Zach here. It’s looking like most of the people who pledged enough money to earn their mug on the blog don’t consider it such a coveted honor as I do. Here are the only two donor photos I’ve gotten since the last batch:
That’s M. Berger, an Oregonian with a heart o’ gold.
And that there is Ian Weintraub. He’s my dad. I’m really liking what he did with the whole “imitate the concept art” thing. I can see this really taking off as some sort of viral marketing campaign after we’ve shot the movie. Kind of like what Death at a Funeral did by placing cardboard displays in theater lobbies with a space for people to pose for a photo and then upload to twitter.
I can already sense the outrage of parents and teachers across the nation (the globe?) as hundreds of thousands of children are caught taking pix of themselves making the international sign for choking in class. Could be cool.
Still gonna hold off on my remaining major news items. They involve an upcoming and very exciting screening in our own beloved NW, an extremely exciting deal made south of the border, and an overwhelmingly exciting addition to the cast of The International Sign for Choking. Stay gold everyone.
Zach here, to deliver some of that news that I spoke of a few days back. It’s going to come in installments. Here’s the first:
Bummer Summer is going to screen as part of the Calgary International Film Festival in late September. If you or a loved one will be in or around the area at that time, check out the festival’s page for the film to get more information. Even if you have no intention at all of attending you should still check it out for the description, which I find super flattering (typos and all).
I don’t think I’m going to make it out to this one, which totally sucks because the schedule looks awesome. Our favorite film that won’t stop following us around, Gabi on the Roof in July will be screening as well, making this our third festival in common. A few familiar titles from the festival in Buenos Aires will also be sharing the slate. And while my movie is playing, Kiarostami’s new joint Copie Conforme will be playing simultaneously in the neighboring auditorium. I find that exciting, but also a total drag because I couldn’t possibly recommend my movie over that one in good conscience.
And that’s all I’m going to spill for today. Be on high alert for a few more news items in the coming weeks, each of which even more exciting than today’s!!!
It’s getting kind of late, I’m getting a little bit sleepy, and strenuous times on a weird, sparsely populated island are in my very immediate future. I’m here right now for one thing only.
As you may or may not know, on the fifteenth of this month we reached our fundraising goal on Kickstarter. It was monumental, and it also scared the hell out of me. It’s a done deal now, I have to make a movie. Whatever, people have been sentenced to worse.
Anyway, one of the rewards for donating $100 or more was that your generous mug gets cyber-plastered right here, all up on the blog. I was hoping to come out with one big donor-face-filled extravaganzapost, but out of everyone who qualified, only two have come through with photos for me to put up. So until the rest of the bunch gets their act together, here’s just a small taste of the lovely people who make my dreams come true.
To start things off we’ve got Mr. Steven J. Wolfe. He’s a die hard Hollywood player with a heart of gold. But I mean that. I’ve gotten loads of guidance from this guy over the years. He’s rock steady.
Next up: Stephen Neary. Above is a photographic rendering of him posing with his robo-deputies. I recommend you visit his blog. When not utilizing futuristic technology to combat crime, he’s an awesome animator. Many dispute the credibility of his work, suspecting the use of wizardry/magical spells. I suspect good old-fashioned hard work.
And that’s it for now. Hopefully the others get it together before too long. And I seriously do have a grip of news. And I’ll tell you all about it next week.
Nandan here. Just wanted to throw out an update on my life, our life, and film life. FIRST OF ALL OUR KICKSTARTER IS NEARING THE END AND WE HAVE 5 DAYS LEFT. If you know any social networking site and feel somehow endeared to us or this project by the name of The International Sign For Choking, please feel free to direct any and all curious people to our Kickstarter page. A clever way of doing this is by inviting people to the Facebook EVENT PAGE
Also, I’m currently living in North Carolina working on a movie with dear friends of both mine and Zachs from the college years – Harrison Topp and Bruno Seraphin. If their names ring a bell it’s probably because either you went to school with us too, or you’re my mother and I’ve told you multiple times who I’m living with right now. Anyways, the film is indeed being made right now, and although it doesn’t have a name you can follow our progress on a currently-much-more-frequently-updated-blog-than-this found at the address kazoofilms.org. It’s a beautiful movie and if you like banjo music or human beings then you’ll probably want to watch it.
And Zach has some secret news coming fairly soon I would imagine.
Zach here. Last Saturday was the hometown premiere of Bummer Summer. It happened to fall right in the middle of the afternoon on one of the nicest days of the year thus far, so I’m impressed that anyone showed up at all. The theater told me that they counted a bit over 100 attendees, and indeed as I stumbled through one of my clumsiest, most at-a-loss-for-words introductions ever, I was humbled seeing the turnout from up front. And then this played:
It was the world premiere of the newest and full-bodiedest trailer for Fresh Starts 4 Stale People, and it was weird.
And then the movie played. In a way, this was the audience that had caused me the most anxiety. It wasn’t just a festival crowd, a mass of anonymous faces. Almost everyone there was either family, a friend, or associated with at least one of the two. They weren’t necessarily “film people”, either. They weren’t there to say “oh, how very reminiscent of so-and-so that scene was” or, “what an interesting reference to such-and-such, I wonder if it was intentional.” They were there to see a movie, not unlike Hot Tub Time Macine (which played later that night), and to see what this guy they knew had been investing all of his time and Facebook activity into. My closest friends from way back were there, people who had been around throughout the entire production, and yet they really had no idea what to expect and I was sure that if they didn’t like it then they wouldn’t want to be friends with me anymore.
I didn’t stay to watch the movie, but I did spend almost the entire time putzing around the lobby with the exception of a brief lemonade-inspired trip to a cafe across the street. At around the 35 minute mark, I listened in on a scene that’s generally pretty useful for feeling out the audience. I was surprised, it was the loudest, most enthusiastic reaction to the scene I’d ever heard. There were cackles and guffaws. I even heard a single, stray clap, which warmed my heart.
