Business is a state of mind.

This article (10 silliest bits of advice to ignore when running a business) from a site targeting small business owners is just as relevant to people looking to work in Entertainment. The theory of success works in both worlds, after all, business is business.

Continuation

Update on the post from a few days ago, Oregon Schools have begun requiring students to take personal finance classes in order to graduate High School.

Amazingly enough, such classes are not offered in College either. Who needs to learn practical stuff in college anyways? Pfft.

New York University was an amazing experience. Those four years informed me as a person and as an artist. I emerged tougher and more driven with a formidible portfolio, degree, and many classic memories, but the school is out of touch, often fueled by fantasy. For the most expensive private institution in the United States, it doesn't do anything to inform its students of the reality it is condemning them to.

I have way too much to say about Film School. So much so that I can't pack it all into an article right here right now. The worth of Film School is a double-edged sword, a love-hate relationship, a shifting tide, the wax-wane of the moon, insert other ambivalent metaphors here. I will leave the subject for now, but opinions will bubble up around here every once in a while, as they always do.

Austin Film Fest '08

So I kind of forgot to take pictures while in Austin. I apologize to my family and my friends for being selfish and keeping my memories to myself. Looking back I facepalm because it would have been cool to prove that I met Danny Boyle, David Wain, Greg Daniels, Tim Kring, Eric Red, the producers of Jericho, John August, Bryan Bertino, and talked with Shane Black and John Turman until 2AM. But the powerhouses were only part of the whole; I thank all the cool people I met and the people I re-met, the lovely programmers, and the city itself, which I was shocked to find out literally turns into New Orleans circa Mardi Gras on a weekend night (and game night!) My mad love of the Alamo Drafthouse has been confirmed, and now we're in a long distance relationship. Austin was like the Irish Car Bomb of Festivals: it's exciting, goes down easy and gets you wasted, but it's not your first nor your last for the night.

Stuff I did/watched/snorted/enjoyed:

Slumdog Millionaire: Danny Boyle does Bollywood. It's classic Boyle, fast, colorful, octane energy, awesome sequences set to pumping music, but it's story is straightforward, cinematic, and hollywood-y. If ever I was going to watch a romance, it would be Boyle's way, with the politics and state corruption and the social message and the third in hindi. Brilliant.

Danny Boyle and moderator Jesse "Red-eye" Trussell.

Psycho Sleepover: Screened alongside "Zombie Gets A Date." This movie has a one-up on Troma because it's actually brilliantly written. Hysterical. There was never a slow moment and I pretty much couldn't breathe throughout the whole thing (from laughter, I know what you were thinking.) Props to the first five minutes for really hitting the movie off. Others could learn from you.

The Audience at the Zombie/Psycho Screening

Role Models: David Wain is the man. It's no "Wet Hot American Summer," but it's worth admission just for its proper comedic pacing. Thanks for making things funny David. Also, I'm proud to have been personally made fun of by David Wain during his Fireside Chat event.

David Wain, Sean William Scott, Jane Lynch

Too many panels, too many films, it was all impossible to keep straight. The gallons of sponsored Dos Equis did not help.

Until next year with "Soccer Mom" (if it ever gets finished!)

NOTE: "Zombie Gets A Date" will be RE-screening at the Alamo Drafthouse this weekend as a last minute addition to the Zombie celebration "Dismember the Alamo." Remember filmmakers, genre works.

Terrible Television

About a year ago in an AA-style environment, I finally admitted to myself and my friends and henceforth the world that, yes, I am addicted to terrible television. OK, it's kind of nuts for me to be so, what with all of my awareness/complaints about the state of movies today (but then again, who isn't complaining, even if they're not entitled to such opinions.)Reality TV has totally screwed up the system and it's made us dumb viewers focusing on even dumber subjects... and I'm a dumb viewer. I know. I know, I can't help myself. I come home after a long day of work and all I want to do is glaze over and watch dumb shit. My list of favorite shows is long and extensive and deploringly idiotic, mostly punctuated by competition shows: Project Runway, Tabatha's Salon Bitchslap, Shear Genius, Top Chef, Hell's Kitchen and Kitchen Nightmares, I Want to Work for Diddy, Charm School, and my favorite, Rock of Love.

