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We’re shooting the parts of Man vs. Self the weekend of July 31st-Aug 2nd in and around Lopatcong NJ(home sweet home). The rewrite’s going well, and pre-production presses on. We’re currently scouting locations for the shoot as well as figuring out exactly what parts of the script we will be shooting for the would-be trailer.

Casting went surprisingly smoothly for a movie about time travel where we have three sets of actors playing the same characters at different ages. We’re auditioning some young actors tomorrow to play our 12 year old mad scientist and after we find him we’ll be ready to go with our cast.

One of the next steps is to build a time machine. Expect video of its construction.

Back to writing!

Brian Dieck has a bug up his ass, and that bug is making him want to shoot Man vs. Self.

Man vs. Self is a script I wrote… 3(?) years ago and has just kind of been hanging out on my shelf and on the hard drives of friends. For reasons mysterious Mr. Dieck has a fever, and the only cure is Man vs. Self.

So, fueled almost entirely by Brian Dieck’s drive to get this movie underway we have a three day shoot coming up to tackle the first few scenes of the movie as well as some shots from later in the script so we can piece together a fake trailer of sorts to try to pimp some budget for the rest of the film.

For those of you as super pumped about Waiting for Waiting for Godot as I am- fear not- That’s getting shot too. Expect WFWFG by the time I go back to school, and expect the scenes/trailer for Man vs. Self sometime after that. While they’ll both likely be shot in July there is going to be a lot more post-production required on Man vs. Self.

So while we get ready to shoot Waiting for Waiting for Godot we are also currently casting Man vs. Self as I work over the script a bit more before we shoot it.

Busy summer. Should be worth it though.

I’ve spent the better part of the last few days writing. Most of the time has been spent on Waiting for Waiting for Godot and the rest has been spent making notes for my new top-secret book idea which is hilarious and will make billions of billions of dollars. In the time spent on the former I’ve wrestled with one line in particular- the one mentioned in the title of this update: “I’m crowning here, sir!”

Crowning, as you may know, is a term used in childbirth to describe the moment a baby’s head can be seen through the vaginal opening.

(LATE WARNING: THIS POST MAY CONTAIN GRAPHIC CONTENT! Really, it’s going to get worse before it gets better…)

However, in the case of Waiting for Waiting for Godot it describes the moment a large piece of feces begins crossing the threshold of the anus despite one’s (in the case, the character of Vlad) best efforts to contain said feces.

To compare pooping to childbirth, as it turns out, is funny to no one but me. Everyone at the reading, my producing partner, and several people who’ve read the script for me have ALL expressed their opinions on the line- none of them favorable.

The reason I even bring up the line’s demise is that I feel it should exist somewhere after I cut it out of the script, and for those who feel the line is over the top here, I present for you the original draft of the scene in Waiting for Waiting for Godot in which the line would have appeared, maybe afterwards you’ll see what great restraint I showed in cutting it down to only one tasteless pooping = childbirth line.

VLAD
I think I’m in trouble!

ETSY
Just go!

VLAD
We can’t leave! But seriously, this is a big one.

ETSY
Go!

VLAD
It’s like I’m having contractions!

ETSY
Will you please just go!

VLAD
I feel like I should have been offered an epidural.

Vlad grunts loudly.

VLAD
I’m crowning here, sir!

ETSY
GO!

…Vlad finally poops then returns to his seat next to Etsy…

ETSY
Do you feel better now?

VLAD
I think I have post pardum depression.

Doesn’t seem so bad now- does it?

Left to Right: Mrs. Filmkid (Steph Tickle), Glen Tickle (The jerk writing this), Duane "Boss from Cigarette Break" Graner, Dan "Dart Mark" Van Winkle, and Lisa "Dan's hot girlfriend" Brown

Last night, after forced labor, pizza, and margaritas the five of us finally sat down to record a reading of Waiting for Waiting for Godot. Mysterious audio problems required us to do it twice. The average times for the recordings were thirteen minutes, putting the actual read through somewhere a bit passed twelve minutes, a nice surprise considering the script’s seventeen page length.

I haven’t gone through and watched or listened to the recording yet, but I was overall pretty happy with how it went live. Surprisingly though a line which compared taking a dump to childbirth didn’t go over well with the crowd. I thought everyone loved poop jokes.

This post also marks the first update to the site during Steph Bello’s (The other Mrs. Filmkid) trip to LA. She should be wildly famous by the time she returns next month.

The setting for the read? The living room of our sweet new house/palatial three bedroom estate.

Happy Memorial Day, folks. I’m gonna go buy some groceries and then listen to my friends read silly words I wrote.

If you haven’t heard, the Filmkid offices are in the process of moving from the corner of the bedroom in our one bedroom apartment to my very own office in our recently purchased palatial three bedroom estate. There’s even talk of turning the outdoor shed into an animation studio.

