The status of things….

I haven’t give up, I know that’s the rumor; I know that’s what they’ve been saying about me. So fucking what! Let them talk, let them pass judgment on me and my career…what the fuck do they know? For the record I’ve been beating the odds since I entered the film game and I’m not about to let a little bit of stagnant water discourage me.

Here, let me catch you up. All my contacts…are a fucking joke, have done absolutely nothing for me. My latest plan to make me famous – yeah, that was getting a literary agent and let me tell you they aren’t the most fearless and courageous group of individuals I’ve ever met, or maybe I just suck as a writer…the jury is still out. I’m left with approaching the A-list actor that I’ve had my eye on and throwing myself at his mercy…yeah, maybe if I was a blonde-haired blue-eyed white guy I might try that.

So now what? I’m pulling out the big guns, that’s what. I’m going to rely on the only thing I can truly count on, the only thing I’ve always been able to count on…my intellect and my financial background. I’m done fucking around with these people and this “friends helping friends” business. Don’t get me wrong, I get it…I understand how business is done…but fucking come on, Man! Am I really not that fucking worthy? Am I really asking that fucking much?

Ok… let’s list all the things that work that I’m not willing to do:

1 – Write a romantic comedy. Ok, that’s never going to happen. Not only do I utterly and completely fucking hate romantic comedies and the condescending and statistically inaccurate approach that they take towards women and long-term monogamous relationships, but the level of writing is remedial and clichéd and the genre in and of itself is devoid of visual style and cinematic character. I’d rather stick my cock in a garbage disposal while saluting the rebel flag than work in this arena. No fucking way man!

2- Write anything that features cute children or PG-13 rating. Let’s be brutally honest here, the entire fucking industry is playing to children, to non-offensive, non-political, condescending and in my opinion irrelevant plotlines that serve no real purpose but to make us complacent and non-attentive to real world things like the Iraq war, mercury in the fish and a general changing in the quality of life here in the states. I will not participate in this. I’m not going to write about magical teddy bears that help children deal with molestation. If you want to do a film about the issues of pedophilia I suggest you start with the thong panties in GapKids and all the booty shaking videos on YouTube. But see that’s just it, this industry is not concerned with solving actual problems or even talking about them…and I’m not saying that I’m an advocate of the British version of ramming social issues down your throats...but there should be a happy medium. Going to see a film is a political act, I don’t care what the masses think. You are sitting in the dark with hundreds of people that you don’t know, that are demographically and politically different from you and collectively experiencing a narrative…that is the definition of political. What irks me is the need for filmmakers to highlight only the sensational, only the superficial…to be the darling of the studios. There are plenty of musicians who utterly and completely despise the present state of the music industry and wish to burn it to the ground. Film is far more bleak due to the barriers of creation (financing) and the difficulties with securing distribution and yet most of us sit quietly waiting for our turn to get screwed. Fuck the friendly film and anybody who likes the friendly film.

3- Option/adaptation/biography farming. I know that some to the “greatest” films in the history of this art form were adaptations. I am aware that many of the most influential films of my lifetime and my parent’s lifetime were based on true events, I just don’t fucking care! Work adapted to the screen can never move you as far or as interestingly as work written specifically for the screen. But it goes deeper than that; why must the cinema be dependent on the devices of literature? (which is a non-visual art form) or the stage (which is for all intents and purposes a static art form…you can’t travel to several exotic locations in 10 seconds so all you theater majors can eat a dick!)…or any other art form that is inferior to the cinema. Yes, I know that seems a bit harsh to say, but it’s true. What separates the cinema from all other art forms, even music, is that a few frames can halt you in your tracks, scar you for life or change your political disposition. I’d like to see a sentence do that, I’d like to see a portrait do that (porn not included…because porno is fucking awesome). I treat the cinema as special because it is special. It is unique and anyone who tries to base it on lesser art forms is a saboteur and should be shot. We are an extremely young art form and we have much growing to do…so why is the general feeling that all the best films have been shot and all the “cool” shots have been shot and all that there is left is remakes, sequels and reinterpretations? It’s propaganda I tell you…propaganda.

