O.K, sometimes it is cool...

Right?

Isn't that cool?

I mean, I freaked when I saw it.  My Director on the series hadn't said 'boo' to me about it, he'd just been quietly implementing the idea he and I had had together a month back while we were trying to figure out how to build a set that we could afford while still making it cool and full of possibility.

We had a 'eureka' moment on the phone call, he ran with it, and that was the last I heard of it.

Until yesterday.

We were at 64 Steps, the production design firm (and it's a real honor to be working with them, they're a bunch of serious dudes...) having a meeting on our two shows and at the end he took me to his workstation and dropped THAT on me.

Holy frickin' smokes.

It's a wonderful thing to work with talented people.

First I punched my director, then I punched my production designer, then I called my wife, then I called my 'other wife' (aka: my executive producer), then I sat at home and stared at it for a bit.

I do realize it's just a set.

But the thing is, it's not.

It's the beginning of the fruition of an idea, the realization of a dream, the fulfillment of a decade's worth of work getting to this point and then (DV) moving beyond.  And the lesson I continue to learn from this biz is the lesson I've been learning this week as my contractor has built us a second bathroom (yes, we've been living for years with four kids and one toilet...pretty awesome...) and a workspace for me that's something other than an IKEA desk next to the water heater.

Every time I made a suggestion he said one of two things.

"That would be better..." (insert Polish accent please)

Or...

"That would not be better..."

And I realized that that's how I need to continue to embrace criticism and comment from the people I work with.  I don't have to take it personally (which is hard for me, I'm a 'personal' kind of guy...) I just have to take it, then throw on my best Polish accent and hardened construction worker attitude and figure out if implementing the idea would be a "that would be better..." scenario or a "that would not be better..." scenario.

Simple as a bathroom in a basement or a smokin' set in a studio.

Simple as better is better and sometimes even awesome.

Like that set!

T

Just so you don't get to thinkin'...

That this 'being a producer' business is all sugar cones and lollipops...

It's 3:23am as I write this, and I'm working.

Just finished a 'big time' email to a couple of key collaborators on one of the new TV series I'm producing.

Why?

Because I can't sleep.

Why?

Because my baby girl woke us up at 2am and I started thinking.

Seriously, when it gets this busy most of my challenge is about using my brain wisely and well during the day then allowing it to to slowly shut down (food, red wine and good sex with your wife helps tremendously, but don't tell her I told you our 'trade secrets'...) at night so that I can sleep.  Just tonight my wife was mentioning that we need to take a good drive together 'cause that's the only time I'll talk to her about what's going on.  She tries to talk to me at night, but I clam up 'cause I know that if I start talking about it, I won't be able to sleep.

Tonight being a case in point.

It's now 3:27am and I'm still awake.

So instead of lying there stewing, I just got up and friggin' plowed through an email to my guys, rhyming off every concern I had, putting it to rest so that, hopefully, I can get some.

Rest.

So long as I can stop worrying that I was too 'curt', 'direct', or 'mean' in my email to them...

'Cause it's 3:28am!

Dang'.

There's no business like this business.

T

Ooh Baby, Baby it's a...

Sad world...

Oh man.

So I watched "THERE WILL BE BLOOD" yesterday and "NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN" today.

I'm in Vancouver, working, which means I'm staving off loneliness with work and movies.  I called my wife this morning, like, six times in an hour and a half.  Little things I wanted to share with her, like the new egg sandwich at Starbucks, the sunshine, things like that.  I told her yesterday that I forget what it was like living alone.  I find myself looking at people trying to figure out which ones are single, which ones are together.  

I was wondering if it's wrong for me to feel 'sad' for the ones that seemed lonely--wrong because I'm only thinking about it from my side of the fence, y'know, like I should cut them some slack because what they know is all they've ever known and who am I to assume that my way of life is better, or more whole, than theirs--then I stop being politically correct and it seems to me that alone is just that, alone, and if asked whether it's better to eat a chicken burrito with my wife and four kids around our dining room table or on the floor of a hotel room with the coffee table replacing our harvest one, it's very clear to me that together is better.

It's what we've been made for.

Together.

And the common denominator in both these 'critically lauded' movies is a bone deep loneliness. So bleak.  I'm sitting there watching the last moments of TWBB and I can't believe what I'm seeing.  Then, I get to the end of NCFOM tonight and I'm feeling the same thing.

Pointless.  Bleak.

Sure, both were impeccably constructed.  Beautifully shot.  Wonderfully acted.  The writing was superb, everything about both films was essentially flawless.

Except for the lack of hope.

"Blah, blah..."  "Go home 'preacher boy'..."

Yeah, I get what you're saying.

I'm not saying anything but that I missed the light.  And I understand why all stories don't have to be happy stories, but I'm really struggling to figure out what the 'value' was in those films. Did they make any contribution to my life?  

TWBB spoke to me about the danger of ambition, the deep evil of dishonesty and a lust for power.  So, o.k, it spoke to me.  But, man, the whole, "I'm a false prophet.  God is a superstition..." thing.  Wow.  So dark.

"Some would say 'honest'..."

Yeah I get that too.  But I wonder if that kind of bleak experience is truly universal or if our artists just 'think it so...'  I wonder if they've been conditioned by years of mounting disillusionment in western culture (our books, our popular culture with all its attachments, our schooling system...) to believe that life is, at its root, hopeless.

