John Q. Phats Entertainment

I went on a bit of a writing binge last night.  For some reason a script I had an idea for has been popping in to my head a lot.  So, I sat down and started writing it last night.  The whole entire thing has sort of a smart ass tone to it.  I meant for it to be a series, but it’s kind of shaping up in to a movie.  It’s called Dead Girl and it’s kind of fun to write because I haven’t planned anything.  I just sort of sit down and write what ever comes to mind.  I’m not putting any pressure on myself to make it spectacular.  I’m just writing it.  It would be nice to have a full on movie script.  If I were a script writer, I would submit scripts to festivals like crazy.  Printing a script out costs you maybe a dollar.  In fact, I think a lot of festivals will accept an E-Mailed PDF.  Which is no shipping cost, no printing cost, and more importantly no production cost.  Plus, I can’t think of a better way to get a script out there.  If I finish Dead Girl, I’ll send it out to every script writing competition I can find.  Why not, right?
Censored was rejected from the Gangrene Film Festival yesterday.  This is only it’s 2nd rejection and it really only brought me down for roughly 20 seconds.  Mainly because there are about a million festivals out there and if I really wanted to, I could probably get in to another 4 by next month.  However, my focus is on Do Nice Guys Finish Last right now, which honestly, will probably have a much higher rejection rate then Censored.  So, it’s probably a good thing to be developing this tough skin at this stage.  The first rejection letter I got, really got to me.  I was upset about it for like a week.  This time it was 20 seconds.  Maybe next time, I won’t feel a thing.  It’s not that I don’t think Do Nice Guys Finish Last is going to be great when it’s done, it’s just that it’s sort of fighting an uphill battle.  It’s 15 minutes long and very offensive.  That’s pretty long for a short film and I’m guessing that film festivals want to appeal to a wider audience, so they kind of attempt to stay in the PG-13 area.  It doesn’t really matter to me though.  We made the film that we set out to make.  Worst case scenario?  I have a short film that I’m proud of to post on my web site.  Plus, I still have the SoCal Film Festival to look forward to.
By the way, Gabe just threw (literally) me edit six of Do Nice Guys Finish Last.  I think this might be our final cut.  We’ll see.  I’ll have to check it out tonight.  I really want it to be our final cut.  The last edit had very minor changes in it.  So, I’m pretty sure it’s almost there.

I’ve been seeing a steady increase in traffic on my site.  That’s kind of exciting.  I was thinking about trying to get some interviews with directors, producers, and possibly an actor.  It really is true that sometimes all you have to do is ask.  Worst they can say is “Fuck off cock lick.”  Wow, that’s pretty harsh.  That actually kind of stings.  There it goes, it just passed, see, I’m fine.  In reality, I would probably get some sort of legal jargon back that translated in to “No, you’re stupid, stop bothering me.”  I think if I can handle a rejection letter from a film festival, I can handle a rejection letter from a famous person.
Have you ever been in a situation where you’re in some sort of a contest and everyone around you is winning awards except for you?  And your thinking (or saying) “What the hell is wrong with these people?!  My stuff is way better then this!”  Then something truly crappy wins and you’re completely outraged?  Hate to tell you, but it’s not because everyone else is crazy, it’s because whatever you entered in to the contest sucked.  I am actually totally guilty of this.  I entered a 24 hour film festival a while back that chose not to show my short in the final screening.  Me and the three people involved were totally outraged.  Looking back at it now though, it wasn’t because the judges were biased, or because the other teams cheated, or because I knocked up one of the judges daughters, it was because my short film sucked.  It was shot on a shitty little standard def camera with no boom mic.  It had two actors in it that had never acted before (myself being one of them).  The third actor was good, but really, how good can you be when you have all of that bad working against you?  When I finally owned up to the fact that my short film sucked, I could learn from it.  I could sit back and figure out what I had done wrong.  Which was far more valuable and got me much further in my development as a film maker.  Best advice I can give you is to go out there and fail.  Fail and learn from it.