I think the secret to my adoration of these shows is down to something innately simple: they're funny as hell. Put aside everything and ultimately you do see the people involved as characters and boy are they funny. How can you not split sides at that chick on the first season of Rock of Love that had melons so big she looked like she had no room to breathe, or the girl/chef/designer that cannot take criticism if it meant they'd keep from falling into a lava pit (I'm looking at you Kenley!) As an extension of my constant habit of observing human beings like an anthro-psychologist, watching these people on TV is another glorious chance to learn more characters, and of course, be entertained by them. I went to a screening of "Showgirls" at a revival theater once and Rena Riffel spoke; the girl's gorgeous but my god she was dumb as a post. And it was amazing. I could have listened to her talk for hours. If that's my reaction to her, then I shouldn't be surprised that I'm kept glued to a couch when a Rock of Love marathon is on TV. I also like to see insolent and ignorant people (and children) get a deserved smackdown (thanks The Nanny, thanks I Know My Kid's A Star.)

I bring this all up because this week marks the second I have actually sat down and flipped to Paris Hilton's new show "My New BFF" on VH1 yesterday. Oh god. It's so bad. I cringe. It hurts. I just know that I won't be able to stop watching.


It primarily fulfills that first requirement of how to get Leetal to love you. Be a visual, visible, shining example of the worst of the world, so that I may watch and comment and loathe and glee in your pain. Because this culture of the new millenium valley-girl is on TV and not in my real life, I am safe and therefore happy to ridicule how you (the contestant) elongate every vowel in the English language and are unable to see how everyone is using you and you have no friends, and still manage to vainly attempt to defend your honor at every turn when, sorry honey, it was never there to begin with. What's different is that, like everything Paris touches (there SERIOUSLY IS a Paris Hilton Midas Touch, I'm telling you) it is unabashedly unafraid to be vapid and flimsy. It likes that it's only concerned with partying and elitism. It's proud to wear pink. Freakily enough, with this attitude comes a slight tone change in the show and the results are rather creepy. What the hell? While Rock of Love indulged in underscored sexism by the view of an observer who let the girls prove themselves idiots, My New BFF is completely encouraging of everyone's actions, actively participating in the hazing, the camera is the Burn Book incarnate.


It IS creepy and you know why? Because of the role model strength that Paris Hilton unfortunately holds. In the second episode, every girl proposed a toast to Paris and called her an inspiration and a role model and beautiful and a goal to genuinely set your life to becoming. And these girls are in their early 20's. Not only has Paris done nothing in her life to actually deserve her wealth and fame, she got it from infamy, sex, and stupidity (her show really is an echo of her...) What about MTV's main audience, the teens and even pre-teens? My New BFF showcases Paris and all of her minions as these heroes, and anyone who doesn't play along is a bitch or a virgin. I'm sorry but this kind of pandering to teens is screwed up. They're already judgemental enough, Paris Hilton's show is not a reflection but an exaggeration of that horribly immature high-school caste system but with no consequences, absolutely no grounding in reality, and offers a reward in the end, Paris's affection, entry into the Popular Crowd. If only there was some inkling that it wasn't just about being popular, that it was about being a personality-filled, entertaining, political, and people-savvy person. The direction of this show scares me a lot, and is part of a bigger problem that scares me a lot more: The Privileged Teen as a role model.

Privileged Teen entertainment is this obnoxious trend I've been seeing where all the entertainment to teens is about characters that are richer, stronger, and have more stuff than them, and take all of it for granted. Gossip Girl, My Super Sweet 16, the OC, 90210, Privileged... it seems to the networks that the only thing kids want to watch are shows about what they don't have, and because the characters are born in money and throw it around so, it gives the impression not of the American Dream but of American Entitlement, that we are all entitled to be rich assholes. Invariably, kids may start to think they are rich assholes, even though they may be in the poorhouse (thanks credit cards!). If kids feel they deserve to be rich and famous, instead of believing in the work that is involved, instead of saving the money from their Starbucks job in a savings account, they go and spend it on $500 sneakers and a $200 Jesus chain because that's what culture told them is more important.


I just wish materialism wasn't so hot on the American agenda. There is nothing emptier than the eyes of a contestant on My New BFF when she accepts that Tiffany ring Paris bought her, overdoses on Paris's fake praise, and calls it love.

The year

For those that know me well, they will sigh a predictable, "Oh right," when I proclaim that the end of this month is a few days past the date I first moved to the great Californay (Sept. 14th, 2007).