Do all people feel hopeless?

One of the near closing lines in NCFOM was little less virulent but still played the 'God card'. "I thought that as I got older God would eventually just come into my life, but He hasn't..."  That felt more authentic to me, yet still hopeless.  And I wondered if the writers, in creating that moment for their character, really felt that people long for an experience of God's life in theirs. I wonder if they think an encounter with God is life's zenith.

Seems like it could be.

Because if God exists and is interested in us then to have some (any) kind of 'communion' with God is to cease from loneliness.   I was reading "I Am Legend" this week too and, again, the central issue in the story was that of loneliness.  

Then I'm walking through Vancouver's streets looking at all the street people and they're so alone.  Nobody (including me) looks at them.  Then I imagined them railing at me for not looking at them and I thought to myself; "It's because you only want me to look at you so that you can harangue me for money!  If you wanted to look at me just to smile and say 'hi' I'd love that, but that's not the case now is it?"

So they're alone sitting there under the lamp post and I'm alone hurrying by.

All of us, divided.

(and before my brother-in-law stops reading this 'depressing' post lemme' try and turn the corner)

Then I saw a commercial with a child asleep in the back seat while her parents drove her to the beach and I thought that maybe there's hope.

Hope in giving oneself away.  

Hope in spending one's life to give to others.  And I don't necessarily mean some kind of 'altruistic' giving but maybe just the simplistic kind, the kind that gives a rose to your wife or a smile to a stranger.  The kind that gives your life to build one so that you can provide one for your kids.  The kind that lays itself out there, risking rejection and pain again and again, for the sake of speaking or making something 'good' that brings life into the existence of another.

'Cause it occurs to me, in the midst of all this loneliness, that it was selfishness that was really the killer in those movies.  And the only antidote for selfishness is selflessness.

To 'find your life' you've got to 'lose' it.

And that's not wisdom I came up with, it's wisdom that came to me.

Like a gift from the blue.  Like water to the desert.  Like a wife to a husband.

Like my kids to their daddy.

Like a new country for all men for whom there was blood.

T

Finally...

So the trailer for my first film is (you said it) FINALLY up online.

You can check it out at www.thestormiscoming.com then select 'THE FILM' then 'TRAILER' and it's all yours.

The thing about it that's both incredibly satisfying and deeply humbling at the same time is just how friggin' long it's taken to get from 'there' to 'here'.

I wrote the film October 2005.

We set it up November December 2005.  Shot it February, March 2006.  Cut it summer 2006. Finessed it fall 2006.  Screened it for the first time February 2007.  Took in the reaction and tweaked some things March 2006...

Then we ran out of money.

The rest of 2007 was about the most insecure, difficult, 'beats taking' year I've ever experienced.

Throughout it (and in the midst of trying to figure out what the heck I was going to do about that pesky little thing called 'feeding your family'...) I kept working on it, little by little, pushing it ahead one inch at a time.  My business partner (everybody needs one of those, f'real...) kept pushing too, working like a madman to try and get our tax credits back from the government.  

Three audits later, we got the money and I was able to get people working on the thing again.

That was fall 2007.

Between then and now we've had the site built and launched, and have toiled through three versions of the trailer (from concept, to rough cut, to final cut, to sound design, to scrapping it, to new concept, to rough cut, to final cut, to sound design, to scrapping it, to third concept, rough cut, fine cut, mastering cut [where it really started to come together], to the final two passes at a sound design that would make my business partner AND my wife happy).

Now that's a tall order.  Anyway, I sat them down (one at a time) to watch it.  And they liked it. Felt that we finally had something worth proceeding with.

That was two weeks ago.

And today it went out to a bunch of folks in 'the biz', real decision makers who were going to decide whether or not to work with us in helping to take the film to market based on whether or not they liked the trailer.

Can you feel the tension?

It's about the craziest, most prolonged period of uncertainty and stress I can remember.

Then tonight, sitting with my wife watching 'American Idol', I popped into my office to check my email and there it was.

A response from L.A.

(let's let the anticipation build a moment...)

And...

They LOVED it!

Want to take it into their contacts at two major studios.

How awesome is that?

Trust my wife to be a 'wife'.  She's like; "Why can't they just say 'yes' and cut us a cheque already?"  Poor baby, this whole journey has been so hard on her.  She looks at me.  "You always knew, didn't you?  You knew the trailer would be the thing."

How can you do this if you don't 'know'?

If you don't believe in your story (and your 'belief' is double-minded at best 'cause you doubt then believe then doubt then believe at least seven times a day)  If you don't love it.  Nobody else will.

Keep in mind now (all you would-be filmmakers out there) that I'm not saying that the thing I love is the best thing ever.  I love my kids.  When they're good.  When they're bad.  I love them just the same.  I love my movie.

My simple, humble, not all that it could be... (or as my outspoken script supervisor told me on set night 17 of principal photography; "Good enough but far from good...")

--Yeah, thanks.  I needed that.  On second thought.  SHUT UP!--

...Movie.  I love it.  For what it was going to be.  For what it isn't and, most of all, for what it is and for all the people who made it that way.

I love it and I love them.

And L.A (in the first small, but oh-so-important way) loves it too.

Can you believe it?

Cool.

So, having passed that first (after so many) test, we get to live to try and fight another day.

Day 775 of deciding to make a movie.

Oh boy.

T