Gadzooks!  It's amazing what the specter of the fourth decade will do to a person.  True, I'm a big proponent of the theory that, for Generation X, forty is the new thirty...

...but, even so, I've been noticing that the everpresent little Gunnery Sgt. Hartman in my skull has been screaming at me a lot more lately, motivating me to GO, GO, GO!!!!  TIME'S A-WASTIN'!  GET THE &@*!%! OFF MY OBSTACLE, MAGGOT!  And so on.

Thus, the Ol' Bait Shop is cookin' with gas this summer with a truly mind-boggling number of projects underway.  Frankly, I'm exhausted just thinking about it.  As always, there's the novel I've been working on since the late nineties in fits and starts, but now there's another, shorter novel I'm hoping to actually finish as part of the "capstone" project I need to complete this fall to qualify for a Master's degree at U-Mass.

Then there's the secret new project I'm working on with Jed (who faithful viewers will remember as my co-conspirator on The F-Word, On_Line, Super Vision and that spec we recently optioned to Michael Douglas and Joel Silver).  With luck, this script will be Jed's next movie and lead to a fresh round of all-star Entouragey action, or at least a few more good film festival parties.

Meanwhile, there's a new original show for the Pinehills Players, featuring antics at a local t.v. station (including a View parody I'm gonna have to rewrite now thanks to the recent departure of a certain suspiciously thin, vaguely insectoid red carpet refugee)...on top of which, I'm cooking up not one, not two but THREE new Ol' Bait Shop Productions:  a mini-documentary, a mini-feature and the first honest to goodness full length indie project I've tackled since Apocalypse Bop.  The mini-doc is a ten-year retrospective for and about the Burt Wood School of Performing Arts in Middleboro, MA.  The mini-feature is also for Burt Wood as part of their summer acting program for young'uns.  Shot on miniDV, this teen romance is an adaptation of the first screenplay I ever wrote (Most People) and will serve as a warm-up for my full-length indie, Christmas Girl.

As you may or may not recall, Christmas Girl is a screenplay I wrote a few years back, which I've pitched to numerous production companies over the years (including various minions of the Farrelly Bros. and, for reasons too complicated to explain here, Britney Spears).  But this year, a trio of inspirations finally convinced me to just bite the bullet and direct it myself.  Inspiration #1 was the kick of seeing Shoe (my entry in the 48 Hour Film Project) screened at the Kendall Square Cinema in Cambridge (as detailed previously over yonder in the Ol' Blog Shop).  Inspiration #2 was a documentary I watched at the 2006 Boston Indie Film Festival with the somber title Before the Music Dies, which was all about artists taking the initiative to be artsy on their own terms without waiting for approval from what Spuddy Gray used to call "the big indifferent machine."

But the hypotenuse of my inspirational triangle was The Puffy Chair (a micro-budget DV feature I missed at several film festivals and finally caught at the aforementioned Kendall), which really cemented the idea that indie films in the digital age don't have to be credit-busting gambles (like my delightful but draining 16mm directorial debut, the aforementioned Apocalypse Bop).  Despite its bare-bones, shot-from-the-hip production values, The Puffy Chair succeeded because it had a good script and a likeable cast -- a feat I hope to pull off with Christmas Girl.  I'm pretty happy with the script, so now all I need is a great cast and a small, dedicated crew...

...which means the Ol' Bait Shop wants YOU!  That's right, if you and/or someone you know wants to audition for Christmas Girl or otherwise get involved in the production, CLICK HERE for more info, and stay tuned... Aslan is on the move!