Posts Tagged ‘Quarry’

Spirit of Seventy-Six

Tuesday, March 5th, 2024

The Muscatine premiere of Blue Christmas on March 16 is already about half sold-out, so if you want to attend, getting tickets now is not a bad idea. It’s reserved seating, which is another factor.

Advance ticket sales are available here.

Blue Christmas Horizontal Poster
* * *

Here’s a nice article about Blue Christmas and its upcoming Muscatine premiere.

Fridley Theatres to hold red carpet premiere
for local indie film on March 16

A red-carpet premiere is coming to Muscatine for a local indie production.

This month, on Saturday, March 16, the Palms 10 Theatre in Muscatine will be holding a premiere for Blue Christmas. The red-carpet event will begin at 6 p.m. with the movie starting at 7 p.m. A Q&A will be held with the film’s cast and crew afterwards.

Taking place on Christmas Eve, 1942, in Chicago, Blue Christmas focuses on a private eye named Richard Stone, who is visited by the ghost of his late partner on the 1-year anniversary of his murder. Through the guidance of three visiting spirits, Stone is forced to visit his past, present and future to finally find his partner’s killer, as well as redemption for himself.

The film was written and directed by Muscatine novelist Max Allan Collins and stars Iowa actor Rob Merritt; Alisabeth Von Presley, who some may recognize from her time on America’s Got Talent; and Chris Causey. Chad Bishop helped produce and edit the film while Phillip W. Dingeldein served as the director of photography.

Collins described the film’s story as a mash-up of The Maltese Falcon and A Christmas Carol.

“They’re two of my favorite movies and two of my favorite novels, and I just saw a way to kind of do them both at the same time… So the material will be familiar to people, and it’s material that really resonates with people because it’s about a person who becomes better by the end of the story,” he said.

Although Collins is best known for his books and comics, this is far from the only time that he has worked in film. Throughout the ’90s and early 2000s, Collins had the opportunity to work on several independent film productions. After he was unable to get a sequel to the film adaptation of Road to Perdition, however, Collins shifted focus back towards his writing and left the film scene.

Then, in 2022, during the production of Encore for Murder, a Mike Hammer radio play that was performed live before then receiving a video recording, Collins was inspired to try doing film again, he said.

“(Encore for Murder) got me thinking about getting back into doing an indie film after about a decade and a half away from doing them,” he said. “I really do enjoy doing films because I enjoy the collaborative nature of it. Being able to bring talented people together is very rewarding, and it’s very different from the sort of solitary endeavor that writing a novel is.”

Reflecting on the production, which was filmed in October 2023 over the course of only six days, Collins had much praise to give the film’s cast and crew. He also thanked Naomi DeWinter and Muscatine Community College for its support in letting the production use its Black Box Theatre for nearly all of its filming.

“It was very much a Muscatine/Quad Cities affair,” Collins said. “I’m really proud of what we were able to do with it – and, boy, does it look good on the big screen.”

Tickets can be purchased on the Fridley Theatres website at https://www.fridleytheatres.com/movie/Muscatine-Palms10/BLUE-CHRISTMAS#.

For those who are unable to make it to these one-time showings, Collins said Fridley Theatres, the chain that owns Muscatine Palms 10, has shown interest in showing the film at each of its Iowa and Nebraska theatres during the 2024 holiday season.

“That’s something we’re really excited about,” Collins said.

You can read the article with photos here, at least for the present.

* * *

Our Cedar Rapids premiere (with Cedar Rapids-area stars Rob Merritt and Alisabeth Von Presley present, as well as me and Chad and various cast members) will be March 13. The house is already half sold out. Tickets can be ordered here.

Our final premiere will be at the Last Picture House in Davenport, thanks to our friends Beck and Woods (creators of A Quiet Place). Here’s where you can buy advance tickets for the Friday, March 22, event.

We are also an official selection in the Cedar Rapids Independent Film Festival, with a 9 a.m. screening and a 1:05 p.m. screening on April 6. Barb and I will be attending the latter screening.

* * *

For any birthday past 70, my late grandfather Ray Rushing used to answer questions about his age this way: “Over seventy, damnit!”

I know the feeling.

On March 3, yesterday as I write this, I turned 76 and the only thing that’s good about is that I’m not dead. There’s so much left to do and I’m going to try to do it. As Barb says, “Just keep on keepin’ on.”

