Copyright

10-26-2009

Copyright are for copycats but we all copy ideas so how much can we call our own?

Copyleft

07-25-1958

Can I copyright my own life and does that copyright start at the date of my own birth or before?
Does my mother own my copyright before I'm born?

Copysoul

11-09-1957

Copyright in the USA is the life of the artist plus 50 years. Does that count for both ends of the artist life? Does that count for the spark of life? I want to know just in case I build a time machine.

Dream Streams, LLC

I thought this company was dead as Richard Hirsch the co-owner moved to Wyoming from Missouri. Thanks Richard for giving me your half of the company.

Good and Bad Marketing

Last week I went to two independent movies.

The first movie I saw was 'My Stepdad's A Freaking Vampire!' on September 17th at the Glenwood Arts Theatre. I thought the movie was a good first effort in the comedy horror gene for Director David Matheny but what impressed me most was his wonderful marketing.

A great movie poster with original art making the poster catch your eye.

The two disc DVD was fantastic in cover art and the product.

More to come....

Taste and Smell

Yesterday for about three hours I lost my sense of taste. I'm use to losing my sense of smell but I don't remember losing my sense of taste before.

I have no clue to the meaning of this.

For the last two weeks I have been focused on writing a contract and putting together a movie company. I have had intense headaches and daily nosebleeds. It feels like my brain is rewiring to make me better at things I'm weak in. I'm more focused with deadlines now.

I guess as I push myself to think in a different way, my brain shuts down other areas of my mind.

Begging for Billionaires and the Impossible Timing

Why do things keep happening to me that seem impossible?

I wasn't told that the movie I worked on for years was going to be playing in the Kansas City Area.

I didn't read the newspaper or was even told it would play once at 5:30 that Saturday.

I was in the area buying a firewire for my camera that I didn't need. I thought to myself;
"I've just wasted a lot of time and gas on a long trip for no reason."

I had went to the movie My Stepdad's a Freaking Vampire that Thursday at the 9th Kansas Film Festival and somebody had told me that a trailer of Begging for Billionaires was shown at one of the theaters in town. So I thought Phillip Klein the Producer and my one time friend had found a distributor and in a few months I might get to see the movie.

So I'm getting ready to go home from Micro Center and I drive by the Glenwood Arts movie theater. I think why not? I might know someone who made a movie that's showing.

I drive up to the theater and park. I meet someone hawking movie fliers for some freedom of speech radio movie. (Broadcast Blues)

"Do you like documentaries?"

"Yeah, I gave a few years of my life to one called Begging for Billionaires."

"Hey, that's playing next."

"You're kidding."

"No, for real go check it out."

I go in and buy a ticket. Ouch, I think to my self. My family lost thousands of dollars because of this movie and I have to pay to get in. I walk to the theater and I think about the death threats and the lung infection I had for three year after I video taped the destruction of old down KC.
I sat down and the title I came up with appeared on the screen.

I think about being chased across Kansas City by union thugs and how they tried to flip my van over with a pickup and a SUV. Then I start seeing my video and hearing my sound and I smile.

People laugh at some my footage, a small chuckle here and there. My work on the movie is more than talking heads and I think what a waste of my talent.

The movie I wanted to make is gone and a good movie is in it's place but not the great movie it could have been. My best interview is in the movie and in the final moments of the movie as a joke on me I guess, is my voice asking the wrong man about Eminent Domain. That was my worst interview.

So in this one movie you find the best and the worst of me trying to capture reality.

I enjoyed seeing my son's name on the big screen and I'm glad my name was missing.

Other than coming up with the title my greatest gift to the movie was talking Phillip into going to press conference in City Hall while he had a lawsuit against the Mayor of Kansas City.
Phillips pointed question to the mayor and her stuck up answer was the real ending to the movie.

The movie about Union Station Kansas City and the Hall connection is gone. Phillip owns that video and won't even give me back the footage of Union Station I shot from a plane two weeks before 9-11 2001. He said he would give me back that footage when I took my name off the movie but it never happened.

Something has happened to Phillip, he scared to talk about one Bully Billionaire who begs for money all the time.