God, has it really been a year? What a mess. All month I have been looking back, prepping to write this post, hoping to find a positive light at which to make my current position seem more deserved, seem more awesome and fantastic and magical, but no, the first year, pardon, sucked donkey balls. It was that bad. This blog was created to document and retell the praises AND the horrors of Hollywood for a young-as-fuck film-school grad (I hardly even mention my degree, I promise you, no film-faggotry here) but I rarely posted, and in those trickling moments almost never mentioned my life. But now, on the eve of October 1st, it has come time to retell what the first year in L.A. might be like for you (or you, or you, or you.... or you!) The results are pretty, the journey was not.

I moved here really liking this place. California is green, it's sunny, people seem happier than on the east coast, and you can see the sky. I bought a hybrid car and was exempt from everyone's gasoline kryptonite as its price gradually skyrocketed. I loved that on every corner, especially in Burbank, film related businesses thrived, their signs proudly promoting cinema-puns like "Lightning" or "Post Office" and the titans were peppered in Burbank, too. I drove by Warner Brother's Studios every day and looked forward to the prospect of just experiencing cinema of that magnitude. That was really my whole intention coming here: why make movies in LA if you're not going to make quintessential Hollywood movies? If the budgets weren't big and the people Oscar-winners and the productions mind-blowing then I should just go back to New York City and make my $5 million indies with a skyline you couldn't ever replicate in a computer. So there. I don't want fame. I don't want fortune. I just want to do what I do, and do it really damn well.

First the strike hit. The writer's strike reared it's well-intentioned head right around October, and productions started disappearing. Having almost no contacts, I got stuck right back where I started: Craiglist and freebies, which I was doing while I was a sophomore in college and thought I was over. Apparently not. Work stayed impossibly scarce for months. Improbably so. While the independents boomed as the studios closed up shop, the competition for crew on the productions still unaffected was impossible. That entire few months seems like a blur... I hardly remember what even happened in that haze of depression. I took on an assistantship that pretty much ran me like a shredder in barely three weeks. I returned to interning for companies that never bothered to make me feel worthy. My goal wasn't work big shows anymore, it was just to find a workplace that had good atmosphere and good people, but I couldn't seem to even find a boss that knew what he/she was doing.

But I used that spare time for something: I finished "Zombie Gets A Date" and I finished my feature script. I attended the Tribeca Film Festival and finally felt like myself again, I felt like I knew what I was doing. When I got back to L.A., I moved out of my apartment in Burbank with three actress roommates and into a single bedroom in Hollywood with no roommates at all, for the first time ever. The move killed my bank account.

Then I got sick. I got really sick. I got so sick that my health insurance, valid in New England but not in California, refused to pay even for the procedures I needed for examination and diagnosis. Within a few months I was in so much pain I couldn't work a full 12-hour set day. I was lucky to be working in Art Department on an indie feature at the time with great crew, so they let me lie down in the art truck cab every four hours or so with no questions asked. It was a very scary time, my body, usually healthy to a fault, was completely rebelling against me. I finally had to take an indefinite trip back home to Massachusetts, where my insurance was valid, to get checked out and hopefully treated. A month later hope was restored, and with it an almost brain-probe induced nostalgia for Los Angeles. I came back a complete 180. Look at the trees! Look at the flowers! The sun! My friends! My movies! The pain is gone, now there is LIFE!

Something clicked while I was away. I missed L.A. so badly. Maybe I loved it. And now I definitely do, with all my heart. It has become home, it is home. I have found my hotspots, I see the culture in the architecture, loving the nature, I'm learning to "work it." I get it now. I love this city. All it took was some time away. I finally have the street map memorized.

And that very nearly puts me to the end of my first year. When I returned from the East a whole new person, I was stuck professionally because I had so much time off my trail had run cold. No one who hires was thinking of me anymore (a key ingredient to staying working in the industry to is keep the iron hot, keep your name on the Producer's or the Production Coordinator's mind. If you're not the first they think of, you're not trying hard enough.) My trail was ice cold, so I started from scratch, calling everyone I have met looking for a springboard. I braced myself for another winter.

Then success! The planets aligned and my search coincidentally fell at the same time as a need for a P.A. on a new movie. An unexpected contact led me to the job, and here I am now, VFX PA on Roland Emmerich's "2012", a $200 million movie that's headlining the summer. Our offices are located on-campus at Sony Pictures, which marks my first time actually working on the lot. I am currently absolutely smitten with my job, and I doubt that in the whole nine months (!) that I'm slated to work here I will ever take it for granted. It was a long time coming.