That may explain why I did Blue Christmas at this ripe old age and have another indie film on the docket for later this year. More about that later. For now I have on my plate a final Heller, more Antiques novels with Barb (we were just offered a two-book contract from Severn), the final Mike Hammer novel for Titan, and a very exciting project that I’ve pitched (apparently successfully, but it’s early days) that I won’t be able to share with you until it’s signed, sealed and delivered. This year’s Quarry novel (Quarry’s Blood) may be the last, as well. Kind of feels like I’m wrapping things up, but there’s still a lot going on – one last indie movie after Blue Christmas, for example. And a Nate Heller series adapting True Detective (True Noir: The Nathan Heller Casebooks) and perhaps other of the novels as fully produced multi-part podcast. This involves my pals Robert Meyer Burnett, Mike Bawden and Phil Dingeldein.

My health seems to be relatively good, though I have a bad day now and then (one was on my birthday itself) that indicates I have to pace myself better if I want to stick around for a few more years.

On my birthday we went to Dune Part Two and I really didn’t care for it. Neither did Barb. Son Nathan, a science fiction fan, liked it more but termed it “slow and unpleasant.” We had all liked Part One, and the advanced praise for Part Two from a bunch of people whose opinions I trust make me question my own judgment. I found the film tedious in the desert sequences and over-the-top in the bad guy portions with two risible villains – the usually reliable Stellan Skarsgård (the Broker in the Quarry pilot!) and least-scary-sociopath-ever, Elvis actor Austin Butler, as well as Christopher Walken as the evil emperor or something, a particularly misguided choice.

Dune Part Two

But Barb and I seem to be alone on this. The best I can say for it is that the lead, Timothée Chalamet, did a creditable job. Best supporting players? The giant worms.

I love science fiction and fantasy movies and TV, particularly Star Trek (I am a stubborn Star Trek The Motion Picture apologist) and the first two Star Wars films, and Forbidden Planet and Outer Limits and on and on. But I’ve always found s-f novels, most of them anyway, clunky with prose worthy of the side of a paint can (Ray Bradbury and Richard Matheson excluded). I truly believe this to be my problem, because too many smart people love the stuff, and I was a shit science student. But man I love me some Kirk and Spock and Bones.

Here’s the thing. Feel free to love Dune Part Two. Too many smart people like it for me to be right about this for anybody but myself. The narrative arts (actually a lot of art in general) is the receptor plus the deliverer. Novels and short stories, and movies too, are inherently collaborative – the audience member plus the artist. I like to say, when somebody dislikes a book of mine, fair dinkum (as the Aussies put it) – sometimes I present my shows on Broadway, other times at the Podunk Playhouse.

In other words, your mileage may vary.

Certainly people who dislike my work are not wrong (though I prefer to think of them as misguided). I get complaints from readers (and reviewers) who think I go into too much detail about clothing and setting, when my approach is otherwise fairly spare. It confuses some readers and irritates others.

My frequent collaborator Matt Clemens always says something to the effect of, “Max doesn’t like to have his characters run around naked, unless they’re naked.”

Ironically, this has to do with my twin enthusiasms for prose fiction and motion pictures. From a very, very, I might say VERY, early age I sought out the books (prose novels and comic books) that movies I liked had been based upon. And I would admit, if pressed (and you’re pressing me now, aren’t you?), that the works I most admire tend to be movies. I probably like Chinatown better than Hammett and Chandler, and boy do I like Hammett and Chandler. I probably like the film Kiss Me Deadly more than Mickey’s actual Mike Hammer novels (maybe excluding One Lonely Night, Spillane at his most vivid and crazed).

So on some level I am trying to make prose fiction that plays like a movie in your mind. I may or may not be successful at that, but that’s the attempt, anyway.

Going back to Dune Part Two, the smartest response I’ve seen to it comes from people who love Frank Herbert’s novel and find the film a sort of visual adjunct to that work as opposed to a cinematic version of it.

But what do I know? If I tell you I liked the David Lynch Dune much more, would you have me locked up? Maybe in the cubicle next to David Lynch?

M.A.C.

Tickets on Sale, Spillane Bargain, and a Novel Out the Door

Tuesday, January 30th, 2024

Advance tickets are on sale for the World Premiere of Blue Christmas in Des Moines at the Fleur Theater on February 24. Buy them here.

