted with armiture to keep his arms in place. If I wore white gloves, I could hold him.

I never put white gloves on so fast in my entire life.

Amy snapped a picture of me holding a Muppet Show performance Kermit. His eyes were yellowing slightly, but his flocking was still intact. Danny reached over and positioned his arms so Kermit would be waving at the camera. I was holding something that Jim Henson not only held, but created and was, in a large way, an extension of the man himself. Whether or not Jim actually built this Kermit, I have no way of knowing. At the time, he wasn't doing puppet fabrication, so I doubt that this particular Kermit was a by-product of his time. But he brought him to life. This Kermit in my hands had been on the show. This Kermit had been, at one time, The Kermit the Frog.

I replaced him, gently, back in the case. Then Danny handed me a Muppet Show Mahna Mahna. I was just taking in the detail in the eyes and the feathers surrounding the face when the Smithsonian folks walked through the door. With expressions on their faces as if they'd caught us using the Muppet cabinet as a urinal. It was probably the camera that freaked them out most.

Now, I've been in situations like this before. You don't pose as a journalist for ten years and not run into things you might have to talk your way out of. My biggest concern was that Danny not get into trouble. So I shook hands and smiled and dropped all the names over at the Henson Legacy I could think of. I hit a bullseye on a couple. They started to relax a little but still insisted that Amy delete the pictures that were taken, saying that Disney is very concerned about copyright violation, etc. Which isn't what they were actually worried about. We were foreigners in their territory. Rather than wait to be ushered from the room, I thanked them for their time and told them we'd get out of their way. No one was gracious enough to offer to let us hang out in the back or even appreciate the time it took us to get there - but then again, I didn't expect that kind of reaction. They wanted us out.

So we hung out with Danny for a while longer and he showed us some of the other exhibits being prepped for the various museums, including a fascinating skull for a Jamestown exhibit. To be honest, I think I asked more questions about how their computer-driven lathe worked than anything regarding the actual exhibits.

In the back of my mind, however, I was still buzzing about holding Kermit. I'd had ten minutes in a room filled with genuine Muppets. I didn't get that when we toured the Henson New York Office Building a few years back!

And as it turned out, Amy confessed as we were leaving, that she didn't delete the pictures after all. Once she realized they weren't monitoring what she was doing with the camera, she just shuffled through them and pocketed the flash card. So I have photographic proof that I did, indeed, handle a real Kermit. I will honor their wishes, however, and not post them. Besides, they're not for the public. Everything else I do is usually put out for public consumption. These pictures are for me.

We walked back to our car, discovered we'd gotten a ticket for parking on "Senate Property", though we couldn't have been farther from the Senate if we'd remianed parked in our own driveway. We couldn't find another parking space so visiting another museum or monument was out. So we drove out and opted to meet Eric Thornett for lunch. He showed me one of the new Canon HD cameras his studio had picked up, along with some footage shot and yes, it was all very nice and yes, now I really want one. Particularly if this camera, being a Canon, will fit the lenses I have for the XL2. But I couldn't really concentrate on any of that.

Because I'd held a Kermit for two minutes. We drove six hours (then back for four) for ten minutes and I would do it again in a minute.

Daniel Robert Epstein: R.I.P.

Last week, I got a startling email first thing in the morning from Robert Kurtzman, asking me what happened to Dan Epstein and that he was sorry to hear about it. Being that early, my brain couldn't grasp the question. A few minutes later, I found out the news: writer Daniel Robert Epstein had died of unknown causes.

I didn't know Daniel that well. He was one of the reviewers I sent screeners to and I had arranged a couple of interviews for him for Suicide Girls. He'd interviewed a lot of terrific people for S.G. including Cronenberg and Terry Gilliam, and, for me, was the only reason to visit that particular site. I was very eager to get him to write for me for Sirens, but his schedule never coincided with ours. The first thing you'll notice, reading his work, is his easy-going, conversational interviewing style. He wasn't a cut-n-paste guy; his interviews had depth to them. That was the chief reason I wanted him. You don't see that type of quality on web magazines that often.

But, because we were only email acquaintances, I don't know any of his friends or family and I have no idea how or why he died. He was a few years younger than I am, so that sent a shiver through me. I'm not ready to reach that point in my life where funerals start becoming a staple. Earlier in the year, we lost a good acquaintance, a filmmaker named Joe Casey. We're working on finishing Joe's last film, an anthology we contributed to called Brinke's Tales of Horror, as a tribute to Joe. I don't have a tribute in mind for Daniel. Part of me feels slightly, and guiltily, relieved that we hadn't become closer friends. It's a selfish feeling - utterly selfish. But we don't mourn for the sake of the dead; we mourn for our own loss. If the nuns and priests and other spiritual leaders are to be believed, Joe and Daniel are in a much better place right now and it is the rest of us who are worse off for their passing.

