Getting some love from GreenCine

I'm an avid reader of GreenCine Daily, the most comprehensive and intelligent collection of links to writing about film that I've ever seen (and my kudos to David Hudson, the GreenCine editor who somehow manages to read and link to all this stuff).

So I consider it an honor any time some of my work gets mentioned on there. That happened today, thanks to the review of Clean Freak over at the chutry experiment.

Another CLEAN FREAK Review, Another Fan

I was just thinking today that I hadn't posted anything on the blog lately (combination of too many migraines and end-of-semester craziness), when lo and behold I got word of another review of CLEAN FREAK.

This one is by Chuck Tryon over at the The Chutry Experiment. Chuck is a media studies professor at Fayetteville State University in North Carolina.

Read Chuck Tryon's review here.

First Clean Freak review

As soon as CLEAN FREAK was complete, I started entering it into festivals. But I also sent it out to a few people who reviewed my last film. One of those people has already published a review. All I can say is that it's refreshing when someone really gets what you're trying to do.

Read Mike Everleth's review of CLEAN FREAK over at Bad Lit.

New Review of American Messiah

Reviews are starting to pop up for The Proper Care & Feeding of an American Messiah as the distribution company gets it out there to reviewers. The latest: PopMatters.

Here's the review: PopMatters reviews American Messiah

Welcome back, Tom

This just in: pitcher Tom Glavine will return to the Atlanta Braves next season. He agreed to a one-year deal tonight.

Nice to have him back where he belongs.

Ready for a Break

Thanksgiving break is just around the corner, and I am as ready for it as the students. My mind was in full creative gear, and then I finished Clean Freak and sent it out to a bunch of festivals -- and now I'm finding myself feeling rundown and in need of a break. I suppose part of it is just the natural "project completion letdown," which I probably always experience (reminder to self: come read this post after finishing the next project).

Clean Freak is now out to about 15 film festivals. There will be more entries, I'm sure, but I'm hoping to get into a few of these...

Clean Freak is finished...

...well, as finished as it can be when I'm the director. I'm just as likely to open it up and make more cuts as I am to never touch it again, but I just sent out the first batch of festival entries, and I'm hopeful that it won't be a bloodbath like the first several months of AMERICAN MESSIAH entries went (faithful readers might recall that the film was rejected by fests for months before getting into its first fest).

Of course, that film went on to have a healthy and fairly successful festival run, won some awards, and got released on DVD -- so I guess a repeat-performance of the whole experience wouldn't be such a bad thing.

But still, I'm hoping not to be rejected constantly. Fragile ego and all that...

Picture Lock

I've locked picture on CLEAN FREAK, which -- for those of you unfamiliar with the term -- means that I will not be making any more edits to the film. You have to lock picture before you do the sound mix, so that's what we're doing now.

Take this with a grain of salt, though. We locked picture on AMERICAN MESSIAH more times than I can remember, only to unlock it again when I decided to make a change.

Still, it feels like a good thing.

Clean Freak: Another Freaking Update

Spent all morning tinkering with the CLEAN FREAK edit, and I think I'm done. It's longer than I wanted (or anticipated) at just over 27 minutes, but I think it's solid, and I'm not sure what else could be cut. I've even had outside people watch it to give me a heads up on any places it lags, and -- having made a few cuts -- I'm pretty sure there's nothing else I can lose.

Now I just have to clean up audio and make DVD screeners...

The Strike

How can I call myself a screenwriter and not comment on the WGA strike. If you haven't heard, the Writer's Guild of America announced that its members will go on strike on Monday, which means that no member writer will write a word for any production. Late night shows will suffer first (as well as shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, whose material is so topical). Soap operas will be off the air next. The network sitcoms and dramas will be in danger within a month or so.

From everything I've read, it's going to be a nasty little work-stoppage. But the writer's have some legitimate issues, and even though I'm not a member of the WGA yet, I'm solidly in their camp on the issues of DVD and digital download residuals (as well as a number of other key issues that have resulted in this strike).

For me, the strike doesn't have a direct impact, unless some guild-signatory producer decides that he or she wants to buy a script right now. I can't sell until after the strike or I'll be a scab and this barred for life from membership in the guild. Frankly, as painful as it might be to NOT sell something if someone was actually interested, it wouldn't be worth it -- I for one won't be party to undercutting the guild's efforts via the strike.

So there, I've said my piece, for whatever that's worth.

Ring of Fire

Friday night, I took my wife out to a show. We haven't done this in a long time, so I got tickets to the Broadway "Johnny Cash musical," Ring of Fire, for her birthday.

Ring of Fire was a lot of fun. It features 30+ of Cash's songs -- an eclectic collection of music, from silly songs like "A Boy Names Sue" to some of his more serious stuff about drug addiction. The songs are performed by a group of great singers and musicians, and the whole evening is sort of just toe-tapping fun. There's no "story" to the show -- essentially, they use the songs to tell Cash's story, with bits of narration/dialogue thrown in between songs to place them in their historical context in Cash's life. It's an interesting concept that mostly works (though there some places where it flags a bit, probably simply because certain songs weren't as good as Cash's best stuff.