Poho County Line

ROSEWOOD LANE makes its WORLD PREMIERE

2011-09-10T11:17:00.000-07:00

Well, it's barely out of the goop (my term for what used to be the soup they develop movie prints in, back in the good old days when prints of movies weren't digitally manufactured) and ROSEWOOD LANE has already been scheduled to make its World Premiere at the biggest horror festival on the West Coast, Screamfest LA.

If you are in the Los Angeles area, or will be in the area next month (October) think about coming and seeing my first film in over seven years. And my first genre picture in over ten!

The festival itself takes place at the Chinese 6 at Hollywood and Highland -- same address I am told is home for the Oscars every year -- and no, that does not mean I am inferring ROSEWOOD LANE is Oscar bait.

It's just good scary fun.

Tickets went on sale yesterday at the Screamfest LA website, and not knowing how big the theater we will be in, I can't say how long tickets will be available, but here is the link if you are so inclined:

http://www.screamfestla.com/showfilm2011.php?movie=Rosewood%20Lane

I do know that most of the cast (their schedules permitting) and myself, will be attending. I will introduce the film personally just before the lights go down, and after the film screens, will be part of a Q and A with the cast.

Should be a blast! Am I nervous? Of course I am, readers and lurkers.

This is the first time ROSEWOOD LANE will be shared with the world. That's always a gulper in my book. You wonder how it will play, what you did right and what you could have done better. It's your baby and the world is about to judge it.

IN OTHER UNIVERSES

Lots of other news happening too, though you know me and my superstitions -- I don't like to talk about any of them in any detail, until they become more of a reality.

But I can tell you I signed my deal to write and direct my brand spanking new horror franchise THE RATTLEMAN, something I am incredibly happy with and excited about.

And I have every intention of shooting it in Greenville, Mississippi where I just returned from a wonderful week long location scout.

It was my first trip to the deep South and I have to say, the people were warm (but not as warm as the weather) and terrific, and the area is ample with wonderful architecture, forests, swamps, rivers, lakes, lonely highways, haunted houses and houses that are just handsome and not haunted -- basically all kinds of atmospheric and cinematic places for filmmakers, and especially a filmmaker like me, to tell their stories.

Look at this magnificent old place on the bank of Lake Washington in Greenville, Mississippi. Any screenwriter worth his salt would take one look at this place ....

And start writing!

The landscapes and weather also reminded me somewhat of my adventure in central Florida back in 2000 where we shot the first JEEPERS film.

And not to intentionally dangle the carrot again, I will say that not only is Mississippi a perfect looking Jeepers land, but there are interesting new developments regarding the possible financing of JEEPERS CREEPERS III: Cathedral.

More on that, as it develops.

I feel like a newscaster or something when I have to tie off a story with that kind of line. Anyway, life is beautiful chaos right now.

And if you have the means, and are in the area, come on down to Hollywood and Highland October 15th and see ROSEWOOD LANE with me at Screamfest.

And if you do happen to see me that night? Even if I don't know you? Introduce yourself. My blog has only 34 followers but has received well over 64,000 views since I started it way back when. So I know there are at least a few lurkers out there, reading my long-winded babbling.

Be well everyone and happy all,

Until I can blog again,

Victor

BACK FROM THE EDITING ROOM

2011-06-28T07:37:00.000-07:00

SPLASH!!! GASP!!! GURGLE!!! GASP!!!

That's s me breaking the surface of the water and coming up for air.

Since I was asked to take down the photos that were in my previous blog entry -- as I assumed I eventually would be, I am only using pictures in this blog from ROSEWOOD that have either already been released on other blogs and websites (including the ROSEWOOD LANE website) along with some personal pictures of my own taken on the set.

I will dispense with my usual apologies for being away from this blog for so long. Feast or famine with me, I guess. I am writing this to you now because ROSEWOOD LANE was locked this past weekend.

What does locked mean? Basically that the film has been edited -- and those shots, now put end to end, all those takes edited together to create the story -- those edits -- are locked.

They won't be changed again, and will become the finished film. The edit is broken into reels. Usually five or six. And those reels are locked. As in no more editing changes should be made.

I say should because sometimes changes are made after a picture is locked, but usually, locked means locked. Locked means editing has stopped and now digital FX, sound design and mixing, the shots all color-timed by the director of photography, and the creation of an original musical score (up till now the film has had a "temp score" pieced together from bits of other film scores) begins.

Daniel Ross got the wonderfully evil part of paperboy Derek Barber, and brought to it more menace and just downright creepy and scarifying stuff than I could have ever put into the script.

The locked picture can now go into the final homestretch of becoming a finished picture.

We have about six weeks to get all this finished. That may seem like a long time -- to do what needs to be done on a feature film, it's not. In fact, it's no time at all.

Not for things as complicated as digital FX and music composition, and the looping of the film (ADR or Automatic Dialog Replacement) and all those hundreds of FX tracks, creating sound FX, adding footsteps, bird chirps, dog barks, (there are a lot of those in ROSEWOOD) every little sound you hear, all that has to come together, orchestrated by a very talented sound designer, more often times called a sound mixer, to make a movie sound like a movie sounds.

These are the next soldiers, the last line if you will on the battlefield, before the film marches forth into the more brutal battlefield of general release. (And that's if you are lucky enough to get a big screen or theatrical release.)

I am finding myself all over the web these days, with the publicity push for ROSEWOOD. I have done more than a few interviews talking about the film, but I am hoping that people will really take notice and take an interest when the film is actually ready and will be released.

That's when we need people to notice, get curious and go see the story that takes place on ROSEWOOD LANE.

Of course every interview always ends with the same question: where the H-E double-toothpicks is JEEPERS CREEPERS III: CATHEDRAL?!

Oh if I only knew. Especially in the wake of The Creeper's latest bit of notoriety that I must confess filled me with pride:

A poll taken on WorstPreview, showed that after four thousand of their readers were asked, The Creeper ranked the number four scariest movie monster of all time.

For a fan of horror-movie monsters like me, who never dreamed he'd have have his own? That put an almost permanent smile on my face.

ACTORS, ACTORS, ACTORS

The gorgeous Rose McGowan as Sonny Blake, trying to convince her new pet cat "Monster" to use the house's old cat door.

One of the great joys of shooting ROSEWOOD LANE is of course, working with actors. And with ROSEWOOD I can't say enough how pleased I am with actor Daniel Ross Owens, and some of the delightful choices he made while playing the monster of the piece.

When I say he brought more things to my "paperboy from hell" than I could have thought up in the script, I am not exaggerating. In fact, this is one of the great perks of working with someone who has great instincts (I have been very lucky in this regard, especially when it comes to young actors playing my young protagonists.

Some of these great talents include Justin Long, Scott Mecholowicz, Sam Rockwell, Jason Behr and Sean Patrick Flanery to name a few, because they are willing to try things, make the part and the movie better.

Daniel Ross Owens in a lighter moment during the shooting of the film's strange finale.

HOW DO YOU LIKE THE FILM, VICTOR?

I get asked this a lot -- as if I can have any real objectivity about it. It's like someone asking you, "so your kid -- do you love him?"

The journey from script to screen for ROSEWOOD LANE is one that spans more than 20 years.

As I have explained in previous blogs, it is strange and also wonderful to see a story I fashioned more than two decades ago, suddenly get the big screen treatment.

Also, I am such a different filmmaker than I was twenty years ago, so it was also interesting to see how much of the script still spoke to me and how much I wanted to change, since my own sensibilities have changed over the years.

How did all this old and new come together? What kind of thrill ride was created? Only you dear reader (and lurkers) can be the judge of that. And each of you will decide on your own how we did.

RAY WISE returns to Poho County, (or a neighboring county at least) this time as Police Detective John Briggs in ROSEWOOD LANE.

The casting of Ray as the detective in the film gave me the chance to cast another of my favorite actors of all time: TOM TARANTINI of POWDER, THE NATURE OF THE BEAST, PEACEFUL WARRIOR and JEEPERS I and II.

TOM TARANTINI is Ray Wise's partner Mike Sabatino in ROSEWOOD LANE. Tom and I have been friends since we met some time ago in the East Bay, before I made the big move to Hollywood land.

You might want to rethink all those knotholes in that fence in your backyard, after you see ROSEWOOD LANE. You never know what they might be used for if your paperboy is the mysterious and much feared Derek Barber.

There is a website for the film slowly starting up if you are curious: here is the link: http://www.rosewoodlanemovie.com/home-2/

Jeepers Creepers fans will hopefully find themselves treated to something quite different but equally chilling when they learn what is terrorizing the homes on ROSEWOOD LANE.

VICTOR, WILL YOUR MOVIE PLAY IN THEATERS?

I get asked that a lot, especially now with a little buzz about ROSEWOOD going around. People are always shocked to find out just how little the filmmaker has to do with deciding his finished film's fate. "I don't know," I always answer, "I hope so, but there's no way of telling."

While the scares are good and the cast terrific -- and the idea of taking something as iconic and all-American as the neighborhood paperboy and turning him into an unexpected nightmare is quite strong and original -- who knows the fate of my or any film in this terrible industry economy where dollars are suddenly the rarest commodity: after a good script, of course.

Why do you find a great little flick in the video store or online that you can't figure out why it never made it to theaters? Because the cost of the movie is one thing. To sell a movie to the world is another. And something much more expensive than the movie.

A 200 million dollar movie that you will see this summer also had another 100 million spent on it to get trailers on the TV every fifteen minutes. It's called a media buy. And every film needs one if you are going to go see it in a theater.

Don't let the psycho paperboy on your block trade out his bike and his morning newspapers for the crossbow you didn't know you still had in your garage.

Your movie is brilliant and only cost a million dollars? Fantastic. Now you have to go find someone who is willing to put ten million MORE into advertising that film.

It was hard before, to find P and A money (Prints and Advertising) for your flick. If MGM hadn't paid to put Jeepers Creepers ads on television, you might never have seen it in a theater.

If Disney hadn't put POWDER ads on MTV and on all the major networks, you might never have discovered that film until one day on a dusty video shelf or late night on HBO.

Each of those films cost around ten mil to make and at least that much to publicize.

MORE HORROR AHEAD?

I also have some very late breaking news about my next film, -- or should I say my next horror adventure, for I am about to kick off my first monster movie extravaganza since JEEPERS CREEPERS darkened movies screens back in 2001.

What you will know him as, is THE RATTLEMAN, and he will have a comic book incarnation as well as a movie identity -- starting with the first in a series of films that I hope will scare the living daylights out of you.

If ROSEWOOD LANE is a great example of how I was thinking about scaring people when I first came to Hollywood, THE RATTLEMAN is about how I play the scare game now, with the benefit of having made the Jeepers series and seen so many brilliant contributions to the genre by my horror brothers and sisters throughout the last decade and into the new millenium.

Though I am rather superstitious about announcing things before the ink is dry on the paper, THE RATTLEMAN may be starring Ray Wise and a few other talented veterans of my previous films.

Including the multi-talented Doug Jones as the title role -- or should I say, the title nightmare in THE RATTLEMAN. Only time will tell, as negotiations begin with my friend Doug -- and many others of my Jeepers family, to bring my next horror odyssey.

I am planning on at least five Rattleman films before the new decade is over, and I am making them specifically for me, and all the horror fans, from all over the world, who I have heard from who tell me they enjoy they way I tell a tale.

A piece of concept art compositing different images to create a single visual idea of what THE RATTLEMAN is about.

As I have said before, these are images that are amalgams of images collected from all over as I write my first draft of any script. Writing to art, like writing to music focuses me on the story, the characters, the set pieces or whatever I am trying to get down on paper.

None of the images I composite are being used commercially or for profit, just for my own private and personal writing process, so I feel free to use whatever terrific images I find (even ones from other films) as long as they feed my excitement about the script I am creating.

But I digress. More facts about THE RATTLEMAN as they become actual facts.

Be well everyone. And thanks for taking the time to write me. I know I am slow at answering sometimes, but it is great to hear from you and to be reminded that the blog does in fact reach a few folks out there in the world.

Victor

A CHILLING WHISPER FROM THE DARK

2011-04-08T06:53:00.000-07:00

Who said shooting a movie is like going to war? Anyone who has ever shot a movie -- that's who!

Quite an adventure this one.

My brilliant partner and cinematographer Don Fauntleroy may have pulled off a minor miracle getting ROSEWOOD LANE shot in the small time we had and the small budget to boot.

Myself and Don Fauntleroy (right) check out a shot on location for ROSEWOOD LANE, in Alta Dena, California. That's Ian our focus puller replaying the shot.

If this was getting back to work? Throwing the door open and getting out on a movie set again? Slamming back into the director's chair for the first time in six years? Then ROSEWOOD LANE was truly a trial by fire.

The good news? The toughest shoots often make the best films.

And what a great cast we had to make that film. Headliner ROSE McGOWAN, supported by the brilliant LAUREN VELEZ (Dexter), the awesome RAY WISE (Jeepers II and Reaper), the terrific TOM TARANTINI (Jeepers I and II and Powder), the fantastic SONNY MARINELLI, the absolutely delectable LESLEY-ANNE DOWN, the very funny STEVE TOM (Funny or Die) and several terrific character actor turns, RANCE HOWARD, BILL FAGGERBAKE, LIN SHAYE and JUDSON MILLS, just to name a few.

ROSEWOOD LANE is what I would call another of my hybrids: this one, a drama that quickly darkens into a chilling and unnerving little suburban nightmare, that suddenly has you jumping out of your seat and holding on tight to the person next to you.

Of course every good terror tale needs its monster -- and the twist here is that the monster is something so typically innocent: the local paperboy.

One of the greatest pleasures of the shoot was creating this dark new character. He turned out well, so well that I want to keep him underwraps for a moment. But I will say he is played by a great young actor named DANIEL ROSS.

Well dear readers (and lurkers) that's all I can say and do right now. I am now at the end of my first week of editing with the amazing Ed Marx. It promises to be at least sixteen weeks of intense post production and I have to get back to it, even as we speak.

Consider this the shortest and most concise blog of mine to date. More when I can actually think, and breathe and put a sentence or two together.

But I will say that THE RATTLEMAN is already starting to rattle, good friends.

And that is more great news for terror town. More news on this and other stories, when I return.

Best,

Victor

2011 Starts with LIGHTS CAMERA, ACTION

2011-02-12T08:11:00.000-08:00

I ask first as always, forgiveness for being away from this blog for so long. And I am afraid that after this entry -- it may be a long time again, before I have time to sit down and share my crazy world with you.

But for the very best of reasons: I am going back to work. The recession hit Hollywood hard -- and it has been the better part of three years since I have had an actual movie gig. Five years since I have had a gig where once again I get to set in my director's chair.

To say heading back to that chair is a good feeling would be quite the understatement.

As some of you may have read on the Internet -- yes somethings there are actually true -- I signed a deal to write and direct ROSEWOOD LANE. That is so great and on so many levels.

One, it is the first time I have visited the realm of classic horror and suspense since 2003 when JEEPERS CREEPERS II rolled cameras on the Creeper's second big screen adventure.

Two, ROSEWOOD LANE is one of my scripts I always regretted not being able to put up on the screen. There are lots of scripts in the life of a screenwriter that simply will never see the flicker of a movie screen or a packed house of moviegoers as the lights start to go down.

For every script that made it to the screen, seven to date: CLOWNHOUSE, NATURE OF THE BEAST, POWDER, RITES OF PASSAGE, JEEPERS CREEPERS, JEEPERS CREEPERS II and PEACEFUL WARRIOR -- for everyone one of those there are three others, that just never got their big break.

ROSEWOOD LANE was one of those scripts. One of those ideas, that when the writing was done -- felt so unique and so creepy and such a frightening rollercoaster ride for me (and for an audience) that I really felt bad when after a few interested financing scenarios either fell through or failed to fully materialize -- ROSEWOOD LANE was put on the back burner.

And then eventually taken off the stove all together and put up on a dusty old shelf.

WHAT A BEAST THAT PAPERBOY USED TO BE

The script for ROSEWOOD LANE, or course has a story itself, and it is the story of me first coming to Los Angeles, more than fifteen years ago.

With nothing but the clothes on my back, my best buddy in the world, and a U-HAUL trailer filled with everything I owned -- I towed an old, rust red Datsun that had duct- tape and plastic for a back window -- down Interstate 5 from the San Francisco Bay Area -- up the grape vine, through the San Fernando Valley and into our new adventure in Los Angeles.

I won't kid you -- I was terrified of Los Angeles. Just before I made the big trek, the streets were in flames and filled with fires, riots and chaos. We heard it all on the radio and TV up in the east bay.

The Rodney King verdict had turned Los Angeles into what up in Northern California --sounded like some kind of apocalyptic fireball. Where brother turned on brother and no one was safe.

I had never lived in a big city before. I had taken a few reckless solo treks to San Francisco when I was a teen, with an ancient car with four bald tires -- but in general I was a small town boy and the big city scared me.

I had grown up in Martinez California. A tiny little place with a tiny little bay. It was my little kingdom. Though to me of course, it seemed vast. One of the greatest baseball players in the world came from Martinez -- Joe DiMaggio. A man who had even married Marilyn Monroe -- however briefly. He was our tiny town's big claim to fame.

(That's Joe on the left and Marilyn on the right)

As a little dreamer in a tiny town -- a kid who fell in love with the movies before he fell in love with anything else -- the big city was only something you saw movies about, and nothing but violent, scary places with lots of crime and strange people.

That's right. They were full of strange people. Yes, I was quite the little Republican back then. Remember, you're talking to someone who was raised in a family where the kids weren't allowed to have Beatles albums in the house, because boys with long hair were fags.

HOW CHUCKY SCARED ME INTO COMING TO L.A.

When Francis Coppola chooses you -- a young and complete unknown who had made a backyard video for 200 dollars -- to write and direct a feature film for his new production company? And then when it's finished, likes it enough to get it into Sundance, making it the first horror film ever to play there?

When all that happens? ... your life changes a little.

When CLOWNHOUSE was taken and shown around Los Angeles to select buyers and studios, one agency in particular came knocking. The Gersh Agency, one of the oldest and respected agencies on both coasts (they used to rep Humphrey Bogart someone told me) signed me as a client.

They had shepherded the careers of horror luminaries like George Romero and John Carpenter, and they told me on the phone (in a conversation better left described at another time -- or maybe in a film) they saw me as someone to shape as the next big horror filmmaker.

I was just learning to be a happy young man, emerging from a very confusing traumatic and troubled time in my young life. I was back home in the Bay Area, with a feature film under my belt because one of the greatest filmmakers in the history of cinema, hand picked me to make a feature film for him.

(Cheezo, the head killer clown (not from outer space) who terrorize three boys in an empty house)

And thanks to that feature film I now had a real honest-to-God Hollywood agency representing me down in Tinsel Town. And then it happened: I got a phone call from them, saying that Universal wanted to fly me down to Los Angeles, based on the strength of seeing CLOWNHOUSE, for a meeting to possibly become the director of a very popular horror franchise that was ready for it's third installment.

I flew down to Los Angeles and I don't think my heart ever made it back down from my throat all day. From the screening they arranged for me of Chucky II which had not yet hit theaters, to the meeting at Hanna-Barbera (one of the undisclosed producers of the Chucky series)

After I got over my initial fear and generally just being flabbergasted that I was even on the lot of the studio that had made JAWS and Hitchcock's THE BIRDS -- after I got over the sense that I wasn't in some filmmakers dream fantasy -- I found myself flooded with ideas for Chucky III, spitballing them with the producers and seeing the smiles on their faces.

If that wasn't enough -- walking into Hanna-Barbera, and children of the 60's and 70s will understand this -- walking into the place that had filled my childhood and teens with THE FLINSTONES, and THE HERCULOIDS and SPACE GHOST and of course the amazing and never equalled JONNY QUEST, that probably inspired me to become a filmmaker in the first place. To walk into that place -- and be introduced to Joe Barbera.

(The Jonny Quest cast from it's original 1964 run. Any American kid from the 60s or 70s who is making movies today, and making exciting or scary ones, I will wager saw these wonderfully drawn, brilliantly scary and incredibly scored cartoons.)

I still get tears in my eyes thinking about shaking hands with Joe Barbera -- in his office full of Hanna-Barbera stuffed characters, and talking to him about how much I loved Jonny Quest. I think I probably had more heart palpitations that day than I had ever felt in my life.

When I didn't get the film, when Chucky III went to another, more veteran director, with none of the scenarios I had suggested, when the job went to someone they felt better suited to the material (more about that in another blog) I came home with the idea that my Hollywood dream was dead.

Ironically, before my plane even touched down back in San Francisco -- before I even had the news that I wasn't going to be directing the film -- it was all over the news that Universal Studios had caught fire. And that the King Kong attraction and some other buildings had gone up in flames shortly after I left.
It was ironic, because my career had gone up in flames at the same time and at the same place. (My buddies used to joke to me about how I set Universal Studios on fire when I didn't get the directing gig)

Then came the call from my agency: "They loved you, but that's how it goes. And if you're up there and have to be flown down for any meeting -- its not going to work for us."

The Dhali Lama had that right. Not getting Chucky was what forced a frightened and heartbroken small town boy -- who had just been through the darkest and most devastating part of his life, to decide to call his agent's bluff and make the big move down to where movies got made.

INTO THE BREACH

I couldn't afford to be afraid of the big city anymore. I had to do this thing. And boy was I shaking when I got there. U-HAUL trailer and all.

It didn't help that within an hour of pulling the U-HAUL trailer into Hollywood and stopping for dinner at a Thai restaurant -- that we saw from our table -- the parking lot fill with cop cars, flashlights and and then cops and guns as they put a man face down on the pavement and at gun point, hand-cuffed him.

As I sat watching this from my table, my coconut soup getting cold, I knew that I could never survive living here. (Ironically, over fifteen years later as I sit here writing this -- I never saw another violent act again in all my time living here in Los Angeles)

Within a week, we got an apartment, got jobs (as phone operators at 1-800-DENTIST in a very artist friendly company, that has spawned a great deal of writers, directors and actors over the years.

My station was adjoining the station of a tall kid with a great English accent who turned out to be Patrick Stewart's son. Another talented actress who worked there went onto be a regular in the cast of THE OFFICE.

But having moved down to Los Angeles and mustering courage to "take the Hollywood bull by the horns" it felt like I got the other end of the bull when I got a chilly reception when I walked into the offices of my agency to announce I had bravely journeyed to Los Angeles and was ready to work.

I honestly think that Gersh (who I am still with today) never thought they'd see me walk through their doors -- calling their bluff and mine -- when I moved to LA and started taking my career as a filmmaker, seriously.

I don't know what I was expecting -- but I suddenly realized (are you listening young readers) that I was going to have to make this happen myself, before I was going to get much support from anyone else.

And so I started writing. When I wasn't working at 1-800-DENTIST, I was in our little apartment firing away on an old Kaypro computer. I was furiously writing these little million dollar thrillers -- and with CLOWNHOUSE under my arm, as proof that I could direct what I write -- I hoped one of these scripts would hit, and that I would be directing again.

There were two scripts I had finished. Two tight little thrillers: one called HATCHET MAN and one called THE NATURE OF THE BEAST.

I looked up production companies in industry directories -- wrote down the names of vice presidents in charge of production -- and printed my low budget thrillers, stuffed them into envelopes and hand delivered them (posing as a delivery boy) to any name I could find that had produced tiny but effective thrillers.

Did this work? Well, sort of. Home from my day job after just a couple of months, I found a message on my machine from a woman who said call me about your script HATCHET MAN.

When I did, I found her name was Claudia Lewis -- and to this day I will never forget her or what she said, "This is my last day here at this company, and I just pulled your script out of a trash can."

"And I read it. And I wanted to know if I could I show the script to a young director named Baz Lurhman for him to direct?"

Baz's terrific flick STRICTLY BALLROOM had his career taking off. The call was both incredible and heartbreaking at the same time. Someone liked my script -- and they were asking if someone else could direct it.

I couldn't refuse. Even though I hated the idea of someone else -- even someone as talented as Baz, taking my baby and making it their own.

(The hugely talented Australian wonderkind Baz Lurhman)

But then fate took another step -- Baz didn't think it was for him and Claudia apologized and for a moment all was lost. Then she said she could refer me to someone else she knew, a producer, who thought might be a good fit for the script.

The man was John Tarnoff. Who had partnered with a man named Dan Grodnik. I left 1-800-DENTIST to direct the film for them. The script had only one major change: the financiers didn't like the title HATCHET MAN.

They wanted something more intriguing. My other million dollar thriller was a scary suburban nightmare about a psychotic paperboy. The script I called THE NATURE OF THE BEAST. A title I had always loved.

We took the title from my paperboy script and my first Hollywood film, made for New Line Home Video, and starring Lance Henriksen and Eric Roberts was now called THE NATURE OF THE BEAST.

It became New Line Home Video's biggest money-maker of the year. And my career was on it's way. Fun Fact: Nature of the Beast was released on video the same day POWDER was released to theaters.

And my little paperboy script -- my suburban nightmare that would have made John Carpenter and Alfred Hitchcock both proud -- was left behind on a shelf with several other scripts I had written that year -- in the hopes of impressing my agency and getting me into a director's chair.

