So I am now an actor. As I write this, various members of the Ballistic cast and crew are hurling themselves, each other, and anyone else foolish enough to get in the way, into our pool – tonight is the wrap party for Synthetic Truth. Director Zach Yoshioka is among them, but before he went down for the third time, assured me that my scenes have not ended up on the cutting room floor as I had feared.

I had two scenes to shoot, on different days – the first one was by far the hardest, since it was mostly outdoors, in 40C+ temperatures, which meant every take was a test of endurance. It also required a fair bit of co-ordination, since I had to drive “home”, get out of my car, lecture my “son”, see him drive off, then stare at the friend he left behind. I appreciate this is not the sort of thing that would tax Jet Li, but doing all this and remembering my lines? Sheesh.

Even the driving part proved a bit of a problem, since I was parked down the road, around the corner and out of earshot, so couldn’t hear Zach yell “Action!”. Admittedly, this was largely because I had the windows up and the air-conditioning cranked to full. But this film is set in Phoenix, and no-one here drives with their windows down, so I was really just protecting the cinematic illusion. Honest.

Actually, another piece of auto filming nearly caused a horrible accident – when my “son” was screeching out of the driveway, he pulled right out in front of a neighbour, who wisely opted to stop, otherwise the filming of the “car crash scene” would have suddenly been brought forward. The odd thing is, I wanted to shout a warning, but was waiting for Zach to say “Cut!” first. I guess this means I take my acting seriously, if I’m prepared to sacrifice someone’s else life in order to stay in character.

The second day was much less taxing, largely because most of what I had to do was sit at a table and look suitably stern and/or disciplinarian. Still managed to forget completely one of my lines, but it all worked out, since the dialogue in question wouldn’t have made any sense in the way the scene was blocked out – I was supposed to smell alcohol on my “son’s” breath, but since he never came within 10 feet of me, it was kinda questionable.

Probably the trickiest thing over the two days was squeezing myself back into my suit trousers, which have hardly seen any activity since I moved out here, the best part of three years ago. Quite a few steaks have passed under the belt since that time, so chalk up another benefit of self-employment. I bet you Tom Cruise doesn’t have to suck his stomach in while delivering lines.

The next big date is the premiere, on August 29th, which I am kinda looking forward to, though I still claim Zach is being sarcastic when he says I did okay. The prospect of seeing myself 20 foot tall on the cinema screen is distinctly disturbing, but then I’ll just have to sit back and wait for the other offers to roll in. Have they finished The Lord of the Rings yet, do you think? 🙂

Much as we’ve enjoyed the experience, think both Chris and I let out a collective sigh of relief on Friday night – or rather, around 2am Saturday morning – when we finally slumped into bed. Don’t let anyone tell you differently: executive producer is not a title to be taken lightly. Still, seeing a packed theatre for the 8pm screening made it all worthwhile. We’d spent much of the previous week faxing and calling newspapers and radio stations, and were rewarded with a blast of publicity, that translated into 400 bums on seats for the first showing, and an eager queue of people outside waiting for the 10 o’clock show [which, if truth be told, started about 10:30 – it was always a little optimistic to cram introductions, two music videos, a photo montage, a 1:50 movie, and post-showing thanks into a two-hour time slot!]

We were taking tickets at the door and running the merchandise stall, selling copies of the film on VHS for $5, and the DVD, with the commentary mentioned last time plus a bunch of other stuff, for $20. Between sales, we watched the movie twice more, making a total of five times in the past week. Though for the sold-out first show, we were reduced to peering round the corner – it was a bit like watching a pan-and-scan version. When you see a film that often, it takes on a whole, surreal air: you find yourself watching characters in the background as they play chess with packets of sugar, spotting extras from one scene turning up elsewhere, that kind of thing. You see it on a different level, when you no longer need to listen to the dialogue, since you can pretty much recite it verbatim.

Not that the week leading up to the premiere was without its troubling moments, most notably when, during the pre-screening, Zach noticed the sound and picture were out of sync. Some horrible moments ensued before we realised this was not down to the actual DVD – which we’d signed off as perfect, that very afternoon – but a flaw in the projection system. Phew. With the first screening out of the way, we now go full-steam ahead onto the festival circuit. We’re going to submit it to them for the next year, giving us a complete round of possible venues, and once that’s done, we’ll be after some kind of commercial distribution deal. Whether we tie-up with some distribution company, or go straight to a chain (such as Best Buy, Suncoast or Blockbuster) will depend – probably on what offers we get!

