John Q. Phats Entertainment

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.

First off, I would like to apologize in advance for this one.  I went on sort of a Harry Potter binge this weekend and watched all five movies over the course of two days and my brain is a little scrambled.  I can’t believe that after five movies, Ron still hasn’t made a move on that Herminy (did I spell that right?  Don’t really care.) chick.  Christ man, what do you need, a written invitation?!  Also, there’s clearly not enough drug use for this to be a movie about a bunch of kids.  Although, I’m convinced that, the divination teacher has got to be on something.  I wonder if there’s a deleted scene where she’s smoking out Dumbledore?  In all seriousness though, for what they are, those movies are amazing.  They are all really well done.  Pretty much every aspect of those movies is at the very least, great.  Anyway, sorry again.
In my last post I talked about an old short film that I did titled The Wake Up.  It really got me thinking about my first short film, Firework De La Muerte.  What a pile of crap that short film was.  It was roughly an eight page script with the same joke told four times.  Really, the joke wasn’t funny the first time and it sure wasn’t funny the 4th time.  For that one we shot in a department store which shall remain nameless, without asking anyone.  We just sort of got somebody with a red shirt and went with it.  That was gorilla film making to the extreme.  To be honest, nobody really cared.  If I was an employee making minimum wage, I don’t think I would really care either.  I think the worst part about Firework De La Muerte is that when it was done, I thought it was great.  But then when other people watched it, they didn’t laugh.  At first I was in denial.  Like there was something wrong with everyone else.  Finally, I realized that it really did just suck something awful.  It was kind of a slap to the face.  But it was necessary.  I remember the first time I watched it, without my head up my ass.  I just sat there watching it in absolute shock at how bad it really was.  After watching it, I actually said out loud.
“O my God……  That sucked.”
There is no place to see Firework De La Muearte, nobody will ever see it.  It belongs in the depths of a hard drive, where nobody will ever find it.  I think I might of actually deleted it off of my external hard drive.  I do still have the prop firework though, made of cardboard, that egg crate stuff you put on a mattress, and duct tape.  The prop was actually kind of glorious, I have to say.  It was a giant somewhat rocket shape covered in duct tape.
While Firework De La Muearte is an awful short film, it really was something that I needed to do, to get where I am.  Now, Censored is playing in festivals all over the place, I’m close to finishing Do Nice Guys Finish Last, and I have a lot of big and exciting projects on the horizon.  This sort of leads in to my next topic.  I finished up fancy new laurels for Censored:
      

Technically, the SoCal Film festival hasn’t happened yet, but we have been selected.

Is anyone planning on going to the AOF ?  I think I’m going to check it out tonight.  I’m not sure what I’m going to see, but I’ll see something.  The first night I went we got a huge bag of SWAG.  Everyone loves SWAG.  Lets face it, if it’s free, someone will take it.  There’s a sign near my house advertising free dirt.  Anyway, the SWAG was mainly postcards of other short films.  There was a ton of them.  In the mix was also a DVD for a movie called Long Pig: Unrated Extreme Edition.  I’m going to take a guess here and say that it’s probably amazingly gory.  An independent film that’s unrated.  O yeah, there’s going to be some crazy gore in it.  I’ve seen some pretty intense stuff.  I really feel like, if I can watch Irreversible, I can probably make it through anything.  It’s not that Irreversible was gory, it was just hard to watch because of the context of it.  That movie was unrelentingly brutal.  I’m reading reviews of Long Pigs now.  Apparently, there’s an “anus scene.”  I’m not sure how I feel about that.  Revolted and curious at the same time I suppose.  I’m not much of a horror buff, but maybe I’ll check it out.  Or I’ll give it to my neighbor to check out.  He loves gory films. 
Gabe should be bringing my hard drive tonight with the scene we shot last Thursday for Nice Guys Finish Last added.  I really wanted Nice Guys Finish Last to be under 15 minutes.  I bet it’s probably going to run a little over 16 minutes.  Which isn’t bad.  If there’s no fat and every scene progresses the story line, I have no problem with that.  I suppose it is what it is.
I’m looking in to renting a theater to show Nice Guys Finish Last.  I thought it would be cool to have a sort of theater showing and get some feedback before I send it off to festivals.  I found one for $650 for one night.  If I charged $10 per person, I would have to have at least 65 people show up to break even.  I know, that I know that many people but weather they would be available or not is a whole different story.  I found another one that rents by the week and that was $1000 for 4 shows.  So, I would need to get 100 people there from Thursday- Sunday.  That’s actually not that bad.  I bet I could pull that off.  O wait, that’s just for a stage, not a screen and all that other crap.  Damn.  I bet I could get a projector though and rig something up.  In fact, I know a guy that has a projector and Gabe is in a band.  Bands have speakers and stuff, right?  I’ll have to get back to you on this one.  Or maybe I can have the actors act it out in real time on stage.  Wow, that’s a terrible idea.