THE FORGOTTEN PAPERBOY

Fast on the heels of THE NATURE OF THE BEAST, another script I had just finished -- a truly unique idea that had been percolating somewhere in the back of my brain for years -- POWDER, was suddenly funded by the best company at Disney, CARAVAN, originally headed by Roger Birnbaum and Joe Roth, and now just Roger since Joe had stepped up to run Disney.

(One of the best times of my life was spent in Houston Texas creating one of my favorite films)

After POWDER hit enormously big, my paperboy thriller -- which had been renamed ROSEWOOD LANE since it's original title was stolen -- remained on that shelf and even when I did remember it -- and would ask my agents about getting it set up ...

They all agreed there really wasn't a place in my "career arc" that POWDER has set in motion -- to go back and make this dark little story about a radio talk show host and her deadly cat-and-mouse war with the local psychotic paperboy.

I was agreeing with them on some level: POWDER was a film I was getting mail about from people all over the world. (I still do) In fact, more than fifteen years after it hit screens, POWDER will make it's Sy-Fy Channel debut this March 20th. Finally recognized as a work of science-fiction and not just drama -- I am absolutely thrilled about it.

But I digress, back in 1995, after POWDER, anything dark felt like slumming.

It's very easy for an artist to get validated for one work -- and if that validation is important enough (and most of us -- moviemakers or not -- are looking for some kind of validation: to know that we are loved, or valued, or respected ) that validation was so important to me, that I sought out more and more of it.

POWDER was a movie of light.

And because I was very sensitive to how I was now being perceived within the industry and to filmmgoers, (especially sensitive given my very fragile circumstances) it felt like I could never go back and do anything dark again.

Even though I loved horror and suspense and thrillers and had since I was ten or eleven years old. I was "the Powder guy" now -- and I had to keep writing and making films that were about light and not about dark.

I really was like a dog chasing a bone -- and now years later, I see that what makes me happiest as a filmmaker, and as a person -- is balance.

I love making a good, straight-from-my-heart film like POWDER or PEACEFUL WARRIOR.

But after a tale of light, it feels good to go and tell a good, scary story that's dark. A campfire story -- like the Jeepers films or THE NATURE OF THE BEAST is meant to be.

An Italian interviewer called my horror films "dark fables" and said that in Italy, my darker films are perceived that way. And that is exactly what they are. Call them fables, call them "campfire stories", but it feels good to try and spin a good yarn and see how many goose pimples I can raise. Or jumps, jolts and "I'm so scared I really wish I could hold on tight to the person next to me" moments I can create in a darkened theater.

ROSEWOOD LANE is that kind of story.

The climate in Hollywood changed with the financial collapse, three years ago. The bottom fell out of the movie industry. Money dried up everywhere. Money that was usually around to finance indie films and indie visions.

Now only the bigger studios had money to make movies -- and even they had to go with their hats in their hands and beg, for the first time in along time, to get their movie slates funded.

Even Steven Spielberg had to go in search for funds for Dreamworks if you remember. And when that man has to seek out funding -- because it's not banging on his door asking for him? You know times are bad.

The industry's financial tailspin has been three years long now -- and the modest budget is the norm. Even the studios have cut their yearly movie output in half or more. And what was once the salary of a major star -- is now the budget of the entire movie.

And while it is good to have that kind of financial sanity return to the land of dreams (Orson Welles called film "ribbons of dreams") it also devastated the large portion of us, who were not Steven Spielberg, and whose liviehoods in the movie world, depended on access to independent financing.

Armies of good and talented people lost their houses, their jobs and their means to feed their families -- and I was one of those casualties. I lost my home of a decade, and watched others around me suffer even greater losses.

We all know there are many casualties from the economic collapse, and Hollywood like many industries was hit and very hard.

But nothing is all good or all bad -- ironically, in this downturn, when modest movie budgets are back in vogue, so are the smaller stories that can be told with less money. ROSEWOOD LANE was the perfect script for this.

And when I dusted it off as my talented friend and director/cinematographer Don Fauntleroy suggested --the only thing it seemed to really need -- was to be updated.

Remember, I wrote this script when I first came to town. And reading it again, it was still a pretty great thriller -- but the script had no cell phones or home computers.

That really surprised me. The amazing changes that have happened to our lives in the last fifteen years. But the script was still solid, still strong -- and I was reminded how much I still would love to put it on screen.

With the advent of digital filmmaking, we are starting to see more and more remarkable works like WINTER'S BONE done for "next to nothing". Micro-budgets is the term de jour.

Nothing new to me really. Most filmmakers start in the realm of micro-budgets. I was paying for my films with the money I made from my paper route as a teen. Francis Coppola gave me what could be called a micro-budget out of his own pocket to shoot CLOWNHOUSE. We had just eighteen days to shoot it and around 200,000 dollars.

ROSEWOOD LANE by the way has a budget that is considerably larger, and my point is, that the modest film production that is the norm now -- in many ways has opened the door for the next two films I am about to make.

ROSEWOOD LANE REVISITED

I don't want to repeat what's already been stated in the trades and in the Fango interview I did just this week, but I will give you a brief take on ROSEWOOD the story and the movie that is now starting preproduction.

Radio Talk Show Therapist Sonny Blake (Rose McGowan) moves back to her childhood home when her alcoholic father dies. But upon arrival in the old neighborhood, Sonny discovers her neighbors are terrified of the local paperboy.

She thinks this is ludicrous -- until she encounters the boy herself and learns the hard way, that he is a cunning, and terrifying sociopath. One who may have killed her father and others.

When the boy starts to call Sonny's radio program, an unnerving game of cat-and-mouse begins -- a game where Sonny starts to doubt her own sanity and wonder if this boy is in fact something darker and more powerful, than makes sense in the world we know.

When their game escalates, Sonny suddenly finds herself in a terrifying all out war -- one that forces her to redefine her ideas of good and evil, and has her fighting to stay alive.

The casting process is ongoing and shooting locales and start dates are still unknown, but my terrific cast already includes RAY WISE, Dexter's LAUREN VELEZ, LIN SHAYE (King Pin, Something About Mary) TOM TARANTINI (Powder, Jeepers I and II) and the lovely and talented LESLEY-ANNE DOWN.

My treasured and cherished JEEPERS CREEPERS film family will also be on board: my great editor of over a decade ED MARX, my magnificent cinematographer and now producing partner DON FAUNTLEROY (he and I are producing ROSEWOOD LANE) and the film will enjoy another haunting score by my brilliant and longtime friend, composer BENNETT SALVAY.

The search for the paperboy, the trickiest piece of casting, has just started.

IN OTHER PLACES IN THE TRI-COUNTY AREA

Rosewood Lane takes place in the ficticious town of Stillwater. But Stillwater isn't as far away from Poho County as you might think. I have added two new surrounding cities to Poho County in my make believe universe.

Stillwater where ROSEWOOD LANE will take place -- a small town across a large bridge and a thriving city - reminescent of my growing up in Northern California, just outside San Francisco.

The other place or town I am adding -- is Hanford. A small seaside town in the adjoining Hanford County which butts up against the borders of Poho County.
(This is a very detailed map I had to create to get an overview of Poho and surrounding counties. It helped facilitate the writing of several new scripts but was originally conceived as a blueprint for a novel I was writing called TALES FROM THE BLUE FISH).

The Blue Fish is a seaside restaurant in Pelican Bay and ... well, just suffice to say that the novel is only a few chapters long at the moment, and has been for a year or so now, and the various plots, the various tales that come from The Blue Fish, mainly about the family who owns and operates it,.

The tales are meant to be many and varied. -The first tale titled LITTLE BASTARDS, is a thriller about a boy who goes on a dark and dangerous quest for a box of buried money -- in order to save the life of his older brother who is doing time in prison for murder.

When toiling in the world of prose, it often occurs to me how easy it would be to tell this tale as a screenplay instead of a novel.

Elsewhere on the map of Poho County: The small seaside town of Hanford -- is about to become the setting of a film very special to me, and I hope of special interest to all my JEEPERS CREEPERS fans.

As you know if you've followed this blog -any of the two years it has been running, then you know of the endless struggle to get the third Jeepers film before cameras. The third installment of the tale has been written for four years now.

Even now, in 2011, seven years after JEEPERS II, hit theaters, we are still somehow sitting around, watching and waiting for a financial entity that would facilitate creating this third film.

A third film that is the second sequel to what internet polls from horror websites -- clearly site as the most requested horror sequels today. The fact that someone can't do the math and find us our budget -- is one of the great Hollywood mysteries I guess.

A terrific piece of fan art someone sent me of a poster for JC3. I like the hopeful date of 2009 on it!

And though I am almost embarrassed to type this -- to even say this to you, once again: am I told Zoetrope (for the umpteenth time in three years now) that Zoetrope is close to cutting a deal with financiers, that might get Jeepers III rolling in September.

Let's just tuck that one away and forget about it for now - less its real this time and we jinx it.

I decided to create a new horror franchise. One that I owned and operated and would never be encumbered by too many cooks in the soup, too many bankers in the mix -- and budgets that were too large to raise in this strangled economy.

If you have read my interview on Fango, then the cat is already out of the bag, and you know the film I am talking about is THE RATTLEMAN. A brand spanking new horror tale that takes place in a sleepy seaside town.

(Quiet, sleepy and mist covered -- there won't be anything sleepy about this seaside town once THE RATTLEMAN shows up)

THE RATTLEMAN will begin filming early summer in a state yet to be determined -- and I can tell you this: I have never been more excited about a horror story.

Rather than blather about it: I will share at the end of this blog, the early one sheet for it that describes it as much as I would like it described at this point.

I need to say to you all, that as I move into shooting ROSEWOOD LANE and then prepping and shooting THE RATTLEMAN -- it may be a while before I can blog again.

If it is, I wish all the luck and love in the world, to all of you, in the pursuit of your own dreams and happiness.

And I will try and find a way to update those of you who are interested, on the process of both these terrific thrillers: ROSEWOOD LANE and THE RATTLEMAN.

And who knows? Maybe there will even be good news about JEEPERS THREEPERS -- when there is more to tell and I can stop and take a breath.

My best to all of my blog readers both subscribers and lurkers. What the heck -- even the haters! Hope everyone is happy and well and surviving the best they can in these tough, tough times.

Warmest,

Victor

(You may have to double click it to full size to read it)

"Welcome Christmas bring you cheer..."

2010-12-23T09:22:00.000-08:00

"...Cheer to all Whos far and near,
Christmas Day is in our grasp,
So long as we have hands to clasp.

Welcome Christmas while we stand,
heart to heart and hand to hand.

Christmas Day will always be,
just as long as we have we."

AS WE CLOSE IN ON 2011

2010-11-19T09:25:00.000-08:00

The end is nigh….!

Well, the end of the year, anyway. That's my new company logo. MENAGERIE ENTERTAINMENT has been around since 1995 when POWDER came to be and it suddenly made good sense to form my own company. MENAGERIE takes its name from my largest, most epic script and yet to be produced project of the same name.

The word is French and though translations vary, I liked the one that says menagerie is a magical collection of objects or creatures. I wanted a name for my company that suggested magic, mystery and a home for all the characters human and otherwise that might be created as I continued to make films.

I thought for this blog, I would do a combination shout-out and attitude of gratitude to some of the things that this year, have given me some laughs, some solace, and some food for thought.

All welcome stuff in the hardest year I've had in a long, long, long time.

As you will note, I spent much more time watching TV this year than I did going to movies or even renting them. I felt much less motivated to watch flicks this year. Less motivated than I have felt in a very long time.

Though in fairness, I don't like to go to the movies a lot when I am writing something. And I have been writing continuously the past fourteen months or so.

Sometimes other movies can cloud my thinking and my writing process. When I am shooting something it's the same way. I don't like to go to movies, even on location, because I can get derailed if I fill my head with too many other people's ideas, visions, stories, and the execution of those stories - when I am trying to stay focused and stay pure about executing my own.

But here are some of the things I have taken a liking to, or in some cases, become absolutely smitten with these past months:

FRINGE

The first season of this series -- and this really is one you need to start at the very first episode -- soon became my favorite of this year. Not only was the writing and acting top-notch, but JJ Abrams and the great minds that put this one together -- took on the X-FILES and did the concept even better, in my humble opinion.

At the center of this incredibly handsome and exquisitely photographed sci-fi drama/thriller is the relationship between Peter Bishop and Walter, his eccentric and brilliant scientist father.

I have to say, the performance of John Noble, an Australian actor (and director) -- and the wonderful words the writers have given him, have combined to create not only one of TV's most interesting and moving characters -- but Mr. Noble continues in my humble estimation, to give one of the finest performances series television has seen.

His deeply moving characterization, and again, this is combined with the terrific writing of the FRINGE staff, is easily one of my favorites in all of television history.

Season Two is continuing a very complex plot-line from Season One, and I do wish that they would soon get back to doing what they do so well --investigating the super-normal, the "fringe events" as they are called, but even if they don't, I count this show as one of sci-fi TV's greatest achievements. Go JJ, go!

MEN OF A CERTAIN AGE

This one really sunk up on me. I don't necessarily think of TBS when I think of good drama - but Ray Romano and Mike Royce's dramedy (is that still a word they use) hooked me and I faithfully watched all ten of the first season episodes.

I'm sure it's no mistake that I too am getting to that place in my life where I am one of those "men of a certain age", but this show continued to surprise me, move me and keep me coming back for more.

The tone of this show, and I mean 'the feel' of it, kept surprising me. Just at the moments when I thought it was about to become too jokey, or too violent or too predictable -- it didn't. In fact -- it always did the unexpected, often turned the tables on a predicament or redefined the situation by changing a character's perspective about it completely. You know, a lot like life.

It is thoughtful, dramatic, funny and powerful, but without ever shouting any of those things in your face. To me, for a television show -- that's an accomplishment.

It explores a trio of longtime friends in Los Angeles (the terrific Andre Braugher, Ray Romano himself (doing a fabulous job) and the pitch-perfect Scott Bakula. All three actors have been blessed with terrific characters and give in return, terrific characterizations.

They play three guys who have reached the point in their lives when they question what it's all about: Family, career, what it is to be a man -- now that may sound a little too mushy for some of you guys.

But it's not. This is a great and gentle guys show. But at its heart it is for guys and about guys, and all this stuff is handled beautifully and credibly.

Some of the stand-out episodes of their regrettably short ten episode season, have easily had some of the best writing I've seen on television this year.

MODERN FAMILY

Every one is already raving about this show, and I have to say, while I'm not much of a raver -- I will say that a lot of the time I catch an episode of this show -- it does make me howl.

It's ingenuity and humanity -- and it's good-natured and very insightful look at the twists, turns, loves, regrets, anxieties and joys of family are nicely explored here.

Several episodes I have kept in my permanent library -- always a sign to me, that there is something terrific, something that I want to hold onto, going on in that show.

And while the cast is across the board a truly terrific one, here's a special a shout out to Eric Stonestreet who plays one half of the gay couple on MODERN FAMILY.

Again, we have a performance of such heart and humor, -- in a gay portrayal that would normally make me cringe and demand that more "macho" guys be gay on TV -- Mr. Stonestreet's take on Cameron (his character) has completely won me over.

I not only feel great love for Cameron now, and adore and respect him as a man -- gay or otherwise -- but I realize it is Eric's performance (and some good writing) that has made what was originally the most uncomfortable character for me to watch on the show -- now a warm and pure delight to watch.

MY THREE MUSKETEERS

Bill Maher, John Stewart and my continuing crush on Stephen Colbert. These are the guys who I feel at least give us the news with less bullshit.

Even the Democrats are not safe -- something that took me a while to get comfortable with. But finally I realized that these guys -- as much as they might protest it -- may be some of the most important political voices of our time.

Because they are the only guys with the balls to stand up and say "That's bullshit" or " That is an outright lie." -- and then actually prove it, with actual facts, and not the fabricated lies of political parties and TV networks.

And John Stewart, when he doesn't let his self-deprecation take center stage, easily one of the greatest interviewers working on TV today. He asks intelligent questions, tough questions.

Admittedly, he has sometimes soft balled questions when you wish he wouldn't -- depending on the guest -- but most of the time, his political interviews seem razor sharp, yet always appointed with civility.

I find him as eloquent and educated a TV interviewer, as we have seen in a very long time. I know he jokes himself, but he raises the bar and puts most of his contemporaries on "serious" news shows, to shame.

Who else is doing this with the exception of Rachel Maddow and an often times uncomfortably rabid -- but still admirable -- Keith Oberman?

Who is standing up and exposing the muck of FOX NEWS? And pointing up the same bias to the left that you find at MSNBC?

My three musketeers, that's who.

And these guys, while they tell it like it REALLY is through humor and satire -- have a deep and genuine love and concern for the country I love, and call my home.

THE DICK VAN DYKE SHOW

Not the first or the last time I'll be expressing my gratitude for one of my favorite shows and comfort food. Great for troubled times and not only is it still funny - but it still holds up. Can't say that about too many shows from the early 60s.

A rare color still taken during an episode where Rob Petrie auditions neighborhood talent for a local talent show. Here, he talks to his boss and producer Mel Cooley about his ventriloquist act.

SYM-BIONIC TITAN

One thing I never get tired of -- and never will is animation. I will still be watching cartoons from the old folks home on my last day on earth, you can probably bet.

My first, "I know what I want to be when I grow up" moment as a kid, was when I knew I wanted to be an animator. And I sent a picture of JONNY QUEST to Hanna-Barbera when I was nine or ten, and Hanna-Barbera sent me a very gracious letter (wish I still had it) that said when I got older, that perhaps I could work for them.

Amazing.

Anywho, of all the new animated shows this year, the one that keeps me coming back is SYM-BIONIC TITAN. While this strange little show clearly tries to straddle a lot of different genres and target audiences, in the process it results in a strange hybrid that has admirable strengths that overshadow its weaknesses.

The show creates a strange John Hughes-ish BREAKFAST CLUB meets STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND experience. There is teen-angst and drama in the form of alien teen PRINCESS ILIANA and LANCE, her teenage bodyguard.

The two, with the help of very capable robot companion -- hide out on Earth as their world is being plundered by dark forces.

While they try and assimilate into human life on earth (and navigate the dark forces of being the new kids at a new school) the battle back on their home planet results in some wonderfully sinister characters, repeatedly sending nightmarish creatures down to earth to locate and destroy the princess.

Even with a clear nod to TRANSFORMERS (a series I never watched or felt drawn to -- no pun intended) I have to say I really like this show and watch it each week like a kid might, on a Saturday Morning in his PJs with a bowl of cereal on his lap.

The human characters have a strangely "cartoonish" design -- almost comical. In fact, they almost look like "logos" rather than human beings.

And while that takes a bit of getting used to (since the story lines are often about their human dilemmas and backstories) -- the extraterrestrial creatures, space ships and the gigantic robot the two teens combine to become -- are always eye-popping as are the Godzilla-sized confrontations there are before the half hour is over, between the giant robot and the horrible creatures sent to destroy the Princess.

I can't help think that this story idea was once a concept for a live action feature film. Still I am glad it found some incarnation.

THE BOONDOCKS

A big thanks to Aaron McGruder and a sad farwell to his creation which ran three terrific seasons on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim. THE BOONDOCKS is one of the best animated series in years. If you've never seen one, you're missing out.

It is a, smart, touching, sometimes brutal, sometimes biting but always funny look at America. It offers insightful and sometimes squirm-worthy takes on the long and arduous journey of African Americans -- but don't think this is a Black show for Black people.

It also fearlessly and I think heroically charges at the universal subjects of racism, being gay, growing old, raising kids, crime, drugs, the media, and the terrible machine America is in danger of becoming.

And did I mention it was funny too? So long and great thanks for this very adult and very terrific animated series.

CONAN O'BRIEN

Not one for late-night talk shows, but TIVO has me watching the new Conan usually during a writing break in the afternoon.

And I gotta say: I'm glad he's back. As was true for the old Conan, I like the tone of his show and the self-deprecating but razor sharp zaniness of this man and his equally funny side-kick, the talented Andy Richter.

BRAD PARKER

One of the most creative and talented people I have had the pleasure to know and work with is artist Brad Parker.

You've heard me gush about him more than a few times in this blog. Brad lives in Hawaii now and has retired from the movie business, but our child, the Creeper from the Jeepers Creepers films, gives us the status of say an amicably divorced couple with an adored child that will bond us together for the rest of our days.

The Creeper is our child -- a child who actually has four parents.

Me, who thought him up and put him into words, then Parker who took the words and sketched him into concept after concept, detail after detail, until you could look at our ancient, winged critter and get excited about him.

Then Brian Penikas, who took the script and the concept sketches and added his make-up FX genius to take the Creeper into a dimensional entity and a do-able make-up effect. Penikas modified and embellished The Creeper and became part of a complicated collaboration between drawings and practical application, until the Creeper was ready to stand before the cameras.

Brian Penikas (left) and the guys who made Breck the Creeper.

The fourth parent is obviously Jonathan Breck who is the actor who took the script, and the sketches, and the make-up and inhabited them, in the way only these special and magical creatures called actors, can. He added his take on The Creeper and there he is.

Actor Jonathan Breck at the Hollywood premiere of JEEPERS CREEPER II

Making The Creeper a strange, scary and mysterious child -- but with four very doting parents.

Nope, we weren't the first movie to be titled JEEPERS CREEPERS, just check out this Roy Rogers Western from the early days of Hollywood.

Brad Parker and I, have had occasion to work on only three films together (JC I and II and PEACEFUL WARRIOR) before he moved off to Hawaii.

I met Brad when I moved to Los Angeles more than fifteen years ago. We were both standing in line at the Hollywood Galaxy Theater on Hollywood Boulevard for the opening night of the newest screen sensation: JURASSIC PARK.

Our "monster movie nerd" antennae immediately extended and entwined as we started talking about stuff only kids who grew up on scary movies can talk about. Now we were kids in our thirties -- but believe me, lost boys can be sixty and still be lost boys.

And Brad and I were clearly lost boys -- both having moved to the movie capitol of the world and for similar reasons.

The Disney version of The Lost Boys in PETER PAN. Barrie's creation of a band of lost and abandoned boys, I have borrowed for my theory on artists in general.

What I didn't know and as I would find out, Brad was a truly fantastic artist in his own right.

Someone who had already created and published comics strips, worked as a conceptual designer for video game companies, and even did an eye-popping and incredibly handsome GREEN LANTERN graphic novel for DC Comics called "Fear Itself".

Brad developed his own look for the book, with artwork based on actual human beings he photographed for each character. The project took over a year, and was incredibly time consuming and expensive -- I think Brad made little or no cash by the time the book was finished -- but Brad's ingenuity and artistry -- and a lot of blood, sweat and tears -- resulted in an ultimately dazzling take on the graphic novel.

Brad was also funny in a zany, Monty Python, Pee-Wee Herman, goofy but very intelligent way that you just don't see much anymore. Many were the times in central Florida when we were shooting the first Jeepers movie that Brad would diffuse the tension by cracking the odd, zany joke -- in the face of tempers, despair and chaos, that sent all of us laughing -- back to sanity. Back to earth. Back to making our monster movie.

I don't know when I found this out, but Brad was also gay. Gay without screaming it in your face, which is how a shy boy from Martinez like myself, preferred it.

If all that wasn't enough of a match to make us fast friends, Brad was also a major Hanna-Barbera/Jonny Quest/animation and cartoon fanatic -- as were most kids of our generation.

Another dazzling page from Brad's work for DC Comics. Brad is and always was a huge H.P. Lovecraft fan, and I would have to guess Cathulu is his favorite critter in all of literature and legend.

I didn't know it then, standing in line with this guy at JURASSIC PARK, but Brad and I had started "the beginning of beautiful friendship."

All this backstory is presented because Brad isn't just someone I am eternally grateful for coming into my life, but he and I have been having some very thoughtful email exchanges as of late, asking questions about life, movies and what they have to do with each other.

Brad's fame is growing in the world of Tiki-art and he has been in several art shows on both continents. He was also profiled this year in an island magazine. Jeepers fans might enjoy the above pic of Brad's island digs and some Jeepers props Brad designed for the film -- including the Creeper's magnificent table.

Brad and I of late, have been asking the kind of questions men of a certain age start to ask, looking back on where they have come from, what their journey has been -- and what it should be in the future.

And of course wondering who they are, and what they have to show for it.

Everyone has a life. (Some people think they have more than one i.e: reincarnation or another longer, eternal life after this one) Some people think that if we destroy others, our life after this one will be filled with rewards that will make the next life even sweeter.

Some people think that if you don't recognize their beliefs as the only and absolute truth -- your next life will be lived in fire and pain, while theirs will be lived on streets of gold, and at the side of their heavenly father, where they get to sit forever and ever. (Sounds like a serious Lost Boy syndrome there if you ask me)

Some people think that after this life, there is nothing. Game over. That whatever nothingness we came out of, we will go back to.

Nobody gets the final word about any of these ideas because no flesh and blood mortal has died and returned to set the record straight. Though again, there may be beliefs that insist someone has.

The one fact that remains, at least for this life, is that we all have a finite period of time down here. What do we do with that time? And what's the point of what we do?

