Last month I got a royalty check from Amazon for One Cent! Really, One Cent. I asked myself what the fuck could they have sold of mine that would generate One fucking Cent!
I still don't know. I'd appreciate it if you'd help me and other Independent Artists out by letting your friends know we're out here and you can buy from us directly.

Years ago I was inspired by the Punk DIY movement. I have always independently made and distributed my films and I do the same thing with my books.
I promise I will never build a rocket ship and go almost into space (you’re not fooling anyone Bezos…), or buy things like social media companies so I can block anyone who disagrees with me.

Growing up in the late 50's/early 60's I was a sucker for monster films. I would watch these on Saturday afternoons and I loved them.
This is one of my all time favorites. Them - about giant ants.

This is from an interview I did a month or two ago for the McMinnville Short Film Festival. It covers a bunch of stuff. Read it and you'll learn a bit more about me and why I do what I do.
The festival is over now and it was amazing. Here's the interview...

When you are on location you need to get everything right, especially the audio. I have said before that an audience will forgive bad lighting, bad camera work, or even out of focus shots. They will not forgive bad audio. If the audience can't understand the dialogue you've lost them.

Because I've been immersed in films for the last four days I decided that today's blog post is going to be some important quotes from a few of the people I interviewed for my 2nd book, The Angry Filmmaker's Survival Guide Part Two: Sound Conversations With (un)Sound People
Sound is an excellent carrier of emotion. And film is about emotion. - Gary Rydstrom, Sound Designer - - Saving Private Ryan, Jurassic Park (winner 7 Academy Awards)

Yesterday was my last class at Pacific University for the academic year and we ended it with a screening of my first feature, Birddog.
This is not a vanity thing for me. One of many issues we discuss is racism and the final class is about Oregon’s history of racism. It really opens up the student’s eyes because they all have this idea Oregon and Portland have always been these liberal places and the reality is quite different.

Growing up we had a series of cheap black and white TV’s. My parents didn’t buy their first color television until I had gone off to college, which was in the mid-1970’s. We didn’t have a lot of money and I don’t believe television was all that important to them. We were a household of readers. Which might explain why I haven’t had cable or a decent TV since the late 90’s. I’d still rather read.
So all the shows that influenced me were in black and white, or so I thought. Imagine my surprise when I was able to watch cartoons and shows like Rocky & Bullwinkle, or Beany & Cecil in re-runs and they were in color!

It’s hard to believe it was 19 years ago that we shot the first scenes for my third feature, Kicking Bird.
Production was not scheduled to begin until the second week of January and yet here we were doing a first shoot at the end of December. It was an all-nighter at the Justice Center in downtown Portland.

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.