4- Dealing overtly with race. For starters this is the expectation of a black filmmaker (wait, lemme guess, you didn’t know I was black..it’s ok, no…really). It is as if the only thing we have the ability to talk about due to the several hundred years we’ve been in North America is racism. So fucking what we also witnessed a man go to the moon (allegedly…cause there’s no wind on the moon children); seen a president assassinated, a political leader assassinated, survived natural disasters…we somehow lack the gray matter to articulate it. Tom Cruise can learn to be Japanese in a matter of months and heterosexual action hero’s can learn to be drag queens in just a short an amount of time…but someone like me having a comment on an overreaching topic like gender identification or the myth that is manhood is craziness. Well I’m sorry to say, you won’t see me writing hood stories that feature dealers, hookers, evil white cops and crying barefoot black mothers who just can’t understand why their son had to die. No thank you. I’m probably not going to have much of a career anyway, why start shuckin’ and jivin’ to get ahead…makes no sense to me…ok granted most things don’t make sense to me, but this is different.

5- Confirm the falsehoods and fears of the general populace. I am an iconoclast…that means that I destroy sacred images. The entire purpose of Big Hit Productions is to turn things on its ear and making a bullshit film like “Crash” is not my idea of starting a revolution. You don’t want to talk about race, you don’t want to talk about power, you don’t want to talk about rape or abortion…you want the illusion of doing this without abandoning what you have long held to be true. That’s not the business I am in. What’s most important is that I am true to myself…fuck what you like! Scott and I have taken a vow (over a pound of weed) to usher in the new era of American Independent film and this is what it looks like…a weed smoking, sneaker wearing, game playing group of cats that don’t like the work of Steven Spielberg and anyone of his ilk. The end is near bitches!

6- Sell my best scripts …and have them horrible rewritten so that when I do finally get a deal I can attempt to defend all the attacks of “hack writing” for rewrites of my work that I didn’t do in the post-zenith of my writing ability…yeah, that sounds like a great plan. Maybe if I suck cock really well they’ll throw me a bone of a kiddie script and I can write witty, non-offensive dialogue for Vin Desil, Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence…never gonna fucking happen! In my opinion nobody is really writing anymore IE there’s not much writer in the Writer/Director and I aim to change that. Every script I have written I plan to shoot, why is that so strange? Maybe if we, as an industry, didn’t think it was acceptable or even necessary to sell the scripts that are near and dear to us to have a career…films wouldn’t suck so much. Yeah, I know…you want to work and that’s all the work they are offering…at least you are writing, at least you are getting paid for it. I’m sorry, I can’t sympathize or respect that point of view. The lines are clearly drawn and you and I are on differing sides.

7- Cut motherfuckers up. I mean let’s face it…you guys are eating up the dismemberment scripts…well here’s a little secret; amputation is one of my greatest fears. I love to write, I love to play games, I love to drive a stick and I love to beat my cock… all of which are seriously diminished with the lost of an arm or a hand (go ahead and try to play Tekken with your feet). But that’s not my real issue, my real issue is stylized violence. You wanna cut someone’s finger off in slow, painstaking agony and accuracy…go ahead and be my guest. Real violence is sickening, real violence haunts you for the rest of your waking days. The first time you realize the level of detail and perfection in the ugliness that the lens can capture…you’ll never want to watch anything that doesn’t prominently feature puppies and butterflies. Besides, I have some talent and I’d like to show it…those films aren’t the way to show you’re a badass screenwriter.

8- Shoot a documentary. This is probably going to piss of a lot of people, especially the married documentary filmmaker I fucked the shit out of at the Action-On Film Festival (you had a sweet pussy though…I will say that) but some things need to be said…like I’m a Laker hater and I don’t give a fuck if they do have Gasol now…they still suck cock and I got $20 says Kobe cries again when they get eliminated! Ok, here’s something else you don’t know…I love documentaries. Not doc’s on how many Big Mac’s you can eat till you drop dead (how about I shoot a film of myself downloading Asian porn on a dial up and see what kills me first the masturbation chaffing or the .05K download speeds) or how much a group of insignificant motherfuckers change over 20 years…I like the real historical shit, you know Nazi’s (ok, not Nazi’s…what else is there to possible left to learn about the Nazi and all the shit that happen to the followers of Judaism?), A-bombs, The Black Death, etc. But I don’t want to shoot that shit. You don’t get the opportunity to shoot a nice high-speed sequence and shoot an actor with amazing physical traits in a documentary, and you sure as hell can’t dress then up in the same outfits as your favorite porno scene (ok…maybe I watch too much porn, that’s possible.) I prefer fiction. And here’s a little ditty that I really need to get off my chest…just because it’s a true story, doesn’t make it a good story…you feel me?

