John Q. Phats Entertainment

I’ve started submitting Do Nice Guys Finish Last to festivals.  Maybe it’s just me, but the price of festival submissions has sky rocketed.  When I was submitting Censored I would come across an occasional $50 submission fee.  Most of them were in the $10-$35 range.  After submitting to three festivals it seems like $50 is the new $35.  I’ve found a couple that were upwards of $90+.  My first question is “Why?”  My second question is “What the fuck?!”  $90.  Do you know what that gets me?  Just a marginal chance to screen at a film festival.  Actually, I suppose that depends on how good your film is.  I do believe that Do Nice Guys Finish Last is at the very least a decent film.  It’s just that it’s over 15 minutes long.  I’m not very confident that it will screen anywhere.  Not because it’s a bad film but it just goes very against the grain.  The run time is a big factor and there’s enough cursing in it to make a sailor blush.  It’s got a C-Bomb in it.  That makes it kind of historical.  I believe this is the first film we have completed that has a C-Bomb in it.  Great job everyone, really great work.  I applaud us.  There really aren’t enough C-Bombs in film festivals.  It’s found it’s way in to popular cinema though. 
“Can I get any of you c***s a drink?”
- Nick Frost in Shaun of the Dead
“Your mother’s c*** stinks like carpet cleaner.”
-Mickey Rourke in Barfly
“Shut that c*** mouth or I’ll come over there and fuck start her head.”
-Ryan Phillippe in The Way of the Gun
“Respect the cock…and tame the c***. Tame it.”
-Tom Cruise in Magnolia

So, I’m not that off base here.  If anyone calls me on it, my first response will be “But Tom Cruise said it!”

Yesterday, I sent Do Nice Guys Finish Last for it’s first festival submission.  It’s done.  It’s almost kind of hard to believe.  I’ve been working on this thing for so long and there have been so many mishaps.  Including one final one.  When Gabe burned it on to a DVD and I watched it, the credit music was missing.  When I told him the music was missing, he decided to add it right there and re export it.  I had emailed him the music about a week ago but I guess he hadn’t listened to it.  So, he decides to give it a listen before bringing it in to Premier.  Twenty minutes after he listened to it, he was still laughing at what a horrible selection I had made music wise.  He even brought over a friend of ours to laugh with him.  I couldn’t help but laugh myself.  He said the music reminded him of that song from the Legend of Zelda.  Yeah, I picked some shitty music for the credits.  It was royalty free though.  Here’s the thing, I am completely tone deaf.  I can’t tell the difference between a tuned guitar and my dick.  Seriously, it’s that bad.  Once when I was younger, I thought it would be a good idea to tighten all the little knobs on the end of my Dad’s guitar.  He laughed hysterically at how bad it sounded and I seriously, couldn’t tell the difference.  The five copies I have right now don’t have any music to go with the credits.  It’s probably better that way.  I should just stay away from musical selection all together.  The festival I sent it out to makes it IMDB appropriate.  I’m looking forward to that.  Now I’ll have two films under my filmography on IMDB.  I’ve thought about making like 10 short films, entering them all in IMDB qualifying festivals, and just submitting all of them.  That way, I can trick people in to thinking I’m a big shot.  Those short films would be incredibly stupid, but whatever.  I would probably get lazy really early and the titles would look something like this:
The Living Room
Dogs and Pillows
Walls
Chris Punches Himself in the Face
Chris Punches Himself in the Face II
Chris Punches Himself in the Face III
Chris Punches Himself in the Face IV
Chris Punches Himself in the Face V
Chris Punches Himself in the Face VI
Chris Punches Himself in the Face VII
You get the idea.  Anyway, DNGFL is DONE!  Thank God.  If it absolutely fails on the festival attempts I’ll be posting it here very soon.  I’ll let you guys know how it’s doing.

Gabe gave me the new DNGFL last week.  So, I take it to my house, import the .MOV in to Premier, carefully add my credits to the end of it, and then I export it.  Then I check the new, exported .MOV.  I watch it all the way through, even though my computer struggles through it because it’s like a 23 gig file.  It looks good.  I’m satisfied.  I burn it to a DVD and just for shits and giggles I throw it in to my DVD player.  It looks great, I’m happy, I’m talking to my girlfriend on the phone about how awesome it looks.  She’s happy, I’m happy, everything is great.  Then I yell out “Mother fucker!” because the credits come on screen and look all distorted and screwed up.  I sit in shock and disbelief.   tell my girlfriend I have to go.  I contemplate throwing my DVD player out the window.  Then I realize that it’s not the DVD players fault.  Then I contemplate throwing my computer out the window.  I realize that it’s not my computers fault.  No, this is the fault of this fucking short film.  Then I realize that I can’t throw it out the window because technically, it doesn’t have a physical presence.  My frustration grows stronger.  I guess I’ll just keep trudging on.  I’ve burned tons of short films and never had a problem with the credits screwing up like that.  Why now?  Why this short film?  Because this project is the devil, that’s why.

Stupid short film refuses to be finished.  Yes, we are still working on it.  No, I haven’t dropped off of the planet and I’m not dead.  We’ve been working on a new name for the company and a new logo.  It’s still in the early stages, but I think it looks pretty sharp.  No, I’m not just saying that because of our little argument over e-mail, Chris, you bastard.  I really do like the way it looks.
I really need to write something.  I want to rent an HD camera and experiment with it.  Even if I shoot something kind of lame, it would be fun to play with HD.  I’ll get right on that.  I’m also searching for a huge couch.  The biggest one I’ve found so far was 11.5 feet long.  That’s a huge fucking couch.  What the hell would you even use that for?  Seriously, think about that.  If you were on one side and another person was on the other, there would be roughly 9 feet between the two of you.  You could play a legitimate game of frisbee at that distance.  That’s about the size that I need though.  How do I get myself in to this shit?  How did I get to the point where I NEED an 11.5 foot couch?  O well, this is what keeps me going.  Keeps my imagination going.  I’m reading A TV Writers Workbook again.  Don’t get me wrong, that book is awesome, but sometimes it makes writing seem like such an intimidating task.  It usually explains its way out of it, but right in the middle of a chapter sometimes I’ll be thinking to myself “Shit!  I have no clue what I’m doing!”  I suppose that’s why you would read the book though.  So you know what to do to write a script. 
Quick list of what’s going on:
1. Still finishing Do Nice Guys Finish Last.
2. Looking for a giant couch.  Anyone know where I can find one?
3. Trying not to go insane.  

P.S. I’ve decided to curse on my blog now.  If Kevin Smith can get away with talking about selling tickets in an alley to pork his wife on Twitter, I can fucking curse.