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!