February 15th/February 18th, 1998

Ok. Obviously there's no link to the squib thing because anytime I refer to a link in a web site, it was the only Marauder site.

Here I'm pretty harsh to Doug and Al's movie. To be fair it's pretty bad. There are a lot of really cool FX, which is why Doug was someone I thought of years later when I needed an FX guy.

But I stand by the fact that Al was not good in the flick. I seem to vaguely recall them actually using a Def Lepard song in their movie also, and thinking, "No way do they have permission for this..."

I remember watching the film with Rick. We both looked at each other, probably thinking the same thing: These are the guys whose opinions we're trusting with script issues?

But they definitely had some good ideas--but remember, we're still on the script for "High", which was not the greatest thing I ever wrote(with Rick).

But get ready...the collapse of this production is coming...

February 15th, 1998

Rick called the local filmmakers back to get some feedback on the script. They told him they liked it and made some notes. We're gonna meet them again on Wednesday(2/18) to talk some more about what we can do for each other.

My brother read the How-To on squibs that's available as a link under our filmmaking links. He's always been into FX stuff, so we're going to go do some tests, see how the stuff really works. FYI,
I was able to locate Pyrodex at Bart's Sport World, a sporting goods store. They say it's 18 bucks for a brick, but you can also get it in pellets.

On the preparations front, you can now see the individual scene breakdown, something that you will need to do if you're going to shoot your own movie.

Starting to feel the pinch of time. We've got about 4 months before I'd like to start shooting.

February 18,1998

We met with the filmmakers. They make T&A pictures. They proceeded to give us a list of things they thought were wrong with the script, and they were actually very perceptive in much of what they locked on. Problem is, they were very rude about it. They gave us a copy of their latest movie, called Screenkill, that they've apparently gotten a distributor for.

We go home with the intention of changing some of the problems in the script. First, we decided to watch their movie.

It sucked. Hard. One of the filmmakers we met(the one who expressed interest in playing Saul) also played one of the leads in the movie, and he'd expressed interest in auditioning for our movie. Too bad he couldn't act his way out of a paper bag. The script was corny with dialogue that makes Battlefield Earth look like high art, and the only good thing to say is that it had some good special effects.