What I’ve been getting at, in a very roundabout way, is that the screening went well. Not to cheese-out or anything, but I was reminded of a beautiful, prophetic Truffaut quotation that I found on someone’s Myspace profile last year while screwing around on the internet in lieu of pre-producing my movie:
“The film of tomorrow appears to me as even more personal than an individual and autobiographical novel, like a confession, or a diary. The young filmmakers will express themselves in the first person and will relate what has happened to them: it may be the story of their first love or their most recent; of their political awakening; the story of a trip, a sickness, their military service, their marriage, their last vacation…and it will be enjoyable because it will be true and new…The film of tomorrow will not be directed by civil servants of the camera, but by artists for whom shooting a film constitutes a wonderful and thrilling adventure. The film of tomorrow will resemble the person who made it, and the number of spectators will be proportional to the number of friends the director has. The film of tomorrow will be an act of love.”
Finally, the Kickstarter page for my new movie has come to a sort of a standstill as of late. The big thirty-day push is coming up fast. Please help spread the word! E-mail, Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Tumblr, telemarketing, whatever… It all helps.
Zach here. I’ve got big news, a couple pieces of it.
FIRSTLY. I just got back from the Brooklyn Film Festival last night. Despite two excellent slots, our screenings wound up being weakly attended. Fortunately, we were too busy having a great time in New York with old friends to be upset.
Rob, Nandan and I got to take part in a great table reading of a script by Gabi on the Roof in July’s Lawrence Levine. I got to go to New Jersey to visit the set of Exit 117 director Kevin McMullin’s new film.
I even got to make a cameo that consisted solely of kissing. It was a good day.
The highlight of the week, however, came after I left. On my way to the airport I got a phone call from the festival’s programmer Nathan Kensinger. He wanted to know if I would be attending the awards ceremony, and seemed discouraged when I explained that I couldn’t. I assured him that Nandan and Rob would be there, and he was pacified. Later that I night I found out that we’d won the Spirit Award for narrative feature. This is more or less the equivalent of what other festivals would call a “special jury prize”. I was blown away. To make matters better, Gabi on the Roof in July wound up winning best narrative feature, and its star Sophia Takal was honored with the award for best actress. They all called me up when my flight landed in Seattle shouting “mazel tov” into the phone. It was special. The only thing that doesn’t surprise me about the whole business is the fact that Rob has already finished the bottle of Bushmill’s that was part of our prize.
SECONDLY. YOU CAN OWN BUMMER SUMMER on DVD.
We’ve launched a fundraising campaign for my new movie on a website called “kickstarter”. It’s awesome. We have sixty days to raise the money that will ultimately take us to Argentina to shoot. By pledging just fifteen dollars, you’ll get a copy of Bummer Summer. And that’s not all. There are a ton of cool rewards set up. Check out our page for all of the details. If you watch the video you can even see a very rarely seen clip of Rob kissing Mackinley. Sorry guys.
But seriously, WE NEED HELP. If you don’t feel that you can donate, that’s no problem. It’s immensely helpful to us just to have you spread the word. Post the page on facebook. Blog about it. Tweet about it. Do anything you can to help us out and you’ll have my eternal gratitude. Sincerely.
BONUS NEWS. I got a mini-interview in an Argentine mag, check it out! (Sorry if it’s hard to read, I don’t know what I’m doing.)
Zach here. At eight o’clock this morning I walked the halls of Capital High School, sheepishly avoiding eye contact like I did my first time…nine years ago. And teenagers still seem as callous as they ever did. In fact, I’m sure I would’ve been stuffed into a locker had it not been for my intimidating mustache.
I was relieved to find Ms. Samson’s classroom and duck inside. She’d called me a couple of nights ago to ask if I’d come talk to her film class as a guest speaker. I said that of course I would, and then naturally neglected to prepare anything at all. Well, I prepared a little. I brought a copy of Bummer Summer and the little booklet Nandan and I had put together to promote my next film, The International Sign for Choking. Other than that though, I figured I knew my own story pretty well and thus wouldn’t need to rehearse it.
So after the bell rang and Ms. Samson took attendance, I sat down on a stool in the front of the room and just started talking. Aimlessly. Just a couple months ago I addressed a three hundred person, stadium style audience. In Spanish. And that was a breeze compared to this handful of kids. There’s nothing like the overwhelming apathy in a roomful of sleepy-eyed high school students to make a guy uncomfortable. It was like playing tennis with a brick wall, only there was no brick wall even. Just a deep, uncaring void of nothingness.
But I’m being dramatic, it was actually a pretty decent time. My talk could have used some structure though, that’s certain. Aside from showing the first five minutes of the movie and pulling up the fundraising trailer on YouTube, I filled the entire fifty minute period with my rambling and didn’t even get around to discussing my actual filmmaking method or advertising the upcoming screening (one month from today!).
So as of tomorrow morning I’m going into hiding. And what better place to do so than the Brooklyn Film Festival? I’m very excited. You can still order tickets if you haven’t yet.
Zach here. Do you remember when Bummer Summer screened at that festival in Athens, OH about three weeks ago? Me too.
Well, I just found out via e-mail that we won third place. I don’t think it’s very commonplace for festivals to award a first, second, and third place. But since we won it, I’m glad that this festival did. I wonder how many other third places we may have won and not even known it? Or fourth places? Or seventh? Seventh place is what I scored in the local skateboard contest in 2003 I think it was.
After the previous post, you may also be wondering why the blog seems to have been hijacked by a fucking nutcase. You wouldn’t be the only one. Thank heavens tomorrow is casual Friday.
