Full Speed Ahead
Sorry we’ve been away from the blog for a few weeks, we’ve been busy taking care of little details like schedules, budgets and money. No biggie!
But never fear, we are back in business and steaming full ahead until our spring shoot. You might even say we’ve entered LUDICROUS SPEED:
Hopefully I won’t look like Dark Helmet at the end of that clip at the end of this shoot. But even if I do, it’ll have been worth it!
Stay tuned to the blog, facebook page and twitter feeds for massive amounts of updates and news for the next few months. It’s gonna be a great spring!
BIG Sundance Sale!
Last week I shared a story about Love in the Time of Monsters team-member Justin Martinez and his film V/H/S storming the gates at Sundance. The midnight screening went really well, and the big news broke this week that V/H/S sold to Magnolia Pictures for over 1 MILLION DOLLARS!
How awesome! A huge congratulations to Justin and everybody that worked on the project. It’s always great to see great people succeed, and I love that fact that someone I know finally broke through the “glass celling” of major festival/distribution that so many independent filmmakers are up against. As our intrepid Line Producer Rob put it, “it’s like what they always told us would happen when we moved here.”
While all this exciting stuff is happening for people surrounding LiToM, the production team is hard at work setting up our shoot this year, and doing our best to get in a situation where someone can faint at our festival screening in the near future.
News From Sundance
You may or may not be aware that the Sundance film festival is happening as we speak in Park City, Utah. It’s the most prestigious and important film festival in the world, and over 10,000 filmmakers submit their film annually. Of those, about 200 are selected. Needless to say, it’s pretty hard to get in if you don’t have big star names attached to your film, so independent filmmakers are at a big disadvantage.
That makes it all the more impressive that our old friend Justin Martinez got his film in this year! Justin shot our short “Background(ed)” (we really thought that one was going to Sundance-HA), and is set to be the Director of Photography on Love in the Time of Monsters as well. Yeah!
Justin’s current film is called V/H/S and is a revolutionary combination of an anthology film and the “found footage” genre popularized by Blair Witch and more recently Paranormal Activity. The official description:
When a group of petty criminals is hired by a mysterious party to retrieve a rare piece of found footage from a rundown house in the middle of nowhere, they soon realize that the job isn’t going to be as easy as they thought. In the living room, a lifeless body holds court before a hub of old television sets, surrounded by stacks upon stacks of VHS tapes. As they search for the right one, they are treated to a seemingly endless number of horrifying videos, each stranger than the last.
V/H/S screened last night at the “midnight” screening series, and apparently went over really well. Here’s a review (note: they refer to Justin’s segment as the “Radio Silence” segment)
Between this and last week’s award for our composer, Rob Gokee, the LiToM team is really out there kicking tail! Looks like I’m going to have to step up my game to match the level that they have already achieved. Congrats Justin!
Justin Martinez at Sundance with his film "V/H/S"
Award Winner!
Big old congrats to our composer for Love in the Time of Monsters, Rob Gokee! He added another award to his mantle when he won BEST ORIGINAL MUSIC at the International Academy of Web Television Awards in Las Vegas last night (for his Night of The Zombie King score). Rob was up against some serious competition, and I’m so excited to have a composer of his caliber (and all around awesome guy) working on LiToM.
Matt and Rob have been working hard developing some awesome themes for LiToM, and from what I’ve heard, we are all in for a treat when he finishes the whole thing! If you want to read more about Rob’s work, go to his website.
Read all about all the winners at IAWTV here, and don’t forget to follow us on twitter and facebook, so you can get updates as they happen!
T-Minus The Future
Strap on those jetpacks and pull on them goggles, kids, because we’re about to enter THE FUTURE, otherwise known as 2012.
This is a dubious year, to be sure, full of turmoil, superstition, and of course a certain Bigfoot-themed horror movie. That’s right, this is the year that we’re all been waiting for, when the written word finally becomes reality (or whatever passes for reality on screen) and I can share the pictures in my head with the rest of the world.
Much like the dreary grey Winter gives way to the bright, sunny Spring, my holiday malaise has given way to a renewed energy for Love in the Time of Monsters. It’s a good thing too, because there’s still a lot of work ahead of us. From working with the different department heads and talking characters with the actors (not to mention finishing the casting process) to logistics and the business of the business, I think I know what I’ll be doing with all my weekends form here until May.
Dare I say, I believe 2012 will be the Year of the Bigfoot. Has a nice ring to it, right? I can’t wait to make it a reality!
A Look Back
Happy New Year Everybody! Hope you had a great holiday and had chance to reflect on the accomplishments and events of 2011. With that in mind, I dug through the Love In The Time Of Monsters archives and pulled out some big blog posts from the first year of the blog. Without further adieu here are the Slavko-approved highlights:
Matt Talks About The Secret To Low Budget Filmmaking
Mike Goes Off About Wes Craven
Andy Learns To Love Distribution
Matt Becomes A Better Director By Watching Bad Movies
Matt Announces Kane Hodder Casting
Andy Announces Doug Jones Casting
Matt Tries To Make Jason Voorhees Funny
Hope you enjoy looking back as much as I did. Don’t be afraid to dig in a little deeper, we had over 150 posts this past year!
Don’t forget to find us on twitter or facebook to keep the updates coming. Will Love in the Time of Monsters cause the apocalypse? Stay tuned and find out!
Inspiration And The Holidays
For me, there is no harder time to get inspired than the holidays. As the days grow shorter, and the gatherings become more frequent, it becomes increasingly difficult to focus on personal endeavors, creative or otherwise.
I suppose it’s not a terrible thing. In place of those selfish creative thoughts are the thoughts of friends and family and the desire to touch base with them. Suddenly, priorities shift from ‘gotta have a meeting’ to ‘gotta go to this party’ in a way that doesn’t make you feel totally lazy.