It is comforting, on this level, to realise what a huge amount of product is out there – a trawl along the shelves reveals any quantity of DVDs which make our microbudget production look like a Spielberg picture. It’s clear that digital camcorders have made it easy for any idiot to make a picture, albeit one on the level of kindergarten finger-painting. If you film it, they will come. However, our film festival trips have shown us that an enormous number of great movies never see the light of shelves. Just looking over our top tens for the past couple of years – where are Ever Since the World Ended, Boys From Madrid, and Dead Dogs Lie? So, it’s safe to say that our duties as executive producers are not nearly as over as we thought. Sigh… 🙂

Buy Synthetic Truth on VHS or DVD now!

By the time you read this, I will have made my debut in front of the camera. Tomorrow, I’ll be taking part in Ballistic Entertainment’s upcoming independent release, Synthetic Truth, in which I play the role of Mr. Anderson – and no, my first name isn’t Thomas. 🙂 It wasn’t supposed to be this way. I was supposed to be lurking in the background, providing vague assistance to Chris, who is on board as one of the executive producers. This means she helps find locations, fronts the cash for the eventual release, and generally cheerleads.

It also meant we were at the last script reading, and when one of the actors was absent, I agreed to read the part for him – if truth be told, in between popping out to the car to listen to a baseball game. However, I apparently did a good enough job to get the role permanently (in indie film, absenteeism is a major offence, and it’s not like you can dock someone’s pay when, er, no-one’s getting any), and am now a stern, disciplinarian father.

To go with this, I now have a stern, disciplinary haircut, since it wouldn’t do for the father to look more of a hippy than his son. It also helps that the temperature here in Phoenix is nearer 50C than 40C this week, though showering becomes a radically different task when you have nothing on your head with which to lather up [I leave the solution for that to your imagination]. As I sit here, comfortably cool, in my crew-cut, shorts and Doc Martens, I find myself quietly humming Tomorrow Belongs to Me, for some reason…

Chris, too, has ended up in the movie through a similar route, playing a controlling, frustrated mother, albeit without the need for a controlled, frustrated haircut – she shot her scenes a week or so back. Should say we’re not married to each other in the film; indeed, I don’t actually have any scenes with my cinematic other half, and so the first time I meet my “wife” will be the night of the premiere!

Before you rush out to hector your local cinema chain for the release date (and I just know you were going to, weren’t you?), I should point out that the theatrical release will be about as small as possible – one night, one cinema, two screenings. But this is how Ballistic Entertainment works, and the money they make from ticket sales, plus videos, covers the night’s expenses and funds their next work.

It is film-making at the purest level – if the audience doesn’t turn up, you are fucked. Proper fucked, to steal a line from Snatch. However, Ballistic know how to put on a show and there’s a lot less at risk than with the likes of Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle. Maybe if Drew Barrymore had added a live band to every showing of the movie – as Ballistic did last time – it might have done better at the box-office.

However, with luck, this will be the first Ballistic Entertainment production available on DVD – Chris and I are looking forward to doing the producer’s commentary track. 🙂 Though expect uncomfortable silence whenever I’m actually on screen; I can’t even listen to myself on voice mail without cringing, so the prospect of being 20 foot high in a cinema makes me dizzy with horror.

All this started with a simple review – we’ve written about Ballistic’s other films before: Premonition, Rebound and Turn, and this established initial contact. We then invited Ballistic to a barbecue here; Chris then wrote them an interest-free loan for the up-front costs, and hey presto, we’re on board for the ride with a full producers credit. Of course, this will in no way impact my fair, unbiased review of the end product. 🙂

Have to say, the script does kick arse, and this looks set to continue the steady improvement Ballistic have shown, even in the relatively short time we’ve known them. Gone is the music nicked shamelessly from Nine Inch Nails; this time, director Zach Yoshioka is working with an original score. Interestingly, it’s been composed in advance, off the script, and he’ll be cutting the film to fit the music. He’s directed a lot of music videos for local bands, so this will be right up his street, and the result will hopefully realise the potential of the script.

