MLK Straycation

Westcott House, Springfield Ohio. I always had heard Frank Lloyd Wright was odd but I didn't realize he was truly wacky until I saw his work firsthand.

The Disco Ball Is Just Hanging By A Thread

I'd like to ring in 2010 by giving a quick shout-out to my pal, Cuban filmmaker Miguel Coyula.  Quite a few years ago now myself and some pals ran a site called Microcinema Scene which dealt with the emerging grassroots DV movement.  At that time we got probably 5 to 10 tapes and DVDs a week from all kinds of filmmakers from backyard horror directors to true auteurs.

But there was nothing quite like Red Cockroaches, a Shakespearean-sized sci-fi epic shot in NYC for $2,000 that looked like two million (with a priceless storyline too baroque to go into here). We realized then that we had found microcinema's first true rising star.

In 2004 I was a judge at Microcinema Fest in Rapid City, South Dakota, as well as taught video workshops at the Dahl Arts Center with Boston-area filmmaker Jason Santo. Santo connived to get Red Cockroaches screened at the Fest, which basically blew the face off of Mt. Rushmore and the minds of everyone in a several-mile radius. But I did Jason one better by conniving to share a dorm room with Miguel at National American University during the Fest.

Ah, how young and full of hope we were then; I was just getting going as a screenwriter in the direct-to-DVD market with Among Us hitting the shelves and Miguel had just finished his first major feature. And today, Miguel has a movie playing at Sundance and I...well, perhaps it's better to dwell on the success of friends.

Strangely, it has been almost ten years since I gave myself, on my 34th birthday, one year to break into screenwriting. And every year on my birthday I take stock and decide whether I want to keep going one more year.

In between, I was hired to write or re-write twenty screenplays: PLAYER IN THE GAME (Myriad Entertainment Group), MECHANIZER (Sterling Entertainment), AMONG US (Polonia Brothers Entertainment/Intercoast), BURNING GROUNDS OF THE UNDEAD (Polonia Brothers Entertainment/Intercoast), PETER ROTTENTAIL (Polonia Brothers Entertainment), RAZORTEETH (Polonia Brothers Entertainment), GIZZARD GUTS (Polonia Brothers Entertainment), DEMONS ON A DEAD END STREET (Polonia Brothers Entertainment), DEAD LAKE (for producer Bob Dennis), SEX MACHINE (Asphalt Planet), THE PAYBACK MAN (for producer Ivan Rogers), DEAD KNIGHT (Cine Excel), COWBOY (for producer Terrence Muncy), SPLINTERHEAD (Polonia Brothers Entertainment), PRIMAL (Sterling Entertainment), NEW JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH (Polonia Brothers Entertainment), MENTAL SCARS (for producer Richard Myles), and three scripts under nondisclosure.

Twenty screenplays in ten years has a nice ring to it, really.

You can buy or rent or see on TV or see at a film festival six of these (MENTAL SCARS just came out this December on DVD). They are on Amazon and Netflix and ebay and available in dollar bins on DVD double features.

One other came out without any of my rewrite. One I think is still stuck in post-production. Two started shooting but never finished. The rest...well, you just never know what might happen.

Somewhere in there I found time to write a few specs, including HANDS DOWN, ONIBOCHO THE DEMON KNIFE, RING OF THE SORCERESS, ROOK, and my modern dress/original prose adaptation of Shakespeare's TIMON OF ATHENS (yes, you read that right). Three of those five have had interest at one time or another, but nothing has really happened on them to date.

For aspiring screenwriters, that's right; nobody has ever bought one of my specs, which I mostly wrote for fun anyway.

I have been proud of everything that left my keyboard and I have never used a pseudonym, two things I promised myself I would hold to all those years ago.

Part of the reason I haven't blogged much lately is that on 2009's birthday I just flat didn't know what to do next.

