Tacos and Beer

HIDE AND CREEP is a Thanksgiving movie. But there’s really only one clue in the movie to let you know that. I’m not a big sports guy, but in Alabama (where I live, and where HIDE AND CREEP is set), college football is wildly popular, and one of the biggest college games of the year is the Iron Bowl. That game pits the University of Alabama against Auburn University, two teams with legions of passionate fans. Hide and Creep is a Thanksgiving movie. But there’s really only one clue in the movie to let you know that. I’m not a big sports guy, but in Alabama (where I live, and where Hide and Creep is set), college football is wildly popular, and one of the biggest college games of the year is the Iron Bowl. That game pits the University of Alabama against Auburn University, two teams with legions of passionate fans. But I’m not one of those fans, because, like I said, I’m just not a sports guy. But I thought having the movie take place on the weekend of a big regional sports e...

Digitizing old video sources (stuff made in the 20th century) is a hassle for multiple reasons. Probably the biggest is that old video was stored in an interlaced format. This Wikipedia article digs into the details about interlaced video, but the short version is interlaced video is captured and stored as half-frames instead of full frames, and combining those half-frames for playback on modern displays (which are almost all progressive instead of interlaced ) can get messy. This is true for material that originated as video, and it’s also true of material that originated as motion picture film. The film-to-interlaced-video process often involved a hack known as three-two pulldown . That hack was necessary because of differences between motion picture film frame rates and video frame rates. Adding to the hassle of dealing with old video material is the fact that modern video editing software (stuff like Adobe Photoshop and DaVinci Resolve) just “fixes” the interlacing behind the...

Back in the olden times, when people wrote movie scripts with typewriters, I can only imagine that properly formatting a screenplay was tedious at best. (If you’re not familiar with what a screenplay looks like, check out this NoFilmSchool.com article that explains how screenplays are formatted and why they are formatted that way.) When I first started writing screenplays in the early 2000s, software was available to make the process easier. But the industry standard, Final Draft, was famously expensive. And the competition wasn’t cheap. Chuck and I won a copy of Movie Magic Screenwriter at an early Sidewalk Film Fest . (I think it was called “Movie Magic Screenwriter 2000” at the time, because back then all the software companies were appending a “2000” to the end of whatever they named their software.) I am pretty sure I wrote Hide and Creep using that software. I guess if we hadn’t won that, I would have written it in Word and manually put in all the weird tabs and spacing t...

In the 1980s, CDs became the music industry standard for album releases. Even though CDs were smaller than the vinyl LPs they replaced, they could hold more music. A twelve-inch record can hold 45 minutes (give or take) of music, while a CD can hold more than 70 minutes of music. Some musicians decided that their albums needed to fill up a CD, even if they didn’t have 70 minutes of good music ready, and we got a lot of hour-long albums that would have been a lot better if they’d been edited down to 40 minutes. I’ve been thinking about the overlong albums of the ’80s and ’90s lately because of the overlong movies of the 2020s. I am certainly not the first person to complain that movies are too long these days. Vanity Fair published a piece on the subject last year. The Vanity Fair article mentions that producers and cinema owners and audiences complain about long movies. But those complaints don’t carry as much weight as they used to, and I can think of a couple of reasons for...

Apple likes to brag that a lot of their commercials and promotional videos are “shot on iPhone.” But of course Apple can afford some wild accessories for their iPhones, including Panavision lenses! Stu Maschwitz wrote an excellent blog post about how one attaches a pro cinema lens to an iPhone. Blackmagic has created a dual-lens 3D camera for making immersive video for Apple’s Vision Pro VR goggles. I’m not that interested in VR, but I think VR goggles would be fun for watching old 3D horror and sci-fi movies like Creature From the Black Lagoon and It Came From Outer Space . And it might be fun to shoot a movie in the style of those classic 3D movies with this new Blackmagic camera. Ben Pearson wrote a lengthy and revealing article about the modern state of film scores over at Slashfilm . It was revealing to me, at least. Among other things, Pearson tries to figure out why we have fewer memorable musical themes in modern movies. No details yet, but apparently Kino Lorber i...

We lost an honest-to-goodness filmmaking giant when Roger Corman passed away on May 9. Corman was making horror and science fiction movies on shoestring budgets long before the big studios came in and started making those kinds of movies with monster budgets. And Corman also gave many renowned filmmakers and actors their first jobs in the industry — people like Ron Howard, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, and Jack Nicholson. I wrote a bit more about Mr. Corman for my Subspace newsletter . That newsletter also contains info on where you can watch several of Corman’s classic movies online for free.