As far as Daniel goes, the journalistic world is certainly worse off. He'd raised the bar pretty high as far as interviewing goes. Any of you want to learn how it's done, read his work over at Suicide Girls. My sympathies go out to his family.

Post-filming recovery

It's after midnight and I'm still capturing footage. I spent a good deal of the day, on and off, sifting through hours of video shot this weekend. Our first production weekend on Splatter Movie went very well, if I do say so myself. We had at least three cameras rolling at any given time so there's a lot to go through. Too early to tell what's gold and what's garbage, so I'm allowing myself to be generous with the longer takes here. Of course, my hard drive space is going to be eaten rapidly at this rate, so I will likely be judicious later.

Saturday was a "getting to know you" day. There were a couple of folks - like our brand new PA Jordan and Nic Pesante's paramour, Catherine, not to mention effects artist du jour Eric Molinaris and make-up artist Lorena - with whom we'd never worked before, and at least one - 2nd Camera Jon Wamsley - who only Amy and I had worked with (on I Spit On Eli Roth - as detailed in Sirens of Cinema #8, on sale now!). So it was a good day for everyone to get acquainted and re-acquainted and especially to check out the space.

The Hundred Acres Manor is growing. Production Designer Ethan Turon is putting together new rooms for the upcoming season, so he and his crew were working while we were scouting locations and just running amok and exploring.

Sunday, Debbie Rochon came down to shoot a couple of pretty intense scenes for Tesseract, the movie-within-the-movie that Amy's character, "Amy Lee Parker", is directing. That's the stuff capturing now in the next room (it's always best if I go do something else when I capture so I don't sit on top of the Mac as its working) and it just looks gorgeous. Jeff Waltrowski, our man-about-town from Hero Headquarters, lit both her scenes nearly single-handedly and the colors are just amazing. Amy decided that the Tesseract footage should be very Argento-esque, with the frames filled with color while the actors themselves would be lit with white light. So the reds and blues and greens in these scenes just pop throughout.

Amy and Debbie have a scene together that will actually be Tesseract's climax - very bloody and very stylistic. I'm really happy with what has been captured, even though I'm only about halfway through the tapes that have been shot (like I said, at least three cameras at some point. Five was actually the record). If I don't get this stuff logged before the next shooting date, however, I'll start to backlog and that just won't be good. However, at this rate, we'll be sifting through at least five hours of video for every weekend we shoot.

If you want to see a very brief tease, we posted Amy Lee Parker's first video blog over on the Tesseract myspace page. You'll have to join as a friend, of course, to see it. Trust me, there will be more coming.

Nuggets of News

My life this week in bite-sized nuggets:

We met with one of our investors on Monday, ate and talked about Splatter Movie and other events in our life. He gave us money.

That morning, a check arrived from another of our investors (which may lead to a big announcement very soon, actually). As far as funding for the movie, we're doing pretty well. Appreciate the support, fellas!

Tuesday we met with one of the owners of the Hundred Acres Manor and met the production designer for the first time, Ethan. We did another walk-through and started to figure out what rooms would be best for certain scenes. Ethan and his crew are actually redesigning a number of rooms for the grand reopening of the haunt in September, so we'll have the opportunity to utilize a lot of brand new backgrounds and settings before anyone else ever lays eyes on them.

Before we left, a deer came running down the hill and scared the shit out of itself - not to mention us. There were about six of us in a group and the thing was running straight for us. A yearling, so it wasn't very big, but it started to skid when it saw us and almost plowed into one of the partners' cars. We took its not hitting us or stomping us to death in a panic as a very good sign. An omen, if you will, of good things to come. At least, it was a portent of our not being stomped to death in the future.

Just got off the phone with the distributor who picked up Abattoir - sorry, A Feast of Flesh. As I detailed today on the Happy Cloud Pictures Blog, the title of our little vampire opus has been changed due to popular demand. Something less French has been requested. We discussed the contract and what special features will eventually be offered on the disk. We're still on track for a fourth quarter 2007 release. As soon as the ink is dry, we'll make a big announcement.

