Wednesday, September 13, 2006

Why Does This Blog Kinda Suck?

Gold stars for all of you who answered “Because you ain’t write in it, fool!”

That’s actually been a pretty big disappointment to me… When I started this blog, I truly wanted to it to be an honest, no-holds-barred, real-time chronicle of what it’s like to make a movie under these particular conditions, but shit… There’s hardly anything up on here that tells you the actual story of the making of TOO MUCH BEAUTIFUL WOMAN.

Thing is (as I’ve said before) it’s not that I didn’t write it all down… I just didn’t post most of what I wrote because I often didn’t have the time (or, in some cases, the money) to go to a cybercafe.

Also, I think I deliberately censored myself quite a bit because… Well, I suppose I never completely got a handle on exactly what I wanted this blog to be. Was it a personal journal, a promotional tool, or something in between?

As a result, I opted not to post some of my more navel-gazing thoughts like, say, my unhappiness with my inexplicable rapid weight gain and acne breakouts during this production (which, by the way, served as an endless source of punchlines for my two compadres).

Then there were the entries about my so-called love life… I thought they were just gratuitous and kinda silly (Let’s not even talk about that one T.M.I. post about hemorrhoids).

Hell, I even held back from posting on a lot of purely professional subjects, like the numerous dickheads and assholes we had to deal with on the daily. Y’see, unlike Denis who has stated repeatedly that he cannot wait to publicly skewer all the jerks who have pissed him off, I’m still a bit reluctant to badmouth people… Partially because I’m trying to build a career here and I’m not trynna be burning bridges just yet, but also because… *shrug* I dunno, probably (as Koko is wont to berate me) I’m just too nice to take pleasure in slagging people off that way.

Likewise, I wasn’t sure if I should air out some of the internal squabbles we’ve had even within our own crew. But y’know, despite our similar interests, we’re all different personalities and hence, there is bound to be conflict. Actually, I’m pretty surprised at how relatively few conflicts there were and how quickly they always blew over. At the end of the day, it’s all love between us and this experience has definitely bonded us in a way you rarely see outside of war veterans and boarding school peers.

In addition, I was always wary of being too candid because while I mostly didn’t tell the cast and crew about the blog’s existence, I always worried that they might just Google “Comb & Razor” or “TOO MUCH BEAUTIFUL WOMAN,” find this page and discover that, oh, we had no money to pay them, for instance.

I know I was definitely a bit ashamed to expose our collective ass by discussing some of the boneheaded mistakes we made, too. I mean, we had some bad stuff happen that threw us way off course… Unforeseen Acts of God and the like. But then there was a whole bunch of shit that went wrong because of our own inexperience and poor judgment. We really made some bad calls… And I mean decisions that would make you look at us with genuine concern and ask “Ummm… So how long exactly have you suffered from this brain damage?”

(It’s particularly embarrassing because some of these problems my friend Mildred cautioned me about in advance and we still walked straight into them like dummies. Sometimes you just gotta experience it firsthand, I guess. Kinda like when someone warns you that they just laid a really stinky fart… Rather than just taking their word for it and immediately vacating the area, you first go take a sniff of it yourself to personally confirm the degree of rancidness, don’t you?)

More than anything, the conflict between my dueling desires to be an honest diarist and an effective salesman made me very hesitant to post about my own personal struggles with the actual quality of the footage we were shooting. I guess I thought it might be a bit discouraging to some of y’all who have been so supportive of us from jump… And hey, if this blog is supposed to be a form of advertisement to make you want to see the movie, isn’t it a bit counterproductive for me to admit that I’m a bit dissatisfied with it myself (even though it’s nowhere close to done)?

Mainly I feared that it might be read as preemptive pleading, y’know? Pro-facto apologizing just in case the movie ended up sucking.

(It is totally not gonna suck, by the way)

But, y’know, that oftentimes sharp dichotomy between artistic intent and final product is a regular part of the creative process so it’s only fair that you get some glimpse of it.

As I start working on editing almost 30 hours of footage into some form of coherent narrative, I’ll be keeping you all up to date on my progress (hopefully sharing some footage with you too) and also putting up “flashback” journal entries – WITH COMB & RAZOR: THE LOST EPISODES.

Hopefully you will find them to be readable and entertaining. Maybe they will comfort and inspire some other fledgling artists who struggle with the hurdles inherent to manifesting their dreams in the material plane.

At the very least, you can read them and laugh at what a moody, self-flagellating, passive-aggressive bitch boy I can be sometimes.

So yeah… I’ll start with that tomorrow. I’m here all week, folks.

As always, thanks for being here, too.

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