I took a lot of 2009 off from freelancing. I had done it once before, for the entire year of 2006, when a lot of personal and professional changes warranted it. This year, I changed jobs again and thought I would take six months off, which more or less turned into a year when I turned down two mockbusting jobs knocking off TWILIGHT and 2012. The good thing is that every time I take some time off there are still people that want me when I come back.

Way back in 1999 I thought the direct-to-DVD market was going to blow up and need content in the same way that the rise of mom and pop video stores launched the VHS boom a decade or so before. So I was able to position myself to be there when that was needed.

When I started seeing the grassroots DV movement taking off, I was lucky to be able to turn it not only into freelance work but an actual job. But about a summer ago I declared that grassroots DV was dead and it was time to usher in the next incarnation if I could only figure out what that was.

I spent a lot of time looking into social media and certain interesting not only philosophical but technological trends, such as the idea of truly free information and entertainment (like via Creative Commons). Strangely, I worked so hard at it as a freelancer that I got myself another real job doing it and all of a sudden was talking to other people about it.

I am still thinking about what that next-gen model is and how I can get involved in it as a freelancer. If 2010 brings less talk about rubber-suited monsters and more on these philosophical subjects, I apologize in advance. It will take something special or of great interest to me to keep doing what I have been doing for the past ten years on the freelance front. But time will tell.

Give me a shout at johnoakdalton@hotmail.com.

Nerd Roadshow

Found by a friend's mom in the attic and given to said friend who was eager to just throw these relics of his childhood in the trash, rescued at the eleventh hour by yours truly. Yes, that's some 60s Silver Age Spider-Man, X-Men, Daredevil, Nick Fury Agent of Shield, Batman, Adventure Comics featuring the Legion of Super-Heroes and an admirable slice of Gold Key Turok, Doctor Solar, Magnus Robot Fighter and more. Not to mention all the stuff I didn't care to take a picture of, like old Harvey comics, Uncle Scrooge, and a ton of Archie comics.

52 Weeks, 52 Books

This was the second year in a row that I vowed to read 50 books in a single calendar year. Somehow I was able to squeeze in 52. In retrospect, I had several snowbound days and a handful of beach days that helped up the numbers a bit. I could have used a few more beach days and less snow days but all's well that ends well.

After swearing off at the end of 2008, I think I will go for a hat trick and try to read 50 books again in 2010. I am one of those people that have four or five books going at once and I don't see that slacking off any. I ended 2009 reading Assignment Treason by Edward S. Aarons, The Penultimate Truth by Philip K. Dick, House Dick by E. Howard Hunt, Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem and Tamar by Mal Peet (which hopefully will all give me a good head start on 2010).

In the meantime, here are my five favorite books that I read in 2009 and five honorable mentions. If I were to write this list again tomorrow, the top three would probably stay the same but everything else would undoubtedly be up for grabs.

Top Five Reads of 2009:

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson.

Lunar Park by Brett Easton Ellis.

The Murderer Vine by Shepard Rifkin.

Heart Shaped Box by Joe Hill.

An Evil Guest by Gene Wolfe.

Five more:

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami.

Babylon Babies by Maurice G. Dantec.

Citizen Vince by Jess Walter.

Missing by Karen Alvtegen.

Real World by Natsuo Kirino.

As always, happy reading.

A Long Winter's Nap

Yes, that's a Colts Snuggie, work with pride. Merry Christmas all!

Thanksgiving Season

The desperation of the night before Thanksgiving, the promise of the day to come.

Feels Like the Last Time

Haunted Disco, Farmland Indiana; photo snapped by my daughter on a tour of Ghost Sites of Randolph County last night.

Speeding Bullet

Odd photo my daughter snapped of me at a Halloween party last night at our house of my lame Superman costume. She thought it was a "just being a nerd" costume, which isn't a costume at all.

Don't Cross His Path

For Halloween, a black cat; Pluto, a stray we rescued and appropriately named after the Lord of the Underworld, in his favorite hangout "The Hobo Shack."

Dogs and Cats, Living Together

On Halloween, the laws of the Animal Kingdom are suspended.

