Monday, December 31, 2007

HARRY AGAIN ...

Married ...?! I must've misunderstood. While I was busy dyin' Anna was marrying my cousin Edmund? There was even a child now, the conception of whom I didn't even want to consider. The familiar pain in my chest flared again, the feel of that Confederate's knife twisting the truth deeper into the already damaged organ. Anna was married, and not to me.

I Stayed around the farm the better part of a month, I thought to win her back, finding time alone with her, reminding her with the heat of my kisses of promises made and broken, in a vow to someone else, our love a casualty of war. Edmund. My kid cousin, pest, who we let tag along with us, endured his endless questions and the moony way he'd look at Anna like she was a dish of Aunt Oneida's fresh peach ice cream.

When he left me to die on the battle field I chalked it up to fear and inexperience. Everyone else thought I was a goner, why wouldn't he? But now it took on a sinister tone. I watch him now with fresh eyes, the way his hand rests with ownership on Anna's back, the way he cannot meet my eye or shake my hand, the shut bedroom door, the child who should have been mine ... Had this been his plan; to get me out of the way and make Anna his own? It was improbable. It was ...

I left the day she took my ring off. As long as she was wearin' it there was hope. And then ... there was nothing. Nothing but an endless stream of tomorrows far away from the place I had always planned to turn up my toes, my loving wife and a passel of babies with babies of their own gathered round, tears and fond memories. There have always been Stokes in Cedarsville ... but they won't be mine. My future stretches out on an endless road to somewhere else. I could not stay in Cedarsville and watch my cousin live my life, with my wife.

I headed west.

There's always somewhere to hang your head and drown your sorrows.

Thursday, December 27, 2007

GRANDMA - EMMELINE'S THOUGHTS

There's a yellowjacket buzzing between the window and the screen. A frustrated hum the soundtrack to the moving picture which has become my life. Every now and then it knocks its body into the glass, the buzz fierce, determined. I could tell him that the fight is futile, but he still has to live it out to its close, where I forsee a new beginning, or what would be the point. The sound of life about to end is romantic, haunting, inevitable.

When did I first slip away? I wonder this when the sun glances off the window glass due east, the way it has on sunny days for the past ... oh ... so many years. I use to hide in my head all the time as a girl. It was safe in there, even if you didn't know what you would find, or where you would travel, if you didn't like it you could always change your mind. Life's not like that. The rules are less malleable and the colors less kind. I learned to do my chores and mastered looking like I was listening in school, then I could wander away at will, to anywhere at all. Maybe I knew then that I would retire here.

Yellowjackets, so aggressive, a barbed stinger made for repeated use. There's a hormone in its venom which acts like a homing device enabling them to swarm their victim, drawn to it, a small army of heat seaking missiles. It's horrible when you're swarmed. Your body becomes a rag doll, flailing and flapping, to make the pain go away. It's a deep hurt, the sting of a yellow jacket. But I still don't wish this death on it. Wasting away between window and screen, all that you can't have right over there.

Meat tenderizer neutralizes the venom. I use to carry it with me in the meadow where there was always a predator to be found protecting his queen. The MSG breaks it down. It works on jelly fish stings as well, Portugese man-of-war. I don't remember how I know this and not the other important things of life like how to talk, or walk, or even that to do these things might be important, to someone.

I was married young. Got caught up in the whirl and swirl of it, its reality only becoming clear at night when that old man would come to me reaking of liquor the points of his beard poking my cheek as he rocked himself on me, in me, those whiskers ... yellowjacket stings ... i was too young ... what was I thinking about ?...

"Get that spoon out of my face, Vicky Plamer!" I'd scream it if I could remember how.

Vicky Palmer, a child I wouldn't let feed my dog. She'll give up soon and go watch her shows. She likes the shows where people are unkind to one another. Where they gather in groups to laugh and ridicule. I liked jane Austen. Same thing really, different costumes. How did it go? Something like "We laugh at our neighbors and make sport for them in out turn ..." nicer language than our contemporary vernacular, but it's just people poking fun at other people. It's when they get the fists and guns and the ... I was the only girl growing up.

