John Q. Phats Entertainment

Often how I write is a little out of order.  Let’s say for example that I’m writing a 100 page movie.  Often times, I’ll get to page 65, and then write something that corresponds with something that happened on page 25 that I haven’t written yet.  So, I go back to page 25 and fill in the gap.  I started doing that last night and realized how ass backwards that is.  As unnatural as it seems, it’s the workflow that seems the most natural.  I’m actually very excited about writing that scene tonight.  I’ve built up a great moment of tension.  My only problem is that I sort of like having these intense moments with no real payoff at the end of the scene.  Nothing really cheesy like a cat jumping out of a trash can or some shit like that.  I’ll give you an example.  There’s a scene when Red Hood has just started becoming a vigilante.  She’s walking through the park when she sees one of the main villains in the movie sitting on a park bench staring intently at a little girl.  Red Hood freezes and isn’t really sure what to do.  I draw it out for a bit of an awkward stare and then the villain just gets up and walks off.  That’s it.  Shit, looking it now, it seems pretty lame.  O well, it’s a first draft.  I guess the payoff is that later on in the movie the two have a big confrontation.  I won’t give it away, but it’s kind of awesome. 
I’m having mixed feelings about what I’ve written so far.  Some scenes I think are amazing and others are beyond horrible.  I’m just going to power through this 1^st draft and hope I can fix the parts I don’t like later.  My page count should pass 80 by the end of tonight.  I can’t confirm this, but I think this is the furthest I’ve gotten on the Red Hood script.  I’m aiming for 120 pages.  So, I’m getting there.  I may send it off to festivals or I may send it off to producers.  There’s a good possibility I’ll do both.  I haven’t really decided what to do with it yet.  I know that I still have a lot of work to do.

This is something that kind of bugs me.  The final episode of True Blood won’t air this weekend because Monday is a holiday.  What the fuck is that shit?  Like the episode has a right to a three day weekend because it works so hard?  I don’t even understand that.  This is not the first time they’ve pulled this shit either.  They did it earlier this season and I was absolutely shocked when I checked my DVR and it wasn’t there.  Here I was thinking “I get a three day weekend and a new episode of True Blood?  This is going to be awesome.”  I’m not sure what airing an episode entails, but I picture it as someone hitting a giant, basketball sized, glowing play button.  It’s probably much more complicated then that, but still, screw this holiday shit.  Jesus HBO, you may as well let the terrorists win.

P.S. Someone recommended that I boycott the final episode.  Obviously, they are fucking stupid.  That show is amazing and I’m sure the wait will be well worth it.

*WARNING*
If you have not watched True Blood, season 3, episode 33 don’t read this. It contains spoilers.
*END WARNING*
If you haven’t seen True Blood or listened to The Heavy, you should do both immediately. If you watch Episode 33, for a short amount of time, you could do both. How often do you find two awesome performances working so well together? You can imagine my excitement when I heard a song by The Heavy playing in the background of a scene in Episode 33 of True Blood. It was in the scene where Russel kills the male prostitute. Granted it was just background music, but still. It worked with the scene and it’s exciting to see The Heavy getting some much needed exposure in the US. I love it when that happens. When two of your favorite things at the time mix.
I’m not going to go too much in to detail about True Blood. I could write 4 pages on it easy. All I’ll say is that it’s a damn entertaining show. Plus I think I’m in love with Deborah Ann Woll. Allow me to explain this. I used to be in love with Milla Jovovich. I thought she was an awesome actress and she’s gorgeous. But, then I saw .45.  Milla Jovovich is naked for probably about 30% of that movie. Well, that sort of killed it for me. The mystery was gone. I had seen it all. What else was there to wonder about? It wasn’t her fault, we just grew apart. For the longest time, I’ve been searching for a replacement for Milla Jovovich. Selma Blaire sort of pinch hit for about 3 months there. I’m sort of picky about which actress gets my love. It has to be a combination of amazing acting skill and sort of flying under the radar. I can’t love an actress that’s in the center of the hollywood stage, what the hells the point of admiring someone if they are surrounded by admiration twenty four hours a day anyway? That would be like donating a nickle to Bill Gates. I’m sure he would put up a front of appreciation, but really, he would be thinking you could go fuck yourself for wasting his time. And who could blame him? Deborah Ann Woll fits my strict standards. She’s amazing on True Blood and if you said “Deborah Ann Woll” at a party you would probably get a “Who the fuck is Deborah Ann Woll?” look from at least 8 out of 10 people. Then you would say “Jessica….. From True Blood.” And everyone would say “Ooooooooo.” So, Deborah Ann Woll gets my love. However, I’m not sure how long our love can last. Her popularity will skyrocket and then she’ll Bill Gates the fuck out of me if I see her in person and tell her I thought she was great on True Blood. Such a cruel world. Lets just try to enjoy our time together while it’s still here.