Artists, be they filmmakers, painters, singers, actors, sculptors, you name it: they think about these questions a lot. And the older you get, whether you're an artist or someone simply struggling to feed and clothe your family, the closer you get to the end and the further away the beginning of life? -- you start to ask these questions more and more.

One of the concepts we are batting about, is the question of whether our art gives our life meaning.

I think my art, my films (and it has taken me a long time for me to be able to call them art, but I see now that even the most commercial of my movies are in fact art) is just a way for this lost boy to tell the world how he felt, how he feels, and what he hopes for.

But do they give my life meaning? "Meaning" is a tricky concept. After so many years on this planet, and what I have been through personally -- both the highs and lows -- observing my own journey, I'm not sure I believe there is a meaning to life, or that there has to be.

I mean, not to get too Peaceful Warrior here, but Dan Millman's ideas (which are basically rephrasings of Buddha's teachings and others) life may be less about understanding its meaning and more about simply finding happiness.

Happiness for you, for the ones you love, and hopefully, as we start to have a more global perspective, for the rest of the world too.

"Don't worry, be happy" may be a little too dismissive and simple, but I am flirting with the idea that happiness may turn out to be the most sensible goal here in a life that continually hurts and bumps and roughs us up.

I heard a quote about happiness on the show I talk about above MEN OF A CERTAIN AGE, that I think might also be the truth about what gives life meaning. It's so simple, but it struck me so true: It went something like, "The requirements for happiness are: something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.
I think art is communication. And I think communication is connection. And I think we all naturally have a need to connect. Lost boys are just that: boys who are lost. Who have no sense of their value or beauty because they didn't get what we most require in that very scary, very impressionable time of our early years: connection.

I think my art, my films, regardless of their subject matter, always carries the hope, that it will somehow resonate with others.

That Brad's paintings or my stories, or this guy's novel or that girl's song, will resonate with the world. That it will communicate what our journey is, or has been, or what we're afraid it will be -- whatever we are communicating in that particular piece of art.

So, I'm going to go on record here and say that, in fact, I'm not sure my art gives my life meaning. And that includes my more artful endeavors like POWDER or PEACEFUL WARRIOR or SOMETHING IN THE BASEMENT.

One of the Latin American posters for PEACEFUL WARRIOR

I don't know if anything truly gives life meaning or if anything can. But that doesn't mean life doesn't have purpose.

I think art gives life purpose. Not meaning really. Purpose. And I think art helps people and society and the world to look at itself. To see the things more dimensionally. To entertain us and maybe even enlighten -- by sharing different perspectives on what we fear, what we call good, what we call bad, or things that are simply misunderstood.

That makes art about as important to society as anything I can think of.

It can also be used for evil instead of good. Because art can lie. Movies can lie. My kind of art, the movies, are especially dangerous, because it can lie to the world -- and in an effort to simply make money -- send the world down on a very destructive path.

But I digress: art does keep me from going crazy. Making movies does give my life purpose and keep me from going crazy. From going dark. From sinking into deep despair. My filmmaking does that for me without a doubt. But it isn't a cure-all that keeps me bright and bubbly each day. I would say it keeps me afloat. I think that's the best way to say it.

I used to think making movies gave my life "meaning', but then I realized, what I was really talking about was purpose. Making movies gave me a purpose.

I want to tell the world stories, and I want to tell the world my stories. I want to give them hope, I want to give them thrills, I want to tell them what I went through, what scares me, what I feel deeply about, what makes me angry, what makes me joyful -- I want to share my struggles and my journey with others, and in the hopes (like the hope of all lost boys) that I will get love back.

I will get respect and warmth and admiration -- and most important of all: understanding. All things that carry the promise that the scared, lonely part of me, will somehow be soothed.

Does it really happen that way? Is that what our art does for us? Not sure.

I do know lost boys often make the best artists. They can also make a lot of destruction. Like most powerful things in life, they can cause brilliant light or great darkness.

I still wonder -- and my religious upbringing is screaming "nonsense!" in the back of my brain -- but I wonder if life and what happens in it, isn't controlled by some deity in the sky, but rather I wonder if life and what happens to us, isn't more often than not -- absolutely random.

And I know that's not as comfortable an idea as: everything has a purpose and someone is watching over us, up there.

ANGER AND RESENTMENT AND BLAME

I have spent a lot of my life angry at people. Angry at parents who didn't know how to be parents and drank and abused my brothers and sisters and I.

Angry at friends who I thought would be my friends forever and turned out to be nothing more than opportunists, "servicing the account" -- as George Carlin so aptly put it in one of his last stand-ups.

Angry at those who judge me, my journey, my films, or any other aspect of me -- without ever knowing me.

Angry at the ATM machine that won't reflect an accurate balance, or angry at Roger Ebert who has given a thumbs down to every film I have spent my life struggling to get made -- I mean, you can burn up all your energy on anger and hate alone.

Your whole life can be about anger and resentment. You can spend a lifetime blaming, accusing and getting lost in all the toiling that keeps us in darkness -- instead of taking that same enormous amount of energy and pouring it not into the dark but into the light.

Making choices that are about moving forward. Forgiving (not forgetting which is sometimes just not possible) but forgiving and using our energy to bring us happiness and move us forward in our journey.

Energy is a valuable thing. It's our life force. Do you want to piss your life-force away on anger, hatred and revenge? Is that the best I have to hope for? Getting even? Righting the wrongs that have been dealt me by punishing others? That's what my life is about. What will I have to show for it? Someone else's pain?

That's my life's goal? Somebody else's pain?

Rather than just giving myself things that bring me happiness. "The best revenge is living well," I remember Stephen King saying.

It's the kind of revenge that moves you forward, away from the dark, into the light and presents you with the happiness you deserve.

No amount of happiness lasts at the expense of someone else's pain. Eventually, there is only darkness at the bottom of revenge. And it's your darkness.

One of Buddha's truly great thoughts (and while I'm not a Buddhist -- I think there are so many of his teachings that prove true) is the one that goes: "You will not be punished for your anger, you will be punished by your anger."

When my life doesn't work, when I'm not where I want to be, when I am so pissed off that my life is not going as planned -- putting the blame on others, dwelling on my hatred for those who have wronged me, or plotting my revenge on them, has never changed the things I wanted to be different in my life.

Nor is it logical, when you think of your actions in the long term.

Hey, I'm no anger management expert or anything -- but in Hollywood, you go into meetings with a lot of people who have either rejected you previously, or you have heard them say bad things about you -- or you have heard things about them.

But going into a meeting in my biz or any others, you have to think about how to get what you need. The answer is never "I will get what I need from this person by telling this person off. Telling him what I really think of him. I will get what I need from this person by hurting them, or making them angry or defensive."

You have to think about your life the same way. Is this going to get me what I need and want in my life?

Is anger or revenge or holding onto a grudge going to get me where I want to go? Not in my experience. In my experience, anger and revenge and holding onto resentments -- will get you nowhere or worse.

THE MEANING OF LIFE AND OTHER BELIEFS

I don't know if the meaning of life is something real.

"Meaning of life" feels like another concept that I'm not sure really exists. The same way I'm not sure "love" or "justice" really exist the way we think they do.

Not because I am growing into a cynical man, but because these concepts are really just words, and words mean so many different things to so many people, that I doubt their actual existence - as we define them.

They might be just concepts we hang on to, while we go about deciding that we are in love with this, and that this thing happened was justice, and that this thing gives my life meaning.

The Python boys may have said it best, when they suggested at the end of their film, that perhaps the meaning of life was simply to try and take good care of yourself and to be good to each other.

How can you call something love -- when what you call love might be hurtful and destructive to the person you are sure you are feeling love for? There are two sides to every relationship. That means two realities in every relationship.

Love could be stalking, then. Right? Is it really love if it's love on the one side and only fear on the other? So love is all perspective?

What about what we consider "good" and "bad". How can you call something good when it turns out to be someone else's tragic end or suffering?

How can you call something bad when the end result might be something amazingly good somewhere else down the line?

In the same vein, how can we call something just or justice, when by another perspective, this justice is seen as something unjust and horrible?

If all these things have to be decided individually and are each a matter of personal perspective -- then I would at least suggest that we have to look at the possibility that these things are simply constructs.

Not reality. Simply one reality.

Even with people in my life that I would gladly give my own life for -- I still wonder if "love" or "justice" or "good" and "bad" and even the "meaning of life" aren't all just concepts, rather than realities. Concepts that we simply strive to believe in, but don't really exist.

What if, like God, they have just been invented by us to simplify or make sense of stuff that doesn't make sense, that we don't understand or that scares us?

IN THE END

As I get older in life, and the end gets closer than the beginning -- it gets scarier and more painful, but simpler too: because this is the time we have.

Right now.

And public humiliation, abusive childhoods, sexual oppression, losing those we care about, broken hearts, fear -- whatever shit we have to deal with -- this is still our time.

And it may be the only time we have to do whatever it is that we want to do here.

When I get stuck and depressed and wonder what the hell I'm doing or if I deserve anything good? (A common occurrence in the life of lost boys)

I remember a wise line of dialog I heard recently: "You can wonder and regret and toil about your decisions and your life all you want, but: A hundred years from now? All new people."

That really hit me hard. All new people. In a hundred years, we won't be here and someone else will.

Everybody passes away. Nobody gets out alive. So shouldn't we be creating happiness? Making art, reaching out, touching, laughing, feeling -- bringing out and encouraging as much caring and compassion as we can?

Sharing ourselves through art, through action, and connecting as much as possible with the time we have?

Before it's all new people?

What do you think, oh reader who I am amazed made it down this far in the blog? I invite anyone out there reading this to chime in and join the conversation.

HOPES FOR THE FUTURE

Hope number one: that Del Howison and I get our horror anthology DARK DELICACIES: THE SERIES up and running in the coming year.

Hope number two: that the third Jeepers film finally finds its financing in the worst economic climate the movies has ever experienced.

CONGRATULATIONS TO FRIENDS

Three of the cast members of PEACEFUL WARRIOR found great success on TV this year. Tim DeKay is now the star of the series WHITE COLLAR on USA, Ashton Holmes was one of the stars of HBO's epic mini-series THE PACIFIC, and Paul Wesley has been the star of VAMPIRE DIARIES going on it's second season now.

MY BOYS

My boys that have been part of my life for four years now. Two small rescue puppies, (above) Mac and Chewie -- were found abandoned on the streets of Los Angeles when they were small enough to hold in your hand.

Chewie was left for dead, with a leg missing (torn off by a much larger dog).

Found these two furry fellahs at a rescue when they came bounding out at me, tiny little fur balls, tails wagging, side by side. (Chewie has a kind of hopping/loping because he has only one front leg).

The rescue woman told us, they had stuck together like brothers since they first arrived at the shelter, so I felt I had no choice but to take both of them home and to this day -- as you can tell from the picture below, full grown now, they are still brothers and still side-by-side.

At the window in my room - the boys' favorite past time is squirrel watching, and occasionally squirrel chasing.

I have learned a lot from both dogs. Mac is sweet and even tempered no matter what shit his brother Chewie may pull. And Chewie is so full of piss and vinegar and boundless energy, that please don't tell him he has only three legs -- he won't know what you're talking about.

Maybe there is a great lesson there for all of us.

OKAY ENOUGH ALREADY

I'll close with this: I think our art gives our life purpose. And that might be more important or just as important as meaning. Purpose is something to do.

More and more, I think it might be simpler than we ever thought. For me my art is happiness (even with the terrible struggles and headaches it takes get it made) And happiness - which maybe the meaning of life - may be as incredibly simple as: something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.

Victor

PS: One more thing I wanted to mention but chose not to put in the body of my blog:

THE F***KS at FOX

Just a bit of anger and darkness that I need to add here to get off my chest, as the year comes to a close. I think it was a new low for FOX "NEWS". If they could get any lower.

Maybe I should be grateful to Fox News in the sense that the entire hideous organization -- the most anti-American network on television, does wake me up - about the political scene in my beloved country.

And for this I guess I should be thankful to Roger Ayles and Rupert Murdoch.

But that's like thanking Dracula for biting people and taking their souls. I mean, is it just me - or does FOX News seem to genuinely just hate people in general? It's almost chilling to watch as they clearly broadcast misinformation daily on a campaign of fear to their core audience: people who are already frightened, or worse: people who just can't come out and say they can't stand to see a Black man in the White House, and are willing to destroy the country to get him out.

Their agenda seems to be: get the Black man out of the White House, get the gays out of the military and exile them from "the privilege" of human rights. Take anyone with a different color skin -- and get them the hell out of my white country!

Forgetting this is a country of color. It always has been and it always will be. And that is in part what makes it great.

Hitler found a way to take the fearful and point the finger at the reason for their despair -- I see the same dynamic here. A campaign of fear to put even more money and power into the hands of people who wave the flag so they can hide behind it.

And what they are hiding is a terrifying disregard for the country, what it stands for, and more importantly for the well being of all the people in it.

FOX NEWS continues, without conscious or education, and much arrogance, to step into the forefront as the true The Evil Empire from the Star Wars trilogy.

How long will it take for people to see that there needs to be a rebellion -- but against the tea-baggers and the right-wing machine of fear, hatred and bigotry that wants to take America back, alright -- right back to oppression and a place where only a few chosen people have a right to freedom and the American dream.

All the Glen Becks, the Rush Limbaughs and Bill O'Reilley, (who still hasn't figured out what Colbert is actually doing each week) as they rake in their million and millions of dollars pissing up the backs of the people they claim they are on the air to save -- it's just awful.

And while O'Bama has been a disappointment, because he didn't stand up and take charge -- he is still head and shoulders above what we had just before him, and I would never think of trading him back to the bench, so that the men who crippled and bankrupted my country in the first place, for their own vehemently unpatriotic goals, could again take power.

POST HALLOWEEN FORECAST: MORE TREATS THAN TRICKS HOPEFULLY LIE AHEAD

2010-11-03T12:18:00.000-07:00

Back again after a long, long absence. Again, sorry my visits to this site have to be so rare. I know many blogs are added to daily and are thankfully brief. I miss the mark on both those counts.

I would like point out at the beginning here, that many of the pieces of artwork that adorn this particular entry are works of Creeper art sent to me from all over the web. Sometimes by the actual artist and sometimes not. Like the dazzling portrait above of Mr. C. Reeper, by one Sharshel Yam.

As with much of the art sent to me based on my films, I do not own these pieces of art, and if you see one that is yours here and would not like it to be, drop me an email and I will gladly replace it.

This blog is meant to basically break radio silence. An update about where things are right now, which is to say -- clearly not much different from where they were before, or I'd be typing this blog from a hotel room on location somewhere.

While that may be a distinct possibility in the new year, for right now the vast majority of my projects, JEEPERS III, THE WHITE, THE WATCH, ROSEWOOD LANE, ALCATRAZ, DARK DELICACIES and HAUNTED, to name the more prominent ones -- are still circling financing in the ever-so-slowly improving financial climate of making independent features.

Have we had nibbles on some of them? Certainly. There are always nibbles on most of my projects.

Does AFM (The American Film Market) start today in Santa Monica California, where many indie films find financing? Yes, it does start today.

Are any of your films being shopped there or getting any closer to financing because of the AFM? Conceivably.

And what does that mean exactly? I will let you know next blog, or after the AFM is done and we see what we have. Until then: why get us all excited about anything?

October came and went with no substantial news about JEEPERS CREEPERS III (though Jeepers Creepers did play on MTV -- in a very scrubbed up version, and JEEPERS II played on AMC as part of it's MonsterFest. And thanks to everyone who wrote me and told me about them.

And about the Twitter fest JEEPERS one had a couple of weeks ago when MTV first played it. There were a lot of questions in those Tweets about JEEPERS III and when it would be seen.
Is there good news -- or even ANY news on that front? Well, in case you don't keep up with the trades here in Tinsel Town, with MGM now reverting to one of the greatest guys I have ever had to deal with since I started making features? Who knows?

Roger Birnbaum, who was president of Caravan Pictures at Disney and greenlit my film POWDER, is now about to run MGM with his Spyglass partner Gary Barber. How could that be good news for JEEPERS fans?

Because maybe there will be a new door opening for the long-awaited, and proven financial success story of the Jeepers Creepers franchise. The franchise that has made MGM its home for the last decade.

MGM can use some cash -- and Jeepers Creepers, the best kept secret cash cow in town, provided UA's biggest money makers, each year one came out.

JEEPERS CREEPERS I and II did more than just break world box office records for Labor Day weekends in 2001 and 2003. Jeepers Creepers III remains the most requested horror sequel for a genre franchise around.

The Creeper truly is money in the bank and maybe with MGM falling into the capable hands of Roger and Gary -- maybe the pieces will finally fall into place, that will set our Creature flying for another 23 days of fun.

Make no mistake, this is a ready-to-go third CREEPERS film, with a strong script and do-able budget and universal demand. It is also not just the third film in my planned trilogy , but also may serve as the unofficial kick off to my idea for a TV series of the same name, that takes place in the avoid-if-you-can Poho County.

Here for die-hard JEEPERS folks, is a splash page about JEEPERS III, that tells the whole story of why this film should be made and made now. (And remember -- all the images on this blog, can be viewed larger if you just double click them. They can also be dragged to your own desktop, if your computer works like my Mac does:)

TAKE A POWDER, WILL YA'?

POWDER got me thinking about a strange chapter in the life of my strange little film about an albino boy born with strange powers -- the effect of his pregnant mother being struck by lightning.

The film was what they call a sleeper hit in 1995. Meaning it came out of nowhere and did very well. Holding at the number two film in the country for two weeks and staying in the top ten for a month. (Even in the face of a damaging controversy concerning my missteps of a decade earlier -- over twenty years ago now)

When the film did well, Disney called and said they were going ahead with an idea for POWDER: The Series.

This didn't come as a great surprise to me -- Disney had already remade POWDER with John Travolta and Robert Duvall and called it PHENOMENON.

As Jerry Goldsmith explained it, to a very hurt and bewildered Victor more than a decade ago: "It's typical, Victor. The bastards saw what it (Powder) did with no stars and a ten million dollar budget -- and decided to try it again with stars and three times the budget."
You can judge the merits of PHENOMENEON yourself. The same way you can judge the merits of the scenes in THE GREEN MILE that seem to have been lifted right out of POWDER as well.

I can still remember Lance Henriksen calling me on the phone after having seen THE GREEN MILE and leaving a message, with that deep voice of gravel, on my machine that said, "Oh Victor. Oh you have to see The Green Mile. There is another Powder baby out there, man."

We called any film that lifted POWDER stuff (like Phenomenon) Powder babies. The same way I call beats and scenes in my own films "JAWS babies" etc. when I do the same, incorporating beats from my favorite films of the past, into the ones I am making now.

As for THE GREEN MILE, if the film version of Stephen King's novel, didn't take ideas and scenes right out of my film -- then it's one of cinema's greatest coincidences - since I have only read one Stephen King book in my life and that was THINNER. (Writing as, I believe, Richard Bachman)

So when I heard that in THE GREEN MILE, when the "uniquely gifted" prisoner is smuggled out of his cell one night, he is taken to the sheriff's house to heal the sheriff's dying wife with his special powers -- my teeth just about dropped out.
Frank Darabont and I have never discussed this -- and I am sure never will. Frank's a good guy and I think a good filmmaker, and the origins of scenes, lines and moments in screenplays, are a complicated thing. It would be a pointless conversation and one that would not resolve anything.

Lance told me to take them all (all the POWDER copycat beats) as compliments. You know ...Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery? Or the French call it an homage. Possibly just a nice word for robbery.

All I know is, when it happens to you? It does make your blood boil a little at first. But then I have to scratch my head and remind myself of all the moments in films I have probably borrowed -- though I hope I have never just stolen them outright as is the case with GREEN MILE and PHENOMENON.

I hope my borrowed beats I have used in my own voice to tell a new tale, not piggy-back on someone else's.

The point of this tale though, was that in being interviewed recently, for an upcoming biography of Lance Henriksen, I was told again, as I had been told before, that Lance's series on Fox, MILLENNIUM, started when X-FILES creator Chris Carter saw Lance in POWDER.

I find this another interesting fact, that in a way makes MILLENNIUM yet another "Powder Baby". Because it was a series about a cop with special powers of the mind. In other words, Frank Black in MILLENNIUM was basically Jeremy Reed in POWDER, only as a cop with pigmentation and some hair.

I remembered back when Roger Birnbaum told me that there was some plans at Disney to make POWDER a series and I thought, really? The series never came to fruition, unless you count Disney's KYLE XY -- a few years later, where again ideas and scenes from POWDER were generously borrowed, at least during the first season -- which was the only season I watched.

But again, I'm drifting. Here's what this was all about: My first draft of POWDER, believe it or don't, written well before 1994, had POWDER as a New York City Detective, who the precinct called "Spooky", because of his albino appearance (plus no hair) and his ability sometimes to solve cases by knowing things that simply could never be discovered through standard investigations.

The first draft screenplay of POWDER, typed on long pieces of prison toilet paper (another story for another time) was essentially a film about a strange albino detective on the trail of brutal killer.

Throughout the film, detective Jeremy "Spooky" Reed, kept being reminded of his childhood, and much like the format LOST used, much of the film were flashbacks to POWDER being raised by his grandparents, kept in a basement to protect him from the sun and -- then eventually adopted by the town's sheriff.

Even the sheriff couldn't protect him from the town's cruelty or fearful assumptions about the strange boy -- and his upbringing was a difficult one as he learned to navigate through bigotry and bullies.

Strangely enough, that sheriff, the one who became POWDER's protector and surrogate father -- would ultimately end up being Lance Henriksen in the final film.

After more early drafts of the script, it became clear to me that the strongest and most unique and interesting part of the story, was the story of POWDER as a boy. And so the story and script shifted. No POWDER as a detective.

Imagine how I felt when Lance Henriksen told me he was suddenly starring in a series where he was a POWDER-like detective? And the show's creator (I was a huge X-FILES fan) Chris Carter even saying that seeing Lance in POWDER was one of the origins for the series.

Lance, always a great guy and a gentleman, tried to get me onto MILLENNIUM as a director, but the producers were wary of hiring a feature director who would need to move at the fast pace of a TV series. (They clearly didn't trust me when I said, I spent most of my feature career shooting faster than most TV shows did)

With so many cop shows now (about a dozen too many spread around the networks) it makes me wonder what would have happened, if indeed Disney did move ahead with POWDER The Series, and if indeed their idea was similar to my original screenplay where POWDER was a detective.

Would we have scooped Chris Carter and his idea to make Lance a profiler who has special mental powers that allow him to see inside the minds of killers?

And what the heck would POWDER: The Series have looked like I wonder:

THE CREEPER COMES TO COMICS?

Another very early conversation, that is just beginning, is about my long standing idea to feature THE CREEPER in a series of graphic novels or a continuing comic. And would be me fulfilling a lifelong dream: writing for a comic book.
I mean, I think I wrote quite a few in my day, and illustrated them too. Sadly, all my teen-aged efforts have been lost to time. I took my cue from Marvel Comics (as much as I loved Superman comics as a young kid -- Marvel always seemed to have the stronger stories that gravitated me to them by my early teens)
My early comic books, the ones I wrote and drew, when they weren't about about idolizing and body-worshipping the local lifeguards at our summer cabin, (hey, I was a gay kid finding a way to explore some very scary -- and very powerful attractions) were often horror comics (what else?) and again I often took my cues from Marvel.

Trying to create a continuing saga. One franchise I thought they had overlooked in the comics worlds was DR. JEKYLL AND MR HYDE. And I remember trying to create a modern day version of this tale, in classic Marvel Comic Book form - somewhat like THE INCREDIBLE HULK I guess, because the Doctor's dark alter-ego continually messed up his personal life.

That was back in the day, when I actually started READING novels. Imagine that today? Some teenage kid reading Robert Louis Stevenson's JEKYLL AND HYDE? I also labored through Bram Stoker's DRACULA (a tough read for a kid) and faltered when trying to get through Mary Shelly's FRANKENSTEIN.

I wasn't an avid reader - but I was sure much better at it than I am now. I don't know if kids read today. Do they? Do they still make them read books at school? Novels?

But back to my own comic book universe: I can tell you that right around fifteen my artistic talent was at a high and my addiction to THE AMAZING SPIDERMAN comics, were at an obsessive level. I never missed one.

I entered the serial comic reading scene right at the time the great John Romita was drawing Spidey. I still recall the issues where Gwen Stacy's father is killed by falling debris, from a building courtesy of a battle overhead between Spidey and Doc Ock.

Police Commissioner Stacey was pushing a young boy to safety. as the debris fell. And it was a shocker -- characters in popular comic books didn't die back then. Ever.

Of course, the public blamed Spiderman for the Commissioner's death, but look at this magnificent cover art. Is there any question where a lot of my sense of drama and presentation came from?

How many filmmakers out there today can say they weren't (aren't) influenced by the incredible artists and writers at Marvel comics back in the 70s?

This was a great and defining moment for comics, because quickly after the death of Commissioner Stacey (if memory serves) came the famous issue of SPIDEY that the comics code refused to put their stamp of approval on, the issue where the Green Goblin's son, Harry, Spidey finds out is addicted to drugs.