Censored played at the Action on Film Festival on Sunday (7/26/2009).  It was a lot of fun.  I got a goody bag filled with stuff.  They invited film makers to come up for a Q and A after the screening.  I went up and said
“If anyone has anything negative to say, I’m totally open to hear it.  Hearing what’s wrong with it is the only way I’m going to make a better film.  So, hit me.”
Too negative?  I didn’t get any negative comments, they were all very nice.  How did you think of that?  What did you shoot it on?  Will the DVD release be uncensored?  I enjoyed it a lot.  It kind of made me feel like a big shot.  I don’t know why, but sometimes, when I’m in the right mood, I love talking in front of a crowd.  I wasn’t nervous at all. 
During the showing, there wasn’t much laughter.  At first I started to feel badly about it, but everyone in the end clapped and one of the other film makers even told me it was great.  Maybe I misjudged Censored.  I really did think it was a laugh out loud comedy.  perhaps it’s not.  Maybe it’s one of those things that’s just kind of clever and entertaining.  I’m totally fine with that.  As long as people enjoy it.  It got a good applause at the end and like I said, nobody told me it was a God awful piece of crap or anything.  Maybe I’m a glutton for punishment, but I almost want someone to stand up one day and say
“That was the biggest pile of crap I have ever seen in my entire life.  You should die.” 
My response would probably be a raise of my eyebrows and a
“Wow, ok, thank you….I guess.”
Overall, I felt a little outclassed to be honest.  One of the film makers said that the budget for their film was $5000.  Censored cost me like $50 to make.  I have to say, the other shorts that showed, looked amazing.  Wilcox Sex Therapy had some nice lighting and cinematography and it was hysterical.  The actor (David Brainard) who played the sex therapist nailed it.  I actually went up to the director of Wilcox Sex Therapy, Daniel Gruen and told him that it was a great film.  It was very well done.  There was another film called The Condom Killer, that was stylized like a 1950’s detective story.  I thought it was awesome that they pulled it off.  It looked really good.  Despite feeling outclassed a bit by the other films, I had a great time.  I’m really glad they did a Q and A at the end.  That was really nice.
As for Nice Guys Finish Last, I’m really looking forward to seeing it with the new scene we shot last Thursday.  Once I get my hard drive back from Gabe, I’ll see about posting some of the out takes.
In a totally unrelated note, according to my home phones caller ID, The Staples Center called at random times in the night and left me 9 messages of a fax machine beeping.  The last one I answered this morning at like 6AM.  I know I’m a Ducks fan, but Jesus Staples Center, what the hell is your problem?

So, I got an e-mail from the Action on Film Film Festival going over all of the nominations for the various awards they are giving out.  I swear to God, there has got to be like 50 awards.  Each award has 5 nominations.  I have no clue how many short films they are showing, but I guess it’s a lot.  So, I’m looking for Censored on one of these lists and don’t see it.  Not one.  I did feel better though when I realized that it’s mainly like 10 or 15 short films listed 5 times for each award.  I suppose that makes sense when you really think about it.  If a short film is nominated for best picture, I imagine it did a lot of things right, so I suppose it’s not weird to see it listed as a best actress nomination and best cinematography.  It makes sense.  If there was a category for “Best Short Film with a Censorship Bar” I would have nailed that shit.  That must have been a nightmare figuring all of that out.  I’ve come to the realization that Censored isn’t an award winner.  I came to this realization when it played at the LA United Film Festival.  It had a couple parts that got a good laugh out of the audience but I know I can do better then that.  There’s a lot that could have been improved.  The lighting could have been better and I was still trying to figure out the boom mic when I shot it.  So the sound quality isn’t really all that great.  At one point, I thought Censored was brilliant.  I still think the concept is strong, but I probably could have executed it a little better.  O well, on to bigger and better things.  Maybe Nice Guys Finish Last will be an award winning film.  If not Nice Guys Finish Last, then maybe the next one.

I entered Censored in to a film festival that makes it IMDB appropriate.  I didn’t realize that I didn’t have to actually be accepted in to the festival, I just had to submit my short film.  So, I get the E-Mail that tells me I can fill out the form to create an IMDB page.  I go to IMDB and start the process of filling this thing out.  It was the most unnecessarily complicated thing in the history of unnecessarily complicated things I’ve ever seen.  First off, every section (even the title) has it’s own guidelines page that’s roughly a page long.  Really IMDB?  Seriously?  We need an entire page explaining how to type in the title?  Are they explaining this from the point of your computer being off or what?
“OK, there should be a big power button on your computer, push it and wait for your computer to load.  Once it’s loaded, open up Internet Explorer, or Firefox, perhaps Opera, any Internet browser will do.  If you’re accessing this site on a cell phone, there may not be a big power button on the front of it.  That’s ok, just load up the browser.”
That’s what I pictured when I first saw it.  I found it hilarious, because if you were reading that, clearly your computer was already on and the browser was already open.  You see what I did there?  Jesus, I’m such a clever bastard.  Anyway, it’s actually rules and regulations behind each section.  It’s somewhat mind numbing.  By the end of it your like
“What the fuck?!  Am I disarming a nuke?!  I just wanted to type in the title!”
It makes you question everything about what you are doing.
“Did I type in the title correctly?  Does it meet all the guidelines?  It looks good.  Can I move on?  Is everything ok?  Where am I?!  What the fuck is going on?!  Who am I?!”
It makes you kind of afraid of the next section.  And when you get something wrong it like highlights it in red.  Which is just as effective as having a person stand there yelling
“You got that wrong you stupid asshole!”
So, after you fill everything out, it gets sent to a representative at IMDB to check over.  So I’ll probably get an E-Mail in 2 weeks regarding all the crap I filled out wrong. 
Currently, I’m waiting for responses from The Action On Film International Film Festival and Woodstock Film Festival.