I had a daughter. She got pregnant by a boy who went MIA in Vietnam. It made her hard. She never liked me much. Thought I was dowdy. "Provenical..." Oh, baby, who cares? Really? I mean what difference does it make to how we live and die, if it's only skin deep? I always hoped for more. More meaning between two people. Had it once. Brief. Treasured. Beautiful. Something I draw off that dusty shelf in the back corner of my memories every now and again so as not to make it ordinary, eveyrday, but a special occasion memory. A remembrance of a time that was as fleeting and as swift as butterfly wings ... He was a drifter. Came to work for Abner and me one summer. That was all. I never thought of him as a place to run away. He was a destination all his own. Just for that while. A gift I gave myself because I deserved him.

Gentle laughter. Real smart and not afraid to share it with me cause I was a woman or stupid, all the things you start to believe after repeated use. Sun warmed skin on skin in the mountains and valleys of this land I had known my whole life ... to see it through a stranger's eyes birthed it back to me whole, mine again ...

"Zzzz...zzz...zzzz..." A stuggle against the window, now the screen, valiant. I gave up the struggle. It was too hard to participate. Once you lose the use of language folks write you off as stupid, not there. I was still having thoughts and ideas and I was angry. Trying to tell them, him... I was the one losing my mind after all. That's when ... the pills.

"Psychotic episodes ...", "Dementia ..."

That's how the doctors diagnosed my anger. How they controlled it. The drugs take you away for awhile. Further away than I had ever travelled in my head. I tried to stay here, live my life, but staying present took the day, there was no room for creative thought, trying to maintain 'normal' took so much effort. ... Now, normal is this.

Abner died. I sat in my wheelchair at the service. Violet sent flowers. I wonder how old Sadie is now? She was three, no four when she left us. It was nice having a child in the house again. ...

What's that sound? That scratching. "Zzzz ...." That yellowjacket is frantic. Something's changing. Wood on wood. It's familiar, that sound ... I haven't heard it in years. The buzz is moving off ... I wonder who opened the window?

Sunday, December 23, 2007

HARRY:COMING HOME

When they found me at Cedar Creek, that battlefield in Virginia, I was pushing out my last breath,

"Anna ...".

There was pain, in my chest, as if my heart was broken,

"Anna ..."

They heaved me onto a pile with the dead, and near dead, sure I wasn't gonna make the night, too many others with a better chance of seeing the sunrise. Come the dawn the pile of bodies on top of me had grown, I must have welcomed the warmth, until I decided not to suffocate instead of bleeding to death, the pressure of all those bodies above having stemmed the flow of my life's fluid enough for the wound to close up a mite on its own.

It took me near an hour to work my foot out into the open enough to wiggle it sose someone might notice. I could hear the voices of the medics, and walking survivors, calling for the living. I hoped someone might pass my grave and notice that the meter of my foot was different from those of the twitching corpses. It occurred to me that a regular rhythm, some synchopated measure, might serve,

'Oh! Susanna ...' I tried to hum it in my head, while bobbing my foot in time to the beat, my feeble voice muffled by the cloth and flesh tomb.

I thought back to Anna and me dancing to that song, old man Finkbbinder on fiddle, poncy Billy Ofsteder singing full tenor. I'd change the name to "Oh, Miss Anna ..." and whisper it in her ear all soft and secret. She'd catch her breath, and tell me not to hold her so close, it was getting hot in there ...

"...Oh don't you cry for me ..."

My cousin Edmund watching us, ignoring sweet Helly who followed after him like a lapdog.

"... Miss Anna, don't you cry ..."

My foot alone in the air, the rest of me crunched under meat sacks of blood and excrement in what use to be the living, singing that song.

"Over here!!"

A voice boomed near by. I felt the pile jostle overhead and the pressure give way to a gunsmoke clouded sky. I thought maybe it was heaven.

I woke up again in a dungy hospital tent to some grizzled old man, smeared in blood, digging a horse needle into my chest

"Aaaaaggghhhhhh ....!!!

