Filmkid LLC

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.