So a lot has been happening, kids. I mean a LOT. I even got married in March and it was a fun party. Julie walked down the aisle to David Bowie’s “As The World Falls Down.” (Yeah, from LABYRINTH.) Afterwards, we went to Italy. In fact, we just got back from Rome. This is a picture of the view from the hotel room where we stayed. Maybe I’m weird… but to me, there’s some kind of epic comfort in sleeping not twenty feet away from a gladiator school where Roman centurions trained to kill each other and fight giant lions, damn-near two thousand years ago. That’s what all those old structures between our window and the colosseum are. It’s a FUCKING GLADIATOR SCHOOL. Um. The colosseum was pretty awesome to sleep in front of too. Even with all the tourists.
Rome is an open-air art gallery filled with colossal things you never forget standing next to. I’m grateful for all of it. I’m grateful for a lot of things. I mean, I write movies and comic books for a living and I get away with it mostly. I’ve been a lot of places there, too. The “life of the mind,” as they say. My art has been focused on the creation of monsters for most of my career, but I make no apologies. In fact, I’m quite proud of those monsters, from the maniac film director Darby Silver of SHOCK FESTIVAL to the supernatural revenge-seeker DIVA JACKSON, who paradoxically blows away the bad guys AND their hapless victims with equal prejudice. Here’s what Diva looks like.
She’s among my most recent work. In fact, Diva’s wild adventures have not even been published yet. With any luck, we’ll start forcing more of this stuff on you on you soon. (I’ll talk about them in a future post.) The work has been challenging and constant and has required more intense focus than in any other time in my career. But I can totally take it. I think.
FIRST… some MOVIE NEWS.
Going on ten years now, I’ve been writing family thrillers for Lifetime. I even have a new one dropping TODAY, which is MAY 2, 2024. So tune in, kids! BET YA CAN’T WAIT! (Believe it or don’t, some people actually do get excited about these films and send weird letters, asking when the next one comes out and begging for plot details; I always wonder if they’re pranking me.) It’s the usual melodrama-with-guns-and-knives-and-screaming-ladies stuff. The director, Roxanne Boisvert, is also the WARDROBE DESIGNER on all her films too, even the ones she directs personally. So she literally calls “cut” on a shot and then gets in there with a roll of duct tape to fix a lady’s dress. If you know anything about how chaotic and insane making ANY movie is, this is just plain superhuman. So Roxanne is cool.
And speaking of chaos. I’ve written about fifteen of these gun-for-hire TV extravaganzas (if you count the ghost gigs)… and I’ve been fortunate to work with the filmmakers at every turn on every single ONE of them to create something we could stand away from and be proud of. (And, yes, we work just as hard as anyone else in Hollywood, in spite of what a bunch of hipsters or “respectable mainstream filmmakers” want to tell you about your own work.) I am involved in casting, shooting, and even the location scouting of these movies. It has not only been a richly rewarding experience on many levels… but it’s also prepared me for what I will be moving on to soon.
What am I moving on to? Well, my first feature as a director, of course! It will not be a Lifetime film. I probably could have done that, but…. um, no. But I do have a couple of those coming soon, as usual, which I penned the screenplays for. TONIGHT’S big flick at The Big L will be…. (drum that roll please)….
You can’t read my name at the bottom of the poster because they always put the credits in these tiny little letters for some reason. (Sometimes I make my own posters with better credits, but enough is enough.) This project began its tumultuous birth process as a series of conversations in development meetings, when the title A MOTHER’S SECRET DAUGHTER was suggested by someone who wasn’t me… and somehow I ended up writing it. That’s the thing about Hollywood. You go in the room with a story about a talking mule and walk out signed to a project that champions the virtues of exploding porcupines. I’m actually working on a book about my experiences writing these and other films, which should make for fascinating and damn cautionary reading for any fool young people out there seriously considering some manner of career as a screenwriter and/or filmmaker. (The short version is: DON’T FUCKIN’ DO IT, BY GOD!!!) I promise thrills and laughs and no hard-to-understand words. In the meantime, here’s some fun trivia about the new one, now retitled OUR MOTHER’S SECRET AFFAIR (see Super Terrific Poster Above):
- Andrea Pavlovic, who plays the villain in this one, was the “final girl” in the recent ultraviolent meta-slasher IN A VIOLENT NATURE, which is one of those gotta-see-it-to-believe-it horror films that lives up to its ickky reputation pretty heroically. I love that our silly little family drama is kin to a movie where a woman’s head is literally pulled through her ass by a six foot tall monster. I mean, I REALLY LOVE that. Andrea is great, too. Didn’t get to meet her on our film because I wasn’t on set for this one. I try to avoid those shoots when I can.
