Yay Triple-A

If you're going to run out of gas, you might as well really complete the experience: run out of gas in the middle of Death Valley.

Okay, fine, technically we weren't in Death Valley, just a part of the Mojave Desert. But the story's better with something like "Death Valley" in it, so let's just run with it, shall we?

Just made my first visit to Las Vegas for a Lightwheel company retreat, during which we spent a full day planning strategy, saw two shows (one of them brilliant), and further enriched the casino at the MGM Grand. I'm sure I'll tell more stories about this in the next few days. But on the way back, we had our opportunities to get gas. In Vegas itself, and a couple times along the road. But of course we had the thought that everyone has: "Ah, no problem, we can get to the next rest stop easy."

But as the miles rolled on, there was a conspicuous absence of gas stations. And the needle kept dipping lower. We tried to pull off at places that looked like they might just have hidden gas stations, like the Ron Paul Truck Stop (no, really), but they didn't. And about 8 miles northeast of Yermo, California, the car started to chug and shudder. Then the engine went quiet and we coasted to a stop on the shoulder of the I-15.

The Mojave Desert. Just past 1:00 in the afternoon. Hot high clear sun, driving away our former air conditioning in about a minute flat. Outside temperature somewhere above 100. And in the car, Buffie, whose body is not terribly good at regulating heat.

But one thing we did have: cellphones. And AAA cards. Buffie had one, I had one. And before we'd even coasted to a full stop, I already had my new iPhone out and was withdrawing my AAA card to look up the number. The whole thing worked exactly like it's supposed to: they picked up promptly, asked the right questions, and dispatched the call to a towing service in Barstow almost immediately. Barely two minutes after I hung up, someone from Barstow was calling back to point out to me that I'd said we were east of Yermo but the I-15 does not travel east-west but north-south, and which way had we really been driving?

We had a 45-minute wait, and it's nice to point out that there were other options: a call box only a few feet back, and after we'd been there for half an hour we received a visit from a California State trooper, who wanted to be sure we were being taken care of. So really, all we had to do was sit and wait. As Buffie slowly turned redder and redder.

But hey, the guy from AAA got there exactly when they'd said he would, he poured in ten bucks' gas (about a thimble-full), I paid him $20 because I didn't have anything smaller and by gum, saving our lives was worth the tip, and then we were on our merry way again. Half an hour later we were in Yermo, freshly gassed-up and enjoying a nice lunch at Peggy Sue's 50's Diner.

I only became a AAA member a few months ago, after a friend of mine got a flat tire just a couple weeks after he'd allowed his own AAA membership to lapse. And now, this soon, it has paid for itself a dozen times over. Let's hear it for the happy ending.

Travelating

The idea is, make a trailer that looks like the next movie we want to make, and it becomes easier to make investors say "Hey, I want to see that movie!" so that we can, in fact, shoot the real thing. Film being, after all, a visual medium. Would you rather see a business plan or three minutes of footage?

That's why we're flying to Vermont tonight. A bunch of actors, some minimal crew, and an astonishing amount of checked baggage. We'll shoot for just a few days, be back by Friday, and then I get some real mileage out of Final Cut Pro.

And what have I been up to in the meantime? Well, getting ready for this, obviously, but also: finishing a treatment for a new screenplay, revising the City of Truth screenplay with Marc (incorporating a wealth of great feedback from several sources), defining the mission statement and purpose of Lightwheel Entertainment, and, happiest of all, rediscovering Thereby.

I posted an excerpt from Thereby Hangs a Tale a long while back, but hadn't actually read it in a time much longer than that. (The book itself has been basically finished for years--long enough that there is stuff in there about two towers being destroyed, collapsing with people in them, that most definitely predates Sept. 11th, and consequently becomes a bit of a problem--do you change the novel because it is, accidentally, too close to something real in a way that would be distracting? Unfortunately, the fall of my towers is so deeply integrated into the story itself that that would be pretty much impossible, so all I can do is have one of my characters, from the "real" world rather than the unnamed someplace where most of the novel happens, comment on the freakish coincidence.)