There was something in my mouth, I bit down hard, grateful for a place to revenge the pain. Someone splashed me with liquid, liquor by its smell, and then I was gone again until I came to much later in more pain then I knew anybody could have and live. I thought about Anna, she was what I was livin' for. The look on her face when I dragged my sorry ass back and walked her down the aisle of the reformed church we'd been worshipping at since we were children.

I lived for the soft of her skin, the memory of the warm wet between her thighs the one time she had let me in, when I'd told her I was heading off to war. How we'd repeat that bliss after making a pledge before the preacher and the rest, make us some sons and daughters ... there have always been Stokes in Cedarsville. The thought of Anna made me pray to live instead of wishing I was dead. Anna was worth living for.

It took longer than I'd hoped. Everytime I'd get near well enough to make the journey home, I'd push too soon, and land myself in some flop house nursing a fever and an abcess. A spinster lady took me in up in Maryland, or was it Delaware. Said she was only doin' it in the hopes that some other woman was doin' the same for her men folk on the road home from war. It took almost two years to make it back to Cedarsville, and when I rounded that bend down Schooner's Lane, named after the ship builder turned farmer who'd settled the land along with the Stokes men back around the time a Henry was king in England, by the time I turned that corner and saw the farmhouse, well, I thought my aching heart was like to burst with joy. I was finally home, almost to Anna ...


HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

Friday, December 21, 2007

SADIE'S 1ST HOLIDAY ON THE FARM ...

Sadie spent her first holiday back on the farm alone. Grandma was there, but she didn't talk, just sat, propped in her wheelchair, staring at nothing. Moving with assistance, Emmeline Stokes could transfer her weight from one warehoused position to the next, offering no emotion to the event. Sadie wondered what she was thinking ... where had she gone so far away in her head while her body was maintained on the farm. First by Mrs. McMichael, Emmeline's oldest friend, whose brood had all grown and moved away from Cedarsville in search of the bright lights and big citiness of Manhattan, an island so far out of Lily McMichael's realm of thinking it might well have been on Mars instead of just 2 hours down the Thruway.

But Lily had dropped dead of a heart attack on her way to bring Emmeline her supper. So Sadie was sent a telegram by a social worker, and she'd left her quiet librarian's life in Lorain, Ohio, where there was nothing much to hold her, to come home and see to things. There was no one else to do it. But Grandma had been a shock.

Emmeline, Sadie's Grandma, had married onto the Stokes farm the summer she was 17. Abner, that was her husband's name, Abner Stokes was 30 when she caught his eye. He'd been married before, but that wife had been barren and then she dried up and died on him at least five years before Emmeline filled out, right in front of him. Her dad had owned the dairy farm down the road and she was always taggin' along after her brothers. Then giggling with her friends walking past Abner's barns. And finally whooshing by in the souped-up cars of teenaged boys. It had been too much for Abner to bear, his imagination was wild with raw images of flowers wrenched from their stalks before the blossom had bloomed. So he'd married her and they'd had Violet and not much else.

Sadie couldn't remember her Grandma whole. Violet, her mother, lit out off the farm as fast as she could. She'd dragged Sadie, the lovechild of a boy who'd never come back from Nam, and headed west for glamour and the movies, for which she knew she was destined. They ran out of money in Lorain, Ohio and Violet died there many Marlboros and MaiTais later. Leaving Sadie alone to clean out her drawers and rent her mother's room to make ends meet.

Sadie'd flirted with that other life, the one of booze and barstools she'd inherited from her mother, which resulted in several small tatoos and waking up to men who held no interest by daylight, no real joy at night. There had to be something more to life. Something like the adventure of the novels into which she escaped. But so far life's journey held nothing more glamorous then picking out a container for her mother's cremains, and then figuring out where she'd have wanted them spread. She knew her mother would not want to be locked in a box, but rather floating in the ether of something grand. Sadie had taken a trip to Cinncinnati and dumped Violet into the Ohio River, where she'd swirled away, a grey-green mass, sinking on her way to Kentucky.

