  Okay, Why a blog? Mostly because I have a huge ego and I feel the world needs to hear what I say. Okay, that's not it at all. I'm directing my first film (after 8 years in the industry) and I want a diary to look back at. I have a really uncanny memory. It's one of those things that is a blessing in most places, and a curse in a lot of others.
I didn't really figure out that my memory was all that great until midway through college (Purdue University, go Boilers) and I went home to visit. I met up with friends I hadn't seen in a couple of years, and there wasn't a thing I had forgotten about them. Like birthdays, family members names, family birthdays, pet names). This wasn't inclusive to just my close group of friends from HS, which amounted to about 2-3 dudes. No, this was EVERYBODY. Kind of scared me. Here I was a B- student at Purdue, who suddenly realized that he had a photographic memory. Oh well, maybe I should of stuck it out in pre-med, but who likes the 7 am biochem class on a Saturday.
Fuck it, I was a film major now. Anyway, a photographic memory doesn't really exist, not on the scientific level. They just chalk it up as having a really good memory. However, play me in Trivial Pursuit and you'll realize that I not only have a "really good memory", I have a great memory. Wicked scary shit. The problem with memory is that it's not only a blessing, it's a damn curse as well.
For there are a ton of memories I'd love to get rid of (parents getting divorced, getting slashed during an out and out riot in New Paltz). But that's not why I want to write a blog. I just want to document for myself how I was feeling during the whole aspect of making my words come to screen, and the fun and hell that I am going to go through to make my dream a reality. See, I'm MAKING A MOVIE!!! Yay!!! 8 years making other people's films in various capacities have taught me one thing. I hate making other people's movies. Not all of them. I had a terrific time working on Hal Hartley's film HENRY FOOL, even though I sort of got fired because I got into a car accident with 2 actors (Kevin Corrigan being one of them).
It sucked, but I was there to learn, and I took in everything I could. But you take the good with the bad. I also did a ton of CRAP. Just awful films where, had it been 10 years earlier, the same "director" probably would have been a lawyer or a doctor. Needless to say, I've worked for a lot of REALLY rich kids who thought they were creative, wrote a lackluster, awful script and then had mom and dad finance the whole thing and then hired me to work on it. I could go into names, but lets just say of all the films I've worked on, whether as a producer, a script doctor, an AD, or whatever; maybe 10% of them had somehhing going for them other than a big check from Dad.
Sucks, I know, it's the reality of the situation of working in indie film. I'm not rich. I don't come from money. My father (whom I just recently contacted after 13 years of silence, to let him know I'm getting married) was a NYC school teacher. My mother worked in real estate in upstate NY as well as sold her art. My stepfather was a GM of a very successful car dealership.
I never wanted for anything, but they aren't really the people I can go to for a check for 150K to make my film. This means making a film will be up to me, and I couldn't ask for a better team mate than myself. Of course over the years I've met a lot of people WITH money, and a lot of my close friends have gone on to do some great things in film. Which is kick ass cool. Anyway, I'm making a film, it's called "Love Courage Respect", it's about frat boys at a blue collar state college in NY. 