I like the new CIVIL WAR movie (the one about an actual modern-day civil war, not the Captain America movie from a few years back). Turns out it is more about battlefield journalism than modern U.S. politics (though it doesn’t shy away from politics). INDIEWIRE did a piece about the movie’s impressive sound design, and VARIETY did a (spoilery) piece about the making of the movie’s finale. And if you want a detailed review of CIVIL WAR, FILM FREAK CENTRAL has a good one. I really like THE FALL GUY... I like the new Civil War movie (the one about an actual modern-day civil war, not the Captain America movie from a few years back). Turns out it is more about battlefield journalism than modern U.S. politics (though it doesn’t shy away from politics). IndieWire did a piece about the movie’s impressive sound design , and Variety did a (spoilery) piece about the making of the movie’s finale . And if you want a detailed review of Civil War , Film Freak Central has a good one . I ...

Stacey and I love watching BOB’S BURGERS reruns after work. It’s a fun show that generally works an original song (or two or three) into each episode. We saw the episode the other night with the song “Bad Stuff Happens in the Bathroom.” Stacey instantly decreed it the best BOB’S BURGERS song. I think she’s right, and that reminded me that my pal (and HIDE AND CREEP actor) John Walker recorded a terrific cover of the song. My pal Chris Mitchell has been taking all kinds of cool photos lately, both digital and... Stacey and I love watching Bob’s Burgers reruns after work. It’s a fun show that generally works an original song (or two or three) into each episode. We saw the episode the other night with the song “Bad Stuff Happens in the Bathroom.” Stacey instantly decreed it the best Bob’s Burgers song. I think she’s right, and that reminded me that my pal (and Hide and Creep actor) John Walker recorded a terrific cover of the song . My pal Chris Mitchell has been taking a...

Director Adam Wingard works on big Hollywood movies, but he still calls Alabama home. So it wasn’t a huge surprise that he hosted a friends-and-family screening of his new blockbuster, GODZILLA X KONG: THE NEW EMPIRE, last week at a Birmingham movie theater. I was maybe a little surprised to get an invite to the screening. Adam and I were friendly when he was living in Alabama. This was a couple decades (!) ago, around the time I was working on HIDE AND CREEP. Director Adam Wingard works on big Hollywood movies, but he still calls Alabama home. So it wasn’t a huge surprise that he hosted a friends-and-family screening of his new blockbuster, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire , last week at a Birmingham movie theater. I was maybe a little surprised to get an invite to the screening. Adam and I were friendly when he was living in Alabama. This was a couple decades (!) ago, around the time I was working on Hide and Creep . In fact, Adam edited the trailer for Hide and Creep . Around ...

I’m posting this a few days late. But Friday was March 15, AKA the Ides of March, AKA the anniversary of the first DVD release of INTERPLANETARY in 2011. I always forget that movie came out in 2011 because it should have come out much earlier. But that movie was literally years in the making — it was a tough movie to finish! I am always happy to see that my old blog about the making of INTERPLANETARY... I’m posting this a few days late. But Friday was March 15, AKA the Ides of March, AKA the anniversary of the first DVD release of Interplanetary in 2011. I always forget that movie came out in 2011 because it should have come out much earlier. But that movie was literally years in the making — it was a tough movie to finish! I am always happy to see that my old blog about the making of Interplanetary is still available on Blogger. And I am happy that people can still watch the movie — it’s currently streaming on Tubi .

Michael Shelton (who’s been in almost every movie I’ve ever made) texted me earlier to let me know we started working on our third feature film ten years ago today. Hoo boy, time sure flies. I wasn’t blogging while we were making that movie. Its working title was Red Season , but the real title (I love the real title, and all credit to co-director/co-writer Chuck for coming up with it) is For a Few Zombies More . It’s a sequel to our first feature, Hide and Creep , but it’s an old-fashioned sequel that should make sense for anybody, whether or not they’ve seen Hide and Creep . If you haven’t seen For a Few Zombies More , you can literally watch it right now — it’s available free-with-ads on Tubi.

Congrats to my pal Andrew Bellware on getting his PhD! His doctoral thesis is about how music works in movies. Apparently in his thesis he mentioned that a friend rescored 2001: A Space Odyssey using 1980s pop songs. I am that friend! That friend is me! I wish I could show you my “remixed” 2001 . But it obviously breaks several copyright laws, so I assume if I put it on YouTube it’d get immediately pulled. That said, I did make a trailer for it, and the trailer is somehow still on YouTube. So who knows.