It was a very real idea in the very fantiful world of action comics -- but typical of that particular period of THE AMAZING SPIDERMAN -- you got caught up in the human drama of the characters as much as you did the supervillians slugging it out with the old web-slinger.

Perhaps this explains the decade long popularity of SMALLVILLE which dips into that well every week? It's teen angst and super powers. A strong mix for the young and young at heart.

With the drama of Peter Parker and Gwen, and drugs and Harry Osbourne, (ignored in the movie versions) to me, and I was just a teen, they were hitting the dramatic beats just right -- it was just a terrific thing, and I couldn't wait for the next issue to come out.

Looking back, and even then, I think, the controversial drug storyline, and publishing the issue without the comics code stamp of approval was a very brave and responsible thing to do.

To broach that subject and to broach it to kids reading comics, it was just so right. And yet, to the Comics Code of America, who probably had a hand in censoring violent comics at one time -- were now censoring issues that should never be censored.

I'm not even sure the Comics Code still exists today.

But as always patient reader, I digress: The prospect of a continuing comic book saga of our flying demon, is one that puts a smile on my face. It is still many steps away from reality, but there is one picture someone sent me that sort of triggered the whole idea:

Someone was daydreaming even better than me -- a Creeper cartoon series? You're talking to someone who was weened on Hanna-Barbera action cartoons. When someone first sent me this - I do have to admit, my ticker skipped a beat.

I promise I will keep you posted on my journey of the Creeper comic, as details shape up. If anyone has an idea out there for who would be a great artist for the books, let me know.

Creeper sketch by Jarrett Fajardo

Since I missed having an actual Halloween Blog, I thought I would keep this one short and end with some of great Creeper art that gets sent to me from the worldwide web. Some of it has appeared to music on a program that I uploaded on a previous blog.

Maybe some of these great glimpses of the Creeper, in the eyes of fans and the good folks who hope like I do, that the creature will fly again -- will help put the good mojo out there that another Jeepers film should be on the way.

Love this crouching Creeper!

Actor Jonathan Breck tells me he gets a lot of fan art sent to him.

One thing about Jeepers artists I've noticed: they come up with some of the most original and coolest visuals I've seen. As seen above.

I've seen lots of depictions of Justin Long's Darry Jenner. All of them unique and startling, like this very cool one above.

Creeper art isn't just limited to paper and pen or computer screens, some bikers have created some pretty cool Creeper hogs!

Incredible detail work on the logo and everything!

I have to admit, when someone first told me that they knew someone who had a JEEPERS CREEPERS tattoo done - I thought they were pulling my leg! But there are quite a few I found out! To quote Bob Burns: How cool is that?

Let's make this blog uncharacteristically short (and hopefully readable) by ending it here. Wish there was more to share, but over the holidays things have a way of shaping up for film production in the new year -- and I have my fingers crossed, hopes aimed high, but at a realistic level, and if anything happens to drop the checkered flag on the Creeper or any other Salva sagas waiting in the wings -- you will read it here first.

Hope your Halloween was a happy one! And thanks to those of you who took the time to drop me a line!

Onward and upward,

Best,

Victor

THE CREEPER STILL CIRCLES HIS 3RD AND BIGGEST FILM

2010-07-06T11:48:00.000-07:00

It's hard to believe that Memorial Day Weekend at the end of this summer, marks the ten year anniversary of the first JEEPERS CREEPERS film.

Are the exploits of Trisha and Darry and their most unfortunate run-in with a creature who only comes out every twenty-three days, every twenty three years, really a decade old now?

For a film that takes place on a lonely country road in middle America USA, central Florida, also known as "the heart of horse country" might have seemed like a strange choice.

But back in 1999, after scouting locations in Canada and looking at pictures from states all over the country, the pictures that came from the sunshine state, particularly places just north of Orlando, gave us long roads, arching trees with Spanish moss and just a terrific, isolated feel.

A feel that seemed perfect for what I wanted to be my first-ever real monster movie, but more than that: a new and unique kind of film in that genre. A kind of "nightmare in broad daylight".

(If you look closely at this production still you will see that Gina and Justin are actually their stunt doubles, getting ready for another take of the Creeper truck wreaking havoc on them. Why is the Creeper truck's door open? To let out the toxic fumes and smoke it filled with each time it had to run)

Of course, since I had never seen TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, I didn't know there already was quite an effective "nightmare in broad daylight" Film. Most people think JEEPERS is some kind of an homage to Tobe Hooper's film -- and were surprised to hear that I had never seen it.

I did, years later finally see the film, and in the presence of Tobe himself. It was much scarier and much less gory (almost no gore at all) than I was expecting. And the filmmaking was really great - something else that took me by surprise, since I had been lead to believe I was about to see the great gorefest that spawned all the gorefests to come.

There was so little -- and the film so scary and the storytelling so strong, I began to see people who thought JEEPERS CREEPERS was a child of CHAINSAW, were paying me a compliment.

Meeting Tobe himself was also a great pleasure. To my surprise he had seen both Jeepers films and told me that the scene in JC2, when the Creeper is hanging upside in a school bus back window, pointing out his intended victims -- was one of the truly scariest scenes he'd seen in ages. Praise from Caesar!

(John as the soon-t0-be headless trooper taking direction before we roll cameras on the discovery of dusty fingerprints on the handle of the kids' car)

But back to Florida: It was the pictures of the old abandoned church on the outskirts of a small city called Ocala Florida, and our consequent scout of the surrounding areas that made us decide we were off to the east coast to shoot the boyhood and lifelong dream of my own little monster movie!

Almost eleven years ago, a bunch of filmmakers from Los Angeles, California decided to take their very serious monster movie, to central Florida. Delayed financing had the production starting six months past the date they were supposed to hit the east coast, throwing us into a freak heat wave at the end of the summer of 2000.

Sometimes as hot as 110 degrees, the brutal weather that always included ninety percent humidity -- would be difficult on most of the cast and crew but it would be the toughest on the young actor playing The Creeper, Jonathan Breck, who would be acting each day under layers of latex and heavy coats and pants.

The other member of the production the intense heat was most difficult for, was the heavy set writer/director (almost four hundred pounds back then in 2000) yours truly.

(Big as a house back in 2000. Not a comfortable body to be in generally -- let alone in a hundred degree weather and with all that humidity. I was a massive, breathless wet tea bag for my entire Florida stay)

I have to be honest here and say that the first time I got off the plane in Orlando Florida, the first time I had ever been to the east coast actually -- and the first time I had ever experienced severe humidity -- this California country boy actually had to sit down after a few steps off the plane.

I had to sit down and try to breathe. The air was so thick with water, it felt like there was no air going into my lungs. Maybe you haven't experienced the kind of humidity I'm talking about. It's not just the heat, it actually feels like someone is sitting on your chest for the first twenty or thirty minutes or so that you enter this environment.

I sat on an airport bench with my producer Barry Opper and acclimated slowly, thinking but not saying, that I would never shoot a movie here in a million years. "There isn't even any oxygen!" I remember thinking to myself.

Little did I know, that a few months later I would be bringing my entire cast and crew here for an extended four month stay while we put JEEPERS CREEPERS before the cameras.

(Jonathan Breck as the Creeper had it a lot tougher than me during the heat wave we shot JEEPERS CREEPERS in. Buried under cloth and latex, the ninety percent humidity couldn't have been fun. Here he is getting a beauty mark or two on one of those long Florida roads we shot on)

I am asked a lot of questions about that film, and since I am sitting here on Fourth of July weekend, still waiting to shoot ROSEWOOD LANE, and getting feedback about how much the blogs about the Jeepers films are enjoyed, I thought I'd revisit the shoot for that first film, though I think I have probably told you everything there is to know.

Since I'm not sure where to begin, maybe the easiest way to talk about the shoot is to answer some of the questions that come my way through this blog.

HOW DID YOU FIND JUSTIN LONG?

Long story but here goes: Justin I had only seen briefly, and that was in the film GALAXY QUEST. He only had a couple of scenes, as a sci-fi nerd who is about to save the world --right after he takes out the trash for his mother.

To say he was brilliant in the time the small part allotted him would be an understatement.

He had also been on an NBC series called "Ed" that I didn't get a chance to check out till after we had hired him and we were all in Florida shooting. But from what I saw in GALAXY QUEST, I knew he had to be one of the boys we needed to get in and read.

(Justin Long and my producer Barry Opper between takes of the car and Creeper truck chase scenes.

Coincidentally, Justin had been working and hanging out with Sam Rockwell (I think they were in a play together) just before Justin trekked out to Florida, so I remember thinking there was some kind of weird or at least twisted symmetry going on in all of this.

(A rare photo of Justin in Creeper garb. This was the first of two times we would shoot the final scene of JEEPERS CREEPERS. Here, we are in Florida in an old abandoned slaughter house where the Creeper's other lair was built)

I think JEEPERS CREEPERS and Justin Long met at just the right time in each of their journeys. Justin had never had the lead in a film before and jumped into the part of Darry Jenner with both feet. I have never seen a better or more convincing performance in a horror film ever, nor had I ever seen an actor who so consistently gave me great take after take regardless of the scene we were shooting.

The hardest part for me, as the shoot went on, was not to take Justin for granted. In fact, halfway through the shoot I got tired of saying to him after each set-up "good job" or "terrific Justy" -- that we formed a running gag where before the shot I would simply walk up to him and whisper, "Try not to f*** this one up."

(Justin's chemistry with the talented and beautiful Gina Philips was that perfect balance of affection and irritation that a director could only dream of getting when writing a relationship film about a young brother and sister stuck in the same car on the way home for Spring Break.)

People often ask why I chose Justin when we had so many other, and larger names read for the part. It was simple. Guys that age (late teens) have a certain way of carrying themselves. Actors that age especially. Guys want to be cool and sexy and puff out their chests with that rather funny but utterly fabricated bravado that simply would have killed the energy I needed from my Darry Jenner.

Trisha and Darry (or Gina and Justin) would basically be playing the audience in my film. In much the same way Roy Sheider plays the audience in Jaws, I needed a Darry who would play me and the rest of the audience for maximum shock, terror and vulnerability.

Most teenage guys who came into read for me, kept their cool, stayed sexy and in control -- no matter what the scene they were auditioning for me. In other words, their portrayal of a real college boy -- suddenly facing death, and being terrorized by something that isn't supposed to exist in real life -- rarely felt real to me.

Justin came in and really lost his shit. Really got scared. Like someone really would if the facts of Jeepers Creepers suddenly became a reality. With Justin I got something I completely believed. Not a posturing, junior James Bond who was too cool for school, or worse, too cool to be scared.

(The Creeper at last makes a grab for his main squeeze. I loved the idea of counting on the audience's expectation for the lovely Gina to be the object of the Creeper's hunger -- and then to surprise everyone by making it Justin's eyes that were the focus of the Creeper's obsession)

I deliberately chose scenes from the script for the actors to audition with, that were ones with the brother and sister really freaking out. Justin was the boy who had the depth and the honesty to really convince me he was scared.

The great Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci says an actor has to seduce the director when he auditions -- and I understand what he means: the actor has to throw a spell over the director. Not a sexual seduction, but it is definitely a flirtation, hinting at a love affair -- not so much with the director, but with the character he is creating for the director.

This relationship the actor creates, is especially important if the director is also the writer. The writer has created characters, both light and dark, and has a very intimate attachment to them. Speaking for myself, my characters are my children. And like any parent, you want to see your children grow to be strong, happy and healthy creations.

It is scary sometimes to entrust your characters to the actors you choose (or sometimes someone else chooses) to take them from you and make them their own.

(Justy getting ready for a take in the diner sequence. His focus before an intense scene, his silent prep, very akin to Sean Patrick Flanery's focus when he prepared for a scene as POWDER, was something that impressed me)

When Bertolucci says the actor needs to seduce the director -- he was probably trying to be provocative on purpose, but he was essentially saying that the actor has to come in and convince the director that he has some magic to give this character.

That he has something to add, to help the character lift off the page and rise up to the screen -- as corny as that may sound. This magic to me, includes the actor's ability to create something real out of this paper and pen creation.

(Justin in one of his best moments in the film (IMHO) At a small diner, after witnessing the Creeper's carnage in The House of Pain, Darry tries to plead his case to a disbelieving State Trooper)

I saw a lot of talented guys during casting for Jeepers, but young Justin was the one who really gave me everything I wanted. And everything I needed the audience to feel through him.

I also got a very unique mix of humor, charm, goofiness, vulnerability, honesty and, one of the most important emotions in a film like Jeepers: balls out fear and terror when the moment called for it.

There was no doubt that I had found my Darry. Too bad the studio didn't want him.

See the money guys don't care how talented or right someone is for the part, if the name isn't big enough (meaning their credits aren't high profile enough to give them what the studios call "marquee value") the part will always go to some more well-known if less talented, or less right for the part, person, that the director has to accommodate in order to get his film financed.

How did Justin Long, an unknown end up starring in my film? The same way the equally talented and beautiful Gina Philips did. Francis Coppola (who had suggested some names himself that were much more well known for Darry and Trisha) asked me who I wanted -- and I said Justin and Gina.

Francis told the studio to give me the actors I wanted. I think it's one of the smartest things I did in making choices about Jeepers, and often when I hear from Jeepers fans that how much they love the brother and sister in the first Jeepers, the more I know it was smart to trust my instinct and fight for my kids.

(Justin was about as sweet, cool and unassuming as any actor I had worked with. It's always great when the truly talented ones haven't let the fear and insecurity that comes with being an artist - take over. It makes them a joy. And a fellow adventurer, and a talented ally in the great journey of putting a story on film.)

WILL JUSTIN LONG BE IN JEEPERS III?

Justin has told me that he really wants to be in the third and final film in the trilogy. If his busy schedule permits, I have a place for him and it would be great to have him.

WILL GINA PHILIPS BE IN JEEPERS III?

The third and final film, currently titled JEEPERS CREEPERS III: CATHEDRAL is built around Gina Philips and her character Trisha Jenner, who twenty three years after the first Jeepers film, is a wealthy business woman. Trisha is a single mom who has a teen-aged son of her own, who she has named after her long lost brother Darry.

(The equal parts talented and beautiful Ms. Gina Philips between takes at the Creeper's pipe in the old church yard in the original JEEPERS)

But Trisha Jenner businesswoman has a life that isn't all roses and fancy cars. She has been having dreams just like psychic Jezelle Gay Hartman, and in these terrible dreams, Trisha sees her son Darry being destroyed by the Creeper in the same way her brother was twenty-three years ago.

Determined to make sure this doesn't happen, Trisha puts all her money and power behind a plot to protect her son and destroy the Creeper once and for all.

IS THE CHURCH FROM JEEPERS CREEPERS REALLY GONE?

It was reported to us a year or so ago, that the church had mysteriously burned down. Locals who I am still in touch with, told me they suspect it was horse rancher, and owner of the New York Yankees, George Steinbrenner, (who just recently passed away) whose property borders the lonely two-lane country road the antique church sits on.

Again this is speculation that it was George, but the tale goes that whoever it was, got tired of people driving out there (it is a particularly quiet and remote part of Florida) asking to see "the Jeepers Creepers" church - so it conveniently burned down.

To me, that's a bit of a stretch. Who would burn down a classic, even historical old church that had been part of the state's history for so many years, simply because it had become a point of occasional curiosity or movie memorabilia?

(I am not supposed to share this rare picture taken at the church, but here I go, for my die-hard Jeepers fans. Why is this picture verbotten? See the bodies and the open doors of the truck? See how clean and sterile looking they are? They were not painted or dressed to ever be seen)

Why? Because the director promised that the inside of the Creeper truck -- would never be seen in the final film. It was one of many cost-saving measures that helped us get our budget down, and so, the interior of our Creeper trucks where never painted, dressed or made up to be screen ready.

The days of shooting at the church are some I will never forget. This was one of those parts of Florida where we were in such deep country that the insect population not only outnumbered us, but they made shooting sound a special kind of challenge.

(Here we are with the crane and the crew for another day at the Jeeper's church. Under that white tent top is "video village" or "Victor Village" we called it. Where I and my faithful script super Patti would sit and watch the shots on the video assist)

The bleets, blurts and chirps and whatever else insects make, was like shooting next to a babbling brook. I'm not kidding, the air crackled with the sounds of all these bugs and secadas that were everywhere in the surrounding woods and fields that peninsula-ed the old church.

When we were about to roll sound, someone would fire a vary pistol into the air and the insects would all go quiet - usually just long enough for us to get a take where the dialog wasn't swallowed up by choruses of crickets and whatever else was out there.

Believe me, the insects you see in California in no way prepare you for the insects you're going to see in central Florida. They are bigger, faster and more exotic. To me it was like shooting in the rain forest -- and discovering big bugs and creepy crawlies you never knew existed.

FROM CLOWNHOUSE TO CAT HOUSE

To say we had many, many adventures making the first Jeepers film would be putting it mildly. I still remember finding the perfect house for Eileen Brennen's cat lady. And that house was an adventure all it's own.

There was a very kind and sweet old cat lady actually living in it. And she had her share of cats believe me. Some of them, while still adorable and cute, clearly looked like they had been inbreeding a generation or two.

The cats that appear in the film in the Cat Lady sequence by the way, are not the cats that lived at the house. Eileen's cats were trained and brought there on the day of shooting …

The house itself was old and unkept -- and since in the original version of the script, much much more took place inside the actual house -- we had plans to refurnish and dress several of the rooms.

I remember walking into the living room and seeing that the owners had the couch pushed tight against the fireplace. It was musky and smelly as you might guess, but when I said, "what if the couch were out in the middle of the room?"

Steven Legler and another of the scouting party each grabbed an end of the couch and started to pull it away from the fireplace, when the owner shouted "Don't move that!"

We understood why -- something behind the couch, and inside the fireplace ruffled and scuttled in a way that was truly creepy as she explained, "That couch is keeping the bats from coming in down the chimney…"

A CHILLING INSIDE THE CAT LADY'S HOUSE

Since I've opened that can of worms (or shall we say bag of cats) let me share with you die hard Jeepers fans, the original plan for the kids' stop over at the Cat Lady house. It was meant to be one of the creepiest and most surreal chapters in Trish and Darry's cross country nightmare and the first leg of the second act finale.

(One of the great joys of my directing career thus far: watching Eileen Brennen work her magic as an actress. She made me laugh so hard in between takes -- with her uncanny sense of comic timing, she ended up being a pleasure on and off camera)

When budget nightmares from production mis-management suddenly demanded we cut about a million dollars out of our shooting budget, the Cat Lady sequence was immediately trimmed by pages and all the interior scenes were scrapped.

The outdoor scenes, the ones you see in the film are really the condensed beats of a setpiece that was much longer and more frightening than what made it onto the screen.

(Shooting a moment inside the kids' car at night)

The race from the Cat Lady's house flowed into a scary nighttime chase down the country road and up to a railroad crossing, where the Creeper truck forces Trisha and Darry across the tracks and being hit (or nicked actually) by the moving train, sending their car spinning, as the Creeper vaults over the moving train -- a larger version of the car hopping he does at the Cat Lady's house in the final version of the film.

This sequence was the second of three scenes with moving trains that had to be cut out of the final shooting draft of the script -- the third scene was the finale where Darry driving the Creeper's truck sacrifices himself by driving into a moving train to destroy the Creeper -- and himself in the process.

I have bitched and moaned about not having a third act in the first Jeepers so much, that I don't want to do it again, here. If you follow this blog or listened to any of the talk about the original Jeepers script, you know that story already.

(Don Fauntleroy lines up a shot of the Creeper about to reveal himself to the kids -- shortly after a severed head hits the hood of Trisha's car)

CAT LADY SEQUENCE VS THE TRAIN SEQUENCE

Sitting in my hotel room at the Hilton in Ocala Florida and trying to figure out how to lose about ten to fifteen pages of script was a particularly stressful and nasty thing to have to do, to what I knew was a very strong and wonderful horror screenplay.

But when the budget came up short by around a million -- and the bond company was called in to oversee the picture, before we had even had a day's shooting, a company that was there basically to make sure the script we were shooting was the script I could afford to shoot -- added to the duress.

How does a film about to shoot suddenly realize it doesn't have enough money to shoot the film? It should never. The budget was either mismanaged or f***ed up by men who were supposed to be letting me know how much we had so I could decide on how much we could do.

Why this didn't happen I am still unclear. But it never happened again, nor have I ever depended on any one single person to look at the budget, my schedule and my storyboards and decide if we can stay on schedule.

I learn something on every film -- in fact, I learn many things on every film, and on Jeepers Creepers I learned that not everyone knows what they pretend to know and they can be a serious liability regardless of what wonderful human beings they might be personally.

Now I only put people in those positions of money and power on my films who I know I can trust to tell me how much of a movie we can afford to make.

(Don Fauntleroy my director of photography on JEEPERS and JC2)

After thinking I had made the right cuts and changes to accommodate our new and unexpected financial crisis, it was my DP, Don Fauntleroy who told me, I think after the picture was finished, that I should have cut the Cat Lady sequence and kept in the third act and the train finale.

Back when I first heard this, I rejected the idea completely. Now I think Donnie may have been right.

Who will ever know?

WHAT IS THE CREEPER?

I guess that's the question I get asked most of all. And the answer in my head is never one I would share with fans or critics or anyone. It's not that I don't know what the Creeper really is, it's that I don't think my idea of the creature's origin or identity, is any more powerful or clever than an idea you might have yourself.
I add to my creature's mythology in the third film, and fill in some more history, but I don't see the pay off, for you or for me, that is better or more powerful -- or more creepy, than having it all be a mystery.

The idea of making a monster movie, and a monster movie in the year 2000, I thought needed to be a careful mix of everything that had worked for me over the years in my long and early starting love affair with movie monsters.

I also knew what paths I wouldn't go down with my creature: I wouldn't have him wisecrack to the camera like the modern day movie monsters we were being given. These were creatures, monsters and killers that I felt played more like jokes or just cheap plot devices that weren't well thought out.

(Brian Penikas and the Make-Up and Monsters family that transformed young Jonathan Breck into our flying demon each shooting day)

I wasn't interested in making a monster movie that made fun of monster movies, and I wasn't interested in making a monster movie that apologized for being a horror film. I wanted to make the kind of monster movie that worked hard to create a very real world that feels true and familiar -- and populate it with real characters.

Not just items on the menu, or hot boys and girls that are their to shake their asses and make a bunch of wisecracks before becoming special effects fodder.

So while I have made some fairly mysterious comments about the origins of the Creeper, I think fans secretly enjoy the frustrating but delicious mystery of the Creeper's true identity and enigmatic history.

THE INSERT CAR

I learned many very important lessons about filmmaking on Jeepers Creepers, and one was, never write a script where twenty pages take place in a moving car. There are only a few ways to shoot scenes in a moving car, and one of them is take a real car out onto a real street and put the car on what is called an insert car.

(Here is the kids' car on the insert car. As you can see, the car is actually on a platform where lights and cameras and camera operators can sit around the moving car (towed by a truck (also called the insert car) where the director and others sit in the back and watch the video assist screens)

The insert car separates the actors from the director, because the director is in a truck that is actually towing the car the actors are in. Communication is minimal because the director wears headphones and tries to hear the dialog on a wireless system that is usually more static than anything else.

Since traveling car scenes (call them insert car scenes) are mostly dialog, hearing the actors is pretty damned important when you're shooting. It's just the worse possible scenario for creating scenarios.

In the original Jeepers Creepers, we spent days, probably weeks on the insert car, both for night and day scenes. It ain't fun, friends. Some of the toughest filmmaking I've ever tried.

OTHER THINGS I LEARNED ON JEEPERS CREEPERS

(Gina Philips checks out the framing of a shot before cameras roll)

I learned that it's good to encourage actors to look and see the frames I am putting them in. It helps them modulate their energy, mannerisms and movement within the frame, and within the scene they are playing.

I also encourage my actors to come into the editing room when the film is being assembled, so they can see the process of picking the best parts of every take and putting them together to make the final scene.

I find if they see how every take doesn't need to be perfect, and that it is sometimes a matter of one part from this take and one line from this take -- it may take the edge and pressure off them the next time the camera is rolling.

When the pressure is off of an actor -- sometimes wonderful and miraculous things happen to that performance.

I also learned that making movies is sometimes some of the most difficult work a man can take on. Don't get me wrong: I know that moviemaking is a priveledge -- and for me a joy -- but it is not glamorous. And the biz, to quote actress Bette Davis, "ain't for sissies." You work, and sweat and fret your ass off making a movie. And don't let anyone tell you any different.

You are spending sometimes a hundred thousand dollars a day of someone else's money and making more crucial desicions in an hour's time than most people have to make in a month.

I'm sorry if I protest a bit here, but I guess years later I am still sensitive to the idea that my father never thought writing and directing movies was a real job, or a man's job.

Though ironically, I doubt he could have ever put up with the hours, the conditions and pressure and "the unrelenting 24/7 for months at a time with no breaks with not even a weekend off" schedule of getting motion pictures.

And in the case of JEEPERS CREPERS, try it in 90 degree weather day after day.

He'd of been drunk the first time someone told him he was behind schedule a day and was threatening to fire him. I have made seven feature films in the past fifteen years -- and not one of them, with the aid of drugs or alcohol.