9- Shoot a feature as cheaply as possible just to see if I can do it and apply to Sundance and rave about the new digital technologies. Yeah, I think you know where this is going. If I build an oven out of duct tape and tin foil and try to bake an award winning pound cake with it…and it turns out to be marginally better than shitty…I’m not going to expect a magazine feature because my oven had no moving parts. Enough of the ploys, of the experiments or the “mom, look what I can do”…that time has passed. It’s time to birth the new cinema and that approach is not cuttin’ it. If this offends you, fuck you and your grainy DV exploration of your mother’s basement you no location havin’-non permit affordin’-sorry excuse for a filmmaker! There is a reason that NERF doesn’t sponsor the NFL draft.

10- Find a talented female director and producer for her so that together we can get lots of grant money. Fuck grant money, and fuck people that only want to fund one kind of film. Fuck the subsidization of this art form. There needs to be some really high barriers to separate those who are willing to die to shoot (yes, I am willing to die) and those who just think it’s cool to hold a camera. I make no apologies for this. A film has to either return its cost of production (negative cost) or it must substantially move the art form forward. Those are the only two things that justify be allowed to return to the well. Films have to have a certain amount of popularity and strike a chord with an audience…otherwise it’s a tremendous waste of resources (we could have thrown a party with strippers and drugs for that amount of money…no… hot strippers..you know, like in Vegas)

So as you can plainly see, I’m kind of bitter and the chances of my pulling this off appear to be rather slim…whatever…odds are for Bingo and attempts to drive from Hollywood to West LA when your obviously over the limit. But fear not my fellow filmmakers, I do have a few tricks up my sleeve.

Like what you ask.. we’ll here are my top ten ideas to get the film funded this year…

1 – Get Britney Spears pregnant and show up at the first press conference looking like Flavor-Flav after a three day bender in Vegas. Go ahead and laugh but Britney’s burning through $700K a month (after taxes) and if losing her kids and watching her little sister get knocked up isn’t enough to make her take a few precautions…I’m sure the prospect of big dreaded black babies should at least be good for and advance on a book deal. I should be able to get a quick $2MM and the keys to the Bentley if I agree to disappear.

2- Set up a fake charity that supports underprivileged African filmmakers and then embezzle the funds, move to Africa, change my name…shoot my feature and apply to Sundance saying I was defrauded by Cooprdog and all I want is the opportunity that he promised me. Go ahead and laugh…watch me get paid on this one.

3 – Buy a bunch of $1K suits, move into a hotel room on Beverly Hills…put my Bluetooth in and have loud film conversations in the lobby and elevators till I manage to start a ponzi scheme for rich investors who think I’m a cross between Will Smith and Barak Obama (go Hillary), but instead of spending their money on coke and Z parts… I’ll make a film. This is a legitimate possibility…but where am I going to get the dough for the suits? This is a maybe.

4 – Start banging a bunch of UCLA chicks, get them addicted to a controlled substances and force them into prostitution…ok, that’s not really funny…but man I’d get laid all the time.

5- Become an escort and get passed around to rich housewives @ $2K an hour (…yes, I’m worth it…just ask your sister). Yeah, that’s a lot of fucking, but I’m really dedicated to this film so I guess I’ll have to do it.

6- Hire a hooker to go to a Hollywood party and flirt with one of the Hollywood players… and then when they are back in the hotel room I’ll hop out of the closet and photograph them.. and then black mail the dude till he greenlights my film.

7-Sell my girlfriends panties on EBAY and install a hidden webcam in her house and sell the feed on a monthly subscription basis. (of course, I’d kind of need to get a girlfriend first.)

8-Write a book about going to film festivals, become critical of anyone who dares try and shoot and indie film and then re-release the same book over multiple years and just change the cover art…oh wait, that’s been done already.

9- Make a rubber replica of my cock and call it FilmDick and sell it for $29.95 under the guise that you don’t have to move to LA to practice what it’s like to try and get your film financed (Feels just like the film industry and you don’t even have to travel..just ask any independent filmmaker…or Melissa Childs…BTW Melissa, how’s that FICA score? Still shitty I bet.. wanna know how I know.. cause your creditors are still calling my house…handle your fucking business!)

10 – Start a film festival and charge motherfuckers $30 to find out that they have absolutely no filmmaking talent whatsoever. Use my festival to meet celebrities who are in the twilight of their career, hand out bad Xerox copies of awards in $2 picture frames I bought at Staples and lastly, loudly boast that what I really enjoy is meeting an working with indie filmmakers.

Ok…I’m supposed to be writing a business plan, or a shot list or some shit… see ya when I see ya!

COOPRDOG