Switching gears here, I saw The Expendables. It’s pretty much exactly what you expect it to be. There’s some crazy ass fight scenes, shit explodes, hundreds of bad guys get shot, and there are tons of cheesy one liners. It’s pretty awesome. It’s the only movie that has the most terrible story line but is somehow still an amazing movie. Which doesn’t really make sense to me. How the hell do you go right by going left? Whatever, it works.  Entertaining flick.

So, we are still waiting on the judging for Do Nice Guys Finish Last.  Again, we gave 2 versions of the short film to 5 people and told them to pick which one they liked best.  We are still waiting on their final word.  Maybe we will have it by the end of today.  Then, we will be done and I will send it off to film festivals.  It’s nerve racking having other people look at your short film for the first time.  O well, that’s why we make them, right?
I’m reading A TV Writers Workbook by Ellen Sandler still.  This book is unbelievable.  I’m loving it so far.  It really does put writing in to a process that’s not so daunting and intimidating.  Plus she’s a writer at heart, so she knows how to put an entertaining twist on everything she says.  I remember a long time ago, I read a book on short film making.  I forgot what it was called or who wrote it.  It had loads of great information in it, but my God was it boring to read.  It was like reading VCR instructions.  I’m actually kind of excited whenever I read A TV Writers Workbook.  I want to know what she has to say.  I’m taking my time with it and actually doing the exercises in the book as I go.  Sometimes I read chapters over again, just to put the information to memory.  Even if you don’t want to get involved in writing for TV, I would recommend it.  It’s a great writers guide and the techniques can be applied anywhere.
Now on to a random fact that I discovered last night.  I’m really trying to get my girlfriend addicted to Dexter.  So, I’ve started watching season 1 with her.  My girlfriend loves True Blood.  She can’t get enough of it.  We’ve stayed up till like midnight watching episode after episode of True Blood.  Which for me is early, but for her is insanely late.  Anyway, we are watching Dexter and she says “Hey, that guys is on True Blood.  He plays Sam Merlotte.”  Low and behold there he was, Sam Trammell, the actor who plays Sam Merlotte.  He was on the second show of the first season and he was one of Dexter’s victims.  He was an alcoholic that would go from city to city drinking and driving.  Every single time he would get too drunk and hit someone he would just pack up and move to another city.  So, if anyone ever asks you “what True Blood character had an appearance on Dexter in the first season?”  You can say Sam Trammell.  Not that anyone will ever ask you that.  I suppose calling it a useless fact was quite justified.

