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Thanks, Lee: You're a Hero

Where would I be if not for great backers like Lee Golub? I'll be thanking all my amazing backers, big and small here. We've already talked about super backer Rick Cavenaugh.

Next heavy hitter up... Lee Golub.

Lee's company owns a little building in Chicago called The Hancock Building.

Back in 2003 when a producer who was going to fund a film of mine died of a heart attack, at only 56, Lee rescued my budding Hollywood venture. Lee's been there many times over these last 7 years since on other equally tough spots. Hollywood is no cake walk.

Lee runs a softball team for the awesome Golub & Co., founded by Lee's father, Chicago real estate legend Eugene Golub. Lee's a real home run hitter who plays in rock band that works for free at charities.

Enjoy my video tribute to Lee who is right up there with the Ghandi, the Pope and Rosa Parks for my dream here in Hollywood.

Hey, Lee: Whenever I need a hero to keep me out of "jail" you're always who I turn to;)

Making a Movie about Therapy Sends me Into Therapy

Just this morning - God help me, story ideas come to me as dreams many times. Usually my worst - I tossed and turned as this dream for a wasteland story rolled though my head, score and all - likely caused by playing too much FALLOUT 3. The night's dream/film was about an Apocalypse survivor who finds shelter with a family, the loving family he's longed for his whole life, only to discover Mom, Dad, and the kiddies are not a real family but androids.

Artificial love is better than no love at all is the premise.

Hollwyood's a damn lonely town. Vegas and strip clubs - you know what I'm saying - have been my artificial antidote. I wrestled in bed for hours before realizing that Ridley Scott nailed this idea a long time ago with BLADE RUNNER. Speilberg's A.I. covers this ground too.But I like the notion enough to maybe come back to it some time. Nothing's new under the sun since Aristotle.

But while I am asleep and dreaming I can't tell what's a good story or not. - Hell, it's taken me almost the entire 7 years develop the skills to tell if my stories are any damn good while I'm wide awake and have a coffee in me. And even then I'm wrong half the time.

I used to have terrible nightmares before some amazing EMDR therapy that unleashed my creative mind. In fact, EMDR is at the core of film I wrote called STEPS.

STEPS - a Top Ten hit out of 1000s of short films when Kevin Spacey and Dana Brunetti's new website Triggerstreet launched back in 2002 - is the movie project that inspired me to move to Hollywood. But for which I got totally eaten alive by Hollywood sharks who I paid a small fortune to bastardize STEPS' script and make me totally miserable.

All back in 2003 while Tom Sizemore danced on my head. Here's all that have to show for spending $70,000 of my money and my investors' money learning what I already knew: Hollywood's a tough fucking town:

YouTube/Triggerstreet/Amazon Multiplexes

But getting out of that shell, doing the unthinkable, living without a car in LA has, in short 6 months, been the time I've met some of the most amazing people and the adventures have been awesome. Not to mention I've lost about 20 pounds riding my bike and walking and I've been saving over $500 a month on car costs. That's enough to eat for a month.

Back to www.LincolnisBack.com, that project, less than a week old is rapidly taking shape. Gone are the days when ideas took years and millions of bucks to reach the screen. Think of it, film it and post it the day on dozens of websites. Yep. It's gonna break my heart to see a lot of these Hollywood dinosaurs go belly in 4 or 5 years.

People love the social aspects of theaters. Movie houses will never be a thing of the past. But thinking positive about the future of entertainment, I imagine Amazon / Triggerstreet/YouTube multiplexes. How much more fun to theater hop a 30 screen theater with your best social networking pals, watching a mini film festival of the best of viral indie films of the month, than 30 screens all playing RAMBO XXI playing in 15 minute intervals?

Don't get me wrong, we'll always love big Hollywood movies, it's just all going to come to theaters digitally and we'll have thousands of options to choose from. Not 5 or 6 when we go to the theater. It will be a new premier every 15 minutes to borrow from Andy Warhol.