But since my friend Buffie was visiting, I happened to mention the novel to her one day, and realized I'd never actually shown it to her. So I pulled up the file, started reading, and had that happiest of discoveries: after a great deal of time, not only do I still like the book, I absolutely love it. So I zoomed through a touch-ups rewrite, happy to find that it was already in very good shape, and after getting some comments from people I will start working on finding exactly the right agent--someone who'll love it as much as I do.

Being in L.A. had kinda convinced me that Thereby was just too weird to ever sell, that's exactly why it sat for so long, unseen and unloved. But as soon as I started reading it again I realized, Hell no, it's not that weird at all, all it needs is the right agent and the right editor and the right marketing campaign, and I think people will go a little crazy over it.

But enough for now. Now, I have to pick up a fish-eye lens and then finish packing before a red-eye to Vermont. If there's an internet connection (we already know our cellphones will be just about useless) I'll try to check in from the road.

The Great Leap

There comes a moment when you just have to let it all fly. Sometimes you choose the moment, sometimes the moment chooses you. And here I am, at the moment.

No longer a wage slave, I now toil solely for myself and my partners at Zenmovie and Lightwheel. It is, of course, utterly terrifying. And there are so many things to do that I'm still a bit flustered, trying to sort out how to get it all done efficiently. The result, at least for now, seems to involve flitting from one project to another, getting a little bit accomplished in several tasks but not quite finishing anything. I'll surely get a better feel for it, but right now I think I'm still a little flummoxed at the idea that there isn't much difference anymore between Friday and Saturday. All that easy built-in structure, gone, leaving just Me and Time. Little Me; Big, Big Vasty Time.

I've got money laid aside for a couple months, and something has to happen during that time. I've always hated deadlines but I just gave myself the mother of all deadlines. And it won't be catastrophic if it doesn't work (after an unpaid summer internship with the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival I got home with $35 in my bank account and a huge stack of bills, but came out from under that just fine); but oh man, I really need it to work. It's time to get down to it, to take that risk, to do what I've always said I was going to do.

Started working on a short story over the weekend, the first time I've worked in straight prose for a remarkably long while. I had a tiny little idea that has already blossomed into something mysterious and strange, and it has definitely been a challenge to write. Which is good: the best way to deal with my new life-challenge is with an art-challenge. And if I pull it off, there's a little money coming in--from writing. From that which I must do.

We've had some interesting meetings with some interesting people concerning City of Truth, and we're going to be workshopping it tomorrow night with some more interesting people. Already we have a host of ideas to make the script better and deeper, and they're all good character ideas, not just showy set pieces. So I'm hopeful there will be good news to report, pretty soon.

Because man. Now there's no choice--there has to be good news, and sooner than soon. I so don't want to have to go back to someone else's office, ever ever again.

Lightwheel Entertainment

We have begun a new company--arising from and yet unrelated to Zenmovie, LLC. The new entity will, in future, serve as the umbrella for everything we do, and it is for this company that we recruited Monica Kim to serve as our third partner. After several days of running through every name we could possibly imagine (I'm still annoyed that Mythos was taken), we finally settled on Lightwheel Entertainment, Inc.

What does it mean? Well, we were initially thinking about spinning wheels, turning straw into film, and saw the wheel itself as a reel of film, a wheel of light. But then I discovered this--a phenomenon known as a marine lightwheel, one of those unexplained wonders that is probably just bioluminescent algae or plankton, organized into colonies, set into motion in the sea. But I loved the image, and found that it suited our mission very well, that a broad description of one phenomenon matched with the kind of movies we want to make: something mysterious, just below the surface.

And so we are named. Filed the papers last week, got our employer ID number, all that. We all have murderous to-do lists already, we have registered several versions of the domain name, we don't yet have a website but we will when the time is right. Lightwheel will be a production company above all else, probably working on co-productions with other production companies, and we have already begun the process of getting our first project off the ground--maybe even our first two projects.

Can't wait for the day when we first see our logo, a wheel of light turning beneath the surface of the sea, flickering across a movie screen. The start of something, right here.