John Q. Phats Entertainment

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.

I thought the showing went pretty good.  Everyone seemed to be enjoying it and people laughed at all the right parts.  I’ll post pictures tomorrow and go in to detail and all that.

I’m showing Do Nice Guys Finish Last tonight at the Art Theater of Long Beach for free. If you want to check it come on down. The show starts at 8PM.

So, either we have just 2 years left before the planet destroys itself or like the Y2K hoax nothing is going to happen and life will go on.  Either way, there’s nothing I can do about either of those so it’s time to have some fun and get down to business.  Unless of course John Cusack picks me up in a limo.  Then we can outrun earthquakes and lava.  That scene was absolutely ridicules and I loved every God damned second of it.  Just turn off your brain for movies like that, you’ll love them.  I liked that movie as a mindless action flick.  I got exactly what I expected.
With Do Nice Guys Finish Last all set and making its attempt at a festival run, I’m ready for my next project.  I plan to start 2010 right.  My resolution was to write a script whenever I get an idea.  I had way too many ideas last year that I’ve now forgotten because I never wrote them.  Sometimes they are entire long short films, other times they are just quick scenes.  I actually do really enjoy writing, but the hardest part is getting started.  So, no matter how bad or small the idea is, I am going to stop what I’m doing and write a script for it immediately.  We’ll see how that goes as I seem to get groups of ideas.  Hopefully I can keep up with myself.
Ellen Sandler is doing a seminar on January 23^rd in Los Angeles at The Writers Store.  I’m seriously considering going.  I really like her book.  Only thing holding me back is that it’s $150.  I could be spending that cash on my next short film.  Who knows though, this class might push me in another direction entirely.  For $150 I suppose I could find out.  I’ll keep you guys updated.  It could be a fun Saturday. 

Happy 2010 everyone.  Hopefully you all have a good year.

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.

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.