They Were Dancing, And Singing

Birthday card given to me that blasts "Play That Funky Music, White Boy." Kids say this looks like a picture of me on cover.

The March of Time

Picture I found at my parents' house of me in 1971, taken on my birthday in 2009. Daughter laughing while taking photo.

All Creatures Great and Small

What Empty Nest Syndrome looks like. Getting ready to walk my one-year-old Westie with the help of a six-week-old stray kitten while my fifteen-year-old Tabby looks on sourly from off camera.

Find A Girl With Faraway Eyes

My contest for "The Girl Who Played With Fire" is finally over and a winner has been chosen. The contest has taken a bit longer than expected, now that I check in on my blog and see it's been a while since I posted. In my defense, the novel is a pretty chunky 500 page opus and I have been fairly busy (though I was trying to read it quickly as per the rules clearly outlined here).

The good news for our lucky winner is that my close friends at the Farmland Public Library got it to check out (probably for me; I have gone to this nice little library for 15 years and they are beginning to know what I might want to read, a plus for small-town living) so I decided to quit reading the copy from Knopf and finish the library's (though I think I am also the first one to read it as well).

Without further ado, the winner is Rue, and as soon as she emails me her address she will receive a nice copy of Stieg Larsson's latest that was only a little bit read. For sore losers, I have some odd little "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" tattoos that Knopf sent along and I will be glad to give one to any contestant that asks.

Thanks for playing! Until later I am at johnoakdalton@hotmail.com.

Got To Move To The Trick Of The Beat

I have read almost 200 pages of The Girl Who Played With Fire this week, so the contest is well underway (scroll down for details). Lots of good book ideas have been submitted via email and by posting below. As the contest ends when I am finished reading this book, and the book is about 500 pages, I figure you have another week or so to enter. I am trying not to read the prize while eating or sitting on the toilet for the contest's sake.

For those who can't believe I passed on going to GenCon, the world's premiere D&D event, to talk about social media at a conference will find photographic proof here and here as well as further evidence here. As a dude who got an electric typewriter to go to college in 1984, forsaking his manual one, I still have a lot to learn, but it was nice to be asked to talk and be amongst the young hipsters who will one day snatch my job from me and leave me broken on the side of the information superhighway.

Plenty going on; until later I am at johnoakdalton@hotmail.com.

The Long and Winding Road

Think b-movie screenwriting is easy, grasshopper? Several years ago I wrote a script I called "Hellshocked" about a group of WWII GIs forced to spend the night in a haunted church behind enemy lines. This was shot and put forth for distribution as "Black Mass." It was sold to the overseas market and did well in Japan as "The Da Vinci Curse" with footage from another already-completed film spliced in. That version came back to the U.S. as "Dead Knight" but didn't get much traction. Now that film has been cut with about 15% newly-shot footage (with another writer) featuring werewolves. Yet through it all my cameo getting machine-gunned straight up in the face has survived.

A Night with the Bums

A photo from my third stop on my quest to visit six ball parks this summer, breaking my old record of five, set a few years ago in a bout of Nerd Extreme Sports. Here I am at the Traverse City Beach Bums; a ballpark that looks like an outlet mall on the outside, but the baseball is plenty enjoyable inside. Last week I visited the Richmond RiverRats as my fourth stop at historic McBride Stadium. Strangely, the former Richmond team moved to Traverse City. Even stranger, at one park they yell "Go Bums!" and the other "Go Rats!"

Awake in the Heartland

I was sitting in the barber's chair reading TIME Magazine yesterday when I read this column from one of my film reviewer heroes, Richard Corliss, and for the first time felt compelled to write a Letter to the Editor.

Mr. Corliss,

I am a longtime fan of your work but take issue with your portrayal of Netflix in your recent article.

It is too easy to draw a parallel between the rise of Netflix and the fall of the local video store such as the one you mentioned in Manhattan. However that theory is contingent on the fact that you ever had that option to begin with.

