Hunting Humans - The Saga

Little Snippet of Goodness

2011-10-24T23:03:00.000-04:00

A couple people had asked me whether I had done any more on HH2, the script.

The answer is, not really. I had about 35 pages--only about 25 sequential, then 10 with various conversations, notes, and then the ending.

But here it is with a few more than I last posted. So if you're interested, check it out. It's still early-draft stuff, but you might like it.

http://www.kangaskahnfilms.com/hh2-txt.htm

And Aric gets SOOOOO badass in this script, it's really hard to tell who I'm rooting for, the good guy or Aric...

July 24th, 2008: Blast From The Past

2011-08-31T00:39:00.000-04:00

Funny afternote: The actor I met at this screening was Richard Cutting. I tried to cast him in Bounty, but it didn't work out, but we reconnected later on and he's starring in my new flick "Garden of Hedon".

The theater is closed again though...

July 24th, 2008:

So there's a local movie playing a couple of nights at a theater near me. It's a Western. I'm still looking for decent actors for my flick, and one of the actors already IN my flick says he's going, so I decide to go.

I hear it's at Westview Theatres and my first thought is--"Hey, I shot HH at a theater in Westview, but they tore that theater down."

I drive up there. Turns out it's the EXACT theater. Apparently it wasn't torn down, it was just bought my an indy theater chain.

I park around back where Aric stalked the projectionist(I took this picture today), and the memory of it all is VERY overwhelming. I haven't been up there in about 10 years.

I meet up with Neil, an actor I wrote the part for, and we go inside and watch the flick. IN THE EXACT AUDITORIUM Aric kills all those movie-goers. It was weird to say the least.

Good news--one actor in the film is particularly strong, and it turns out Neil knows him, and he was sitting right in front of us during the screening. He said hi to Neil after the showing, and I was startled to find out he's nothing like the character he played in the movie--which was a big sign of how good an actor he was, that I actually expected him to be somewhat like his character.

I think he could play one of the main roles I've been having a hard time casting. I'm gonna set up a time to audition him.

May 28th, 2008: Mail...and MURDER!

2011-04-19T17:10:00.000-04:00

I got a letter yesterday in my company's PO box. In the interest of preserving it rather than retyping it, I've uploaded it so you can read it for yourselves. (I blacked out info to preserve some semblance of anonymity)

You should be able to zoom in on it.

LETTER

Anyway, yeah, the guy's in prison. His name looks familiar to me so I googled it. And here's a little tidbit about him:

"His statement begins with details of how Milner, then 19, lured 17-year-old Frankie Garcia to a rural Carson County barn with a promise of beer.

Once inside the barn, Milner said he hit Garcia and told him to get down on his knees. Milner then took a rifle he'd hidden in the barn and told Garcia to put the barrel of the gun in his mouth.

"He grabbed hold of the barrel and I said now put it in your mouth," Milner told the Ranger. "And we just sat and I just kind of made him beg a little bit and then I just shot him."

Mull asked Milner whether Garcia said anything before he died.

Milner's reply: "He said, 'Please, please don't do this."'

When Mull asked how many times Garcia was shot, Milner said:

"Once, I made sure it was quick. The only time he suffered was when he was scared."

After killing Garcia, Milner said he went to Lake McClellan where he knew a large birthday celebration was being held.

"My intention was to I guess rack up a body count," Milner said in his confession.

Anyway, he was to serve three life prison sentences(he wounded but didn't kill any of the people at the party) but some technicality knocked his sentence down. He'll be eligible for parole somewhere in 2012 or something.

Cool, eh? My murderer-fan club seems to grow by the day!

But then today I got a package in my company PO Box with the new Jack Reacher novel that doesn't come out for a couple of weeks. Some fans knew I love those books and sent me the hardcover! And just a little note with their names, but no email or anything so I can thank them.

Not sure how they got it early, but it's super cool.

February 26, 2008: SK Update

2011-03-04T23:22:00.002-05:00

This story just continues. They just ran this on 48 hours mystery last week:
CBS NEWS 48 HOURS

------------------------------------------------------------------
Feb 26, 2008
For those of you who don't know(and I can't remember if I mentioned it in this blog), an alleged serial killer(confirmed kill of 1, and they're linking him to more now) was caught and they found a copy of my first movie in his truck.

Yeah, my first flick which is basically a how-to-be-a-serial-killer movie.

Yay me.

If you're interested, you can read a ton of articles at THIS LINK.

There's tons of them, and CNN even had a little video spot showing a clip from my flick.

Well, this month's People has a little three-page article featuring the story of the last family he attacked(where he got caught), and they even mention my flick in there.

The best thing, though, will be if he turns out to be an actual serial killer. See, I stole the name of my flick from a book--it's an encyclopedia of serial killers. They update it every ten years or so.

So if he turns out to be a serial killer, they'll mention my movie in his listing in the very book that helped inspire the film in the first place. Man, talk about the circle of life(or death, as it is).

September 16th, 2007: The serial killer entry

2011-02-06T14:04:00.000-05:00

Here's the actual note in my log where I first started hearing about the killer who was caught with HH in his truck.

Okay, if you haven't seen this yet, check it out:

CHECK VIDEO BELOW

Pretty weird. I'm torn about how I feel about it. Obviously it's pretty horrendous, but if you've seen the film you know I have a pretty twisted sense of the world. I've read about every serial killer who ever lived, and there's always some interesting footnote about each.

And now my flick will be one of the interesting footnotes to this guy's description. I know it's a bad thing, but part of me is a little thrilled.

Not so coincidentally, I've been watching the imdbpro moviemeter on HH go up. Three weeks ago it was 52,000 and some change. (FOC hovers around 18,000) Two weeks ago when the story broke it moved up to 22,000.

This week it's 15,928.

And to answer your question: No, I don't get any piece of increased rentals.

FYE Banner

2011-01-22T22:35:00.000-05:00

November 12, 2007

A buddy of mine that works at FYE brought me a present yesterday. It's a 6 FOOT by 6 FOOT cardstock posterboard that all FYE's had hanging up for Halloween. It says FAN FRIGHT FEST across it, and features like 100 movie box covers on it.

There's Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, Scream, The Ring. A lot of big movies.

Why did he bring this to me? Smack dab in the middle of them is my first flick, HH.

No, I can't explain it. There are no other microbudget movies on there. If they were gonna put one of my flicks on there, I'd have bet it would be FOC, since FOC had LGF as a distributor.

HH has a nobody distributor(it's now with a company called Trinity). So I can't explain why they'd put it on there--but it's very cool to be featured on there with some distinguished company.

But I'll be the first to admit that it shouldn't be there amongst those giants...

Some of the lower ones...

The Serial Killer Who Loved Hunting Humans

2011-01-11T21:09:00.000-05:00

I'll have more about this as we get to its entry into the HH log, but I'm not sure how long the Tube will leave it up there, since technically I don't own the footage. (to which I say, THEY didn't own MY footage, but they put it in their video anyway...)

But if you wanna see the CNN clip they played for a while, you can catch it below. Note, they get into the actual DVD details at about the 2 minute mark.

Foreign Distribution

2011-01-08T21:18:00.000-05:00

So as I said, we licensed foreign rights to IFM World Releasing, a company run by Tony Ginnane. I knew nothing about the guy. Talked to him on the phone a couple of times. Seemed pretty gruff and no-nonsense.

It was funny that years later you can see him in the excellent documentary on Australian horror films called "Not Quite Hollywood". I highly recommend the documentary. Anyway, turns out he used to be a producer of a lot of the "Ozploitation" flicks.

Anyway, you might be surprised to find out that HH has been licensed to about 30 foreign countries. These are some:
India
French-speaking Africa
France
Benelux(had never heard of this country before we licensed it)
Czech Republic
Thailand
Spain and Andora
Indonesia
Slovakia
United Kingdom

I try to get dvd copies of each foreign copy, but it's pretty hard. Also, some of those rights went to free television or the like, so there is no physical copy to buy.

But it is a lot of fun to watch Rick talk and hear some foreign dude's voice come out. Here's some of the foreign covers I own.

That's right, that's not even Rick ON the cover.

(kinda looks like Screech with a five-o'clock shadow...)

So that was the final entry into the HH log

2010-12-12T21:28:00.000-05:00

But I continued to blog about it in private, anything that happened to do with HH. So, in the continuing effort to amuse you faceless masses, I will post those too...

Tuesday, July 26, 2005

So there was this contest...

I can't remember how it came up. I think someone mentioned that I ought to do a "Hunting Humans" comic book, and I said I didn't have the time, and this writer buddy chimed in that he could write it.

I guess I probably looked at him funny. He then got a little insulted and said, "What, you don't think I can do it?" And I said that really, no one can get Aric Blue's voice to really sound like it should(and by voice I mean the way they talk, their personality).

So--and you'd think he was drunk, but he doesn't drink--he says "I bet I can write Aric better than you can." And I remember laughing.

He devised a contest--we would both write one issue of a "Hunting Humans" comic and get three objective people to take a look.

About six weeks later we both had our comics. I really just translated the beginning of my "Hunting Humans 3" script into comic form(I didn't have the time to write any new stuff, and please don't ask me about HH2).

We only found 2 judges(one was the other writer's wife) and we turned them over with no author's names on them anywhere. We asked 3 questions: Which was a better comic, which did they like better, and which one was closer to the Aric from the movie.

The first judge(our very own Stewie) emailed me his results--all three in my favor. He thought the other Aric was far too angry to be the Aric from HH.

Then the other judge chimed in(after informing me that she thought she could tell the difference in the scripts just by looking at the formatting, and she was right)--she liked the other writer's script as a comic better, but she agreed my Aric was closer to the movie. (Personally, I think she just said she liked his better out of pity)

So we don't need a third judge, because I've already won two out of three.

The point is...I don't think anyone can write Aric better than I can. I created him. He lives in me, since a huge part of me is him. I've written two and half scripts with him, as well as a ten page bio sheet before I started HH.

The other writer had my wife and I over for dinner the other day where he tried to lose graciously, and failed. Better luck next time!

May 25th, 2003

2010-10-04T01:25:00.000-04:00

HH never made us any real money. It slightly more than broke even, but got us a nice profile. We got some very good reviews and MTI got it into every Blockbuster and Hollywood Video out there.

IFM still has the foreign rights and I never did audit them. Frankly, if I had the money I would, but I think by the end of it I'd end up spending so much on an accountant that we'd owe even more money...

We had an expense cap at which point they couldn't take expenses any more, and it's funny how they seem to stop selling your title when the expenses reach that cap.

MAY 25th

Final entry in my HH diary. I’ve started the Fear Of Clowns diary, so this will just sort of move into that.
HH comes out on July 22nd. It’s been given an R rating by the MPAA.

So far I’ve only gotten one check from Tulchin but I’m expecting two more for the domestic distribution, then some for the foreign. We'll basically break even on the deal for domestic, but my main objective was to get our movie distributed so we can aim a little higher on the next flick.

On the foreign front, we got a statement from IFM--the foreign guys--that says they’ve sold $31,000 worth of territories. They’ve collected like $14,000 of that, and they’re billing us like $18,000 in expenses.

Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? Clearly I’m going to have to audit the company. More money out of my pocket.

Anyway, feels strange to end this diary, but since I’m really just continuing on in the other one, I guess it’s not so bad.

One movie down. Infinity to go. One movie at a time.

HH article in Fangoria

We Interrupt This Blog

2010-09-02T03:21:00.002-04:00

To bring you this--we're trying to raise the last 25% of our budget on the new flick through crowd-sourcing via Indiegogo. So we're asking everybody's help!

But don't worry--there's some cool incentives to be had with your donation! Check out the link below to see the teaser and more info!

http://www.indiegogo.com/GOH

March 16th, 2003

2010-08-31T07:38:00.003-04:00

March 16, 2003

Okay. Was the Joe Bob thing back in October? For real?

Damn. The quick summary then.

We’ve signed both foreign and domestic deals for Hunting Humans. The foreign with IFM was done first. They recently sent me magazines from AFM and MIFED with ads for Hunting Humans including the poster.
AFM and MIFED are two of the biggest marketplaces for selling movie rights. IFM attends both.

One of the magazines has a small article where they credit Lisa Michele with being in Enemy of the State.
See, when I was making the press kit I couldn’t get Lisa’s bio. I called her, I emailed her. Nothing. So I made it up. I said she’d had parts in Enemy of the State, The Replacements, and a few other movies shot locally.

Apparently they liked that and used it in the article.

Pretty funny.

Anyway, part of the whole distribution process is “delivery”. That’s where you have to get them the master and it needs to pass “quality control”. We had TONS of problems. Cost a bit of money to fix it. That will, of course, be coming out of our end.

It took a lot of time, but now we’re just waiting to hear when and where the movie will come out. The contract has a tentative date of May 15th, so we’ll see. The day I walk into Blockbuster Video and see it on their shelf will be the last big high for Hunting Humans.

Meantime, we’re prepping for Fear Of Clowns.

November 1st, 2002: Email to Rick from Joe Bob Briggs

2010-08-08T00:19:00.000-04:00

Rick got this reply from Joe Bob, in which he's referring to the rash of snipings in the D.C. area in regards to HH's subject material:

Email from Joe Bob to Rick:

Dear Rick,
>
> Oh my God! You made that movie and you live
> in Maryland? Has Chief
> Moose been to your house yet? You guys have either
> the best or the worst
> timing of any filmmakers in history!
>
> GREAT job, man. You convinced me.
>
> Hang in there,
>
> Joe Bob

Special Excerpt: Stalking Kevin Smith at Phillycon 2002

2010-07-18T03:18:00.000-04:00

This hot chick really has nothing to do with this story...

I mean, first off, how many people have stalked Kevin Smith? It must drive him crazy...Also, it's funny to read that I was trying to give him a tape. Yes, a VCR tape...man, times change fast.

Anyway, I'm at the Philadelphia Wizard Convention in 2002 on Friday and I miss an early chance to get into a line to get him to sign shit. That is where the story begins...

Stalking of Kevin Smith:

I find out that Kevin Smith is signing stuff right then. I grab my movie and high-tail it over to him. They've capped off the line though. No more people until the signing the next morning.

Yes, that's right, morning. As in, A.M.

I try to put it from my mind. I buy some stuff for the store, try to get the lay of the land, and in general do nothing of consequence.

The next morning I get up at the ungodly time of 9:45am. I take my patented three-minute shower and am in the show within five minutes of it opening. Target: Kevin Smith.

I'm informed that they're already out of tickets for the signing. I'm like, What The Fuck? This guy's the Special Guest and they're giving out like 100 tickets?

My new plan involves bum-rushing Smith when they escort him in for the signing. The line has formed and he's supposed to show up at 11:00 A.M.

I figure I'll catch him on his way in, force the tape into his hands, and run off like a lunatic.

So I bide my time. I look at all the freakos and the Playboy chicks. I pretend I'm not going to assault the Special Guest.

One such Playboy chick

The time comes. 11:00 A.M. No Kevin Smith. 11:15 A.M. No Kevin Smith. I go back to the booth to make sure the guys don't need anything. As I'm coming back, Kevin Smith shows up. No way could I get to him before he was behind the line.

Thwarted! Lost the battle, but not the war...

Yes, I see him now...

I go up to the line. Instead of Smith sitting at a table signing, he's going to walk through the line chatting and signing. How cool would it be to get in that line?

I approach a decent-looking fellow. Not one of those raving Kevin Smith fans who can tell you how many minutes each of his films are. A regular joe. I ask him if he wants to make $50.

"Doing what?" he wants to know. I tell him. Give this tape to Smith. If Smith doesn't want it, fine, the guy can keep the fifty and give me back the tape. I'll be watching.

The guy says Nah.

I'm pissed. He asks me what's on the tape. I tell him. He says Nah again.

So I try to bribe a Wizard security guy. I tell him "I'm a retailer and I got in here too late to get a ticket. Any way I can get in?" He says no, Smith was late and has to get done so he can get to the question and answer panel.

"Fifty bucks?" I prod him. Clearly he'd like to, but there are too many other Wizard staffers there who'd see. He can't.

Now I'm getting steamed. All this effin work to get a tape to the guy. I decide to bum rush him on the way out then.

I spend the next two hours patiently watching and waiting. Some might say stalking. Those people are very intelligent and scare me.

Same picture, because I'm focused on my prey. He's in my sights.

The line dwindles. Smith gets closer to the exit side of the line.

I close in. I try not to make eye contact. Don't want to spook him.

The HULK!

I marvel at how Lou Ferrigno(signing right next to Smith) is still in awesome shape. Isn't he like sixty years old now?

Then, miracle of miracles, Smith is done. Other onlookers start to press against the rope trying to get him to sign stuff. He does!

I make a frozen rope right to him. Calm, cool, collected. "Hey," I say, "Just wanted to give you a copy of my movie."

He tells me he can't take it right now, but he'll be going by the Oni booth immediately after that and he'll pick it up there. Give it to Brian Johnson.

I thank him, but inside I'm crestfallen. Is this the way he blows off people? Hey, what's that chick got to do with anything?

At the Oni booth, I tell the guy that Kevin asked me to give this to Brian Johnson. He's nice, says he'll give it to him. He goes through the hut in the middle of the booth to the other side.

I take off my hat(incognito now, baby!) and walk around the other side. Brian Johnson is one of the guys from Kevin Smith's movies(I think he plays Steve-Dave). He takes out the insert of the movie poster from Hunting Humans(my movie) and looks at it, shows it to one of the other actors from the Smith movies.

After a moment he tucks it under the table. Will Kevin get it? Only one way to find out.

I go back to where Smith is finishing signing. He's being mobbed and the Wizard guys are trying to get him out of there. Finally, they escort him away. Like his shadow, I follow.

Sure enough, he goes right to the Oni booth. A mob follows him. As soon as he's on the other side, Brian Johnson(may his camels be forever flea-less) hands him my tape. Some words pass, but I can't make them out. Smith takes my tape into the little hut where he disappears for a half an hour to sign things.

He's got it! Sweet! Mission accomplished. I pat myself on the back and go snap some pictures. Jeph Loeb and Jim Lee are signing in preparation for the twelve-issue run of Batman that they'll be doing. Jeph even smiles for me.

Postnote: I don't know whether he ever watched it. Never heard. Ah, well. It's a fun story now though...

October 27th, 2002: Making Deals, Joe Bob review

2010-07-06T00:05:00.000-04:00

I have no picture for my post. So here's a hot chick I took a picture of at a comic convention where I stalked Kevin Smith. You'll read about it in the next blog post.

----------------

Funny afterword about this:
I'm not sure if we actually played the Chicago fest or not--one of our foreign dvd covers to HH says we played in it, so I'm confused...where'd they get that info? I don't know.

Also, Tony at IFM turns out to be Anthony Ginnane, who you can see in the very entertaining documentary Not Quite Hollywood, about Australian exploitation movies. He produced a bunch of movies before forming his own distribution label.

OCTOBER 27th

    Really ought to update this more often. So much has happened that it’s hard to believe.

    Okay, first and foremost, after a long talk with not only Paul(works at Tulchin’s) and Tony at IFM, we signed the deal with them for foreign. We’ll see how it works out.

    Second, I had sent the movie off to a couple of festivals to see if we could get in. Chicago Independent and Hollywood Film Festival both blew us off, not even telling us we didn’t get in. I mean, how hard is it to email someone? If you’ve got a small indy movie, DON’T send it to them. Chicago claims it’s independent but doesn’t seem to be.

    Anyway, the B-movie Film festival didn’t tell us that we got in, but they emailed me to tell us we were nominated for seven awards, so I’ll forgive them. Best Writing, Best Editing, Best Action Sequences, Best Villain, Best Actor, Best Score and Best Movie. Not bad! (Footnote: We ended up winning two, Best Editing and Best Action Sequences)

    And then there’s the sniper…

    If I had a dime for every person who jokingly asked me if I was the sniper, I’d have enough money to shoot my next movie.

    Then I get word from Mary Koon, assistant to Joe Bob Briggs.

A quick word about Joe Bob, in case you don’t know who he is. You might remember him from his long run as the host of TNT’s Monstervision. He writes several syndicated columns throughout the country as well as putting out books with his compiled “Joe Bob’s Drive In” movie reviews.

I had sent a screener to Joe Bob like eight months ago and figured it went into the trash(where the one I gave Kevin Smith probably is—see “Stalking Kevin Smith”(NOTE: WILL BE THE NEXT BLOG POST).

Anyway, his assistant emails me to tell me Joe Bob’s review goes up on 10/23 and she thought I’d like it. She included the review with her email.

I was elated. At least he didn’t hate it! And hey, Joe Bob actually watched MY movie! This is a guy I used to watch on the freakin’ TV! I’ve got two of his books!

Then I read the review.

Holy shit. I was like…HOLY SHIT. He RAVED about the movie. I couldn’t have written a nicer review if I tried. He wrote:“The story twists and spirals several times in the very accomplished script of Kangas, and this might be one of those movies that's actually helped by the low production values. It looks so grainy and gray it's the kind of home movie a serial killer would make about himself.” Wow.

A few of the other words he used are: “It doesn’t disappoint.” “A well-directed movie”. “…eerily prescient”(go look it up). And then he gives it four out of four stars.

Quite literally, it’s the biggest high I’ve gotten since I finished the movie, including the public screening at United Artists. I mean…HOLY SHIT.