So I already feel like I have proven myself more the man than he ever claimed to be.

Whew! Sorry about that -- not sure where that came from. Isn't it funny how the judgements of our parents, even when they are long gone, seem to still trouble us in the corners of our minds we thought sure we had cleaned out.

And people ask me why so many of my films are about troubled relationships between a father and son.

ONE OF THE BEST THINGS ABOUT BEING A FILMMAKER

And that's that it never really gets boring. Sure it's a grind like most jobs because day after day you have to go to work. But since each film is different, each 'job' as a director brings something new to accomplish.

(What was supposed to be a football field of bodies - a Sistine Chapel's stretch of human bodies sewn together, turned out to be these few on our limited budget and rapidly injurious budget cuts that kept flying at us)

New problems to solve, new actors to deal with, new tricks to create ... the job is always different. And that may be one of it's saving graces. (That and a healthy paycheck if you rise to the position of a well-paid filmmaker) Nice work if you can get it, as they say.

(Shooting the Creeper crawling down the wall toward Jezelle)

If it looked real in the film -- it's because it was. None of this CGI bull**** for us (we couldn't afford it anyway) We had to devise a way for our Creeper to actually crawl down the wall!

(Shooting the pipe sequence. You can click on the picture and get a bigger version)

Most folks don't understand that to build a real Creeper lair underground at the end of a long corrugated pipe would be too costly -- so the pipe was erected in our JC warehouse, where we also built the jailhouse cell block, and the subterranean part of the House of Pain.

How much of a great puzzle that was to put together. I think eventually we had to have three separate pieces of pipe of varying lenghts to create the final illusion. Two were in the warehouse - the long one seen in the picture above.

And a shorter one for shooting Justin and the rats that allowed us to get our close-ups before his great slide. The third pipe was also a shorter piece and was on the actual church location -- built to look like it descended far down into the earth, and anchored to the ground so Justin could crawl into it and Gina could try and stop him.

It occurs to me just now, that Justin did his own "stunt" slide down the long pipe. The full scale size pipe built in the warehouse. I remember it was the last thing we shot in the entire picture.

Less than an hour after Justin slid down the pipe -- we were suddenly drinking champagne, giving out gifts and then I was back on a plane for my home in Southern California -- and a climate where I could breathe. I didn't even stay for the wrap party -- something I would almost never miss.

But the climate and the stress of the shoot had really taken its toll on my four hundred pound body. I needed to get home and only heard about the wild shenanigans of the JEEPERS CREEPERS wrap party -- from those who had survived it and returned to Los Angeles to tell me about it.

Well, it looks like I have gone on about nothing for long enough here. Thanks for all the feedback and questions. Thanks for following the blog. You can contact me through the address supplied in my profile if the spirit moves you.

That's me just about all blogged out. Lots to tell you about projects that are still nearing prep, but maybe next time.

JC3 still circling its funding, ROSEWOOD LANE looking for cast so it can go roll cameras, and the always developing projects like ALCATRAZ, THE WHITE, THE WATCH and DARK DELCACIES (both as a movie and as series hopefully)

If there were more to report on any of these projects I would. But money is scarce in the movie economy and I just have to be patient and see what happens.... hoping as most filmmakers do, that the money muse will smile on them and they can go tell another story.

For now, memories of JEEPERS CREEPERS as its ten year anniversary approaches -- maybe with the third and final film of the trilogy in sight.

Here's my deepest wishes of appreciation to the many people who went on this adventure with me, both in Florida and Los Angeles -- and to the many more who watched it in theaters and on Sci-Fi Channel and IFC (where it airs unedited thank God) and on DVD.

Onward and upward everyone,

best,

Victor

A SAD GOOD BYE TO OLD FRIENDS

2010-04-05T12:55:00.000-07:00

I got a call from Charlie, my best buddy back in my high school days, to hear the sad news that his brother Michael had died.

Charlie was my best friend and movie making pal in high school. And his brother Mike, a year behind us, was our cameraman, stunt man and co-conspirator. The three of us were the resident drama club geeks, Harryhausen fanatics and weekend filmmakers.

The sad news of Michael's passing brought back all the adventures we had in those strange and distant teen years, many of them running around Alhambra High School, in northern California, with a Super 8 camera, starting what I didn't know then, was the beginning of my career as a filmmaker.
You are forewarned that this is gonna be a very long blog entry, some of it painful. And it will take a while, or may never get to, bits and pieces about POWDER and JEEPERS CREEPERS or Hollywood filmmaking.

So Creeper fans look elsewhere-- but as I said in my very first blog -- the blog is more for the blogger than anyone else. And that is certainly true here.

When I heard of Michael's untimely death, I went back to year books, scrap books and early screenplays, and started to read and see things, I had forgotten (or tried to forget) because they were so long ago.

I do, on occassion get questions about how I got my big break, or how a kid up in Northern California ends up in the movie biz, and answers are never simple ones.

Maybe in this blog, are the answers for some of you, to those questions. But really, this blog is about me telling the story I feel like telling right now, one that came rushing back to me, with this sad, sad news.

A CINDERELLA STORY

I called my story "a Cinderella story" to an Entertainment Tonight interviewer on the set of THE NATURE OF THE BEAST in 1994.

I detest the cliche, and even the emasculating properties of the words to describe my journey to Palmdale California, outside of Los Angeles and directing Eric Roberts and Lance Henriksen in a script from my own pen, but I couldn't help myself, when I said Cinderalla story.

At that moment, I was insanely happy at my own situation.

For me, I was a kid who survived a terribly troubled childhood, a shame filled struggle with my sexuality, an alcoholic step father, and had even survived a terrible misstep that sent me to prison for a year, a place I was brutalized and was lucky to have made it out of alive.

And after all that, here I was, somehow now living my dream -- shooting a feature film, in Hollywood California, with top-notch actors I had grown up admiring, a producer who believed in me, working with a real movie crew, all of us shooting a script I had written myself.

The idea for NATURE OF THE BEAST, had ironically, come to me during my eighteen months in prison. Based on some of the tragic and very scary people I found myself living among there.

And now, here was Entertainment Tonight, interviewing me on my set.

Though to be fair, I think ET was there mostly because that day, we were shooting with legendary animal wrangler Jules Sylvester, and working with a poisonous Gila Monster, a massive boa constrictor, several poisonous spiders and a virtual zoo of other creepy crawlies.

Michael Coday's passing stopped me in my tracks. It stopped me cold. Like death stops all of us when it gets close and personal. And makes us stop and think, how none of us know the path our lives will take. Or when our time here will be up.

Thinking about Michael takes me back to the early years of my life, and how my journey to being interviewed by Entertainment Tonight, began.
Here is probably much more than you want to know, about how I remember it all happening.

SHOOTING MOVIES WITH CHARLIE AND MIKE

Years before I was lucky enough to have Francis Ford Coppola tell me he would pay for my first 35 millimeter feature film out of his own pocket, I had already been making films for over a decade.

I read somewhere where luck is just where preparation meets opportunity.

Well, I might be an illustration of that concept, simply because there were many, many years where I was learning my craft, making tens and tens of super 8 and regular 8 movies.

You see, there were no video cameras when I was growing up young readers - call us Children of a Lesser Technological God- no easy access to getting your story onto a TV screen or any other kind of screen.

I made probably more than twenty short and three feature length films in Super and Regular 8 -- that preceeded Francis Coppola seeing me as someone who could take a couple hundred thousand dollars and come back with a movie.

SEEDS PLANTED START TO GROW

I was always interested in movies and television from my earliest memory as previous blog entries mention. But maybe what I haven't mentioned, and am wary to -- is that the first film to ever truly terrify me, was the one my dear old mother decided to expose me to, when I couldn't have been more than four or five.
ATTACK of the 50 FOOT WOMAN was one of those Drive-in movie cheapies that ended up on TV as an often run late, late show only a few years later. This is my earliest memory of watching anything scary on TV. Something where I was literally terrified.

Watching it now, it is a laughable melodrama that the bots of Mystery Science Theater would have a field day with -- but the visuals of a great white ball, landing on earth and containing an evil bald giant, who looked like a pissed off version of Mr. Clean - was all it took to truly mess up my little brain.

Even this still, of the sheriff and his deputy investigating the interior of the ship, and looking through various glass tubes and balls -- reminds me of the chills that movie brought me when I was a tyke.

Have you ever seen a film that did this to you? Scared you so much, you went back and saw it again? And not for fun - you saw it again because you refused to let it become the master of you?

I really think this is the seed of my early and ongoing fascination with horror and suspense. And with me, I think letting me see this particular movie, when I was way too young - became the catalyst.

And this rather hilarious lobby card, where the giant reaches down to grab a woman out of her car who witnesses the landing -- reminds me of how terrifying that scene was to me.

Now, as I look at it, it looks as if they borrowed a giant rubber hand from another sci-fi cheapie and put it on a fork-lift, its big floppy fingers swinging unmenacingly -- but back then, through innocent and horrified eyes -- it was literally heart stopping.

Whether I like to admit it or not, it left a scar on me that can't be ignored. Maybe this scar, the first of many in my early childhood - was the seed of my seemingly fatal attraction to scary movies.

ONE OF THE HAPPIEST TIMES OF MY LIFE

Unlike most kids, I was actually happy to be at school and away from my unhappy and scary homelife - what kid wouldn't? And while I don't remember exactly how Charlie Coday and I first met and became friends, it had to of been in my freshman year at Alhambra.

And Charlie would be my best friend for the next four years. His younger brother Michael wouldn't join us in the hallowed halls of Alhambra till the next year, but in that magical freshman year, when Charlie and I first picked up a camera -- it was an old Regular 8 millimeter that his parents had.

And thirteen year old Mike was our cinematographer -- because Charlie and I had to of course be the stars in front of the camera! But how did we even think to make a movie? We didn't think of it on our own believe me.

The big moment I think -- came in my freshman English class, in the form of an amazing teacher named Jack Holder.

We have all heard stories about teachers who made a difference in someone's life, and I have to say -- I had one of those and to spectacular effect. Leyland "Jack" Holder was about to retire, when a spindly, skinny and geeky Victor Salva got him for freshman English.

What he did with me, in that year would probably get a teacher fired today.

Now that I've purposefully got your prurient minds spinning -- it was something that may have made all the difference in how I would from then on, see myself and navigate through my life.

Jack may have been more of an actor than a teacher -- or combined his talents for each, and by the time I got into his class, was a tall, balding white-haired guy with a great voice, hilarious sense of humor and a great outlook on life that every high school freshman should be exposed to.

Jack was perfect for getting bored thirteen and fourteen year olds interested in reading Shakespeare and all that lit stuff. But when we were asked to write our own short stories -- all that changed for me, thanks to this man.

Who I will always be thankful for, helping me see, in skinny, young, closeted Victor Salva in frosh English, where my passion lay.

I'm not sure what I was thinking about here in my frosh portrait. Or what that far off look in my eye was -- like most teenagers, dreaming of a better life maybe? Somewhere over the rainbow?

Jack Holder took that dreamer and put me in touch with my true bliss. It started when I handed in a required writing assignment: a short story, which after reading, Holder had me read to the class.

Always a bit of a class clown, and hungry for attention, I really liked reading my story to everyone. It was my first ever really public storytelling moment I realize now as I write this down.

WHAT A STRANGE LITTLE CREATURE I MUST HAVE BEEN

But another thought occurs now -- what about the little animated movies I would draw on the end of tablets -- Spiderman adventures and Superman, and Jonny Quest, imitating the cartoons I loved so much?
I would buy tablets in bulk with the money from my paper route and create my own animated stories, and even created my own company logo after seeing "A HANNA-BARBERA PRODUCTION" so many times.

My tablet animations would end with "A VSP PRODUCTION". Meaning a Victor Salva Production -- though I think it never occurred to me that VSP Production, literally translated into "A VICTOR SALVA PRODUCTION PRODUCTION".

I would flip my tablets for the neighbor kids, friends, family and anyone who would watch, performing the soundtrack myself making voices and sound FX.

What a strange little creature I must have been. And excuse my French, but -- holy shit, that would mean I was making little movies as early as ten or eleven years old.

So maybe I was a storyteller long before I got to Jack Holder's English class, and he clearly saw this, when he read that story.

Jack Holder liked my story and performance enough, that he made a deal with me: for the last few weeks of the year, he would excuse me from ALL homework and reading assignments in his class, if I would write one short story a week and then read it to the class on Fridays.

It was a dream gig for me! I started looking forward to every Friday and making sure I made my deadline of having a story. Usually in the mode of TWILIGHT ZONE. Scary and with a twist! Some of the stories were utterly ridiculous, but in my boy's mind -- they were terrific!

I vaguely remember one story I wrote was about a rash of cat murders in a neighborhood and the two cops that got stuck with the job of tracking down the sadist who was doing it. The big twist was that at the end, they chased him down a dark alley and shot him -- only to find that he was a full grown man with the head of a cat!

The result of some horrible accident gone wrong. Was he killing cats because he couldn't stand the sight of them? Or because he was trying to cure himself? I don't remember, I just remember thinking how brilliant it was that this guy wore clothes and stalked the back alleys as a cat killer -- and turned out to be a giant cat himself.

Another was about a boy who mowed lawns and did gardening for his grandmother, and found a dead body in her mullberry bushes. The twist on that one was that the boy found out too late that it was his grandmother who was the homocidal maniac.

Now, let me get one thing straight -- I wasn't a morbid kid. Or a violent one. I didn't like to torture animals and couldn't abide cruelty, which I saw plenty of in my dysfunctional family. Better shrinks than I, could tell you why my storytelling always ran to the macabre.

I don't know what these stories say about my family, my childhood, or my religious upbringing (Catholicism is a bloody tapestry of torture and murder -- see Passion of the Christ if you don't understand what I'm saying) but at the time, I could think of no greater pleasure than to try and chill my fellow freshman on Fridays, with another scary tale.

Was I trying to scare people as bad as I was scared watching ATTACK of THE FIFTY FOOT WOMAN or Hitchcock's THE BIRDS? Was this my turn to be the one scaring people instead of them scaring me?
Fridays where popular too in class. Not because my stories were any good, which they weren't. But because no one had to do any work on Friday except listen to me!

MAKE A MOVIE

Jack Holder was the man who after several Fridays of TWILGHT ZONE like tales, told me I should pick up a camera and put one of my stories on film.
At first, we dabbled mostly in stop-motion, following in our hero Ray Harryhausen's footsteps.

You can click the image for a larger view and read the text for more info, but this is me at Charlie's getting ready to try our first animated Gumby movie.

I was teaching myself about movies, imitating movies I loved (spoofing a lot of them, because that's easy and fun to do when you're in high school) and trying my hand at longer feature length films, scary ones (horror was my favorite genre growing up) but I never really finished any.

We always ran out of money, time or patience.

The first screenplay I ever saw, was actually a teleplay -- and I saw it at the age of thirteen, because I remember I was in the eight grade at St. Catherine of Sienna, the Catholic grade school I attended. The teleplay was for one of Rod Serling's TWILIGHT ZONE episodes called THE MONSTERS ARE DUE ON MAPLE STREET.

I was in creative writing that year, one of the text books had a complete half-hour teleplay for that episode of Rod's series.

I read the words trucking shot (what they called dolley or moving shots back then) and close ups, and all kinds of the language used to created the shots that made up the stories I watched in TV and movies.

That was my crash course in screenwriting I think. And it came at around age twelve or thirteen. Charlie and I took Jack Holder's idea to heart and started spoofing our favorite horror movies and TV of the day: like JAWS.

Our film version was a spoof called GNAWS, and read like a MAD MAGAZINE send up. (Our magazine of choice) I played Roy Shieder, Charlie played Robert Shaw's Quint and Mike was faithful cinematographer.

Our JAWS spoof not only made headlines in the Martinez Gazette, but resulted in a Hollywood style premiere one Friday night at the high school cafeteria -- where a standing room only crowd roared with laughter at our take-off on one of my favorite films of all time.

Another youthful obsession was KOLCHACK: THE NIGHT STALKER.

The novel by Jeff Rice that they based the TV movie that not only introduced Carl Kolchak to Charlie, Mike and I -- but that sent us off wanting to create our own Kolchak thrillers.

Me about to don my Carl Kolchack garb for what was to be the first of many Kolchak adventures Charlie, Mike and I planned to shoot.

In my rummaging through old papers and photos, I did find the "script" for one of the earliest films Charlie, Mike and I ever made: our spoof of THE EXORCIST, we called THE ASMODEUN.

The Exorcist was one of those movies that scared me so bad (and Charlie too - we saw it with our girlfriends) that I had to go back and see it again. And then again, until I wasn't afraid of it anymore. If you weren't raised Catholic and taught all this was real -- you might not be able to fully understand the trauma this film inflicted on me.

Here is the title page of my script for the spoof. THE EXORCIST hit theaters in 1973 so I would have been fifteen and so would Charlie. Mike would have been fourteen:

The comments in pencil in the lower corner are from Mike himself: "Vic, I think we should film it in order and do as little splicing as possible. Props won't be much of a problem. It's possible. Mike Coday. PS: If you drop this movie, I'll have a big, spasmadic cardiac!"

I guess we had lots of plans for lots of movies that never got made, and Mike was really hoping we would actually give this one a try. Talk about minimalist screenplay writing: here is the first page of the actual screenplay:

Not a lot of format -- not a lot of anything!

Back then, we were all about special effects. And all of ours had to be done in-camera. We had already done shorts where turning the camera upside down when we shot, caused the shot to run backwards when played rightside up.

So we had this crazy idea for a shot where our possessed girl "Megan" would punch "Father Merrits" (me) and he would fly off the ground, into the air and then crash down on the floor smashing his head and dying.

We decided I would jump off a scaffolding down onto Megan's fist and when I would hit it, she would retract it. Since we would shoot this shot with the camera upside down -- in the finished film the shot would run backwards.

Meaning Meagen would thrust her fist up and hit me in the chin and I would go flying up onto the scaffolding (but really up and out of frame) demonstrating her demonic powers.

I can tell you, gone are the days when we just decided to jump down from a five or six feet and onto somebody's fist -- but the shot worked pretty good when we finished our little ten minute thriller/comedy and the effects as primitive and goofy as they were -- were a real crowd pleaser.

We would do ANYTHING to get a shot. Anything to ourselves or anyone else, who was willing to put up with us -- including burying Charlie alive for one scene in STALKED where he was a corpse breaking out of the ground next to some unsuspecting picnickers.

THE ASMODEUN was a "Cova Films Production". That's Cova as in the first half of Coday and the last half of Salva.

Our early attempts would include, animated heroes like BERT THE BEER CAN, sci-fi spoofs about killer ping pong balls, and even one called something like ATTACK OF THE YOBWONG.

If I remember right, the creature in that one was really a long stretch of Play-doh, animated frame-by-clunky-frame, into a monster we called "The Yob Wong" because its size and length at one point, resembled the wong of a fellow classmate who we had gym class with. He had one of the biggest penises we had ever seen, and titled our film accordingly, without ever telling anyone what the title meant.

This would not be the first or only time we took our inspiration from our rapidly developing teenage libidos, but for the most part the early films in high school, were more more goofy than bawdy. Or if it was drama or suspense - unintentionally melodramatic or preachy.

When we got permission to show a collection of our short films one day after class in the drama room -- the audience wasn't just receptive, it grew in size each time we announced a screening.

This was all the validation Charlie, Mike and I needed to keep producing film after short film. Many off-color, sometimes overly gory, but mostly pretty brainless - and the product of three boys who just loved movies.

Young Mike Coday with the fancy Super 8 camera their parents bought that graduated us from 8 millimeter to Super 8. For more info, click on the picture for the larger version. There is a bit more information on it.

We also graduated in our four years at Alhambra, to more serious attempts at serious films, but still by imitating others: NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (STALKED), INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (THE OCCURENCE) and a thriller in the vein of DIRTY HARRY movies, called TAKE ME A PICTURE.

TAKE ME A PICTURE was the first film we tried -- and never finished -- where we went "on location". In this case, to Santa Cruz to takes some shots of the lead in the film (me - who else?) and his girlfriend, being stalked by a killer who takes pictures of his victims before doing away with them.

One of our attempts at drama was even a very early version of POWDER (though we didn't know it back then) called THE MAN OUT OF THE APOCALYPSE.

Shooting A MAN OUT OF THE APOCALYPSE, Charlie makes up our friend Brad Shumate in the title roll. That's me looking on. To read more about this production, read the text on this picture by clicking it, to see the larger version of the file.

Scorcese says each filmmaker makes the same film over and over again. Well I might be proving him more than right, if you consider that this early high school film of mine, has elements and certainly the spirit of my 1995 film POWDER.

The predecessor to POWDER? Another friend in our class, Doug Sowers, replaced Brad Shumate as THE MAN OUT OF THE APOCALYPSE in the middle of our shoot, either because Brad suddenly couldn't shoot one day, or we thought Brad looked too short for our alien, in the scenes we had shot earlier.

Making films was just part of what Charlie, Mike and I spent most of our teen years time doing at good old Alhambra High School up in the hills of Northern California.

Drama class was an elective, but once I took it, and always with Charlie, it became another universe where I flourished and found myself capable -- and believe me, their were plenty of areas in my young life where I clearly wasn't.

We did lots of musicals and dramas during my time at Alhambra. Thankfully being exposed to some of the greatest playwrights of that or any time: Chekov, Arthur Miller (the first scene I ever performed was one from ALL MY SONS, a brilliantly written post war drama, that I am certain informs most the dramatic scenes I have ever put down on paper since.

My first leading role, was in a play that both Charlie and Mike each had parts in as well, THE RAINMAKER.

Charlie Coday, Mike Coday and me in one of the terrific scenes from N. Richard Nash's 1954 play THE RAINMAKER. He adapted his play for the screen and it became a film starring Burt Lancaster and Katherine Hepburn.

Our time in drama gave us a working knowledge of just about everything: props, set construction, lighting. Everyone worked in every aspect. We built and painted our own sets and learned about exits, entrances, projecting your voice, learning lines... you name it.

Here is Barbara Garbarino and myself in a scene from THE RAINMAKER. I didn't know it then, but acting myself, was probably one of the best training programs I could have had in learning to become a director.

TRUE TALES OF HORROR

I see as I list all the fun, movies, plays and accomplishments in high school, and relive those joys for a moment, thinking back to Charlie and Michael -- I am avoiding a large, and much more unpleasant part of that life so long ago.

So, I'm gonna take a deep breath here, and get into it a little, and try not to sound like a Lifetime movie. When you grow up in the kind of family I did, you aren't just living in a climate of fear and danger, you are starving for attention, validation, a sense of safety and security, and of course love.

While Charlie and Mike's parents were buying us Super 8 wonder cameras, the irony was not lost on me that, I would have never been awarded anything like that back at my house.

It may sound harsh, but I'm not sure I would have ever been given anything from my mom and dad that allowed me or encouraged me to pursue any of my passions or talents.

And so here comes the uncomfortable part of my memories of growing up back then: talking about my strange and volatile family.

Here I am at my Grandpa and Grandma's house in 1969. That's me toasting with the other kids with my milk.

The picture above takes me back to memories of my deeply religious Catholic grandparents, who I know adored us, their grandchildren, but as I would find out later, threw my mother out of the house when she got pregnant at seventeen.

They also disowned their own son, my beloved uncle Phil, and never spoke to him again, when after his tour with the Navy ended, they found out he was gay.

So you'll forgive me if the words "family values" or Christian values, to me, always seem to translate into the words, bigotry intolerance and hatred.

What I didn't know then, was uncle Phil's banishment was a portent of what lay ahead for me shortly after I graduated high school.

My real father had abandoned my mother and her three tiny toddlers - myself among them. She had no money, and the story goes, when the power was turned off at our tiny house, she was reduced to warming milk bottles for my little brother Gene, by candlelight.

These were desperate times - and my stepdad arrived on the scene soon after.

My soon-to-be-stepdad was young, handsome, fresh out of the navy, and a rage-a-holic. Along with being an alcoholic.

In fact, when doctors told him to stop drinking a year before his death, he laughed right in their faces and said, "I've been drinking since I was fourteen and I am not gonna stop now."

Sadly one of the last things that got back to me, about my stepdad, shortly before his death, was that he had punched my brother right in the face as they both sat drinking at their favorite watering hole in downtown Martinez.

A "misunderstanding" about some fish my brother had caught, and hadn't shared.

But when I heard he dropped Gene with a punch to the face, right in public, I was reminded of the terrible time bomb we all grew up with as tiny children.

Why my brother stayed on, not only in Martinez, but at my father's side, to take that abuse and humiliation for years and years -- and from a man who despised just about everyone -- will always be a mystery to me.

Needless to say - this young navy man that suddenly inherited three kids (and soon had another on the way) was not great with children.

Just don't tell him that. Ever.

Like most alcoholics - he was a big kid himself, and a very angry and brutalized one.

My brother and my sister and I were still in short pants when he broke onto the scene - and was pressured by his own father, to make an honest woman of my mother, who was young, abandoned and struggling with no money and three very small kids.

My stepdad could not have realized how much responsibility he was taking on, by marrying my mother. And he would start to resent it almost instantly.

