John Q. Phats Entertainment

So, I will be in Vegas this weekend accepting our award for Do Nice Guys Finish Last. It’s exciting to hear when someone else likes something that you created. Plus I’m kind of an ass and will bring it up as much as possible to brag. “Hey, you remember that time I won that award?” is now my new favorite quote.
Anyway, enough of that for now. A friend of mine did sound work on a documentary called 45365. Not only is it kicking ass and taking names in it’s festival run but it’s airing on PBS on December 14th from 10PM to 11PM. The film hasn’t had a DVD release yet, so it’s kind of hard to see. This is a great opportunity to check it out. So, be sure to watch it. On top of all of that Roger Ebert gave it a glowing review. (http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=%2F20100324%2FREVIEWS%2F100329984) I think that’s pretty cool. I’m pretty sure Roger Ebert has never seen any of my short films. If he did, we might be the first film to get a negative star rating. Just to be clear, I had absolutely nothing to do with this documentary, I just know the guy that did the sound design on it. You can check local listings for it here. If you want to learn more about the film, you can look it up on Google you lazy bastard. I’m just kidding, check the link here.

P.S. My spell check is broken, but that doesn’t matter because I’m awesome at speling.

The Do Nice Guys Finish Last showing was absolutely awesome.  Aside from the weird guy that showed up that everyone feared was going to rape them.  Other then that though, the entire thing went off without a hitch.  I did a little Q & A after the short film which is always fun to me.  While I’m nervous as hell in front of a crowd, I do pretty good.  In my college speech class a girl made a comment on my speech that I get nervous and as a self defense mechanism, I start to tell jokes and try to make people laugh.  Which she said works really well for me.  I don’t get many compliments, so I have to hold on to whatever I can get.  After the short film and the Q & A we had the theater for another 2 hours, so we watched Hot Fuzz.  That movie is even more glorious on the big screen.  I thanked Simon Pegg and Nick Frost via Twitter for Hot Fuzz but they never responded….  Fuckers.  Just kidding.  I’m sure those guys get at least a million tweets thrown their way every day.  I got some good constructive criticism from Kristen Carter (Censored).  She said it wasn’t long enough in some scenes and was too long in others and overall, it probably could have been shorter.  I can agree with that.  Nobody had anything horribly bad to say about it though.  In fact when I told the crowd that someone told me it was the most offensive thing they had ever seen, I got quite a big round of applause.  Thanks to everyone for that and for coming.  It was insanely fun.  I hope to see you guys at the next one, because there will be a next one. 

P.S. I’m two rejection letters away from posting Do Nice Guys Finish Last online.  Come on festivals, do the right thing, reject my ass.  It has a narrow audience and it’s too long to program.

Today on YouTube’s front page they featured some shorts from the Sundance Film Festival.  Seeing as how Sundance is supposed to be one of the biggest and best film festivals out there I was kind of curious and half expecting something brilliant.  I would think that the only real advantage to showing these is that it would be sort of a marketing tool.  Like “look at these great films.  Come check out the festival next year, to see more just like it.”  This is just my opinion but after looking at these videos, I would not pay to go to Sundance next year.  I kind of expected them to put their best foot forward.  If this is the best they’ve got, I’m not interested.  Sundance shorts I’ve seen in the past have been deep and thought provoking, these are beyond shallow.  The one redeeming short out of the four on the main page is a documentary named Mr. Okra.  It’s a great story and it’s really nicely shot.  I was looking for more of something like that, rather then “look how stupid we are!” comedy.  By all means check them out though, this is just my opinion.  Sundance has a channel on YouTube.  I haven’t checked out some of the other videos yet, but these aren’t much of an incentive to do that.  I’m still not sure if this is now the norm of Sundance or if this is an extreme misrepresentation of the short films at Sundance on the part of YouTube.  Perhaps I’ve just lost touch with what’s good.
There are some short films out there that are so unbelievable they make me look at what I do and think “I have no clue what I am doing.”  That’s what I expect to see when I watch a Sundance short film.  That’s not what I got.
Here’s the link to Mr. Okra and here’s the link to the Sundance YouTube page.

Still plugging away at the festivals.  I’ve sent it out to five so far.  The last one was sent to Australia.  I thought that was kind of exciting.  I sent it to something called The Sexy International Film Festival.  A festival that focuses around sex and relationships.  I swear to God, they have a festival for every thing.  I’ve seen festivals focused around dogs, cats, homosexuality, ethnicity, religion, the environment, racism, sexism, and many other isms.  At least a sex theme festival is something that’s generally loved by the public.  Who doesn’t like sex of some sort?  Since DNGFL had to make a long trek to Australia, that required a visit to the local US Post Office.  Could there be a worse run organization without it just completely collapsing on itself?  There was this lady there who said they were holding a package for her.  Apparently they keep all of the packages in a giant disorganized pile in the back room.  Brilliant idea during the holidays by the way.  So, the attendant had to go to the back like 4 times to look through everything.  Each time she came back she told the lady “It’s not back there.”  After the fourth time, she found it and gave it to her, so the line could move forward.  I laughed out loud when I saw this.   Here’s the scary part about this though.  These are all government employees.  Essentially these are the same brand of people that RUN OUR COUNTRY.  You know how when you walk up to a postal worker behind that little window and they look like they should have committed suicide like a week ago?  Just how miserable they are and how much they don’t give shit if you get what you want or not?  It’s kind of funny if you really think about it.  Despite all of that DNGFL is on it’s way to Australia.  The reason I bring this up is that while in the post office I started thinking of a comedy revolving around the Post Office, but it quickly turned in to a drama involving suicide and drug abuse.  I bet I could turn that in to a comedy.  Overdosing can be funny if you shoot it right.  The movie Dear God has kind of an up beat theme to it, but after my experience yesterday I can assure you that it was %100 fiction.  It’s about a con man turned postal worker that decides to try and scam people that have written letters to God.  He inadvertently ends up helping them and when the other postal employees catch wind of this, they decide they want to help people too.  Hilarity ensues from this point on.  It’s kind of indication that the post office sucks based on the fact that they need the power of almighty God, just to turn it in to a feel good environment. 
All of that aside, this Saturday me, Caine, and possibly Chris are going to get together this weekend to shoot something.  So, I might just have some new short films up.  Nothing super fancy, but they might be funny.  Caine is funny, that’s pretty much all I have working for me right now.  Neither of us has written a script or thought anything out at all really.  All we know is that we’re going to have a camera, it’s going to be day time, and we are going to shoot something.  I’m stealing an idea from Six Finger Fist here, but what ever.  If anyone wants to give us a title for this new short film, leave it in the comments, and we’ll base our short film off of that title.  Why not, right?