Another thing, Joe Bob GOT it. He actually understood the movie and some of the underlying themes. Few people have commented on the irony about Aric Blue, that he prides himself on how self-aware he is, and yet he’s caught in the same trap that he uses to kill his victims.(his pattern is that he stalks and kills people)

Believe me, I’m coasting on a high right now.

So anyway, we’re in the midst of negotiating the details of the domestic deal. What happened was that I couldn’t find any info about the company who wanted the movie. I thought it was Spartan—turns out it wasn’t.

I have to sign a non-disclosure agreement before I can find out who it is. I can’t say, but they’re small. I talk to the guy in charge who says he’s 95% sure they can get HH into Hollywood Video. They can’t make any promises about Blockbuster, but they have gotten movies in there before.

Out of the thirty grand, I’m gonna have to pay for an MPAA rating which will run about two grand. Then I have to pay Harris $1500 to go through HH looking for any copyright violations and other stuff, as it’s a pre-requisite for getting E&O insurance(which the distributor will pay for).

So the piece of the pie is getting smaller. Harris gets 10% of the thirty grand. In essence, we’ll be making our budget back from the domestic. If all goes well with the foreign, we could make up to 150 grand on that.
Biding my time to see if we get any other responses about the Joe Bob thing.

July 27th, 2002: Offers

2010-06-23T02:02:00.000-04:00

Hey, look! Really bad pre-photoshop(I used Corel Photopaint) poster mock-up.

Last week we got an offer from IFM Film Associates. It boils down to a percentage deal on all sales, but they’re kind of like a middle-man. I check another filmmaker who used them, and he tells me they have yet to make a dime after the advance.

    Which is weird, because IFM claims they’ve done about $150,000 in sales, so I don’t know what kind of expenses they’re claiming.

    And oh, IFM claims they’re “marginally less enthusiastic about this title, as opposed to [another movie they name] because it has a much grittier look and is less clearly generic.” That’s right, our movie is too original.

    Gonna turn that one down.

    Then tonight Paul at Tulchin’s emails me that we have a new offer from Spartan Video, a buyout offer. They want the US rights for $30,000. We’ll still be able to sell cable/TV rights and foreign. It’s a low offer, but it’s money up front, which is what I’m looking for. That back-end money is for shit when you can’t trust any of these companies.

    So now I have to figure if it’s a good idea. It’s more than the entire budget of our movie, but not as high as we wanted. If I’m confident that Spartan can get the movie into Blockbuster and Hollywood Video though, I may go with them anyway. Time to get some money and move on.

MAY-JUNE 2002

2010-06-04T07:13:00.000-04:00

Man, it's like foreshadowing! I name Lion's Gate as a possible distributor, and they end up picking up my next movie(which is also mentioned in this same entry).

Ransom is still a script I like a lot. But it's really not that marketable without a real cast.

MAY – JUNE

    Did the press kits. They turned out pretty nice, but cost about $450. I send twenty-five of the fifty I’ve made, plus screeners to Tulchin. Two weeks later he emailed me a list of the distributors he sent them out to. Some of the names are Universal, Warner Bros, HBO, Showtime.

    I wonder if Harris has even seen the movie. Ain’t no way this is a big-studio movie. I’m thinking more like Fine Line(who is also on the list) and Lion’s Gate.

    Harris lets me know he needs more screeners. I email him and say I’ll send him another fifteen, but that these things aren’t M&M’s and these are the last ones I can send to him for a while.

    In retrospect, I wish I’d had the press kits when I sent out screeners to the festivals we applied to. Would have made a better impression on the judges.

    Anyway, I can now sit back and hopefully wait for the offers to pour in. I’ve finished Ransom For A Psychopath, one of the scripts I was thinking about shooting, but it would cost too much money. Still aiming at Fear Of Clowns. Got about 90 pages done, still working out some kinks.

April 30th, 2002 - Back East Pt2

2010-05-14T04:12:00.000-04:00

I get up about one p.m and don’t feel so hot. My wife shows up. I get them to go get me something to eat, and then I throw up some and sleep some more.

After they bring me a sub, I feel a little better. None of us make any move to go into town and watch any movies. Fuck that.

After a while, my wife and I get ready for the awards show. No way am I thinking we’re going to win an award.

You see, the actor Frank Vincent is being honored at the awards gala. He’s also got a movie running in the competition. Now ask me what movie I think is going to win.

It does. Then Best Feature in another category goes to some movie whose producer also helped put on the festival. Conflict of interest, anyone?

The director of that feature also gets Best Screenplay and Best Director. Everyone in the joint seems to know him. I’m feeling like more of a stooge by the minute. I can see this whole thing was planned out before they even started the show.

Well, the dinner took place at the Liberty House, so that was neat. New York City skyline in the background, Statue Of Liberty off to the right. Everyone in suits and tuxes.

My wife and I go back to the room. We’re going to try to go into New York City, but by the time we get ready, it’s pouring rain.

We go back to the room and say fuck it. The whole weekend has pretty much sucked. I spent roughly seven hundred dollars of money I don’t have.

So now I’m sitting here a couple of nights later and the whole thing is like this mini-nightmare. I just never expected a first-year festival to be this political. Christ, it’s who you know even at these little festivals.

I’ve got to jam on these press kits. Hunting Humans has to get out there. I’m working on the screenplay to Fear Of Clowns right now. It’s more of a straight romantic horror mystery. You know.

April 30th, 2002 - Back East Pt1

2010-05-10T07:22:00.001-04:00

I believe this is where my hate of New Jersey started. And something I remember from right after we first got to NJ: Rick and I are walking back from where we grabbed lunch and we see a girl, maybe 18, walking the opposite direction from us.

She's crying, and pulling a suitcase behind her. Rick and I watched her walk past. I mean, what were we going to do?

Anyway, the entire night in New York is just one giant surreal thing in my mind. Bizarre. I guess that's New York.

-------------------------------

April 30th

We got home from the Back East Picture Show. It took place from the 25th to the 28th of this month. Things started bad. Should have taken it as an omen and gone home right then.

Rick and I left for it on Wednesday night. I had made reservations at an Econo Lodge about two miles from the actual hotel we’d be staying at for the next couple of days(by then it was booked up for that night because we’d planned on coming down on Thursday).

My plan was to get the lay of the land, put some flyers out at the theater, etc. Try to get some people to come to our showing.

What happened was that we got into town within 3 hours. It took us about another hour to find the goddamn hotel. The guy I called didn’t speak much English. He was no help. We finally stopped at the Doubletree and I checked to make sure my reservation was fine and got directions from that guy.

After a small misdirection,we got to the hotel. It was a dump. You at least expect an Econo Lodge to be decent, but this was in a crappy part of town. Tons of construction, lots of litter and crap all over. The rug in our room was stained and burned in places. I didn’t want to put my head on the pillow, the room was that crappy.

We figured to get up early and get over to the theater. I set my alarm for 9:30am.

We get up and roll out. I buy a map of Jersey City at the hotel. We head toward what we hope is the theater.

Construction prevents us from taking certain roads. We keep getting detoured to other roads. We find some of the roads we’re supposed to be on, but they’re not going where we want.

I ask a couple of people where the theater is and they’re like “That’s in Hoboken, right?” as if it’s forty miles away. The paper I have says it’s about three miles away.

It takes us, no shit, two hours to find the theater. No shit. And it was only three miles away.

It’s raining like a bitch, we’re pissed off about what a crappy city Jersey City is, and finally we stumble into the theater.

Hudson Street Cinemas is a two-screen theater. Small and quaint. I meet the guy putting the festival on who seems fairly nice, but he’s asking me questions about how did I do the sound for my movie. I don’t know what the fuck he’s talking about. It’s called a microphone, chief.

He wants to know if we’re going to the seminar or something. I tell him we just want to go get something to eat. We’re hungry and tired from being lost.

We get some lunch at a little crappy steak joint. They don’t serve fries. They serve some onion-covered potato thing. A thimble of bitter cold slaw. The burger is okay.

We head back for our screening, dreading it. You see, they’ve not only given us a bad time slot, but they’ve put us opposite the Director’s Lounge where everyone can go get free drinks and schmooze with the other filmmakers.

Five people come to our showing. Two of them told us beforehand that they would be leaving a little early to go to the Lounge. So then we had three people.

Great, I’m thinking, as I watch the movie for the millionth time. How can we win an award when only three people are watching it?

After the movie, they took a few pics of us. We rushed off to the Lounge. Had some drinks, chatted with some people. Everyone was very transparent with their “What can you do for me?” attitudes. Passing tapes and business cards.

At least we find out that there will be judges voting for the best movies, not the audiences.

That night we go to bed early. I need the sleep. I figure we’ll party the next night. We’ve been passing out cards with invitations to a screening of HH in our room with free drinks.

Friday rolls along. We head to the theater, where it seems no one is taking part of the showings. No one seems to care. Where are all the filmmakers?

We catch a movie called Peroxide Passion. Not bad. Some good acting performances by the leads, but some of the directing is off(or it could be the editing, it’s hard to tell without seeing what they had to work with).

I’m bored. Kinda pissed. We can’t find where people are hanging out, if they even are, so we can’t pass out some more invitations. We want some people to come to the screening in our room, but we’re getting a bad feeling.

I make Rick watch Living In Oblivion. He didn’t find it as funny as I did. He’s real jaded. He gets into these little bitter moods. I can feel it too, but I repress it. Time to get pissed later.

We get some dinner and go to the theater to see what it’s like. Tonight they’re screening the movie that the guy who put on the festival shot, but it’s not in the competition.

There’s a decent crowd out front. Danny Aiello walks by. Some other actors whose faces you know but names you don’t. We decide not to go to the screening. I’m not feeling like watching any of these fucking “filmmakers” movies, ‘cause they didn’t come to mine, did they?

We head back to the bar that hosted the Director’s Lounge. We get some drinks. We head back to the hotel at about 11:30pm. I get the room ready, get some liquor ready.

No one shows. No one. Rick’s pissed. I’m pissed. What the fuck are all these people doing?

Rick and I take the Path, a subway that runs into New York. We get out on 14th street and catch a cab, telling the guy to take us to any happening bar. The guy has no idea what we’re talking about. (He doesn’t seem to speak fluent English; go figure)

Finally he drives us to some strip with a couple of bars on it. We head into one called Bar515 and get some beers. After a while, two girls wander over and ask us what the badges around our necks are. We tell them. One girl is named Rebecca I think, and the other girl is some Hungarian girl who doesn’t speak much English.

Rebecca’s a wanna-be actress. She’s pretty with a good body, but I don’t think she’s got the intelligence to be a good actress.

Bar515 closes at 4am, so they ask us if we wanna go to another bar with them. We’re wasted. We say sure.

They take us over to some theater that’s hosting a Neil Simon play. Some mook is letting some people in the back door, but they won’t let us in, even with the girls. Another guy comes up and Rebecca talks to him. He hands the big black bouncer a hundred dollar bill and we’re in. Let me tell you that I have no idea why that happened.

We’re ushered up some dark stairs into an even darker room. Little black couches, bluish neon lighting around the walls. I get five drinks, which come to thirty six bucks. Rick has to pay for it, ‘cause all I got is plastic at that point, and they won't take credit cards.

We hang around chatting on the couch and then suddenly the girls are gone. They went through some door that is opened and shut periodically to admit certain desirables, of which we are not.

That clinches it. We finish the drinks and get out of there. Where ever we are, it’s close to Times Square, because that’s where we end up.

It’s like Vanilla Sky. There’s no one there. A lone hot dog vendor. We get a hot dog for Rick and a pretzel for me.

Then we head home. We get off the fuckin’ path at the wrong place and have to hoof it about a mile. It seems like ten miles when you’re drunk.

When I get back I call my wife and tell her to go ahead and come if she wants to. The festival isn’t anything like I expect.

I go to bed at about eight a.m.
TO BE CONTINUED

April 21st, 2002

2010-05-03T23:48:00.000-04:00

The interesting anecdote here is that the theater that we used to premiere "Hunting Humans" was the actual theater where Shivers would stalk Lynn and Tuck in "Fear of Clowns".

My projectionist buddy James Fellows got us into both theaters, and dies in both movies.

The line to get into the auditorium.

April 21st

    The screening was yesterday.

    I’ll start off by telling you how soured I am on the state of Maryland in terms of help they give to filmmakers. How about zero?

    I was reticent about mentioning this stuff, ‘cause you don’t want to burn your bridges(but since I may be the only one reading this and I can always hit the delete key), but when we first started prep for the movie I sent a letter to the head of the Maryland Producer’s Club. One Jed Dietz.

    It asked if he had any advice or could offer any help obtaining permits.

    No response.

    I let that slide. Who knows what happened to the letter? I was too busy to ever give it another shot.

    So I put together this screening. My wife makes a bunch of press kits and sends them to the local television stations, newspapers, you name it. We waited a week and got no response.

    I call and email a butt-load of the local newspapers. A small local one called “The Gazette” responds, but that’s it. Rick and I do an interview that comes out in the April 13th newspaper. It’s pretty good, but the paper is too small to be much help.

    I fax the Sun(the biggest local paper), since I’ve already emailed them and snail mailed them. No response. I think perhaps they have too many good stories. I pick up one and read an article about how to make old furniture look like new furniture.

    I decide they don’t have too many good stories. Finally one of them calls three days before the screening. They want to interview me over the phone. Great, I say. I do the interview. I ask whether they’re going to send someone out to see the movie. They tell me no, they’re doing the story on me and that’s it.

    Totally defeats the purpose. If I wanted a story on me, I’d make it up myself. I need some good quotes, some critics saying they liked the movie.

    My wife called three of the television stations who all say they’re going to try to get a crew out, but it’s a busy Saturday for news.

Me and the wife outside the theater

THE SCREENING

    I got five hours of sleep the past two nights. Just kept thinking about all the shit I had to do. I did a test run with my computer and made a copy for the VCR in case something drastic happens once we get to the theater.

    It all seems to be going okay. Ticket sales had been okay, but I figured to get a lot more people showing up after hearing about it in the Sun.

    I arrived early(8:15am) at the theater. My buddy had told me a site rep was coming out to supervise us, which was really bad because I was using the theater’s digital projector and sound system when I was expressly told not to.

    We devise a big lie where I brought in all this equipment the night before. To top it off, we’re moving the showing into the biggest theater. I’m worried about the site rep, but I’ve run a couple of scenarios through my head depending on how the person is.

    We get everything set up. We test the sound, get it to the right level. My wife starts blocking off sections for cast/crew/press. I’m running all over. Waiting for Jeff and Paul to show up so I can hand them the video camera and still camera and tell them what to shoot.

    Nine o’clock comes around. One of my employees shows up to be the ticket taker. Jeff shows up shortly after that. Then my brother. Good to go. Nine thirty shows up and there’s still only friends and family.

    I put on the tickets to arrive between 9:45 and 10:00, but you’d still expect some people to show up early. I’m getting worried. I’d hoped for big crowds already. A huge line.

    I start to feel a little better as people arrive. A line does form. It’s not as many people as I’d hoped, but it’s a decent crowd. I get them in a line and have Paul take a picture so you can see what they’re waiting for.

    A few people ask Rick to stand in front of the movie poster so they can take his picture. Funny stuff.

    Everyone gets let in, taking their seats. I stall, hoping more people will show up, or maybe the press. So far, we haven’t seen one press person. That pisses the shit out of me. I guess a movie shot by a Maryland filmmaker in Maryland gets screened all the time at the movie theater.

    Fuckers. This state sucks for indy film.

    Rick and I get up front and say a few words. There may have been 150-200 people there, but in a 450 seat auditorium, it didn’t look like many. I’d had an idea of what I was gonna say and I still blew it. Public speaking is not my forte.

    The movie starts and I run upstairs to get my seat where I can see everyone’s reaction. Rick and my wife are sitting near me.

    The lead-in to the credits didn’t get a whole lot of reaction. I didn’t expect it to really. I imagine a lot of people are slightly shocked, wondering what they’ve stumbled into.

    The movie rolled on. Some scenes that got a reaction at other showings don’t get any reaction and vice versa(the “Must be the pickels” line got NO laugh, while Rick’s naked ass garnered a lot). Rick looked over at me when they laughed at his naked ass with a look that plainly said Fuck You.

    The reaction that most pleased me was when Jeff gets his throat cut in the movie theater. There were a lot of people sucking in a breath when it happened(it was THAT loud) and then a lot of uncomfortable movement. Very cool.

    As expected, people jumped when Paul got clubbed, but I think even more jumped at Rick getting punched after he gets out of the bath.

    Then, disaster.

    Last half hour of the movie, the sound begins reverberating. Every noise, every dialogue, every narration. I RACE up the stairs and stop the movie. I push the space bar, hoping everything will clear itself up, which it normally does.

    Nope. I try again. Nope.

    Finally I load the old version of the movie and hit play and it works. But that meant I would have to come back up and self-load the outtakes. I’m pissed and embarrassed. The one time I need the thing to work and it screws up.

    After the movie everyone seemed to enjoy the outtakes. Lots of laughs. A bunch of people waited around to say hi and tell us how much they enjoyed it. Very cool, but I’m still stewing. No press whatsoever. They’re the fucking reason I did the whole thing.

    I briefly think about doing something rash, like stalking and killing a few reporters for fun. I bet they’d do a story then, wouldn’t they?

My first newspaper story

April 8th, 2002

2010-04-30T03:55:00.000-04:00

Ha! Look at that! I say it's a PLUS that the festival was in New Jersey! Man, have I learned better...

April 8th

    No April Fools here. I submitted a screener last week to the Back East Picture Show, as the deadline was March 30th. I was notified on April 1st that we got in.

    Very nice. It’s another festival where they don’t let studio films in, so I feel that we have a chance of winning it. And as a plus, it’s in New Jersey, so Rick and I are gonna attend.

    Of course, everything is expensive. The hotel is going to cost $120 a night. In addition, they only give us one all access pass. For Rick to get one, it will cost $200 plus $125 to the acceptance awards dinner(which is black tie optional). Ouch.

    The movie screening is going full bore. It’s on. Rick and I are going to be interviewed for The Gazette, a local newspaper. My wife sent out press kits to the local news channels and newspapers, so hopefully we’ll get some people there.

    We’ve sold a decent amount of tickets. We only have to sell about half of the seats for me to break even, but I think we may sell out once word gets out. Most people I talk to want to attend, but don’t like the Saturday morning thing.

March 15th, 2002 Press Kits/Prepping For Showing

2010-04-16T03:15:00.000-04:00

Hahahahahahahaha! Plans! They're so great.

I mean, for laughs later.

March 15th, 2002

    Press kits. Harris needs about 25-30 screeners and press kits.

    I don’t know what a press kit is. I ask Harris to send me some samples if he’s got them, which he does.

    After perusing them, I figure out that what I’m missing from my press kits is anything related to the press at all. We had no time to get reporters out to the sets when we were shooting. Then I dove head-first into editing. No time there.

    Now we need some press.

    I call our local movie theater representative and asked him how much it would cost to four-wall my movie.

    Okay, so maybe that’s not what I said. I think I gave him the impression that we were having some investor presentation and “might” need the video projector. He quoted me prices ranging from $800-$1750 plus $500 for the projector.

    Which won’t be a problem if I make the tickets like $30 apiece. Except that you can’t sell tickets to this, because that’s against their contract.

    Fuck that. There’s no way I can put out that kind of money. Time for a plan.

    I call the guy back and tell him I’ve got my own equipment. Scratch the $500 projector. You see, my buddy who works at this theater tells me he can smuggle the projector out for free. Sweet.

    I book the cheapest time, which is Saturday morning. I’m going to sell tickets at my store, so the theater doesn’t know anything about it. When I do the pre-interviews, I won’t specify how to get tickets. I’ll say they won’t be available at the theater and to call my number for information on getting tickets.

    That way I’m not publicly saying I’m charging for the tickets.

    If all goes well, I’ll have seats available for the press, who will come and write up some nice “Local Filmmaker Does Good” with a few pleasant critiques of the movie. I’ll make a sweet press kit, get thirty copies made, send the whole shebang to Harris, and in three months will have checks rolling in.

    That’s the plan, anyway.

March 11, 2002 The Producer's Rep

2010-04-09T06:05:00.000-04:00

Live and learn. The deal with Harris worked out okay, but knowing what I know now, I would never sign with a producer's rep that charges money for their services.

They should take a percentage(like 10%, maybe 15% for foreign sales) plus expenses(that you spell out in the contract), and that's it. That's what my current rep does.

March 11th, 2002

    In the back of my mind I’d been mulling over whether to try to get a producer’s rep. What they do is sell your movie for you, and take a cut of the profits. They know all the distributors and they attend all the major festivals, so they know who’s looking for what.

    The way I heard, they get ten percent of your profits, but they pay for themselves; they’ll get you at least ten percent more than you’d get yourself.

    I stumbled onto the web site of producer’s rep Harris Tulchin and Associates. He’s a pretty big-name guy, with offices in Paris, Rome, LA and New York.

    I called there to see whether they were interested in seeing the movie. After finding out that Spectrum was interested and that we’d won an award at a festival, they said send it along.

    Long story short, I talked to Harris. They take $5000 up front plus ten percent of the profits. I said “Wow, that’s a lot of money”, because, to me, it is. He said “If I make you five hundred grand, it won’t be a lot of money, will it?”

    He had a point.