The fighting was often something terrible between he and my mom. And since they both drank -- and every night -- I remember it happening constantly. Sometimes violently.

Lots of Friday and Saturday nights the kids would be cowering in their beds when mom and dad got home from the bars and started going at it.

I remember my mother's blackeye one Sunday morning that made me seethe with a hatred for my stepfather, that if there had been a gun in the house, I might of made headlines even at twelve.

My point is, the horror in my films may easily trace back to the horror we all lived in that house on Shell Ave. A terribly scary place for children to grow up.

One point of honor I give my stepdad (there are a few) is that he was not religious. He refused to go to church, or confession (I'm not gonna kneel in a little wooden box and tell my sins to some other asshole, just because he wears a robe." And in retrospect, he did have a very good point.

It would be untrue not to say, that he was sometimes absolutely right about some things.

But he was crushingly oppressive. And then sometimes, turn right around and do something incredibly kind and generous. Like fix up a TV in the bedroom my brother and I shared -- or help me buy and then fix up an old Plymouth Valiant so I could have a car.

I was sixteen and I named it Bruce after the mechanical shark in JAWS.

He begrudgingly paid for all four of us (my brother, sister, myself and my half sister) to attend the Catholic school downtown, at my mother's insistence.

The war between my dad and me started almost instantly when he moved in, according to him. He used to joke, "You thought you were the man of the house, then I showed up. I had to show you who was the real boss." He showed me alright. And it must've been tough: I was three or four.

When school wanted me in the mentally gifted minors program - he flew into one of his rages and turned them down flat. Another raging argument with my mother. "You're gonna turn that boy into a faggot if you let him join some group like that, that's gonna let him think he's smarter than everybody else..."

Like most parents panicked about their children's sexual preferences -- they were unaware that my sexual attractions had been decided long before any gifted children's program was offered to me as an adolescent.

My dad was an uneducated man who feared, and so hated, all things (and people) who were more educated than him. He kept saying he wanted all of us kids to do better than he did.

But his behavior said something completely different. He didn't really want us to be a better man than him, or to be a smarter man than him, or a richer man than him -- because whenever it started to look that way, he reacted not with pride, but with that very scary anger and obvious resentment I came to know so well.

Looking back, I don't think I had a dad. I had a bully. I had a boy who never grew up, who was beaten and mercilessly abused by his own mother and father, who drank as early as fourteen to cope with it -- and then, as an angry, raging alcoholic teen, joined the Navy.

When he got out, he may have genuinely fell in love or maybe just lust, with my beautiful mother. And, with a beer in his hand, and his chest puffed out, -- as bullies do, so they won't look like the coward they really are -- my stepdad married my mom, while they were both still in their early twenties.

He crashed onto the scene, as a big, tattooed lout -- "who knew all about parenting kids..." because he had been so expertly parented himself, by a dad who would beat him so badly -- he often slept in the family car, in the garage afraid to go inside his own house

My stepfather would mistreat us all terribly -- and then become angry when he didn't receive what he felt was the requisite amount of unconditional love he deserved.

And he would often tell us why he deserved it: for putting clothes on your backs and food on the table and a roof over your heads. He didn't know that every time he would rant this -- his complete resentment of having to do any of it -- raged through.

This, young readers, gives you, as a child -- a feeling of being a quite worthless piece of shit. Not to put too fine a point on it.

And I think my dad really did drink so much, and was consumed so much by his own self-hartred and fear of being stupid or poor, that he went through all of his years as our father -- calling us worthless pieces of shit -- and then getting angry at us for not loving him for it.

As I got older, around twelve or thirteen -- I started to realize just how little my father knew. I didn't forgive him for being stupid -- I hated him too much for that. He had been far too cruel and abusive to forgive him for anything.

But I did make a classic mistake, that all boys make with their dads: I decided that since he didn't know everything -- that he didn't know ANYTHING.

He had learned some lessons about life, that even in his terrible way of bullying and brutalizing somehow got through and serve me today.

But back then -- it was war. War between me, and this terrible thing that I could never understand the reason for suddenly being brough into our house and our lives.

I still remember the Christmas when all I wanted was an Easy Show Movie Projector. That was all I asked for and all I talked about. I would be able to show little two minute clips of Space Ghost, The Flinstones and Jonny Quest on my bedroom wall.

Santa that year only left me a pair of barbells. Because he thought I should work out more. My stepdad of course, found this hilarious. And when I cried, I was punished for my tears -- and probably spanked -- and then forced to smile and announce to the room, that I loved what Santa brought me.

My stepdad was the kind of man that was so unhappy, so abused in his own life, by his own father -- that he could literally find a way to punish you with ANYTHING.

He found a way to punish me with Christmas that year. Punishing me for being a boy who loved movies, instead of fishing, weightlifting and football.

I know he would argue that he was just trying to make a man out of me. But I would argue that if someone had cared enough to make a man out of him, a real man, who knew what love was -- this father and son story would have been a much better one.

This picture hits me with a sad and kind of terrible irony -- since my dad's nickname for me as a boy, was eventually 'Asshole'. He even called me this long after I left home. He would leave me messages on my answering machine. "Hey asshole, don't forget you're coming to dinner here Saturday night..."

His resentment and discomfort with me -- and what had become an unspoken but intense battle between stepfather and stepson -- never found a truce really. Until the night my mother died of a cancerous tumor.

Before then, I don't think my much damaged parents, ever saw their strange, angry and twisted form of parenting as any form of cruelty. But they didn't see a lot of things. They chose not to.

And when they saw something they didn't want to -- they beat it down, or looked the other way, or they drank.Here he is with his newborn daughter. My half-sister. I love the big cigar and my little sis looking like she's going to puke from it. Smoking around the baby -- my how times have changed.

There was lots of terrifying crazy-making behavior as there is in all alcoholic families -- where all the children can do is take cover. Because you never knew what would be coming flying at you next: rage or disproportionate affection.

There would be some nights when I would be woken out of bed at two or three a.m, along with my brother Gene, and treated to hamburgers from the local burger joint.

Dad would be drunk, have had a fight with mom, and when he brought her burgers as a piece offering from her favorite eatery, and she refused them -- dad would wake up Gene and I -- and make us eat them as he professed his love for us and a warning to us -- even at seven or eight years old -- never to get married.

One of those times I remember Gene falling asleep right on top of his burger, he couldn't keep his little head up at three o'clock in the morning.

Me and my little brother Gene back then. We haven't spoken for over twenty years.

There was never any money, that was always the excuse when we wanted something, even a breakfast cereal that we had seen on TV.

These were parents who could find money to own fishing boats, several over the years, and a cabin in the Santa Cruz mountains, but never took their kids to Disneyland, even once in their lives. In fact, I think a total of about three times, were we ever even taken to the movies.

That's three times in eighteen years that we ever went to the movies as a family. We were never taken anywhere on vacation that was about us as children.

We were more just the lug along baggage of a man and woman who drank too much, and through deeds and actions, often displayed a not-so-hidden resentment or utter indifference to being the parents of four children.

Stepdad and mom in their later years.

I never knew my dad was an alcoholic until I was about twenty something, and he ran into me with a friend of mine who was a substance abuse counselor. After we exchanged quick hellos, we moved on and my friend asked me, "How long has your dad been an alcoholic?" I got very defensive and said, "What?" She said, "That is a serious drinker's nose."

I said she was crazy. She asked me five questions about him and I answered yes to all of them. Until that moment -- which truly staggered me -- I had no idea I was the adult child of an alcoholic.

I just thought my dad was an out of control asshole who you should just stay clear of whenever possible.

Me on one of our family camping trips -- which I despised. Notice I am not doing anything - including reading, or smiling or having a good time.

When I started to bring comics to read or paper to write with on fishing or camping trips -- this became forbidden as well. One of the many ongoing battles between my dad and I. He wanted me to be something I clearly wasn't -- and as a result, I think didn't like to see me pursuing anything that I took a genuine interest in.

I don't want to talk about the food issues around my house, but I did start this blog with an oath to myself to tell the truth in it. And I have had enough therapy over the years to know that the food rules in this unhappy house may indeed be one of those reasons why at times in my life I have ballooned to almost four hundred pounds.

My mom and my brother and sisters and I, on the day of my big sister's First Holy Communion. All smiles on days like these. I never understood till years later, that everyone's family was not a volatile, unsafe place to grow up.

Food wasn't scarce at home, we just weren't allowed in the kitchen, or the refrigerator -- ever. Forbidden. Food was controlled as if we were about to run out of it at any second. Have you ever heard of a family where the children weren't allowed in their own kitchen or refrigerator?

And it wasn't from not having money for groceries believe me. These were parents who were eating steak every Friday and Saturday night, leaving the kids at home and staying out till the wee hours drinking.

Meanwhile, my brother and my sisters and I, rarely were taken out to eat. Even McDonalds was too expensive. I remember the time Charlie came over to our house (a rare ocassion indeed) and lunchtime came around -- and my mother made me a hotdog for lunch -- and Charlie wasn't offered anything. Nor did I dare ask her to make him anything. (She was quite violent and volatile herself when triggered)

This was one f***ed up family and I would not understand the far reaching damage of their cruelty and dysfunction till I was long gone from that house on Shell Avenue.

My uncle Phil, home from the Navy with a buddy. That's me with the spaghetti beard and big smile: (I always loved when Phil came to see us. I probably had a teeny-tiny boy-sized crush on him way back then)

Even though this picture brings back chills as well as memories, I like this picture because you can see my stepdad for what he really was. He's not hiding behind a smile or a somber pose. That's him in all his dark, angry and drunken glory.

A timebomb ready to explode at any moment. And he often did.

This may all sound like a lifetime movie, or that I am just taking my place in a long line of disgruntled kids who blame their parents for not loving them enough.

But I think that stage I have left behind. I love them now, and know they did the best they could. I also despise their cruelty and weakness and utter disregard for the four tiny souls they were entrusted with.

I am one of those grown-up kids who need the world to know, that I barely survived my alcoholic parents, and that if I really want to trace back the roots of my storytelling sensibilities, and even my knack for horror and suspense, you really don't need to look any further than the time I had growing up.

The three posters I grew up with in my teen years, on the wall beside my bed. I added Jeepers Creepers with Photoshop because it seemed like an illustration of it's logical origins.

Ultimately, I am saying in my own clumsy and clunky way, that if you starve a child, as they develop, from any of the vital human necessities -- like love, security and a sense of self-worth, then you are committing, in my eyes, the worse kind of child abuse there is.

The first film I did where I openly addressed a lot of my issues with my stepdad was the thriller RITES OF PASSAGE, where Jason Behr played a sort of movie version of myself, DEAN STOCKWELL played my stepdad, and ROBERT KEITH played the favored son.

Dean Stockwell refused to do several things in the script, because he said a father would never do those things to his young son. I think what he was really saying, is that it made him uncomfortable to portray a man so unsympathetic.

A different actor, Dean was far from my first choice for the role, would have found a way to fill out this incredibly tragic and abusive character.

In the final moments of RITES OF PASSAGE, young Cambell truly has a rite of passage -- having to defend his own abusive father from a man who plans to kill them all.

Rites was a thriller in the Hitchcock style I love so much, but it also touched on all the issues I had with my own dad, and I remember it was painful to write and to make --but I told myself I was making it not just for me, but for all the boys in the world, gay and straight, who had been abandoned or betrayed by the men they needed to trust the most.

Dean was a lazy actor, who perhaps had spent so much time in front of the camera, (since he was a boy) that filmmaking had lost its allure. It was a paycheck for him, I think. And though he had some good moments in the film -- I think missed the mark.

I think the character of my stepfather in my script, challenged too many of his own ideas - or simply demanded he work too hard, and go to places an actor needs a lot of courage for.

Ironically, I never told Dean that he was refusing to do things that really happened in my life. That my stepdad had actually done. I was afraid to argue with Dean, in the same way I had been afraid to confront my own father.

Young Cambell is arrested at the end of RITES OF PASSAGE. Betrayed by both the men/ fathers in his life. I had a blood father and a stepfather - both alcoholics who I felt abandoned and betrayed me in my real life -- though admittedly in a much less cinematic way than the men in my film.

I guess I still had some shame and fear about asserting myself to any man. I was still a scared boy, trying to tell a tale about what happens to scared boys when their fathers push them away.

A final heartbreaking moment between brothers at the end of RITES OF PASSAGE as Cam (Jason Behr) is about to be driven off to prison.

The kids who grow up battered, whether it be physically, sexually or emotionally -- have a heavy toll taken on the rest of their lives. They often spend it, in a wreckless and destructive search for a family.

A desperate search for connection, validation and the sense that they are loved. Most of us from that generation are lacking these things in various degrees. Because they are things we never got, from parents too damaged themselves, to love even their own children.

A FAMILY OUTSIDE THE HOME

In drama class, I found a family. In movie-making I found a family. It wasn't just storytelling. It wasn't just that for a moment, as you told your story, you were the center of attention, the master of the tale -- it was oxygen to a suffocating child.

It was validation for my battered pysche, and it made me something valuable, desirable and precious to others.

And back in the days of Alhambra High School, I got to do it with my best buddies. Charlie and Mike. Who were my family away from my family. I would spend hours and even days at Charlie and Mike's -- dreading when I would have to return home.

At Charlie and Mike's, I found generosity, acceptance, laughter, plenty of food, and even encouragement to go and do whatever we boys (Charlie, Mike and me) got excited about.

As a testament to this, the Codays even bought us a state-of-the-art Super 8 camera that allowed us to do slow-motion, fade-ins and fade-outs and had filters for indoor lighting and outdoor lighting.

Like other young men find a family and a brotherhood in their football, baseball or basketball teams at school, I think I found my family in drama class or what was then called performing arts.

Me as John Procter in Arthur Miller's THE CRUCIBLE. It would be years before I realized just how beautifully written and constructed the play actually was. Back then I'm afraid it was mostly lost on me. And my actor's subtext was simply a driving need to sound like Charlton Heston -- someone I adored and worshiped back then. Hey I was a Catholic boy and he did part the Red Sea!

LESSONS IN POLITICS AND POPULARITY

As my courage and popularity grew, I got into politics and was elected Student Body President in my senior year. It was there that I learned a hard lesson about running for office and politics in general -- namely, that the guy with the best campaign wins. Not the best guy - the best campaign.

Simply by giving my campaign speech to the student body with an excess of jokes about cafeteria food, and large posters done by my own hand with my passion for cartooning, including Harryhausen creatures and comic book heroes like Spiderman saying "Spidey says Vote for Victor" -- I won by a considerable margin.

The popular candidate had taken office, without a real idea about bettering the school, student rights, or school policy, anywhere in my head.

I was the incredibly funny and popular boy who wrote, starred and directed his own movies, and even skits for the football rallies, with his girlfriend Gail Rouse.

The skits which came at a time when attendance in the rallies was waning -- reversed that trend to standing room only. Again I was being validated and valued -- and I swelled with confidence and accomplishment.

Me and Gail Rouse, my then girlfriend (and still one of my best friends ever) doing one of our rally sketches.

I'm not sure what was more fun -- performing the sketches, often doing the best Paul Lynde impersonation I had -- or Gail and I laughing ourselves silly writing the sketches often just a day or two before. I realize now, it is the only time in my life where I ever wrote comedy -- and I'm not sure I ever had a better time writing. Gail I think was a very big part of that.

I never felt bad about winning the election for Student Body President until much later in my life. Back then, I enjoyed my victory, my position of power and proof of my popularity. Even though I realized that the girl I had defeated, was not only better for the job, but would have actually done something positive for the school.

It was insane what happened. And unjust. Politics truly was simply a popularity contest.

Me and Charlie clowning at one of the student council meetings. The man looking unamused is our principal Frank Walsh. I think he saw me as an annoying, insanely popular glory hound. And there is too much truth to that my loyal readers!

I don't think politics has changed much. The biggest dipshits are often elected simply by having more money and more ads, and being able to throw bigger scares into people -- than the guy who is less worried about power and who really cares about you and your country.

Though for the first time in almost a decade, we finally have a president, I can be proud to say I voted for.

THE BIG DARK

This tale of my high school years wouldn't be complete if I didn't address what back then was my terrible secret. Something that weighed so heavy on me, the mere thought of it back then, made my heart skip a beat.

While Charlie and Mike were lusting after girls, I knew, down in the deepest part of me, it was certain guys, not certain girls that gave me the feelings most young males enjoy with a semi-clear conscience.

What if you were the most normal boy in the world? Good looking, student body president, editor of the school paper, voted most likely to succeed. You had a lot of good healthy lust in your loins, just like your best buddies, but it wasn't for some hot cheerleader - it was for the team's quarterback.

You didn't wire yourself this way. You didn't wake up one morning and say, "I think I'll try this whole gay thing out." It was decided for you, and years before you would ever be concious of it.

You still liked monster movies and Clint Eastwood, hot cars and tough guys like Charlton Heston and movies where lots of things blow up -- but you fantasized about boys instead off girls late at night, with your hands below the covers?

You weren't a girl, and you didn't want to be one. You didn't secretly dress up in women's clothes, or talk like one. You weren't interested in fashion or clothes -- and had no innate sense or obsession with style or color.

You were just a guy, who was like all the other guys, except from the time you were six or seven, your natural gravitation and sexual attraction was toward other guys.

At fourteen or fifteen, when I had to come to terms with this in 1974 - it was like finding out you had cancer. And you needed to find a cure.

My very somber looking high school graduation portrait. JEEPERS CREEPERS fans will recognize this picture from an album cover in Jezelle's house, the first time she plays the song for Trish and Darry on her record player.

But there wasn't a cure for what my heart desired. There was just a lot of shame. And hiding. And tears. And stolen glances in the locker room.

And my Bible telling me I was an abomination -- though now I realize it was calling people who eat shellfish the same thing, and in the same chapter encouraging parents to sell their children into slavery or put them to death for being disobedient.

One of the many religious depictions of homosexuality I was exposed to during my young Catholic years. I find this painting about the demonic perils of gay love to be almost hilarious -- since the painter has made it so very homoerotic, it's as if his own sensibilities betray themselves while he tries to condemn the subject.

And oh yes -- if you look close in the background -- is that THE CREEPER back there?

Like the painting above, back in the 70s, as I struggled with coming out, it felt like some kind of black death. Like a cruel trick of nature. To give me so much, so many talents and so many highs and joys, and accolades, so much to be happy about -- only to be cursed with something, that if it became known -- would take everything away.

That's how it feels when you're young and you realize you are different. It feels like it threatens to take everything from you. It wasn't much of an exaggeration in the small little, teen-aged existence I had fashioned for myself in Martinez California.

I knew if it was found out, it would make my life with my family an even bigger nightmare than it already was. And it did. When magazines with boys instead of girls were found under my bed at age eighteen, I was told to either give up my evil desires or move out.

I was far too angry at my stepfather by then, to give him the satisfaction of doing anything but calling his bluff -- and getting my ass out of that house and out on my own.

Me at twenty or twenty-one, when I moved in with a man over twice my age. I wasn't coerced, and I wasn't seduced. I think I simply wanted to live with a man who adored me -- and I truly found one. But that story, and that adventure is for another blog all together.

Though leaving home had one small problem -- I had no place to go. A friend I had made at the local community college, took pity on me, and I moved into the spare room in his apartment.

These were not good years, my late teens and early twenties.

I was putting on weight, my coping mechanism for all my secrets and stresses at home. I had started to eat too much and exercise less around seventeen when I got my job at the corner deli and liquor store as a stockboy.

I was later promoted to sandwich and deli boy -- and boy did I have a wealth of coping mechanisms behind that huge delicatessen.

Me at the deli before I started packing on the pounds. This is from '76, -- all the Alhambra students who worked at the store posed for their annual yearbook ad.

At high school, teachers and friends saw me how I wanted to be seen: talented, happy and above all special. And when I look back at the pictures of me during that time, I find it hard to see any pain or shame, or secrets hidden behind my eyes or my smiles.

At an awards ceremony for seniors in my graduating year, when a good friend was announced an award recipient - I wore a blue bandana around my neck, most of my senior year -- I thought it was way cool!

But I remember they were there plenty of secrets. And plenty of pain. I was living a double life.

I don't recall when Charlie or Michael found out that their best friend was gay. I know it wasn't during high school, maybe a year or two later. But I also knew they weren't the kind of friends who would turn their back on me. And they didn't.

There would be plenty of those who did. And then plenty more when I made my circumstances even more severe and repelling. But even that seems so long ago now. Decades really.

At twenty I was out of the house, had moved away from the man I had impulsively moved in with, and was again living with buddies. Still dreaming of breaking into the movie business.

After we all graduated high school, Charlie and Michael had found other friends, and I had too. My interest remained in movies and movie making and theirs seemed to go elsewhere.

Roddy McDowall, one of my favorite actors when I was a boy, said that the movie business isn't something you get into because you want to. It's something you get into because you have to. And that's exactly how it was for me. And still is.

Me directing my first (and only) film in 16 mm. It was expensive and when the young male lead turned up one shooting day with his hair dyed red and cut short to his head -- without a thought for the film's continuity -- it became another of my unfinished films in a long line of unfinished films.

I went on without Charlie and Mike to make films at Diablo Valley College, and eventually one that found its way to Francis Ford Coppola.

Me at twenty six or twenty-seven on local TV Station KGO in San Francisco. We are watching a clip from my backyard video SOMETHING IN THE BASEMENT. It had won first place at the Sony/AFI Festival, and by the time I was invited onto this show, I had already met Francis Coppola and was already rehearsing Sam Rockwell and the rest of the cast, for the upcoming CLOWNHOUSE.

When Francis came into my life, that is I guess, where the next chapter begins. With that incredible break where preparation met oppourtunity.

But that's a story for another blog. About another time.

I visited Martinez a few years ago, and sat down with Charlie, now a father, and Michael, all of us in our forties. Men who now lived very different lives from the one we all seemed to live together back in the 1970s at Alhambra High School.

But we found plenty to talk about. The disappointments, the stupid things we did, the miracle of us surviving those years with no severe injuries -when our antics were often so wreckless and dangerous.

We talked about my life in Los Angeles (I had made six feature films by then, including the JEEPERS films) and everything always led back to a story about Cova and our moviemaking days.

"Remember when Michael jumped off the roof as our stunt Dracula, because no one else would do it?" Stuff like that. And for a moment, it was like it all happened only yesterday.

I cringe when I think of how I must have sounded at some points. There is a part of me that is still so unsure, so insecure, that all I do is lead with my credits and accomplishments.

And I fear, I may have done that with my oldest friends, Charlie and Mike, during some of our conversation. It's my fall back position when I feel scared or uncomfortable. Or guilty.

And I did feel guilty somehow. That I had left Martinez behind. Escaped it would be more appropriate for me. Guilty that I had won the favor of Francis Copolla, disgraced myself nationally, and survived even that, to move to Los Angeles and make feature films.

Whatever this conversation was in part, sadly, I now realize, that it was the last time I saw Michael. Or spoke to him.

Charlie and Mike, were two brothers who weren't just the start of my dream. They were something much more crucial to my survival. They were friendship. And at a time when I needed it most, friends and a safe place to be, because my home wasn't.

They were my first brotherhood really. Much more than the frail and strained relationship I had with my own brother, who I shared a bedroom with, from the time we were toddlers to the time I left home at 18.

There is a line in STAND BY ME that says, we never have again, the kind of the friends we had back when we were kids -- and while I question the validity of that statement, I do feel when I look back on Charlie and Mike -- just how much they were my world.

Mike and me clowning at the Administration Building downtown where his dad worked. We wanted to shoot a couple of scenes there for our thriller TAKE ME A PICTURE. Out beyond us is the Martinez Harbor and Benicia Bay.

Mike, except for those five or so years, decades ago, I barely knew you, but the news of your death makes me long for the days when we ran around, laughing our asses off, learning new tricks to do with the camera, and just becoming who we were becoming.

We had the kind of enthusiasm kids have when they discover something they love and run at it with everything they've got. Ignoring the naysayers and in my case, the parents who thought it was a terrible -even disgraceful- waste of time.

But you can't tell kids that when they are in love with something -- and you, me and Charlie were in love with the movies.

And nobody was going to stand in our way -- or our dream of someday making that movie that would grab the world by the tail, and let us stand next to Spielberg and Harryhausen and the other mythic weavers of boyhood dreams.

So long, Mike. Remember you are loved.

Victor

SOMEWHERE IN POHO COUNTY IS ROSEWOOD LANE

2010-01-28T13:39:00.000-08:00

Somewhere in Poho County is the small town of Stillwater, just across the bay from the big city. In the big city, radio talk show therapist Sonny Blake has the 8 pm to Midnight slot.

The thought of finally getting to put one of my earliest (and most favorite) scripts on the screen has me feeling a little giddy these days. ROSEWOOD LANE inches ever closer to preproduction and it happily will be the first horror film from yours truly in eight years!
I am in conversations with my favorite Creeper Jonathan Breck to do a cameo (though you might not notice him without his wings and fangs) and the cast already includes two of my favorite actors, Gina Philips and Ray Wise.

