This week we have our only film festival screening (to date, anyway) for Blue Christmas. It’s at the Cedar Rapids Independent Film Festival, which holds its 21st edition April 5-7, 2024 at the Collins Road Theatres, 1462 Twixt Town Road, Marion, Iowa. CRIFF (in their words) will celebrate the work of filmmakers from across the state, throughout the country, and around the world, all with connections to Iowa.

Here’s the festival’s official listing:

Star Rob Merritt will be in attendance for the 9 a.m. screening, and Barb and I will be there for the 1:05 p.m. screening. Other cast and crew members may surprise us at one or both screenings, and I will be there for the awards on Saturday night at 9:30 p.m., hoping to take home some gold or silver.

We are also entered in the Iowa Motion Picture Awards, which are presented May 4 at Forest City, Iowa, at the awards event. That is a competition but not a film festival. My films have done well at this event in the past, and just last year I won Best Director for Mickey Spillane’s Encore for Murder. Barb and I plan to attend.

We are considering a few other regional festivals, but the reality is that we already have our home video distributor in VCI, whose partner label MVD will be taking us out to streaming services.

And the Iowa-based Fridley chain, as well as the Collins Road Theatre in Cedar Rapids and the Last Picture House in Davenport, have expressed interest in running Blue Christmas this coming holiday season. So further festivals, if we choose to enter any, will be for fun and a little recognition; but it’s the Cedar Rapids Independent Film Festival and the Iowa Motion Picture Awards that could prove beneficial to marketing. Every indie film likes to have a few Laurel Wreaths for bragging rights.

The support we’ve received from the Fridley chain, Bruce Taylor at the Collins Road Theatre, and our pals Beck and Woods at the Last Picture House has been enormously gratifying, as has been the audience response to our little movie. As I’ve said before, I am well aware that we have a certain home court advantage here in Iowa. But it feels good nonetheless.

Seeing Blue Christmas on huge movie-theater screens, as opposed to at home screening or on physical media, has been an unexpected treat.

As the news regarding Blue Christmas will be taking up less of my weekly updates – at least till Christmas season 2024 – I want to take this opportunity to thank my talented cast (toplined by Rob Merritt and Alisabeth Von Presley) and my key partners, producer/editor Chad Bishop and Director of Photography Phil Dingeldein, for making this $14,000 production look like a million bucks.

Also, thanks to my bride Barb, who swore she would have nothing to do with this one, and then at the last minute dug in and did her usual stellar job.

I am about to begin scripting our fully immersive audio production (calling it a podcast doesn’t quite cut it) of True Noir: The Nathan Heller Casebooks, based on the first Heller novel, True Detective. This will be ten scripts designed to run around forty minutes or so each. I’ve already broken the book down into those ten episodes in an outline/synopsis that runs 70 pages.

So it’s a massive project.

Director Robert Meyer Burnett – whose Robservations, among much else on YouTube is well worth following (I do) – did a fantastic job with an exemplary voice cast in doing a sort of pilot (a twelve-minute version of the opening of Stolen Away) that will be part of a crowd-funding campaign launching soon. Rob (who, among much else, directed the cult-fave Free Enterprise with William Shatner) created in the pilot a virtual movie for the ears.

Starring as Nate Heller is Todd Stashwick, who appeared memorably on the recent third season of Picard as Captain Liam Shaw. A fan favorite among Star Trek enthusiasts (of which I am one), Todd is a Chicagoan who brings a great grasp of that key city to the proceedings. His casting, both for his Chicago and Trek cred, is a masterstroke on Rob Burnett’s part.

Barb and I have been Star Trek fans since college days (original series and, later Next Generation), and I cast Majel Barrett Roddenberry (Gene’s widow) in Mommy, knowing the value of Star Trek to then vital cast listings on video boxes (we were a chain-wide buy at the then-dominate Blockbuster). I knew Majel through Big Entertainment, the comic book company where she and Leonard Nimoy were doing titles when I was doing Mike Danger with Mickey Spillane. We also had Mickey in the cast and scream queen Brinke Stevens (who I knew from the San Diego Comic Con, where we became friends) as well as Jason Miller for his Exorcist value (and acting talent). Miller came on board because he liked the Mommy script, and since he was a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, that was a hell of a compliment.

By the way, if you’ve read Spillane – King of Pulp Fiction by Jim Traylor and me, you may recall that Gene Roddenberry and Mickey Spillane were pals and planned several projects together (that unfortunately did not come to pass).

Anyway, I want to share with you this fabulous poster for the upcoming audio drama, which I feel represents Heller better than most of the original cover art ever did (excepting the excellent recent Hard Case Crime packages).

More about the crowd-funding effort will be shared here in the days and months ahead. But for now feast your eyes on this….

M.A.C.