Robert Kurtzman interview

Just wanted to quickly announce that Film Threat put my my interview with KNB co-founder Robert Kurtzman. Check it out here.

This is the beginning of a series for me, as I'll have pieces with Dick Smith and Toe Tag Pictures' Jerami Cruise coming up soon.

Seven years, no itch

Today, Monday, Amy and I will have been married for seven years and together for a total of fourteen. The realization of just how lucky I am – how lucky we are – keeps hitting me with odd regularity. It’s pretty amazing, actually, these days, that anyone can stay together as long as we have. We have our problems—everyone does—but we’re still very much a team in all respects. I know that I love her more now than I did when we first got together.

With everything that’s been going on lately—between filming Abattoir and preparing for Genghis Con II—we almost forgot that our anniversary was coming around again. We actually had to consciously schedule some time to just celebrate!

While I waiting to pick her up, I’m sitting in the little house in Mount Oliver—Sheridan’s safe house/High Stakes house—capturing the footage we’ve shot so far. I’m only going to get through 4 of the seven hours, however, as I’m teaching myself Final Cut as I go along. So far, I’d say 95% of the footage is gorgeous and usable as it is. There will be some necessary color-correction down the line, of course, and I’m still deciding if I should throw a Magic Bullet filter on it to give it a more saturated feel, but aside from that, everything is coming together very well. Once I get all this into the computer, I can start editing and seeing how it’s all going to come together.

We shot all weekend again, starting with Sheridan’s fight with Pris on the stairs of the Bathory house. Pris is being played by Alyssa Herron (Severe Injuries) and she’s all tall and graceful in the role. And by “tall”, I mean a full foot taller than me. So when Amy instructed her to attack me all out, she did, and I had a difficult time staying upright and finding the necessary leverage to keep her from knocking me over. So that fight will look cool, anyway.

Rachelle Williams (The Take-Away Spirit) ended up being able to come down at the last minute—we weren’t completely expecting her due to schedule conflicts, but she turned out to be a hell of a trooper and faced the PA Turnpike with aplomb to arrive and shed her clothes for us as “Carlotta”. She and Pris end up seducing and killing “Mr. Price” played by Nic Pesante (who provided a bit of nudity himself, actually, so no one can call us sexist as far as this movie goes!). And you have to truly admire a pair of actresses who can just start making out with each other on film after only having just met about an hour before. (That goes for Stacy and Zoe from last week as well!) Fortunately, I’ve known Rachelle longer than I had Zoe, so I was a little more comfortable with the directing this time out, i.e. ‘Put your hand there, kiss that, lick there…’

Don Bumgarner provided some truly gruesome effects for this scene, including an eye-rip and a leg that had been made to look like the girls had gnawed it to the bone. This will be the first vampire movie (that I can recall) where the vampires actually play with their food! It’s actually pretty gross, to tell the truth.

Saturday was a bear, though, in terms of scheduling and getting everything done before people started to pass out from exhaustion—particularly Amy and me. But by the end of the day, we’d shot a good dozen pages and four sequences (including pick-ups from the previous week).

Sunday was fairly easy, truth be told. It was more a pick-up day than anything else. The longest stretch involved a three-page dialogue scene between Bill Homan and Steve Foland and that was hammered out in about an hour. All in all, we did more hanging outside and just talking than we did working. For a change. Not surprisingly, the first weekend Tim and Charlie were available to pitch in, we didn’t have anything for them to do. Tim did bring us a big box of Gross Movie Reviews books. And a pair of gold sticks to get rid of our flies. He’s good that way.

So with this weekend behind us, we have a grand total of four days left on the schedule—okay, six with pickups. Of course, these next four will be nearly impossible to finish with everyone’s busy schedules… But at least Abattoir will be finished in the same year it was begun… unless I just jinxed myself by writing that out loud.

Surviving Abattoir

We had a whirlwind few days last week, but now we're mid-way through Abattoir's shooting schedule. Give or take a few, we shot over 30 pages in three days. This included dialogue and effects shots, double or triple the page-count in terms of set-ups. Plus two new people we'd never worked with before, generously donating their time to make a strange little vampire movie!