The lights come up and Phillips see me and looks nervous. Both Phillip and I have learning disabilities and worst yet we are both emotional cripples. He can act very rational and then go into long vulgar rants. I become angry without warning. Two guys with learning disabilities shouldn't make a movie together.

Phillip starts to take a question from me and then invites me up front to talk about the movie.
I'm not angry, I'm happy and talk about all the stuff that happened to me in the years I worked on the movie. One man in the audience calls me a lair in so many words because I name two of the unions that chased me across town. I straighten his facts out and hand the microphone back to Phillip.

More to come... Read this one fast Blogger might pull it down.

I see this post is still up. I guess I'm still a little paranoid about Blogger censoring some of my posts on this blog. I was going to write more about this movie but I no longer feel the need to.
I think I was in the right place at the right time to help me bring a peace to my soul to the living nightmare that was the making of this movie.

I hope the movie does some good.

Trying to be fair

What is fair? I'm writing a contract for a movie project where I am the producer and I'm trying to be fair to the writer and myself but I'm not sure what is fair. I'm not going to tell you any of the details of this contract but I am going to write about how I'm trying to find a balance between my own needs as a producer and the needs of the writer that I'm hiring.

I am still in the middle writing this contact. More to come....

The contract is finished and it was far from perfect but I did the best I could in the time I had.
I believe I was fair as I could be. I don't know if the pay was fair. I don't have the money to pay more and I think the writer knows that.

Now I must cast the actors for a script reading.

Rose Pearl Painting

Rose Pearl is a creature of my imagination inspired by a comment on this blog from my fine blogger friend Joan Cook. Joan has sent me her painting in our painting exchange but I have been a real slacker on this oil painting. Okay I've been working on a few other projects.

Rose Pearl is the R2D2 of my novels I'm working on and Joan gets the first painting of this creature of the Id. This is the second layer of oil paint with 14 more layers of paint to come.

The Girl in the Photo

I finally learned how to post a photo on this computer. Simple really.

My Grand Daughter at her birthday party. She laughs at me as I play with my new video camera.

This post isn't about her party but about a half forgotten vision of a girl in a fountain.

A vision of a girl with blond hair and blue eyes that falls through the grid of a fountain meant for child's play but was in truth a death trap for children. I knew that and tried to get the fountain fixed when I worked at a science museum and historical landmark.

I just mixed a vision with reality but that has been my life. I ask myself if I'm insane everyday since 1975 when infinity flinched for me.

I did everything I could to fix that fountain but the man that ran my department was an evil fool that didn't understand the basic problem with the fountain and did a cosmetic fix over the grid that did nothing to improve the safety of the fountain. Two children fell through the grid and both were taken to a nearby hospital.

I knew what the problem was in the design of the million dollar fountain. A plastic grid was covered with rubber mats but that plastic grid was held in place by two lose plastic cubes that moved around in the wet overflow basin .

When anyone walked up to the fountain the streams of water blocking the entrance to the interior shut off. You then could walk into the fountain and the water streams would begin again.

A infrared beam would trip a timer to shut the fountain off but children and many adults would think it was some kind of pressure switch. People would jump up and down on the fountain floor until those lose blocks fell off a ledge causing the floor to fall into the overflow basin.

I tried to fix the problem by cutting a long piece of thick plastic to wedge in the basin but couldn't cut it on the shop table saw because the plastic was to thick. I begged my boss to let me take it to a shop with a water saw to cut it but I was told no because of the high cost of doing anything outside the museum shop.

Then I was let go from the museum and it wasn't my problem anymore or so I thought.

I began to have visions and dreams of a little curly haired blond, blue eyed little girl of two or three falling through the fountain grid and dying. In my dreams and visions of this I was told only I could stop this future. I believed this future and took on the most rich and powerful people in my part of the world to make this vision go away.

The movie Begging for Billionaires came into being because of these visions. I was black listed because of these visions. The fountain was removed because of these visions.

I can't prove any of this but I believe with all my heart this is true.

A few weeks ago I was looking at photos of my grand daughter when I saw that the girl in the photo and the girl of my visions were the same. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up and I became lite headed and had to sit down.

I don't believe my grand daughter would have fell through the fountain grid and died if I hadn't done the things I did to force the removal of that fountain. I do believe someones grand daughter would have died and they love that little girl as much as I do my little girl.