The move itself has been grueling and time consuming, but the advantage to this is that it’s giving me a good amount of time away from Waiting for Waiting for Godot and more importantly it’s giving everyone to whom I’ve sent the current version a chance to read it over at their leisure before I start nagging them for their comments. In fact the opposite is starting to happen and Haller keeps offering his opinions, but I simply don’t have the time to have a meaningful discussion with anyone about anything that isn’t house related until the move is over.

The Great Duane Graner emailed me back PAGES worth of notes that I haven’t even begun to go through, but I’m really looking forward to it. Duane has at least one advanced degree in English, a theater background, and an ironclad sense of humor, so if anyone will appreciate an adapted satire of a Sam Becket play it’s him. Or he’ll really hate it and it’ll turn out I’m just really off the mark on this one. After all, a certain lovely producing partner of mine has expressed a somewhat less than glowing opinion of the script, so maybe it’s just not as funny as I think it is. Well, it is funny, but maybe it’s just not funny to anyone but me and Dan. Dan’s a big fan of it. He’s my puppet. My beefy, karate fighting puppet. Filmkid Superfan #1 Nick Taylor also digs the script, although he is not my puppet, and as far as I know he does not know karate.

But as the title suggests there will be a table reading of the script some point in the near future. Our lease on the apartment is up on Thursday so we have to have everything out of there by then, after that the move is officially over. There will still be unpacking/sorting/placing/et cetera to do, but the hard stuff will be over. This weekend will see our first house guest(s) as my friend Pete will be back Jersey-side for a few days, and there’s even talk of my brother and his girlfriend crashing at our place for my godson’s baptism on Saturday.

After all that madness we should be well on our way and I’ll be able to get a few cats and kittens together to read through my admittedly silly script out loud so I can see if it plays out like it should. Word on how that turned out to follow. Enjoy!

After wasting an F’ing solid year of talking about this idea I’ve finally put fingers to keys and banged out a script for Waiting for Waiting for Godot based on Samuel Becket’s “Classic” play Waiting for Godot. l put classic in quotations because I’m of the belief that this play is the original over-hyped piece of garbage.

So- why make a movie about it? Excellent question, skeptical fan. Largely I did it out of self flatulation. Things in my life have been going rather well recently so I needed to torture myself with boring absurdist theater trash to balance everything out. In order to properly adapt/satire the play I had to read it, and re-read it, and watch performances of it, and read idiotic interpretations of it. I’m comfortable in saying that I know more about Waiting for Godot than just about anybody, and I’m not altogether happy about that situation.

The premise of the movie is that two theater critics are sitting in an empty theater waiting for Waiting for Godot to start. The longer they wait the more their ordeal starts to resemble the play itself. The challenge in doing this is that I want the movie to be funny for everyone, not just those of us who have suffered through Godot.

Much of the Filmkid inner-circle has already seen the early draft, and some are familiar with the play and some are not. I’ve quarantined the ones who have not read the play from doing so in order to keep a control group- untainted by Becket- who can give me an un-theater-stained-biased opion of the movie as it exists on its own.

I’ll be working on the script over the next few weeks. The beauty of it is its simplicity. It’s all one location. There’s only a few actors. Should be a cheap and easy shoot. Details on the production as they develop.

NOTE- Any hardcore theater fans who “love” Waiting for Godot who plan on leaving me comments or sending me email about how I just don’t understand the genius behind it please save yourself some time. Unless you have a PhD in the works of Samuel Becket, I am fairly confident I’m more familiar with this play than you. It’s a boring play. It is stupid, and nothing happens. Godot isn’t God. Becket said it himself. He wrote the freaking play in French.

I’ve noticed a spike in hits so far this month, so I’m assuming that means some new folks are checking us out. Welcome! Check out the store, buy Several Ways to Die Trying on DVD, or a shirt, or both!

Register to join our mailing list, or check out the Filmkid Forums.

I’m putting together a videos page that should be up shortly so you can all see some of our other work.

The CD mentioned in the previous post is now available on iTunes, and I actually just listened to it and it’s great. Go, download and be merry.

Artist: Jesse Gimbel
Album: Letting Go Before I Begin

Friend of Filmkid Jesse Gimbel just dropped his new CD Letting Go Before I Begin. If you don’t buy it here:

CD Baby

A meteor will come crashing through your house and kill you.* While the the CD doesn’t feature “Drying Out Pages”, the song he wrote for Several Ways to Die Trying, it is still awesome and you need it.

GO BUY IT.

*Not 100% sur on the meteor situation, but buy it- or else.

On top of things like Anthony Michael Sansosti: Year One and Antidepressed I do other comic work as well. The project I was currently working on in tandem with Antidepressed was called Edison vs. Tesla. The premise was that based on their real life rivalry Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla duke it out with lightning guns and giant robot suits.

Well, yesterday I found and read this:

Brief synopsis- Based on their real life rivalry Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla duke it out with lightning guns and giant robot suits.

*sigh*

Matt Fraction did a great job writing it, so I can’t even be that pissed about it. The book’s great if you have a chance to pick it up. Just don’t expect Edison vs. Tesla anytime soon.