Advance tickets are on sale for the Muscatine premiere of Blue Christmas at the Palms theater on March 16. Buy them here.

When I have a ticket link for the Cedar Rapids Premiere at the Collins Road Theatre on March 13, I will post it.

When I have a ticket link for the Quad Cities Premiere at the Last Picture House on March 22, I will post it.

* * *
Spillane: King of Pulp Fiction Audiobook cover

The Edgar-nominated Spillane – King of Pulp Fiction by Jim Traylor and me is on sale at Barnes & Noble for an astonishing $13.47. That’s literally half price for a new hardcover copy. Not sure how long this price will last, so I’d suggest striking while the iron is hot. [The Nate Heller novel The Big Bundle is also 50% off! — Nate]

Pictured here is the audio edition. It, and the e-book edition, are priced higher than the hardcover (at the moment).

For those of you wondering if I’m planning to attend the Edgar Awards event, that’s as yet undecided. I have expressed here my feeling that there remains enough anti-Spillane sentiment to make a win difficult. Also, the other nominees include books on Poe and Ellroy, the first the author the award is named after (!), the second a highly celebrated author in the hardboiled field.

The other factor is that Blue Christmas has been entered in the Iowa Motion Picture Association awards and I am waiting to see how we fare there. As a three-time former president of that organization – and with a new film I’ve written and directed utilizing Iowa talent (and Iowa money), my first indie offering since 2006 – I have a responsibility to consider that event (which takes place in the same time frame as the Edgars) instead. I can only be in one place at a time.

A further factor is that a New York trip would cost me about what I was paid as an advance for Too Many Bullets. Add to this a trip from Muscatine to Manhattan and the air travel (and taxi rides) it would entail would be difficult for me at this age and with my health issues.

Again, a decision has yet to be made.

I will say that in the unlikely event that Spillane wins, it would be an honor second only to being named an MWA Grand Master, an award I treasure.

* * *
Antiques Foe cover

This morning Barb and I shipped Antiques Slay Belles to Severn, our publisher (based in the UK).

Getting a novel out is a harrowing job. The writing itself was concluded last Thursday. We essentially took Friday off, then dug in for a long weekend of assembling the manuscript.

That’s always tricky. Both Barb and I write in WordPerfect, so a conversion to the more accepted Word is necessary. We also create a file for each chapter as we go. The first stage of prepping the completed manuscript for the publisher is to assemble the chapters into a single file, a task I take on. The next stage is for me to read the hard copy we’ve created and for Barb to enter the corrections and to consider the tweaks I’ve made (sometimes she disagrees with them, and we discuss, and usually she’s right). Usually I get about 100 pages done and Barb begins her process of entering the corrections/tweaks while I press ahead. This is a job (on a 60,000-word manuscript like Antiques Slay Belles) that usually takes two full work days.

Occasionally I discover something that got past both of us and that requires a rewrite. That happened this time, and a considerable slice of the first chapter had to be reworked. This takes considerable poise to deal with in a cool-headed manner, and of course we both ran around with our hair on fire for a while before figuring out how to fix the problem.

Another issue is the conversion itself. We frequently discover page-numbering problems, and working in one word processing program that requires a change into another word processing problem has, as they say, issues. I do a certain of amount of work in Word and so does Barb, but for fiction writing, we both much prefer WordPerfect and we pay for that preference at this last stage of the process.

I handle the actual conversion, and I go through page by page looking for conversion problems, but I inevitably miss a few. Still, I think we send in a very clean manuscript. About the only thing I like about the conversion process is that Word gives the entire manuscript a fresh spell- and grammar-check, and I’m able to address some goofs we made that we hadn’t previously caught.

Last step is simply to send it to our editor with an attachment of the manuscript.

Now we sit back and wait for the editorial response. Usually this comes quickly, but a problem I have that some writers do not is that I almost immediately move on to my next project. And by the time I get the editorial notes, asking this and that (about plot in particular), the novel in question is less than fresh in my mind.

Not complaining. All of this is part of the process. But I am guessing this aspect of getting a novel written (and delivered) is off the radar of most readers. And that’s not a criticism. You have a right to not care (or not seek knowledge of) how the sausage is made.