But, like I said, Grandma had been a shock. Sadie had seen pictures after all, and heard stories of someone powerful and vibrant and alive. "Not enough room for the two of us ...!" Violet had always said. Sadie assumed this meant personalities. Personality was what Violet had a lot of, and Sadie had known to diminish her own to make room in the small house, or it would probably have exploded. But Grandma just wasn't there. No personality at all. Like a window onto nothing. It had been a great disappointment to Sadie.

She had so looked forward to belonging to something larger than every day. But Grandma was just maintenance ... in the beginning. Sadie started poking around the old farm house a month or two after she'd set up a routine for Grandma with Mrs. Palmer, and gotten herself a pocket-money job at the used bookstore in town.

Town. One block of not much. There were the weekenders who brought the exotic with them up from New York City and looked down their noses at the trades. There were the regulars who roamed the town; Dollar Bill, the homeless guy who they say walked out of his office on Wall Street straight up the Henry Hudson, landing in Cedarsville, in the same suit, now shredded and dirt caked, the Windsor knot of his tie holding his collar together. His parents had had a house there when he was small. It was where he'd been happy.

There was a Busy-Body, who owned the dress shop down the street. Gender dubious, She liked bouffant hairstyles, rhinestone glasses, and sold a mix of kitch and boutique. Her companion was a troll-man, who everyone knew was a woman, also known as the Gossip. She could be relied upon to recall the salacious events of Cedarsville, no matter the era, and made the most godawful smelling linament, which worked really well, but could clear a room. Sadie wondered what President Bush would make of this heterosexual couple.

And then there was Henry. Henry Becker, whose mother, Abby, had been the only person Violet could tolerate in that small town, so the stories of little Henry Becker were tinged with a magical charm, and the mandate to look after Violet Stokes's girl was inherited. Henry had showed up at the bus the day she arrived with her small suitcase of treasures, the rest of her life not worth the freight. He'd driven her up to the farm house, took her in to meet Grandma and Mrs. Palmer, and she hadn't been able to get out a word. Not a single word. Nothing seemed good enough to say to him, this special and rare beast who had come so suddenly upon her in this wooded place. She wanted to be her best self for him.

This had never happened to her before. She could talk. Have conversations. Though she rarely did. Henry had been something else. He was a seismic event. The heat rushed to her face, her chest got tight, and all the words rushed from her head ... all she wanted to do was throw her arms around his neck, give her mouth to his, feel his hands on her ... but she could never find the path, the words, which are the normal road to such events.

Henry had awakened something in her. When she set presents for Grandma and herself under the small tree she'd sawed down and decorated with the red-glass ornaments she'd found in a dusty trunk, forgotten reflections of a warmer time in the old farmhouse, she gave herself a present from Henry. It was wrapped in plain brown paper and tied with a green velvet ribbon, a ribbon her mother had given her to wear in her ginger hair at a piano recital when she was 12 ...

She didn't need to open it, she knew what it was. So she stared at it, wondering how she would react if it had really come from him. Well, because it had really come from him in a way, its spirit. She knew her cheeks would flush with color and she'd smile without being able to stop herself as her fingers fumbled with the ribbon, too pretty to let go to waste, looking up at him as he watched her, waiting for her impetuous delight ... when she'd fling herself into his arms laughing at the small scrap of old paper on which he'd written but a single word ..."Hope?".

Sadie smiled, blushing as if it were more than her fantasy. It was enough.

HAPPY-MERRY!

Tuesday, December 18, 2007

SLAP&TICKLE READING

Twenty actors met us at the Atlantic Theatre studios yesterday for the first reading of "Slap&Tickle" our next project, Sophia's and mine. It was awesome! We invited members of our Racing Daylight crew who have already signed on for the next round, Stephen Harris, our d.p., Jamie Kirkpatrick, editor, and Michelle Baker, locations and on the producing staff, and of course Donn Gobin who is the best cheerleader exec. producer in the world! Ingrid Price will be returning as costume designer, Melanie Dimitri as key in makeup ... so reassuring to us, that so many have wanted to work with us again. Quality of life as hallmark.

