Billy Unger Wins and Cop Dog Pandemic

Billy Unger ended up winning Best Performance in a DVD Film at the Young Artists Awards!

He's also in like a dozen movies coming out over the next year or two.

The lead actress, Cassi Thomson, has also landed a recurring role in HBO's Big Love, playing Chloë Sevigny's secret daughter.

Finally, COP DOG has spread via cable and satellite to more portions of the world:

-- on DVD in Australia

-- on the Superchannel across Canada

-- and on HBO in Mexico and pretty much every other country south of Texas.

-- but still not the part of North America between Canada and Mexico... I blame Lou Dobbs.

Squirrel Tricks

We've been feeding the squirrels in Central Park lately and noticed a couple tricks they've learned.

The parks people put out little feeders for the birds -- and, knowing that squirrels will go after the seeds, they hang these small feeders on the thinnest branches so that only the light birds can get to them. But the squirrel in this first photo is brave -- he climbs down the thin branch to the very end, then pulls up the string hand-over-hand to drag the basket closer, then holds the basket with one paw and grabs seeds out of it with the other.

The pigeons have also figured out a strategy for this -- the squirrel drops a lot of seeds in the process so they all hang out below the basket.


As you can see in the second photo, they aren't shy. They also have another thing, which I suspect is a trick. You'll throw them a peanut and it lands maybe a foot from them, but they'll wander around looking for it and not finding it. Sometimes even walking right past it so their butt is practically hanging over the peanut.

We point and make clicking sounds to get them going the right direction, but eventually grow so frustrated that we simply toss them another peanut. Playing dumb gets you twice the food...

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.