Jeez Jon

Nerds Love My Movie

Spewgilist, a geek/pop culture site, has named Fellowship of the Dice Best Geek Movie of 2008!  Thank you, Spewgilist.  Apparently, they will have an article about the film coming soon. 

A Sad Day In Nerdiana

Gary Gygax, creator of Dungeons & Dragons, passed away today at the age of 69.  'Tis a sad day in the land.  All the elves, bards, gnomes, dwarves, and arcane prestige classes salute you, Gary.  And a special shout out from me, for giving me the inspiration for my movie. 

A Holiday Gift Idea

As we have passed Black Friday and gone head-long into the holiday shopping season, it's difficult to really find the right gift for that special someone.  Especially if you're looking for something that says "Jeez Jon!"  Well, let me help you out.  We're having a holiday sale for the DVDs of Fellowship of the Dice.  Both the regular edition and the special edition DVDs are on sale for the holidays.  So, buy one for your geeky loved one today!  And, for those of you who haven't seen it yet, here's the trailer:

Thanks a bunch!

Awarded

You wanna see us holding our award for Best Professional Film from Gen Con Indy 2007?  Well, take a look:

Pretty snazzy, huh?

Returned

Finally, a semi-lazy Sunday... or as lazy as a Sunday gets for me.  With our final convention appearance at Gen Con for Fellowship of the Dice now behind us, Tom and I can now relax some.  Overall, Gen Con was quite a nice experience, though it didn't start out that way.  Due to some complete disorganization on their part, Gen Con didn't have us listed in their program. At all.  Let me paint the picture thusly:  Tom and I didn't have any sleep the night before because we had to run around late Tuesday night replacing a bunch of equipment for our booth because a certain delivery company misplaced our case of booth equipment.  The case, I might add, is 77 pounds and 3 1/2 feet tall, and Certain Delivery Company lost it... for 6 weeks.  They found it and said they could deliver it to us... after the convention had already started.  So, we had absolutely no choice but to replace our printer, monitor, and other sundries that night.  And then, we were up at 2:30am to be picked up at 3:30am to go to LAX to fly out to Indianapolis.  So, you can imagine after dealing with all of this, the last thing I'd want to see is us completely not in the program.  Since Tom had been dealing with Certain Delivery Company (and all the other BS surrounding the convention), I said I'd take care of this and went off.  After a half hour of asking around, I finally found the coordinator who was in charge of the film contest.

Usually when I talk to someone, especially in a customer service capacity, I think very carefully of what I'm going to say beforehand to make sure I come across as pretty even-handed and professional as possible. This time around?  Not so much.  I opened my mouth and let him have it.  For about a full 5 minutes.  As this was in one of main corridors of the convention center, people stopped and watched me tear this guy a new one.  Technically, I never yelled at him, but I did raise my voice.  I told him that in all of the conventions we'd been to (8), being in the program was the main push of people knowing about screenings of our film, and it's people seeing the film that sells the film the most.  I railed at him about how they have no excuse for being this disorganized, and their lack of organization is unconscionable, considering the size of their organization.  Knowing that I was completely in the right, he didn't fight me on anything.  Apparently what happened was that they didn't have the Film Contest organized until that evening , which missed the deadline for printing of the official Gen Con Program.  Did they tell us this beforehand?  No, 'course not. I then asked for his supervisor, 'cause at this point, I wanted some of our hard-earned money back.  His supervisor showed up, and I tore into him as well.  The Supervisor apologized profusely, saying he had no idea this was happening, and then found ways to make it up for us.  Instead of just the three screenings for the contest, they gave us two additional screenings in larger venues, allowed us to put flyers in a variety of locations (the convention center has very draconian rules about where to put flyers -- one of the many annoying BS regulations we've encountered during our convention tour), and they made up signs advertising our screenings all around the convention center.  I then strode back to our booth and recounted to Tom what happened.

Tom: Wow.  Okay.

Me: Yeah.  I went all Executive Producer on them.

From that point forward, I'd garnered a bit of a reputation amongst the Gen Con staff.  When our first screening was starting late due to one of the other films running longer than advertised, another coordinator came up to me and apologized obsequiously for the mishap, and assuring me that Fellowship would run without interruption, etc.   

The Gen Con experience, from then on, was a good one.  We had some great screenings -- some scarcely populated, some nicely populated.  After the final screening, I actually had a couple people ask me for my autograph right then and there.  We sold more DVDs of the film there than at other conventions.  We had people stop by our booth to tell us how much they liked the film.  We got to go hang out with Vito and Ryan as they were play testing their game.  Although Indianapolis was pretty humid, it was still nice to walk around a city I'd never been in before. Oh, and the Film Contest has a nice ending: we won Best Professional Film.  It's now the "award-winning" Fellowship of the Dice.   

Our next step is to get more distribution on the film.  We're working on that.  Check back for more details.  We have seen a spike of sales at Amazon and bn.com for the film, so that's good.  Tonight, we are screening scenes of the movie for the improv show Dungeon Master, and it looks like I'll be improvising with them as well. Should be fun.  But the rest of the day today?  Resting, Netflix, chilling.

Indy, Films

Tomorrow before dawn, Tom and I are off to GenCon Indy in our final promotion stop for Fellowship of the Dice. Expect a long blog entry from me about the clusterfuck nature of getting things together for our last gaming convention, all due to companies we use that don't seem to know what the hell they're doing. If I can, I'll post from Indianapolis.

And now a story to make you smile: Fox's Right-Wing Answer To The Daily Show Fails. Are we surprised? No. Are we still happy? Oh yes.