    So I decided to play a little mind game with him. I wanted to see how much faith he had that he could sell the movie.

    Look at it this way: If he thinks he’s going to sell my movie for five hundred grand—a movie that will clear him fifty grand—is he going to turn me down because of the upfront five grand?

    Not if he thinks he’s got a pretty good shot at selling the movie.

    A couple of days later I called him back and told him I couldn’t get any more money, that I’d spent it all on the movie. He said he’d thought about it and would change the contract he’d offered so that the money was deferred against the first payments.

    I’d done it! Clearly he thinks we have a shot of selling the movie, or there’s no way he’d agree to that. Think about it; all the upfront costs and time is going to be on his dime. He’s working for free until he sells my movie.

    If he really does sell my movie, this guy’s going to be in my good graces in a serious way. I may even thank him in my Oscar acceptance speech.

February 16th, 2002: HH on the Big Screen

2010-04-06T03:54:00.000-04:00

February 16th, 2002

    I saw my movie on the big screen last night.

    If there was ever any chance of me doing something else for a living, it’s gone now. The only answer to the question “What are you going to do if you can’t make it doing movies?” is “Die”.

    The theater James works at just got in a big-time expensive video projector. I took a VCR up to the theater and we tested it out, and it looked great. I imagine it’ll look even better if I bring up my computer and we run the movie full-resolution.

    We made plans to play it last night for a select bunch of people(some of the cast and crew, my parents, my parents-in-law, and a few other people who are connected with the film in other ways.)

    It went over great. I think everybody liked it. You could see the surprise in their eyes that I could do something like that. It’s what I’m getting from everyone. In some ways, it’s a hell of a good thing to hear that everyone likes the movie, but there’s also this veiled compliment of “We didn’t think YOU could do something like this.”

    Winning through lowered expectations, I guess.

    Anyway, we’re still arguing over the contract. Spectrum is changing little things that we haven’t talked about when they send me their contract draft, and it’s getting old quick. I’m going through one more draft and then I think we’re moving on.

February 1st, 2002: Contract disputes Pt. 2

2010-04-04T21:58:00.000-04:00

February 1st, 2002

    Been going back and forth with Spectrum. I get a bad feeling about them. It started when the president, a woman named Yvette, told me there was no way she could give us 70 percent of the take. She said, and I’m closely paraphrasing here, “I’d go out of business if I gave that kind of percent. I've never heard of a percentage that high in all my years of business.

    I mention—not argumentative, mind you—that I’ve talked to quite a few people who all mention that it’s pretty standard. Yvette says I should find out who those companies are then, and sell it to them. She didn’t say it snidely or anything, and she qualified it by saying they’d really like to take the movie, they just couldn’t do that percentage.

    On the other points, she didn’t have a problem with my clause stating that if they haven’t given us 125 grand in three years, the contract is null and void.

    I asked her how many units she thought she’d move. She said they don’t talk in units any more(something I found strange, since her other rep told me they’d move 6000 units at Blockbuster alone). She said they talk in terms of gross dollars, and she thought HH would make between $275,000 and $450,000.

    She asked me how much our budget was and I told her eighty-five thousand. She said making that back shouldn’t be a problem.

    Now all this is great, but none of it’s in the contract. And one thing I’ve learned is that if it’s not in the contract, it’s not in the contract.

    One big sticking point is that she said they couldn’t budge from giving us only 25% of the take after recoupables on any DVD receipts under $24.94(which she claimed is “sell-thru”). I asked her why the cut was so much in her favor.

    She said they have to make some of their money back. I asked how that works, since they’re taking all the recoupables from my end. She laughed a little uncomfortably and said they still have out-of-pocket money they need to get back.

    Last but not least, they want a clause taken out that was put in by Saleman that says we need to get a copy of any deal they do and that Spectrum needs our approval on them.

    Now, the approval part is a little unreasonable, but they claim they want the whole clause taken out, because if they sell our film in a package deal, it would violate the privacy of the other films in the group.

    I tell her I’m gonna consult my lawyer. I call Saleman. He says it’s a load of crap. If they don’t tell us how much money they made us, the only way we’re gonna know is if we audit them. And, as Saleman pointed out, if we audit them, we’re gonna find out the terms anyway.

    So I mull it over. The whole package thing sounds like a bad idea to me anyway. Here’s why: Say Spectrum packages ten films(including HH) together and sells the rights to Germany for $100,000. Now, what if the percentage Spectrum is earning for the other nine films is more than HH? What’s to stop Spectrum from saying that $99,000 of those dollars are for the other nine films, and only $1,000 is for HH? In that way, Spectrum would gain more money and I’d be screwed out of the deal.

    I decide to put a clause in saying that there can be no package deals where HH is concerned unless the amount paid for the package is at least proportional to the number of films. I left in the clause about letting us know how much they get in each deal, because I don’t want to be forced into auditing them(which will cost me money).

    I mail the new contract back with a note to call me when they’ve reviewed it. A few days later Yvette calls me back and leaves a message that says she needs to talk to me about four points in the contract.

    I have no doubt about what they are. But I’ve made up my mind that if they insist on the 25%, I won’t sign with them. I’ll shop HH around a bit, since we’ve only sent out about ten screeners. I’ve also looked into self-distributing, which looks feasible if we can pool about $25,000. More on that later.

    I call Yvette back, but it’s Friday, and I think they all left early.

    Then we get hit with some good news for a change.

    Friday night I’m skimming the newsgroups and I see a notice about the winners of the DIY film festival. I’d asked Rick to send a copy of the movie in, but I didn’t know whether he did.

    I see a film called Ocean Park has won Best Film. I figure, Rick didn’t send HH in or also likely, he did and we just didn’t win.

    Imagine my surprise when I scroll down and see “Best Screenplay award goes to writer/director Kevin Kangas, who wrote the dark drama "Hunting Humans," a cold look into the mind of a serial killer that features a unique twist on the theme.”

    This is big. This is great. The first festival we enter, we win an award. The award is big for two reasons: First, it’s a hell of a boost for me right now, as I’m feeling drained and uninspired lately. There’s nothing like success to give you a boost of inspiration.

    Second, any award you can put on the video/DVD box is an incentive for someone to take home your movie, which is increased incentive for Blockbuster or Hollywood Video to put it in their stores.

    Tried to call Rick, but his phone’s off. Too bad, I’m dying to give him the news.

January 25th, 2002

2010-03-29T16:42:00.000-04:00

I was gonna put up two posts, but the next one is pretty large--deals in-depth with the problems of the contract.

But the gist of the early information was that if the distributor is going to take out expendables from your end, you should be getting at least 70% from the net take AND you need to be able to limit how much they can take out. (otherwise they'll make a million dollars and say they spent a million-five so they still don't owe you)

More detailed stuff in the next post.

January 15th, 2002

    New year.

    Soon after I received their email, I talked to a lady named Toni at Spectrum who offered to email me a contract to license HH.

    The contract offered no advance, which is pretty standard. They offered a 50/50 split. After asking around, a few of the more knowledgeable folk on the filmmaking newsgroup let me know that was a pretty bad split. 70/30 in my favor was a little more standard.

    Without a lawyer, I wasn’t signing anything. I asked around and got a reference to Michael Saleman, an attorney with offices out of LA and Texas. I sent him the contract, and he butchered it.

    So last week, I sent it back to Spectrum with the changes. Now I’m waiting to hear what they’re going to say.

    Personally, I want to get all this shit out of the way and get on with the next movie. On a side note, having some crappy health problems. Pain in my gut, blood tests show liver problems(which my doctor temporarily called hepatitis, then said it might just be a virus moving through), and my back has never been worse.

    I’ve been to the chiropractors twice in two days. I’ll be going back two more times this week. I’m in pretty bad shape for a thirty-one year old.

August 21st, 2001/November 19th, 2001

2010-03-26T05:28:00.002-04:00

To put the budget in perspective, film cost $3900, development and transfer of the film to BetaSP cost $6900, the D.P. and his hotel cost a total of $2700. So between those three things is $13,500 of the total $20,500...

August 21st, 2001

    Rick came over and we watched the movie, noted any final sound problems we had. Once scene was totally out of sync, so I have to fix that. Then, I’ll be sending it out to distributors(I sent a copy with the fucked-up sync to the Copyright Office to establish my copyright).

    All in all, I’m pleased with the movie. It’s got some moments where I literally cringe because I don’t like the scene, but there’s a lot of great moments too.

    What it all boils down to is that it’s better than I ever expected it to be. I’ll put it up against any other under $25,000 flick, especially by a first-time director. The final budget, total cost to make Hunting Humans, was $20,500.

November 19, 2001

    A lot has happened. I’ve fixed everything that had problems. I started mailing out tapes to distributors(nine have gone out) and already there’s good news.

    One of the ones I sent the tape to first, Spectrum Films, called my voice mail number that I gave them and said they’d like “to discuss a possible distribution deal”. This was on Thursday the 15th.

    I figured I’d call them on Monday, which would give me some time to talk to some people and see if I could get my mind wrapped around what I’d say.

    Instead, Friday came around and they dropped me an email which said the following:

“Kevin:
Yvette gave you a call yesterday. Perhaps you're busy or you found a distributor, but I just wanted you to know that your movie was so "different" it had to make the rounds. I saw it first and that started the rounds. Unanimously, it is a good film and we would like to distribute it.

Please let us know either way.”

    It was signed by one of their acquisition guys. All of a sudden it’s not “We want to talk”, it was “We want to distribute”.

    Understand, from all I’d read, it sounded like finding a distributor for an independent movie with no known stars was a little like looking for your contact lens in an in-ground pool.

    And here we are, three weeks after sending out tapes, a distributor has already offered to distribute it.

    I keep my wits about me. First, never celebrate until someone’s signed on the dotted line. Second, I don’t know much about Spectrum. Their web site shows they’ve distributed other small movies, some with small stars and some with no stars. But do they pay well? Do they get behind your movie and try to get it out there?

    And there’s another part of me—the same part that was saying “When are the distributors going to call?”—that’s now saying “Why’d they have to call so soon? None of the other distributors have even had a chance to see it yet?”

    See, no mattter what happens, I’ve always got reason to complain.

Aug 14th/20th, 2001

2010-03-22T20:35:00.000-04:00

See? Can you believe how much shit I had to do just to get this movie done? Problem after problem.

August 14, 2001

You know, the shit just can’t go right, can it? I put the pieces of the movie together and rendered it, then tried to play it. The picture stutters after about three minutes, loses audio sync too.

To quote Aric Blue, I mean, what the fuck? This worked before, why is it screwing up now? I haven’t changed anything that I can remember.

So…I’ve pulled out the 900 mhz monster. Would be nice if I could just hook up the hard drives and tell it to have at it, but the hard drive controllers are completely different, so it won’t recognize them. So I have to create little 650meg pieces of the movie, burn them onto CDs and then copy them onto the new hard drive that’s been set up for the computer.

It takes FOREVER. I shit you not. The movie has to be done in about 15 parts. Each part takes 1-2 hours to render. Burning the 15 CDs takes about a ½ hour apiece. Then copy each file from the CD to the new hard drive, which takes 10 minutes apiece. That’s roughly a minimum of 25 hours, and that’s if I sat at the computer non-stop without getting up.

Ye Gods.

August 20th

Mark it down, baby. I have a completed movie, and it’s on tape now. Words can’t describe how psyched I am. I called Rick at home at 12:30 am to wake his sorry ass up and tell him.

August 7, 2001

2010-03-19T05:24:00.000-04:00

Hahahaha, a "900 mhz beast" of a computer...man, technology changes fast.

And yeah, the credits are certainly pretty laughable compared to what I can do now, but that's how it goes...

August 7, 2001

Finishing up the “mastering”.

The scene where Aric finally kills Dark bothered me. The music just wasn’t enough of a payoff. I didn’t feel Aric’s victory like I wanted to.

Listening to the title credits music though, there’s a piece of it that would fit perfectly. So I cut it and moved it and listened to it to see whether it works. Boy, does it.

So I told Evan in an email. He went ballistic, sent me a three-page email about how he didn’t want me to change it. He offered to give me back all the money I’d paid along with the points if I left it alone.

I replied, trying to calm him down, then phoned him last night. After letting him hear it, and tweaking it a little, he agreed that it’s fine. I’m not sure if he likes it better than the way he had it, but he sees what I was going for.

I’m rendering the movie now so Rick and I can watch it, make any final adjustments that need to be made. We’re also going to redo the last scene’s narration, ‘cause I don’t like it the way it is.

I’ve got the other computer(a 900mhz beast) rendering the final credits, which I’ve done with 3D Max, which is a little bit like using a cannon to kill a roach, but it gives me extreme control and lets me do professional-like credits. Hopefully, there’s nothing that needs to be changed in them, as it takes about 16 hours to render.

JULY 24th, 2001

2010-03-12T06:47:00.000-05:00

This was the beginning of learning just how much work goes into sound...it is immense and time consuming, and while the tools have become easier to use, the time it takes to tweak things to where they need to be is still LOOONG.

July 24th

Is the month flying by or what? I’ve laid in the music and am trying to lower it in certain parts and raise other pieces of the soundtrack. I’ve discovered that what I should have done is export the dialogue, the narration, and the M&E(music and effects) tracks separately from each scene.

So I went back and did it. Took a lot of time, exporting each, then laying them all back into the entire film. Luckily, I had kept all the sound elements separate in their tracks so it was easier than if I’d just dropped stuff in the timeline.

My buddy Rich Herard, who’s kind of a sound guru happened to come by my house(he needed help setting up a laptop), so I played him a bit of the movie I had tried to master.

He liked it, but he said “You gotta do something about the narration. It sounds flat.” Then he said something about pumping up the mids, taking out the highs, or maybe I got that backwards. I don’t know what the hell he’s talking about.

I have a nifty program installed on my hard drive called Cubase VST that I know nothing about. I figured one day I’d mess with it.

Well I boot that up and Rich starts playing with it, proclaiming it to be “the bomb”, and starts making my narration sound good. So now I gotta go through all my narration tracks, fix them with Cubase, export them again, reinsert them into the timeline. And it’s time-consuming.

Ugh. Just one more thing. I’m wondering whether anyone is going to realize how much went into Hunting Humans. I guess that’s what this diary is for.

July 19, 2001

2010-03-04T04:51:00.000-05:00

So the Ransom was a big pipe dream. I finished the script and I think it's pretty good, but it's not something I could do on the cheap cheap.

I even did a mock poster with Rick, Marsters, and Lance Henriksen as the other main character. I'd show you but it's godawful. I had zero idea of what I was doing graphic design-wise.

JULY 19th

The entire score for HH arrived at my house today. I’m ripping it from the CD, then I have to insert it into the soundtrack in sync, then remaster everything. That’s mixing all the different tracks(dialogue, score, effects) so that they all sound correct in relation to each other.

It’s a long process. I’m gonna have my work cut out for me. The first thing I did was log online and do some research. Found a great site(www.filmsound.org) has a lot of great articles, but none go too deeply into the actual nuts and bolts of mixing.

I’ve been doing CGI work with my brother on a few scenes in the movie that need touching up, but I’ve put them on hold. The movie holds up okay without them, but the sound has to be done.

Got final permission to put VAC in the movie. I’m going to use two of the four songs I asked about. A nice guy named Athan at Metropolis Records is sending me a contract. It stipulates that for every $100K of profit HH does, Metropolis gets $1000, but it’s a fair price to pay, since we’re getting the songs so cheap.

Anyway, I’m defragging my hard drive right now before I begin the sound mastering.

The end is near, so I’m alternating between this and what could be the next movie we shoot, tentatively called “Ransom For A Psychopath”. I’m telling you, I’m going to establish a serial-killer genre. I’m hoping to get Bruce Campbell in a small part, and maybe James Marsters(Spike on Buffy, The Vampire Slayer) as the psychopath. Rick would co-star as the detective hunting him.

Yeah, I’m already aiming a little high. But as Jack Burton says, if you’re not gonna aim high, don’t bother aiming. (Okay, so he never really said that, but he could have...)

July 7, 2001

2010-02-12T04:55:00.003-05:00

This is one of those weird things you just gotta hear to believe...

July 7, 2001

Been to St. Augustine, Florida and back. Nice vacation. I actually didn’t want to come back. The weather was awesome and I hadn’t seen some of the family down there for years.

Evan’s sent me the first 40 minutes of score, and it’s some great stuff.

I had sent a question to Metropolis Records about how much it would cost to license a few songs from Velvet Acid Christ(VAC) for the movie and they said it would be $250 a song, which would include sync rights and performance rights(you need both to use a song in a movie). The price is VERY reasonable, so I’m going to try to pin down the songs I’d like to use.

I’m trying to finish the final credits, but I’m not sure what songs I’ll be using from VAC, and what songs I’ll be using from a guy named Leroy Bocchieri and his group, Day One.

I figure I’m going to put his songs in the office scenes, like they’re playing on the radio. He’s offered to let me use whatever I want.

First time I talk to Evan after I get back, he tells me a VERY strange thing. He had his mom over and she watched the scene where Aric kills everyone in the theater, and she apparently thought it was horrifying. And then he drops the bomb.

He says, “You know, it’s very strange that I’m doing this movie, because do you know who Richard Ramirez is?” The name rings a bell, but I can’t place it right away.

“The Night Stalker,” he says. I remember some sketchy details about him. Killed a bunch of people in the eighties, got caught because of something stupid.

So Evan says, “Yeah, my grandparents were killed by him.”

I’m floored. What do you say to that? And it turns out that it was his mother’s parents. The mother he’s showing my serial killer movie to. Hoo-boy. He says that until he was sixteen he thought his grandparents were killed in an auto accident.

I quickly peruse the Hunting Humans encyclopedia which goes into Ramirez’s history. I spot a name that pops up, though it’s not Evan’s last name. I ask him if that’s his grandparents. He exclaims yeah, how’d I know that? I said the name just jumped out at me. He said he didn’t know any of the details about his grandparents’ death. After reading about it, I told him he didn’t want to know.

Just another interesting anecdote in the story of Hunting Humans.

June 17th, 2001

2010-02-08T06:37:00.004-05:00

I know--running out of pics I guess. So here's another wannabe actress. Did I post this already? Am I a dick for running these, or am I a dick for other reasons?
----------------

Get ready. It's about to get weird. Not this post. The next one.

I'm just saying. Get ready.

And you do not know tedious until you go in and individually fill in scratches on each frame of a movie. I remember it. It was one of those times I could have said "Screw it," and just ignored it.

But I put the time in. And it was a LOT of time...
(and I used Corel Photopaint, because at this time Adobe Photoshop wouldn't import a movie--only Corel would)

June 17th

Evan called me last night, but I was still brain-dead from the trip, so I didn’t get out of bed to take his call.

I called him tonight. He says he’s got “ground-breaking stuff” to let me listen to, the first eleven minutes of music, and it’s what he calls “one-cue”. He told me that means it’s all one piece of music, and it’s one of the longer ones ever done. He said the only one he knows of that was longer(it was 22 minutes long, but I can’t remember what the movie was)

So I listened to it. Excellent stuff. I’m very happy with it. A lot of what I had heard before was clearly just experimenting, as the final product was great. He’s dropping me a copy of it on CD in the mail, so I’ll be able to hear it in full glory(everything I’ve been listening to has been through the crappy phone-speaker).

I’m trying to get him a video-lock of the final movie, as he’s still scoring to the next-to-the-last version. Once I do that, I have to finish up all the sound, clean up all the film scratches digitally(which I started, but have a TON left to do), and add some CGI work to a few scenes where the special effects didn’t come off. Then when I get Evan’s music back, I’ve got to master it with all the other sound.

And I’ve given myself roughly five weeks to do all that—four, if you count the fact that I’ll be out of town for one of those weeks.

June 1st/16th, 2001

2010-01-30T23:10:00.002-05:00

Hard to believe I didn't even have a DVD burner back in 2001. Man, technology moves fast.

June 1st

After exporting some Quicktime files, then unsuccessfully trying to upload them to Evan’s ftp site, I sent him a CD with the files burned on.

He called me to say the quality wasn’t high enough.

At this point I’m ready to say fuck it, just do the goddamn score and give it to me, I’ll figure out exactly where it goes.

I decide to give it one more try. We’ll compress the files with the cinepak codec. I’ll send him the entire movie. I’ll send it to him in three parts, as I can only fit so much on one CD-ROM.

The downside is that is takes about fourteen hours to export one part, so my computer is all tied up for two days while I export this shit.

It’s frustrating. I’ve got a lot of work to do. I really can’t devote this kind of time. I email Evan and tell him this is it. This has got to work, because I can’t devote any more time to it.

In between all this shit, I’m working on a couple of screenplays. I’m thinking about one of them as our next feature. With luck, we’ll get some money out of HH, enough to get a backer to pony up for a 35mm feature.

June 16th

Am on a plane into BWI now. I’ve been in Vegas for 5 days. Quite a town. Don’t think I’d want to live there. For one, it’s VERY expensive—don’t believe any of the shit people keep saying about how everything there is cheap because they want you to gamble; it’s a load of crap. Second, the air is so dry that even when it’s 104 degrees outside, it doesn’t feel that hot.

The downside is that my skin started flaking like I’d had a bad sunburn and my nose got so dry it began to bleed. This is apparently a common phenomena, as Missy’s brother also got a bloody nose and when he went to get at tissue, the bellhop said “Welcome to Vegas” with a laugh.

