red hands diary

Last Sunday I drove out to the high desert and met with Kimberly Nichols who's this very cool artist/writer friend of mine. She's agreed to do net marketing with us and we're blessed to have her talents.

She's also helping us set up this awsome rave party out in the desert to officially launch the
www.dirtyredhands.com

site. At this point we're looking to have it August first. Like a thousand people in the warehouse of artist Robert Dunahay
www.robertdunahay.com

Should be an extreme sort of freakout. Robots, lasers, artists and desert scoundrels and mongrels raving it up. Because I'm a total follower of the Corman aesthetic I'm even planning on shooting footage for the next movie I'm putting together with the Mongrel Collective: SPIRITEUR. Everyone's invited. If you come out you could be in the new movie! In any case you'll be able to meet all us and join this very cool and exciting revolution. And get drunk and walk into Joshua Trees. Burning Man eat your toasty heart out. Stay tuned to this blog or join the mmmmmongrel group at Facebook to get the exact dates and times.

What else is going on? Refael continues to tweak and update the site. Hector and Khoren continue to cut their versions of DRH. Once we get a finished version I'll put together a "package" and start casting about for corporate investors. That should be fun.

We're having another meeting next Friday to see how the episodes are grinding out and to also talk t-shirt and other merc exploitation. I'll keep you in the loop.

red hands diary

Had an official DRH LLC meeting last night where the collective talked about how we want the website to try to make money. We all agreed that all the versions (both of them) should be available on a LIBRARY page of the website, and that on the main page we'll have several episodes that we change every couple of days. Instead of charging people for watching the episodes we're gonna try to cash in with ads. I like this. It follows the network TV model and the rock and roll band model. We'll have ads on the website and we'll sell episodes to ad-based interenet TV networks. What's crucial then is we need to really create buzz and get an internet marketer on board who'll plug like crazy all over the net... Following the rock and roll track some more we also decided that we could really use some corporate sponsorship. Niall said he was able to hook this up for a fanzine he worked on back in Chicago, back in the day. Once we have a finished feature we'll put together a "package" and go for it. I have no idea how to lure corporate sponsors so I guess I'll learn as I go. We all agreed that best way to get anyone, corporate or otherwise, to the site was just to be really fucking cool. People look for and try to connect with shit that's really cool. We are really cool, and we're sexy and fun, and I still think having parties is a critical tool for getting people involved and spreading the word. I keep hitting a wall with this myself so I'll just keep putting it out there that DRH is looking for a party promoter to help us get things started in the downtown, Echo Park, Highland Park, Silverlake, Los Feliz, Hollywood area. I know it'll happen, and when it does, it's going to be huge and sick.

Tomorrow I travel out to Palm Desert to meet with a prospective internet marketer and also plan the huge premiere launch party, which should be really cool - robots, lasers, one thousand mad desert artists and moviemakers... I'll keep you in the loop about the where's and when.

RED HANDS diary

Well, I realize I said that this diary was moving over to
www.dirtyredhands.com
but there's still some pretty serious bugs in that system so until we get them fixed I'll keep people up to date here.

We finally finished our shooting. Last weekend we did our picks ups and inserts on Saturday, and then our reshoots on Sunday. Things went very well. Only one person called 911, and that was in the valley so we really should have seen it coming. I guess she didn't like us pretending to beat the shit out of someone under her window during church hours. She told the police on the phone that our camera was a gun and well, that's what you call a wrap. We bolted and no one was pinched.

Ed and Neti and Myles shot a final scene that we didn't get at the downtown bar on their own last Wednesday. That's a hot shit crew for you - no money, no producer, no glory - and they still went out and got gold. Love. I've been looking at the results on Khoren's final cut pro and everything looks very cool. We're still on track for having it all up and running by the end of the month.

I've been putting up DRH fliers all over Silverlake and even though I'm green to street promotion I learned quickly that my height is a big advantage. The higher up the flyer on the telephone pole the longer it stays up.