This may be our only entry in the world of cinema, but whatever happens, it’s been a blast. The enthusiasm of Zack and the rest of his crew is entirely infectious; it’s been a revelation to see how much hard work goes into even the smallest film behind the scenes. Tomorrow, I get to see what life is like hitting marks, remembering lines and backhanding my fictional offspring across the face. It promises to be an interesting day – stay tuned for an on-set report next week!

Marquee Theatre,
Tempe, AZ
June 23rd, 2003

Women taking their clothes off is, in my opinion, a fine thing, which provided hours of happy entertainment during my days in London. Now, of course, I’m a very content married man, and Chris is the only woman I really want to see divest herself – but the concept still holds nostalgic interest. Enter Burlesquefest, a travelling show which promised to put the “tease” back into striptease, with performers such as Catherine D’Lish (her real name, allegedly!) and Kitty Crimson.

There certainly seems to be a demand; the Marquee was crammed to capacity, with all seats occupied, and lines of standees down both walls. Some members of the audience were also extremely enthusiastic, to the point where we wondered if they’d perhaps just been released after fifteen years in San Quentin. Acting as MC was Kitten on the Keys, a singing, dancing compere who describes herself as a, “firkeytoodlin’ frisky feline,” not averse to taking her own clothes off. The support acts were Oracle Dance, a trio out of Denver, Colorado, plus Crimson (pic, above) and D’lish.

Musical accompaniment was provided by Devotchka, a group who musical influences range from the Gypsy Kings to Quentin Tarantino, via the Russian steppes, with instruments including violin, tuba, and that thing shaped a bit like a mandolin whose name escapes me at the moment. They were initially amusing: hey, this one sounds like Hava Nagila! Unfortunately, we eventually realised all their songs sounded like Hava Nagila [save the odd-yet-cool version of Venus in Furs by the Velvet Underground], and their entertainment value went into a sharp decline. There was just so much Devotchka, at times we wondered if we had accidentally gone to one of their concerts which happened to have dancing girls, rather than a striptease show.

As for the striptease, no question that this was Performance Art, particularly when D’Lish was on stage – her props included a gigantic spider’s web, as well as an oversized champagne glass filled with soapy water (hopefully warm!), and her costumes were no less extravagant. The latter applied to all the performers; think Chris came away with an entire shopping list of wants. Crimson’s inspiration is clearly early Marilyn Monroe, and I found her acts convincing but largely derivative, without much hint of any of her own personality. Perhaps this was just in contrast to Kitten on the Keys, who refused to take anything the slightest bit seriously, least of all herself, and was the most engaging character in the show as a result.

Comedy has always been an essential ingredient of burlesque: W.C.Fields, Lennie Bruce and Bob Hope all worked in clubs. If the rest of the cast seemed to be a little po-faced at times, perhaps revelling in the post-modern irony of it all, Kitten made up for it with sheer good humour. The highlight, personally, was her tinkly lounge version of the Sex Pistol’s Anarchy in the UK, which became a sweet little ditty. [Insert obvious joke here]

I happily admit it all made for two and half entertaining hours. However, I was surprised by how unerotic I found the vast majority of the spectacle; a slight twinge when D’Lish was pouring champagne down over her body, and that was it. There are several reasons for this, even discounting my happily-married status. Firstly, but probably less importantly, it was really pretty tame – if this were a movie, it’d probably be PG-13, since the panties and pasties remained on.

Now, there’s no reason why gynaecology should have to come into play. But in the modern world, where an average hour of late-night cable contains much more nudity and sexuality than this whole show, and most of the Burlesquefest acts could trade costumes with Christina Aguislutta, a certain amount of desensitization is inevitable. What the performers seem to have forgotten is that burlesque operated on the edge of what was acceptable in society, and that society has changed, and continues to do so – perhaps in 50 years they’ll be having nostalgic lap-dancing tours.

Retro is cool, but there’s a good reason we don’t drive Model T’s any more, and Burlesquefest came off as possessing about as much “edge” as a low-rent Las Vegas casino show. The closest it came to subverting community norms were a few nods towards paedophilia (“I was 8 before I was 7”) – and while some may find Shirley Temple impersonations sexy, it’s a niche market. [Chris also pointed out that the performers were 100% white. Read into that what you want.]