A Variety Of Thank You's

Duckie, thanks for the Fellowship of the Dice shout-out. You rock. 

CNN, thanks for calling Romney's & Giuliani's bluff on them bowing out of the You Tube debate. That's pretty damn awesome of you.

E!, thanks for finally pulling the plug on the execrable Simple Life. While this won't completely remove the possibility of my coming across Paris Hilton's ugly mug as I channel surf, it helps. 

And finally, a big shout out to my agents for keeping me pretty busy lately.  Let's hope this continues [knocks wood].

Film Runner Interview

The interview I did for FilmRunner.net while I was at Origins is now up and available.  It can be found here on the Downloads page. The file is HUGE but the interview is nice and brief.  Enjoy!

Nina, Pinta & d20 Maria

The Origins Game Expo is going on around me as I type this. We've done a mess of interviews, including one for the Columbus Alive Newspaper.  My podcast interview for Fellowship of the Dice can be found here. 

Muzzling The Parrot

I'm exhausted.  Tired.  Pooped.  Spent.  But, here I am, because frankly, I feel inspired. For the reason why, let's travel back in time a bit. Say, a couple weeks ago...

Tom and I went with our buddy Seb drove six hours to a gaming convention to publicize Fellowship of the Dice.  Suffice it to say, things did not go very well.  Even though they had put together some screenings for the film, they didn't have the room ready for us.  Like, say, for instance, a screen on which to show the film.  So the brain trust who was running this inglorious convention brought in two screens to see which one would work.  Eventually, they got the damn screen up as a semi-eager crowd of people waited in the conference room, watching them do this.  Then the audio didn't work.  That got fixed and then they couldn't get the overhead lights to turn off. At this point, it was 9:20 pm, 20 minutes after the advertised 9pm start time.  As the crowd got antsy, they asked for us to play the film anyways, so we did.  The screening went as well as can be expected, but for obvious reasons, the film looked washed out. Afterwards, we shlepped over to our hotel, slept that night, and went back to the convention to do a Q&A about the film.  That was the convention runner's idea.  So, we did that.  2 people showed up - our friend Kevin who owns the film and his girlfriend.  I was just livid, angry, put out.  And most importantly, flippin' hungry 'cause we didn't have lunch yet. 

We bailed at that point.  We weren't planning on staying the whole time anyways, but this was just the last straw.  Tom, Seb and I got some nice healthy organic food, got into the car, and took the 6 hour drive back from Arizona to LA.  As I was working away at a Sudoku book, it hit me:

Pearls before swine.

That's what we just did.  We took our movie -- our lovely, non-perfect but very entertaining and goofy film -- and presented it to people who didn't respect us and didn't deserve it.   Of course, hindsight being 20/20, we should have completely cut our losses and not gone at all, but I came to this realization (or re-realization).  I'm not going to put up with people's crap anymore, and I won't waste my time on people who clearly don't deserve it. 

This hit me with such clarity, such force.  Maybe it was the combination of Diet Coke, Seb's J-Rock music and Sudoku boxes, I don't know.  All I know is that I'm not going to waste energy trying to impress people who just don't deserve it. I'm so much better than that, and what I have to offer is, too. This realization, this raison d'etre was further underlined when we were at PolyCon two weekends ago.  PolyCon was the complete opposite experience -- sure it was a bit of a hometown advantage, but those people loved the movie and liked the fact we were there.  They appreciated the film for what it was, and for that, I'm grateful.

For me, the experience in Arizona was like our insecurities about Fellowship of the Dice (and to take the creative extension, insecurities about ourselves) were made manifest. That we were treated like we were an inconvenience, that the film is substandard, that no one really cares.  These feelings, of course, are COMPLETE BULLSHIT.

When I first took Viewpoints with my teacher Alex, she had a great way of phrasing this.  All of us have that little voice inside us that says we're not worth it, that second guesses us.  She calls it a parrot -- the parrot sits on our shoulder and says stuff like "Why are you wearing that?  What are you doing? You think that's good?" I've spent the bulk of my professional life wrestling with that parrot, smacking it around, boxing with it, punching it in its beak, etc.  When I had the swine/pearls realization, my goal became clear: I'm going to muzzle that goddamn parrot for good.

Last week, I got a call for an audition for four small co-star roles on a new Lifetime show.  I prepped for the audition -- I did my source work, I did punctuation walks, I worked on moment before's, the whole nine yards.  But the main thing I did was I went in there with the intent of punching that parrot and knocking it to the floor.  If my movie is worth while, then by gum, so'm I.  I went in and read for the roles, and I ended up stumbling over one of the four lines.  The casting director asked me to do it again.  Collecting my thoughts, I let my eyes drift from focus, thought of my ugly-ass parrot on my shoulder, and then thought of the scene... really, what happened right before the scene starts.  And I opened my mouth and the words just came out. 

I got a callback two days later.

Needless to say, Operation Parrot Mute continued.  The callback went very well, punctuated by the fact that the 8 people in the room loved my headshot, handing it around the room so everyone could take a gander and compliment it.  And the next day?  I got one of the roles, and out of all of them, I got the best one, the one with the big punchline joke of a scene. That victory margarita with dinner that night tasted sooooo good.

The shoot went off well today.  I was in and out in 7 hours, which for those of you not in the business is really fast, even for a TV show. Sure, I did some battling with my parrot, as it never goes away, but I seem to be winning.  Putting my parrot -- my insecurities, my lazy qualities, my fears -- into my mental cross-hairs is seeming to pay off.  It'll take a continued effort and I can't guarantee that my War On Parrots won't be a long one... but I can tell you, it'll be AWESOME.