Pissbook

We're sitting at yet another NY Starbucks and over the course of a few hours as we watch out the window, every dog that passes the stack of garbage bags outside first sniffs them, then pees on them. It's Facebook for dogs.

15 Days

My dad wrote a little short story a couple weeks ago and I thought it'd make a strong short script (and be really easy to adapt -- all I did was change the formatting!)

So I spent a couple hours re-formatting, showed it to him, and then sent it off to a couple places asking for short scripts. 15 days later and a director now wants to make it.

It took me five years! I'd call my dad a bastard, but I think that might backfire on me in some way.

Low Budget Awards Season

The Oscars are over -- so now it's time for the movies that cost less than the dresses worn at the Oscars!

Billy Unger is nominated for best performance in a DVD film at the 30th Annual Young Artists Awards. Go Billy!

You'll need to scroll down to the bottom to see the list of nominees -- but he's doing well in a category where two of the other films are by Disney and Universal.


Also, my horror screenplays RED SKIES and THE SOUND are both finalists in the 2009 Paranoia Horror Film Festival script contest. After seeing their website I figured that my goriest screenplays might have a better shot.

Given that the IFFF where COP DOG showed was Feb 26-March 1, the Paranoia Film Festival is March 13-15, and the Young Artists Awards are on March 29th, and we just had 10 inches of snow dumped on us and wind chill is sub-zero -- you can imagine that this is a month I particularly wish I was in L.A.

The Marketing Strategy

The headline above is from the New York Times and if I were the Obama team I'd SEIZE on it.

Everybody thinks they're middle-class, or at least has reasonable hopes that they're on their way to being middle-class. He might even manage to get crazy Lou Dobbs on board.

7th Anniversary

We don't make a big deal about our wedding anniversary and don't mention it to people, but at dinner last night -- our 7th -- got this fortune in my cookie.

COP DOG at 2009 International Family Film Festival

COP DOG now has an official page at the 2009 International Film Festival.

It's showing at 12:30 PM on Sunday, March 1. I won't be making it, but I think much of the cast will be there.

Would You Check?

Via Mind Hacks -- Steven Pinker says of the genes that increase the risk for Alzheimer's disease:

Still, I figured that my current burden of existential dread is just about right, so I followed Watson’s lead and asked for a line-item veto of my APOE gene information when the P.G.P. sequencer gets to it.

I would check. One reason is that I'm young enough that there's still hope for various forms of treatment or preventative measures to arise before I reach risk age. But second, if prevention isn't possible I'd just as soon kick off due to heart disease as have my soul slowly destroyed -- Camel unfiltereds here I come! -- at about age 55-60.

Too Lazy To Type Degrees of Separation

You'll probably need to click on the image to read anything but that's the IMDBPro main page above.

Typing being the awful chore that it is has forced me to invent a game: how few mouse clicks can I use to get from whatever the current main page is to the actor, director, writer, or movie I'm looking for?

No typing into search boxes allowed.

For example, using the sample page how do I get to, let's say, Kuma -- the canine lead in Cop Dog?

We start with the #2 video rental from the left column, Death Race (1 click), from there to lead actor Jason Statham (2), then on to Crank 2: High Voltage (3) -- then to Lil Chev Chelios, Billy Unger (4 -- Billy Unger is the Rosetta Stone of Cop Dog!), then Cop Dog (5) and finally Kuma (6 clicks).

If music videos got IMDb pages it'd actually be slightly faster since Taylor Lautner (middle starmeter at #5 famous in part from Twilight, 1 click) is in the music video Caught Up In You (2):



by Cassi Thomson (3), co-star in Cop Dog (4) then Kuma (5 clicks).

On a side note, apparently tween girls all over the world hate, hate, HATE, Cassi for stealing Mr Lautner from them.

Writing Exercises

If you ever took any creative writing courses or were part of a writing group you might remember writing exercises -- something like "write a ten page story that includes Fig Newtons, a dyslexic wombat, is set in World War II, and the main character knows how to play a Xylophone."

I always thought those were rather artificial, of questionable educational value, and distracted you from the real task of getting your actual writing done.

The distributor is now requesting that we put together stories where the lead character is a 15-year-old boy, plus or minus a year (COP DOG's 12-year-old lead would be too young for next year's slate); with an animal ala COP DOG, but we're already using a dog in another movie and couldn't afford something like a bear and definitely not something aquatic! (did you know that chimpanzee actors are governed by roughly the same working condition rules as child actors?); it must of course be about 90 minutes long; limited locations and limited number of parts, including non-speaking parts because, at these budgets, extras are expensive too (unless your family members all have a lot of free time); should be humorous but maybe with a little heart (er, sentimentality -- but not during the first ten minutes! The first ten minutes should be fun); and there must be a family aspect, i.e. adult or other members of the family centrally involved (don't ask me, that requirement is pretty vague).

It'd also be good to include a holiday theme -- but Christmas is used in another project and we need holidays that also resonate in Europe -- so no Thanksgiving and Halloween isn't so great either.

Round Table Pizza from Ellensburg WA

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J'aime and Gary have had to suffer a disastrous drop in pizza quality. I'm fond of Round Table Pizza. Though individual restaurants vary, when they're on they're one of my favorites. And 40 minutes for good pizza is an easy trade-off.

Besides -- I think it's legal to drive like 150 in Washington if you're east of the Cascades.

Di Fara Pizza

From Brooklyn and New York

Di Fara is two stops away on the Q train. I suspect one of the ingredients is Crack, given that I can't bear going a week without it. This addiction is complicated by the fact that it's pretty much too busy to eat there Friday through Sunday, closed Monday, and can get sorta busy during the weekdays too.

I suspect it might be the best pizza place I've eaten at, since I'd have a tough time choosing between it and Casa Bianca -- but I grew up with Casa Bianca so that gives it a hometown advantage.

Proposition 8 -- the end of laws in California

It occurred to me that the passage of Proposition 8 in California would set a pretty radical precedent.

Essentially, what proposition 8 does is recast an old law that was ruled unconstitutional by the CA courts as a constitutional amendment -- and, in theory, make it impossible for the courts to rule it unconstitutional.

If this proposition goes through then why would ANY future propositions ever be worded as anything other than a constitutional amendment? There's no downside to doing so since the only requirement is still a majority of votes cast -- and this way the people who got the proposition on the ballot knows that they can simply bypass the judicial branch.

Only a fool would ever word a proposition as a law -- they'd all be constitutional amendments.

In effect, this method would simply eliminate the judicial branch with regard to propositions. And, if I were bringing a challenge before the court, I'd make absolutely sure to point out that okaying prop 8 would be tantamount to writing their branch of government out of existence.