Wendago

Natalie has moved out. Mel has moved back to Nashville to spend some time with her mom. Not sure when she’ll be back. Should have known the three of us would self destruct again.

We’re spending the night with the Lorey’s to bring in the new year. I’m sure we’ll hot tub and we might play a little Texas Hold’em.
Mel and I are fighting like cats and dogs so it might be nice to take a break.

We did Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve. I’m not Catholic but I enjoyed it. Natalie spent the night and we shared Christmas morning together. We had more gifts under the tree this year than any year before. I can remember the old days when Mel and I would go to Wal-Mart on Christmas Eve, we’d split up with twenty bucks each and buy tiny trinkets to give each other the following morning.
This year I got the greatest gift ever. Mel ordered me a top of the line Alienware. It is a monster. 3.2 pentium IV with 2 gigs of mem and a 500 gig 10,000 rmp harddrive. It’s purple and green and glows red on the inside. Can’t wait for it to get here.
On the work front nothing has changed. Hollywood shuts down during the holidays and this year is no different. Patrick is still on Cursed but he got a gig directing a horror flick called “Potter’s Field”. Pretty interesting story. But now comes the tough part…they have to pull the money together. If it goes forward he says he’ll cast me in some role and maybe even the lead baddie. I’ll have to buff up for that though.
Dean’s still on “My Wife and Kids” and seems to enjoy it. They’ve been on 4 day weeks which is pretty great for series TV. He and Damon wrote a couple of scripts this year too. One for MGM and a flick based on “Homey the Clown”.
Mark Haslett (he worked for Cunningham and we wrote “Western Front” together) has got the rights to “Last House on the Left” from Sean and has written a pretty decent script for it. He’s got a producer and wants to direct it as an independent film.
Sarah’s still moving forward on her Indy flick, “Tyranny” in which she plays the lead. It could be the break she’s looking for.
All in all it’s been a decent year…cept it has offically been a year since I had a gig. Be nice to get another. It’ll happen next year.

Called the Guild today. I got checks for the first and second quarters and today was the three month and three week deadline if I was going to get a check for third quarter. The Guild informed me that it was not uncommon for a studio to skip a quarter when paying out residuals. How nice that they have that option. I wonder if I could do with with my electric bill?
Tomorrow night we’re Returning to the King with Natalie and Jake. You can never go to Mordor too much. Great movie. Can’t wait to see it again.

We pitched Jennifer Klein and her staff yesterday and eh…it went bad from the moment we entered the room. Jennifer felt pressured into taking the meeting before Christmas and had passed before we even got there. We, of course, told a great story and they admitted it was a great story but the budget issue came up and our agents had the pass before we even got downstairs.
Today was Beth Babyak at Morgan Creek and again everyone knew Patrick and everyone loved Stuart. But they loved the pitch and for the first time no one mentioned the underwater stuff. Of course, that threw us off. We’ve heard it so often to not have it mentioned made us wonder if they were aware that it would actually be a challenge. A challenge that certainly has fixes but not mentioning it was a worry.
So far we have heard back from everyone we’ve pitched except for Glenn Williamson. All passes. I’m assuming Glenn will pass as well. But we hit the big guns after Christmas. Dreamwork, Bruckheimer, Cameron. It’s not over yet.