February 26, 2008: SK Update

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

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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

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

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

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

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

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

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