I d have to say I'm disappointed it took this long. I had a lot of false starts, many issues that most people do not normally have to contend with. It was not a painful year as much as a hard-edged one, but what I do pride myself on is making something happen. Whether success was going to happen instantly or five years down the line, I worked hard as often as I could to make things happen for myself. I refused to settle for craigslist ads, while I did those crummy jobs that never paid, I made active efforts to keep the ball rolling, calling, filming, greeting, practicing. Day-to-day it felt as though nothing was happening, but you have to fight such feelings; only when it's dark enough can you see the stars. For those that come here dreamers, it does little good to do that either... I have plenty of dreams, but it's the goals I was moving towards. Those practical, real goals. Acquiring those is what kept me happy. Dreaming is only a motivational tool. It will not get you the job (coping with THIS mode of thinking, by the way, was a difficulty in living with three actresses).

I've been reading a plethora of entertainment related blogs as of late. So often there are posts about what it takes(I guess readers often email with questions about such things.) Some are incredible. Some are horrifying. Some make you think twice.

If this blog is discovered by some kid hotshot who thinks that they can come here just like I did, I hope you assess yourself beforehand. Just consider the math. Film is the industry here. Your chances are higher. Simultaneously, they're lower. What are you going to do about it? It's a tough world, as is the cliche, but as long as your head is to the ground (or you are completely insane, because character counts for at least 50% of getting a job here) it is possible.

There's bruising left over, but there's no real way to fail if failure is another step to success.

Mike Doherty

Festivals Galore

Oh 'tis the season! And by season I mean Halloween! "Zombie Gets A Date" has been gifted with nine more festival performances, check 'em out and maybe one is in your city!

Austin Film Festival*
Shockerfest*
Coney Island Film Festival
Screamfest LA*
International Horror and Sci-Fi Film Festival*
Williamstown Film Festival
B-Movie Film Festival
BoxUrShorts Film Fesvial
Olympia Film Festival

*will be in attendance

A triumphant return!

Public Service Annoucement

Watch this show. It looks like the 80's but it was made in 2004. That's the point, the all-encompassing, glorious, effervescent pastiche. It's the headroom, it's the music, it's the crappy continuity, the jump cuts, the blatant sexism, the hideous camerawork... it's more 80's than the 80's. And I love it to death. I've known and loved "Darkplace" for a while, and have recently rediscovered it on DVD (you must have a region-free player, fellow Americans). "Garth Marenghi's Darkplace" is a singular gem that I still have no idea how the hell it was made and actually shown. I mean, this kind of genius, this magnitude of genius, usually gets irrevocably lost. The fact that this exists on DVD form on my shelf and on my TV gives me hope for the future of awesome. Yes, such amazing things exist, and will continue to exist, however few and far between they may be.

Wikipedia

"Dagless: I just can't believe the Temp is dead
Reed: It's alright Rick, we'll get another one."

New Discovery #1

Get Rich Slowly.

Psychological calm for the broke-ass artist's mind. I feel like my brain's just had a nice massage.

Video Break #3

Doing my part to push Jeff Stearns, the filmmaker and now a friend, to a million views, here is "Yellow Sticky Notes", one of the films that competed alongside "Zombie Gets A Date" at the Tribeca Film Festival 2008. All the animated shorts at Tribeca were so uncomparable to the rest of the films that a lot of people got to wondering whether the festival should create a separate animation category. This film is a prime example of how animation and live-action, while both telling the same stories, have trouble competing in the same categories because they tell them so differently.

Watch in higher definition at the Youtube Screening Room.

Video Break #2

David and I graduated from NYU animation together. Do you know how many people specialize in Lego Animation? Not very many! (way to be special, dude.)

Phun with Fotoshop

New header design. I've amassed about fifty tutorials to shape up some sagging skills. It's a little overwhelming, but it seems little tips are sticking here and there. I have turned completely insomniac lately and have resorted to desperate brain-numbing measures to cope. Productivity goes way down when you're too tired to think, even if you have all the time in the world to do so.

Drawing Class

Long time no draw. Still life of a doll; it was the most humanoid thing around, so excuse the princessey subject matter. Charcoal on paper.