Thanks to all of you who have been supporting our “Sweded”, “Be Kind, Rewind” style remake of “The Princess Bride.”
We are officially in the final fifteen and will find out the winner Thursday night! You all rule!
Remember that bad-ass commercial I got paid loads of money for? Well it appears I may be getting residuals for it too. I received another check in the mail for it today (much tinier but still not insignificant). @008 is going to be my year!
Our “Sweded” version of The Princess Bride is receiving rave reviews (hopefully we’ll win the grand prize of a totally bad-ass Dell computer or the second prize of a Dell laptop), we’ve got another short film in another contest (hopefully to win a 58″ plasma HD TV), and I just booked a 4 day Production Assistant job. Let’s keep this train a-rollin’!
So I already posted about our film, “The Princess Bride” in my last post. Now I calling everyone to arms! I try not to call in favors like this too often so hopefully it carries some weight.
When you click on the link above, you will see a place whee you can rate the film 1-10 stars, but you can’t rate the film without having an account on filmmakingfrenzy.com. To anyone who can be bothered, we beg you to take the few seconds to make an account, verify your account, log in, rate our movie (hopefully 10 stars but I won’t ask anyone to go against their own judgment) and leave us a nice comment. I totally understand if you can’t be bothered but it can’t hurt to put out the rallying cry!
In the spirit of the new movie, “Be Kind, Rewind” starring Jack Black and Mos Def, The Alamo Drafthouse and Filmmakingfrenzy.com are holding a contest to make a 5 minute “Sweded” version of a Hollywood movie.
We chose to make “The Princess Bride”. Larry and I also starred in our friend, James Pound’s remake of “Back to the Future II”
Sadly there was one other remake of the Princess Bride which had some of the exact same ideas we had, but luckily I think our two versions are vastly different. Go check them out and vote for us!
I have started uploading our content to FunnyOrDie.com so if you feel the hankerin’, head over there and give us some “funny” votes!
On a complete side note, there’s a very short teaser trailer for a short film I did here. You might only be able to view it if you have a myspace acount. Sorry, but I think that’s the only place it’s posted.
A while back my talent agency got me a gig working as an extra on a SAG national commercial. Most of the extra work I’ve done pays basically minimum wage. This one ended up paying about $300 a day for two days of work.
Today my agency called to tell me I had been upgraded to “Principal”. Basically this means that I ended up being seen too prominently to be considered an extra.
With this upgrade comes an additional check.
To the tune of around $3400.
In addition to this, I’ve been on three auditions in the past two weeks for actual real paying gigs including two commercials and one feature film lead. Let’s hope this trend continues to rise throughout the year!
Periodically a producer friend likes to issue challenges as a sort of learning experience. Recent he challenged my friend Chris to make two short films, one with no dialogue, and one with only 30 seconds of picture and the rest just dialogue.
The first one has a rough cut finished. We shot this in one afternoon. Written and Directed by Chris Thompson.
I find it quite amusing. I’m the burglar, by the way.
I went to a read through of this film I’m doing the other day and one of the other cast members was a guy I’d worked with once before. In the course of conversation he told me that he had just been hired as Ed Harris’s stand in on the new movie, “Appaloosa” which Ed Harris was directing and starring in along with Viggo Mortenson, Renee Zellweiger, Lance Henrikson and Jeremy Irons.
Last night I got a call from someone who I’ve done a lot of extras work for asking my height and weight. She told me that she needed a stand in for Ed Harris because the first guy’s mother had just just died. I told her I had just been talking to the first stand in the other day and was sorry to hear that.
I was excited about the prospect but also nervous. The original casting call had said they needed someone who was 5’9″, 155 and preferably balding. I am 5’10”, 165 and have a thick head of hair. My contact told me that she just didn’t have many guys of the right frame so I should be close enough. She told me to wear the flattest shoes I had and keep my hair as low as I could get it.
About 30 minutes later she called me and told me that the first guy wanted to go ahead and work but that she didn’t feel right about him going in despite his mother just dying and she couldn’t understand how he would want to go ahead and work under those circumstances. She asked how well I knew him and what I thought about the situation. She said she was just worried that maybe he thought he wanted to go in but then might have a freak out on set or something. As much as I wanted this job (and could use the money) I told her that I understood where he was coming from. If I was in his situation I would not want to just sit and dwell on it. I would rather go and be doing something I loved and something that I was excited about and would make me feel better and perhaps help me deal with it better. She understood and agreed with me that it wasn’t really her place to make that decision for him and she certainly didn’t want to take the job away from him. I also told her that though I really wanted the job, I also didn’t want to take it from someone who had it first and who could probably really use it now. That would be a double whammy to lose his mom and then a cool job too. She said she’d call him back and tell him he was back on. I felt like I’d done the right thing. Luckily I didn’t have too much time to get too excited about it.
My condolences to you, Anthony. I hope you at least had a good time on set to ease your mind.
Most people talk about how brutal acting is because you encounter more rejection than anything else. I’m in the unusual situation of actually having build my confidence in my abilities since, so far,about 95% of my auditions have resulted in me being cast and I also have people just outright calling me and asking me to be in their films without even auditioning sometimes. I realize this will like all get worse as I get further into my career but at the moment, it’s pretty sweet.
I realize that most of you can’t make it to College Station on December first but for anyone who can or who wants to join the convoy heading from Austin to College Station that day, my band which usually plays all private functions is having a public gig at Hullabaloos. It’s going to be a huge blast of a party where we get to pull out all the stops and play all our best stuff. Come join us!