Sorry for not posting for awhile, I’ve had a busy week.  I was on vacation in Minnesota.  I’m back now and there’s a lot to talk about.  We’ll start off with the light stuff.  Me and my girlfriend have been watching a lot of the second season of True Blood.  That show is absolutely awesome.  I hate to say this, because it seems like after Twilight, everyone is jumping on the vampire band wagon, but it makes me want to write a vampire short.  It seems like the hardest part of doing something like that is making it not look cheesy.  Why?  Because not making it look cheesy is either going to cost you money or time.  Possibly both.  I’ve done one suspense based short film and I wasn’t too happy with it.  That’s all right, it was a good learning experience. 
Programming for the festival is going nicely.  My biggest issue with short films is time.  People try and tell a story in 10 minutes that could easily be told in 5.  The longer a short film is, the more obvious it is.  First off, let me tell you, if you’re making a 20+ minute short film it had better be brilliant.  It’s an immediate flag to see a short film that runs over 20 minutes.  The first thought is “This could be really bad.”  Mainly because I would rather sit through a bad 5 minute long short film then a bad 20 minute long short film.  I’m pretty sure I’ve said this before, so I’ll just move on.
NHL 10 comes out soon.  The only reason I mention this is because NHL 09 already consumes a large portion of my life.  I’m not really sure what’s going to happen when NHL 10 comes out.  I may lose a lot of sleep, which means I might miss a lot of work, which means I might get fired, which means I can’t pay my cable bill, which means they would turn off my Internet, which means I wouldn’t be able to post here anymore.  This is the reality of the situation.  Don’t judge me, it’s not my fault, I have an addiction.  If they had a ten step program, I would probably be a prime candidate.  By the way, that reminds me of one of my movie quirks.  I absolutely hate it when you have people playing a video game in a movie and they are button mashing like crazy on the controllers.  Why not just have them play the game with the audio off?  Then record the audio of the game some other time and then insert that audio in editing.  You would think that would be something that directors catch, but I see it all the time.  I’ve shot a couple things with people playing video games and every time I’ve been able to work with the audio and make it look like the actor/actress is actually playing the game.  Or you just record them playing the game with the audio on from the angle you’ll be cutting to that actually shows the game and then use that audio.  It’s really not that difficult. 
Moving on, we should be done with the audio for Do Nice Guys Finish Last possibly tonight.  We’ll see, I may not be able to tonight.  It would be nice to finish it up.  Vacation kind of put a stop to everything.  I really want that done by the end of next week.  As soon as it’s done, I’m going to send it away to 6 festivals.  Might get rejected, might not.  Either way, I’ll keep you guys all updated on what’s going on with that.
There are big things happening with JQP Entertainment itself.  We may have a new name soon.  Which means we would have a new web address.  I would actually probably keep this same design and everything, the only thing that would change would be the web address and logo in the upper left corner.  Actually this web address would probably link to the other one, so really there wouldn’t be that much of a change.  We are changing the way we do things and we all agreed that a new name is necessary.
I’ll probably be mentioning this every post from now until then, but the SoCal Film Festival is very close.  I’ll more then likely be attending every night, either with someone or alone.  It’s so close to me, it seems like a waste not to.  It kicks off Monday, 9/14/2009 but Censored isn’t playing until Friday.  Again, you can buy tickets here:
http://www.socalfilmfest.com/tickets.aspx
There’s just a lot going on with JQP Entertainment right now.  Way more then I can probably mention in this post.  I’ll let you guys know as new things come up.