The performers were so supportive of the quirky way we devise a screenplay reading which eschews the narrator and has the characters reading their own actions. Melissa Leo told me that the staged readings of Racing Daylight we did this way helped her get the charcter deeper into her bones. With small budget films rehearsal is all but nil so this method of reading seems to give us a bit of rehearsal we hadn't anticipated.

Slap&Tickle, unlike Racing Daylight, is a more traditional narrative in construct, and content, though there is a twist. The multi-generational and multi-racial nature of this depression era story surprised the cast and the small invited audience. They have never seen this movie before, with a family that looks less like the segregated stereotype of the Hollywood renderings, and more like America. This is the American family I know from the inside out.

Our potential investors and partners were smitten. YES!!! They laughed, they cried.

Racing Daylight has opened many doors. One in the can proves you can get it there I expect. I also suspect that moving on to the next project frees up the first from over-mothering. But lest you think I have forgotten this first in the excitement of the second, fear not, we are looking at some very interesting and cutting edge methods of distribution for our first love-child, RACING DAYLIGHT.

Friday, December 14, 2007

J.K ROWLING

I think it's no surprise to anyone who knows me well that I'm a "Harry Potter" fan. Okay, maybe fan is mild, having read the series in its entirety more than four times, and individual books even more than that. Particularly the last, book 7, "The Deathly Hallows", where Ms. Rowling draws the threads together so satisfactorily, with so much attention to love and risk and hope in the tale of the boy wizard.

I started out life with a fascination for 'Peter Pan', and still believe that it is the story of a woman afraid of growing up to be a man. After all, the Peters on stage, at least in the productions I've seen, are always women. And certainly Peter was a female in the 2 productions of the play I mounted at the convent. One in the summer of grade 2 and again in grade 6. Of course I played Peter. I directed and cued lines from the stage, as I had memorized the play in its entirety when I was 4 or 5.

We all danced, but my brother was David Lichine's protege until junior high when tights in his locker brought unwanted abuse. David believed, in the Ballet Russe way, that dancers are actors who speak with their bodies. Acting classes were mandatory at the Lichine studio, and when Tian, my brother SabasTIAN, was 7 or 8 he was cast as Peter Pan. I helped him learn his lines. I was a capable sidekick, happy to parrot, especially the irreverance of a foundling.

We were all adopted, the children in my family, 3 of us, then 4, then 3 again. I was the youngest by 3months and 3 years respectively. Not knowing my genetic history has been a great creative spark for me. I learned to be whoever I wanted or needed to be to suit the time and occasion, having no pre-set default to minimize my options. But Peter Pan modeled something else, a self-sufficiency coupled with a disdain for the institutionalized family he so obviously craved and tried to recreate in Neverland amongst the lost boys.

There were the overt villains; Captain Hook and his pirate crew, and absurdities; Nana the nanny sheep dog; and terror in the crocodile with the ticking clock. But what I remember most was the conceit of mothers as those who 'bar the nursery window if you stay away too long'. There was no going back. No love was unconditional. Peter protected me from abandonment while I was growing up.

Harry has become my adult child. He's braver, less defensive than Peter. The kind of spirit which enabled me to conceive of and believe it possible to bring Racing Daylight from the page to life. Sophia, my producing partner, is also a self-professed Potter queen. We discovered this shared obsession deep into our working relationship and we find ourselves using Potterisms or quoting Dumbledore in relation to life issue questions. A dose of magic in this business of make-believe in which we dwell.

I have sent a dvd copy of Racing Daylight to Ms. Rowling, in care of her agent, in the hopes that our make believe will in some small measure pleasure her, as her world has captured me. Ours is an adult fairy story, worlds where anything is possible, if you believe. And I do believe in fairies.

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

THE INTERNET/WGA/TEASER

We have been counseled to cut a new teaser. One which features the quirky funny side of the film. Jamie Kirkpatrick, beloved cutting genius, is fitting this into the schedule of his new feature.