We picked up Sofiya Smirnova at the airport on Friday morning (after a slight scare that she might not be able to make it due to a family tragedy - which only proves what an amazing person she is!) and, after a brief stop-over at our place to refresh and grab some coffee, we were off to the main location, which happened to be the Victorian house owned by co-star Stacy Bartlebaugh-Gmys and her husband, Ron. Shooting went pretty well and smoothly, even though I was the only male in a house full of women (or, as I liked to put it, "the lone sausage in the taco factory" - which just endeared me to the cast!).

Now, the reason I was a tad uncomfortable is because of the delicate balance of the female nature. As everyone knows, because it's a biological law: with any given group of women in one location, after about fifteen minutes, their cycles synch up. (Corollary: "one or more women left alone in a room will instantly devolve into a topless pillow fight".)

But we got a ton of stuff accomplished, including an uncomfortable flogging scene involving Amy's character, Elizabet, punishing Alyssa Herron's Pris. Uncomfortable for Alyssa, that is, as she was the one being flogged. (Oddly enough, for our company, Amy did not actually whip Alyssa... this time around anyway.) She was kneeling nearly naked on an over-stuffed chair, reacting to the swish of a riding crop very close to her bare skin. Don't let anyone say our cast isn't dedicated!

Fortunately for me, Carolyn Oliver, from Secret Scroll Digest, was on hand to be my AD for the weekend. Amy and I don't usually have ADs - we're often thrust into that role ourselves, on top of everything else we have to do, so it was nice to have someone around to do the various tedious AD chores (which, in our case, also included Script Supervision and continuity). I also had to be my own DP as Jeff Waltrowski was stuck at work all day.

Saturday, we went back to the house in Mount Oliver to shoot Amy/"Elizabet" and Sofiya/"Zhora" killing two of the main characters. This was the first time we shot with Aaron Bernard ("Seth") and the first time Bill Homan would be on hand to play Tom the mercenary. Don Bumgarner, my effects lead, was on hand to provide the bulk of the effects (including teeth-casting and appliance-affixing), helped out by Kelly Fritz and Carlos Savant (returning from shooting with us on High Stakes). We had five scenes to blast through between 10am and 6pm. We actually wrapped about 7, which made me feel bad, but it took as long as it took. At least we got Bill out of there in time to get to work.

Midway through this shoot, another heart attack: Zoe Hunter was having trouble getting to Pittsburgh. She was due on set for Sunday so we could shoot her death scene (we had too much to do and we'd never get to the crucial bar scene in time!) and had to come from New York (hey, she coulda said 'no' when we asked if she wanted to work with us! But we're just so darned cute, it's hard to refuse us. Particularly Amy.).

Ultimately, she hopped on a bus and rode the eight torturous hours squeezed beside ... okay, no cheap shots at people who ride Greyhounds. You know how unpleasant it can be, though.

Saturday night, Amy, Sofiya and I crashed at Stacy and Ron's so we wouldn't have to trek all the way back to Waynesburg. Rest was sparce as the price we paid for Zoe coming via bus was we had to be up at 6am to pick her up. We got back, put her to bed for a couple of hours, and then were back and awake at 10am. Ready to go. Or, at least, upright.

Sunday was another whirlwind. We needed to get Steve Foland out of there so he could get back to the Pittsburgh Comicon, so we concentrated on his scenes first. Then we had a fight scene between Sofiya and Megan Ruggiero (playing "Charlotte") that resulted in blood and black bile (don't ask). This was the first time Stacy had ever had that many people in her house and her OCD was working overtime. (It's a gorgeous house; she and Ron killed themselves to refinish every surface of wood and decorate it as beautifully as it is... you'd freak out too, trust me!)

The last sequence was a sexy and bloody murder scene involving a three-some gone very wrong. This was the sequence Sofiya was looking forward to all weekend - "Am I still writhing in the blood in ecstacy?" she asked all day. And how could we possibly disappoint her?

Jeff not only lit this scene beautifully, he also had to be in it.

"I don't want to take my shirt off." he said. "I'm fat."

"Dude," I explained. "You're in bed with a topless girl, while two other girls writhe on top of you... You could be eating a sandwich all the way through - no one's going to notice!"

A touch of Southern Comfort later, he was fine with the scene.

Again, we wrapped an hour later than I'd hoped, but the footage came out beautiful. This has very little to do with my expertise, though. It's impossible to photograph Stacy's house badly. Finishing up, we all drove over to Oakland to the "Fuel and Fuddle" to celebrate a successful weekend.