I'm sure the powers that be in my little corner of the world would tell a different story about the removal of that fountain but they didn't have hundreds of dreams and visions of a little girl falling into the death trap that was that fountain.

The Two Million Dollar Dream

I'm going to pitch a movie with a two million dollar budget. I've been thinking about writing this movie for many years. I'm in the process of writing it now. I have found a wonderful location for the movie. I know an actor that would be perfect for the lead.

Can I pull this off? Yes I have no doubt the movie is a real possibility. The story is solid and I know I can direct it. All indie movies compete with Hollywood and without a good budget for the basics of production most movies don't have a chance at the box office.

Of course I wouldn't own the movie.

The Hardest Script

I just finished the first draft of a script called 'Paralyzed in Paradise'. This script is based on a short story I wrote for this blog called 'The Frankenstein Effect' in a May 2009 post.

I have written feature length movies that took years that were easier than writing this script.

The story is based on the lowest point in my life and how my imagination allowed me to do the impossible. I was in a metal ward and overdosed with enough drugs to kill me when I became more than just the possible. I no longer have fear of the impossible and know I was given the greatest of all tools bound in my soul. I was given the gift of an endless imagination.

In truth it is a gift we all have but forget how valuable it is. Imagination is worth more than all the riches of this world. I faced my worst fear in that metal ward and found the glory in never giving up no matter how impossible the odds are.

My friend Desiree Nordlund of the blog Me A Writer Of Movie Scripts is doing a rewrite of the script. Soon I will send her a contract by snail mail to her home in Sweden and my movie making will become international when she signs the contract and returns it to me.

I will direct a movie made from this script so others can do the impossible in their lives.

Ghosts in a Skyscraper

Ghosts in a Skyscraper was a feature length movie script that I began writing two weeks before 9-11-2001. I became obsessed with planes, cell phones and skyscrapers.

More to come...

Hitler and Grandfather English

I 'm working on a graphic novel about war and how it in all its forms effects a family over many generations.

My Grandfather English is part of this story. A mix of fiction and real life stories (As most of my writing is) this tale at it's midpoint is about two men in World War One.

Both my Grandfather and Hitler were Runners in the first world war.

My Grandfather loved the land and being a farmer was his only dream.

Hitler was a failed artist that twisted politics into his own brand of hell.

My Grandfather was the last man to return home from Germany to his home of Sweet Springs Missouri. He was the only veteran returning from that war that didn't have a band playing for him at the train station.

My Grandfather died in a little house in Kingsville Missouri in 1959. That day he relived every battle of World War One that he had been part of. My mother was alone with him when he took his final breath. I was the only other person in the house. I was a little boy learning to walk with a baby bottle in my mouth.

Hitler wanted the world but my Grandfather English had five grandchildren and seven Great Grandchildren in the web of human life. In the River of Time power is the cowards path.

Living for your family and the power of nature is always the better path.

All through the war my Grandfather carried a pistol but he never fired it. He never killed anyone in that war. When he was issued the gun by the the army he was to test fire it. For what ever reason he didn't get around to test firing the gun until the day he returned it to the army after the war was over.

The gun wouldn't fire. The gun was defective. Through seven battles of world war one my Grandfather English carried a gun that wouldn't fire.

Peace

So how do you stop war? How many people does it take to make a war?
Are there quiet wars? How do you win a peace?

Anger is a waste of energy. I fought a small war once. No one was killed but a lot of people lost their jobs. A few death treats and one long chase. I was angry for three years. What a waste of energy. A war of video tape, lies and hidden truths.

Wars beyond political fights are whole sale murder. How do we stop this dance of mass murder?

I wish I had just one answer.

This and That

I still haven't figured out how to post photos or movies with my new computer.

I have a movie of my Grand Daughter's Birthday but I haven't learned how to get it out of my camera yet.

I'm writing a short movie about the lowest point in my life. Strange as it may be, it's playing like a comedy with tragic under tones.

I'm rewriting my novel based on my first 20 years of life and imagination.

I'm trying to put together a movie company.

I'm trying to finish Joan Cooks painting I need to send her.

Oh and one last thing. I'm making the most complex graphic novel ever made.

I'm so glad I cut back on my projects as I use to have about 30 big projects going at any one time:)