Closer and Closer

It's been a few days since I blogged, largely because I've been Doing Things. And when I'm not Doing Things, I've been just as busy Not Doing Things, i.e., Resting. But the movie opens in San Francisco in exactly two weeks, and we're already getting little tastes of what the experience might be like.

Over on MySpace, last week the movie got listed as one of the "top picks" on the homepage of their Film section; we'd had about 170 viewings of the trailer prior to that, and after it the viewings have increased tenfold. At more or less the same time, we started hearing from the zenmovie.com site host that they were very angry with us, because our bandwidth usage had suddenly spiked like crazy--again, all from people watching the trailer. And as a long-time patron of Apple's QuickTime trailers page, it was peculiarly satisfying to see our movie show up in their list recently (and optimized beautifully, I might add--it looks absolutely spectacular).

Marc Rosenbush went to a screening hosted by the San Francisco Film Society last week, and a few reviews started popping up on the internet within a day. Some were great, some not so; the ones that were not so great were clearly from people who just didn't connect with the film, and that's something I am perfectly okay with. Always have been: I learned a long time ago that there's no such thing as a story that everyone connects with, so the thing that really matters is telling your story the best you can, then stepping back and letting it find whomever it will find.

Obviously, that laissez-faire attitude is about to get a major test...

There haven't yet been any official reviews, but press kits just went out recently (after all that time doing stuff ourselves, it's kind of amazing that now there's this team of people, some of whom I've never met, who are now busy busy doing stuff like press kits, not to mention the whole process of actually getting the movie to the various theaters); Marc did an interview with someone from the San Francisco Chronicle that he completely enjoyed, and that should appear just before the opening; and we've got various events that we're trying to put together to celebrate the occasion. Seriously fun; seriously busy.

Onward, upward...