Returning Sofiya and Zoe to their transportational outlets, Amy and I dragged ourselves back to Stacy's the next morning and repacked the car. We'd gotten a total of ten hours of sleep in three days and not only felt it, but looked it. We still had an hour's drive back home, where we went immediately to bed, pulling the dogs up to our chins and trying to recover.

We still have eight days of shooting to go, give or take, but this would be the worst stretch. While we still have to bring Zoe back for a day, and then Debbie Rochon for her "special appearance" (it's weird to shoot a movie without Debbie, she's been a part of our family for so long), nothing we have left to do will be as stressful. We'll have effects days and action days and dialogue days, but they won't be packed on top of each other like stressful Lincoln Logs. We're still on track to have this finished by the beginning of June.

So with this weekend down, I was able to concentrate on finishing up Sirens of Cinema issue 4, planning #5, capturing footage and working with Amy to plan Genghis Con II: The Wrath of Con.

You know, that's how we relax.

Oy.

Meanwhile, here is a link to more pictures, courtesy of Zoe.

Abattoir, exhaustion and whining

So... we started shooting Abattoir two weeks ago by choosing something simple to kick off with - namely a four-hour trip to Baltimore to film with folks we'd never worked with before in a location we'd never seen. Fortunately, the aforementioned folks were JimmyO and April Burril, Lesley Vernot, Stephen and "Tall Katie" (all from Chainsaw Sally) and Eric Thornett from Piranha Pictures. Also on hand was Jason (whose last name I don't think I ever knew), a martial-artist who provided some much-appreciated kicking. Make-up was provided by buddy Mike Conlon (and assisted by his buddy "Bull" - thanks, man!). The location was an amazing former Korean-Catholic church owned by JimmyO's friend and colleague, "Kit".

Shooting went swiftly and more-or-less efficient (if tinged with our usual chaos) as we drove through some impromptu fight choreography and gore and ended with Amy, April and Lesley topless and chewing on my neck and wrists. See, it was a flashback sequence involving my character (a suave and ruggedly handsome Irish vampire hunter) and Amy's character (a dark and beautiful vampire madame)... nevermind. No matter what you do, when you try to describe a horror movie, you inevitably sound stupid. Suffice to say: blood and breasts. These are the things that make the horror world go 'round.

Although, the next day, when we got together to celebrate April and Jimmy's daughter, Willow's, 2-year birthday with a big family party, I couldn't help but feel guilty about what I'd done to the little girl's mother the next day. "Don't worry about it," Jimmy told me. "You should see what I do to her mother!" And yet, I was oddly uncomforted by this remark.

Back home, we spent the rest of the week catching up and preparing for our "domestic start date", which was this previous Friday. This time, the cast consisted of Stacy Bartlebaugh-Gmys, Alyssa Heron and Tim Gross; the crew: Amy, myself and Jeff Waltrowski; effects: Don Bumgarner and Kirk Owen. And the eight of us all squeezed into Don's basement shop and the narrow area outside his apartment to create a dark, scary alley for Tim to kick the crap out of Stacy and, in turn, get demolished by Alyssa. Much blood and pain was involved (as detailed on Tim's Bastards of Horror site), mainly because Tim decided to torture himself. Don, too, was torturing himself because he'd only given himself a week to complete a very complicated effect that wasn't quite ready come time to shoot. Since I'm the king of inserts (no pun intended), it wasn't that big a deal. We can go back to it. And it'll be worth the wait.

(A brief aside, Robert Kurtzman, one of the founders of KNB Effects Group, Inc., called my cell when we were on our way. He wished us all luck with the production. Can you ask for a better blessing than that?)

Saturday, several of us reconvened at the tiny little High Stakes house to shoot my dialogue and close-ups and attempt to block out a scene to be shot at a future date, once Easter was out of the way and no longer taking my cast away for family obligations.

I realized halfway through shooting this scene, as I forgot line after line, that I had every potential to utterly sink this movie with a crappy performance. For some reason, though I haven't really acted in eight years (if you can call the smirking and falling I did in The Resurrection Game "acting"), I decided to give myself all the exposition in the movie. So there are pages after pages of long speeches that I have to deliver. And, because I loathe and despise myself as a human and a deity, I decided that my character also has a thick Irish accent. Fortunately, since I couldn't remember a lot of my lines, that negatively effected my ability to keep the accent consistent... wait, fortunately? That can't be right...