As for the rest of the day, I spent it in the garage and in the attic, hauling out equipment, cleaning it and writing "Property of Happy Cloud Pictures" on it in black and silver sharpie. We have to leave a lot of various bits and pieces at the haunt. I'm not worried about anything stolen, more that something will accidentally get mixed in with the haunt's equipment property. Still, I came away feeling very proprietary.

So we meet with various cast and crew members on Saturday, shoot some b-roll and head home to rest for the big shooting event on Sunday. We have to shoot somewhere in the neighborhood of ten-to-twelve pages in around eight hours. Not even a record for us. Still, a lot to do and a lot of rust to shake off and get our Happy Cloud family back into the well-oiled machine it was while shooting Abattoir. We'll all miss Carlos Savant--he's down at a shop in New Orleans and busy to the gills right now--but welcome Eric Molinaris into the mix. There are a couple of people we've never worked with before but who come highly recommended.

This should work out to be something quite special when all is said and done. But then again, I tend to say that about every production. It's certainly unlike anything we've ever attempted before. To that end, I recommend that everyone check out the two Myspace pages: The Official Splatter Movie Page and The Official Tesseract Page, which is dedicated to the movie-within-the-movie Amy's character is shooting. Awesomeness is coming soon.

Moving Forward...

I spend much of my life in dread of the Big White X.

In the cartoons, that's the "x" painted on the ground where the anvil is intended to drop. Usually, a coyote is standing on the X, watching as the shadow grows above him - right before the inevitable "Wham!"

The problem with my Big White X is that I'm never quite sure when I'm standing on it - or how long that whistling sound will last before I realize I'm hearing it.

The future, to me, is something sharp and pointy and very, very heavy and rushing at me at a frightening speed. Always. It's not the change I fear, it's the impact that change will make. And the problems that come riding on its back.

As you've no doubt read from Amy's blog, after a month of finagling, chasing, begging and calling calling calling, I finally found an insurance agent that would provide us with th policy we were seeking in order to shoot Splatter Movie: The Director's Cut. We were seeking this to not only protect the owners of the Hundred Acres Manor and ourselves but also to insure--hence the word--that our friends and family would be protected in this unfamiliar locational space. If, Film Gods Forbid, someone would actually get hurt, we know now that they'd be taken care of.

For weeks, it was the runaround from this agent, the cold shoulder from that, an attempt at rip-off from the third. But today that came to an end. I even got an emailed proof-of-coverage to show the haunt's owners in case the policy takes a while to come via mail. So we're set to schedule, plan and finally shoot(!). Which is very exciting.

And I'm forcing my head to not look down. I don't want to see the X if I am standing on it. I know in the back of my mind that this was the inevitable conclusion to a very frustrating task, but I worry when things go smoothly - even if they hadn't up until this point.

This, my friends, is what is known as "being crazy".

So I'm trying to break myself of habitually feeling dread every time something goes my way. I'm trying very hard. Positive thinking was never a superpower I possessed. I'm trying to convince myself that sometimes things work out without incurring the wrath of the universe. In short, move onto the next dreadful task and celebrate that I can do so with all ten fingers.

And I understand, too, that there are plenty of new Herculean tasks to undertake - ever movie comes equipped with an endless number, naturally. So plan ahead and, as the cliche goes, hope for the best, prepare for the worst. And appreciate when something goes right.

And then turn around widdershins and spit on a rock, just to be safe.

Pirates, Rednecks and Insurance Companies

So Film Threat put up my review of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. I don't normally write reviews of mainstream stuff - they have Pete Vonder Haar for that - but I felt compelled. We saw it again yesterday and sat through the credits for the epilogue (not sure why we didn't the first time). While the first two movies had brief "gag" post-credit sequences, this one actually served as a cap for the story and actually expunged the few negative feelings I had towards the movie. The epilogue, truly, makes the Elizabeth and Will Turner story very satisfying. So much so that you'll be shocked that Disney had the balls to end it that way. Go see it, sit through until the very end - when the ushers come in and start giving you dirty looks - and then come back and discuss.

* * *

We're trying desperately to get Splatter Movie: The Director's Cut off the ground. We just signed our last few actors--I'll make the formal announcement soon--the set is fantastic and ready to go. Our effects are being covered by two very talented men. I have my second cameraman lined up. Our investors are sending us money, enabling us to fly some folks in and feed the rest. Tom Sullivan is on board and anxious to get started! So what's the hold up?

Insurance.

