“I’m have returned” being how I have announced my return to anything and everything since 2001. I wrote a mass email letting my friends know I was back from a trip to New York, and proofread it a million times, only to send it at the same time I read the horrible mistake in the subject line. Rather than lose face, I just started using the phrase all the time. And that tradition continues to THIS DAY!
Guys, I’m a little hyper. Also, I don’t know who “guys” is, since I’m sure no one is really following me anymore. But check it out.
I quit my job and immediately started spending more time and effort on helping “The Sundowner” get onto the festival circuit than I ever spent at my actual office job. It has paaaaid off! I’ve been sitting on the news for awhile, but now it’s pretty safe to announce that the dinky little documentary made primarily by my wonderful boyfriend is an official selection at Slamdance 2010. Yay!
What does this mean? It means we’re about to pay out the ass to go to Park City, Utah for nine days and hope against hope that we’ll hobknob with the right guy and come back to the Bay Area with jobs. “We” is myself (co-producer, a generous credit), Steve (director/editor/everything-else-er), and Alan (producer proper). And “we” are fucking amateurs compared to the other things that appear to be opening at Slamdance. Uhm, our little doc is premiering in the same festival as Soderbergh’s latest? Insanity.
Aside from feeling in over my head, I feel excited and happy and perhaps ready to return to using the internet. It’s hard to update any blogging platform when life gets to the point of only being able to say, “My job sucks” in a variety of ways. But now there will be plenty of other things to say, and they will be said.
Dr. Emmett Brown was standing on his toilet seat on the evening of Nov. 5, 1955, attempting to hang a clock in his bathroom, when he slipped and slammed his head on the side of the sink. Never forget.
First unemployed GPOYW for me, very exciting. Here I am, in my boyfriend’s apartment, taking a quick break from working on festival submissions. The big list of festivals to submit to is kinda visible in the right of the picture. And on your left, the huge and imposing Raging Bull poster that might have been a tip-off about the bf’s potential personality disorders had I been willing to pay attention to that. Which I hadn’t!
This is how I feel about today being my last day at work, it feels like Nina Simone, man.
Perfect. I thought I had taken home all of my CDs two days ago, but while cleaning out my desk today I found one CD that had slipped through a crack. It was unlabeled. I put it in. This was the last song on it. Life is good.
Wigley, Christolos, and I screened it last night for Jon and his old fishing buddy Tom. It was a fascinating experience and conversation, because Tom is still living the good life, out on a boat in Alaska, getting drunk and enjoying himself. He could be called a “free spirit,” but a more appropriate term would be “man’s man.” He very much represents who Jon was when he was captain of a ship, but as the teaser makes clear - Jon isn’t exactly a happy-go-lucky sailboat guy any more.
Many women artists are very talented at creating their work but have great difficulty with fundraising and publicity. The traditional wisdom is that these artists should go to more classes that teach these skills and somehow make time to do all the extra work. But does that really make sense?
We don’t ask plumbers to fix our cars, and we wouldn’t want a dentist doing open heart surgery. Even in the world of arts management, a bookkeeper would have a hard time getting a job as a marketing director. Why do we think that a talented musician should spend her time writing grant proposals or that an actress should write her own press releases?
In almost every other sector in our economy, we recognize that the division of labor is more efficient because it lets everyone do what they do best. If we truly respected the skill and experience and rehearsal time that it takes to create great art, then we would want our most talented women artists to focus on their art, and we would find people who were talented at managerial tasks to work with them.
I’ve officially been named a co-producer of The Sundowner, which is terrifying, flattering, and exciting.
We are in the final final stages of production, now. Although I’ve been on the sidelines of this project, giving informal feedback and helping out with transcripts and whatnot for almost a year, only at the time of extreme procrastination am I offered a credit. It makes sense, though, as I’m older than both the primary filmmakers and have many more years experience finishing projects in a tight crunch. It took me about three hours while simultaneously working my desk job to complete a task that should have been done weeks ago. Not to brag or anything! :)
The next few posts will explain a bit more of what this short documentary is about, and about the impact Jon (the doc’s subject) has directly had on my life and, most importantly, my decision to quit my job. I should have them up in the next day or so. I don’t have that many pictures, so y’all will have to deal with the screenshots I already have. An early cut of the film is available (highly inferior cut, with temporary music and only coming in at about 12 minutes, but it was still good enough to win an award) if anyone is interested in viewing it.
DVD insert for The Sundowner. I’ve been watching this project come together for over a year, and the final design is so strangely appropriate and inappropriate. What’s appropriate is that it’s very beautiful and simple, but what’s inappropriate is that there appears to be a serious lack of drama. Only the last phrase of the DVD synopsis even hints that something might GO WRONG in this story, and in reality the wrong-going is what makes the story work.
We argued about this for awhile, and decided that people who would be interested in the film as already described would appreciate the drama all the more, whereas trying to hype it based on the drama would be exploitative and inaccurate, and most of all disrespectful to the man the story is about.
I guess if you are going to make a documentary about a personal friend, you have to either be fucking cold-hearted enough to exploit them like crazy, or make a documentary that is ostensibly boring as shit and thus unlikely to make any money.
![thedailywhat:
No. No No No No No No No. No. of the Day: Tweets as speech balloons in the first issue of Image Comic’s upcoming series Forgetless.
[via.]
I like it. I can see how it might easily go horribly wrong, but I like its potential.](http://3.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kr5quuT4jh1qzpwi0o1_400.jpg)
