Two Dollar Radio & Film Moves

One of my favorite small presses, Two Dollar Radio, is preparing to make some films. Two years ago I read The Orange Eats Creeps by Grace Krilanovich and it helped change the way I think about literature. Not right away. My first read of it, though charged with some enjoyment, felt like work, and at the time I wasn't in the frame of mind where I necessarily appreciated hard work in my reading life. That changed after I finished the book, a few months passed where it somehow was still digesting and decompressing in my subconscious. The desire turned up to revisit it. And looking at myself as a writer at the time I felt like a fraud. For a long time I was focused on telling clever stories. Whereas there isn't anything wrong with a fun yarn and a clever twist, I wasn't exploring and challenging myself with the fresh palette of the page. I was bound by old expectations of what I thought good novels should be. I wasn't handling language as a fine craft. Reading the book again moved me to reinvent myself as a writer, to explore personal landscapes and handle language with a finer point of respect and reverence and reshaping. So I credit this book as an important one in my development as a reader and a writer.

Then this past summer I read Crapalachia by Scott McClanahan and I had to do a double take because I didn't know sentences could be so lean and efficient yet saturated with personality. 

I have some other Two Dollar Radio books on my shelf queued up and am already counting potential Christmas money I haven't received yet to load up on some of their newer titles that have intrigued me, like Jeff Jackson's debut novel Mira Corpora. 

As the books of theirs I've read have been like the introduction of strange delicacies I never knew existed, I'm excited to see what they do with the medium of film. They already have an enviable handle on narrative and voice. In the age where Syd Field formulas have rusted many movies, and people's expectations of how a movie should be paced, I welcome and anticipate what they may be projecting in the realm of digital cinema, and how it may change us as movie viewers.

For anyone that stumbles on my little blog here in the next couple of days, consider tipping them in advance at their indiegogo campaign so they can make the first round. 

Dub Step Father

If you're familiar with dubstep you may find yourself amused, and even cracking a giggle or two. Yet another adapted stage sketch by us Wood Sugars to video. We've been having a ball with Eliaz's new camera.

The Week in Review

This has been one of those weeks that bull dozes time. Been a busy week with the day job and Wood Sugars shows, with of course some after show boozing that made the early mornings the next day a little rough to get the day flowing. Our MILF show on Wednesday had a great turnout, with a quite a few randoms. Thursday's "One Night Only Show" was a lower turn out but I had a blast. We all drank some red wine before the show. I feel a bit funnier, loser the roll with the give and take of comedy performance with red wine trickling in my blood. After we went to a bar called Simon's with a weird old Swedish feel to it. I liked it. I had a little too many cans of cheap Genessee beer, I hadn't heard of it before but it was on sale and my wallet is thin so I gave it a shot. It tasted nice. But I felt a bit ill the following morning. When I arrived home after intense thunderstorms crackled.

My screenplay of Whiskey Pike unfortunately did not make it to the finalist round of the Nicholls Fellowship I had entered it into. Out of almost 7,000 entries 350 were selected for the final round of judging. I was certainly bummed but I spent some time looking back over the script yesterday and I certainly understand its imperfections. At the time I had submitted it I felt jacked that it was quite incredible but with my latest review of it, a little time and space between my last tear into, I do find there are a lot of fluff moments. I have the piece littered with little transitions, montage between scenes to show travel, whiskey biz development, etc. And on closer inspection these things are really just fat which at the time I thought would build a swell visual sprawl of the old time, wilderness landscape. And when it comes down to it a lot of that stuff is understood. And I'm again reminded that film is really tied together with the most important moments.

So I spent some time reworking it, and in a way I've been wanting to do for some time. I'm definitely interested and determined to shoot this thing out in the woods in the 5 year plan. Whereas I certainly don't think this piece will necessitate millions of dollars, being essentially a period piece, it's going to have some costs. And with film, its like holding up a microscope to the detail, which requires more money to fine tune that set and costuming detail. But being a theatre guy, having spent a majority of my time in Chicago studying theatre and putting on plays, my biggest interest in the production is the element of performance. The characters, the dynamic between the Bowermaster family members and most particularly the rivalry between Shane Bowermaster and George the Brewer, incited the new impulse in me to extract and piece together the scenes which focus on these relationships to develop what can an intense theatre piece that can still translate under a low budget. With theatre such period elements of costuming and set can be more representational and with the right lighting can take you to that place with more punch of ambiance perhaps film even can.

So this is my latest experiment with the Whiskey Pike script, tentatively titled The Whisky Infused Boom of Shane Bowermaster. I know I've gone back and forth quite a bit on whether I want to do this as a play or a film or what not. Sure I'm flip-floppy like a politician here, but it is an ambitious piece, and I want to make sure I put some good thought into how I want to commit to the first production of the piece. My next motion is to begin work-shopping the piece with actors and work towards doing a public staged reading of it in the near future to really hone the project.

This week I've also been getting pulled into watching CNN and CSPAN and MSNBC to follow the whole debt ceiling crisis. It's been like a riveting soap opera. We'll see what the dramatic conclusion is. As of this writing I hear there is McConnell bill that is "close".

the pike projected

The Whiskey Pike movie has become my obsession, my passion project. The film adaptation will be my main focal point over the coming year/years until it is being projected at theaters.

I spent quite a few months pounding out a variety of projects but nothing went further than a second or third draft. I feel its time to really hone in on a project and tighten both the creative and business ends of it. So since I can't stop thinking about this one, I am going to give into it. I'm probably on my 5th draft of the feature screenplay, and although I'm happy with it, I'm continually revising and playing with it.

At first it was looking to be very much a period piece, but on further introspection and thinking about the project I've decided that period pieces are in danger of getting so caught up into the dramaturgy and taking themselves so so seriously that they fall flat. I've begun playing with the setting of the piece to maintain a somewhat antiquated world with getting myself pinned the exactitude of the 1800s. It's important to me to keep it a low tech world, so what I'm experimenting with is a modern -esque where the power grid has completely collapsed, so every one back to "re-pioneering" the world, and crafting sustenance from the ground, from one's hands. Although I'm not interested in dwelling upon it as a post-apocalyptic piece, I am interested in the platform of a frontier on top of a failed infrastructure.

My very good friend James N. Kienitz Wilkins is interested in directing, I'll be producing and performing as Shane Bowermaster. I'm looking forward to collaborating with him again. We made quite a few movies growing up and into college and beyond college.

Now it is time to fund raise, fund raise, fund raise. One of the best things you can do is buy the illustrated book, some of the royalties will be going into the film fund.

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