Just in case you are interested, though, I thought I’d share this vital but little discussed aspect of the creation of a manuscript by fulltime professional writers.

* * *

Later this week I am joining Heath Holland on a taping his Cereal at Midnight podcast for what may become a regular (once a month?) exercise in discussing Blu-rays and 4K’s. We are starting with the latest Kino Lorber boxed set of western films.

Heath has been slicing up my two-hour (yikes!) career interview with him into bite-size portions. Here’s me on the relationship between Quarry and Audie Murphy.

M.A.C.

Back in Business

Tuesday, January 9th, 2024

Somehow it’s the first week of 2024 and it seems to be business as usual around M.A.C. Productions. Which means we are busy but there’s nothing “usual” about it. But it’s all good news, and good problems, so despite the Buck Rogers sound of the date on my calendar, I am rarin’ to go.

First news to share is that we have lined up four Iowa premieres for Blue Christmas in February and March.

We will have the World Premiere in Des Moines at the Fleur Theatre on Saturday, February 24. The Fleur is a terrific venue. They have a quote from me on the wall! We had a big Road to Perdition event there on the film’s release, and a few years ago I introduced (and spoke after) a screening of Kiss Me Deadly.

Our Cedar Rapids Premiere will be Wednesday March 13 at the Collins Road Theater. Another great venue, Collins Road Theater (love that name) is very supportive of independent film, hosting the Cedar Rapids Film Festival.

(We are entered in the fest and, if selected, there will likely be another Collins Road screening of Blue Christmas on the weekend of the fest, April 5 – 7.)

We will have our hometown Premiere at the beautiful Palms 10 Theater here in Muscatine on Saturday, March 16. It’s a treat and a privilege to have our film made available to our friends and family so close to home. We’ll go the Red Carpet route and everything.

On Saturday March 22, the Quad Cities Premiere will be held at the Last Picture House in Davenport. This is the brand spanking new theater that is the brainchild of the Quiet Place//65 filmmakers (local boys!), Scott Beck and Bryan Woods. Their support of their home-state filmmakers is much appreciated.

We – Chad Bishop, Phil Dingeldein and I (the executive producers of Blue Christmas) – are very grateful to the various managers of these theaters for welcoming us onto their screens. It came together remarkably quickly and is extremely gratifying.

Chad and I will be participating in a Q and A session after each screening with various cast members present. Phil Dingeldein will be there as much as his busy schedule allows, as will star Rob Merritt and his co-star, Alisabeth Von Presley. Alisabeth and Rob have been confirmed for the Cedar Rapids premiere.

As you may know, we shot the principal photography in Muscatine Community College’s Black Box Theater, and we are working out details for a screening there as well for students and teachers.

If you were a contributor to the fund-raising effort, and were promised admission to a premiere, please write me at macphilms@hotmail.com and let me know which of these premieres (choose one, please) you would be able to attend. More details will follow.


I’m centerstage with my back to the camera, directing Alisabeth Von Presley and Rob Merritt in Blue Christmas; left of me is Liz Toal, first camera assistant, and I’m blocking my buddy Phil Dingeldein, at right.

A lot of people who keep up with these updates helped make this film possible, and we are very grateful. I frankly thought I’d hung up my indie film shootin’ iron with Eliot Ness: An Untouchable Life (2006). But Encore for Murder came together so well as a play, we shot it at the last minute and soon the ol’ juices were flowing. Which in a man my age isn’t pretty….

I will tell you, with no modesty at all, that Blue Christmas came out most satisfactorily (as Nero Wolfe might say). That our cash budget was $14,000 indicates just how remarkable a feat this was. (The budget would sky-rocket if everyone, myself included, who took no remuneration were actually…you know…paid.)

Heath Holland at Cereal at Midnight on YouTube showed off on both the Blu-ray of Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane (which includes Encore for Murder as a bonus feature) and the DVD of Encore on his wrap-up of new releases. Thank you, Heath! (I am recording an interview with Heath tomorrow.) You can also rent both the documentary and the recorded Golden Age Radio-style play on Amazon Prime and VUDU.

* * *

And so the writing year begins.