I live in a town with the unlikely name of Farmland, Indiana, in which the closest video store is a Redbox at a McDonald's in a town ten minutes away and the closest Blockbuster is in the nearest city thirty minutes the other direction. There is also where you can find the closest movie theater (that you can't drive your car right up to the screen). I am fortunate to live on a road where the cable service runs past, connecting two towns, but many of my neighbors rely on spotty dish reception or digital rabbit ears.

Netflix is a godsend to me, a person who graduated with a film major in college (reading Film Comment voraciously at the college library), works peripherally in movies and film festivals, and yet lives in several square miles of cornfield. I am also a voracious reader and probably get a second strike for loving Amazon and my new Kindle. The proximity of a hip bookstore to my home does not bear discussion.

Those of us who live in the vast Flyover Country between our two coasts have learned to live without the instant gratification our metropolitan brethren yearn for but do still smart at those who take our cultural lifelines to task.

Me And The Girl Who Played With Fire

Not, as one might suspect, the title of my wife's autobiography but instead the new Stieg Larsson book, which astoundingly Knopf has entrusted me to give away on my blog; one of only 250 bloggers to snag one, so look sharp. Whether I might have been #249 is only speculative. Contest rules below.

Tattoo You

Every once in a while a plugola scandal wafts through the blogosphere--a blogola scandal, if you will--where somebody is blogging merrily along about how great a movie or gadget is and lo and behold it comes out that somebody might have given that something to said blogger for free, contingent of course on them blogging merrily about it.

I can promise that everything you read on here is my own two cents given freely, though loyal readers might suspect that there aren't a lot of people willing to give me freebies to blog about grassroots microcinema, obscure b-movies, old paperbacks, underground comics and zines, and the like. As Blogalicious once pointed out, I am prone to writing about "very weird and unpopular b-movies and comics"--many of which, as it happens, are my own.

That being said, I have been offered a DVD or two from time to time, though some Amazon and Netflix reviewers who have longed for my death--or at least a long incarceration in a b-movie Gitmo of some kind--might speculate that I would more likely be offered blogola to not mention their movie at all. Nonetheless I am glad to have stayed clear. The next time you see a horror or sci-fi movie getting talked about all of a sudden on all of your favorite genre blogs, you might stop and think about why. I'm just saying.

All this is a preface to the fact that Knopf emailed to ask me if I wanted to be one of only 250 bloggers to give away a free copy of The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson.

This is cool for a number of reasons. Loyal readers know I read and loved Stieg Larsson's first book, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and have pimped it mercilessly to the general reading public that I come across on the interwebs and in real life. I have nothing to gain professionally by sucking up to Stieg Larsson as Stieg Larsson is, unfortunately, dead and his books are being published posthumously.

I also liked that Knopf trusted me to give this book away and not ferret it under my pillow. Even though my name is going to be entered for a chance to win the third book for my very self to keep I have never done well in Vegas and am not holding out hope.

Even better, I get to come up with my own contest.

My first thought was that I would ask people to send in a picture of them holding a copy of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and then I would put their names in a hat and draw one at random. That wouldn't mean that they had read it, but I think they should know it exists before trying to mooch the second one off me (Knopf, actually). And I believe if they read a teensy bit they would probably get hooked like I did.

But my wife nixed that idea, saying she thought I would get a lot of weird or inappropriate photos. She was right; I had simply forgotten how many hot young things flock to my blog regularly to read about old D&D games I have played and what comics I like and what I thought about the new Star Trek movie.

So she suggested a wiser alternative. Send me a list of five good mystery/noir/thriller books. Don't send me your top five because I probably have already read them. In fact I read five pretty good books last week on vacation and can on average read four or five a month. If you happen to include a couple of Scandinavian thrillers in there I will write your name down twice as I am trying to find some more of those for myself. If you don't know what I'm talking about, here is a current list of good ones I have already read:

1. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson (natch).