This coming week, we have Sofiya Smirnova coming in from Chicago and Zoe Hunter coming down from New York. Shooting will take place at the little house and in Stacy's grand Victorian home in McKeesport. (For those familiar with Pittsburgh terrain, McKeesport and Mt. Oliver are nowhere near each other... so, yay!) And we will attempt to shoot something like fifty scenes in four days.

Now, on Friday, we shot 24 set-ups in three hours, which included nine effects shots. Saturday, we shot five pages in about an hour. So we move fast. While we can move at least this fast, it would help if we could move faster. I'm anticipating some severe exhaustion break-downs come Tuesday.

Pray for us. Any theology will do at this point. We'll take what we can get.

***
So we finally caught Good Night and Good Luck last night. The movie is compelling though completely without a climax (which is in keeping with the historical story they were telling). I couldn't help but wonder where the Edward R. Murrow's and Fred Friendly's of today are hiding. Why aren't our journalists (with, oddly, the exception of John Stewart) speaking out as loudly against the McCarthy's of today (of which there are more every day)? Guantanamo Bay, gas prices, the war in Iraq, the upcoming war in Iran, wiretapping, hunting accidents--why are we sitting here and taking all of this? Why isn't anyone speaking out?

Wondering this out loud, Amy grumbled that, instead of complaining, maybe I should do something about it. Sure, I have a blog! Beware evil-doers!

The sad fact is, I don't have the power. I'm not in a position to reach millions of Americans. I'm not a respected war correspondent who was already the voice of the people when he took on Washington injustice. And while I'd love to think that I had the mettle to do so, I have no idea if I would be strong enough to do so.

I don't do much of anything of importance. I write constantly, but about entertainment. I write about and interview indie filmmakers, actors, actresses. I report about what movies are cool, what should be avoided. On one hand, I suppose it could be argued that I'm giving people who deserve it an opportunity for promotion, to reach people who might otherwise never have heard of them. Or it. Or whatever.

And I have had the opportunity, I suppose, to report about more-important issues. I could be reporting about the war. I'm sure I could convince Film Threat to send me to Iraq... to report about Iraqi movies, or interview Iraqi celebrities... that might be all I'm qualified for. I don't know.

I don't know if I would do "more important" work if given the chance. I do know that I'm no more a Murrow than the folks currently working out there. I think, sadly, that his like will not be seen again.

So I'll probably continue to whine about high gas prices and the totalitarian practices of our current government, because on a Quantum Physics level, my voice alone can effect reality, right? But I don't see myself reporting from the roof of a war-sieged building holding a film festival any time soon.

Thoughts for the day

Finished up the foley and sound-tweaks on High Stakes last night. After the miserable mic buzz made most of the live track useless, I was forced to ADR 90% of the short. Now, listening to the clean dialogue nestled in with the rest of the track, I wish we'd gone 100% ADR. All of the actors re-recorded their dialogue nearly-seamlessly, and it's just so much better. Add to that Scooter McCrae's awesome score, we have a cool little movie here. (In case we haven't said it ad nauseum, this is for Brinke's Tales of Horror due out this summer by JD Casey Productions.)

Which makes me feel a little better about starting production on Abattoir this coming Saturday. Thanks to JimmyO Burril, we'll have a great location to shoot an integral flashback with half the cast of Chainsaw Sally (along with Eric Thornett and some of his Pirannha Pictures family and effects artist Michael Conlon). Fortunately, all of this footage will be silent, so it's one thing I won't have to worry about. Driving to Baltimore and shooting in 16:9 24p for the first time ever is daunting enough. Not to mention that I'm actually acting in the damn thing! (What the hell was I thinking?)

***

Sirens of Cinema #3 hit the stands last Tuesday and I think it's our best issue to date. Our new layout artist, John Boone, did a terrific job and I think we're starting to hit our stride with the look and feel of the publication. Highlights of this issue include "The Ladies of SLiTHER" (including an excellent interview with Jenna Fischer by Debbie Rochon), a great interview with Tina Krause by the aforementioned Scooter, Linnea Quigley's first new interview in some time, Amy's third Pretty-Scary article and a neat Genghis Con overview by Art Ettinger of Ultra-Violent Magazine. Did I mention that I'm very happy with this issue?