We need to get liability insurance to make sure that - Film Gods forbid - if anyone gets hurt, we're all covered. It's not a lawsuit concern. I'm working with a lot of friends. I want to make sure my friends will be safe.

However... we've spoken with three different insurance companies. One didn't get back to us until late last week saying that no one would underwrite our claim. Of the other two, one guy is on vacation and the other seems to do all of his business from his car. The lowdown seems to be that what we want isn't worth anyone's time. We're not asking for a lot of coverage, we're not looking for a million dollar policy. So no one wants to handle it. Apparently, our money just isn't good enough.

It'll happen and it'll probably happen soon. But the wait is frustrating. Here we are trying to do everything right and the easier route seems to be to just screw it all, damn the consequences. We're not about to call it quits, but the waiting sure is aggravating!

* * *

Last week, I spent two days working an auction. The focus of the auction was heavy machinery of the construction variety. Lots of backhoes and tractors and steam rollers and enormous things whose sole purpose seem to be terraforming planets. This meant, for me, waiting on literally hundreds of contractors and construction workers and businessmen, most of whom had a net worth in the millions, getting them registered and then cashing them out when their auctions were won.

Now, you think "millionaire" and your mind conjures Donald Trump, right? In this case, try "Larry the Cable Guy". There was a guy leaning on the counter counting out stacks of hundred dollar bills. He had, from what I could see, seven teeth. Apparently, an asphalt mixer was more important than dentistry to this entrepreneur.

And yeah, I spent most of the day - the fourteen-hour-on-my-feet-one-break day - dropping what I did for a living and offering these backwoods Rockefellers my business card. And what I was talking about was as foreign to them as the world of Bearcats and backhoes were to me.

So, I contented myself to counting the hours until I was allowed to go home and restraining myself from pummeling those fine examples of maleness who were sexually harassing my female co-workers like it was still the 1850s. Actually, there was one guy who was acting like one of the cave people in Quest for Fire - literally sniffing one of the female account reps. Apparently, Arthur C. Clarke was wrong - you can evolve to the point of using tools without ever having touched the Monolith.

New gee-whiz-bang news!

Okay, so some of you may not have seen this on Amy's blog yet. For those of you sub-rock dwellers:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Happy Cloud Pictures is proud to announce their next production:
Splatter Movie: The Director's Cut.

An independent production company sets up at a haunted attraction to shoot both a horror movie and the simultaneous making-of documentary, unaware that the set is being stalked by a killer masquerading as one of their own performers. As filming progresses, the line between what's real and what's fiction begins to blur—and then vanishes entirely! Splatter Movie: The Director's Cut takes a time-honored storyline and gives it a Happy Cloud Pictures twist, resulting in a veritable tesseract of a film. The end result will be as much a deconstruction of the slasher subgenre as it will be a new entry in horror history.

To complete this elaborate project, Happy Cloud Pictures is teaming up with the Hundred Acres Manor, Pittsburgh's only 100% volunteer based tri-themed haunt benefiting Homeless Children's Education Fund and Animal Friends. This immense attraction will virtually be a character itself in the film, providing a wonderfully-macabre landscape for the characters to play.

With a script from Mike Watt (The Resurrection Game, Dead Men Walking), Splatter Movie: The Director's Cut will star and be directed by Happy Cloud Pictures co-founder Amy Lynn Best (Abattoir, Severe Injuries) and will co-star legendary special effects artist and actor Tom Sullivan (The Evil Dead)! Also joining the cast are Elske McCain (Poultrygeist) and Best's Abattoir cast-mates Sofiya Mina Smirnova, Rachelle Williams (Jess Franco's Take Away Spirit), Alyssa Herron, Nic Pesante, Stacy Bartlebaugh-Gmys Jeff Waltrowski (Project Valkyrie) and Don Bumgarner.

Keep checking back at happycloudpictures.net or www.myspace.com/happycloudpictures for updates and news about this exciting project.

Now then, this is something we're extremely excited about. The project was inspired by a short film Amy shot with Devi Snively and Jane Rose back in March called, I kid you not, I Spit on Eli Roth (read all about it in Sirens of Cinema #7 - on sale now!). The shoot was set at the aforementioned Hundred Acres Manor - which is about a mile long of twisting, turning corridors and spooky rooms (not to mention an enormous maze that had us all lost for about twenty minutes when we visited with Mike and Carolyn and Anders Erikson and Melinda Kreuger at Halloween).