- Another horror connection. Many of you know this, but I love saying it out loud, so here goes. The executive producer of this film made David Cronenberg’s SCANNERS. He also made OF UNKNOWN ORIGIN, which was directed by George Cosmatos, whose son Panos Cosmatos made MANDY. Pano’s favorite film of his father is OF UNKNOWN ORIGIN. It has Peter Weller in it and is my favorite Pierre David movie. Pierre makes about ten million movies a year and will bury us all.
- Nearly every character in this movie is named after a famous fictional person in another movie or book, or named after someone I know in the entertainment biz… but since they started blabbing on other blogs about who those people are in other films when I started revealing them here, I will NOT SAY WHO THEY ARE THIS TIME. You gotta figure it out yourself. And be mindful. This is a HARD trivia game. Only die-hard “genre fans” who don’t generally like Lifetime stuff will know all the answers. The film is LOADED with easter eggs and shout-outs, too. I sneak them in every single one of these. A lot of them get cut out. But lots don’t. Again, most of the time I make sure they are invisible to anyone who is not “one of US.” Gooble gobble. So there.
- Okay, what else? Oh yeah… this is probably the first movie I’ve done at LT where it’s more “family drama” than “thriller” (which, believe it or not, they don’t actually like) but I haven’t seen the final cut yet. Maybe they changed that? Full Disclosure: when you write this many movies, not every one of them makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside, either when you make them and/or when you see the final version. Hell, you can even direct one personally and hate it later, even if everyone else thinks it’s amazing and it makes you a multimillionaire. Just ask George Lucas.
Anyway, my next one will also be directed by a woman, a pretty famous lady in the LT TV movie biz… and that will be my swan song for a while at Lifetime.
What is my first directing gig gonna look like? Not telling. But it’s been in the works for years, and production begins soon. I WILL say that just about everyone in my film is a fucking monster.
So, on a final note . . .
WHY monsters?
It’s very simple. I grew up with them. We all did. They are everywhere you go. And I’m not talking about the guys you see in films like NIGHTBREED, where “monsters” are the heroes. Those aren’t monsters at all, in my opinion. They are… well, the HEROES. They just look weird and maybe they have a problem with drinking blood or something.
But I write about the really bad guys, guys. I’ve said this before and I’ll keep saying it until my career finally goes up in smoke: I don’t do any of this stuff to be cute. Not even the Lifetime films, which I started writing years ago because I needed the money, but continued with because I was able to say a few things I actually meant. That’s what people can sometimes not understand when you trot out such work, or really any kind of work that challenges their perspectives. I think my best art does that. And, yeah, I think of it all as art. It’s just different classes of art, right? Or something.
My Lifetime film WEB CAM GIRLS is about a monster. It’s deeply disturbing. My friend Glynn called me up after she watched it and said she was worried about my mental health. Mission accomplished.
My short story book PROJECT 51, which was written in 24 hours on my fifty-first birthday, is a magnum thrill ride through Monster Town USA. I did it not for fame and riches, but because it was something I HAD to do. It’s deeply disturbing but also deeply personal. Mission accomplished.
The first film I ever wrote, way back in 2005, was filled with monsters, and as we made it, I even got to understand one of them better than I wanted to, through the amazing actor Ethan Embry, who gave a difficult, nuanced, and even sensitive performance. It illustrated chillingly well that the worst monsters come in under the radar, inside our circle of trust. And then they destroy you. That was MASTERS OF HORROR: INCIDENT ON AND OFF A MOUNTAIN ROAD. It’s difficult to watch that one, so many years later. It makes me cry a lot. But… well…. mission accomplished, right?
But I also write about the people who stand up to monsters. That’s Ellen, also from INCIDENT, played with great skill and poise by the awesome Bree Turner. She was a character originally created by Joe Lansdale, who’s descent into the belly of the beast I was able to adapt and take even further, in collaboration with director Don Coscarelli, one of my mentors in the film biz. Ellen changes in the film, and even becomes a monster herself. That happens to many of us also. It’s one of the things I am most fascinated by as a creator of anything. I earned this fascination the hard way, folks. I’m not being cute.
But I also believe there’s a way through this kind of darkness… and I believe love can sometimes win. Check out the ending of my movie ESCAPING MY STALKER, the very last scene, in which one of my favorite characters, played with authentic sensitivity by Ezmie Garcia, decides to reach out to and forgive a man who caused her so much pain, because being a monster was not his fault. It sums up the whole ballgame for me. I cry when I watch that too.
This ain’t easy. It takes heroic struggle. It takes changing our perspectives. It means, sometimes, becoming the very thing you hate. Some of us go down there and never come back. Some of us live on. I live on. And I stay here at the edge to tell these stories because I think we need them. This is the call of my life, and it’s been a life worth living.
Um. Even if I’ve been so busy with it that I just got around to getting married and seeing Rome for the first time.
But hey . . . that’s cool, too.
S