My personal theory is the creative drain comes from the increased pressure of shopping during the holidays. For the past week, I’ve been frantically trying to get all my presents purchased (take that, procrastination!) to free up the rest of my December for more fruitful activities. Except, by the time I wrestle through the crowds and drop chunks of my hard earned cash around town, I don’t have the energy to do anything more fruitful. It’s as if the implicit cost of holiday shopping is one not of the wallet, but of the soul.
That’s not to say I’m not trying to do things. Mike just finished the latest and greatest draft of the script, I’ve been doing endless amounts of research – yes, that’s what I call it when I spend the day watching Netflix, thank you very much – and generally doing what I can to keep the movie moving forward if only incrementally.
But hey, any progress is good progress, right? Right!
And if nothing else, it’s only another week until Christmas, what’s a little more time off? Maybe for Santa will bring me a bit of inspiration this year to make 2012 even better than 2011.
In the Pink
I never knew until lately that drafts of scripts are referred to as colors – it always made sense to me to call the final script, “the Final Script” and then if it needs tweaking, “the Final Script with revisions.” Right? Well here at Love in the Time of Monsters we’ve gone so far from Blue to Blue With Revisions to Pink. Apparently that’s just the tip of the spectrum. Who knew? Many people, actually.
I was chatting with my friend Eli at a Holiday Party the other night and his experience in the industry opened my eyes a bit more. “Just wait,” he said, “until you’re on double colors. Double Yellow, Double Green, and then after that you start making up new colors so one day everyone needs the latest Double Goldenrod.”
It wasn’t a revelation that a writer’s job is never done, but it sure kept me humbled. You can re-read how excited I was to finish previous drafts which is great and all but now I envision the rest of my work being rainbow of tweaks filtered through the prism of causality. Also there is a financial aspect to that metaphor, let’s call it the beam of capability.
To complete the metaphor, the black void represents L.A. Duh.
Backing up a bit, here’s the news on the Pink Draft – after primary breakdowns from our department heads and the American Film Market blitzkrieg we here at TBC Films had a better grasp of what Love in the Time of Monsters needed to be, and more importantly cost. There were a couple of scenes in the film that made our Line Producer, Rob Overbeck, literally cringe – not because of how bad they were (which they totally aren’t) but how practically difficult it would be to pull off on our budget.
Love in the Time of Monsters is all about being as powerful as possible as inexpensively as possible, so these cringe-worthy events had to not only be revised but hopefully even amplified in emotional resonance. Thanks to Matt’s Vision Quest a couple weeks back we worked out some amazing solutions through collaboration, and I’ve been wrestling with the last bit of changes solo ever since. As I’ve boasted before, I’m way happy with the results that makes this draft is cleaner and tighter than ever.
The plan from here is to get more accurate budget breakdowns from the department heads so we can know exactly how much we can splurge on the PsychoMoose. It’s all coming together … next year is going to be a hell of a climax.
Win/Win
“You stay in this, okay? This is your place, this is your place. You control it. Remember? You control it.”
Usually when I review movies on here, it’s some film I loved from my formative years, which somehow reflects on the style and substance of Love in the Time of Monsters (see Tremors or Big Trouble In Little China). I love all that stuff, but I want to take a minute and talk about a new movie that has little to do with LiToM (at least on the surface): Win/Win.
Win/Win Stars Paul Giamatti as a small town lawyer who moonlights as a wrestling coach for the local (and really bad) high school team. His law practice is going under much like the team he’s coaching, and he pulls a legally and morally questionable move to keep it afloat by agreeing to act as a legal caretaker for a man suffering from dementia (played by an awesome BURT YOUNG!). Seems simple until the old man’s grandson shows up on Paul’s doorstep with nowhere else to go.
This film does so many things so well, and makes it look easy-one of things that connects it those after-mentioned movies, and what we are trying to achieve with LiToM. It’s funny, touching, ridiculous and has an amazing screenplay/direction by Tom McCarthy (Station Agent, The Visitor). Most importantaly, it’s filled with REAL characters with REAL relationships. Because wheater you are coaching a wrestling team or fightling zombie bigfeet, real characters are what makes it all work. Fantastic performances (Amy Ryan, Jeffery Tambor) all around, especially by Paul Giamatti, who is probably the best working actor out there-I mean you just believe everything the guy does and forget he’s acting after awhile. I wonder if he’d be interested in a mountain man like character who hunts bigfoot? 
Just watch this movie (it’s available on DVD), and don’t be scared to share it with your whole family, it’s good for everybody. It’s a shame it didn’t stick around theaters longer, and even more of a shame you aren’t going to see it come Oscar® time, because it’s by far my favorite film of the year. And it didn’t even have sandworms, kung-fu, or exploding heads. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Concept Art: The PsychoSquirrel
As we’ve alluded to over the past few months, Love in the Time of Monsters isn’t just about guys in Bigfoot costumes and the girls that love them. I mean, that’s a big part of the movie, sure, but it’s not the only bullet we got in our gun. In addition to these costumed performers, our heroes will have to deal with psychotic, mutated woodland creatures. With that in mind, I present to you our concept of a PSYCHOSQUIRREL:
Pretty badass, right? I know I wouldn’t want to run into these guys while taking a leisurely hike through the woods.
Much props to the immensely talented Ryan Vogler for lending his brush to the cause and bringing this tiny murder machine to life. I can’t wait to see how Pendergraft brings him into the physical world.
For more of Ryan’s work, make sure you check out his Deviant Art page. And for more about Love in the Time of Monsters, make sure to befriend us on Facebook or follow us on twitter.
