Many apologies for the long silence. (Though it's not like I vanished off the face of the planet, as I have continued to add Lists of 9 and Movie Reviews to this site, even though it's been four months since I last posted a Development Update.) The fact is, I had been waiting for my IFTA arbitration claim against Claustrophobia's former foreign sales agent MonteCristo Entertainment (run by Michael a.k.a. Michele Taverna) to finish up before updating anybody about it. The good news is that I won the claim! I just found out last week. This means that Taverna is officially required to pay me the money that he owes me and assign the rights to the Thailand, UK, and (most importantly) Japan deals over to me directly, so that I can hopefully start collecting on the royalties from sales to these countries. Of course he hasn't paid me yet. And there's no guarantee that he will. If he doesn't, you can bet I will continue to assert that Michael Taverna and MonteCristo are people that film producers should avoid working with.
In the meantime, I got a full-time job again. My first since quitting Paramount back in 2002. It's a bit strange to be back in the corporate world - I am once again working for a company that specializes in Web design, only I am now a producer instead of a designer, which is a bit closer to what life as a film director is like. In other words, lots of planning, lots of managing, lots of decisions and lots of deadlines to worry about.
I certainly haven't given up my filmmaking dreams, however, and Dial 9 to Get Out continues to sputter ahead, however slowly. (It didn't help that one of my two producers got a job working on the TV show Lost in Hawaii just a couple of weeks after we signed our agreement.) My friend Stephanie, who has considerable casting experience, has joined the team as our casting director and is trying to contact certain name actors that we'd like to talk to, even as Gregory and Meta, the producers, prepare budgets and attempt to raise money. It would be nice to post some solid updates about this film soon, but in the event that it can't get off the ground - it's always a question of money, as you know - at least I'm now pulling in a regular salary again, so if nothing else, in a couple of years I will have saved up enough to shoot another self-funded low budget picture. That might make for a slender Updates page in the interim, but I will make my third feature film eventually. I think that's inevitable. It's just a question of what film, and when.