While shooting the short, I knew I wanted to shoot something of our own there. The place was begging for something bizarre and sinister and violent, but... what? A slasher movie seemed obvious - too obvious. Plus, we already did a slasher movie, albeit a comedy (i.e. Severe Injuries for those not paying attention). But the idea kept gnawing at me every time I'd head toward the upstairs make-up room, inevitably turn the wrong way and slam my shin into a coffin hidden in a room where we hadn't located the lights yet.

Multiple times over the weekend, I creeped myself out. I always found Haunted Houses to be cheesy fun, where you laugh when the high school volunteers leap out at you, their over-sized masks covering their eyes. Being in this enormous haunt pre-season, and having a lousy sense of direction, I couldn't shake the feeling of being watched, the distant sense of panic of getting lost (which stems from a tragic Boy Scout woods retreat), etc. So, okay, I knew the story was going to be a slasher movie. But how the hell do you make an original slasher movie? If the recent Hollywood offerings were any indication, you apparently can't. This latter theory is also backed up by the slew of indie fare I've suffered through recently (not everything - don't scream at me - you guys know who did the good stuff).

So the movie-within-a-movie idea came to me - also not terribly original, but I thought I could figure out a unique twist to the entire thing. Both Amy and I have been answering a lot of interview questions lately regarding what makes a horror movie, etc. So if I took the opportunity to actually explore the genre while recreating it at the same time, we just might have something here worth making.

I realized around page 10 that this script was going to be a royal bitch to write. The disjointed nature of the thing dictated that its structure was going to be difficult to find. At the same time, I knew I wanted to incorporate real documentary and interview footage into the narrative, which made things even slipperier to beat into shape. All in all, Splatter Movie was the hardest script I've ever written, and took me the longest ever for a first draft. I was literally averaging about three pages a day. Not to brag, but I usually write MUCH faster than that.

But the resulting draft really felt satisfying once completed. I really do feel like we have something here. It is, if nothing else, very weird. Everyone we've shown it to really likes it. Fred Obermiller, our executive producer, told me he thinks that it's my best work to date, so now I have THAT to live up to. Thanks, Fred. People are coming out of the wood work, too, to help out. Not the least of which Ted Sobek, one of the owners of the Hundred Acres Manor, but also Erik Molinaris at the Douglas School(aka The Savini School) and his team of intrepid and starving students, as well as Mark Marsen and Scott Tyson at Specter Studios, who are donating some props for us to use. So thanks all around to all of these fine folks!

So, we'll see. We have to finalize our production insurance, since we'll be shooting on property not owned by us. Usually, our homeowner's insurance covers us for damage and injury, but there's only so far we can take the idea of "mobile business", so we want to have the policy in place before we shoot to make sure everyone will be safe and protected. But once that's ready, we're set to go. And, as usual, we'll keep everyone posted as things progress.

Henson and other things

Yesterday was a day of mourning for me. Jim Henson died May 16, 1990.

So I spent the day in quiet reflection and repast, contemplating my own position in the universe...

Actually, I didn't remember this date until late in the day. If I had, I would surely have spent it watching my Muppet Show DVDs, sitting in my living room, surrrounded by Muppet paraphenalia, as I plan to later today.

It's always been one of my biggest goals to work with the Muppets. Interviewing several Muppet-eers for the now-defunct Cinefantastique was one of my career highlights, as was setting up this job at the actual Muppet Offices in Manhattan - which, of course, no longer exist. When Amy and I went to visit and arrange the articles, The Muppets were still the sole property of the Jim Henson Company, not the Disney Corporation. People still cared about the Muppets then, too.

We got to see Jim's office. Kept exactly the way it had when he died. There was a stained-glass window - on top was Ernie and Bert, below, the likenesses of Jim and Frank Oz. I swear it felt like someone had just left.

As we sat in this enormous conference room, just Amy and I and Veronica Hart, head of public relations, seated at this enormous carved table with Muppety feet on all four corners, Jane Henson walked in, apologized and walked out. I couldn't believe it.

I really do hope, some day, to write for a new Muppet Show. Right now, though, the Disney Corporation is adamant that the Muppets "no longer resonate with the American viewer". Perhaps that's because they've been kept out of the spotlight for so long? The Muppet Holding Company, as it was called until recently, has a new president now, however. Maybe things will change.

* * *

I've never been accused of being on the cutting edge of anything. So it should come as a surprise to no one that I discovered James Farr's Xombie this morning. Literally this morning. There's an interview with him up on Film Threat right now, and I couldn't help but sympathize with his trials at getting Xombie made by the majors. As he points out, studios are afraid of anything they haven't seen before. We went through a lot of that, and are still going through it, with The Resurrection Game. So swing on over to xombiefied.com and check out the episodes. They're really terrific.