I didn’t really do much of anything film making wise last night so I suppose there’s not much to talk about.  I watched the first three episodes of True Blood, Season 2.  I like when the in-show time between seasons is like 2 minutes and miraculously all of the main character either have new hair cuts or have dropped like 20 pounds of fat.  Vampire Bill went from being normal to somewhat in shape in a mater of hours.  It’s especially obvious when you go straight from season 1 right on to season 2.  Don’t get me wrong, I love that show, but I thought that was really funny.  Me and my girlfriend were up pretty late last night because we couldn’t stop watching that show.  That show is the king of the cliff hanger.  At the end of every episode, you just think to yourself “Just one more.”  That show is getting more and more graphic in both the sex scenes and the kill scenes.  Last night the main vampire character, Vampire Bill, bit his girlfriends neck and then sloppily made out with her, dripping blood everywhere.  All on her face, in her mouth, and all over the bed.  He did this, while he was having sex with her.  His girlfriend was in to it too.  I actually said “Jesus” out loud.  The tone was a mixture of “what the hell?” and “that’s awesome.”
The name of this whole film making thing is changing from John Q. Phats Entertainment to JQP Entertainment.  First off the name is way too long.  I tell them the name of the company and they look at me blankly and say “What?”  It’s too hard to remember.  Second of all, I’m tired of people thinking that my name is John.  People will write me E-Mails reffering to me as John.  Which I don’t really get.  I suppose I get the logic and I mainly blame myself for having a dumb ass company name, but still.  Besides, my e-mail address is my real name followed by jqpentertainment.com.  I imagine if the company name is JQP, people won’t refer to me as JQP.  Part of me wants to change the name completely, but that would really suck.  Although, in all honesty, I can probably come up with something better.

I finished up watching season one of True Blood last weekend.  Really awesome show.  I’ve also been watching Dexter, Season 3.  Is it possibly for that show to be any more awesome then it already is?  Every single season I expect that show to be not as good as the previous season and that doesn’t happen.  It’s very strange.  Somehow, none of the characters are getting stale at all.  It’s just strange, because the show goes against everything that I know.  Jennifer Carpenter is amazing on that show.  She plays Dexter’s sister.  She was also in The Exorcism of Emily Rose.  She played Emily Rose in that movie and there are a couple scenes where she goes insane.  She nails it.  The first time I watched that movie was with a friend of mine that never shuts the hell up.  Between the two of us there’s some sort of constant noise at all times when we are together.  I think the only thing said throughout that entire movie was “…..O shit.”  She’s really good at playing afraid.  While she’s been great in what she’s done, I’m sure we haven’t seen what she can really do quite yet.
Still waiting on the color correction for Do Nice Guys Finish Last from Gabe.  I did get an update from the SoCal Film Festival.  Apparently they are having a competition to see which program can sell the most tickets.  I’m not really in to all of this competitive stuff.  Now go buy some tickets so my program can break in to the top 6.  Again, Censored is playing in Program 10.  You can buy tickets here.  Dooooo it.

The search for a mascot continues.  Current discussions focused around what exactly the mascot would mean and why I was doing this.  We also discussed squirrels and mice as possible mascots.  Wow, that all sounds so official.  I suppose this is part of me taking a break after finishing filming for Do Nice Guys Finish Last.  I usually do that.  I wish I didn’t have to, but it does make everything more exciting when I start on my next project.  I have been writing here and there, but I haven’t really worked on anything major.  I really want to shoot in HD next.  I keep telling myself that once I get an HD camera that shoots 24 FPS I’ll be good from then on.  I know that’s not the case though.  As I have said in previous posts, I’ll always be chasing some new billion dollar thing that does something better then my current equipment.  I like to consider myself a budget friendly film maker.  I usually make what I have work.  That doesn’t really come out of ingenuity though, it’s more of a necessity.  Like when we built the jib arm for Red Hood.  I could have rented one for $2500, but I didn’t have that kind of budget.  So, I built one for just over $100.  It worked and now I have a jib arm.  Building stuff is always a cheap way out.  Plus, it’s kind of interesting to see what Gabe can come up with.  Or some random guy who posts blue prints on the Internet.  We built a steady cam off of the Internet.  We called it the Raminator.  It worked pretty good.  It’s kind of heavy and weird, but that’s kind of the point.  It’s supposed to add weight to the camera at a lower point to help stabilize it.  It worked for what we wanted to use it for.  Back to my original point, the mascot.  The mascot has to do with changing the name of the company.  Also, I want something kind of fun to put at the end of the credits that people will remember.  That’s pretty much it.  I really thought that there was more to it then that, but I guess not. 
Gabe tells me that the color correction for Do Nice Guys Finish Last is tedious, but he’s making progress.  Once the color correction is done the transitions will be a snap.  The credits are all ready to go.  So, we’re not too far off.  There’s not that much color correction to be done.  For a lot of the scenes, Gabe stuck with one camera.  It just flowed better that way. 
I watched a bunch more of the first season of True Blood last night.  Awesome series, but I stand by my belief that vampires are dicks.  I also got Dexter Season 3 on DVD earlier this week.  I’ve only watched the first episode, but holy shit that show is awesome.  I can’t stand watching shows on TV, I have to wait for them on DVD.  I think it’s the cliff hangers that really aggravate me.  There have been a couple times in True Blood, where if I wasn’t able to go to the next episode immediately, I would have lost my freaking mind.  Same with Dexter, although Dexter usually has a pretty good ending to each episode that leaves you satisfied.  Heroes plays the cliff hanger game a lot.  The worst by though is Lost.  I watched season 1 on DVD and decided to watch season 2 on television.  Every single episode I watched ended with me yelling “Jesus Christ!  What the fuck?!”  I only watched like 4 of them before I finally gave up and just waited for the DVD’s.  The thing with Lost is, is that they show you a preview the week before and you’re excited to see this one thing in the preview, then you watch it, and of course, that one thing is at the end of the episode.  But then that’s all it is.  There’s no explanation of it.  It just sort of happens.  Then you have to wait for an entire week to see every ones reaction to that one thing, which is what you wanted to see last week.  Season 5 comes out in December and I’ve been keeping up with it.  I love that show, I think it’s great, but screw those writers.