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.

Censored is back up in the shorts section.  Along with its fancy new laurels.  I think the Censored festival run is over.  It had a good run.  I would have really liked for it to screen out of the country.  Of course, I didn’t really submit to any festivals in other countries.  But I at least would have like to get it out of state.  That’s all right.  Maybe Do Nice Guys Finish Last will break the California borders.  We’ll see.
Being a programmer for a film festival, I have a whole new outlook on how to submit.  When submitting Censored I made one mistake, which actually is forgivable.  I showed the name of my company before the film started.  The blunt truth is that when watching short films as a programmer, I don’t really care what the name of the company who made it is.  I’ve never heard of this company and there’s a 99.999999% chance that I’m going to forget it 3 seconds in to the film.  I read a lot of books on how to submit to a film festival and I was happy to realize that I got everything else right.  My festival ID # was always clearly displayed on the both the DVD and the DVD case.  Along with the run time of the short film, the DVD region, the name of the film, and my name.  Also, my film didn’t have a DVD menu with only one option.  You put it in to the DVD player and it starts.  After programming I can also see why I got some rejection letters.  It’s good to see the other side of everything and it gives me an opportunity to correct some of the mistakes I’ve made.  After all this programming, it’s become even more apparent that it’s all about the story.  If the story sucks, the short film sucks.  You can have Oscar winning actors and jaw dropping cinematography, but if the story is some rehash of an idea that’s been done a million times or it’s just a shitty story, I’m unimpressed and so are other people.  This next bit is a little random.  Please, for the love of God, don’t start your horror short film with the killer or crazy person or whatever making a montage of pictures they’ve taken of their next victim or their victims.  In fact, avoid the making of the picture montage scene all together.  It’s been done about a gajillion times and it’s sort of lost it’s shock value at this point.  I’m sure you can come up with something much better anyway.

I think we are done with Do Nice Guys Finish Last.  Finally, right?  I say “think” because we may still have a little bit more work to do on it.  I’m still not sure though.  I tried to stick with that amateur film maker style and make the transitions simplistic.  They were simplistic, yet thought out.  I really liked it.  That short film has sort of grown on me.  I wasn’t really all that crazy about it when we had the first couple of edits, but I think it’s a funny short film.  I think I can get it in at least 1 festival. 
I’m reading a new book, A TV Writer’s Workbook by Ellen Sandler.  I haven’t really read that much of it, but I have to say, it’s extremely entertaining thus far.  I probably shouldn’t have expected anything less from an experienced writer.  She has all these great stories about her experience in the industry.  I’m going to do the exercises in the book.  I have a really hard time writing sometimes.  Plus I haven’t read a single book on it, so this works. 
I watched the first episode of Dexter, season 4 last night.  I wish I could have caught it on Sunday when it first aired.  That first episode was awesome.  That part where they altered the intro was great.  
Censored will be available in the Shorts section for viewing soon.  I figure it’s done with its festival run, so we can post it now.

I know I promised this to you guys yesterday, but things got a little crazy yesterday.  First off, I think I seriously injured my leg.  That’s ok though, because I had a good time doing it.  I won’t go in to the story so lets just get right in to what I thought of the festival.
It was cool.
Moving along. 
|Just kidding.  The festival was great.  I had a good time and Censored got a great reaction from the crowd.  I always get nervous right before I watch my own short film at a festival.  When I did the Q & A at the Action on Film Festival, I was not nervous at all.  But before my short film actually showed, I think I was shaking.  I can talk about the short film in front of a crowd, no problem.  I don’t know what the deal with that is.  I have to say, I was much less nervous sitting in the audience this time around.  The other films were great.  Some the favorites of the night from the group I went with were 9mm Brush, How to Train Your Pet, Special Delivery, & The Family.  This is not saying that the other films weren’t good, these were just some of our favorites.  I feel like I should mention Couched, just because for a low budget short film, the effects were amazing.  I personally really liked The Family.  The festival is still going on until Wednesday.  I’m giving my leg a day to heal, but I think I’ll probably limp my way over there on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.

This will be purley a plug post.  Tomorrow I’ll talk about how it all went and what I thought of Alls Faire in Love(I saw the world premier last night at the festival).  Censored is playing tonight at the SoCal Film Festival.  Program 10- Off The Beaten Path.  You can buy tickets here:
http://www.socalfilmfest.com/tickets.aspx
Say hello if you see me there.
It’s playing at the Huntington Beach Library and Cultural Center at this address:
7111 Talbert Ave., Huntington Beach 92648
My film is playing at 7:20 PM.