2. The Redbreast by Jo Nesbo

3. Jar City by Arnaldur Indridason

4. The Princess of Burundi by Kjell Erickson

5. Missing by Karen Alvtegen

Yes, I know there is no Henning Mankel or Karin Fossum on this list, I haven't read their works yet and that's why I want a recommendation.

So. A list of five books. Make it worth reading or I throw your crap in the trash. Your name can go in the hat twice if you include Scandinavian authors. I will pull the name out at the end of the contest, which will be when my ass finishes reading the book for myself. Knopf didn't say I couldn't read it! So your book is slightly used by me. It's free, what do you want?

Send contest entries to johnoakdalton@hotmail.com. Good luck!

Bright Lights, Small City

Live from the Traverse City Film Festival. We stood for an hour in a standby line outside this cool theater and just slipped in for a midnight showing of the crazy Norwegian zombie flick "Dead Snow." A soon-to-be cult classic. Had the added benefit of seeing Michael Moore and Jeff Garlin hanging around outside.

She Rides A Crimson Shell

Last year, I visited the BlogIndiana Social Media Conference in Indianapolis and had my mind opened to the Next Big Thing. A long-time believer in microcinema and grassroots DV, I saw a new model coming that I would need to know about to keep my day job afloat (as well as my humble, fragile screenwriting career loyal readers come here to learn about) and wanted to sniff out more about it. Astoundingly, this year I will be speaking at BlogIndiana. Is my entry into these hallowed digital halls signalling the death knell of Web 2.0? Only time will tell.

I am getting dangerously hooked not only on my Kindle (just snagged some inexpensive Allan Guthrie noir) but www.paperbackswap.com, a magical place where you can get rid of modern trashy paperbacks you don't want any more and trade them for golden guilty pleasures like Samuel R. Delany and Day Keene. This site is a vast improvement over www.bookcrossing.com, in my opinion, which I often referred to as "Book Throwing Away Club."

The good news for me is that usually a big spate of reading forecasts the brain food for a long bout of writing, so stay tuned. Until later I am at johnoakdalton@hotmail.com.

The Teeth of a Hydra

My wife bought me a Kindle for Father's Day/birthday/maybe a piece of our anniversary and I would like to think it was out of undiluted love but it was more likely because I just own too many books. My recent obsession with replacing all of the Gold Medal paperbacks of my youth (and then some I hadn't heard of because ebay- and in fact the interwebs--had yet to be invented) has only magnified this issue. A dire threat was issued that we would need a new bookshelf to hold all of the books but I thought that was a helpful suggestion and went out and bought and built yet another bookshelf.

Thus a Kindle, which holds quite a few books itself and is smaller than the new bookshelf.

There are many of my reading brethren who are philosophically opposed to the Kindle because they like the look and feel of paper. These are, basically, the same people who pretend they don't read tabloids or watch reality television, and I once numbered myself among them.

But it is hard to pass up the convenience and ease and relative inexpense of downloads with the Kindle, and I found that I could actually read off of it pretty easily (as a person who does not like to read anything longer than a blog post on a computer screen). I soon had a new dark mistress.

The first book I downloaded was "Pygmy" by Chuck Palahniuk followed in quick succession by two Hard Case Crime novels, "House Dick" by E. Howard Hunt and "The Murderer Vine" by Shepard Rifkin. $20 of Father's Day money gone. I was happy to find Hard Case Crime on Kindle but was disappointed two books I was looking for--"The Savage Detectives" by Roberto Bolano and Denis Johnson's "Nobody Move"--were not yet available.

The Kindle people are diabolically clever by offering up all kinds of free downloads, mostly of classics but plenty of other stuff to get you hooked, like "Assassin's Apprentice" by Robin Hobb and "His Majesty's Dragon" by Naomi Novik, both of which I had already read and admired and both the beginning of addictive series. Joseph Finder's "Paranoia" is up there free, as is "Elric: The Stealer of Souls" by Michael Moorcock. I downloaded a couple of freebies that I probably wouldn't buy but might try for nothing, which I am sure was the plan, like "Manifold Time" by Stephen Baxter and "Blood Engines" by T.A. Pratt and "Weapons of Choice" by John Birmingham. Then, while nosing around, I broke down and spent a few thin dollars on "To Kiss or Kill" by Day Keene and "Leaves of Grass" by some dude.