Well, unless viruses like the Swine Flu make social interaction too dangerous. See this New York Times story about 2000 college student becoming sick in a week. - Crazy Story idea there . "Bill Martinson, poor townie, was getting nowhere with the college chicks. That is until the Swine flu hit the girl's dorm and he went on mop patrol. Bill meets Ashley, the girl of his dreams, when she barfs all over him..."

I get tons crazy ideas like the above. I have file cabinet full of several hundred shitty ideas like the above which will never see the light of day.

Getting Out My Shell

For big projects, which are worlds unto themselves, I'll post sub blogs. I am working on a new project that just came out of the blue called LINCOLN IS BACK with Tom Katsis, one of the top Lincoln actors in America.

I met Tom last week simply because times are so tough that I gave up my beloved Beetle early this year to conserve dwindling investor capital. I do work from home after all. And meeting with studios happens no more than once a week, or, let's be honest, that's my bag here, once every other month if I pester the shit out of execs like a $50 whore until they meet with me out of pity.

So most of the time my Beetle sat gathering dust for weeks between uses. This is part due to the odd fact, odd for Hollywood, that I've kept up my old Chicago habits of walking whenever I can to the stores for exercise. In fact for a dozen years after my unbelievably expensive divorce from Gloria I had never even owned a car. So I decided, like back in Chicago when I was getting slaughtered by alimony and child support, to rent a car here in LA on a as needed basis, sucked it up and called VW. I told the truth, that in this economy I could no longer could afford the payments.

VW's repo man was appreciative I had voluntarily given up my ride. He told me he usually has to hunt down repos after months and months of missed payments. Here I was giving up my car being less than 30 days in the hole. But I'm old fashioned this way. I pay as I go. Comes from having two parents born in the last Great Depression.

As the repo man left, stereotypical stoggie in his teeth, said, "Don't sign anything VW sends you. You've done enough for those jamokes." Then he added, "Have a better day."

As I felt like crap and watched the tow truck take my beloved Beetle that perfect March day, I called my mom on the cell and told her about my cost saving decision. Now, my mom thinks I went a little insane 7 years ago when I quit real estate to become a starving artist in Hollywood. So she said, "You'll be vulnerable to the weather and killed by Mexicans without a car in LA. You're like a turtle out of your shell now!"

Trading Tom Sizemore for Ed Asner

I had escaped Tom Sizemore. After seven blissful nights' sleep, I was rested and began to attack Hollywood with renewed vigor.

I worked a solid six months getting scripts off to studios. I now had one of the top entertainment lawyers in Hollywood in my corner thanks to a Chicago pal, Heath Fear. My new lawyers Greenberg & Glusker made it relatively easy to get in the door with the studios. But without attachments of name stars my efforts were stymied.

I didn't let it phase me. I kept writing new and better screenplays. I was improving steadily as both a director and writer. So treated myself to a new puppy.

Sophia is a delight and so adorable she literally stops traffic. I was enjoying the new YouTube and decided to follow my success with WAVE and the more sophisticated DESERT SILHOUETTES with a screenplay I had written just after 9/11 about a dog trapped in it's apartment after the master goes missing in the WTC disaster.

I even shot it 4:3 ratio as I thought all it would be was a great exercise for me. But as I filmed my puppy Sophia, using my apartment as the set, I began to realize I had something very special. One of my dear friends Alexandra More saw the work in progress, agreed to play Mother and introduced me to the great Ed Asner. Ed happily agreed to play Father in the film.



8 film festivals later I had my first film project with a name star as Ed loved the short film so much he agree to be attached for my feature film SUMMER RULES. A script he has calls one of the best he's ever read. It's an expansion of the short film that has been so successful on the festival circuit. Ed was the lead in this summer's biggest animated hit from Pixar, UP. Ed has been kind enough to send the script onto one of pals in the biz to star as the billionaire cowboy Derek Calloway. Fingers crossed. I hope to tell you all about that star attachment here one day.

Fire Timelaspe

Fire is one of the things that has become tough to live with in LA. This is cool time lapse footage filmed in the last 24 hours. I added the score from the Phantom of the Opera 1925.