The Vegas strip is beautiful at night. You’ve never seen so many lights. It’s a very friendly town. The people who live there, the vacationers, all were very warm and accommodating.

I’ve got to get right on the phone with Evan tonight to see how it’s all progressing. The new movie files I sent him worked perfect, so he’s started. He did the beginning scene which threw me for a loop at first.

See, the movie starts off with black screen and Aric Blue saying the words “Hunting Humans”. Then we dissolve into shots of Baltimore. I pictured it being very ominous, sinister, building.

Evan pictured it like this: You hear the words “Hunting Humans”, then the music slams you: “Bum BUM!” and goes right into the theme that he came up with.

At first I was very put off. I mentioned that it wasn’t like I thought it should be. I told him to play it a few more times. The more I watched it, the more I thought it was interesting. Not bad, just different than I would have gone. I guess this is what they call collaboration.

Time is really crunching. I’ll be back for about two weeks and then I go to Florida with my parents for some family shindig I couldn’t get out of. Then I’ll be back on July 4th and Evan is supposed to be done by the 8th.

We’ll see.

May 21st, 2001

2010-01-25T23:39:00.000-05:00

May 21st

Have talked to Evan a couple times. We went through some bits he’d put together. He’d been trying to put together a “sound”, like a small tune that when you heard it, you’d identify it with “Hunting Humans”.

He played me two that were okay, but just didn’t fit the mood for me. Then he played the third, which was very cool. Very dangerous, mysterious.

I tell him to go with that. Play it with strings, with horns. Over a couple of nights he refines it. I’m getting excited. I’m hearing it over the crappy phone speakers and I’m getting excited.

The new problem seems to be how to get timecode that he can put his score to, so when I get it back, I can put it to the movie so it’s timed perfectly.

There doesn’t seem to be a way to do it from my end. Evan’s familiar with people who have the equipment to stripe timecode in the spare audio channel.

I’m not one of those people. I can’t even get visual timecode on, as Adobe Premiere doesn’t seem to be capable of writing it. It can read it, but not write it.

Evan wants me to export Quicktime files that he can import on his computer. This will take quite some time. I’m trying to finish up putting sounds in, revising the movie so I can begin digitally-fixing scratches in the film.

I’ve experimented, and the results are amazing. The key to not paint over the scratches, but to use the “Clone” tool in Photopaint. If you paint or draw, the film grain isn’t there, so it’s pretty apparent where you painted(which is just as bad a scratch). But if you clone another area around the scratch, it looks great.

It’s VERY time-consuming, but worth it.

The deadline is killing me though. I’ve told Evan I need the score back from him by July 8th. I want to have the movie finished by the end of July. I’m hoping to rent the screening room at Jillian’s and play the movie on the giant television screen there. Have the cast and crew there. Get drunk, see what everybody thinks.

May 8th/12th/17th, 2001

2010-01-21T01:33:00.002-05:00

A promo image we shot for HH press kit
(and one I've licensed to other people, in case you
see it on something else)
----------

May 8th

Evan emails me that he won an award, for best art director for some CD cover or something. I think he should be winning awards for his scores. Shit, if he gets his hands on a real orchestra, I think the sky’s the limit. I mean, the guy’s only 25 years old. Imagine him in another ten years.

May 12th

Evan wants to call me, says he’s got something for me to listen to. I tell him I’ll call him, to save him the phone bill(since we’re on opposite coasts). He says don’t worry about it.

So Rick and I are out recording foley sounds all night and we get to my house about midnight. I get Evan’s email, so I email my phone number to him.

A half-hour later I get a call. It’s Evan. He’s kind of soft-spoken, young, enthusiastic. Rick takes off as he sees it’s going to be a long conversation.

Bottom line, I ended up talking with him until about four-thirty in the morning. We chatted film, we chatted composers, we talked about a shitload of stuff. He seemed very cool. Very knowledgeable. Played me some small stuff to give me an idea of what he could do.

He’s got some awesome equipment. Of course, he seems to want to experiment with some weird sounds, when I just want some straight orchestra stuff. At one point he was debating whether to use a “haunting kazoo” as the backbone of the music. I tell him I don’t think that will work.

He says he’ll email me when he wants me to call him.

May 17th

I was flipping channels when I came across a movie with Rebecca DeMornay and Michael Rooker in it. I knew Evan had scored a movie with those two, so I figured what’s the chance they were in two movies together?

I checked the title of the movie and sure enough, it’s the one Evan scored. I watched a little of the movie, called A Table For One. Kind of boring, but not bad. The score was nice.

I tell Evan in an email I saw the movie on Showtime. He told me he didn’t like his score for that one much, as the director didn’t give him much leeway.

May 1st, 2001

2010-01-19T03:20:00.001-05:00

May 1st

I forgot to tell you about this cool song and group I stumbled onto. Hellbent is the name of the band. I had posted an article on the newsgroups that I was looking for industrial songs to include in my movie.

Hellbent was one of the groups that emailed me. They pointed me to a song called “heliophobic”. It was pretty cool, but not really the mood I was looking for.

But on their web site was another song called “3 Murders, 3 Nights” which is COOL. Very ominous, relentless, perfect for the movie. I emailed them back to see whether I could use that one and they were open to it.

But that’s all words until a contract is signed. So I told the guy I’d make up a contract and fax it to them. The guy I’m talking to is from the UK, but the group is made up of guys from all over the world. Guys from big industrial groups like Pig, Chemlab, and more.

They sent me a CD, and it was really good. Then I got a copy of Stuff magazine in the mail and guess who’s reviewed on the new CD page? Hellbent, and they got four out of four stars. So then I panic. What happens if they suddenly think they’re too big to let me license their song for fifty bucks? (and at this point I got them to let me play the whole song over the closing credits, which really ends the movie nicely)

I email the guy right away and tell him that I need the contract signed, as I’m talking with the composer now, and have to know whether to get him to compose a score over the end credits.

The guy—his name is Bryan Black—says he can fax me the signed contract. He does. It’s set, we can use the song. It’s quite a coup, if you ask me.

Meanwhile, I’m going back and forth with Evan. I asked him to start composing some credit stuff. He said he’s working on the “architecture” of the film--I don't know what that means. I’m putting off talking to him on the phone.

I also notice that he hasn’t really said anything about whether he liked the movie or not. Rick’s really wanting some kind of opinion of the film, but so far, Evan’s not very forthcoming. At least he hasn’t said “It blows, I won’t score it”.

April 28th, 2001

2010-01-16T19:57:00.002-05:00

I remember this stuff vividly. Evan's a freakin' musical genius, but working with him could be a trial. I know a lot of super-creative types who are like this.

I'm sure I seem the same way in some respects, so I don't blame him. In the end I don't think anyone could have given me a better score, so it worked out.

But at the time it was frustrating.

April 28th

Oh boy. Jesus, the shit just keeps going wrong.

Not totally true, I guess. There’s good and bad.

Evan emailed me. Said he read my note regarding the music playing over the credits, and he thinks it’s a mistake. Says he hasn’t listened to it yet, but he thinks it won’t work with what he’s going to do, that you have to establish certain things in the credits, blah blah.

Sounded like he was being a bit of a primadonna. He was going to watch the movie “with an open mind” and see what he thought.

The email right after that put him over the top. Said that he thought the song over the credits was “amateurish” and “sucked the big jafooey, which is putting it nicely”. He said that if I insisted on leaving it in, he wouldn’t be able to score my movie. He claimed he can do much better.

I called Rick to tell him about this. He laughed in a wry kind of way. I had already decided on the tact to take with Evan and it goes like this:

There’s no contract between Evan and I. I nagged him to get me one, quite a few times, but he kept putting it off. Hey, whatever. It’s more to protect him than me, as he doesn’t even want all the money up front.

So I’m not going to come out and tell him that the song is definitely out, but I’ll let him know that if he can come up with something I like better, I’m open to it. If he’s willing to work on the credits 100 times if that’s what it takes, then okay. I’m confident he can come up with better, because he’s that good.

But if he doesn’t, I’m not contractually bound to use his version. It would be kind of a dick-move to do, and I’m sure it would sever any future working relationship between us, but I have to do what I think is best for the movie.

So I email him with that and wait. I still haven’t talked to this guy on the phone, and now I’m getting afraid to.

April 10th 2001

2010-01-14T22:22:00.003-05:00

So a little funny anecdote about this. I received a couple of submissions for guys who wanted to do scoring. Guys who had never done anything. I still have Jesper Kyd's submission CD. (check him out here - he's doing okay :)

Another guy was Kevin Riepl. I liked his stuff--he's the guy I mention below when I say I licensed the song "The New Evil".

A few years later when Evan didn't work out for "Fear of Clowns", I shot Kevin Riepl an email to see if he was interested in doing it. He was too busy with scoring videogames, but he referred me to Chad Seiter who ended up hitting it out of the park for me.

So that's why I never throw anything away. CDs, headshots, audition tapes. I'm a little ridiculous with that stuff, but you never know what's gonna come in handy down the line.

Don't know why I don't mention it in the entry below, but Evan Evans had sent some CDs to me and I loved them, but thought there was no way he'd do it for the paltry sum I was offering.

I sent him a letter telling him exactly how much I had and said the job was his if he wanted it. He said send him the movie.

April 10th 2001

The light, I see the light at the end of the tunnel.

I have a rough cut of the movie, minus a few sound effects, the end credits, and the score. It’s got some rough spots, it’s got some nice spots, but all in all it’s a far cry better than many movies that were shot for 1000 times its cost.

Evan Evans has a rough copy on VHS. I mailed it to him, but still haven’t actually called him on the phone, just corresponded in email. I’m gonna call him this week after he’s had some time to respond.

I’m terrified he’s gonna watch it and back out. Say “Hey, this movie’s not for me”, which would be polite for “This movie blows, I’m not gonna attach my name to this”.

That would knock some wind out of my sails, but I’ve got a back-up plan. The guy who does the title score in the movie is available, though I haven’t discussed anything with him. I licensed one of his pieces to play over the opening titles, because it’s perfect.

The movie opens with a quote from Tim Cahill, author of a number of travelling-books. Years back he did a book called “Buried Dreams”, which was based on research and interviews with John Wayne Gacy, infamous serial killer. Anyway, I read the book a long time ago but saved the quote because it really stuck with me.

Regarding the quote; I haven’t actually gotten permission to use it yet. Bothersome. The book is out of print, so I emailed the book company to find out how to get the clearance. I got an email back saying to write to an agency in L.A., as they were Cahill’s agency.

The letter I sent them was returned with an “Unknown Address” on it. Apparently the agency is closed. I emailed the book company again who said they were clueless how to get in touch with Cahill. I’ve searched a lot of places on the web looking for a way to contact him. The closest I got was an “Outside” magazine website, which is all about travel. Cahill writes travel and adventure books now, and had done a few articles on the site.

As I did some more digging, I discovered he was one of the web sites “Contributing Editors”. So I emailed them to see if they could get me in touch with him. No response yet.

Anyway, the movie opens with the quote, then plunges you right into the world of Aric Blue, serial killer. We show him stalking and killing a young woman, his first victim in the movie. He hangs her in the shower to keep her out of the way as he washes to make sure he’s got no blood or incriminating evidence on him. (In the script he also pours industrial-strength drain cleaner in the drain to make sure he leaves no hair in the tub, and he vacuums where he’s been and takes the vacuum bag too. These scenes had to be taken out due to the problems we had on set that night)

So after he kills the woman we fade to black and open up on the credits. Here’s where the song I licensed starts playing. It’s called “The New Evil”—which is very appropriate—and is ominous, menacing, reminiscent of the Halloween theme song. I licensed it for $300 from the guy who I “met” over the internet.

I didn’t realize it, but this would turn out to be a waste of money.

July 20th-26th, 2000

2010-01-07T20:08:00.005-05:00

A promo pic shot after the fact since we needed some pics for the press kit

------

I don't remember most of this stuff. I don't remember watching any of "Dangerous Mode"(Rick Shipley's movie) with Bubby, but I guess I did.

And the reference to Joe Ripple's movie stands--it was the main thing I didn't like about his and Don Dohler's movies; the Canon GL/XL look. Never liked the picture--just seemed way too video-ish.

But Joe's good people; check out his web site at:
http://www.timewarpfilms.com/

July 20th-26th

Talked to Ripple. He said, no problem, he could swing by and do it. Turns out he directed a movie since we last talked and has a web-site.

I’ve looped some of Rick’s stuff already. With enough takes, and some fiddling with the audio, I’ve found that it’s possible to make the ADR believable.

The important points seem to be this: Have the microphone about the same distance from the actor that it would have been in the scene(which adds “space” to the audio and helps match to the picture). See, if the audio sounds like the actor is speaking into a microphone that is two inches away, but the picture is a wide shot then it won't match. (Especially if you have one actor's audio from the shoot, but are looping another actor in the scene)

Also, the hard consonants seem to be the important syllables. So if they hit most of those, it looks pretty good.

I talk to Bubby(who plays the bad guy) and get him to come over. He hasn’t even seen the movie he did for Rick Shipley, so I show him the copy Shipley sent me. I don't think he’s impressed.

Then I show him some of our stuff. He likes it a lot more. Or maybe he’s just a good actor.

Anyway, I set him up for the ADR and he nails it like he just did the lines yesterday. Fucking amazing.

Couple of days later Ripple comes in. He does well also, but not as good as Bubby. I see some of the footage from his movie. Doesn’t look bad, but you can tell it was shot on video.

June 25th, 2000/July 1st 2000

2010-01-05T23:00:00.003-05:00

This was the worst. Missing a tape of audio, and since we shot on FILM there was no audio. We had to do looping without even the benefit of knowing exactly what was said.

Sure, you HOPE the actor said what was in the script but do you know how often actors subtly change lines?

I do...

June 25th 2000

Editing the picture. Trying a scene one way, trying it another, and seeing which one I like. Shortening clips, retrying the scene, over and over again until it’s perfect.(or as close as you can get with a little footage as we’ve got)

Discovered a BIG problem. I seem to be missing a DAT tape. If it can’t be found, we’ll have to ADR(Automatic Dialogue Replacement) without the Automatic. Also called looping, which is more appropriate to what we’ll have to do.

What that means is that I’ll have the actors watch themselves on television and try to say every line that they said when they did the dialogue.

What makes it extra tough is this. The big movies do ADR in some places because there might be too many other sounds getting in the way of the dialogue(traffic, or a plane, or any other little sound). In their case, they can actually play back the way they said the line and just try to mimic it.

In our case, we don’t even have that. So if one of my actors did any improv at all, we’ll have to take guesses at what they said. (And remember, we shot this movie over a year ago, so it’s not as if the lines are fresh in their head)

I’m going to do some extensive looking for the missing tape, but I’m not hopeful. I have a feeling it must have been lost on location, as whenever a tape got full, I left it at my store. All the other tapes were together, so if the missing tape isn’t at my store, it’s MIA for good.

JULY 1st 2000

The tape is gone. I’ve looked everywhere. It’s gone the way of the dodo.

So…I knew we’d have to do ADR for the final fight scene, as we didn’t record dialogue at all. But now I’m missing a number of other scenes, the toughest being when the police detective comes to Aric’s door and questions him about the murder in his neighborhood.

It’s a lot of dialogue. I haven’t talked to Joe Ripple(who plays the detective) since we shot the movie, other than a few emails here and there.

To test the water, I’m gonna get Rick over here to try some lines out, see how easy/hard this is gonna be. From what I hear, it’s not a walk in the park.

The good news, and I think you always have to try to look for the silver lining—even though you may not find it—is that, with all these problems, there’s not a lot I haven’t learned how to handle.

On the next movie(‘cause there WILL be another), I’m going to be well-prepared and more comfortable, because frankly, I’m pretty sure there’s no problem I can’t work around.

No followers?

2010-01-04T17:41:00.001-05:00

I'm gearing up to get back to updating these blogs but it keeps showing me that these blogs have no followers...

Wouldn't you like to be notified when the blog gets updated? Start following! :)

March 2000

2009-12-20T23:22:00.002-05:00

It's worth noting that the additional five grand we got was by putting together a prospectus coupled with my trailer--showed it to one of the actors(Jeff Kipers) who had some money and he agreed to come in as Executive Producer with the extra cash.

March 2000

I've been busy. Edited 2 separate trailers, twice. I lost a hard drive that had all of both trailers on it, so I had to start over. I had exported some rough copies onto VHS, but I wasn't happy with them, so I did it all over from scratch.

I've done some rough titles in 3D Max, an excellent program. With help from my brother, I've gone in and added blood digitally to the scene where Duke gets shot and it looks good.

I got enough money to get the rest of the footage transferred to Beta(at a cost of just over three grand), so I've got the entire movie now on Beta. It's down to a matter of editing.

We've picked up an additional five grand, which should be enough to finish the movie. I've got my eye on a couple of composers and I'm going to try to talk one into scoring the film for what is essentially peanuts.

Dec 1999/Jan 25, 2000

2009-12-11T07:23:00.000-05:00

December 1999

Managed to get the money together for the 10 reels. I’ve gone through and tried to pick ten with what I hope will have the best shots on them.
What happens if they all come back blank? How fast am I gonna kill myself?

Jan 25, 2000

Got the footage, ten reels(about 1 hour 55 minutes of footage), transferred to video best light. I was a little worried about it, because RGB--the lab who did two reels to make sure nothing was wrong with the camera/film/etc--did a lousy best-light transfer.

Well, I'm happy to say, Fotokem did an outstanding job. I gave them minimal instructions, just asking that they lighten anything that was too dark.

I had picked the reels to be transferred with a general idea of how I want the trailer to look. If I need any shots that aren't on these ten reels, I'll have to shoot them on video and intersplice it, hoping that it's not too noticeable. The difference between how film looks and how video looks is pretty dramatic.

Some of the shots came out better than I could have expected. I think I can make a good trailer.

A little treat

2009-12-07T12:18:00.003-05:00

Let's take a break from the past for a moment. I'll share with you the first 25 or so pages of the sequel to "Hunting Humans" that I started writing about 5 years ago(I think).

There's some background on the page about it. Check it out if you like Aric Blue.

Note: the formatting is off a little, but I've tried to preserve it as close to the original Final Draft version as I could.

http://www.kangaskahnfilms.com/hh2-txt.htm

November 1999

2009-12-06T01:09:00.002-05:00

Wow, it was slightly over 10 years ago but it seems like a lifetime...

November 1999

Here's what it all boils down to: Money.

From the beginning, I had my eye on post-production. There are really two ways to go about it and they are as follows:

1. Shoot the film and get it transferred to video in as high-quality as you can get, with scene-by-scene color-corrections and all. Then, edit the entire movie on video and come up with a finished product on video(ala Robert Rodriguez). Shop that around, enter what festivals you can, see if any distributors are interested. If they go for it, the cost of doing the re-edit and all will be up to them. This is the over-all cheaper way of doing things, and the way I was looking at.

OR:

2. Shoot the film and get it best-light transferred to video with time-code. Edit on video with an AVID machine, then get the negative cut according to your EDL(Edit Decision List) that the AVID gives you. Then prints are made from your edited negative. These prints can be submitted to festivals and what have you. This is more expensive.

As it is, I raised all the money for the production on my own, but I over-taxed myself. Personal things have come up to keep me from raising other money(bought a house is the main one), so I'm stuck. I don't have enough money for either option right now.

So, the option I'm currently looking at is getting about 10 reels transferred at one-light(it doesn't look that great) and editing it into a trailer that I can show to some backers to get them to put up money. Getting the reels transferred is going to cost in the neighborhood of $1600.

Yes, film-making is expensive.

Equipment

2009-12-03T21:24:00.002-05:00

Wow, for those who really MUST know everything that was used on a film.

THE EQUIPMENT

The Camera:
We shot on an Eclair NPR. It's a pretty compact camera, pretty quiet if you're not shooting in a small room with a shotgun microphone(which we did frequently).

The Film:

All of it was shot on Kodak Vision 500, a very high-speed film. Too bad the actual company who sells it is not so speedy processing account applications. The film cost $135 per 400foot roll, and that gets you about 11.5 minutes at 24 frames per second, which is regular speed for film.

The Sound:

We had an Audio Technica 835b shotgun microphone. Very sensitive. Too sensitive sometimes. We used a Mackie 1402VLZ Pro Mixer. I recommend it highly. We recorded all the sound onto a full-sized Panasonic DAT machine. We had a portable DAT, but didn't use it, as it didn't show levels very well.

The Lights: (Or lackof)

We had a 1000watt Lowel DP light that went from flood to spot. Probably our most-used light. We had a 1000watt Lowel Soft Box that worked well. We had some Chinese Lanterns that we lit with bulbs ranging from 100 to 250watt. Other than that, all we had were some construction lights and creativity.

September 8th, 1999

2009-12-01T03:35:00.008-05:00

This is surreal. This is the actual place where I started originally uploading this log WAAAAY back when.

September 8th

Started putting some of these journal entries up on the web. I figure filmmakers should get a kick out of them. I start it off with a list of the “Players” and “The Equipment” which is below:

Kevin Kangas, Director: His qualifications include extensive studies of the films of Michael Bay, as well as his ability to pronounce the title La Jetee. Sometimes, he can even tell you whether it was Einstein or Eisenstein who came up with the theory of relativity.

