Post

THE KILLOUGH CHRONICLES

by James Killough

After financing fell through on the first iteration of Hatter the film—arbitrary changes to British tax laws threw the entire industry there into chaos for about eighteen months, long enough for many productions to fall apart—I began to develop other projects.  Rather than learn my lesson about how hard it is to finance esoteric, difficult films, I managed to come up with one that was even more obscure, Post.

James Franco Kissing Himself (2011), by Solve Sundsbo

The idea for Post came from two sources.  The first was a two-day discussion I had in 2001 with filmmaker Tarsem Singh (Immortals, Mirror, Mirror) about the nature of romantic love.  Everything in Tarsem’s world is highly visual, perfectly designed down to the most minute detail.  The conversation took place in his loft overlooking Trafalgar Square, and this rarified environment gave me a sense of how the piece might work cinematically, even though it was primarily just a philosophical conversation with no real conclusion.

The Meshuga Plum Fairy

THE KILLOUGH CHRONICLES | REVIEW

by James Killough

Even if you’re not in the film business, most people are conversant with how hard it is to deal with the studios when making a feature film.  Any given episode of Entourage is a slice-of-life peek into the morass of ego and fear and plain bad taste that is the development and production process.  But what is seldom examined is the darker corner of the film business, that mysterious tangle of dank, bat-filled caverns behind the studio walls, which has so bewildered so many unsuspecting filmmakers that some have disappeared forever in its mazes.  I am, of course, talking about Distribution.

I know, I've been running a lot of images of Michael Lewis lately, but this time he's completely relevant to the post. I promise.

The experience of having a movie released theatrically by a major distributor can sour even the most optimistic producer, who might still be in love with the business despite actually having made it as far as being able to show his oeuvre to the public, which is akin to winning a season of Survivor.  The accounting practices are legendary, especially the bit when they offset the losses from another film on the profits of yours if it’s a hit.  There are other traps, too, like that guarantee of a healthy market saturation of five hundred screens and a Christmas release, which is suddenly moved to February and dropped to five theaters.  What are you going to do?  Hire a litigator for a  minimum of $50,000 and go through the process of suing a studio?

Quit While You’re Behind

THE KILLOUGH CHRONICLES | MAKING HATTER

by James Killough

I keep telling Baker and Tuttle that we’re moving away from this whole Marcus “Marcia” Bachmann gay thing, but then something pops up to keep it current, like my buddy Shawn Riegsecker sending me this wonderful YouTube vid yesterday:

I don't even know where Minnesota is exactly, but God I wish I'd been there for this.

If you are too lazy to watch the video (just click on the image above; I didn’t embed the video), it shows a bunch of gay neo-barbarians “glittering” Marcia’s ex-gay clinic in Minnesota.  For those who aren’t up to date on this, Marcia uses government money to try to brainwash Gheys via scalding enemas of self-hatred and magical thinking (a.k.a. religion) into denying who they really are.  What she is doing is so beyond outrageously offensive and borderline criminal that it needs to be hosed down with serious humor and satire, the only effective antidotes to the poison of evil intentions.

Aloe Vera In Your Handbag

THE KILLOUGH CHRONICLES

by James Killough

This blog has becoming something of a daily beast of its own, attracting glamorous star contributors like James Tuttle and Eric Baker, getting picked up and aggregated by powerful international websites with ties to the fashion mafia.  We have started to view ourselves as the two-thirds homosexual lifestyle-and-entertainment Julian Assange.  And it is understandably going to our heads.  Always one to try to keep us grounded and humble, Tuttle is prone to tossing off quips like, “We must make sure our tens of readers don’t think we’re losing touch with reality.”  He is just being a snarky homo, as is his right under Article 2(a) of the Provincetown Declaration of Equality of 2011, which allows a Ghey a measure of dark-roast sarcasm in direct proportion to how old he was at the time of the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.

Founding Bear Daddies gather in Provincetown for the signing of what is commonly known in the gay community as P-Dec, a reference to declaration signer Benjamin Frankbear, seen here in the foreground, and his inability to control himself during the celebratory beer blast out on the deck.

With so much Perez Hilton-ish red-carpet flash and glimmer going on around here, it’s hard to remember this blog’s original intent, which was to promote Pure Film Creative, our web content company, with a side purpose of exposing the nefarious dealings of my erstwhile landlady, the Wicked Blais.  With the Wicked Blais safely out of harm’s way, seething behind the walls of her own private Mordor of shithole Hollywood real estate, we should try to cast an eye on web content from time to time rather than just name-dropping for the sake of tags, and lamenting the lack of style on reality shows.

The Joy of Stalking

THE KILLOUGH CHRONICLES

by James Killough

Alan Cumming has a new site up dedicated to obsessions, itsasickness.com.  I would say it celebrates passions more than obsessions in the truest sense of the word, and I am hanging on the truest sense because the site does have “sickness” in its title.  And sick obsession reminds of the time I went truly mentally ill and stalked a former lover.

Knowing Alan as I do, he probably means sickness as in the recent colloquialism “That is so sick,” like it’s a really good thing.  In the video up on the site right now, Zoe Kravitz is obsessed with a green dragon plushie costume, with how it makes her feel empowered.  This isn’t my particular experience of people obsessed with plushie.  The plushophiles I’ve met are rather lovable, extreme introverts who like to dress up as cartoon characters and have kinky sex.

Zoe Kravitz vogues plushophile lite in Williamsburg for itsasickness.com.

I had a brush with plushophilia and diaper fetishists back in the early Noughties through a friend, Gene, who also had extreme social anxiety disorder (SAD).  Gene was one of a trio of people who would trigger the mnemonic that gave rise to my play Hatter, the film version of which Alan Cumming has been attached to, just so you follow my meandering train of thought.  Gene had some hilarious stories about “furries”