I don’t recall how old I was when I discovered MAD Magazine but once I did everything changed. I’m sure I didn’t understand a lot of what was in there, but it made me want to understand. It made me want to read and learn more so that I could be in on the joke.
Sure, I read comics and even subscribed to some through my college years but it was MAD that calibrated my humor meter. MAD introduced me to satire.

I have been posting stories from the Angry Filmmaker Archives for the last 4 weeks. I put up one story a week. Here are the first four stories all in one place. Check them out and if you like what you see I encourage you to purchase a book or some merchandise from my website. This is how I support myself.

The following day I got a phone call that changed my life. My wife (at the time) called to say she was pregnant with our first (and only) child. Gus was the first person I told and of course he said we’d have to go out and celebrate. And boy did we.
We went to a nice restaurant and the alcohol started flowing. We finally left that place and went to a bar where we were turned away. They didn’t say it but we were already pretty far-gone and they didn’t want to deal with us. I certainly couldn’t blame them. We found a late night coffee place and some of their coffees had alcohol in them. So we began ordering these amazing coffee drinks and telling the waitress to hold the coffee. It was pretty much straight booze we were drinking at this point. We left when they closed still in a party mood because I was going to be a Dad.

I have to say My Own Private Idaho has always been one of my favorites because we were young, just learning our craft, and working a million miles away from a studio system so we did what we wanted and how we wanted it. I got to experiment with a lot of sound styles, Gus pretty much let me do what I heard in my head. Sometimes he would pull me back but he always gave me freedom to create for his films. We had a good relationship in those old days.

I just got my new passport in the mail. I’m excited. Do I have any trips planned? No, but that’s not the point.
The point is, I can go places. And I love travel. Travel opens up the world.
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” – Mark Twain

I had graduated from USC film school, edited a documentary on a Venereal Disease, and decided that the independent film world was where I wanted to be. So I returned home to Portland.
When I moved back to Portland the film business was not as large as it is today. There were only a few companies that were making commercials, corporate, and educational films.

I watched the Jim Henson film, Dark Crystal, to get inspiration. It worked really well as I hated the sound on Dark Crystal. It was sparse and pedestrian and I never once believed I was in a different world. I vowed that I would do better on Mark Twain

Finally did some filming a couple weeks ago and it felt great.
I went out with Son-in-Law Sam and my buddy Wayne and we shot a bunch of book promotions and a couple of trailers for my films to post on my Vimeo On-Demand channel.
It's been a long time since I've filmed anything and although I keep saying I need to get back into it I never seem to make the time.
Do I have things I wish to shoot? Absolutely.