Rick Ganz, Lead Actor: Just because everyone wants him doesn't mean his ego is huge. His modesty is legendary, and mostly because we've only heard of it and never seen it. If you see him, make sure you ask him to get you an autograph from his cousin Ricky Martin.

David Gil, Director of Photography: He's the guy that shot that commercial with the one guy that's talking to the other guy when that thing happens. Yeah, you know the one. Just don't be his Assistant Cameraman if you like to sit down, because he gets miffed. And speaking of...

David Mun, Assistant Cameraman: Hey, you gotta give the handicapped a chance sometimes. And I hear we'll get a special tax break too.

Rick Shipley, Title Pending Outcome of Litigation: Local filmmaker whose titles include but are not limited to: "I Wish My Mom Was A Whore", "Die, Slut, Die, But Do The Laundry First", and "If Sheep, Horses Too".

Bubby Lewis, Lead Actor: Likes earrings a bit too much, if you know what I mean and I think you do. Sings and dances on set for no discernible reason. I think he thinks he's good.

And a lot of other good for nothings!

In case you didn't get it, almost all of the above is a lie. Read on and you'll see what the cast and crew was really like. Then, buy the book and see what kind of juicy stuff I could make up about them.

August 25th, 1999

2009-11-26T00:59:00.003-05:00

I am ashamed to admit I have no pics for this entry.
So here's another would-be actress and the picture she sent.

August 25th

I managed to get my employee to come in and work my shift so I could get some sleep. Gil and Mun wanted to go out and have some drinks, since it was their last night, so I needed the rest.

We went to the Cancun Cantina, a bar that's half-country/half-good-music. Gil, Mun, Rick and my girlfriend got pretty trashed, doing nasty Tequila shots. I got a good buzz. We left when they closed, so Gil and Mun would get no rest before their plane left at 7:40am.

Not that I would either. I had to go unload the van and return it to my parents' house, because I was getting a bit sick of it. I wanted my compact car back.

I unloaded the van and went to pick the guys up. Mun was puking, Gil was sleeping. I rushed them to pack and took them to the airport.

I dropped them off at the terminal and helped them take their bags to the luggage check in. Mun looked like he was going to puke some more. We didn't exchange too many words, but I've got their numbers and emails.

We're going to hook up at some point. I'll probably be flying out to Fotokem in L.A. to supervise the color-correction on the video transfer, and L.A. and Arizona are only about four hours apart.

I gave them some scripts to take a look at. If I can show Hunting Humans to people and say, "This is what I did with almost no money", I'm hoping I can get some backers to shoot a 35mm feature that can actually make it in the theaters.
That's the plan anyway.

August 24th, 1999

2009-11-23T07:18:00.003-05:00

Special effects by Half-Ass, Inc.
------------

Okay, full disclosure here. I never mentioned this when I posted it before, but there was some awkwardness when shooting Ganz's naked scene. You see, the night before this shot we had found out that our Director of Photography was gay.

And then Rick remembers he has to drop trow and get his ass shot by said homosexual D.P.

Now he's self-conscious. What if Gil's looking at his ass with lust? Oh, the horror.

So when we get to the naked scene Ganz comes out of the bathroom in a towel. We set up for the shot and Ganz drops the towel--and he's got an athletic cup duct-taped over his junk.

It's the funniest thing I've ever seen. I try not to laugh too much.

Weird thing is that Gil acts as strange as Ganz does. Acts like he doesn't want to shoot it. So I take the camera and shoot it myself, and for once he doesn't seem to care if I touch the camera.

Strange night. But I remember it all fondly now. The warped looking-glass of time...

August 24th

Last day of shooting. Feels pretty surreal, like it's not really the last day.

The first bit of shooting called for some shots in downtown Baltimore. Rick arrived and he followed me into Baltimore. Gil hung out the window and got some landmarks. Then I pulled over and Gil and I got into Rick's car to get the other shots. I let Mun drive my parents' van.

It went easy at first. Traffic wasn't too bad, but it was getting worse. We got into a lane and Rick asked, "Is this a turn lane?" because we wanted to go left. It wasn't a turn lane, but we did anyway. A minute or so down the road and Rick asked, "Where's Mun?"

My parents' van was nowhere to be seen behind us. "He was right there," Rick insisted. They dropped me off at the street and said they were going to circle back around. I started jogging down the road toward where I see a police car's lights flashing.

Sure enough, a cop has pulled Mun over. I tried to talk to the cop, but he didn't seem to care.

Mun didn't even have his license on him, so the cop was trying to check it. We waited, and after about 15 minutes--and the cop smoking two cigarettes in his car--he came back to the window and said that Arizona wasn't cooperating with info. He suggested I drive out of Baltimore.
We lucked out there. Mun would have been screwed if he got a ticket here.

We high-tailed it back to my girlfriend's parents' house, where the rest of the shooting would take place. Unfortunately, they were home.

We displaced them to the downstairs and began shooting. Things weren't going well. The special effects where Rick cuts himself with a knife weren't working for squat, Gil was getting into one of his "let's-get-it-over-with" moods, and my girlfriend was coming upstairs to ask how much longer because her mom had to come up and go to bed.

We rushed through some scenes. I improvised some of the scenes--none to the better, I might add--but we finished all but the last scene we had to shoot. It's the one where Rick stands naked in the middle of the living room.

Surprisingly, we had no problem. It seemed that once Rick got naked, he kind of enjoyed it. Of course, he had an athletic cup taped over his crotch(a really funny sight), but you couldn't see it from our angle.

And just like that, we had the Martini(the final shot of a production). We broke down all the equipment and went through it so no one had anyone else's stuff. We even had almost an entire reel of film left.

I had Mun wrap 100 foot onto a spool so I could shoot some stuff with my Bolex.
I took the boys to the motel and went to pick up comics for my store. No sleep for me. I feel like I should be used to it.

Rick, when hearing he has to present his ass to a gay guy

August 22-23rd, 1999

2009-11-20T00:47:00.003-05:00

August 22nd

Oh my God, what a wonder two days off can make. I feel refreshed. Mun went to New York for a couple of days, and Gil went to D.C. to visit his cousin.

Sunday morning rolls along and we headed to Owings Mills to make up some shots we couldn't get at the office before. I picked Mun and Gil up at 7:00am and they were pretty tired. Ganz was a half hour late, but once we started shooting, everything rolled pretty smoothly. Gil was pretty tired, so he let Mun shoot most of the shots.

I dropped them off and went to my house to get an hour's worth of sleep before the wrap party. My girlfriend bought enough food for an army.

Only about half the crew showed up. Any other time you mention free beer, you get too many people. I got drunk, and that's all that mattered anyway, isn't it?

August 23rd

Behind the Scenes shot to the only deleted scene

Hard to believe it's the next to the last day of shooting.

I mean, we're almost done shooting a feature film on a shoe-string budget. How many people actually accomplish what we've done? There’s literally thousands of people on the web all talking about doing it, but I bet you only one in a thousand does.

Anyway, we had a flashback scene where Ganz comes out of the bathroom pulling on a ski-mask and shoots a guy in the back of the head. I was going to have it very John Woo-ish, with Rick catching the bullet shell in slow-mo as it pops out of the gun.

It was what I called a “trailer” shot, something that would make it into the trailer I’d show everybody. Really, it wasn’t even in the movie.

The evening started badly enough. Rick couldn't find a ski-mask. He ended up buying a bandana to wrap around his face, so I guess now I'll be accused of stereotyping him. Oh sure, the Latino had to wear a bandana, did he?

We get to the racquetball court and find that someone has signed the court out for the time we wanted to shoot there. Rick has played with him before, so when he showed up, we asked him if he'd like to be in the movie. He's not too enthusiastic, but since all he has to do is play racquetball, he said okay.

The guy who was supposed to die doesn't show up. He was my hair-cutter, who just about begged me for a part. I substituted one of the guys who was supposed to be a racquetball player, but we didn't need him since two real players showed up.

We set up. I pumped up the sprayer so when Rick fired the gun, I could squirt blood all over the glass. After a couple of rehearsals, we went. The bullet shot was loud as crap, and Rick didn't catch the shell.

The blood went everywhere. It went onto the glass wall, but it also went all over the floor, the camera, the rail and my pants. And all of a sudden, a woman's voice said "What's going on here?"

I was in the process of coming out of the bathroom with some paper towels when I heard her, so I was completely unprepared. Rick and I have played racquetball there a lot, and I have never seen a manager in the building. It's like 11:00pm at night. For once, I didn't have a lie on the tip of my tongue.

Rick knew her. He tried to smooth-talk her. It seemed to work, but she said she wanted the place clean, as she just spent $4100 getting the place painted. I'd say she got ripped off.
She left and Rick started panicking. She knows him, she'll have us arrested, and so on. I calmed him long enough to get a final shot from inside the racquetball court, but we started cleaning up and I didn't get any slow-mo of the bullet being caught.

We did get her whole speech on video though. Way to go, Mun.

I dropped the guys at the motel and Rick and I went back to clean the place. We must have done an okay job, because Rick called her the next day and she said that all was fine.

August 19th

2009-11-17T06:21:00.003-05:00

Setting up Duke's death scene
---------------------

Ha! We actually watched Mickey Blue Eyes! Man, that's the funniest thing in this blog...

August 19th

Good day. Lots of sleep. I woke up and made a phone call to Duke, who hadn't responded to my emails about showing up tonight for his death scene.

We couldn't shoot until Rick showed up, so I went and picked up Gil and Mun. We also stopped by FedEx, who had left a note on my door saying they had a package.

It was the two reels we'd sent off to RGB Labs. I was a little nervous before we sat down to view them. What would they look like? Would there be scratches through the negatives? Maybe even nothing on them?

We watched the video, commenting throughout. We all agreed that it looked pretty good, but the transfer sucked. There's an entire scene that you can't even see what's going on. They didn't monitor the transfer, they just set best light for wherever the reel started, and then probably left. Other than that, what we shot looked pretty good.

We showed it to Ganz. I think it gave him a little boost. It kind of picked us all up a little bit. Nothing like results to get you motivated again. I'm Jonesing to develop the rest.

We went out and tried to get the final scene of the movie, where Aric drives off in a new stolen car, off to a new city with new prey. I put Gil and Mun on an overpass and said to shoot our car while we drove under it and pull up to a wide shot of the highway.

We drove under, then back around and they had never seen us. They didn't shoot any film.
Daylight was fading quickly. I told Rick to drive around and come up the ramp and we'd shoot him driving there, with the sunset behind him. We shot it, but I don't know how well it turned out. If we have film left in the end, we'll shoot it again.

I made a quick call to Duke. His wife informed me that he had karate class that night and wouldn't be home until around 9:30pm. That means he wouldn't be on location until 10:00pm at the earliest.

The true face of Aric Blue

I cursed Duke's mom for ever having him, and we went over to the house to set up lights and get ready. We shot some pickup shots and then some close-ups on Ganz, then waited for Duke to show up.

An asshole neighbor came out and asked us who gave us permission to shoot there. I lied about a class project again and he asked whether we'd shot behind the houses the week before. I said yes. He said, "Yeah, we saw you aiming your camera in our windows". Dream on, pal, your wife's a cow. I don't say that, though. I just nicely tell him we were shooting in the house on the end and that I used to live there.

He doesn't relent. Get the lights and cord off his lawn, he wants nothing to do with it. Have we gotten permission from the Association(the community one, I presume) to film there?

We moved the lights. The neighbor continued to bemoan his woes to Mun, but we were pretty much ignoring him now. Duke showed up a little late, but we got the scene done and I think it went pretty well. Even managed to record sound this time.

We packed up fast and rolled back to the movie theater. We got there about midnight and shot the scenes we'd missed, as well as some more coverage. Ganz fled for home and the rest of us stayed and watched Mickey Blue-Eyes, which was actually pretty funny.

We've got Friday and Saturday off(thank God!) and then we shoot early Sunday, then have the wrap party in the afternoon. Technically we're not done, but it's close enough, and it'll be the last weekend day we have available before Gil and Mun fly back to Arizona.

"Hey, you got something on the back of your head..."

August 18th, 1999

2009-11-16T07:41:00.002-05:00

Rick Ganz taking a sleep break on the floor of the theater
--------------

August 18th

I woke up after four hours and was still dead tired.

I got up anyway. Had to make some calls. RGB Labs called and said they'd be sending back the two reels they'd developed and transferred to video(oh yeah, forgot to tell you that we sent them), but they needed a credit card number and not the check I'd sent.

I shuffled some scenes around so we could shoot later at the theater.

I got Gil and Mun, and Ganz showed up before that. We shot some cool scenes, most of them with one take. Got some coverage anyway. You always get some coverage.

Doing good on the reels. We still have about six reels left and not a ton left to film. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

We got to the movies and set up early. The first shots went easy. Then we got to the pivotal point in the story where Aric finds one of his would-be victims already dead, with a note on him that says "I've got your pattern".

We shot the beginning, where Aric rounds the corner, punches in the code and finds Doug(played by James Fellows, a projectionist who shops at my store) already butchered.

James Fellows, MURDERED!

We shot the cutaways of Aric's POV moving slowly down the blood trail on the door to the body and got all that done. I told James he could go change out of the bloody shirt and put on another one for a different scene.

We were changing mags when I see Rick laying on the floor. No gloves on his hands. I asked him whether he was wearing gloves during the scene. He said, "Oh shit". I took that as a no.

We had to reshoot some cutaways of his hands with the gloves on. I hope the scene still works, since it's one of the biggest moments in the film. It's where the story spins off in a new direction.

We went outside and got some other shots, and Mun came up to me and asked whether he could strike the set, meaning pack it up. I was in the middle of one shot and I thought it was the last one, but I didn't have my script in front of me. Mental Note: Don't ever strike a set until you're sure you're done.

Ganz took off and I went to check over my script. We missed the entire beginning of the script where Aric gets to the theater and lets himself in. Now we're going to have to come back for it.

Dead...and loving it

August 17th

2009-11-13T20:34:00.003-05:00

Jeff Volpe dies great(and is happy about it).
------------

This is a case where I REMEMBER how bad the shooting day was, but in retrospect it seems like we had a lot of fun. Very strange trick of memory.

August 17th

No shooting at all in the day. Scheduled setup was at 12:30am at the movie theater where a buddy of mine works. That was when the last movie lets out, so we would setup in the theater and hopefully get all the shots done.

Setup took longer than I'd planned, once again. Mental note: Need a bigger crew.

The scene is where Aric goes to a movie theater in the middle of the day and finds a showing that's not very full. He proceeds to kill three of the four people in the theater, and is about to kill the lone girl when her boyfriend walks in. Aric then kills both of them.

The girl ended up a no-show, so I did some fast re-writing in my head. We didn't have much time either, so I moved the body count down to four instead of five.

The new way I planned it was for Aric to kill the three people who are in the theater, and then while he's about to leave, he hears the door open. He sits down quickly as another movie-goer enters. With three lone guys watching the movie, the theater appears to be a porn establishment. I may add a V.O. later, so the audience will identify better.

We shot a wide master of Aric walking in, looking around, then moving behind the first victim, played by Jeff, the guy who runs my store on Sunday. We cut, got Jeff out of the scene and continued the master as Aric gets up and sits behind victim number two, Brad, another employee of mine.

We moved Brad out of the scene and had Aric get up and come across near camera where he sits behind his third victim, played by Assistant Cameraman David Mun. We cut and moved Mun out and then finished the master as the last movie-goer enters, played by Brian Wade, a customer of mine.

We had a slight delay as we blew a fuse and tried to locate which fusebox was the correct one(there's about 6 fuseboxes scattered through-out the theater, running from the projection room to behind the concession stand).

We moved in for a close-up on Jeff, the first victim. This was going to be the only one I used any kind of special effects on, figuring that once the audience sees it the first time, they'll draw their own conclusions. We shoot a medium as Rick lunges forward and runs the knife across Jeff's throat. Then we moved in for a close-up where I'd already drawn a bloody wound on Jeff and taped a tube to the side of his neck.

The plan was for Rick to start with his arm in front of the room and cut in from the medium to the close-up, and as his arm leaves frame, you'll see the wound, and I'll spray blood rhythmically from the tube, so it will spout out.

We rolled camera, and no blood spurted at all. Rick's arm had been blocking it, so it just leaked down Jeff's shirt. We couldn't very well try it again, as Jeff's shirt was soaked red now. The blood on the auditorium floor looked cool leaking down the incline, so Gil suggested we get a shot of that from a low angle, and rig the tube again so blood pumped down toward the camera from Jeff's neck as he lay on the ground.

Credit to Jeff for laying down on that nasty floor, because it wasn't clean. He was having a good time and that makes all the difference when you're working on a low-budget movie. The difference between the miserable night before in the woods and the night at the movies was the control of the location. Things went wrong in both locations, but at the movies everyone was having fun and it was easy to come up with other solutions.

We finished with Jeff and moved on to Brad. Brad's not a professional actor, so I had some reservations about how realistic he'd look when Rick grabbed him from behind. I told him the shot we were going to do and said that we'd stop rolling when Rick lunges forward. "Is he going to grab me this time?" Brad asked. "No," I replied, "we'll stop right before that."

While Gil and Mun were taking some last minute readings, I told Rick to go ahead and grab Brad. The surprise would be real. It worked too.

We cut from that to a shot as Brad's arms drop into the aisle(Aric is pushing each person he kills onto the floor so they can't be seen). Brad flops partyway into the aisle and all you see are his arms being pulled into the row.

We got done that shot fast and moved to the Mun shot, which went off without a hitch. We play with the idea of Mun’s character trying to stop the knife and getting his finger cut off(since Mun is missing a finger already), but decide that it’s too much trouble to mess with.

The original plan was for Brian, the last victim, to come in and sit a couple rows behind Rick. Then, Rick would get up and sit behind him. Being a large theater and the only two people in it, this would perturb Brian's character, so he would turn to look at Aric. Aric tries to act like he's watching the screen, but when that doesn't work, he attacks. I wanted Rick to stab Brian in the chest, but we didn't have any special effects worked out for it at all.

I changed the choreography so Rick stabs with his big knife, but Brian catches his wrist. Then Rick reaches behind him and pulls out a small knife(a special effects knife with a retractable blade). Rick jabs it into his chest a couple of times. The first two practices didn't work, as the small knife kept falling out as Rick stood up. The first real time, after the stab, the blade came entirely out of the handle of the fake knife.

I managed to fix that, but on the second take, Rick snapped the blade in two. Hopefully we got what we needed. Mental Note: Bill Rick for the fake knife, that careless bastard. That thing cost me $3.99

We finished up that scene at about 6:00am, and didn't finish any of the other theater scenes. I'm going to have to do some shuffling to fit those in tomorrow night.

I dropped the guys off and had to go straight to pick up comics and sort them at my store. Only problem was that the van I was using was overheating. I dropped by an automotive place and had them take a look. The van needed a new radiator.

By the time I got that replaced and sorted the comics, it was almost noon. I had about four hours to sleep before we were shooting again. Ain't this the life?

From left to right: Dave Gil, Dave Mun, Jeff Volpe, Rick Ganz, and Brian Wade

August 16th, 1999

2009-11-12T03:07:00.003-05:00

Setting up in the woods. So...so...stupid.
--------------

One of the worst nights. Hands down. Hot, sweaty, bug bitten night.

August 16th

I got up early and started to go down my written list of things to do. First on the list was to call Kodak and get five more rolls of film. I used my girlfriend's credit card. That was all we were going to have to finish up, so I resolved to be a little more rigid on what we shot.

I had to get a replacement bulb for the Lowel DP light that blew in the rain. I knew we were going to need all the light we could get for the shoot in the woods that took place that night. I also needed more fake blood, as the stuff I've made up just isn't cutting it.

I also found out that Lisa, the girl we needed for the office scene on Saturday, couldn't make it on Saturday. I scrambled and told Rick to try to get the office for Sunday instead. Now I've got to try to fit Gil and Mun's mini-vacation in before that, and that also means we'll be shooting the morning of our wrap-party.

I picked Gil and Mun up, and we headed to a lighting shop. We picked up two bulbs for the light and some more gels. Gil is acting a little weird again. I don't know what throws him into these moods, but he seems to snap out of them pretty quick. Hopefully, he'll be out of it by tonight.

Fast forward a couple of hours and we were on our way to the woods across the street from my parents' house. We got there a little later than I would have liked--darkness had already fallen--but we found a little clearing where we could shoot the final fight between Aric and Dark, the serial killer who has been stalking him.

We started setting up lights. We ran all the extension cord we had across the street from my parents' house, but it wasn't enough. We couldn't hook up more than one light per cord or we'd blow a fuse at the house.

A cool neighbor let us plug into their house, which helped, but we were really running behind. It was 10:30 and we hadn't shot a frame. I had us scheduled to start shooting at 9:30.

Then, the asshole neighbor had to show up. "What's going on?" he demanded to know. "Mr. Lally?" I asked.

He said yeah, but still didn't seem to recognize me. "Kevin Kangas," I told him, very friendly. "I lived across the street from you."

He nodded, but didn't seem to care. "What's going on?" he asks.

I tell him we're shooting a movie in the woods. He wants to know how long it's going to go on. I lie and say about three hours. "So you're going to be shooting until midnight?" Nice math, Einstein.

"About one," I correct him, even though I have us shooting until 3:00am on the schedule, and most of the time we ran over.