I have just completed what I’m calling Conversations With Nathan Heller, a 13,000-word look at the entire Nate Heller novel series to date. The format is that I am visiting Heller at his Boca Raton digs to interview him before beginning each book in the series. This has been done for Otto Penzler at Mysterious Press, and was just shipped yesterday. What Otto’s reaction will be is hard to say, but obviously I hope he likes it. The title may change – that will be up to Otto, at least to some degree – but I think any Heller reader will get a charge out of it.

No idea when this will be published, but I will keep you informed here. I’m told there will be a square-bound hardcover edition.

Additionally I have corrected and tweaked Quarry’s Return, the copy edited version on its way back to editor Charles Ardai. The novel is scheduled for December, I believe. Going to be a busy December, with Blue Christmas possibly playing in some regional theaters (we’re working on that).

In the meantime, Barb has been working on her draft of Antiques Slay Belles – another Christmas book! I will start my draft yet this week.

After that I will be starting the massive podcast script combining the novels True Detective and True Crime (the first two Hellers) into one massive dramatic piece.

Stay tuned.

* * *

I received today copies of the fifth Ms. Tree collection, Ms. Tree – Heroine Withdrawal. It’s (as Chester Gould used to say) a honey. Just physically lovely. I am so grateful to Nick Landau and Vivian Cheung at Titan for keeping after to me to do these Ms. Tree collections with them (a shout-out to the great Andrew Sumner).

I also received two books from Gary Kato, who helped Terry Beatty out on Ms. Tree from time to time – Peter Pan in Return to Never Never Land and Satin’s Ways – both written by my pal Ron Fortier. Both are published by Redbud Studio.

M.A.C.

Blue Christmas Is a Wrap!

Tuesday, October 31st, 2023

Jake Marley (Chris Causey) and Richard Stone (Rob Merritt) in the private eye’s office.

We completed production on Blue Christmas last evening, and will be picking up various things and stuff at Muscatine Community College (our gracious host) this afternoon. Before I discuss the shoot, let me provide some background, requesting patience from those of you who have heard this story before (perhaps more than once).

The day before Thanksgiving 1992, I was notified by mail in a letter from a particularly odious editor at Tribune Media Services that my services as writer of the Dick Tracy strip were no longer required. I had done the writing of the strip, taking over for creator Chester Gould, since late 1977 – a fifteen-year run plus a few months.

Actually, they had already picked up my contract by not notifying me into I was three months into the new contract period, which was an automatic pick-up. But when I called the gracious Robert Reed, the recently retired head of the TMS, he talked me out of suing the Trib. He had hired me, and he deplored the decision of the editor (who had not hired me), but reminded me how many lawyers the Trib had, and how costly it would be for me to fight a battle even in the right. Then he said something I will always appreciate him for.

“You don’t need to worry about your next job,” he said. “You’re Max Allan Collins.”

I had needed reminding on that point. My friend and future DC Comics editor, Mike Gold, had already told me, “You really should have moved on after ten years. It stopped serving your career at that point.”

Nonetheless, it was a blow. And the same day, my agent informed me that – just a few weeks after winning the Best Novel Shamus award for Stolen Away – my Nate Heller contract had been dropped by Bantam Books, who had screwed up the series by publishing the hardcover and trade edition simultaneously, and making my hardcover sales on that title look like shit in the computers.

So I had lost everything, career-wise – both Tracy and Heller. I scrambled and did a few short stories for my pals Ed Gorman and Marty Greenberg, God bless their memories, but mostly I was at a loss. Untethered. And as close to a writing block as I had ever got. Thanks to Ed and Marty I kept going. But other than those assignments (writing for their theme anthologies), I had hit the wall.

Then on Christmas Eve 1992, after the festivities were over (my family has always celebrated Christmas Eve, rather than Christmas Day), I had an idea and began to write. A Christmas Carol was one of my favorite stories, the Alistair Sim film of it in particular, and my favorite single detective novel was The Maltese Falcon. I had the stray thought that the two stories might be effectively combined, and began to type. I have no idea how long I worked – most of the night, as it was a single session – but the result was a fifty-page novella, “A Wreath for Marley.”

I am not by inclination a short story writer, but as soon as I’d finished it, I knew “Marley” was special. Maybe not to anybody else, but to me. And over the years it’s been in several anthologies and ultimately the lead story in a holiday-themed collection of my shorter stories, Blue Christmas (available from Wolfpack in the collection’s most current incarnation).

