The documentary about me that was shown at the Muscatine Community College “Legends” dinner last week can be seen here. I think MCC’s video guru Chad Bishop (who also edited Mickey Spillane’s Encore for Murder) and college president Naomi DeWinter did an excellent job putting the half-hour program together. You can see it right here.

Meanwhile, Mickey Spillane’s Encore for Murder has been nominated for three Iowa Motion Picture Awards in the following categories: Best Feature, Best Director, Best Director of Photography. We are honored and Barb and I plan to attend the festivities in Forest City, Iowa, in May. Details are here.

I am not being falsely modest when I say I do not expect us to win in any of these categories, and that I’m quite pleased just to have been nominated. (This echoes my certainty that Quarry’s Blood is a shoo-out and that I was incredibly lucky just to be nominated.) We are up against some “real” movies, as opposed to our feature, which is a recorded play edited together from a live performance and two dress rehearsals, with our actors (in costume) holding scripts from which they read. The ubiquitous Chad Bishop is the (quite funny) on-stage foley artist. Encore is an odd duck, if entertaining, largely due to our guest lead actor, Gary Sandy.

Another indicator of the unlikelihood of any win is that we entered four categories, and the one we did not get nominated in is the one that to me is the most impressive: editing. I was with Chad in his editing suite throughout the process, and editing our little feature was a big job. We had four cameras going on three nights, and that means a lot of selecting of shots as well as looping in audio from one night into footage of another when a line was flubbed or inaudible.

I have found, over the years, that editing a feature seems to bewilder judges in film festivals, largely because these judges can’t appreciate invisible editing – so necessary in putting a narrative feature together – and go for flashy stuff right out of TV commercials. I recall Don Westlake saying, “Good writing is invisible,” though it’s the overwriting in our genre that gets the most attention, and that seems to parallel this situation.

Nonetheless, it’s an honor and even a relief to have Encore singled out in this way. As I’ve mentioned here before, it will be included as a bonus feature (a 90-minute bonus feature!) on the VCI release of Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane – the 75th Anniversary Edition.

We have a few more pictures to share from the Legends evening.

Here, once again, is where you can participate in bringing Blue Christmas to the screen. Kick in enough and you’re thanked on screen or become a credited producer or even executive producer on the film. Just what your CV lacks! We don’t have any perks listed (physical stuff) but that will likely come; if you have ideas about what kind of perks would spur you to participating, write me at macphilms@hotmail.com with suggestions.

We have had a few hearty (generous) souls donate to this project so far. Again, this is about raising enough money to provide some of the matching funds needed for the grant we’re going after. If we don’t get the grant, we will use the funds to do an even lower-budget production. I don’t relish that, but we did put both Real Time: Siege at Lucas Street Market and Eliot Ness: An Untouchable Life together for about fifteen grand each. That wouldn’t cover the craft service for one day on a Hollywood production, but with an indie film you have to will it into existence.

The plan A and plan B both involve shooting largely in studio conditions, mostly on one set (a private eye’s office in the wartime 1940s). This would likely have us bringing Gary Sandy back in a major role (Jake Marley). Plan B would be producing Blue Christmas as a play and shooting it much as we did Encore for Murder, but with much more meticulous pre-production planning.

(Encore was rather put together on the fly – when Gary came in three days before the performance and I saw that we “had something” I enlisted Phil Dingeldein with shooting the play. I saw an opportunity and took it. Recording it as a “film” was something we put together in under a week…not counting rigorous post-production editing, of course.)

Not sure how long the 99-cent e-book price on the collected John Sand novels (by Matt Clemens and me) will run, but check this out if you’re interested.

I do know that the “featured author” sale at VJ books is still under way.

This is a podcast about Road to Perdition, supposedly about the novelization; but I admit I couldn’t get through it. I’m nonetheless happy for the attention.

For those of you who have been putting off buying I, the Jury on Blu-ray because the package (which includes 4K and 3-D discs in addition to Blu-ray) seems overly expensive…it’s on sale right now at Classic Flix, at a much lower price ($24.98, virtually half price). Even if you don’t have either 4K or 3D capacity, the Blu-ray alone is worth that. This is a much underrated Mike Hammer film, a beautiful transfer of the great cinematographer John Alton’s moody noir. I do the commentary. They also have a DVD at $13.98.

I’m signing off early this week, to encourage those of you who like to spend time here to take that time to look at the nice documentary above.

M.A.C.