YAY! The Weekend!!!

Did ya like my little joke? On my last entry? :D

I'm all "There's this documentary about this guy..." hee-hee-hee. But it was really a short Tommy and Brian and I shot a few years ago.

Tommy got this nifty idea about shooting shorts as tests whenever we get an idea about a feature we'd like to make. It's brilliant in 2 ways: First and most obviously, it gives us a really good idea about exactly what it's going to take to shoot the feature we have in mind, and secondly it adds another short to our resumes! This is more important than you might think; when Kelly moved out to L. A. he was surprised to discover that he had shot more films than any of his aspiring-filmmaker friends! You wouldn't guess that to be the case for someone who had lived in Hollywood longer, but it is.

Another (unforseen) benefit is that you get to see if the finished product is worth a year (or more) of your life. In the case of "HAL.com" we were planning to do a mocumentary in the vein of THIS IS SPINAL TAP and the Christopher Guest movies of the late 1990s. Everyone we told about the idea was excited by it. They wanted to see the flick based soley on the concept! But after we finished "HAL.com" we realized that that style of filmmaking really didn't highlight Tommy's amazing cinematic abilities -- and that's something a first-time feature director REALLY wants to do! That's kind of his calling card. That's what gets him future jobs!

And as you could see from "HAL.com", just about anyone could have shot that. Tommy's genius is that he recreated the style of a documentary, but no one in Hollywood (no one that can offer Tommy a job, anyway) will look at it and go "WOW! That looks just like a low-budget documentary! You're a genius!"

So we decided to hold off on the mocumentary idea until after we make a big-ish splash and making movies becomes our day-job.

So anyway...

IT'S THE WEEKEND!!!

And I've got a big one planned, too! If all goes well, this is how it will play out:

Sunday, Family Dinner, natch. Then I hope to catch a late feature of GRINDHOUSE with some free tickets I have! The condition is that they only let you into movies 2 weeks after their release date. So I believe I can finally use one for GRINDHOUSE! (YAY!!!)

Then Monday is kind of packed... First, when I entered the script for our short "The Caretaker" into the Creative Screenwriting Expo Screenplay Competition last year it didn't place or even get an honorable mention or anything. BUT... Last week I got an email from CS offering me a free "career consultation" thingy as part of CS's Screnwriters' Bootcamp! I filled out a questionair online and a professional writer was matched up to me, and we then scheduled a phone consultation for Monday. It'll be 30-40 minutes, and I have NO IDEA what's going to happen, but it'll be cool in any case!

I'm a little excited about it, because it doesn't seem like CS could afford to offer this service to ALL the applicants. So it makes me wonder if maybe my script didn't get a little bit of attention somewhere along the way ebfore it scrubbed-out of the competition.

It's very likely that this consultation is in some way an advertisement for the Screenwriters' Bootcamp program, but still... I would assume the screenwriters who do the counceling, or whatever, get paid, and therefore I still think the script must have caught someone's attention for some reason. So yay! :)

Then, we may or may not meet with Tommy. No idea yet. I don't know if Tommy knows, from week to week, which day he's going to be able to show up to meet with us.

(That reminds me, I need to try to email him and ask him, lol.)

THEN... Brian and I plan to catch the late showing of HOT FUZZ at the Alamo Drafthouse near us!!! I'm SO excited about this!!! I've seen the movie online, but it won't compare to seeing it in a theater!!! I watched every episode of SPACED online, a few times each, and watchign it on dvd was still much cooler! PLUS, I didn't yet know about the genius of Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg when SHAUN OF THE DEAD was in theaters here in the States, so I've only seen SHAUN on dvd! t will be SOOOOOOO COOL to see HOT FUZZ on the Big Screen, as it was intended to be seen!!! (And Gnomey, you will be RIGHT BESIDE ME -- in my imagination, lol -- for every frame of the film! hee-hee)

:D

(Wendy got to see it at the cinemas in the UK.)

And then for Tuesday I have no particular plans. But I've still got 8 episodes of THE DRESDEN FILES to get through (10 if Brian's in the mood to watch with me) and I just got BUFFY, ISSUE #2!!! I could read it tonight, but I think I'm gonna hold off and savor it this weekend!

It was SO COOL... Since I found the first issue at my local grocery store I've been checking the magazine section every time I stop in. The last 2 times it was still only Issue #1 (and that's the ONLY comic I've spotted in that store, lol!) and so I figured that grocery stores are probably a secondary market for the book. I figure they probably prints a run, which they distribute to comic book shops, and if they print a second run they ship that off to interested grocery store chains.

But I heard last week that the second issue should be coming out soon, AND IT WAS IN THE STORE THIS MORNING WHEN I GRABBED MY WEEKEND PIZZAS AFTER WORK!!! This HAS TO be the first printing! Which means that I can probably (though not definitely) look forward to a new BUFFY every month when it first hits the stands!!!

Frickin' YAY!!!

I mean, whether or not my hypothesis is true will have to do with how well this second issue sells in grocery stores. But still, one can hope.

And at any rate, I HAVE ISSUE #2 NOW!!! hee-hee :D

Okay, I should take out the trash and check the mail before I slip into my pirate jammies and figure out what I'm gonna watch as I fall asleep.

PEACE, LOVE & HAPPINESS TO ALL!!!

And smooches to my Gnomey Goddess!!! x o x o x o