And the search is on for an actor to play the very scary paperboy in the script, around which the story revolves. I would prefer an unknown, or at least someone we haven't seen a lot before, so we have no preconceived notions about the actor.
And it's easier to believe that he is Derek Barber, a typical, boy-next-door kind of kid, with a very deadly secret.

It will be the hardest part of casting, since the boy seems charming, awkward and harmless on the outside, but is quite dark and damaged on the inside. Great fun for young actor who can walk that wonderfully thin line.

The character of paperboy Derek Barber suffers from an eye discoloration called anaridia -- it's where the pupil doesn't fully develop, so it stays as dark as the iris. The result is eyes that are dark as pitch.

Finding the right guy to play this kid, is kind of like trying to find the right shark for JAWS, or the right guy to fly around and eat people. It has to be a careful and original choice.

I had a similar challenge back in 1994 looking for the very special boy to play POWDER. And from previous blogs you know that search was quite extensive and included some of the hottest young talent working back in the mid nineties.

Here the challenge becomes the same: looking for someone very special with the versatility to appear harmless and sweet on the outside -- and terrifying when no one is watching. He also has to look young enough not to have a car yet. (In the script he is sixteen or seventeen).

This time we are casting not for POWDER, a boy of love, light and hope, but for another kind of boy. A very different kind of boy. A line from the script describes him perfectly:

"He's a trick of the light. Something dark that doesn’t always look like one. Until you look into those eyes. Those reptile eyes, that look like two big holes where the person outta be."

A very quick and small presentation teaser was put together for it, and you will find it below. If you're going to watch it, I would recommend you download it and play it for best picture and sound:

http://depositfiles.com/files/n18fmlg8m

It is also posted on YouTube as well, but quality and sound are always questionable:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YzDCyGy_0w

Be well everyone, and for God's sake stay off Rosewood Lane or at least avoid the paperboy at all costs.

Victor

SON OF FRANKENSTEEN

2010-01-17T12:02:00.001-08:00

Thanks for all the kind remarks and hellos after being away from the blog-o-sphere for so long, it was good to hear from all of you.

Things are finally heating up in the world of film projects, as I mentioned in my last blog, as many scripts that were once simmering on back burners, are suddenly coming to a full boil again, including: THE WHITE, ALCATRAZ, THE WATCH and of course the big screen adaptation of my partner Del Howison's anthology series DARK DELICACIES: THE MOVIE.

Even JEEPERS THREEPERS is again having the heat turned up on it, with the added caveat of perhaps doing the third installment of the Creeper trilogy in 3D.

3D is all the rage again, and you are all turning out in droves to see it. So, expect more 3D titles in the near future and maybe even your favorite feaster of 23 years to maybe come out of the screen at you, as well. More as details continue to develop.

But, the first show out of the gate this year, as I mentioned in my last entry, is a script I have long awaited to put up on the big screen: ROSEWOOD LANE.

We are now in what is called preproduction on Rosewood. For those who don't know specifically, this is a vital stage of moviemaking that prepares everyone for the actual shooting of the film.

"Prep" as it's called, includes all manner of getting your movie ducks in a row: location scouting (and deciding where to shoot to begin with) casting, costuming, storyboarding, set building, putting together camera and make-up crews, even rehearsals if there is time allowed -- and I always try and make time).

Basically prep is getting your little army together to go out and shoot this thing.

THE JEEPERS TEAM

The team coming together for ROSEWOOD LANE are many of the same terrific people that brought you both JEEPERS films.

My suburban thriller that stars Gina Philips, who I am so happy to be reunited with after our wonderful collaboration on JEEPERS CREEPERS, also includes from the Jeepers team: Production Designer Steven Legler, my editor Ed Marx, my make-up effects wizards at Make-up and Monsters, my wonderful stunt coordinator from Jeepers II, my multi-gifted partner and cinematographer Don Fauntleroy, and my brilliant composer Bennett Salvay.

There isn't a team of people I'd feel better about going into battle with on any film, than these terrific people.

As the train starts to leave the station for ROSEWOOD LANE, I have had the best time reading one of my Christmas gifts this year, the big coffee table book called UNIVERSAL STUDIOS MONSTERS.

It's a great ride back to the start of Universal studios and how the horror genre became their bread and butter back in the great days of Hollywood.

The pictures alone are worth the price of the book, if you are in fact as big a fan of the old Universal black and whites as I am. For me, these were the films that started me off on my love affair with the horror genre, so it is especially terrific to read about them all again, this time as an adult (some would argue) here in this terrific book.

It really made me break out all my DVDs of the Universal Horror Hey Days! Over the holiday break I took out all the houses of Dracula, and all the ghosts and sons and returns of Frankenstein and had a week long festival of black and white horror fun.

My favorite Frankenstein film, and it always was, was SON OF FRANKENSTEIN, where Basil Rathbone played Victor von Frankenstein's son, Frederick. Freddie returns to the village of Frankenstein with his wife and his own young son Peter, to a cold family castle and the unwelcoming villagers who still remember the horrible monster that stalked the countryside.

To me, the film is a standout for many reasons: the fantastic and massive sets that look like no other Universal horror film (with the possible exception of the Wolfman's great sets for the Talbot estate) the creepy story of the Frankenstein monster moving about the massive estate at night through secret passageways -- and befriending small Peter Von Frankenstein, "A giant came into my room last night, daddy…"

(The young actor who played the young Frankenstein boy, Peter, was Donny Dunagan, who was the uncredited voice of BAMBI in Disney's animated masterpiece.)

Another distinguishing factor in the film, was a performance by Bela Lugosi as Ygor, a man hanged for grave robbing but after surviving his execution, haunts old castle Frankenstein with a broken neck and a gravely voice.

Lugosi really showed he had range in this film, and the part is ever so juicy. Ygor has befriended the Frankenstein monster (still alive of course) and has been using him to kill off the jurors who sentenced him to death.

Add to Bela, just a great supporting cast. Including Lionel Atwill as the village chief of police, with an artificial arm --the monster ripped it off him when he was just a boy.

(If you are a Young Frankenstein fan, this is the character spoofed so ingeniously by Kenneth Mars in Mel Brooks' send up of the Frankenstein films)

Film fans correct me if I am wrong, but that feels like the first time in movie history, during a hilarious game of darts with Gene Wilder, where an offscreen cat screech was used for comic effect. ( If you know what I'm talking about -- you are truly a YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN fan and are laughing right now.)

My affections for this entry in the Frankenstein franchise, The Son of Frankenstein, is also helped by the fact that one of my boyhood idols was Basil Rathbone (I was a Sherlock Holmes freak when I was kid)

Mr. Rathbone -- is that about the greatest name an actor could have or what: Basil Rathbone -- Basil played the son of Colin Clive's Victor Von Frankenstein from the original film and is suddenly obsessed with his father's work, when he discovers that the creature still lives and may be immortal.

As my Christmas present book points out, Basil does an atypical over the top, one might even say hammy job of portraying Dr. Frankenstein Jr. The book suggests it might be because Rathbone was quite derisive when it came to horror films and didn't want to appear in this one.

That gives the film an even more interesting dimension -- Rathbone does seem to be throwing a tantrum through most of the film -- like a petulant child unhappy with having to be where he is.

Whatever the reason for him hitting all the dramatic notes in Son of Frankenstein so hard -- I never seemed to notice or care as a boy. It was always my favorite of the Frankenstein films.

(Rathbone, Karloff as the monster, and young Donny Dunagan between takes of Son of Frankenstein)

The book has terrific bios of the horror greats of the time, including Bela Lugosi, who was somewhat of a victim of his own success, he played Dracula so well.

Dracula was a part he had played on stage and actively campaigned to play in the film version, but then, after the film's great success, found it hard to be considered for anything other than horror roles.

As the biggest horror star in the world -- with the smashing success of Dracula -- Lugosi then turned down the part of Frankenstein when Universal offered it to him.

When their main horror attraction said no to all that make-up, and to a part with almost no dialog at all, they were forced to look elsewhere -- and came upon a lowly bit part player named Boris Karloff and the rest was history.

The book points out that after that, Lugosi never turned down a role. Feeling like he had truly missed out on being the sensation that was Frankenstein, and being in a film that propelled Karloff to equal horror-superstar status at the same studio.

The book is full of interesting tidbits like that one, and I have to tip my hat to the wonderful job Michael Mallory did in putting it all together so handsomely.

The chapter on Lugosi goes on to reveal that Bela was a classically trained actor, and in the prestigious Hungarian National Theater had played everything from Romeo to Jesus Christ.

(From Jesus Christ to Dracula -- now that's one hell of a character arc)

There are also tidbits of stuff that I did not know and was thrilled to find out, for instance did you know that the most popular Universal movie monster of the 40's wasn't Dracula or Frankenstein -- but the Wolfman. Which is why Lon Chaney Jr.'s Larry Talbot is often at the center of so many sequels from that era, and the monster and the vampire, supporting characters?

As a kid, the Wolfman wasn't my favorite, but as I wrote into my screenplay for CLOWNHOUSE -- he was always the monster who scared me the most.

Some of the pictures in the book are easily worth the price of it, if you are as into this era of horror filmmaking as I am:

(I love this shot of Bela as Dracula, smoking a cigar between takes (I also read in the book that Bela was rarely without one) with Glenn Strange as the monster, and the director of dialog Norman Abbott (relative of Bud) on the set of my all time favorite Universal horror film: ABBOTT and COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN)

Or this splendid picture on the set of SON OF FRANKENSTEIN, where they celebrated Karloff's 51st birthday -- and as it turned out, was the same day Karloff's only child, daughter Sara was born:

Or this amazing shot of Elsa Lancaster doing a make-up touch up between takes as THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN:

If you, like me, thrill to stills and photos from films like these, do I what I do, go to a website called "Dr. Macro's High Quality Movie Scans", this terrific site has all kinds of beautiful stills from horror of that era (and films of all kinds) for desktops or whatever.

Just google Dr. Macro and you'll get taken there. Here is one of the stunning stills that site had from Son of Frank:

ONTO THE BLACK LAGOON...

All this praise and I haven't even gotten to the chapter about my favorite Universal film Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, or the chapter about my favorite Universal guy of all time: THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON, but I'm looking forward to it.

Again, as prep heats up on ROSEWOOD LANE, I will try and keep all interested parties in the loop, but things tend to get a little chaotic, exhausting and 24/7 as a picture goes into active preproduction.

But it is a chaos I welcome gladly.

Best to you all,

Victor

AND COMES THE END TO BEGIN AGAIN

2009-12-28T08:11:00.000-08:00

Hard to believe it was a year ago that I started this blog.

Though I have managed to make an entry here and there, when my schedule permitted, I feel that lately I have been particularly absent. Three months absent from the looks of the date of my last entry.

Even now, I am trying to get a new entry published during this 'calm before the storm' when preproduction on my new film starts up in earnest in the next couple of weeks.

I would LOVE to report that the film is Jeepers Creepers III: Cathedral, and that it is at last in actual preproduction but I cannot.

While it is still a possibility in the coming new year, I am tired of reporting to you just how close we came to getting this thing up and running, and then having plans fall through again and again.

I used to think it was the financial crisis the movie industry is in (along with the rest of the businesses in this country and around the world) but I have come to believe now that the reason the third Jeepers film is now almost half a decade delinquent, is because of greed and incompetence.

Exactly the same kind of thinking and "gimme, gimme, gimme" mentality, the same mentality that says "screw everyone else, I got mine!" that has the world in financial turmoil right now, continues to keep the last and final Jeepers flick from yet reaching the screen.

It's not because of the Jeepers family, who have been ready now for three years with a great script that everyone likes and the promised participation of Ray Wise, Gina Philips, Justin Long, Patricia Belcher, Brandon Smith, and of course the Creeper himself, Jonathan Breck - all waiting in the wings to make Jeepers Threepers.

(Sent to me by a friend, some catalog where the Jeepers poster is part of the tonal decor. Don't recall if they're selling the poster or the furniture in the catalog this was a part of)

And when I say the Jeepers family has been ready now for three years, I also mean my incredible team of artists, whose magic has been responsible for so much of what is good about the previous Creeper tales. This team of friends and collaborators includes composer Bennett Salvay, editor Ed Marx, director of photography Don Fauntleroy, production designer Steven Legler and make-up FX wizard Brian Penikas, just to name a few.

After the terrible roller coaster ride of the last few years for JC3, the news I have for Creeper fans for 2010 is this: There is now a very strong chance that Jeepers Threepers will get before the cameras this year -- and with a very strong chance of it being in 3D.

(The most recent script cover for the third Jeepers film - someone sent this amazing piece of Creeper art to me, that I liked so much I used it for the in-house script cover. I wish I knew more about this artist and this work because he should be doing poster art, whoever he is. Anyone know the artist here or how to contact he or she?)

In Other Worlds

With New Years day just a week away, I wanted to look back on 2009 and acknowledge the good with the bad.

Though the year was one of the worst financially in the short history of my adventure down here in Los Angeles, there were some good things that happened along with the struggle and turmoil that I am sure we all had to endure this year.

The good things that come to mind

2009 was the year I became a published author, first in The HORROR BOOK of LISTS, and then with my short story THE WANDERING UNHOLY published in the third edition of the Dark Delicacies books, this one subtitled "Haunted".

(Both these fine books for horror fans like myself can be purchased at good old DARK DELICACIES Bookstore in Burbank - signed by some of the biggest names in horror. If you don't live in Southern California, you can order from their website: www.darkdel.com)

The not so good things that come to mind

I am not sure of the exact chronology, I think it was also the year I sold my first script to television: A NIGHTMARE IN LACE. My teleplay, originally written as an episode of my proposed DARK DELICACIES TV series, was sold to NBC as an episode of the weak and mishandled FEAR ITSELF anthology series.

It resulted in the weakest and most inept screen version of anything I have ever written, and I am forced to look at it from two perspectives: One, this is what happens where there are too many cooks in the soup. And in the case of FEAR ITSELF, the problem is magnified when the cooks know so little about storytelling and even less about what makes horror really work.

The other perspective is financial. And from that aspect, all I can say is thanks. Thanks for the paycheck.

It makes me want to do the DARK DELICACIES TV series even more. I am convinced that horror fans have settled for mediocre and downright awful stuff, long enough. Time to give them something that reminds them of what we loved about horror and suspense and why we used to be so excited about it.

2009 was also the year I got to make contact with so many of you, through this blog. Thank you for taking the time to contact me, write me, ask questions, and just connect. It has been terrific getting to know some of you.

John Carpenter said that his fans are very scary people. He said that when he meets his fans it's like, "be afraid, be very afraid".

The public can be a very cruel and very scary place. There are a lot of people who forget that human beings are on the other end of their emails, critiques and remarks.

It is easy to go toxic and corrosive when banging away on those keys. And slamming a movie, an actor, a filmmaker, a singer or whatever, might feel good at the moment -- as long as you stay unconscious to the fact, that anything you are commenting on -- has a flesh and blood human being behind it, just like you.

A human being who created what you are commenting on, and is just as human, just as flawed and probably just as insecure as you might be.

The difference is, they have put their ideas out into the world. That is always a brave thing to do for anyone -- and why I think artists of all kinds, are some of the bravest people in the world.

I have to remember this often, when I'm having a bad day and really want to vent. Some of the comments you read on IMBD and other sources - are so toxic, corrosive and damning, you have to wonder what the authors of these comments are doing with their own lives, to make them so miserable and hateful.

In my own experience with this kind of toxic exposure to some people, their anger and disgust almost always traces right back to their ignorance on the subject (or the person) or how they are really feeling about themselves.

I have to say, as opposed to John Carpenter and his fans, I have had the opposite experience getting in touch with so many people who are either Jeepers fans or just appreciative of my work in general. I know I have a different body of work than John Carpenter, and that might skew my fanbase (I cringe a little, for my presuming I have a fanbase, but I do, as evidence continues to indicate) and I am thankful for all the communications from all of you.

Nobody gets into this business to stay anonymous, a famous saying goes. And anybody who says they aren't in this biz to draw attention to themselves and their talent, is bullshitting you or at least themselves.

My point is, that no matter who people are in this biz, or how big or how small, contact and resonance from fans and aficionados, is important. I am a big fan myself, of movies and music and art, and so much -- so I see it from both sides of the equation.

Letters, emails, you name it, they may not seem important in the grand scheme of things, to the people we hold in high esteem, but you might be surprised how encouraging, uplifting and remarkable many of us find, getting a note from someone who simply took the time to say: I like what you do. Thanks.

So, to all the great people I've had the chance to email and talk to this year, through this blog, a big thank you. It means more than you might think.

The email address to contact me is supplied somewhere on this blog site, I think in my profile. And thanks to everyone who is so patient, as my responses some times take a while, depending on what's going on with the rest of my life.

BY THE PRICKING OF MY THUMBS ... SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES

I know I said that early in January I will be starting preproduction on my latest film. But what film will I be starting early in the new year, if sadly, it cannot be JC3?

I'm happy to say that most of the Jeepers family mentioned above will be joining me right out of the gate this year for a thriller-chiller I will be writing and directing starring Gina Philips, Lesley-Anne Down and Ray Wise, called ROSEWOOD LANE.

Easily my favorite of all the suburban thrillers (I really like to call them "shockers") I have scripted, I have wanted to make Rosewood Lane since I wrote the very first draft, long before JEEPERS CREEPERS.

The story concerns radio talk show therapist Sonny Blake, (Philips) who moves back to her childhood home when her alcoholic father dies. But upon arrival, she discovers the neighborhood is terrified of the local paperboy.

Sonny thinks this is ridiculous, until she encounters the boy himself, and learns the hard way, that he is a cunning and dangerous sociopath, who may have killed her father and even others. When he starts to exhibit abnormal abilities, Sonny starts to doubt her own sanity and the boy begins waging a war of terror on her.

Ray Wise plays a Detective who goes toe to toe with Gina Philips - doubting her story about the boy -- until he realizes, and possibly too late, that she might be right, and there may be a cunning and diabolically clever serial killer stalking her -- a serial killer who has yet to get his driver's license.

ROSEWOOD LANE is a jump-out-of-your-seat thriller in the tradition of my favorite terror in suburbia film: John Carpenter's HALLOWEEN. And as I said, the entire Jeepers Creepers family is coming on board for this: Director of Photography Don Fauntleroy, editor Ed Marx, production designer Steven Legler, make-up effects wizard Brian Penikas and composer Bennett Salvay. The film will be produced by me and Don Fauntleroy.

I have to say it is the most excited I've been about telling a story in years. And if the industry's tailspin has had some negative repercussions, it's had some positive ones as well, because making smaller budget films is suddenly all the rage again.

And scripts that studios loved but said were too small for them to make, are suddenly the only thing they feel secure in making. This in many ways has given new life to projects I thought I had outgrown, or that my agency said were too small for me to make, now that I was the Jeepers guy.

(Always excited to have RAY WISE joins the cast of any film I make. I am certain it is no secret by now, that Ray is probably one of my favorite actors of all time. I look constantly for places to put Ray in any script I write. He's one of those rare film actors, that any time he is on screen, you can't take your eyes off him.)

This movie is a milestone for many reasons, but maybe the most exciting is that it is the first movie I am producing as well as writing and directing. And I am producing it with my good friend, director and great cinematographer, Don Fauntleroy.

This means more creative control and ownership of the finished film. Something I have never gotten on any of my seven previous feature films, including the JEEPERS films, POWDER and others. So it is a new chapter in my career, as well as returning to my favorite movie turf: the suspense thriller with supernatural overtones.

With the coming of 2010, there also comes new life for several of my scripts, including ALCATRAZ: The Wind at the Door.

(One of the best scripts I've written in years. Commissioned by my Jeepers Creepers guys from the old MGM/United Artists, who now run Overture Pictures -- it would be the return of the super-scary, big screen ghost story -- and we haven't had a great, scream-right-out-loud, big screen ghost story in too long.)

2010 also takes the big screen version of DARK DELICACIES The Movie, a step closer to production. More on why that is true in another blog when I have more concrete details.

But this is the brainchild -- call it love child even --of me and my partner Del Howison, who have every intention of not only getting this horror anthology to the big screen but ultimately creating a TV series also based on the award-winning horror anthologies and Del's world-renown horror store in Burbank California of the same name.

(Del Howison and I are ready to take DARK DELICACIES to the big and small screen this year, and indications that this might be happening are more promising than ever)

And speaking of horror and screenplay writing, I just did a rewrite on quite an interesting horror script that my longtime DP and now director, Don Fauntleroy will direct. The script currently titled : HAUNTED is one of the creepiest horror stories I've had a hand in shaping in a long, long time. Again, as I worked on the script, I couldn't help fiddle around with some images to create a script cover for my efforts:

(HAUNTED is an original screenplay by Charles Agron and Stephen David Brooks, with current revisions by yours truly)

I have spent most of 2009 writing and rewriting scripts - basically what a writer/director does between filmmaking gigs. And the time between my gigs got perilously long when the bottom fell out of the financial structure of the world and the movie biz.

I have been a busy beaver these last couple of years, and the script covers I've fiddled with on Photoshop for each one, moves me closer and closer to another element of filmmaking that I love: the marketing and poster art for the stories I create.

I know I've shared a few script covers with you in the past, but I am getting quite an art gallery of them, since Final Draft included the wonderful function of being able to send finished screenplays in PDF format. Here are a few more, that have kept my keyboard working, during my dry spell of actually directing:

(JOSH GOSHH 2520 AD got a real writer's work over this last year. Not only did I do another pass on the feature length screenplay of this coming-of-age action adventure story set on Earth in the future, but I also re-worked the script into a two-hour pilot for a proposed series. This script idea I have always thought lends itself to a episodic television)

One of my earliest attempts at a presentation piece to pitch this film is on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZnuuN5D0eo

(BIO-SEED which I think I mentioned in an earlier blog, is my techno-thriller based on the terrifying truths about the genetically altered foods that have been forced on us as a nation and a world. Like most first drafts the script is currently way too long (132 pages at last count) and needs to be boiled down to the best bits)

(ENTITY (not to be confused with the film The Entity which starred Barbara Hershey or it's upcoming remake) is the script I wrote right after POWDER. It has had many brushes with "almost being produced", and when I did a new pass on it, this year, it also got a face lift with this new script cover. There is a presentation piece I did for this particular script, posted on YouTube if you have a couple of minutes)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7_ST-k7fSE

(THE WHITE, my polar bear, Jaws-in-the-snow thriller, now has producer Lizzie Friedman attached to it, and we are about to begin the process of getting the picture funded. It will be a wild amalgam of digital and make-up effects polar bears, and some of the scariest set pieces I've ever had the pleasure of dreaming up!)

(MENAGERIE, orginaly written in 1996 as a follow up to ENTITY and POWDER, is my sci-fi epic that concerns a group of archeologists who send a sonar dart into the earth looking for fossils -- and instead find an alien city three miles wide and three miles deep. The rock around the find is from the Jurassic period, suggesting an origin for mankind that turns the world upside down)

Again there is a visual presentation pitch for this story posted on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dd5ZnzChny4

The rest of my screenplay and Photoshop work done this past year, concern the new script ideas that have just started to create a page count, in their very, very early stages. Some times a script gestates for years (like POWDER which took me five years and many drafts to decide how to tell the story) and others come very quickly - in a few months time:

(BLUE PEOPLE is my UFO Thriller that has been half a screenplay for almost five years now. )

I always wanted to do a thriller with aliens (especially after my own strange experience on Interstate 5, between Northern and Southern California --see one of my previous blogs about that).

BLUE PEOPLE is about a group of kids on the long drive home from a rock concert, who pull over for a friend's upchucking -- and end up seeing something that gives them a nightmare night they will never forget. BLUE PEOPLE has elements of my favorite UFO thrillers: FIRE IN THE SKY (maybe the best of its genre) and of course INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (all versions) and even a little bit of INVADERS from MARS, along with my favorite TV series on the subject THE INVADERS.

(THE HAND IN THE SKY is my latest endeavor, and while still in the infancy stage in my mind's eye, I am excited about this one because it has the feel and the mystery of POWDER, while still being able to hold it's own as a strong, character driven thriller. More on this one as it develops)

Well, just looking at all these posters - and remembering there is a script behind each one, makes me think you really can't accuse me of not working this last year. 2009 has probably been my most prolific years as a screenwriter. Now I am hoping the coming year is my most prolific year as a filmmaker.

Getting to take as many of these stories in front of the camera, as I can.

Well, I think that's all I have time for right now. Maybe I'll surprise everyone and make this blog a short one.

If I can do blogs about the progress and process of ROSEWOOD LANE, I will, but again, things get pretty 24/7 once the train leaves the station and a film starts to get made, but who knows?

What's ahead? Who knows that either? Will the Creeper fly again - and in 3D (thank you James Cameron -- I think) Will ALCATRAZ get a shot at the big screen? Will Polar Bears go on the rampage and will DARK DELICACIES finally get the big screen treatment it deserves?

Will ROSEWOOD LANE turn out to be what I am hoping it will be? Namely a jump out of your seat thriller in the tradition of Carpenter's Halloween? Because we haven't had a truly great, popcorn-bucket-goes-flying-out-of-your-hands, "oh my God, I can't watch"… what's-in-the-shadows? style shocker in way, way too long.

Only the future will tell ...