Secondly, there seems to be an inverse-cube law at work here. No matter how elegantly you dress it up, sexuality works best when it’s up-close, personal, in your face, and moist – not thirty rows back in an auditorium seating nine hundred people. In that kind of location, no matter how enthusiastic you are, even the wildest of abandon is gonna end up spread pretty thin. By removing the intimate element, presumably as part of taking out the “sleaze”, they’ve also sanitised it, to the point where most of the acts were closer to modern dance than anything else.

Whether we attend future Burlesquefests is uncertain. It will likely be influenced by the potential Devotchka quotient, as much as anything else (a little goes quite some way!). If it was the same people performing the same acts, I’d probably be less inclined to go, since variety is the spice of, er, variety. A different selection of artistes would probably see us there though – on the other hand, I’d definitely miss that version of Anarchy in the UK…

I’ve recently become aware of just how important Google is, and it’s not an entirely comfortable feeling. This all started when I noticed that visitors to girlswithguns.org had plummeted to a fraction of what they had been. A little investigation revealed that Google, which had been bringing people to the site quite happily, was now disavowing all knowledge of it.

The resulting search to find out what had happened, pulled the veil back off Google a little. Not that they helped much: an email requesting information from them went entirely unanswered for two weeks, and then got a boiler-plate response, telling me pretty much what I’d discovered elsewhere.

The precise algorithm Google uses to return results is a closely-guarded commercial secret, for obvious reasons – otherwise, it would be manipulated by every spammer, advertiser and porno site under the sun. What we know, is that one important factor is the number of pages that link to a site: in simple terms, if site A links to site B, it’s taken as a “vote” for Site B, boosting its importance. But the importance of site A is also taken into account: if microsoft.com links to your site, it’s probably better than if we do, much as it pains me to admit it.

This is a process still open to abuse: in the most famous incident, Adam Mathes convinced enough people to link to a friend’s website using the phrase “talentless hack”, that the friend became the #1 site returned when you Googled the phrase. Now, ironically, the stories about this “Google bombing” are top of the listing. This has since been used for purposes both good and evil, such as to target Critical IP, a corporation accused of unsolicited telemarketing to domain owners.

It’s a continuous process, with people striving to find ways to improve their listing, and Google tweaking their programs to prevent manipulation. For any search engine will only live or die by it proving useful to the people who use it. I still remember the first time I was pointed to Google (thanks, Mike and Steve!), back in the days when the main search engines were the likes of Yahoo and Altavista. How revolutionary it was to see a site without adverts, just a quick, clean interface.

Since then, Google has started to sneak in ads at the side and atop its listing, but it’s undeniably #1. It still does a pretty good job, especially when you consider that Google has to try and work out what you want: if I type in “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”, do I want to buy the film, read reviews of it, or find some piccies to nick for Film Blitz? [cough!]

Though it does seem I have to burrow further down these days to find decent sites. For example, the useless, advert-laden, Java-heavy rottentomatoes.com seems to crop up every time I type in a film title. What they need to add is some way to customise it to individual’s users’ needs, so that it “learns” from the sites it suggests that you visit, and skews future results towards those. Perhaps this apparent commercial bias is connected to the lurking possibility of Google selling their stock.

Which is something that concerns me, simply because of the power that Google wields: in the wrong hands, it could be used to censor, suppress or drive out of business. I estimate traffic to girlswithguns.org dropped off 90% after it ceased to appear on Google, and few companies could withstand that level of drop in sales. I believe Google should be a public utility, something run for the good of Internet users rather than for profit, as the potential for abuse is just too massive to leave in the hands of a private company. An effective monopoly on access to information such as Google has, is, at best, highly questionable.

However, it’s something where a free-market will likely prevail: if Google fails to deliver what people want, something will arise to supplant it, as Google replaced AltaVista. And I don’t care – for the moment, at least, since sanity has now returned, with girlswithguns.org now currently listed at #15 on a Google for “girls with guns”. But I see that if you search for “Trash City”, our commercial arm, trashcity.com has now supplanted us as the #1. Time to engage in some Google bombing, methinks… 🙂