Monday, June 4, 2007

NOT TIRED YET!


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It’s late on Sunday night, I have a lot going on tomorrow my body is tired but my brain is still going. I thought I would do a little bit about The Item. My friend Dan Clark wrote & directed, my other friend Don Asher produced, and I Dave Pressler designed, created the weird creature in the film, as well as acted. I play Martin. We made this film (Shot on digi beta) back in the 90’s before digital video was all the rage. We would earn money in our television endeavors then shoot some more of our movie. This went on from 96 to 98.
We had a rough video cut that was submitted to the Sundance Film festival, we were accepted into dramatic competition, no one was more surprised then we were.

We were very proud of our movie, but the subject matter was exploitation / art dark comedy with a hell of allot of gratuitous violence! A fun romp, but would it work for the Sundance crowd? The audience was polarized, people either loved The Item or hated it. Entertainment Weekly had us in the The Sundance Buzz section the week before the festival. I understand that bombs also make a buzzing sound before they blow up.
Don’t get me wrong, I loved The Item, but it was very Midnight Movie! Very Grindhouse! In hindsight, we would have done really well in the Midnight Movie category, instead of dramatic competition. We wend back to Hollywood with out a deal.
But that is more common then the entertainment press would lead one to think. The focus of the festival winners is a better story, the scrappy kid who made a film with his last two cents, and came home a millionaire! Not the reality of hundreds of others who slugged it out for a year for a reasonable distribution deal, or nothing at all.

The wonderful thing is you can buy The Item at Amazon, get the DVD it’s got extras and it in the proper format. THE COVER ART IS MISLEADING! It was forced upon us by the distributor! There was really nothing legally we could do. If you ever make a deal for a book, DVD, whatever. Make sure you have FINAL APROVAL OF THE COVER ART in you contract! It just so happened Jeepers creepers was coming out on video and they wanted it to “Kinda' Look Like That” to trick movie fans into buying our movie.



It’s really sick and wrong and the one thing that bugs me every time I see the cover.
Check it out, at the very least you get to see me running around with a big mustache shooting a gun. Here's the trailer.



The European distributor has a much better DVD cover, this one.


I swear I’ll get back to writing about sculpting . :-D

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow! The EuroBox is a bettr box! I want a EuroBox!

MM

Anonymous said...

Kinda how your robot toy tends to “Kinda' Look Like That" Bender character from "Futurama".

"It’s really sick and wrong and the one thing that bugs me every time I see" it on a toy news site.