"You have permission?" he prompted me. "No," I said, still nice. "I just thought that since I grew up in this neighborhood, I wouldn't have any problems." He told me he can't let me shoot a movie in the woods until 1:00am. "Come on," he said, "you're going to be shooting a movie in the woods until 1:00am?"

I told him he probably wouldn't even hear us, because we're in the woods and we won't be loud--though I guess I forgot to mention that we needed to fire some blanks. "Frankly," he said, "if I hear you, I'm calling the police."

He went back in. I made a mental note to throw a brick through his window later.

We moved in to shoot the fight scenes, but we didn't have enough power to record any of the dialogue, so once again, ADR is the word of the day. The similarities to Robert Rodriguez astound me.

The night stretched on. It was hot and there were a lot of bugs, mosquitoes included. I was real unhappy at the start, because I'm not sure anyone besides me knows exactly what we need to shoot. Gil is shooting some stuff and excluding others, and I think it's because the lighting is very tough to work with.

The hours went by and we finally came to the end. We were saving the gunshots for the end, but we had a shot of Bubby(Dark) getting shot in the head. I hooked a hose to his head and attached it to a pesticide sprayer filled with fake blood. When I squeezed the lever, blood shot out.

We got a couple of scenes shot and I was hunting for something on the ground when I accidentally squeezed the trigger when the pump was not attached to the hose. A shout, then people were laughing, and I looked up and Bubby's face is covered with fake blood. I'd sprayed it all over his face. He was laughing, so it was cool. We wished we'd had it on video.

We finished at 4:30am, firing off the blanks and bolting. Of course, Rick forget to wear his gloves the first time, so we had to shoot a second take.

I had brought the van around to the baseball field side of the woods, and had to navigate a tiny path that was bordered by a ditch on one side and a fence on the other, THEN drive on a hill that sloped about 40 degrees. I prayed that the van wouldn't flip.

It didn't. I went home, sweaty and smelly and miserably tired. If you think you're going to shoot an indy movie--and you don't absolutely love movies and the process--save yourself a lot of trouble and go do something else.

Oh, and don’t schedule any shoots in the woods in the middle of a summer night. That’s an important rule to remember.

August 15th, 1999

2009-11-10T21:00:00.003-05:00

The motley crue outside the movie theater.
Shooting without permission, of course.
----------------

This was a busy day. I remember it. Good news is that it turned out that we weren't missing a reel, we had just misnumbered one.

I remember driving through Baltimore too slow for traffic behind us, and the light we had gaffer-taped to the car ceiling kept falling down into Rick's face as we shot. (you can see one take in the bloopers on the HH disc)

But I don't think it was one of the tougher days.

August 15th

Houston, we have a problem.

We can't seem to find reel 17 of the film we shot. It's just missing. Which should be a notice to you: Log all your footage. We've been doing it most of the time, but we were real short-handed for a few days, so we stopped briefly in a point where we had no sync-sound.

The day started late and I'd gotten a lot of sleep, so it was the first day that I felt a little better. My head was clearing and I didn't feel as sick.

We went up toward the movie theater where Aric kills five people while they're watching a movie. We shot the outside scenes as he walks toward the theater with not much problem, and then the scene where he exits the theater with a bloody shirt and knife.

We took a break while we waited for darkness to fall and I began to look over the schedule and script. I tried to keep track of how many scenes we'd missed and where we could shoot them. Gil wanted to go visit his relative in D.C. while Mun wanted to go visit his sister in New York. They both wanted to do it Saturday, but that's the only day we can get the office again to shoot the missed scenes, so if we end in time, they can split.

Our other problem comes by the fact that we have about six rolls of film left. Each roll is 400 feet and shoots about 11.5 minutes of film at 24 frames per second.

We've got a lot of shots ahead of us, and 69 minutes of film ain't gonna cut it.

We headed into Baltimore to shoot some city scenes as Aric looks for more prey. We got some scenes from inside Ganz's car, then we tied up traffic as we shot from my car toward Ganz.

The light we rigged in Ganz's car made his face light up, so a lot of people were looking over at him. I decided if anybody asked that we'd say we were second unit for The Replacements, which is the Keanu Reeves/Gene Hackman movie that was shooting in town. They were actually shooting as we drove by PSI-Net Stadium to shoot our scenes.

We moved back into Glen Burnie to shoot the scene where Aric leaves the movie theater and sees a stranger that he believes might be another serial killer. I played the guy he sees.

We pulled our cars up to the light, essentially blocking the road in that direction. We started to shoot, and it wasn't very long before an unmarked car comes driving up, turning on his blue lights.

He rolled down his window and asked what we were doing. In the manner I've perfected I said, "I'm shooting something for class."

"You can't shoot here," he told me, looking at our setup. "You'll cause an accident."

"Oh, no," I assured him. "Everyone is driving by here slow."

The cop looked like he didn't believe me, but he didn't want any part of it. It was about one in the morning. "All righty," he said and sped off as fast as he could.

Gil and Mun couldn't believe it. They were cracking up laughing. They said if we’d been in Arizona, we’d have been jacked-up against a wall by that time.

We shot some more footage. A close-up on me from Aric's disturbed point of view. Close-ups on Rick. Shot of me from Rick's car as I pulled up.

Another cop pulled up, this time fully marked. A black officer stepped out as I walked up to him. "What's going on?" he asked.

"I'm shooting something for class," I replied, which you'll memorize if you're smart and shoot a lot of guerilla stuff. Them's magic words.

"Oh yeah. What school?"

I've always been a good liar. "Anne Arundel Community College."

The cop seemed familiar with the school. "What class is it for?"

"Film Production," I slipped out, then smoothed it over. "Actually, Video Production, but we're gonna shoot on film and telecine to video for editing." I figured that throwing in the big words might help.

"What teacher is that?" he asked. "Mr. Sparks?"

My mind reached for a name and came up with one. "No, Mr. Hamburger." Which I then realize happens to be the name of the realtor I used for my store.

The cop frowned. "Hmm, don't know him." He asked me some more questions and seemed genuinely interested. I told him about the story and he said it sounded like it would make a good movie.

He asked if we were going to use any guns and my warning lights went on. Sure, I told him, but we'd already shot those scenes. My warning lights went off when he volunteered that he had a prop gun that shot blanks if I needed one.

He said a Good Luck and Be Careful before he left.

We finished up our shots and I made a long list of things to do before we shot the climactic fight tomorrow, not the least of which was, try to find some money for more film.

August 14th, 1999

2009-11-09T03:01:00.003-05:00

Rick's favorite scenes to shoot
----------------

August 14th

Hey, what's another hot humid day to a guy who's coughing up phlegm and has to direct a film even though his head is so stuffed up that he can't think? I overslept, but it was no biggie. Our day was pretty small. We'd actually gotten one of the scenes out of the way on an earlier day when we'd had the time.

We got a shot of Rick waking up from a nightmare. Easy stuff. We've got another shot of him waking up on a different day and getting a phone call, but we have to put that off, as the thunder and lightning is raging outside. I'm hoping it will blow over fast, as I've got Joe Ripple coming over at 6:00pm to shoot the other scene with him. I called him anyway and told him not to come unless I called him again.

I fixed some dinner(Caribbean jerk chicken) while we were all waiting to see whether the storm was going to blow over. It did.

I called Joe when the sun began to reappear, and we quickly secured a car. We didn't have a person to be the dead body in Aric's car, so I cast my girlfriend. She just had to play dead, but every time her eyes closed, they twitched. I hope no one notices. We shot a cover shot anyway, just in case.

It took some time, and the sun went down fast, but we got it done. I think it came out pretty well.

Joe went home and we shot the other scene inside the house, where Aric thrashes himself off the bed in his sleep, then answers the phone and has a conversation with Dark.

We finished up around 8:30pm. Not too bad. The guys(Rick, Dave and Dave) went into D.C. to party, but I just wanted to sleep. It was the third night in a row that I felt my eyes trying to shut while I was driving to the store to drop off the film in the refrigerator.

Late call tomorrow with not much sync sound. But come Monday, we have three days of grueling stuff. I hope I feel better.

Don't make him angry. You wouldn't like him when he's angry.

August 13th, 1999

2009-11-05T15:25:00.002-05:00

Ah, lasers!

Another hot, humid day. I woke up sick as a dog, coughing up green phlegm and wheezing. Not fun.

We needed to shoot on a bike-trail overpass that crosses a major highway, and I'd had one in mind when I wrote it. The only problem was that there were no main roads anywhere near the actual entrance to the trail.

We stopped on the highway and I climbed the fence, scaled the tree-covered hill, and looked for a way to get to the overpass. Didn’t see an easy way.

I found the closest place we could get to, since we needed sync-sound with this take and don't have a generator. We needed to use the inverter that you plug into your cigarette lighter to get AC power. I had to jump a curb on private property and drive up a hill, but I did. We were on the property of a major mall(Marley Station) and they routinely had security trucks patrolling. I wondered how long it would be before someone came up to question us.

We got a couple of nice shots up on the bridge, but not before Ganz could sneak in a complaint about how hot it was. It must be hotter when you're watching other people carry equipment, because he's always whining while the rest of us are working.

Weird.

Sure enough, a security guard showed up with the stock question: "What's going on?" I lied to him and told him we were filming a little thing for class. He asked whether we had permission from the mall. I gave him my best innocent expression and said, "This isn't BG&E's property? I called them to ask for permission and they said it was fine as long as there were no crews working on the property".

He bought it. He said no, it was the mall's property and how long did I think it would take? I was gonna say an hour or two, but said, "An hour--" and he gave me a look, so I added "Tops." He nodded okay and took off. If ever there's a job for liars, pencil me in as C.E.O.

There was a shot I wanted of the people on the overpass talking while we get a car's-eye-POV driving under, but we only took one shot at it because it wasn't an easy set-up without walkie-talkies. We honked as we approached, but in major traffic, they didn't hear us until the end.

We returned to the house to shoot the big showdown before the final fight. It went terrible.

The room was too small. I knew that going in, but it really sunk home when you've got three actors trying to interact in ways they're supposed to, but they have to move to get around each other.

Then, every time we try to do sync-sound, we pick up the camera noise. It's very quiet, but when you get in a small room with a shotgun mic, you hear it pretty good. It sounds like a movie projector that's been muffled.

So I try to record everyone's lines, but there's no way this scene is going to come together without some major ADR. Just what I need, more studio time.

The scene runs long, very long. I'm trying to get as much coverage as I can, but rain hits and one of our lights(our brightest) gets blown out. We've got no replacement bulb. Great. It also kind of ruins our continuity for the shot outside that we were going to get, so now that gets pushed back to later.

We ended after shooting for roughly 14 hours. We had a break in the middle, but it's not like we relaxed too much.(I recorded some ambient sound and tried to redo the shooting schedule) We shot four rolls of film, as opposed to our average of about two per day. We're down to eight or nine rolls. It's going to be close.

Tomorrow we shoot late, so I'm going to get some sleep. I need it bad.

August 12th, 1999

2009-11-04T03:19:00.002-05:00

Bubby, Dave Gil, and Rick Ganz mugging for the camera
---------------

I remember that Trent showed up--we had never auditioned him. He came on a recommendation from Bubby. No one I had auditioned for that part had been very good, so I was even thinking about trying to do it myself.

Not really what you want to attempt on your first film.

Trent shows up with a box of cookies. We all sat around shooting the shit while we set up. It was fun. A decent day other than the blistering heat.

Aug 12

Today's stuff went pretty smoothly, but we shot over two rolls of film in one day, which is more than we can afford. We'll have to tone down a bit, so we have a lot of footage left for the finale fight between Aric and Dark.

We met Trent, the actor who was to play Frank, the scummy detective. He's a funny, talented guy, but don't ask him to fart. He can fart and burp on command.

We shot most of his scenes without much problem. Rick forgot to wear gloves in one scene and I've got a feeling we won't get a chance to re-shoot or cover it by showing him wiping off the keyboard where he was. The other guys keep saying "Suspension of Disbelief", but they're also saying "Fix It In Post", which is not what I want to hear.

The weather was hot. Very humid. As soon as you walked out the door, you dripped sweat. I'm hoping it will clear out before we shoot the final fight, as that's outside in the woods.

If the humidity is like this, plus mosquitoes, can you say Suck-Shoot?

I'm going to bed.

Trent played a scummy Detective

August 11th, 1999

2009-11-01T23:52:00.002-05:00

August 11th

Shooting was scheduled for 6:00pm. I picked up the camera guys and dropped them off at the laundry, so they could wash some of their clothes. Exciting stuff, this filmmaking.

We were shooting a flashback scene where Aric poisons the girl in the apartment above him by injecting her eggs with massive amounts of codeine. We had a really attractive girl named Allison to play the girl, and the scenes went down fast. We ended up two hours ahead of schedule.

We moved to a parking garage to shoot a scene we missed. Parking garages are excellent when you don't have a lot of light, as they're pretty well-lit.

I moved some of the voice-overs(V.O) that Aric was saying in the car to in the garage, which made the shooting much easier. We've already driven around looking for well-lit streets, and it's not an easy thing to find around here.

We finished that and picked up one other scene we missed, and we were still ahead of schedule.

What to do, what to do...

We went to a strip club. No, we had no scenes to shoot there, but all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. We played some pool, watched some naked chicks, and had the Arizona crew buy us beers since they were sure they could beat us in pool.

Better luck next time, guys. And Mun, get that nose washed off, if you know what I mean(and I think you do).

Call time is 1:00pm tomorrow. The shoot will probably be harder.

3:55 a.m

I was getting sick. My throat is getting scratchy and my chest is starting to get congested.

I felt it a little bit earlier, but did it stop us from going to Fantasies Strip Club after last night's shoot? No. Being sick is not a good way to be when you're directing. I'll be lucky to have any voice tomorrow, which is for the big showdown between Aric, Dark and Frank.

We'd be shooting around 2:00pm, so I was going to try to get some sleep, but I'm typing this at 3:55am, so it won't be as much as I like. I'm ready to drop now.

August 10th, 1999

2009-10-28T02:07:00.003-04:00

Joe Ripple faces off with Aric Ganz,
revealing that what I really wanna do is shoot a Western
--------------

It's funny that this was the first shoot with Joe Ripple, who would later go on and surprise all of us by directing horror movies on his own.

I'm sorry to say that back then we were shooting on film, because we wouldn't do any "rolling rehearsals", and Joe did some funny improv on one that I wish I had video of...

And looking back at this to see that I watched The Sixth Sense in the middle of this film...it's hard to place how far back this was until you see details like that.

August 10th

The schedule got changed again. Ganz was getting tired, as he's working his regular job and doing these late night shoots, so I agree to move some shots to later so we can end the night earlier.

The sun was setting, so we got a few shots and then moved inside. I was worried about the actor playing our detective, Joe Ripple, since I hadn't heard back from him, but he showed up early, dressed perfect. He came on, knew his lines, and made us all crack up on set. One of our better choices for actors, and someone I'll definitely use again on another shoot.

We rolled through that scene and then knocked out three scenes in a half an hour. They were all set in the bedroom as Aric Blue goes to sleep. All we had to do was change him and lie him in a different position. Came out like a charm.

Ahead of schedule, we shot a scene that was planned weeks later. A flashback scene. It went nicely. We were thinking about sending out two reels to RGB labs to see what the stuff looked like and to make sure there was no scratching on the negatives or anything. It was too late to do much if there was, but it would be nice to see.

We knock off early and go see Sixth Sense, starring Bruce Willis. Good movie. Worth seeing. (and in hindsight, I had no idea how big it would go on to be)

Tomorrow is a cake day. We're shooting one scene in the evening that's a flashback. I'm beginning to brace for the coming weekend, as that's when I have scheduled the bulk of the shoots.

August 9th, 1999

2009-10-26T23:45:00.003-04:00

Getting the shot with the real gun--notice us all cleared from behind the Camera.
----------

This night was hot, and I ran a lot. That's what I remember. And yeah, I remember those annoying kids.

August 9th

Another late day. Most of our schedule is evening shoots, as a result of of the combination of our lead actor's work schedule and the fact that many scenes take place at night.

The shoot was at my girlfriend's parents' house, which was doubling as the place that our lead serial killer has temporarily appropriated.

I got my girlfriend to go down to a neighbor's house--one she doesn't know--and ask if they'll mind if we shoot some film in front of her house. The woman didn't seem to mind. Then I got my girlfriend to go to another neighbor and borrow a dog for the night's scene. Only drawback is that there was this kid that kept saying to me, "My dog's gonna be in the scene tonight". Over and over. Like I don't fuckin' know it, kid.

Dave, Dave and Rick Ganz arrived, and we started to set up. We needed to shoot a scene as Rick watches a man with a dog, then the man with dog walks off. The light was fading fast and we wanted to shoot before it got pitch black.

Didn't happen.

We didn't shoot from inside the house where I'd originally planned it. The dog was excitable and uncooperative. We had to put its owner out of camera range in the direction we wanted it to walk, and sometimes it would just bolt out of its collar. It liked cheese, so we hid some in the bush where we wanted it to go. It didn't work too well.

Kids ran into the scene once, not knowing we were rolling. I was losing patience very fast.
We moved down the street where we would film where Rick kills the man and his dog by shooting them. We had to run extension cord down the road about 800 feet and ended up putting too many lights on one cord.

So I ran another line from the house(the operative word begin “ran”, as I ran back and forth from the house myself no fewer than ten times).

We kept blowing fuses, so we tried hooking them to the house near where we were shooting(without permission). They didn't work. Finally, my girlfriend got permission to let us run cord to the house of someone she knew nearby.

The kids had come down and were pestering the shit out of me. They'd climb in the van, they'd pull extension cords, they were brats of the worst order. I blew my top. I wasn't nice about it all, but I got them out of there. They left crying. I think one of them stole the disc to my light meter.

That's showbiz.

And this is what the shot looked like on film.

We got the scene done and I think it came out nicely, at least the end of it. Hard to tell. The hardest thing about this shoot is not being the one shooting. I'm used to shooting my own footage, and sometimes it makes you feel a bit helpless and uneasy when you don't know exactly what was shot.

We shot a dream sequence later in the night, spewing smoke all over. The wind started blowing, and Gil said to Mun, "Move the smoke machine over there". Mun said, "But the smoke's blowing that way". Deadpan, Gil said back, "Oh, then just sit there." It was funny.

One thing I learned quickly: Indy filmmaking is about compromise. You need to be able to rewrite the script on demand to fit the boundaries that you'll come up against. Running too much footage? Shoot less takes. People talking in places that it's hard to light? Move the location. Can't get the shot you want? Shoot a different one, even if you think it could have been the best shot out of the whole thing.

It's frustrating, but that's pretty much the definition of indy filmmaking, at least as far as I can read it.

I thought I'd record some of the sexual innuendo going on during the shoot, but it's hard to write them all down. Here's a couple:

"I got Off on my hands" --Rick Ganz, referring to bug spray.
"Move it around so I can get the effect" --Dave Gil, referring to moving a Chinese lantern on a boom pole to see the best lighting.

August 8th, 1999

2009-10-25T21:37:00.003-04:00

Dave Gil goofing off as Mun holds the China Ball lamp that we've taped to a boom pole. This was our primary light on HH. And no, I'm not kidding.
-----------

Man, running around doing things with NO permission is quite the rush. You never know what bullshit story you're going to have to make up on the spot to convince someone to let you shoot there.

Cop come by? You're a student shooting a film.

Nosy neighbors? You're shooting something for your son's school's project.

Inquisitive people? You're shooting a video for a movie you wanna get into Sundance. Can they help?

It's like that 80's song. Lies lies lies...yeah.

August 8th

Started late afternoon, so I finally caught up on some of my sleep. Our first shot was guerilla filmmaking at the Super Fresh.

No permit. No insurance. No permission.

No problems, either, it turned out. Not one person bothered us, not even the two cops who pulled up near us. They went in to get a pizza. I mentioned how well that went and that we were ahead of schedule and everyone told me to shut up; I'd curse us.

We were about 45 minutes ahead of schedule, but it was raining and the later scenes involved outside stuff. We shot anyway. It went well. We even got to use a restaurant called Granny's, got permission and all. I forgot to get a location release signed, but I'll do that the minute we're done shooting. I promise.

On to my brother Paul's. He plays an artist who is stalked and killed by Aric.

He was a real sport. We shot his death scene and all, even splashed water(doubling for gas) all over his room and he didn't mind. He was late for a family reunion, which I was AWOL for. Hey, gotta have priorities.

Went on to Rick Shipley's death scene. Got the locals to cooperate with us and they even let us run a power cord into the building. Went off good, should look really nice when color corrected.
Our next scene was in Aric's car, which was Rick Ganz's car. It was full of stuff though, since he was moving. We had to go move him to Frederick before we could shoot the next scene. We were ahead of schedule, but that would set us back.

After dropping Rick's stuff off, we went to Annapolis to look for well-lit roads. We stopped at Denny's for a healthy breakfast. For some reason, they had the A.C. set at about Absolute Zero.

Dave Mun told a funny story about how he lost his finger(he's missing one, in case you didn't hear). Anyway, when he was younger, he was in a class to learn how to catch throwing stars. His master threw one and Mun reached up to catch it. "Did I get it?" he asked. Say this like you're an ancient Oriental Martial Arts Teacher: "You failed".

Cracked us up, anyway. All any of us had to say to get the group cracking up was "You failed".