Me and my girlfriend have been slowly watching the True Blood series on DVD recently.  The general story is that vampires have come out and admitted that they exist and that there’s this product called True Blood that vampires drink instead of feeding on people.  The main characters are straight out of hicksville USA, so the show sort of has a racial undertone.  There’s people who are for vampire rights and people who are against them.  Here’s what I’m saying though.  I don’t hate the vampires because they’re vampires.  I hate them because they are dicks.  Pretty much every vampire on that show is a gigantic douche.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great show, but I can relate when a character wants to bash a vampire in the face with a shovel.  Of course I’m only like 5 episodes in, so maybe my opinion will change.  I think it’s an awesome show.  I’m somewhat addicted to it. 
About a week ago, I found an old thumb drive that I’ve been looking for.  On it were a bunch of somewhat old scripts.  Some of them were kind of funny.  One of them was really dirty, without really being dirty at all.  The title of it was Foodophile.  Here it is:
EXT. PARK – DAY
DAVID sits down on a park bench with food in hand ready to eat.  He’s holding a box full of chicken wings.
As soon as he sits down VALERIE sits down next to him.  They both look at each other and smile.  VALERIE has a Weinerschnitzle bag. 
DAVID picks up a wing and eats all of the meat off of it.  He looks over and realizes that VALERIE is seductively licking a french fry. 
DAVID stops and starts to slowly stick his finger between the opening of the two bones.
VALERIE pulls a hotdog out of the bag and begins to stroke it as if it were a penis.
DAVID puts the bones to his mouth and starts to lick in between them as if it is a vagina.
VALERIE puts the hotdog in her mouth as if she is giving a blowjob. 
DAVID smiles and continues stimulating the fake chicken clit.
VALERIE grabs a handful of chocolate milk shake and smears it in to her mouth and face.
DAVID stops dead in his tracks.  He stares at her in shock.  He gets up and walks away.

I’m not sure what I think of it.  It’s kind of sick, wrong, and awesome all at the same time.  I had some other stuff on there that I think I wrote when I was drunk or something.  One was about a woman having sex with a blender.  Don’t ask. 
In other news, my web designer added a new add on to the site which filters out spam.  JQP Entertainment- 1, Spammers- 0.  Also, internet at my house is out.  I’ll try to find a computer to update on this weekend, but I make no guarantees.