* * *

While on hold for another technical support problem - this time banking-related matters - I couldn't help but realize that I was talking to yet another person in India, rather than anyone in the actual bank I was calling. As I sat and waited, a political pop-up window opened, urging me to feel some sort of outrage over the immigrant "catastrophe" we're facing in America. See, immigrants are flooding into the United States and taking our jobs away. I felt that was about half right, or, actually, two different statements. Immigrants are flooding into our country. Check. They're taking our jobs away. Check. But only the ones we send overseas through national greed and focus on the bottom line.

I don't see college graduates crying out over the need for more dishwashing and hotel cleaning jobs. They're crying out because all of our tech and customer service positions have been given away to folks in other countries who will work for much less than Americans will.

So all this hue and cry about immigration. That's the smoke-screen, right? That's the "hey look over here!" wave of the arms while our jobs vanish from the country. Which am I really supposed to care about? (Don't bother writing to me to tell me how misguided I am about this issue, btw. If I'm ignorant of an enormous amount of facts and figures and statistics and the fact that Pablo the Pool Boy ran off with your mom, ya know what? I'm okay with that hole in my education.)

I should just relax and wait a while. In a few more months, we can worry about gay marriage and abortion again. (As far as I care about these subjects: as long as neither are made mandatory, I don't care who does what. I don't plan to marry a gay man and I am unlikely to ever have an abortion of my own. So it's not my right to tell anyone else that they can or can't.) America will always have it's hysterical causes. So long as we don't mention the war.

With all of this going on, smoking, of course, is the brand new villain. The smoking ban in Pittsburgh lasted for about 14 hours before it was suspended by pending lawsuits issued by two area restaurants. To which I say: bravo and don't hold your breath (no pun intended). Again: I don't smoke. I hate smoking. I'd love it if every smoker I knew magically came to their senses and stopped smoking today so we could all eat in peace without someone having to run outside for 5-7 minutes. But it ain't going to happen.

And that being said, it shouldn't be up to anyone to tell anyone else what they can and can't do. We already have smoking and non-smoking sections in restaurants, to whatever successful degree they exist. Why do we need city-wide bans? Why did New York or California need these things? Why should we persecute an entire section of our society simply because they're committing suicide right in front of us? Everyone should have the right to commit suicide any way they like. And for us non-smokers who don't want to inhale second-hand smoke? Tough. It should be up to each individual to decide whether or not he should shun his friends. As far as my smoking friends go, they don't blow smoke in my face, they don't smoke inside my house when they come over. They don't force a cigarette into my mouth when I eat. That's pretty much all the courtesy I require.

* * *

So a few weeks ago, mankind saw the death of Jack Valenti, one of those villains in history who truly believed he was doing the right thing at all times. He was the head of the MPAA which, of course, is another evil company that truly believes it has the best interests of everyone in mind. Like anti-smoking legislation, it believes it knows better than you. Whether they want to believe it or not, they're censors. Watch This Film is Not Yet Rated for examples of this. For the independent filmmaker, they are the quiet gestapo. They don't come into your house and seize your film - they don't want anything to do with your film, but please come right in Mr. Spielberg and tell us all about your latest war atrocity production.

Now, that being said, the MPAA was set up to prevent the government from stepping in and doing the censoring that Hollywood didn't want to do. Just like the Comics Code, as it was established in the '50s, Hollywood took it upon themselves to self-govern, according the changing mores of the movie-going public. Except, unlike the Comics Code, which has relaxed over the years and has, almost, completely vanished, the MPAA has no strict code to adhere to. Everything is done on a case-by-case basis. So, of course, ample amounts of cronyism abound.

But Jack Valenti stood by it all the way. He knew better than he thought we should. And now that he's gone, his ill-conceived notions of propriety continue to endure. The next element to be taboo in American movies? Smoking, and the depiction of smoking. And, of course, the horrible notion of "the glorification of smoking" (!).

And around and around and around.

* * *

Another entity convinced of his own inherent goodness recently called home: Jerry Falwell. Though I'm sure his ministry will continue to stomp their jackboots over anyone not of their faith, the good reverend is gone from this Earth now. Every random website has a poll: "Jerry Falwell - Heaven or Hell, cast your vote!" I don't think it matters.

