TICKET INFO for THIS MOVIE I CO-WROTE IS SCREENING AT MANN’S CHINESE in LA on JUNE 2nd.

So here is the trailer for The Exquisite Corpse Project a film I co-wrote with my friends from Olde English.  The premise is pretty straight forward: Ben Popik, the director picked 5 writers and had all of them write 1/5th of a feature.  But the catch was that after the first writer (me!) wrote the first 15 pages and the next writer could only see that last 5 pages, and so on and so forth.

The results are interesting and at times really inspired, but what I think makes it a beautiful piece of work is the interweaving doc about the process.  It really gets to the core of what it’s like to make something and collaborate, which first and foremost is what film is.  I’m currently finishing my first feature (How to Follow Strangers) as a writer/director and at times it feels like all you get are lumps.  Trying to balance egos and expectations, make something true and honest while still engaging the audience can be a brutal process.  And if you don’t step back every now and again to remember at the beginning, there was a childlike wonderment and desire to play with people who inspire you, it may not make sense why you keep taking it in the butt.

Unless you like taking it up the butt, in which case, more power to you.

Check it out! lesfilmfestival.com

A few choice excerpts from his New York Times Obit:

In 1969, after six months alone on the Atlantic battling storms, sharks and encroaching madness, John Fairfax, who died this month at 74, became the first lone oarsman in recorded history to traverse any ocean.

In 1972, he and his girlfriend, Sylvia Cook, sharing a boat, became the first people to row across the Pacific, a yearlong ordeal during which their craft was thought lost.

For all its bravura, Mr. Fairfax’s seafaring almost pales beside his earlier ventures. Footloose and handsome, he was a flesh-and-blood character out of Graham Greene, with more than a dash of Hemingway and Ian Fleming shaken in.

At 9, he settled a dispute with a pistol. At 13, he lit out for the Amazon jungle.

At 20, he attempted suicide-by-jaguar. Afterward he was apprenticed to a pirate. To please his mother, who did not take kindly to his being a pirate, he briefly managed a mink farm, one of the few truly dull entries on his otherwise crackling résumé, which lately included a career as a professional gambler.

Seriously!?

Are you guys watching Morgan’s Show yet?  It’s so incredibly comforting, I don’t know what I’m gonna do when the series wraps Friday.  It’s like Friends getting cancelled all over again!*

*What?  Friends was voluntarily shut down?!  That’s crazy! Read the rest of this entry »

This shit cray.*

I’M GONNA GET SO MANY TATTOOS NOW!

So I had a short film that I made play at the Tumblr festival in LA awhile back and during the same block, this film played and was cute and great, and really had a lot of fun with a simple spin on the end of the world idea.  I usually not into apocalypse films, because I’m too busy being anxious about today to worry about impending doom.  But this I like.

The tour doc I directed about TV on the Radio is playing at South by Southwest.  Huzzah!

I wanna go gay for Azealia Banks.

© Helene Giansily

I saw a woman walking down the street who had on cut off jean shorts, a white t-shirt with paint stains, and a backpack when I was on my way to the office.  She was very relaxed, drinking an iced coffee, sauntering on her way to what I later found out was work.  She was an artist assistant, which inevitably meant she was interested in working as an artist in her own right, but hadn’t figured out how to do it full time yet.  Or maybe if she wanted to do it at all.

I like these cross road moments for people.  I used to PA on tv commercials, music videos, films, as I was figuring out how to do my own work.  I just wrapped my first feature, and I partially wish I would have done it much sooner and a part of me knows that was not possible.  It took me years after graduating film school to develop the confidence and skill to feel comfortable committing to the idea of making my own work.  And in hindsight I think that’s exactly what it takes.  Not talent, or a mindblowing idea.  Just commitment to following your ideas through, knowing that you may not be as good as you want to be, but allowing yourself the opportunity to be great.  Granting yourself permission to both fail, and more realistically, succeed.  Because to me, failure is only not trying, whereas success is trying and getting better each time.  But in order to do that you have to try. Read the rest of this entry »