We found the Annapolis Mall to be pretty lit, so we figured we'd drive around in the parking lot, in the road that goes in a huge circle around it. You wouldn't be able to tell, since the focus was on Rick.

Anyway, we'd just started shooting and security drove up and asked what we were doing. I told him we were shooting something for class. Did we have permission, he wanted to know. I told him no, but we'd be gone in five minutes.

Not good enough, apparently. He kicked us out.

What an asshole. Annapolis is like that. I think it must be a huge city full of closet cannibals or something, because I've never seen a town so afraid of cameras.

Later, Rick started to question whether he wore the right wardrobe in the right shots. Just what I needed. We didn't have anyone in charge of continuity, so I'd asked him to go through his script and make a note of what outfits he wore and when. So much for that.

We ended up shooting until 4am in the morning, but it wasn't that big a deal since we had a late start the next day.

August 7th, 1999

2009-10-24T23:52:00.002-04:00

Lisa played Barb, the secretary

Mun(with beer), Ganz, Gil, and Shipley
-----------------

I remember this day as being kind of fun. The environment was semi-controlled.

Biggest hassle was my stomach--early in the morning it just decided to freak out. To be delicate about it, I blew up the only bathroom in the office, so we couldn't shoot down that hall until the stench cleared out.

As I look at the pics above I remember that Gil got into a little mood and asked Mun if he wanted to shoot a couple of takes. This made me very uncomfortable, since I had seen nothing Mun had ever shot.

I let Mun do it for a couple of takes, but I supervised even closer on those.

August 7th

Earlier than noon, I don't perform well at anything other than complaining, so you can imagine the state of things as I picked up the camera guys at 8:30 am.

We arrived at the office at the scheduled time of 9:30, but there was no one to let us in. Jeff, one of our actors for the day was already there, and after a few minutes, Ganz arrived with the key.

We hustled all our equipment in and set up.

Rick Shipley, a local filmmaker who had helped us cast a lot of our talent, showed up to help us out. He shot a movie on DV called Dangerous Mode, so keep an eye out for it.

The girl who would play Barb, the secretary at Aric's workplace, is named Lisa. She and her boyfriend Brian showed up. Shortly after, Duke arrived. He played Brad, another of Aric's co-workers.

As we set up, I could quickly tell we'd have a problem shooting sound in the office that was to be Aric's. It was small, and the sound was reverberating the slight camera noise right into the shotgun mic.

So for every take, we would shoot film and sound, then another take without the camera, so I could try to place it in. I've a feeling, though, that we're going to be doing a lot of ADR(Automatic Dialogue Replacement). That's a tedious process and isn't exactly cheap.

We started rolling through the scenes, but some of the people we were using weren't actors, so they'd flub lines left and right. I had to have Gil get a lot of coverage from behind in case I had to just dub in the lines while the audience is staring at their back. I've had to do it before, and I did it with success, so I'm not too concerned about it.

One of the funny incidents: We didn't have enough hands to do the slate, so we had the actor in the scene doing it. It was something like Scene 33, Take 2. He reads Scene 33, Take 6. None of us could figure out where the six came from, but that's one way to make it tough to sync up sound in the editing room.

As the day wound down, it turned out I didn't have enough sound cable to run outside around the side of the building, so we had to scrap that shot for the day. That made two scenes total that we missed. It looked like it was a good thing that I'd left an extra week for anything we missed.

We were probably going to need it.

We wrapped about 9:00 pm and I flew home. I was asleep by 10:30, so that the next day I wouldn't be comatose.

AUGUST 6th, 1998

2009-10-21T23:55:00.002-04:00

Dave Gil sets up the shot with Cathy Granville.
--------------

I was sweating bad. That's what I remember about this day, and you can see it on the Making Of on the HH dvd.

NOTHING was going right. I didn't know near enough about sound and I was in charge of it all. I was on the DAT machine trying to get the best sound but I wasn't even sure what levels I was supposed to be recording at.

Sure, I had spent a year on the newsgroups talking to sound guys but you get differing opinions. In the end it worked out pretty well.

But don't get me started on everything else that day. I've spent a lot of time trying to forget it.

AUGUST 6th

On paper, I had us starting to set up about 4 p.m., as the shot takes place sometime toward the evening. We were scheduled to be in Rick Ganz's parents' house. He told them to take off and he'd pay for a hotel room for them.

I was running late, due to trying to call everyone, ensure we had food and drinks on set, pick up the special effects knife and more that popped up by the moment.

I got Gil(the D.P.) and Mun(the A.C.), and we bolted over to the house. Rick and Cathy--the girl who was to get naked for the shower attack--were waiting.

We began setting up. It took a while. There was a ton of equipment, and we were working with the bare minimum as it was. No wonder studio shoots have crews of a thousand.

We set up and get some of the shots inside. They were going well and the dog we had was actually doing what it was supposed to! We couldn't believe it.

Luck changed just like that.

We went outside to try to shoot some exteriors. The mosquitoes attacked immediately, biting the hell out of Mun and Gil's arms and legs. I've never seen anyone swell up from mosquito bites like they did.

I was trying to record sound when suddenly a fire truck pulled up across the street, and of course they didn't turn off the truck. They just sat there and made loud noises. So we were going to take it all back inside when I heard someone shouting to me.

The fire truck was there because there were live wires exposed. Those wires had now blown a transformer in the neighborhood, so no one had any power. Cameras and DAT machines and mixers run on power. I figured we'd wait an hour and see if they had it back on.

I figured wrong.

Rick came in and told me his parents were outside. His father had a stroke earlier in the day and they were back from the hospital. They didn't want to go to a hotel.

We beat a hasty retreat. The plan was then to go to the apartment Rick was moving out of, and try to shoot the rest of the scene and match the shots. I realized immediately that the carpets were not going to be the same color, but lots of people have more than one color of carpet in their house. I hoped it would match somehow, or I'd be rewriting out the beginning of the scene.

We got to the apartment and set up. The place was messy from the get-go, since Rick was on his way out, but now the living room was cluttered with equipment. As we were getting ready to shoot the scene where the girl strips to her underwear, Rick's soon-to-be ex-wife shows up.

What are we doing there, she wanted to know. There was an argument. Rick's soon-to-be ex-wife left in a huff. Good riddance, I say.

So we shot the scene where Cathy strips to her underwear and enters the bathroom. It went pretty well. We started the shot where she takes off her bra and panties and starts to get in the shower when she's attacked. When Rick pulled the curtain back and grabbed her, you could hear his hand hitting her throat. He JERKED her to the side and made motions like he was stabbing her.

When I yelled "Cut", I was terrified that Cathy was hurt. If you'd seen my face during the take, you would have laughed. I think my jaw hit the ground at the ferocity of Rick's attack. If it looks half as good on film, people will think Rick really hurt her.

Well, he did, sort of.

He had a real knife for that shot, and he brought it in and turned it so the handle would be the only thing touching Cathy. Unfortunately, he nicked her with the knife a couple of times. She was a real sport though. She didn't even complain when the prop knife with a retractable blade--the one that was hand-made by my brother--broke skin on her chest.

We ended about midnight and we had missed a scene. Not too bad, considering we'd had to move on the fly.

The only bad part: By the time all was said and done(we had packed up, I'd taken the crew home, I'd gone to get the wheelchair that was near our original shoot that evening, and then I'd gone to Metro to get some last-minute food and supplies) it was 4:30 am. I went to bed immediately and got up at 8:30 am.

Very tired, very sick to my stomach. I knew it was going to be a rough day.

Rick Ganz is creepy in the shower. Trust me.

August 5th, 1999

2009-10-20T09:02:00.005-04:00

Funny anecdote I remember from this day that I never put in the log.

I picked up Gil and Mun at the airport.

Now, I don’t realize it because Gil doesn’t set your gaydar off, but he’s gay. (and this will come into play in another funny story during HH)

So we’re driving out of the airport and some idiot swerves into my lane. I say, “Fucking faggot.” Gil and Mun laugh—I probably would have realized they were laughing just a bit too hard, but I had other things on my mind.

Later when we found out he was gay I remembered that and laughed. Hey, I’m a child of the 80’s. "Faggot" was the in-slur back then, and it's still a staple of my vocabulary.

Also, meeting Mun turned out to be a great thing, as he went on to shoot my next two features.

This is what the back of my parents' mini-van looked like--
it's the poor-man's grip truck.
------------

August 5th, 1999

The D.P. and his camera assistant flew in, so I was to meet them at the airport at 7:26 p.m. I was using my parents' van for the week, so I went to pick it up. Meanwhile, I was frantically trying to find a wheelchair for the dolly shots.

I got to my parents' house and my head was still spinning from the list of things to do. I'd written tons of them down, not the least was to call the actors/actresses I'd need for the next day's shoot. Kiona, our Production Manager, helped out some, but I hadn't really given her much of a cast list to go from.

I was about to pull out of my parents' driveway when my dad said to hold on. He played with one of the tires and I just got a chance to hear "Looks like a...nail", before the tire began deflating rapidly.

It was about six o'clock and now I had to jack up the car, patch the tire, put the tire back on and get going. I'd meant to stop by my brother's house to pick up the special effects knife he made, but there was no time now.

I got it all done and picked up the guys at the airport. They turned out to be real good guys, amiable and understanding about the very-guerilla way of shooting that we ended up doing.
David Gil is the D.P.(Director of Photography), and he's done stuff for Fox, NBC and CBS, so he really knew what he was doing. The only reason I could even afford him was because he was trying to get some feature film credit for his demo reel. He's only 28, too, and Latino, but don't hold that against him. (Who loves ya, Gil?)

David Mun is the 1st A.C.(Assistant Cameraman), and really the only A.C. At 22, he's younger than Gil, but seems pretty knowledgeable. He's shot some shorts on his own and has his sights set on D.P.'ing a feature himself in the future.

We decided to go ahead and take the camera up to the theater that night, as we were going to catch a late showing of Mystery Men. We were going to try to get some footage of my friend James splicing film as a theater worker.

As we set up and just messed around, I saw how long it took to set up lights, test equipment, move everything, and the rest of the essentials. I could tell that I might as well toss my projected schedule into the paper shredder.

The Mystery Men was pretty good though, and we did discuss a few of the tactics we'd take to shoot some of the other movie scenes. I dropped them off at the luxurious hotel that I'd gotten for them(Motel 6) and headed off to get some sleep.

Good luck with that. I ended up getting about 3 hours of sleep.

August 1st, 1999

2009-10-19T06:47:00.003-04:00

Exhibit B for why you should not try your own poster art
--------------------

So yeah. This one is pretty brutal. You can tell I was feeling the pressure.

The funny part here is that Rick and I knew each other since about 1994 and then he started dating his soon-to-be wife. Let's call her P.

And I didn't like P, and I guess the feeling was mutual. Rick kinda distanced himself from me, I'm sure at her urging. We stopped hanging out. I didn't get invited to the wedding. (I was not offended--believe me, I hate weddings.)

A couple of years after they got married we somehow connected again, and tried to get a feature film off the ground, which led us here.

But eventually my perception of P was proven correct, and they divorced. Too bad the brutal part of the separation took place during my first feature film...

Aug 1st, 1999

Eight days until we shoot and I still have no film. Kodak keeps referring me to someone who's not there. I leave a message, I get no reply. This was all because they wanted me to get a business account.

Am I going to get a discount for having a business account? No. So what the fuck? Rick, the main asset, is having trouble with his wife.

Basically, she's a cunt. No, really. I don't use that word a lot, but it fits. If they didn't have a kid together, I'm sure Rick wouldn't even be married to her.

So, they're going to separate and the way this is going to work out is that Rick has to be out of his apartment somewhere around the 15th of August.

Ah, perceptive of you. Yes, right in the middle of the shoot. I guess, because I don't have enough to worry about.

Anyway, I call Kodak back and act like I've never talked to them before(they've got a million reps, so it wasn't tough). I ordered twenty five reels of 400 foot film and had them ship it to me. Taken care of.

Thanks for jerking me around, Kodak. I’ll remember you in the end credits.

A Brief Break

2009-10-16T21:38:00.002-04:00

A quick break--this is the last trailer I put together before sending the final to MTI Home Video for delivery. It includes the awards we won and the Joe Bob Briggs quotes from his review.

July 29th, 1999

2009-10-15T22:36:00.003-04:00

A promo still Rick and I shot in Baltimore

----------

Looking back this is one of the scariest decisions of my life. I was 29 with a small business and eleven grand. I could take that money and do something else, or roll the dice on the movie.

I felt like I didn’t know what I was doing. I might as well be lighting the money on fire. Maybe if I called the whole thing off I could still convince myself there was a chance I could do it. No need to attempt it and fail.

It should tell you something that I still remember exactly how frightened I was at moving forward. I remember the nights lying awake trying to convince myself that taking this chance would be okay, even if I failed.

Interesting to note that I think this was the start of my long long battle with insomnia.

July 29th, 1999

The shoot date is barreling toward me like you wouldn't believe. I'm having a hard time sleeping. Every time I lay down I think about all the shit I have left to do, and invariably I can't sleep.

I make plans for an employee to cover most of the hours at my store. New comics come in on Wednesdays, so I would need to come in and work those days, so I've scheduled no shoots on Wednesdays. That'll be the one-day off a week for everyone. That is, everyone but me.

I talk to my parents about switching my car for their van for the three weeks. No problem.

I've bought some lights from eBay that I'm hoping will help us out on the shoot. A big 1500 watt Lowell as well as a smaller one on a telescoping tripod. Gil is going to bring a fog machine, so I don't have to worry about that. (Fog machines help boost light in low-light scenes in the dark, and they add a type of ambience. If you spread it around, you can't even see it in the film, but it adds)

Jesus. August is right about here and I'm going to shoot a movie. Holy shit. Holy shit. That's all I can think. After almost five years of trying, I'm going to shoot a movie.

Cold feet hits big. I think about calling the whole thing off. Hey, I think, I've only blown about $2000. Cut my losses right now and I've got a chunk of money and no remorse about wasting it.

Is this going to be a waste? Am I going to be able to deliver something I'm not ashamed of for roughly 1/1000th of 1% of an average Hollywood movie?

I don't know. There are too many variables. Too many unknowns. I'm a control-freak and a lot of this is going to depend on so many things I won't have total control of.

I won't call it off. I'm going to shoot this movie, because if I call off another attempt, I'm done. That would be it. You don't understand; when you start prepping for a movie, everyone hears about it. Then, two months later they ask how it's going and you have to make excuses.

And while you're making excuses you're second-guessing yourself, you're doubting yourself. You feel bad about having to make these excuses, and lo and behold, it happens all over again!

It wasn't going to happen to me this time. I was going to shoot the goddamn movie and if I wasted money--fuck it. I'd make more and chalk it up as a learning experience. That's what everything is if you look at it in the right light.

A learning experience.

March-July, 1999

2009-10-13T03:25:00.004-04:00

This is part of the story that I have conveniently left out when I have talked about HH. In the end I chose to take the tougher road in order to make the film, something I did a couple of times.

Now I'm glad. But back then, man, it was a struggle.

March- July, 1999

More trying to fill roles.

I bring in Duke and I do Aric’s lines while Duke reads Brad’s lines. This cracks Rick up, as he’s seeing me do the lines the way I wrote them, which is not exactly the way he’s been reading them.

Duke’s not bad. He’s nervous, but he settles down after a while. I think we’ll go with him over Rick’s other friend. I’ll try to get the other guy a non-speaking part, so he can at least be in the movie.

Rick’s got someone for the naked part. She comes in and does some lines(even though she doesn’t really have any in the movie, other than talking to her dog), and I shoot some pictures to get an idea of how she’ll look. I think she’ll do fine. More on her later.

We still haven’t filled two parts in the movie. The part of Ken, a dorky co-worker of Aric’s who really wants to be his friend, and the part of Frank, the scummy detective hired to follow Aric.

Rick mentions that his boss at work has done some theater stuff. I’m getting desperate, so I say, let’s see him. He brings him by one night. The guy kind of looks like the actor who plays Freddy Krueger, which is cool. Maybe the audience will suspect he’s the other serial killer in the movie. His name is Jeff Kipers.

He reads some lines and does pretty good. I cast him on the spot. He wants to know when rehearsal is. I laugh like a hyena. Rehearsal? There won’t be any time for rehearsal. Learn the lines, we’ll do a couple of run-throughs before we roll the camera, and there you go.

Still no one for the part of Frank. I may do it myself, even though I’ve given myself a non-speaking cameo already.

Oh, yeah, I guess I can mention that I got kicked out of my house. Well, it wasn’t really my house.

It went like this:

My girlfriend(who was actually my fiance, but the word freaks me out) had moved into her grandmother’s house(at her grandmother’s request) because the old bag lives in Florida for most of the year, just comes back to her house in Maryland for the summer months.

So my gf said to me "Hey, you want to move in with me, just split the utilities, since the house was paid off?" Sounded like a good deal. So that’s where we were for over a year.

Then, somewhere around June, her grandmother called to say she was coming back and she wanted me out of the house when she got there. Came out of the blue. I mean, I never got along with her(hence, I had given her the nickname “troll”), but we hardly even saw each other. I think she hated the fact that I’d go to bed at like four in the morning and get up to go to work at about one p.m. That didn’t jibe with her view of the nine-to-five man.

So my gf flips out, tells her grandmother off. I’ve got roughly two weeks to move out of the house and no where to go. I can get an apartment, but it’s going to suck money from the movie. I don’t think I can afford to shoot the movie AND get an apartment(which will take a security deposit and the first-month’s rent up front). I’d have to pony up about $1200 immediately.

I make a decision. Time to suffer for the art, baby.

I move into my store. It has a back room(about ten by twenty feet), and I buy a futon to serve as my bed. Won’t be much of a bed, but…

My cat has to move in with me. She’s not too keen on the idea, and frequently takes to attacking customers while they’re shopping through the back issues. It IS kind of funny to watch.

Here’s how my schedule goes for about two months:

Hang out at the store before going to bed, watching one of about three channels I get on the television. I go to sleep about four in the morning and wake up frequently because the futon is hard as hell, not very comfortable. Then, when my employee shows up to open the store, I wake up briefly, but doze back off.

Finally wake up at about two p.m. I peer out the covered back windows to see if there are any customers in the store. If there are, I wait until they leave. If not, I come out and act like I’ve been there since we opened.(I don’t want customers to think I’m living in the store).

Then I stuff a change of clothes in my bag and go take a shower(either at my parents’ house or Missy’s parents’ house.)

It’s not fun, not at all. To be honest, it's some of the worst nights I can remember...

At one point, after a few months of this, my gf has moved out of her grandmother’s house also, and moved in with her parents. She asks if I want to do that also.

I jump at it. This store shit SUCKS.

February 8th, 1999

2009-10-12T07:27:00.004-04:00

Who is this? Just another actress who'd like to be in movies.
Sometimes they send pictures.
No. Again, nothing to do with HH. I apologize.
-------------------

I know, I know. This is a lot of technical stuff that probably is boring to you if you don't make films. But I am going to put this up exactly the way it was, so you're just gonna have to suck it up for a little while.

Don't worry, in the next blog I'm going to tell something about HH that I have only told some close friends, something that was never put in the original HH log online. How's that for a tease?

And yes, we shot HH on FILM. It's this ancient thing you may have heard of. If you don't know what it is you'll have to go to the museum to see it because it's very hard to find now.

You may get the gist of how hard this was when you read everything I was doing. Yes, all the preproduction from shooting script to booking hotels and flights, ordering film.

Everything.

It's a TON of work, when all you should really be doing is concentrating on how best to CREATE the picture. (which directing is a small part of)

February 8th, 1999

The script breakdown is about the most important thing you can do for yourself before the movie. A good P.A.(Production Assistant) can do that for you if you have one.

I didn't.

Make a chart or copy the one I've provided. Go in and fill out a separate chart for EVERY scene in your movie. Every scene. If you've got a flashback in a scene, that's another scene. A scene in your script is defined as a change in locale or a change in time if there's no change in locale.

The problem you're going to have on your no-budget shoot is continuity. You're going to be shooting a scene one day, but not get it done. You'll come back in a couple of days and continue.

That day comes, but wait! What was everyone wearing? Was that cut on the left cheek or right cheek?

If I had a continuity person, they'd have been taking polaroids. Of course, I had no such person. I told Rick to make a notation on his copy of the script in every scene of what outfit he was wearing so if we shot a sequential scene, we could page back and see what outfit he had on. The drawback for Rick was that he would have to have his entire wardrobe in his car.

I'd have killed for problems that minor.

I booked a flight for my DP and AC, and called a million hotels to see if they had any deals for 21 day stays. A few did, but nothing to make you shout about. Lowest I found was $1100, which I figured I could swing.

Kodak is giving me the run-around about getting an account with them. I thought I could get some sort of deal on film, but they then say they don't do that. They transfer my call to some lady who tells me she has a bunch of film that NFL Films didn't use that I can buy cheap.

It's not the ASA we're looking for and it's not on spools, so we'd have to roll it all. I call Gil in Arizona who says it's not a good idea. I call Kodak back and say no thanks.

January 13th, 1999

2009-10-10T23:12:00.002-04:00

What's this have to do with HH? Nothing. I didn't have a picture, so I thought I'd post a pic of Ganz one Halloween--my brother turned him into Darth Maul. We got pretty drunk that night...
--------------

Wow, pretty detailed post. I don't really have much to add other than that we got some CRAZY headshots, which to this day I still have. I should scan some of those and post them.