If the universe works the way I think it does, and there actually is a Heaven and Hell, well, Falwell went to Heaven. He was convinced that everything he said or did was mandated by his devotion to God. Jews and Homosexuals, in his view, really were responsible for 9/11 (makes as much sense as every other theory). Unless he was a terribly good actor, Falwell was an utter slave to his convictions. He was pious, he was hollier-than-allayou. So, of course, he got his ultimate reward. To think otherwise is either shadenfreude or a gross misunderstanding of the laws of the Divine.

* * *

This is why I love the Muppets. On the Muppet Show, none of this shit mattered. And I hate that I've reached a stage in my life where all of this actually does matter to me. It's a sign of horrible maturity where you are actually affected by the world around you.

The last three weeks

Three weeks later and I've been all over the world again, or so it seems.

It started with I-CON, up in Stonybrook, Long Island. Amy and I were in attendance again at the request of friend and artist Mike Apice. For the second year, we were set up with the artists back in the Art Show portion of the convention. As I've mentioned before, this is a fan-run convention—one of the largest in the country—and because of that, it's a catastrophuck in terms of organization. Neither of us wound up on the site as guests, so nobody knew we were there. Two of our movies screened—at 3pm on Sunday, as the show drew to a close. We were supposed to be on a number of panels—none of which were on the convoluted schedule. And because I get the impression that the organizers aren't as hip to the Art Show as they want us to believe, we were again hidden in the ass-end of the very long sports building, sequestered in a gymnasium on the other side of a second gym where all the guests go to hold their Q&As. As a result, nobody knew we were there.

Which is a real shame because the quality of art on display was simply amazing. No matter which end of the room you started on, your eyes fell upon some of the most gorgeous and offbeat paintings, photography and sculpture. So while the traffic was more of the rural cross-roads variety, rather than the bottleneck to be found downstairs in the dealers' room, we were afforded plenty of opportunity to hang with some of these incredible artists. It was our personal pleasure to hang and eat and drink with a series of Mikes (Lilly, Okamoto and Apice) and their respective others Marie, Diana and Romik (sorry, man, couldn't resist – Romik is an amazing artist in his own right and nobody can dispute that). And we got to meet Artist Guest of Honor Steve Ferris, whose work just brings tears to the eyes. It's my sincere and desperate hope that I'll get the opportunity to work with all of these people again on projects in the future (the three Mikes have already contributed covers to Sirens of Cinema (5, 7 and 2, respectively) and look for a cover by Romik very soon.

Now, aside from the disorganization, there's only one other thing that irks me about I-CON. I've pointed this out before, as well. Science Fiction fans are a different breed from horror fans. There is virtually no little sense of humor to be found at SF shows. Nor is there much originality to be had. SF fans take themselves very seriously. There's no joking about what they like. If you don't know who they're dressed as, costume-wise, it's tantamount to pissing yourself in Royal Court in their eyes. Last year, I entertained myself by asking each person I saw with a scarf if they were Dr. Who or just cold. Not a single smile. This year, I couldn't even work up the energy to do that. The costumes on display, again, were dazzling, but they were all meticulously copied from something else. Anime outfits down to the thread count—not a single original creation, however.

SF fans like what they like and nothing further. Horror fans like everything. SF fans like Voyager or Next Generation and that's it. Horror fans like slashers, monsters, and science fiction. You mention horror to most of these hard-core SF fans, you might as well be exposing yourself to them, the mortified looks you get in return. *Sigh*

But anyway… the very next weekend was Cinema Wasteland. And suddenly all was right with the world. If you know anything about us, you know that Wasteland is our favorite show of the year, hands down. And we get to have this pleasure twice – in March and in October. It's like coming home, it really is.

And the nicest thing about it—something I've come to realize about the horror community in general—is that a family has grown out of this show. The same people attend or set up as vendors show after show. We get together twice a year to hang out, drink, take the piss out of each other and have a really good time. This is all thanks to the atmosphere generated by the promoters, Ken and Pam Kish, and all the vendors, guests and attendees respond to this. It's just a relaxed, wonderful event.

To make it more wonderful, Abattoir had its first screening in its final form on Saturday. After a series of stressful, technology-involved problems (a laptop that stopped working, a DVD player that followed suit), we screened to a moderately-packed house that seemed to respond positively to our weird little vampire movie. Because it was Wasteland, I was actually able to sit and enjoy some of the movie as well, instead of being too nervous to even enter the room. After (and during) the screening, Amy and I contented ourselves to drink perhaps just a little too much. And because it was Wasteland, we had plenty of people watching out for our well-being during the evening. Amy had a trio of French Canadians (Stiv, Hugo and Dave) with whom she murdered the French language. I hung out primarily with JimmyO and April Burril. And by the next morning, Amy and I shared details of the previous night—fortunately for us, we blacked out separate chunks of time, so the filling-in process went smoothly.