The writing of “Marley” ended my creative logjam. Soon I had sold Carnal Hours, one of the best Heller novels, to Dutton in a multiple-book contract; and – on the fly, at WonderCon – sold the idea of Road to Perdition to a DC editor who wondered if I might be interested in writing a noir graphic novel. Mike Gold and Robert Reed had been right – losing Dick Tracy was like Dean Martin breaking up with Jerry Lewis – teaming with Jerry was the best thing that ever happened to Dino (Martin said) and the next best thing had been breaking up with Jerry.

Another result of losing the Tracy strip was finally pursuing my interest in filmmaking. In 1994 I wrote The Expert in Hollywood for director William Lustig, and wrote and directed Mommy here in Iowa. The latter feature – in which Patty McCormack portrayed a grown-up variation on her famous evil kid role in The Bad Seed – became a video store hit and sold to Lifetime as a movie of the week. Its success led to my scripting a feature film version of “A Wreath for Marley,” which I called Blue Christmas. We were in pre-production of that project when the success of Mommy made it necessary to follow up with a sequel, Mommy’s Day, causing us to temporarily shelve Blue Christmas. The thought was to do it next.

That did not happen. While Mommy’s Day was also a video store hit, we did not get a cable TV sale, and then my producer – only my best friend from high school days and the best man at Barb and my wedding – stole our money. I was never able to mount a full-throated production again. Our budgets of half a million and a quarter million for Mommy 1 and 2 respectively were never to be repeated.

I managed to stay active in indie filmmaking for another decade. I served three terms as president of the Iowa Motion Picture Association. I was able to get funded for two documentaries (Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane and Caveman: V.T. Hamlin and Alley Oop) and did three short films with my Mommy director of photography, Phil Dingeldein. Phil and I mounted Real Time: Siege at Lucas Street Market for around $10,000 (shooting mostly on security cameras) and had a similar budget (thanks to a Humanities Iowa grant) with Eliot Ness: An Untouchable Life. I wrote numerous screenplays and sold a few, including some that were never produced, with a short Quarry film, “A Matter of Principal” leading to the feature The Last Lullaby, which I co-wrote.

Then, of course, there was Road to Perdition with its big-name cast and Academy Award nominations and so on, which led to Phil and me trying to get the sequel, Road to Purgatory, off the ground. Much time was spent on that and we came heart-breakingly close several times. While various screenwriting projects continued (and still do), gradually I came to accept that my film directing days were over.

I did not consider this a tragedy as my fiction writing was trucking along. A Quarry TV series was produced by HBO for their Cinemax network and I was able to do a couple of scripts for it (one for the never-produced second season). Filmmaking was a part of my credentials and that was nice but nothing I was actively pursuing any longer.

Then last year I co-produced the “Mike Hammer” Golden Age Radio-style play, Encore for Murder, originally an audio full-cast production with Stacy Keach. I had done the play twice before (in Owensboro, Kentucky, and Clearwater, Florida) with Gary Sandy as Hammer. Gary and I were friends going back to his co-starring role in Mommy’s Day. This latest Encore production was a fundraiser for the local art center/museum, and Gary generously donated his time.

The play came together so well that literally a few days before its single performance, I called Phil Dingeldein and asked, “Do you want to make a movie this weekend?”

As some of you already know, Phil came down and he and Chad Bishop (who was the on-stage foley guy in the play) pooled their resources to shoot two dress rehearsals and our one performance. Then Chad and I spent a month or so editing the footage into a movie of sorts – or maybe it’s a television program, hard to say exactly what animal it is.

At any rate, the result, like the performance itself, was surprisingly good. Phil and I were already mounting an expanded version of the Spillane documentary as a 75th anniversary (of Mike Hammer) release for VCI. We showed Encore for Murder to Bob Blair, the president of VCI, pitching it as a Blu-ray bonus feature for the expanded documentary. Bob not only snatched it right up for that purpose, he planned a release on DVD of Encore itself. Both will be out well before year’s end.

So my filmmaking juices were flowing again. I proposed to Chad Bishop that we mount a follow-up Golden Age radio-style production of Blue Christmas. This morphed into a stage play that I planned to shoot much as we had Encore, only with more elaborate pre-production.

Finally I decided just to shoot it as a movie.

The script needed to be reworked from one that had half a dozen locations to one location in which all the the Scrooge-like visions take place in the private eye hero’s office – a single realistic set that would serve surrealistic purposes.

