Jeez Jon: 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.