Suffice to say I am ready for my beach vacation in a few weeks. Give me a shout at johnoakdalton@hotmail.com.

The Imaginary Blonde

Longtime readers know about my fascination with the detritus of a misspent youth; 70s comics, Gold Medal paperbacks, late-night creature features, musical one-hit wonders, and the like. Those who, like me, peruse the dustbins of history for forgotten lore know that it is not so much the acquisition as the hunt.

For instance, recently I went to a party at a friend's and came across a box of comics his mother had chucked out of the attic and told him to get rid of. He hadn't gotten around to throwing it away yet and I peeked in out of curiosity and found a whole slew of 60s-era Marvel Comics with single- and double-digit numbering and titles like Uncanny X-Men and Daredevil and The Amazing Spider-Man. Yes, the little voice in my head told me to casually offer him $20 to take the box off his hands but I couldn't do it.

Even more recently I was visiting a little antique store my wife had dragged me into and I happened across a stack of old magazines. The old man running the shop told me a 99-year-old man had recently passed away and the proprietor had been given the opportunity to sort through his junk and see if anything was worth saving.

My eyes landed on Manhunt Detective Story Monthly #1, January 1953, with stories by Mickey Spillane, William Irish, Kenneth Millar, Richard S. Prather, and Evan Hunter, among others. If you do not recognize these names, please leave this blog immediately and go to Google, then come back when you are educated, grasshopper. Right behind this one was issues 2, 4, and 9, featuring Richard Deming and David Goodis and Ross Macdonald (as I said, Google).

All for a thin dollar each. The proprietor must have seen my bad pokerface because he hesitated to sell them at the eleventh hour, but without making a quick trip to ebay couldn't figure out how not to sell these to me.

Later I checked out ebay myself, and suffice to say could make back my $4 rather easily. But these are made for reading myself, looking at the covers and thinking about that quickening of the pulse when I saw them on the dusty shelf.

I'll be out nosing around, but can be found at johnoakdalton@hotmail.com.

The Down Side of Up

Cinema Minima, a film site I have a lot of respect for in the independent/grassroots film world, recently remarked on a slow news day "Not 'Hollywood Independent'--writer John Oak Dalton is the real thing." Let this humbling statement not proceed the death knell of American Cinema.

Despite this great affirmation, like the stoic (which unkind reviewers might refer to as wooden) star of "Drag Me To Hell," I have started to wonder if I am under some sort of gypsy curse.

Both of my cars died within four weeks of each other, leaving my wife and I stranded in different cities. I cut through the ball of my thumb again while slicing a bagel. The garden hose on the outside wall leaked into the house and I came home and found the plumbers had to cut a big hole in our kitchen wall. We hiked around, as is our tradition, on Father's Day and saw a big timber rattlesnake sunning itself on the trail. Though we did not see it was a timber rattlesnake until we looked on the interwebs, which we did because when my wife (who believed it was a grass snake) poked it gently with a stick and said "Go away, honey," it rattled at her.

I do have to admit I watched "The Seventh Seal" again the other night and maybe that's where it all started. You watch a dude play chess with Death and you sort of have to take what comes. But with its eye-popping black-and-white cinematography, clear-eyed scripting, and a hard-assed performance by Max von Sydow, it is worth it. The down side is that you remember that most everything made today is disgraceful crap in comparison.

Even though I love this movie, I still love "The Bicycle Thief" more and wish I could make a movie like "Alphaville." If you have not seen these three greats, shut off the internet, set aside your Will Ferrell movie marathon, and get to work. Then come back when you get it done.

Until later I am at johnoakdalton@hotmail.com.