Be warned, it ain't too pretty in here!

2000 American Film Market
The Demon Files
Homesick
The Term Paper

American Film Market - Santa Monica, CA (2000)

I wrote a script for a friend called Ready, Willing & Able, about a rag-tag group of ex-CIA agents who join forces to thwart a chemical weapons heist and a mole inside the Agency. The film was shot on 35mm in 1997 and was picked up by Showcase Entertainment. We worked with Showcase at the 2000 AFM to sell our film to international and domestic markets. The end result was that the film was distributed overseas, but not in the U.S. I chronicled my experience at the 2000 AFM in a humorous journal below.

This project was originally shot over a two-week period on Hi-8 back when that was the no-budget state-of-the-art format of choice. As a writing experiment, I wanted to see if I could pull off writing a serial, like the old Captain Marvel, Dick Tracy types of serials from yester-year. So, my brother, Paul, and I hashed out a story about unrelated vicious murders with a common, evil thread. The end result was a 13 part serial called The Demon Files (poster below).

I was working at Nickelodeon Studios at the time and my television co-horts loved the serial script so much that they suggested I try to get a pilot made and in the hopes of getting it turned into a TV series. Instead of just giving out a script, I thought it might be more effective to actually shoot a "rough draft" of the first installment, Episode One: THE POSSESSION.

SCRIPT - If you have the Adobe Acrobat plug in, you can read the script of the first episode. NOTE: The script is registered with the WGA.
JOURNAL - You can read the journal I kept during production, if you're so inclined.

So, I pulled together some of my old acting cronies and got some of my Nick friends to help me out. My wife had just given birth to our daughter and was gracious enough to spend the week of shooting at my in-laws house. The entire budget of the project was $450.00. I was able to edit in the straight cut Edit 3 facility (VHS to VHS) at Nick at night (no pun intended).

The Local Talent Archive crew recently uncovered a lost, VHS, time-degraded copy of the 36 minute short and we are in the middle of digitizing it. There are a couple of "hits" on the video and some bad sound due to degradation, but the story's pretty cool and, overall, it works on a lot of levels. We hope to offer it for viewing via streaming media in the near future.

HOMESICK (1988)

Ah, Homesick. For a long time, I hated this project. Not so much that it's all that bad, but that it's so much less than what I had envisioned it to be. I had been in the theater department at the University of Florida for four years and had been surrounded by plays. So, when I wrote this script, it wasn't so much a movie, but a play on video. A little too wordy, not too interesting visually... and that means the acting had to be solid and the story had to be excellent. The acting, for the most part, is competent. However, the story is average. It was my first real script... my first attempt at trying to convey a real plot and it suffers from a lack of focus. The story, about a son who comes home after a long absence, had one major flaw: the conflict was between a father and son and the impact of alcoholism on their relationship. But, instead of writing a story about the son confronting the father, it's about the son sharing this long-burning conflict with his mother while the father is not there... an inherently weak dramatic choice. But, you learn by doing.

SCRIPT - If you have the Adobe Acrobat plug in, you can read the script of this project. NOTE: The script is registered with the WGA.

We shot the project in a friend's house over a single 36-hour period. It was exhausting and I'm surprised how well the performances held up, considering how exhausted we were. I used my acting friends from college. Most of them came prepared. One didn't know his lines. Another did it inspite of the fact that she was recovering from having her wisdom teeth removed... what a trooper! I was able to convince a local cable producer, Amy Laakman, to get involved in the project. She was aching to do something creative and we shot it on 3/4" video. In the end, the project suffers from lacking of preparation (no storyboards) and lack of sleep (missing shots which are not noticable to anyone but me).

If you're a glutton for punishment, we hope to offer the script online and a streaming version of the film in the near future.

Personal Note: During the same weekend of the shoot I was also running the light board at the Constans Theater for UF's summer show Something's Afoot (I think that was the name). After shooting for 36 hours straight I had to go to the theater and run the light board. I was so tired, I laid across the chair with my hand up on the light board. The girl handling audio would wake me when a light queue was coming up and I'd bolt up, hit the queue and then lay back down.

THE TERM PAPER (1986)

This is a personal favorite of mine. The Term Paper is about a college student who realizes, at midnight, that a major term paper is due the next morning. This was based on a true story. My girlfriend at the time, Sue AmRhein, had to write a term paper. She started by using her electric typewriter (peronal computers were out, but expensive... poor college kids didn't have them as they do today... God I sound old!). The typewriter broke and she ended up having to finish it by handwriting it on lined paper. I took that experience, added about 10 more obstacles and storyboarded the whole thing.

We actually shot this film on film! Super-8 silent to be exact. My brother, Paul, and his wife bought me a Super-8 camera as a present for getting accepted into the College of Fine Arts at UF. So, I storyboarded out the story and bought the film. We shot it over a single weekend in June of 1986. I rented a couple of lights, but really had no idea what I was doing. Ended up we could have used only one of the lights, because it was so strong you couldn't see the effects of the other two lights on the film. Again, another lesson learned.

The end result is a 30-ish minute film, costing about $400.00, that still holds up today. Digitizing this project is a lot more lengthy, because the transfer to video has caused some color distortion. So, I'm pains-takingly going through each scene, digitizing it, correcting the color in Adobe Premiere, redigitizing it (which takes forever) and then going to the next scene. But, since it's a favorite of mine, it'll be worth the effort. We hope to offer this in some form of streaming media in the near future as well.

Personal Note: At one point in the story, the Student kills a cockroach crawling across his dining room table by dousing the creature in an immense, non-stop shower of bug spray. Moments later, his cigarette falls out of the ashtray and onto the trail of bug spray, causing it to ignite, travel across the table and lighting his incomplete term paper on fire. Paul was working as a Chemist in Shands Hospital and got a hold of pure alcohol. Did you know that when pure alcohol burns, it's invisible? I didn't either. Paul did. But, that's why he ended up an Analytical Chemist. Anyway, it's the impurities that cause the flame. So, we added a WHOLE bunch of salt to the alcohol and set up a trough out of aluminum foil on the top of the outer edge of the table. Since the camera would be below the table, looking up, you wouldn't see this aluminum trough travelling around the table top.

So, we roll camera, pour the alcohol and light it. It works great! The flame slowly travels from one part of the table to the other. In the end, I believed that I could simply blow this flame out. Bad assumption on my part. In the film, you can actually see me try to blow the flame out, see it still raging and mouth to myself the word "Sh*t". The flame ended up being MUCH larger than we anticipated. Fortunately, we were prepared. Mike Beckett, a friend and fellow actor in the short, was standing by with a fire extinguisher. He sprayed the fine powder all along the trough, reaching the end. However, a small flame still survived, and the entire trough went up in flames again. Mike hit the flames again with the sputtering remains of the extinguisher and it, luckily, put the fire out. The room was a total disaster. We had to take all of the furniture out of the house, wipe off the extinguisher powder and vacuum the entire apartment. In the end, though, it's a pretty cool effect! And, after all, isn't that the point?