Phil came on board, taking a week’s vacation to shoot it (with his sometime accomplice, the talented and skilled Liz Toal), meaning we had to mount the principal photography in a single week. I approached Muscatine Community College about using their black box theater as, essentially, a film sound stage for the week-long shoot, and they got on board.

We had been led to believe we had a good shot at a Greenlight Iowa grant for $50,000, which would have been tight but sufficient. We mounted an Indie Go Go campaign to raise supplemental funding and reached our $7000 goal. But the grant did not come to us – although frankly we were never contacted about that after jumping through many an official hoop (never even informed we weren’t getting it, which stalled us while we waited for news that never arrived).

So finally we built upon the Indie Go Go money, took our own payment completely out of the budget (Chad, Phil and me), and got one $5000 investor and a few more donations, coming up with a princely $14,000 to produce the equivalent of a $300,000 to $500,000 indie. This was a big part of planning to do the film in (choke) six days.

For a long time, Gary Sandy was going to play Marley, but other commitments and a reluctance to work during the actor’s strike (although our micro-budgeted production was not a target of the strike) caused Gary to drop out a few weeks before shooting began. That left us with a cast consisting of talent from the Quad Cities, Cedar Rapids and Muscatine, with almost everyone from Encore for Murder back again.

So how did the shoot go?

The professionalism of Phil and Liz was a breathtaking thing to watch. Chad Bishop wore more hats than Barthlomew Cubbins – lighting, audio, producer, actor. I had caught Covid about a month out and got cleared to work weeks before the production would begin; so I was tired and exhausted going in…but that didn’t stop me. I would say I got my stride back by the second or at the latest third day.


Barb and Max on set at Blue Christmas.

Our set was a thing of beauty thanks to Bill Turner, a veteran of local theater; and Bill took on a role in the production as well, doing a fine job. Our lead was the remarkable Rob Merritt from Cedar Rapids, who has many movie roles under his belt and held up under the burden of being in virtually every scene. Among his co-stars was national celebrity Alisabeth Von Presley, who looks like something out of a Russ Meyer dream and performed like a dream, period. The entire cast did stellar work, including Encore veterans Chris Causey, Rene Mauck, Cassidy Probasco, Brian Linderman, Keith Porter, Judy Wilson, and Evan Maynard. Tommy Ratkiewicz-Stierwalt, Chase Bishop, Kim Furness, Dave Juehring, Tracy Pelzer-Timm and Scot Gehre, among others, were also in a very talented cast of twenty-four. Corey Ruby did the special effects, and my old Seduction of the Innocent pal Chris Christensen has signed on to do the score.


Director of Photography Phil Dingeldein gets a role…

…and lead actor Rob Merritt films a scene.

We worked long days – seven a.m. till at least seven p.m. On all but one day, I went home on the lunch hour and took a nap. The production was both brutal and rewarding, and it’s doubtful I’ll ever be foolish enough to put myself through something like this again…although I’m glad to have done this one last time.


Special effects man Corey Ruby takes pride in applying bullet holes to lovely Alisabeth Von Presley.

Barb had sworn not to be part of this crazy effort, but she was right there with me on the first day and thereafter. She ran craft services and did so very much more. Nathan Collins and Matt Clemens were there every day running security (MCC was in session). Nate did everything from man a boom pole to shoot footage on a high-end camera.

Of course, we’re not finished. Chad and I (and Chad’s cohort Jeremy Ferguson) will be shooting Second Unit material, chiefly establishing shots (once the snow starts to fall here). And right away we will begin editing, a process I enjoy a great deal.

I will report here as we move forward, but I can say that at long last, the promise of Blue Christmas is being fulfilled. If we’re not the best goddamn fourteen-thousand dollar movie ever made, I defy you to show me one that is.

* * *

Despite some stellar reviews on Amazon, Too Many Bullets remains mostly ignored by critics elsewhere. As I mentioned previously, none of the trades – Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus, Library Journal or Booklist – had reviewed it.

I am going to get the book into some reviewers’ hands, but in the meantime, if you’ve read and enjoyed the novel, please review it at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Goodreads and elsewhere, and if you have your own blog, talk it up there.

There have been a few notices, like this one.

And this.

M.A.C.