January 13th, 1999

After 5 months, I have over $5,0000 in the bank. I'm doing research on renting the sound equipment, because believe me, sound is very important. The only problem is getting someone as a sound guy. They're all pretty expensive.

I'm only two grand shy of my goal. At this point, we’ve got about four months to go. Gil had asked whether we possibly had enough money to get his camera assistant David Mun along. I jammed some numbers on a spreadsheet. I knew it would be a HUGE help to have another body on the set at all times, as we we'd be working with a skeleton crew, so I booked two plane tickets.

We had a D.P.(Director of Photography) and a 1st A.C.(assistant cameraman) and a good start on our budget.

Actors.

We needed them bad. I had our star, the actor buddy I spoke of. Rick Ganz. Cuban, built like a woman's wet dream. Chicks dig him and he can act. He's our number one asset.

I wrote the script sleek, so we wouldn't need anyone for very long besides Rick. There were about 28 characters and 26 of them die. I broke down the script into scenes detailing who would be needed for each scene and for how long.

The cameo roles I pushed aside. Friends and family would work for those. The speaking roles I highlighted.

I looked around and found that most decent actors, SAG(Screen Actor's Guild) and non-SAG, who are looking for work look in Backstage Magazine because people advertise looking for actors. I paid $50 and got an ad put in the East Coast Backstage about our production.

The ad ran. I received over 400 head-shots in two weeks. It was pretty stunning to see all these things pouring in. The only problem I began to see is that most of the actors/actresses were from New York.

I made name tags for the characters we needed to find actors for. Then Rick and I went through and looked at headshots, putting them in one of the stacks or shoving them off to the side if we didn't see them as anyone in Hunting Humans.

Soon we had at least three or four people in each stack. I made calls to each of the people to try to set up a time to audition them. Most of them had voice-mail, so I left messages.

Our responses were less than encouraging. Some didn't call back. Those who did that found they would have to come to Maryland to audition backed out. A few said they'd see how their schedule would work out. I told some of them that if they wanted a page of the script that they could act out on video, and then send me the video, that that was fine.

It seriously amazes me how desperate all these people claim to be, but they can’t drive four hours to audition for a PRINCIPLE ROLE in a motion picture.

Some good-looking women had sent headshots, and Rick wanted to invite them down to audition even though we really didn't have any roles that would fit them. I had two female parts; one was a girl who gets nude and the other was an over-weight slut. I didn't see any girl coming down from New York for either part.

The nude girl part was bothersome. I thought about trying to hire a stripper for a night, but I didn't know how good an actress they'd be or whether they'd do it for as cheap as $200, which is what I'd set aside to pay "naked girl" as we began calling her.

Working on the movie felt good though. We were getting a lot accomplished.

I’ve auditioned one of Rick’s friend’s for a minor speaking role, but he’s tanking big time. He gets nervous, blows lines, seems to be waiting for me to say a line so he can say his.

May replace him with a buddy of mine, Duke, but I don’t know whether he’ll do any better.

August 28th, 1999

2009-10-09T10:11:00.003-04:00

One of the posters I created with my VERY limited Photopaint skills back in 2000

-----------------------

Wow, this post gets pretty numbers-specific, doesn't it? And yes, I owned a comic book shop. Some people don't know this.

The bottom line is that you don't want to be arguing comic stuff with me--I can take you. :)

August 28th, 1999

I own a comic shop, but it just pays the bills and doesn't let me store up any money. I begin putting things up on eBay pretty frequently. Anything that doesn't sell at the store, or anything I have doubles of.

And lo and behold, people are buying. People are frequently paying retail or more for my stuff. It's great. Checks and money orders start rolling in and I begin another bank account under my production company, Marauder Productions.

Meanwhile, I'm still looking for a cameraman. I stumble upon someone named David Gil from Arizona. He sounds gung-ho, very much into movies, and constantly busy. The kind of guy I'll need. He wants $2800 for the 3 weeks, which is by far the best rate I've gotten for a D.P. with his own camera. I ask for his reel and he sends it. I watch it closely and he's got good composition and is pretty steady.

I tell him about Hunting Humans. He's interested. He offers to do the entire shoot for nothing if I pay to get him here and his expenses while he's in town. It's too good to be true. Given that I was screwed on one D.P. already, I'm a little leery. I think he's psyched to be the D.P. of a feature film, and being Hispanic, is excited that the lead character is also Hispanic.

I do some calculations. I want to have at least 5 hours of footage for my 90 minute movie. That's a tiny shooting ratio, but if you're well-prepared, it's not unheard of.

400 feet of 16mm is about 11.5 minutes at 24 frames per second, which is regular speed. If you starting shooting slow-mo, one reel will shoot even less. So I need about 23 reels of 400 foot film, which will equal 23X11.5, which is 264.5 minutes.

The film stock I was looking at was Kodak Vision 500T(a fast stock, meaning we don't need to add a ton of light), and it cost $132.52 per 400 foot core. A quick multiplication ($132.52X23) means I need $3047.96 for film alone. Note that this does not cover development of the film or transfer of the film to video for editing.

Some other things I needed to consider: Insurance(which you will not get a permit without), food/catering(which you won't get happy actors who work for free without), the D.P.s plane ticket and his hotel stay.

I roughed it out and decided to skip the insurance. I only had 2 scenes that took place on public property, and I figured I could B.S. my way through for those. It looked like I needed about $9,000 to get the movie in the can. Workable, since I have a credit card with a $2,000 limit.

My eBay goal became $7,000.

August 14th, 1999

2009-10-08T01:38:00.002-04:00

We shot the little Paul attacks Rick thing in a parking garage. No permission, and it is actually the garage you see Aric Blue drive out of at the beginning of HH. The garage attendant came up and asked what we were doing--one guy beating up another guy and then putting a knife to his throat.

I said we were shooting something for class, a phrase I learned was the filmmaker-liar's gold. I'll go find some video and post it--I've never shown any of it anywhere.

August 14th, 1999

I begin making plans. In the interim, I have bought a 16mm Bolex, non-reflex. Non-reflex means that you can't exactly see what you're shooting. You have to look through a viewfinder which gives you an okay approximation, but it's not that good, especially when you're changing lenses.

I got it from eBay, along with some extra lenses. I find that wide-angle lenses(which is just about anything lower than 15mm, but the nice ones are 10mm) are extremely expensive. Most 10mm lenses go for over $400, with fish-eye lenses(8,6,4mm) going for almost double.

Bolexes take C-mount lenses, in case you wanted to know.

Anyway, I got the Bolex and some film from Kodak(1-800-621-FILM) in 100 foot spools. I got reversal film, which means that whatever I shot could be projected through a projector and would look regular. If you shoot negative(which most professionals do) and project it, all the colors will be freaky, like if you hold a photo negative up to the light.

I shot some stuff, just bizarre things like Rick walking through fire with my gun and a laser sight cutting through the smoke. (At this point, I’m living in my girlfriend’s grandmother’s house, so I’d stacked up some paper on her front lawn, lit it on fire, and had Rick walk through it, keeping the paper below frame. You should have seen the bald spot on the front lawn that was there after three takes)

So we shot things like that. It came out pretty good, especially when you consider that reversal film has little leniency in lighting.

I decided to go out and shoot a little spoof about my brother, Paul, stalking Rick. Rick leaves a movie theater and Paul goes after him, beats him up and is about to kill him, but he finds out Rick isn't who he thought he was. He leaves a bloody Rick lying on the ground contemplating the misfortune. It came out pretty good, all things considered. Four cop cars stopped by to ask what we were doing, and I promptly lied to each of them. If you want to be a guerilla filmmaker, become acquainted with the words, "We're just shooting something for class".

I sold that Bolex and got a reflex Bolex, so I could see exactly what I was shooting. In case you didn't know, the Bolex is a great camera(first camera we shot on in Film 101). Built rugged and hard to break, it's why you can reasonably buy one that's 40 years old and it still works like a charm. The only problem is that you can't shoot sync sound with them, even if you buy a crystal-sync motor, because they're still too loud.

I notice on the newsgroups that there are frequently people with professional-level film cameras looking for work. I've looked at renting cameras and most of them are at least $1500 a week, and that's not counting film. Most of the people I talk to want between $1200 and $2000 for a week, plus travel expenses paid for. It's not bad, because you're getting someone who knows what they're doing, but it's money I don't have.

I come up with a way to make money. More precisely, hello, eBay.

August 5th, 1999

2009-10-07T05:03:00.005-04:00

Rick reading opposite an actor auditioning while I roll camera

This brings me to ruminate on Dexter. People ask me what I think about it.

Hey, I like the show. But it's very hard to watch that first episode. I think it steals pretty liberally from HH.

And before you say, "Hey, it was a book!"--I read the book. The book's only similarity is that Dexter also ends up being stalked by a serial killer. The Dexter of the book differs pretty greatly from the Dexter of the show. The show-Dexter seems to be Aric Blue more than book-Dexter.

Did one of the show's creators borrow from my movie? I don't know. But I think if you watch HH back-to-back with episode one of Dexter you can make a pretty convincing argument...

August 5th, 1999

Well. How things change.

Production on High was halted, due to the sudden dropout of our Director of Photography. He sent me an email claiming he was going to Hong Kong for a year to shoot a documentary.

That's what you want to hear when you're about a month from shooting a movie.

So High was scrapped, just like that.

But there is good in the bad. I decided somewhere along the line that the "Slacker with a gun" film--the movie everyone with a camera and no money films--was not a wise idea to invest money in. It was also not a genre I'm all that excited about.

Somewhere after we scrapped High, an idea came to me.

Follow me here. I love serial killer stuff. (Don't look at me like that, millions of you buy those True Crime novels, so I'm not the only one). Serial killer films have been done about as much as the Slacker films. Many good(Silence of the Lambs, Henry:POASK) and many bad(too many to name). But my idea was a little different. It's the kind of idea that I started talking to people about, and they'd get this funny, far-away look in their eyes. "Wow, that's a cool idea" and "I don't think I've ever seen a movie like that" were common responses.

I was onto something. That something was "Hunting Humans".

I began with a serial killer named Aric Blue. He was young, he was popular, he was handsome.

But none of his co-workers knew that he was killing people for a hobby. None of them knew that he secretly despised them, because his front was that good.

Aric picked his victims at random, thus avoiding motive as a way of being caught. He stalked his victims, assessing and using the patterns in their life to kill them.

Up until now, you and everyone else I talk to are thinking, "Hey, what's new about that?"

Plot point one: Aric picks a new victim, finds their pattern and goes to kill them. He finds his victim already dead, though, with a note attached to the bloody body. It reads "I'VE GOT YOUR PATTERN".

There's another serial killer, and he's hunting Aric. The movie then becomes a cat and mouse game between the serial killers, as both try to outdo each other.

That's normally enough to get people's minds going with the possibilities. Most people don't see the problem inherent in it, though: There's no protagonist. My intention is to get the audience to at least admire the cold yet precise way that Aric does his killing, and the fact that he's funny in a cruel sort of way shouldn't hurt either. But it's still a tough situation.

But it's the kind of different that could make the difference on the festival circuit.

Feb/Mar/Apr/May 1998

2009-10-06T04:52:00.005-04:00

A pic of The Ganzinator as Michael in "High"

This is the last post before "High" falls apart and "Hunting Humans" begins.

We shot some cool tests on Super8 film, but the first camera I used had some sort of light-leak problem, so there's a bright white light on much of it.

I'll post some of the video when I rip it from old dvds that I burned from the video that I recorded from the projector playing the 8mm on the wall. Yeah, I did that. It's cheap, but it works.

Feb 28,1998

Made the changes we saw appropriate to the script, and I gotta tell you,
I think it's quite a bit better than it was. Stronger opening and we've cleaned
up some motivation problems that were there.

Mar-Apr

Started casting. Very busy, which is why I haven’t been able to keep up the log.
The producer who's been helping us had us put on the Maryland Film hotline, where actors can call to see what movies are casting in the area.

Met a lot of people, but it seems everyone wants to try out for the part
of the bad guy, Saul. Knew he was the best character, but still...

Ordered film and shot some test stuff. We were gonna shoot on 16, but it turned out to be too expensive when we lost our DP. Ordered some film for the super8 camera I have, an Elmo 240S-XL. The problem with the camera is it only shoots one speed, and we'd really like to have slow-motion. May get another camera depending on how the tests turn out.

May 9, 1998
Got the results of the tests back. Super8 really doesn't look too bad, but we don't know what it will look like transferred to video. We plan on shooting and then getting it transferred to either BetaSp or 3/4 video. We're gonna record sound on a DAT and then sync up the sound to the video. Problem is, the camera is not a sync camera, so we won't be able to run any scenes long. When I get into the editing room, I'll have to sync each take up, and may even have to sync the sound more than once per take.

Ordered blanks for the guns from Independent Studios. The blanks are .$65 apiece, which is more expensive than real bullets. We're going to have to do some weird editing as a result of the fact that real guns will only fire one blank at a time, because blanks don't eject themselves like real bullets.

If we had the money, we'd rent some prop guns that are built to shoot the blanks, but pistols cost $45 a week and semi-auto rifles cost $100. We'd need about 12 pistols and a couple of rifles. The other problem is, to get the guns, you need insurance.

That would add some more to our already strained budget.

February 15th/February 18th, 1998

2009-10-05T22:10:00.004-04:00

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.

February 4th-February 18th 1998

2009-10-04T05:45:00.005-04:00

So here's a funny anecdote for those who have read this part before. The filmmakers that we met in the bits below were Doug Ulrich, his buddy Al and another buddy. We got so pissed at him and his buddy during this pre-prod process for "High" that I eventually put "Al and Doug" in the no-thank-you section of "Hunting Humans".

The funny part is that later on I hired Doug to do the special effects for FOC1 and Foc2. By that time I had forgotten about the no-thank-you, and a few years later Doug saw HH and read the end credits, and then called me up. We had a good laugh at it.

February 4th, 1998

Met some local filmmakers. Right across the street from where they shoot Homicide is a little coffee bar called The Grind. That's where they wanted to meet. Sounded a little pretentious to me, you know? Like, filmmakers only meet in coffee bars, it's the Los Angeles thing.

Turns out they seem to be a nice bunch of guys who have some experience. They've shot some features on Beta SP(which they say is a bad move, in hindsight) and right now are shooting a skin flick for Cinemax. Apparently, Cinemax has a deal where, if you meet their requirements they'll pay you $40,000 for 8 weeks of run time. Then, if they still wanna show it some more, they'll give you $10,000 for another 8 weeks.

After that, you get the movie back. They just buy rights to show it, not to own it. Kind of like leasing your movie. This leaves you room to sell the film rights where ever you want to. Of course, there probably won't be a lot of takers in the U.S. after it's been shown, but there are plenty of over-seas markets.

Anyway, these guys are going to read the script and let us know what they think. If they like it, they'll help us produce the script. As far as I know, that doesn't include raising any money, but is more of finding the talent(actors), lending their cinematographer and camera(an Eclair), and helping out in other ways.

Coincidentally, one of them whose name is Al looks somewhat like Felix in the script. We'd have to sleazify him a bit, but he'd probably fit pretty well, and he acts too. (NOTE: When I first wrote this I was being nice, but he was pretty pasty white with greasy long hair)

A funny anecdote. The guy who could fit the part of Felix mentions in the course of the conversation that he thinks he could play Saul(The handsome, homicidal villain of the movie). Rick starts laughing, thinking he’s kidding, but from the serious look on his face you can tell he’s not. Rick’s laugh fades and he turns it into smile, says, “Really?”

One of those things you wish you had on camera later.

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 look like high art, and the only good thing to say is that it had some good special effects.

February 2nd, 1998

2009-10-02T04:05:00.004-04:00

This section alludes to one of my regrets about HH. The original draft of the script ended on a big shootout--visions of John Woo slow-mo gunfight--but because we were running out of money, I had to rewrite the end.

That's why it's now that masturbatory gotcha, no gotYOU, gotYOU, Nuh Uh Got you! moment between Aric Blue and Dark.

Know what would cool? If I could find that version of the script and post that ending.

Yeah. That would be cool.

February 2nd, 1998

Found a great site that tells you how to make squibs. For those who don't know, squibs are small explosive charges that you place inside blood bags that you detonate remotely, causing it to explode, thereby simulating a person being shot. This is pretty big, since we've got a big shoot-out in the end of the script and I'm counting on doing all of the f/x myself.

The scene in the end of the movie calls for somewhere between 12 and 20 guns. I had planned to rent some prop guns that shoot blanks, but also to sprinkle real 9mm guns in so I wouldn't have to rent so many prop guns.(I have access to a good number of 9mm guns.)

Once I shot the thing, I could edit the sound effects so they all look like automatic guns. You see, blanks don't emit enough gas to eject themselves from the gun, so if you put them in a real gun, you only get one shot because the bullet won't come out.

Anyway, I can't find any 9mm blanks at any of the shops that specialize in blanks. Most carry 8mm, which seems to be what many of the prop guns fire. More on this later.

January 29th, 1998

2009-09-30T20:02:00.004-04:00

Yeah, this is all pretty much set up. Dry, boring stuff you gotta do before each and every movie unless you have--what do they call them?--producers and production managers and other people in general.

Funny anecdote--the casting person I talk about below triggers some memories. Rick was in a movie directed by a local guy that we'll call RM. RM had some people over to his house to shoot some storyboard stills for his next movie so I went over with Rick. Rick ends up being in a doggy-style sex position with this casting chick for a shot. They're in clothes, but Rick didn't know her that well so it was pretty awkward. That was the first time I met her, but Rick got to know her better.

So fast-forward to we're trying to find some help to shoot "Hunting Humans". We get in contact with this casting chick and she says to come over her apartment. It's July. I meet Rick, and he's got eggnog. I don't know why, except that Rick likes it.

We go over to the ladies apartment and chat for a while. I remember Rick asking her if she wanted some eggnog. The look on her face like, "Are you joking?"

He wasn't. And we didn't end up working with her. I don't blame the eggnog.

January 29th, 1998

I've completed the daily shooting breakdown. This is where I've grouped the shots according to location, so I can get as many scenes done in one location as possible per day. It's infeasible to try to shoot the script in a chronological fashion.

In the breakdown I make some projections on how long it will take to shoot each shot, depending on how many different camera and lighting setups I picture we'll need. Again, I'm pretty much guessing. That's why I'm leaving a couple of extra days at the end to shoot whatever we didn't get done.

On the talent front, Rick's talked to a producer he knew from a couple of other productions. She's given us a couple of leads for our cast, as well as the name of a local director who's done a few low-budget features.

One of our main problems is how to locate a lead actress who A) Can act and B) is very attractive and C) is willing to take off her clothes in two scenes for almost no up-front money.

Rick met the local director who likes the trailer for the script. He claims to have access to a camera, a cinematographer and other actors and actresses.

We're meeting again on the fourth and we're going to talk more about what we can do for each other.

January 6/January 12, 1998

2009-09-30T06:29:00.008-04:00

Hard to believe it was 1998 when we really started moving forward on this. Previously Rick Ganz and I had worked to get two movies going forward, even casting both. But right before we could get them off of the ground they would fall through.

For the record, they were "Lucky Ones"(a standard kids-trapped-in-woods horror with some interesting kills) and "High"(a slacker-with-a-gun that I wrote from an idea from Rick). We actually had a poster for "High" featuring Rick with a girl he may have been banging. The sans-chick poster is above, presented only for posterity and my embarrassment--that's what a guy with Photopaint(not Photoshop) and no skills can come up with.

I felt like this was my last chance. I couldn't go through the whole process again, telling friends/family that we're doing a movie only to have it collapse. So it was with a bit of desperation that we went headlong into this.

January 6, 1998
The shooting script is done! And I thought the script was tough. The shooting script is a detailed list of how I'd like the movie to look when it's done. Of course, this is only my version of the shooting script. But for me, this is easiest, since I can now see what shots I need.

So I had to watch the whole movie in my head, scene by scene and write down the shots. In case you're not used to my lingo, CU is Close Up(head shot), MED CU is medium close up(forehead to adam's apple), MEDIUM is waist to head, OTS is over the shoulder, WIDE encompasses the whole room.
Keep in mind that these are my definitions of the shots. D.P.'s have wide-ranging definitions of the shots; everyone has their preferences.

January 12th, 1998

Working on the script breakdown now. With this, you're breaking every scene down into its parts and especially trying to keep track of who's in the scene, what special F/X are needed, what time of day the scene is, and any props that might be needed.

There's other stuff that can be included. The more info you put in now, the less time you'll spend hunting for that info later.

The Saga Begins

2009-09-30T06:17:00.004-04:00

A lot of people wonder about how I got started making flicks, and also in particular how "Hunting Humans" came about. That's the first movie I wrote/directed, which later got picked up and released through MTI Home Video.

I recently lost a hard drive, but luckily I have backed up some of the log files I kept. I thought: Hey, if I put it all on the interwebs then it'll be backed up THERE. And everybody's a winner.

So here it is. I'll include everything, including some new info--yeah, stuff about the serial killer who was caught with "Hunting Humans" in the dvd player of his truck. And anything else connected.

I'll try to hunt down some pics, and keep you abreast of any interesting stuff STILL going on with the film.

I'll post new thoughts in bold at the beginning of each entry, with the old diary entries in regular.

Hope you enjoy.