Things

Zen Noir recently screened during the Venice Film Festival, with our sales reps (Marc and Marla Halperin of Magic Lamp Releasing) attending and doing that magic thing they do. Some interesting people saw it, there are some interesting nibbles from distributors, and that's all very nice; the odd thing for me is the difference between this and the theatre experience. As a playwright I wasn't what you'd call screamingly successful--there were a couple of plays I wrote that got produced, but only locally in Chicago. So I never had the experience of something I wrote being produced elsewhere, that strange sensation I'm getting now, of something I helped to create that is finding its own life and journeying around the country, around the world. This thing we made over the course of a few very hot weeks in Topanga Canyon just played in Venice, and in Cannes before that. I've never been to Venice, but this movie I produced has. What an odd and delightful feeling. The closest to it I've ever felt was one year when my short play "Poised" was running at one theatre while at the same time I was performing in some Beckett one-acts at another theatre. That too was odd and delightful. I could get used to this sort of thing pretty easily.

Mr. Rosenbush is in Idaho this weekend at another festival, this one in Sun Valley, where, this being a spiritual film festival, there will be a lot of Buddhists, our key target audience. The Dalai Lama will be in town at the same time and Marc will be attending some sort of mass ceremony. The screening itself is Saturday night, during which I will be--

--at a party! Outta Sync's wrap party finally happens on Saturday night, four-plus months after we actually wrapped. The nice bit is that there is some footage edited together that everyone can see at the party; the odd bit is that we'll be celebrating the wrapping of principal photography just before some of us get involved again in reshoots and whatnot. In particular, on Tuesday the boys of the band begin rehearsing the final version of our hit single, "2 B neXt 2 U." We had a rough, recorded by Bill Robens, but now we're all going to participate. Time to find out how badly my voice has deteriorated since the last time I did any real singing, in 1989.

(Hey, wow--I went to Amazon to pull up the listing for "Fine Young Madrigals," and they're actually showing a couple copies in stock! I was given a few copies of the cassette tapes at the time but never got a CD--tried a couple months ago and Amazon couldn't find any. By gum, maybe this time it'll actually work out.)

And finally: editing in Final Cut Pro works much, much better if you begin with QuickTime movie clips. I accidentally skipped that little step recently, importing some iMovie clips (in .dv format) that we shot a couple months ago, and had endless trouble till Apple's invaluable message boards finally got me straightened out. But after spending all this time with Final Cut, and the manuals, I still feel like an absolute idiot most of the time. Very discouraging.