My official vacation started mid week, making my way to the Big Apple. The film is done, the script is not quite ‘done’ but in a draft I could live with; my normal distractions weren’t around. It was more than a little scary to me to acknowledge how much stress I put on myself on a daily, sometimes […]
This past week has been one of the most fulfilling of my life. I left ‘the new hometown’ to go to ‘the original hometown’ to finish the short. As much as anything else, it was a major learning experience for me. First thing we did was ‘picture lock.’ I reviewed a couple of cuts from […]
Hey gang, I’m leaving L.A. for a week so no blogging til the middle of the month. Going to approve the final cut of the short in KC, and make an overdue trip to the East Coast. I’m sure I’ll be full of stories when I get back. A few random notes in the meantime… […]
Lucas, Spielberg, and Scorsese all get their well-deserved credit, but doesn’t Mel Brooks deserve a little more love for pumping out his own classic films in the 70s/early 80s? Chief among them is his parody of the Western genre, Blazing Saddles. The story revolves around a black sheriff put in charge of a racist town […]
Diff’rent Strokes was by almost any measure a classic sitcom of the early 80s. The premise, an extremely wealthy white man adopting two black kids from the projects, set the stage for many of the celebrities we see today going to Africa and adopting black babies. (That’s a joke folks before anyone bites my […]
A life, Jimmy, you know what that is? It’s the sh-t that happens while you’re waiting for moments that never come. – Lester Freamon, “The Wire” Last night, I had dinner with one of my oldest friends and his fiancee. It was my first time meeting her, so of course we talked about a few […]
Exhausted. It’s been a couple of days since we shot, and I still feel exhausted. I’m not in ideal shape physically, but I (thankfully) dropped 10 pounds in the month leading up to this, so I know I’ve been in worse shape. The crew and most of the people who stopped by seem to feel […]
There was a time, many years ago now, where if you turned to VH1, BET, or MTV, no matter what time of day or night, you’d see a music video. You just to have to take me for my word on this one. One of, if not the pioneer of all video countdown shows (including […]
“Whether you like it or don’t like it, learn to love it! WHOOO!” As a kid growing up in Kansas City, we’d make frequent trips to my parents birth state of Louisiana, where most of my aunts and uncles reside. My mother’s hometown would be considered rural South; I lived there for a short […]
In the Heat of the Night is considered one of, if not the defining film of Sidney Poitier’s career. It spawned an equally popular TV show, and is often earmarked as a ‘defining’ film of the 60s. On to the tale of the tape… Relevance: Well, the story of the film revolves around a black […]
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