****

Amy and I finally got the chance to see SLiTHER on Tuesday. We hit a 5:15pm showing and were the only people in the theater (save for a guy who kept popping in and out for some reason). I was immensely pleased by the film, which lived up to my expectations of gore and comedy, just like Gunn promised. My ONLY complaint, and it's a minor one, is with the dialogue. Now, Gunn is a clever, intelligent writer. He's not afraid of the low-brow joke, given his Troma background, but for the most part, the dialogue consisted of lines like "That's some fucked-up shit." and "What the fuck was that?" and "Fuck you, you fucking cocksucker." (This last one was delivered by the hilarious Gregg Henry, and he made it work.) So I was disappointed that there was so much of this and so little of Gunn's cleverness (though that aspect did shine through in the rest of the inventive script that merged Night of the Creeps, Night of the Living Dead and Shivers). So, again, minor gripe. Now, all of your horror bastards get moving and go see this movie, damn you!

****

Which brings me to another point: why are the characters in horror movies these days so unpleasant? I realize that was a standard set in (or around) Friday the 13th, but Jesus! How are you supposed to care if these people are ripped to shreds if you don't like them? The new Hills Have Eyes gives us the least functional family of nitwits in recent memory. Similarly, Hostel is about horrible, ugly Americans being brutally killed in Eastern Europe. Roth's previous Cabin Fever was about horrible people contracting an equally-horrible disease.

The low-budget arena fares no better. The last few Asylum movies are rife with unpleasant people who don't like each other systematically slaughtered for no good reason. And they're always going on camping or hiking trips, trapped with each other before they're separated, and no one can stand each other. I don't know about you but I rarely go on trips with people I hate. Is the kind of bickering that passes for dialogue a short-hand for the conflict they'll face in the future? Or is it just lazy writing? Note to the screenwriters out there: if you hate the main characters, your audience with root for the villains. If that's what you want, you've done your job.

****

V for Vendetta is an outstanding--if heavy-handed--and surprising movie, given the world's current repressive climate. It echoes a sentiment made by Thomas Jefferson that I always admired, in which he insists that every generation should revolt against its government to remain free. And he made this assertion after he drafted the Declaration of Independence. V calls for people to keep their governments in check, to not give up our civil liberties in exchange for "feeling safe". It says, rightfully so, that the government is not the controlling hand but the servant.

I'd love for everyone in the U.S. to run out and see this movie and get it. But the grumbling that I've heard around the net by the zombies who have seen it are largely irked that there wasn't more "Bullet Time" like in The Matrix and that Natalie Portman isn't as hot when her head was shaved. Oh, yeah, and it was confusing.

This particular bread and circus wasn't as nourishing and thrilling to our downtrodden masses, I guess. Which is a shame. Because it's a message that really has to be received.

Maybe the special edition DVD will make people wake up...

****

For some reason, we're doing it again. Genghis Con II: The Wrath of Con will kick off from September 15-17, 2006 at the Greentree Radisson in Pittsburgh, PA. Our guests this year include Lloyd Kaufman, Debbie Rochon, Amy Lynn Best, Tiffany Shepis, Sofiya Smirnova, Melantha Blackthorne and April Monique Burril. More guests will be announced soon. The screening room will be manned by Secret Scroll Digest and we will be hosting the 2nd Annual Pretty-Scary Film Festival. So check out the official site, reserve your tickets (discounts on weekend passes available with a verified room booking at the Radisson) and come on down!

And the wheel goes 'round

Sometimes, I wonder if I ever have a "light" stretch of time. It seems like we're always busy with something -- usually several somethings -- resulting in eight-day weeks that leave our heads spinning.

Two weeks ago, we hit the I-CON SF convention in Long Island, at the invitation of genius artist Michael Apice. While it gave us the opportunity to briefly catch up with Mike, fellow artist Romik Safarian and Debbie Rochon, none of whom we'd seen in some time, it was three long days spent out of our element. We realized halfway through the weekend that we don't fit in real well at Science Fiction shows. Though I am a huge SF fan, some of the hardcore fans are just too intense, refusing to even consider something outside of their particular subgenre (the anime fans are only fans of "this" series, the various Doctor Who folks only like Tom Baker or the current incarnation and are suspicious of anything Not That Thing). However, we had the pleasure of meeting J. Corsontino and Donny Ha, the artists behind "The Time of the Fairies"--two of the coolest people I've ever met.