Now, this past Friday, Good Friday, was celebrated with Grindhouse. Members of the Happy Cloud family (Amy, myself, Carolyn Oliver and Stacy Bartlebaugh-Gmys) got together with members of Hero Headquarters (Jeff Waltrowski, Dave Cooper, Tara (the future Mrs. Cooper) and their friend Ambrose) for a glorious afternoon of senseless violence followed up with a steak dinner (it's the blasphemy that adds the extra flavor). As expected, Grindhouse was a fabulous, nearly-nonsensical three-hour-plus thrill ride. It's unashamedly stupid and utterly satisfying.

Of course, because Grindhouse was released on Easter Weekend, a notoriously family-oriented weekend, it opened to less-impressive numbers than expected by the Dimension head-honchos. And the crowd of reviewers have, in a marvelous display of shadenfruede, declared the film a bomb. Which is, of course, just silly. Like the B-movie films its creators pay tribute to, I suspect that Grindhouse will need more than a single weekend to find its audience.

On the other hand, I think commercial success was the furthest thing from the minds of Tarantino and Rodriguez. Why should they give a shit? They made a movie—a pair of movies—for an audience of two, themselves, first and foremost. And they banked on there being enough like-minded folks out there—like our aforementioned octet above, for starters—to keep the movie running for a few weekends before the inevitable packed DVD release. Grindhouse celebrates a subculture of movies that very few members of today's modern audience has any frame of reference for. They crafted a pair of intentionally-silly exploitation movies out of pure love for a whole cadre of intentionally-silly exploitation films based primarily in a decade that already seems prehistoric to the slew of ticket-buyers in the new millennium. It was a Sisyphean task that the duo took readily—gleefully. They didn't make Grindhouse to attract the attention of those who made the insipid Blades of Glory #1 at the box office. And they certainly didn't make it for the Meet the Robinsons crowd. Those audiences, quite frankly, deserve exactly what they got and nothing more. They're the reason Norbit 2 is in the works and they can have this world they've carved.

Nope, Rodriguez, Tarantino, and the whole company made Grindhouse for folks like us. And by 'us', I mean, of course, anyone reading this blog, for starters. The film lovers. The hard-core, unapologetic geek. Grindhouse is an intentionally imperfect child, a gritty and gratuitous as absolutely possible.

And to the critics who gnashed their teeth and groused or got embarrassed by the preceding, it wasn't for you and we're all happy you're not in our corner. To Barry Paris, of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, who needed "post-screening smelling salts" and was sent mincing into the night by the preview, next time, sir, perhaps you'd prefer to spend your time with a good loafer-lightener. And to the nitwits who bitch in the other direction, that the directors failed to emulate the '70s exploitation films because of x, y, z (use of cell phones by characters, references to Iraq, whatever), your theorem is flawed here. I may grudgingly grant that Tarantino inserted a Tarantino movie into the middle of his '70s race car/women revenge film, but, as Mark Bell at Film Threat pointed out, every no-budget '70s-era grindhouse movie has long, extended moments of talkiness. Tarantino is proud of his knack for dialogue—it's what he's known for. So, yeah, his talky parts are especially talky, but no less so than Two Lane Blacktop or Road Games. If you didn't like it, tough. It wasn't made for you.

Our little octet cheered and applauded and roared with laughter all the way through. Once Death Proof gets past the talky first act misdirection and is underway with the marvelous Zoe Bell and her posse, we couldn't take our eyes off the screen. The Faster, Pussycat ending was nothing short of celebratory!

(And to critics, like the aforementioned Mr. Paris, who accuse Grindhouse of being misogynistic, you should, perhaps, look this fucking word up! It comes closer to misandry, for Christ's sake! Oh, and by the way, Mr. Paris, not to beat a dead horse here, but how, exactly, is "Pittsburgh's own Tom Savini" "immortal"? And how is George Romero "sainted"? Seriously, I'm curious as hell.)

So, for my money, Grindhouse was the perfect way to kick off our Easter celebration. Though I couldn't help to think, with no fair amount of irony, that Dimension spent $56 million dollars to make Grindhouse look like The Resurrection Game…