Our present teaser is running on a couple of websites now besides our own:

There's YouTube, where we posted ourselves, and In The Trenches, a site by and for women over 40. We met them on the internet and Melissa Leo and I met up with COO, Debbie Zipp, and members of her team over lunch in Los Angeles. Debbie liked the film enough to support it with a teaser of it on her site. She also helped us get a script of Slap&Tickle, our next project, to the legendary Ruby Dee.

Thanks, Debbie.

__________________________


MotheringHeights.net
GriefBecomesMe.com
ChristineFugate.com

I met Christine Fugate at a Sundance producers weekend. She and Suzanne Jurva were my housemates there. Such a supportive pair ... of each other, of me, whom they'd only met the second before. So happy. Very motivating women. And now Chrisitine has posted us on her blog MotheringHeights which is witty, sage, and insightful advice irreverently proffered. I wish she'd been writing it when my kids were of an age. I have passed it on to those in need.

Visit her other sites as well to learn about christine the filmmaker. Thank you, Christine.

__________________

It's propaganda, the notion that 'the internet as new frontier' is so far away in producer spin, with regard to their position in the WGA strike. Ten years ago I got a script (Pretty Bird) to the American Zoetrope inner sanctum from an upload to the AZ website. I followed due process; reviewed four scripts on the site then I was eligible to post one of mine own for review. I posted one an agent had told me was "an embarassment" to me, and which at the time was my love child.

The script of Pretty Bird worked it's way up the food chain with good reviews, then it was read in house, and we exchanged several phone calls with regard to an option which was tanked when my then agent got into the picture and loaded my deal with a director and producer she represented, people I had never met but who liked the script but had not optioned it and ... you've got to love the way this system works, huh? Or run mad...

That was ten years ago. Levels of protected access have changed. It's easier then ever to reach people. I wrote to Mark Cuban directly. He got his company, HDNet, to read the script of Racing Daylight with an eye to finance. And if I had emailed them a pdf with something they felt they could market I would have sold it direct. That's my point. That's not what has happened for me, but then I know I'm not making films for mass consumption.

But please, make no mistake, I KNOW there is an audience for this film. They are not a small group, but diverse and hungry for product which makes them think, both morally and spiritually. They are men and women who are looking for a bit of whimsy in their everydays. I have sat in those audiences and listened to the women laughing at the foibles of Sadie, at themselves, and that awkward feeling which floods your body when near the person who gets your motor running. I have heard the pious moan, and seen them nod at Edmund and his karmic dilemmas. I have watched men, who are already surprised that it's not a 'chick flick', guffaw at the antics of Henry, as us, watching the strange woman discover herself, and him.

In this new digital age I can find people with whom to do business with greater ease and provide them with a product they want at a reasonable, no middle person, rate of return. And until the walls of protected access go up in this medium, opportunity is rife for the maverick who likes to pioneer.

We're arguing over the internet, the writers and the studios, as if it were an entity way in the distant future, when it's here now.

Friday, December 7, 2007

THOUGHTS ON DISTRIBUTION

I keep getting the tower card in tarot readings related to 'Racing Daylight" and distribution. I think it's no secret that I steer by these arcane rudders; astrology, tarot .... I use to be embarassed by these rituals, hiding them away as secret practices. But after consideration I figure that these are centuries old systems which, when used as guidance tools rather than predictive ones, are as effective to analyze a set of circumstances as a 'blackle' search, and for me, infintely more satisfying. Once you crest certain age hurdles, odd predilictions change categorizing from frightening to eccentric, and one generally cares less about the opinions of others.

My mother gave me my first set of tarot cards when I was 14. She said I was 'ready to learn how to control my gifts', and that's all the guidance she gave me in this arena, except to offer me several books on the subject as companion to my deck. An interesting contrast to the Convent School where she sent me to be trained in other esoterica. I never thought to ask what those gifts were, I was a teenager then, and what could she possibly know or understand about me?

