Pet Projects

After a challenging couple of weeks, I'm starting to get motivated again. Part of the doldrums set in when I tried to objectively consider what it would take to make The Seventh Daughter on a small budget. I counted 65 different locations in the script -- 1920s era, several crowd scenes -- and quickly realized that even if I were an established director it would be pretty much impossible to get something like that off the ground. So it assumes the status of pet project.

But my spirits were somewhat lifted when I heard that one of my other pet projects -- the 3-DVD collection I produced for Kino, Houdini: The Movie Star -- had been named one of the best DVDs of 2008 by Sight and Sound Magazine. You may remember I posted on my blog the trailer I cut for the series (follow the Kino link and you can see it). Special homage is hereby paid to critic Michael Atkinson (one of the last few good critics standing) for making Houdini his solitary pick.

He writes: "Twentieth-century pop culture at its least pretentious, least schooled, and most pulpishly innocent, this DVD set encompasses almost all of the surviving footage from Harry Houdini's shortlived acting career (he quit in 1923, dissatisfied with movies' profitability), as something of a pioneer in the annals of athletic-celebrity-turned-matinee-hero. Houdini's infamous stunts are immortalised in cheesy fictional contexts, and though audiences from 1919 onwards went to Houdini's movies for the sheer spectacle of seeing Houdini be Houdini, they also got lost in a fantasy landscape where Houdini wasn't a magician but an invincible ubermensch fighting evil. Breathless, blissful odeon naivete."


Click here to read the whole article.

So you see... sometimes pet projects come to fruition after all! Oddly enough, filmic pet projects coming to fruition is the them of another script I've been finishing, Shangri-La. Taking this as some sort of sign, I've picked it up, dusted it off, and started working out some of its few remaining kinks. And... Lord help me... I'm starting to think, "you know... I could shoot this... maybe next Winter/Spring." Gluttons for punishment we low-budget film folk seem to be.