make you wanna holler hi-dee-ho

fake letdown: baby courageous and i drove to biloxi on a last-minute, gamble-all-night roadtrip. on the radio we heard npr air a report from sundance '06. they gushed over the ten million dollar acquisition of little miss sunshine, a crowd-pleaser. and the one film they chose to highlight as a dud was hawk... heh. the best part came an hour later when my mom, having also heard the npr interview called to make sure i felt alright about it. that's what mom's are best at. and anyway, it's not my movie. i had one scene that i can't even be sure is still in the film.

a slightly real letdown: an adaptation of a play i wanted to do is on hold. i notified the agent of the playwright in the UK, and the agent said he would ask him, but in the meantime could i send a bio. but the theater i'm working with on it balked at this, citing numerous requests for the same type of work being rejected. their advice was to lie low for a while and continue to work on it without telling them.

i'm torn. the playwright is incredibly successful, an oscar winning screenwriter, and to date has worked on dozens of television programs in the UK. he ain't hurtin' for money. yet i feel the artist always comes first and if he's due a fee for a derivative of his work, i'll pay it. my buddy claims the playwright doesn't even own the rights to the play i want to adapt anyway. huh...
in the meantime, i've started to write something entirely original, but thematically similar. an improv comedy workshop made up of differing working classes. imagine a cake delivery boy, a robot programmer, a coffee shop cashier, two unlicensed private investigators all learning improv comedy in order to showcase for a talent agent.
i think it would look a little something like this.

painful letdown: what it is.

dying is easy

i used to do a lot of improv comedy. for about 15 years solid. i have not done any in almost a year. in that time i've played bit parts on tv and in movies, pitched products on the radio. let's say my nights are freer.
the other night i did a murder mystery with some friends of mine. it's tests any actor's pride to do a show for people while they are partying.
we performed a delicious little school-pageant-murder-skit at a church recently. i was moving through the buffet with an electrician and his family, grieving in-character over the dead janitor "rotting in the kitchen." a guest's mom had just died that morning, it was announced. suddenly, it seemed nobody cared that our janitor had died. but we sure as hell did. we made those selfish bitches solve that crime.
a colleague commented that "a little part of your soul dies each time you do a murder mystery." so i've done maybe a dozen now. which roughly equates to 12 parts of my soul expiring.
i had a small scene in a film the hawk is dying which premiered at sundance this week. secretly hoping it would play on the big screens here in atlanta, i'm almost certain it will not. one reviewer saw no direction in all miserable two hours of it. a 'dance blogger (his abbreviation) noted many walkouts in the first screening. rumor has it, the 'dance has returned to its roots, is therefore very low-budget, and acquisitons are slim.
miles davis in 1975 proclaimed "jazz is dead."
to me, it's more about the forms. the forms aren't dead. the scene might be. maybe the style. some jazz really stinks like a rotting janitor. and some movies are miserably long and pointless.

one of the few good things about modern times: if you die horribly on television you will not have died in vain. you will have entertained us.
--kurt vonnegut

nobody move, nobody get work

helluva holiday. one helluv-one. drove to wilmington for another "surface" audition. and went to charlotte once for a national advertisement. neither panned out. that's twenty hours of pure southern interstate driving. and nothing to show for it 'cept beef jerky wrappers, wendy's wrappers, chili cheese fritos bags, yoo-hoo bottles, sunflower seed shells, andy capp hot fries bags, taco bell wrappers, dentyne ice foil, and one tijuana momma red pickle sausage skin. baby courageous at least rode with me on one trip. we listened to lewis black, davids cross & attell, and some great driving music.
on the way to wilmington there was an amber alert issued for a young girl who was said to have been kidnapped. she ended up in a suburb of atlanta, so there's a really good chance i passed them on I-20 that morning. in many hours of driving through the carolinas, i didn't see one single state trooper. and while the system itself is brilliant, radio stations should allow someone other than the morning zoo crew to announce the details. the license plate of the vehicle they were looking for was 890MPG. the whiskey-soaked voice of the rock witch sputtered "eight, nine, zero, em as in mary, pee as in peter, and gee as in gamecocks!" nice.
this past weekend i shot a scene for a horror thriller called terminus directed by dave bruckner, jacob gentry and dan bush. three directors means three times the decisions. which generally means three times DOPE! yeah, we were the first two days of shooting and they're finding their sealegs. but how often do i get brained with a baseball bat in a film? the movie is about a signal coming through the tv that makes people go something something...CRAZY! i was hoping to do my first topless scene, but bruckner reminded me that i'm 55378008. for an entire shoot yesterday i played a dead body. for as many hours as i drove to charlotte and back, i lay on a hairy floor with karo syrup squirting from my head. but i'm starting to understand what jacob means when he says "i love movies. i love watching them, i love making them. i wanna do this the rest of my life."