Next Friday we'll meet and talk about what and how to sell stuff. This is the perfect time. This is the time of innocence and splendor and there are no rules and we are all absolute beginners. It's our time.

SPIRITEUR diary

We (me, the writer/producer, Ed Joyce, the director, and Khoren Mirzakhanian, the editor) went to the desert last Sunday to do the location scouting. It's very noir out there. Stephen Mooser, the acclaimed children's book author, has graciously allowed us to shoot at his guest house in Joshua Tree and it's going to be perfect. Originally in the script I written the sex/sacrifice/black magic scene to drop in a basement. No basements in the high desert, but there is a natural cave in the hills next to the guest house which will be even cooler!

We then met with Kimberly Nichols, who's this really cool artist/writer who lives in Palm Desert. She's interested in helping us secure some more locations and organizing the community to get involved. More exciting is that she's agreed to play Katie, the psychic.

At this point we're still on track for the end of July/first week of August shoot. I'll go out again in a couple weeks to nail down the rest of the locations and deal with other logistical issues. The weekend of the 17th we'll do a podcast of the novella and, if it all comes together, throw a party to celebrate the completion of last MONGREL COLLECTIVE movie (DIRTY RED HANDS) and to shoot the rave scenes of SPIRITEUR. I'll keep you informed on this blog what's happening with that party and if you come to it you'll BE in SPIRITEUR. Won't that be fun!

RED HANDS DIARY

HAS officially moved to
www.dirtyredhands.com
check out the new posts and watch the movie there!

Red Hands Diary

Once again the members of Dirty Red Hands met at Neti's to check out rough cuts of episodes of Dirty Red Hands. Hector was unable to show up so we didn't get to see the full length rough cut he'd promised.

Because I'm a very impatient person and I feel that this project should have been wrapped up by now, last week I brought Khoren Mirzakhanian, who's this wonderkid post production hot shot to come up with another version of DRH and we watched the cool shit he's edited and cooked up. Good stuff.

Neshia has agreed to be our party promoter club wrangler because I suck at that shit. At this point we're planning one of our premiers for the middle of July.

We are also very lucky that the extremely cool and talented Sylvan has agreed do some composition for DRH. His stuff is very exciting and he speaks with a suave French accent. Check out his work:
http://www.musicbysylvan.com/

Oh, right, and at the meeting I tried to sell the idea of having subtitles for some of the scenes in DRH when we were shooting in environments that shredded our sound. I truly believe that if you look at current docs and a few of the more progressive directors (David Lynch, Tony Scott, anyone who's Brazilian), you will see that subtitles are not only very sexy but also completely accepted as par for course in this new world of digital story-telling, when you can't always control your sound. The other members of the collective thought very differently (despite my stunning Breathless analogy and other pretentious grandstanding postulations), and that's what's cool about a collective, everyone, from the actors to the directors to the editors and composers, everyone gets to contribute and be heard. I certainly heard them and now we're doing an ADR (sound looping) session at the end of the month. I of course hope that it all gets fucked up and we'll be forced to go in the subtitle direction, but unfortunately for me everyone on this project is so professional and talented that they'll probably come up with amazing stuff and we'll end up having really pristine dialogue in those scenes. And that's totally cool too.

Also I think I offended everyone when I suggested that we sell smelly "collectable" t-shirts and thongs emblazoned with the DRH art that we'd personally worn for a while and not washed. It's okay, I'm sure Picasso has similar marketing ideas which weren't understood in his time either.

As soon as Khoren has episodes locked we'll start putting them up on our new website:

http://www.dirtyredhands.com

This blog should be viewable over there too... Actually I'm sure how that transition will work. I'll keep you posted. Oh, right, and I've got my podcasting gear which I'm learning how to use so there will be podcasts of behind the scenes Dirty Red Hands action available.

Hector's incredibly cool cut should also be up on the website when he's done with it, along with Ed's director's cut of the original (non guerrilla) budgeted RED HANDS, of which we still need about $40,ooo to complete. If you are an investor and you watch Ed's director's cuts, beware, your checkbook will start writing itself!