I hope the coming year is good for both you and me, and hell, everybody everywhere, cuz we could all use some love and some luck about now.

Onward and upward, and if I don't get the chance to say it to you, or blog it to you, before the day arrives,

Happy New Year ...

Victor

Creepers, Polar Bears and Other Hunger Related Things

2009-09-17T08:31:00.000-07:00

It was great to see all of you at DARK DELICACIES this last Tuesday Night for the DVD release of the short-lived FEAR ITSELF series that ran on NBC last year. I am the not so proud writer of a much f***ed with episode in that series called, IN SICKNESS AND IN HEALTH, from an original teleplay I wrote called A NIGHTMARE IN LACE.

If you are interested in how things are reshaped once they leave the writer's typewriter, I have included a link here to the original teleplay that NBC bought from me to make this episode of FEAR ITSELF.

John Landis was brought in to direct -- and between he, the producers of the series, not to mention Mick Garris and the network, what ended up on TV, I didn't recognize as my chilling little story, about a woman who on her wedding day, realizes she is about to marry a serial killer.

What ended up on the boob tube seemed to be one big misunderstanding about what the engine of the story is about, where the scares are, and what a good twist is. But I'll let you decide, if you end up buying the DVD and watching the series, you can compare my teleplay, and then "everyone's improvements".

http://rapidshare.com/files/281412106/NightmareInLaceFEAR.pdf

If nothing else, I think I can boast having written the most boring and pedestrian of all the episodes in the series. Though in all honesty, I haven't seen them all. The box set includes behind-the-scenes goodies for some of the episodes, (including John Landis directing my episode) and four unaired episodes, that seems to suggest that NBC couldn't wait to get that show off the air.

The Amazing Doug Jones

Hey, another great thing happened Tuesday night at the DVD signing, I finally got to meet actor Doug Jones, who I had been wanting to meet for quite some time. Doug is an actor that any horror and fantasy fan has seen a lot, but may not be aware they have. For instance Doug plays The Silver Surfer in the big screen Fantastic Four sequel, and he also plays Hellboy's amphibian co-worker Abe Sapien.

And in Guillermo De Toro's absolute masterpiece PAN'S LABYRINTH, Doug played Fauno, that unforgettable creature whose eyes were in the palms of his hands.That doesn't even begin to cover the body of work for this very talented actor, who I finally got to press the flesh with this week. Doug stars in one of the FEAR ITSELF episodes, called SKIN and BONES, so he, and a variety of writers, actors and directors who contributed to the series, showed up to sign the box set of this horror anthology.

Doug may be off to New Zealand soon to participate in THE HOBBIT, though he had to be a tad mysterious about the details. I know whatever he does will be incredibly memorable. You can learn more about him and see more of his work at his website: The Doug Jones Experience (www.thedougjonesexperience.com)

If you have never traveled to Burbank California, for one of these signings (they are announced on the Dark Delicacies website www.darkdel.com) it is a great opportunity to meet some of your favorite names in horror and fantasy. I know I have met many of the legends I hold in high esteem, and it's great to see them up close and personal, and lather them with the appropriate fanboy gushings it is often hard to control.

All thanks to the great folks at this unique and one-of-a-kind horror store. And if you're not California adjacent, they have a great mail order service that can get you autographed DVDs, soundtracks, books and the like, all from these signings if you are not able to attend personally.

(Writer Steve Niles (30 Days of Night), actor Doug Jones, and myself, pose for some pics at the DVD signing of FEAR ITSELF, last Tuesday Night)

It was also great to see so many of you the week before at DARK DELICACIES for the signing of the new DD Anthology Release where my first (and possibly last) attempt at prose was published. It's always great to see the Jeepers fans and to hear those questions about Jeepers III, and to know that when it finally goes, a lot of folks are anxiously awaiting the third chapter in the Creeper saga.

More Jeepers news later in the blog.

Hey There, It's a Big White Bear!

Lots of big bites (no pun intended) for my polar bear script THE WHITE. Which is exciting as my "JAWS in the snow" movie promises to be maybe the scariest and the most technically and physically challenging of my career. A challenge I would welcome.

As we decide (myself and my manager Dave Brown) decide the best way to field the interest and then move ahead, there is a possibility my old friend and mega-talent Brad Parker of Jeepers Creepers fame, might join forces with me for a month or so, to start storyboarding, in THE WHITE, where various animatronic and full motion digital polar bears will be needed for some of the setpieces.

Setpiece is a term I use to describe sequences in a film that are the big scenes of the film, in action films or thrillers, they are often the standouts in the script, as they showcase the action, scares and thrills. But also because of their overall importance and impact they have on the story.

Polar bears cannot be trained or even "wrangled" which is the term animal handlers for the movies use when talking about procuring wildlife for a film. I've had to work with crow wranglers (and trainers) for both Jeepers films, and dog and rat wranglers too in my short career.

(The big rat in Jeepers One, that sort of leads the pack of the rats Justin Long startles in the pipe to the church? That rat was named Bear. And he was adorable and affectionate and hung out on my shoulder for most of that day's shooting)

But no such wrangling is possible for polar bears: the world's largest land predator and the planets largest terrestrial carnivore. So the bears in THE WHITE will need to be created.

Brad is still in Hawaii where he's lived for a few years now, doing his Tiki Art. In fact, Brad has a showing of his paintings at a pretty big gallery on the big island of Maui and is making a personal appearance there this week.

So I was thrilled to hear that Brad might be willing to come out of "storyboard retirement" for a few weeks to work with me on some of the most thrilling and chilling setpieces I have ever written: the polar bear attacks in THE WHITE.

Doing storyboards this early in the process, have two purposes. One, a realistic budget for a film like this, can't be made unless we know the shots and the sequences we are talking about that will need digital polar bears and make-up FX polar bears from my FX House geniuses at Brian Penikas' Make-up and Monsters.

The second use of storyboards this early, is that they can be used as presentation art, when we go to financiers. This helps them visualize what we are talking about and helps the bear sequences jump right off the page in a way that a screenplay can't.

(A great piece of presentation art by Brad Parker for the original Jeepers Creepers, this was supposed to be my cameo in the Creeper's House of Pain. In a longer sequence that was later shortened before we built the Creeper's underground lair, Darry (Justin Long) finds a portly gentlemen that has been turned into a human door to a secret chamber beneath the old church)

It is looking like New Zealand or Canada (where the story is actually set) are the most likely candidates for shooting THE WHITE, but research on how to create this unique motion picture has just entered the discussion phase. I will keep you updated as I am incredibly excited about the project (in case you couldn't tell)

What am I doing now?

Well, I am back writing yet another spec script. "Spec" is short for "Speculation" which means you are writing a script without being commissioned to do so, on the speculation that someone will want to buy it. Some of our greatest films have come from spec scripts, because they are usually passion projects from writers who feel strongly enough about their idea that they are going to write it whether someone pays them to or not.

Working on another script right now, is not part of my normal pattern. After many months, like the ones I spent on THE WHITE, I usually have to take on some project that has nothing to do with typing out setpieces and lines of dialog on this computer.

But another idea that has been gestating suddenly wants to come out, and I know better than to try and stop it. This seed of this suspense thriller started when I was made aware of something absolutely diabolical going on in this country and around the world, concerning the world's food supply.

And so, I have again found myself sitting here at my computer, this time shaping a techno-thriller (one Michael Crichton would have been proud of) about a struggling young couple who are expecting a child, when the young husband gets a rare job at one of the biggest multi-national conglomerates in the world.

But his dream job turns to nightmares (as you might guess) when he learns the truth about the future of bio-technology and the dark legacy ahead of us if we don't wake up about what we eat and how it is genetically altered.

Michael Crichton would be especially proud of this one I think, because it is all all based on current scientific fact. The horrors are real and I wonder if people are actually aware of them. More on that as it develops.

When the muse calls, I answer. And it's calling again, so here I go again. Maybe by the time it's finished, I'll have some concrete news about the Creeper being ready to fly again, or maybe the polar bears will be given the greenlight.

And Somewhere in Poho County...

One of the more pleasant surprises last week was in Variety where they posted the top five Labor Day Weekend Openings in movie history. And while Rob Zombie's Halloween is the current reigning champ for that weekend, almost a decade after their Labor Day Premieres, Jeepers One and Two still hold two of the top five slots for Labor Day champs.

And let's remember, nine years ago, movies tickets were a lot cheaper than they are today, so with no adjusted gross here for ticket sales, it is pretty incredible indeed that both Jeepers flicks remain in the top five.

I forgot until I saw this in Variety, that Jeepers II had actually opened bigger than Jeepers I. There is no doubt in the Jeepers Creepers camp that when III hits theaters it should be on our magical weekend, that the Creeper traditionally owns whenever he shows up: Labor Day.

The growing fanbase of the Jeepers films is worldwide, and recently someone put together from all over the globe, the different inroads the Creeper and the world of Poho County continues to make.

It is an hour long program of Jeepers Fan Art, tattoos, motorcycles, and all the many and varied incarnations you can find the Creeper in, in the current pop culture.

It's all put to music, some of it Bennett Salvay's score and some great renditions of the original Jeepers Creepers theme song as well,. It made me laugh many times and has some hilarious (and rather blunt) comments about the likes and dislikes of various Creeper fans and their feelings about Jeepers One versus Jeepers Two.

I have posted it in two parts on Rapidshare. You would need to join these parts with a FileSplitter program to enjoy the complete show on your computer, but it is worth the work for this must-see piece made for and by Creepers fans.

Your own fan art, if you ever posted it anywhere on the web in the last decade, may appear in it. Here are the two parts:

http://rapidshare.com/files/270664274/JeepersArtEverywhere-desktop.m4v.001

http://rapidshare.com/files/270676286/JeepersArtEverywhere-desktop.m4v.002

I think we should announce right now that next Labor Day Weekend, JEEPERS CREEPERS III: Cathedral will hit theaters. But with all the tedium around financing the film (due mainly to so many interests in the franchise having to be satisfied before we can solidify our sixteen million dollar budget) no one wants to make that statement yet.

I think they should make it, and give us all something to shoot for. And give the money guys the idea that, all this haggling and procrastination can't go on forever.

Be good to yourself,

Victor

Back from the world of Dreams

2009-08-18T10:41:00.000-07:00

Well, this place needs a few cobwebs brushed out of it. I feel like I haven't been in here in so long, I need to do some sweeping and vacuuming. First, I'll hang a few pictures that were shared with me these past few months. Some that were just so fantastic I need to share them with like minded horror fans.

Like the one above, that was in a desktop wallpaper collection someone sent me. A skull full of sinister looking black spheres is an especially potent image to me. If you don't know why, take a peek at my true-life experience with a sinister black sphere, just a few years ago on Interstate 5, driving back to Los Angeles from the bay area:

I did dramatize my experience with music for YouTube, (that is after all what I do for a living, dramatize things) but I did not however exaggerate what happened one little bit.

And while some of my friends doubt what I saw or the details of my story, those who know me best, know I am a skeptic when it comes to such things, but that night, as skeptics often do, I received an education that broadened my perspective to put it mildly.

Other pictures I feel I just have to share because they are so terrific:

(I don't know who the artist is here, but his terrific sense of the terrifying, the garish and the dazzling are quite apparent)

Jeepers news? I wish I could say we have the money to enter our official preproduction, but I can't.

If we had gone ahead with our initial plan to make Jeepers III for a budget of five million dollars (probably a made for DVD scale story) we would have already shot the film by now. But I still feel that the third and final Jeepers story should be bigger and more conclusive than the previous two films.

I am holding out for keeping the film theatrical and on the scale the script presently is at. But we are definitely paying the penalty for not taking the easy money or the short cut of making much less of a movie, for a budget that wouldn't have been even half the budget of the first film.

With each of the Jeepers films bringing in over a hundred million dollars a piece for DVD sales, and having done handsomely in their theatrical releases where they each broke a world record for Labor Day weekend, it would seem the making of a third Jeepers film would be a financial no-brainer.

There are those who understand that JC3 is exactly that. But the financial collapse of the country, thanks to deregulation and unfettered greed by Wall Street, the Federal Reserve and politicians on both sides of the aisle, has damaged not just our personal lives, mortgages and jobs, but in the movie world it has made it next to impossible to get anything financed at the moment.

The newest edition to my team, is my manager Dave Brown, who we may all be thanking soon, for Jeepers finally getting in front of the cameras. More on Dave and all that good stuff as it develops.

One of the things I have learned in this business is that if you don't accept a rather Buddhist philosophy, that whatever is going to happen will, and in its own time, you will have a very unhappy time in the world of movie making.

Let's keep to the positive:

Like earlier this week, IFC, the Independent Film Channel, played both Jeepers One and Two, back to back, letterboxed and completely unedited. They repeated this double bill twice in the same day.

(A desktop JC2 poster, done in the fashion of those great old, Irwin Allen disaster movies)

I have, as I often do when I am writing, fallen off the face of the earth for a time. I have spent the last few months, researching and writing a spec script that has been fermenting in my mind, all through the process of getting Jeepers III funded.

The process may be different for other writers) but there is a time in the script writing process for me, when the story suddenly bursts out of you.

The set pieces all come up, you have found the right music, discovered what the human dilemma of the story is, and then look out, here comes the lion's share of the story -- ready or not.

During this, what I call "the home stretch" of the writing of any first draft, I can find myself working for months, almost continuously. I mean seven days a week with breaks for food and some small distractions to refresh the palette before diving back into the world of the script.

I kept getting signs from the universe everywhere to write this script and that includes a major sign right in the middle of scouting locations in New Mexico for the newest Jeepers flick.

(We walked into a saloon on one of the many standing "western town" sets that populate the state, and there behind the bar, as a centerpiece above the mirror, was this polar bear head)

For those of you who know a little bit about me, or have read previous blogs, you know that JAWS, the film from 1975, based on Peter Benchley's best-selling book that a young Steven Spielberg took and with the help of producers David Zanuck and Richard Brown, created one of the biggest influences in my entire life.

Not to mention one of the biggest blockbusters in movie history. In fact it might have been the first film called a blockbuster. The term, as I understand it, coming from the fact that people often lined up around the block to see these films.

I have often waxed romantic on how this singular film, which I saw obsessively at the age of sixteen, the summer it hit theaters, was what I consider the true birth of my life goal, to make feature films.

(The three posters that adorned the wall next to my bed for most of my teen years)

It was the year when I realized what film editing (Verna Fields) and film scoring (a young JOHN WILLIAMS) and a well framed shot (Bill Butler the director of photography) a good storyteller (a young and ambitious Steven) and good screenwriters (Carl Gottlieb, Peter Benchley and Howard Sackler to name a few who created the script) -- what all these talents combined, could do to a dark room filled with movie goers.

See I didn't just go and see JAWS fifty-five times that summer to watch the movie. I watched the audience. And I watched them because they were absolutely electrified by what they saw. This may make no sense to you, if your experience of JAWS has only been on TV or DVD.

These were sold out crowds of movie loving, movie goers who had heard this movie was a wild ride -- and that's what they got. The movie got them so worked up in places, it was like sitting in the stands of a football game. At some moments, people roared, screamed and stomped their feet they were so affected by what they saw.

The only other time I have seen an audience so active and worked up, was in the finale of John Carpenter's HALLOWEEN, when Laurie is being stalked by the Boogey Man in the last terrific moments of cinema's most effective "killer in the shadows" movie.

Again the storyteller had found a way to set a mood, and create an atmosphere of suspense, that mixed with enough jolts and laughs, that when the time came for the climax of the story, the audience couldn't contain their emotions.

Again, if you never saw HALLOWEEN in a packed theater you may not understand exactly what I am talking about. Sitting in the theater watching that film, was like being in the bleachers when your home team was making a sprint for a last minute touch down. The roar of the audience in places in the finale were louder than the film.

One of the most brilliant moments in HALLOWEEN's finale is Jamie Lee Curtis banging on a neighbor's door, as she is being pursued by the terrifying shape of Michael Meyers -- and the neighbor simply turns off the porchlight on her. I always thought this was a brilliant and realistic comment on our own fears and apathy, and sent the audience into bigger fits of fear and dismay.

But I digress: JAWS, if you will, though I could never have know this back then, became for me, a kind of master class in creating the ultimate thriller/adventure film.

At the tender age of sixteen, and risking death, as I was grounded that week that JAWS hit theaters, I snuck off with my buddies to the local drive-in and was so dazzled -- I copped to going to the movies right in front of my parents, the next morning. All I could say was they had to go see this movie!

I don't remember why I was spared their wrath, maybe my enthusiasm saved me, but when I went a second time -- this was when movie tickets were still three dollars -- or 2.50 if you went to the drive-in -- I liked it even more. And when I went a third time, this time to a walk-in and not a drive-in, the experience I had with that audience, compelled me to come back time and time again.

Until the entire summer was spent, revelling in the JAWS experience. Perhaps only those of you who speak and understand true movie geekdom, can understand what happened to me that summer of '75.

(Even today, the film lives on. Here is an inspired screening of the film in Great Britain, where you can watch the movie, while in the water!)

I already loved movies, but someone had put one together in such a way, that I was filled with a sense of awe and even a sense of purpose. As I went over and over again that summer to the same movie, I was going to my film school, because I watched more than the movie.

I watched the audience and what the music did to them. I watched what a small piece of comedy did to them in the middle of all that suspense, and I watched Steven launch four hundred people right off their seats -- as if those seats were wired with electricity -- all by simply cutting two shots together, with the right piece of music.

(The boys, Robert, Roy, Steven and Dreyfuss aboard the Orca)

I think that film showed me how important casting was. And how splendidly balanced a film cast needed to be. In the case of JAWS, Roy Scheider, who up to then had played tough guys, killers and ruthless pimps, got to a play a decent man, a father, and a cop who moved his family away from big city crime -- to Amity Island.

A man who hates the water and who can't swim, getting the job of sheriff, and about to run into moral dilemmas about politics and commerce vs. public safety.

Roy got a chance to play the classic Hitchcock role of an ordinary man swept up in extraordinary circumstances when a great white shark, the most voracious of underwater predators, stakes a claim off the island he polices.

Add to that cast a young, smart ass rich boy ichthyologist, Richard Dreyfus as Matt Hooper, the town's slippery mayor (the brilliant Murray Hamilton) and the Ahab like shark hunter Quint (playwright and actor Robert Shaw) and you've got a wonderful cast against the backdrop of a really scary and very thrilling story.

The cultural phenomenon of JAWS that summer, changed the face of movies forever. Because it was so big and successful. Successful in box office terms means lots of repeat business. People had such a journey in the theater, they came back to repeat it.

TITANIC's box office prowess sort of mystified me, as there were other Cameron films that to me were far superior rides. Then I met some girls, young girls, who had each seen Titanic fifteen times -- a three hour movie, fifteen times. And they always went with friends, groups of four or more. Can you hear the cash register singing? And these were kids with the short attention spans cultured into them by MTV.

I started to understand the film's box office champ status. And the same reason JAWS was the box office champ at one time, and STAR WARS, THE GODFATHER, THE EXORCIST, and the list goes on and on.

Though in all fairness, only my mentor Francis Coppola seemed to be able to create "the biggest box office champ of all time", with just great acting and storytelling (the Godfather ) With no help from epic special effects, possessed children or the visual hyperbole that comes with science fiction films or the millions of dollars that went into digitally sinking the Titanic.

Put simply: I learned that blockbusters are movies that are seen more than once. More than twice, and often times more than that, by the average movie goer.

And here is where JAWS taught me that a scary movie should be a ride and not just an assault. JAWS you see, had adventure. It had nature, big and powerful, it had human drama and an ethical dilemma -- and terrifying scenes of the monster feeding off us humans as if we were just items on the menu.
(Roy Scheider has his big moment of truth in the thrilling final moments of JAWS, immortalizing the phrase "Smile you son-of-a-bitch!")

JAWS is something we rarely see today in our horror films: terror mixed with humanity, human dilemma and the comedy of life that comes into every stressful situation. I think I have been chasing this idea of the big, scary, adventure film, most of my commercial filmmaking life.

And I make no denials that parts of Jeepers II, is me taking a passing interest in my two favorite templates: JAWS and MOBY DICK.

But a recent spat of Discovery Channel programs (broadcast in HD and on a large plasma screen TV -- there is nothing quite like Hi-Def TV) I started to discover the strange and sad case of the arctic polar bears.

Learning that polar bears are the largest terrestrial carnivores on the planet, ones who have no fear of humans and target them routinely for food, a film started to shape in my own mind.

One particular show made some years ago, showcased that these big, fluffy white giants migrate through several small towns toward the arctic circle in Canada, and are such a threat to the town's inhabitants, that they needed a sort of "polar bear police force" to keep the bears and the humans from running into each other.

The special itself was so scary, the lives of these men who cared enough about these bears to protect them -- and the people of the town the bears routinely scanned for food -- made me realize that a fictionalized movie version of this situation, could literally be JAWS in the Snow.

And so I started reading and watching and doing more research than I have probably ever done in preparing to write a screenplay. The great tragedy I discovered, thanks to the greenhouse effect that is melting miles of arctic ice each year -- creates an even bigger threat to both the bears and the people who live in that part of Canada.

Unable to walk on the now thinning arctic ice -- the same ice which allows the polar bear to hunt and eat (seals, walruses, and even whales) or migrate across the ice of the Hudson Bay, the bears are suddenly trapped and starving, with few options to feed themselves.

(This startling photo illustrates exactly what makes a thriller about polar bears such a scary idea for a film. Here is of one of the great white bears taking a lunge at some curious tourists)

Polar bears are great swimmers, can stay underwater for two minutes at a time, and can outrun humans quite easily. These big guys can get up to forty-miles an hour on land, and the males can weigh up to 1300 pounds. They have an incredible sense of smell -- that could easily out perform even the Creeper -- as the bears have a nose that can smell a seal, ten football fields away under three feet of ice.

The scenario that was presenting itself, was both terrifying and heartbreaking. Polar Bear populations have been declining one percent a year for the last twenty years, thanks to continued and legal hunting of them, and the sea ice, their world basically, melting more and more each year.

Associations for hunters and the lobbyists who represent them in government, misrepresent this situation to keep the bears off the endangered species list, and the continued hunting of the bears makes the situation even more complicated and tragic.

It also makes for a scary-fying thriller, because what happens when the world's largest land predator starts starving? They become even more desperate and bold in their search for food. Hence my latest script, what I call THE WHITE.

(Since my scripts are now distributed in the form of PDF Files rather than printed on paper, I get to design covers for my screenplays, that often resemble my fantasy of what a movie poster of the film might look like)

It's a good sign when I work seven days a week, for months and months on something. Which is what has kept me from making any blog entries of late.

When I work really hard on something, it means that it has gotten so exciting for me that I am at a point, where I can't do anything BUT work on it, and that always makes me think I might be creating a movie idea where people will feel the same way watching it: like they are on such a ride that they can't do anything BUT watch it.

I just registered the script with my union, the WGA, (Writer's Guild of America) a precaution I take after finishing each of my scripts, so I can feel like my idea is protected and I can talk it up when and where I want to.

(A page of introduction and explanation that I include in my first draft)

I think, most notably, THE WHITE, afforded me the opportunity to write my own JAWS. And if I can find the financing, perhaps make it into a film that would be a nod to one of my all time favorite films. More than any other nod I have yet made in my other suspense films.

But mostly THE WHITE feels like my favorite kind of movie adventure: full of suspense and terror, but also full of wonder and adventure. And of course, at its center, lots of human dilemma, ethical questions, and some great characters too, all essential for a good and memorable ride.

Other Things to Talk About

Sunday, August 30th at 2:00 pm, at my favorite store in all the world, Dark Delicacies, I will be signing "Dark Delicacies III: Hauntings". The latest anthology of horror stories, compiled by my friend and co-owner of the store of the same name.

I will be there with many other writers, much more notable and accomplished than myself, who have also contributed stories to this, the third installment of this award- winning series of books.

What makes it auspicious for me, is that my contribution, "The Wandering Unholy", marks my first ever published short story. Prose has never been my strong suit, but I was happy and anxious to try my hand at it.

If you think writing screenplays (of which I have written about forty since my high school days) is the same as the art of telling a story in prose -- trust me when I say, they are two different worlds, and one, much more difficult for me than the other.

So it was a challenge and a delight to do this, and to have it accepted into the third installment, included with the likes of my friends Del Howison and Clive Barker just to name a few.
Del and I have spent the last couple of years trying to get Dark Delicacies onto TV screens in the tradition of TWILIGHT ZONE, THRILLER and ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS.

(Del Howison at the signing of the first Dark Delicacies anthology, at his wonderful store of the same name, run by Del and wife Sue)

The story I contributed for this installment of the book series, was based on a teleplay I wrote for said DARK DELICACIES The Series.

If you are Southern California adjacent, drop in, buy a copy and say hello.

(The signing will be Sunday, August 30th, at the wonderful Dark Delicacies, 4213 W. Burbank Blvd., Burbank, CA 91505 )

If you can't make it, and want to read the book, or even get one autographed by many of the authors in the anthology, just click onto the Dark Delicacies website. http://www.darkdel.com/ You can order one that is personalized just for you.

Onward and upward, more Jeepers news soon hopefully,

Victor