Rider-Waite, that was the brand of card she gave me. My mother had a very fancy gilt-edged, almost icon-like, deck of her own, which I never saw again after that day. Maybe I was supposed to carry on the tradition of card reading and she would retire hers, though I do remember her putting together juju and gris-gris bags in later years which were a bit darker in intention, but I had learned not to ask questions about her motives. I found a Rider-Waite deck, wrapped in silk, in her lingerie drawer when I cleared it out after she died.

The deck I use now was inherited from Barbara Lehmann, a close friend with whom I had attended U.C. Berkeley. She died when we were 37. Her passing changed my living. Barbabra had survived Hotckins disease at the age of 13 with huge doses of radiation administered at Stanford Medical Center. It seems the radiation which saved her would also give her the fist sized schwannoma at the base of her spine which caused her so much distress that she dropped dead. The cause of her suffering only diagnosed post mortem. She actually died of an arythmia, like a toruture victim who just shuts down when it all becomes too much.

Barbara haunted me for a short time after her passing. That was my first visit from someone who was dead that I actually knew, and that's when I knew for certain there was life beyond death, or, that I was truly insane. I have opted for the first interpretation.

But back to the tower card. I wasn't sure what it meant in relation to my issue. It is a frightening looking card with lightening bolts blasting a stone tower, an impenetrable fortress. The interpretation is always, old systems crashing down, fear of change, holding onto the past. I couldn't get my brain to fathom its meaning in relation to my questions and concerns.

But now, all of a sudden it makes a sense to me. The WGA strike has encouraged my understanding of how it all works and why we're all trying to divide up this new pie BEFORE it takes root and becomes the new system. The old way and models of distribution, the studio stronghold is the tower, and it's all about to change. The advent of this new electronic age when more control, responsibility, is given to the individual ... structures are scrambling for control of the new while still searching for the 'sure things' of the old model ... but they don't really work anymore. Change is imminent, is upon us, is an opportunity!

The tower card cautions one to release the old and encourages a willingness to embrace the new, or be crushed under the toppling stones. Such good and sound advice that. So our strategies are changing to accomodate the new and interesting and unknown. The digital. The new models are nebulous, there's an opportunity to be creative, to take it to the niche rather than asking them to find us. Exciting this!

They say, in tarot, that once you accept the 'hard' cards as opportunities, walking your path is easier. Onward!

Monday, December 3, 2007

SUNY ULSTER

I LOVED this screening! For many reasons, not the least of which that we screened from tape and not dvd.

Since July when the Marbletown Democrats screened our film on dvd, it has been a nightmare to sit in the audience. The color calibrations are off and the technology, DVD, is unreliable projector to projector. Lots of skipping and poor color calibration and dirty sound heads have made for some pretty woeful viewings, nerve wracking too.

But wonderful Sophia, having been with me on the last two fiascos, where folks have still enjoyed the film and stayed despite the quality issues, was not going to have that experience again. The amazing woman contacted our local hero, Jason Martin, who hooked us up with his friend Kale to rent a mini-dv player. She contacted Anthony, a techno-wizard at UCCC and between them they plugged in our rented player to his perfectly calibrated projector and watched the film as it was intended to be seen with our incredible sound/music playing out of state-of-the-art speakers.

We will NEVER screen from a DVD again!

The audience were people I knew, many of them, in so many different areas of my life. People with whom I sit on the boards of the Library and its foundation, moms with whom I have sat on basketballl bleechers forever who are also intriquing and inspiring artists and individuals, members of our Actors&Writers audience, who have come because they like my work, and a woman I'm hoping will be our entertainment attorney, Jackie Borock, who is new to the area and a boon to our burgeoning film community.

This was an audience that came wanting to like this film, and they did. The questions were so insightful. so clearly steeped in the metaphors and the deeper meanings inherent in this quirky ramble. I am so excited by the human responses to what we have wrought. This film works! Repeatedly we see that it delights and it pays off. So funny and pleasing that. I've always thought of myself as so 'out there' conceptually, but I see from these screenings we're having across the country that I'm not so 'out-there' alone.

Thanks to Jaf Farkas, our art director and Sarah Plant, composer, for coming along as part of the home team. Onward!