Nine hours later, we were back home and playing catch up for the next four days, while at the same time trying to get ready for Cinema Wasteland in Cleveland. Wasteland is our hands-down favorite show, so we were really looking forward to hitting it. Thus, the four days leading up to our departure were ridiculously long. (Which was spent recording ADR for the worst parts of High Stakes and starting the layout for Sirens of Cinema #4.)

Friday finally reared its ugly head and we were able to make our trek out to Cleveland. Even though we'd started our con season last month with Fangoria in Chicago, Wasteland felt like coming home. We know virtually everyone there so it was like a three-day family reunion. Plus, we have this enviable spot right up front between Wasteland's creative team, Pam and Ken Kish, and Ultra-Violent Magazine.

We took it easy on Friday, still feeling drained from the previous week. Saturday, however, is always party-time. We roamed around a lot, hanging in the bar with Tom K, Thor, Necro and Lucy from B-Headed.com before heading up to the room occupied by maniac writer Joe Knetter, his wife Nicole, their (our) friends Stacy and Julie, Joel and Libby, Veronica and Sonny, etc. We were soon joined by Roland Pena and the immortal 42nd Street Pete (who became the voice of Wasteland for the weekend), Kevin Barberry from Rock 'N Shock, Jeremy and Meredith of Dark X-Mas fame, Jungle Gym Kim of Satan's Sideshow - and numerous others who, unfortunately, alcohol has erased from my memory.

Then... the lights went out.

There was a weird brownout earlier in the evening, but then the full-scale black-out hit about five to Midnight, like some sort of odd Mayan Y2K. The whole hotel was thrust into darkness, save for emergency lights in the corridors. With no air conditioning and non-opening windows, it was too hot (not to mention dark) in the rooms. The hallways were filled with people sticking their heads out of the doorways like bizarre, vertical groundhogs. Finally, we just camped out in the hall, hanging with Toe Tag's Shelby and Crusty who'd had their photo-shoot ruined by the sudden dark (though that didn't quite stop anyone from taking pictures - the flash arching down the halls).

Downstairs, anarchy erupted. Without lights, the conventioneers went feral. The anxiety of our electric generation thrust into darkness was compounded by the bar going dry. Without the computers, the bartenders refused to serve alcohol (darkness must effect math skills as well). So people were forced to entertain themselves. These activities included impromptu parking lot fire eating, a mock crucifixion, table dancing and some indecent exposure. Little time expired before the cops arrived. They claimed they'd been summoned after someone was offended by a young woman found topless in the hall. This could very well be true, or it could have been a convenient excuse (although the most far-fetched explanation for the blackout I'd heard was that the hotel wanted an excuse to bring drug-sniffing dogs in to bust up the various weed parties. Highly unlikely. And ineffective if true).

Ultimately, we did feel very sorry for anyone who was in the hotel but not with the convention, as the lights didn't come back until almost 4:00 am and the noise level was constant until then. Add to this the dirty trick of Daylight Savings Time ending. Everyone was extremely disoriented come morning.

Because of all of the above, Sunday was an "off" day. It was difficult to remain "on", particularly for Amy, who has to smile and make eye-contact with everyone through the door. Things felt odd and surreal. At least we were productive. I managed to finish up ADR for High Stakes with Nic and Charlie and had interesting meetings with a couple of producers/distributors. As soon as something concrete comes up, I'll share the info.

But we still stuck it out, almost to the bitter end, because, frankly, it's difficult to leave Wasteland. To give ourselves a sense of closure, we met up with Henrique Couto and his friend Lisa for dinner afterwards before we made our way home.

So now we're home and gearing up for another long weekend. We officially start shooting Abattoir on Saturday, kicking off the production with a sequence involving most of the cast of Chainsaw Sally and a big church in Baltimore. It'll be the first major production of ours in three years.

Until we leave on Friday, though, we'll be spending the rest of the week catching up, getting things ready, hoping not to forget anything and trying to be professional, even when we feel like amateurs. And for the next five weekends after that as we continue to shoot.

Keeps us off the streets, though, right?

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!)