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rinueHayseeds is finally finished, or at least as finished as we intend to make it for the moment. We could spend months and money doing more tinkering with color timing and audio scrubbing, but it's watchable now, and no amount of money would make it look and sound like a million dollar film, so it doesn't seem worth the investment at this stage. I still don't have much sense of how the film will go over with people. It's inoffensive and pleasant; there are regular laugh lines; it resolves well; it develops its themes appropriately; and it's too short to overstay its welcome. Nobody is going to be pissed off they watched it. But I don't know whether it'll stick with anyone, either. It's hard to tell. It's definitely better than other first features I've seen. But I also look at it and see the budget. Probably (hopefully) this is not a tic that will be shared by most viewers.
I don't have a way of showing the film to our far-flung friends and crew right now; we're not keen to put it online or give out DVDs, both because that would endanger our festival eligibility and because in some cases our music rights aren't cleared for that. So we pretty much have to be like "yay, we're done! No you can't see it, are you crazy?" Hopefully it will be accepted to many festivals, festivals nearby our friends and crew, and then distributed to movie theaters, also near our friends and crew. A handful of us watched it and ate cake. It's been subbed to Sundance and Slamdance, and we have a list of other submissions to make as various deadlines come up. We'll throw together a trailer soon.
(The favorite scene so far of people we've shown it to is the scene in the retirement home. I think that's partly a reflection of the script - that scene is tightly written and high energy - but I think it's also a reflection of the ways in which Hollywood has failed. The most exciting thing about the scene is that you see actual older people from an actual small town, acting the way older people act. They're not making speeches about how they've lost their kingdoms, and they're not rapping nudist grandmas. They're people you know. I can understand Hollywood being racially insensitive, but this not being able to write realistic older people - don't they have families? It's not like having progenitors is exotic.)
Anyway, now that I theoretically have free time, Val has generously gotten me a Wii to bribe me to relax for a second or two. Which will probably be partly successful, because I do like to play Harvest Moon. Really a lot. At the same time, there's a music video I need to edit, I'm behind on Italian lessons, I can finally work on my office renovation, and I'm probably going to pick up another MS from Drollerie. I'm also leaning toward sitting down and finishing the Unidentified Objects script, not because I think it's likely the film we'll make next (although it's not impossible) but because I've done all the thinking I need to do about it.
Alas, it is probably getting too late in the year to learn to play Bocce, such that it would start to snow about the time I figured it out. I am better off taking it up in the spring. This had been one of my goals for the year.
Got a story rejection back today, and it's one of the ones where the magazine held it long enough past their average response time that it clearly got passed up through a couple of tiers of slush writers and got to the top editor, but then the top editor sent me a form rejection. (I have access to lots of data; I can't be fooled about who the rejection likely came from.) This is sort of the normal pattern with me and the majority of genre publishers. Slush readers and sub-editors, usually female, like what I write. It gets passed up to the person at the top, usually white male, usually Clarion trained, and he is agog that I don't use the Only Allowed Story Structure in SF, and doesn't even know how to comment or give me advice because Does Not Compute.
It's annoyingly predictable. Female SF editors write me back, but that narrows my range of publishing options. This is the kind of thing that pushes me to go literary, even though the odds and response times are both longer, just because at least I can chalk those rejections up to individual caprice and/or name and degree whoring, rather than having to deal with this outdated sexist gatekeeping.
Ciro's surgery today went well; his jaw too is now titanium enhanced.
I don't have a way of showing the film to our far-flung friends and crew right now; we're not keen to put it online or give out DVDs, both because that would endanger our festival eligibility and because in some cases our music rights aren't cleared for that. So we pretty much have to be like "yay, we're done! No you can't see it, are you crazy?" Hopefully it will be accepted to many festivals, festivals nearby our friends and crew, and then distributed to movie theaters, also near our friends and crew. A handful of us watched it and ate cake. It's been subbed to Sundance and Slamdance, and we have a list of other submissions to make as various deadlines come up. We'll throw together a trailer soon.
(The favorite scene so far of people we've shown it to is the scene in the retirement home. I think that's partly a reflection of the script - that scene is tightly written and high energy - but I think it's also a reflection of the ways in which Hollywood has failed. The most exciting thing about the scene is that you see actual older people from an actual small town, acting the way older people act. They're not making speeches about how they've lost their kingdoms, and they're not rapping nudist grandmas. They're people you know. I can understand Hollywood being racially insensitive, but this not being able to write realistic older people - don't they have families? It's not like having progenitors is exotic.)
Anyway, now that I theoretically have free time, Val has generously gotten me a Wii to bribe me to relax for a second or two. Which will probably be partly successful, because I do like to play Harvest Moon. Really a lot. At the same time, there's a music video I need to edit, I'm behind on Italian lessons, I can finally work on my office renovation, and I'm probably going to pick up another MS from Drollerie. I'm also leaning toward sitting down and finishing the Unidentified Objects script, not because I think it's likely the film we'll make next (although it's not impossible) but because I've done all the thinking I need to do about it.
Alas, it is probably getting too late in the year to learn to play Bocce, such that it would start to snow about the time I figured it out. I am better off taking it up in the spring. This had been one of my goals for the year.
Got a story rejection back today, and it's one of the ones where the magazine held it long enough past their average response time that it clearly got passed up through a couple of tiers of slush writers and got to the top editor, but then the top editor sent me a form rejection. (I have access to lots of data; I can't be fooled about who the rejection likely came from.) This is sort of the normal pattern with me and the majority of genre publishers. Slush readers and sub-editors, usually female, like what I write. It gets passed up to the person at the top, usually white male, usually Clarion trained, and he is agog that I don't use the Only Allowed Story Structure in SF, and doesn't even know how to comment or give me advice because Does Not Compute.
It's annoyingly predictable. Female SF editors write me back, but that narrows my range of publishing options. This is the kind of thing that pushes me to go literary, even though the odds and response times are both longer, just because at least I can chalk those rejections up to individual caprice and/or name and degree whoring, rather than having to deal with this outdated sexist gatekeeping.
Ciro's surgery today went well; his jaw too is now titanium enhanced.
