It's strange. On a day-by-day basis, I still find myself having a lot of free time, enough to occasionally mope about how busy I'm not. But when I think about everything that's been happening over the past three weeks, it's pretty remarkable. First of all, my editor and I achieved picture lock. This means we have completely finished cutting the visual part of the film, so that my composer and sound editor can safely work with the movie knowing that I won't be monkeying around with the cut in the meantime. That's the other news: I now have a composer and a sound editor. Christopher Farrell, who did the amazing score for my first film Foreign Correspondents, agreed to come back on board to score Claustrophobia. So I'm excited about that. And I have a great sound editor whose background ranges from sound editing The Young and the Restless to being the live sound mixer for punk band Bad Religion. Interesting guy.
Today is a historic day, as far as that first feature of mine, lovingly nicknamed ForCor, is concerned, for it was four years ago today that the film was finished and premiered. And now, four years later, it looks like it is finally getting sold to video stores. The film's producer Julia Stemock gave me the good news last week. Now, frankly, I've heard so much "good news" which amounted to nothing that my standard reaction to it has become "yeah, sure". But this time it looks like the real deal. You could have knocked me down with a feather.
This comes at an oddly appropriate time. The day I started working with Chris Farrell - February 4 - I was out at lunch with a girl I'd dated not long after the premiere and ran into ForCor star Corin Nemec! It was a real 1999 flashback. Also, recently I broke even on the money I paid to have the ForCor videos and DVDs made. Now that that's out of the way, any money that comes in from now on will be divided amongst the film's investors. Which is funny, because I had gotten to the point where I was telling investors "Hey, we did our best - don't expect to see any money ever." I should say that more often. And speaking of which, I just got an investor for Claustrophobia. I wasn't looking for any money, but I'm not going to tell him no. It's certainly welcome.