What is the movie Things Going Smoothly about?

Everyone keeps asking me, "Whats your movie about?" And I just stand there looking stupid, not saying a word.

I've been trying to work that out. Maybe a blurb, 20 or so words thrown together to pitch the main premise of the movie. Can't seem to come up with the right buzzwords or soundbites to make it make sense. Does that make sense?

Here goes; Things Going Smoothly is a movie about one mans role in the apocolypse. Taking the idea of personal responsibility to the extreme he conciously tries to work the butterfly effect towards the destruction of the human race. (Oh, and there's a romantic storyline too.) His life becomes consumed by the barrage of information pointing to the end times and his own personal collapse.

This Micro-Budget movie is Written and Directed by Chris Miller, with a cast including Mike Messier, better known from his role in Mario Van Peebles movie Hard Luck and his local cable access show.

I imagine myself in the typical hollywood pitch meeting, unprepared but with an idea, "Imagine Out of Sight meets The Omen."

A romantic comedy about the devil?

Out of Sight? Soderberghs turn around movie, one of my all time favorites, Jennifer Lopez in her best role ever, George Clooney in the role that made him into the dashing leading man that he is today, far from his Rosanne and ER roles. Steven Zhan, excellant casting, not to mention Ving Rhames.

Then there is the Omen remake. Loved the original series on a whole, following the life of the anti-christ, but this movie fell short. Granted I never finished watching it, too heavy on the catholic bullshit, and I work way too much to sit through something that can't hold my interest. If the catholics were going to save us from the apocolypse they wouldn't have a leader whose name adds up to 666. Vicarius Fili De, or something, but thats another story.

The movie is slated to begin production at the end of Novemebr and yet it has had nothing but setbacks. Still loss of actresses and delays in finishing the script aside, I think this movie is going to get finished. I learned so much from my first failed production of a feature length horror movie that I have incorporated those early lessons into this production.

A Quick animation about Potatoes

This is just a quick cartoon I made with some pictures Matt Goltz drew up and some old audio I had lying around which I spliced together to keep myself occupied.

This whole, not having a TV or Stereo thing gets old when I'm not drinking.

The Desktop Stole My Movie Script

After a flash of insight one night while working my at my second job for the day, an overnight shift at a convience store, I managed to mash two of my older scripts into one movie with some various other ideas thrown in. I worked on writing pages of notes and when I got home reworked the script into something I could be proud of. Then the computer stole my movie script.

The monitor stopped working. And if there is one thing that hinders your ability to use a computer its staring at a blank screen and getting pissed because you were in the process of backing up the file when it went down.

No problem, I bought a new monitor, a flat screen that took up far less room on my desk leaving plenty of room for scribbled notes and hard boiled eggs.

But it wasn't the monitor. So I borrow a computer from a friend, minus the hard drive, pull mine out and install it on his machine. Simple right, all I need is that one file. My script. So I can rewrite and tweak it until its perfect. After all I want to begin shooting at the end of November and all of this happened sometime in October.

Only Microsoft Windows decides to throw a wrench in the works by saying I need a new authentification code. Call India it says. So I do. Automated operator can't help me; I get a guy who says words in English but I'm not sure if he understands them. My authentification code is wrong, please read the whole thing he says. I did, I'm looking at it and I'm telling you the whole thing. Please hold he says as he hangs up.

I call back, after 5 minutes trying to bypass the automated operator I finally get a female operator that speaks a little better. I give her the code, almost immediately she asks if I have moved the hard drive from an Emachine computer to a Gateway computer, why yes I have. She says I need to reinstall the hard drive on the Emachine and call back with the code it gives me. But it's not sending a signal to the monitor I say, how will I get the code to get my one file off of the computer if I cant see the screen? She can't help me.

So now I'm getting desperate. Over a month since the rewrite and scrap pieces of paper with notes and dialogue are floating around everywhere, in jean pockets and in my back pack, stuffed in books that I've already finished reading. I need to get that script.

So I pull a slave/master switch. I put my friends original hard drive in as the master and switch the pins on my hard drive to be the slave. It actually worked, though it doesn't seem to want to recognize any of my programs and I had a hard time remembering where I actually saved the script. By the time I find the folder I realize that I saved it as a Works Word Processing file. A format I can't seem to open on any other machine, even ones with Microsoft Works installed.

It's funny but even when I try to write notes at work to add quality to the script the pens stop writing.

Someone said that maybe the movie was cursed. There's the monitor thing, the mouse pad problem on the laptop that holds up everything for 20 minutes at a time, the pen thing, the file format problems, the lack of internet access which seemed to be solved then reared it's ugly head as yet another problem and the loss of the female lead due to drug problems.

And when I started to think of all the little things that kept popping up while closing my drawer out for the night I realized that I had done $666 in sales.