Nothing major has happened since my last update (hence the non-film-related photo at left), but I figured I owed this site's readers a little news. First of all, despite my IFTA arbitration win against my former sales agent MonteCristo Entertainment last spring, its President and CEO Michael (Michele) Taverna failed to pay me my award. Then, two months after the announcement of my victory in the claim, his lawyer wrote that Taverna had since severed his ties to MonteCristo Entertainment - how convenient for him! - and thus a) couldn't pay me anything, and b) couldn't assign the rights to the foreign sales deals over to me. So my attorney put some pressure on them, and then voila, suddenly Taverna and his lawyer were able to pay me a little (though not everything). Then my new sales agent - also an attorney - put more pressure on, and then finally, a couple of weeks ago, Taverna signed over the rights to me, after nearly a year of insisting that he didn't have the power to do so. Funny how the story changes when the legal screws are applied, no? So anyway, while I still haven't been able to collect on the full award, getting the rights to these deals - which means I can finally collect on the sale of my film Claustrophobia to Japan - could help. No money yet from my Japanese distributors, but they seem honest.
Meanwhile, I recently left this Web producing job that I'd had since January. There was no drama-filled resignation announcement, and no bad blood - I just decided that I needed to work in design and art direction again. Project management is stressful and not particularly creative. So a-job-hunting I will go. Oh, but there is one intriguing bit of Dial 9 to Get Out news that I just heard, and that is that we finally got the script to a well-known actor's agent. Hopefully both agent and actor will like the script and sign on, in which case development can move forward at a more rapid pace. If I write nothing more about this here, then you'll know what happened!