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August 29

Why make things? There is joy in discovering something, and in sharing it with others. Our card's run up so now it's all messages in bottles. We thought perhaps Sundance fit the profile of our tormentor, and so maybe we shouldn't initiate dialogue. Then we found a $100 bill on 52nd Street, outside a lively nightclub, swirling on the pavement between limos, exactly what was needed to apply, and so we applied, as no portfolio, not even a longsheet of denial, is complete without Park City. Doubtless a sheer rhetorical exercise on our part, but being past sadness, bitterness, and despair, and immune at last, we seek only to amuse ourselves.

August 21

HORRIBLE CHILD BLESSED BY THE POPE OUTSIDE A SOUP KITCHEN IN ROME

papal driveby

July 24

Dankencore, Brick Theater.

HORRIBLE'S FAVORITE NEW FLICK: MAN ON WIRE

July 17

NEXT SCREENING 00/00/00 ???

GNINEERCS NOOS, GNINEERCS NOOS, as Kubrick might have put it. Very Looking Forward to July 23, It is always totally non-boring to watch one's things meet an audience, receptive or no. After several years setting up dominoes. Grim fascination at the worst, a good deal.

Oh! Sorry: Stephen King, actually? One forgets about the writers.

Emerson College has a terrific audio/movie file website of lectures and talks on many things. The other day we listened to a film coach, consultant to directors (mostly documentarians) about how to make their films work for first-time viewers with no stakes in or prior knowledge of the film. ("Whaddya think, does it work? I maybe like it but does it work? I don't know if it works." That kind of work.)

She speaks wisely about what is called the "dedicated audience" - vested viewers including family, friends, and specialists in a related field for whom the film may bear particular interest. Persons more likely to enjoy the work presented than neutral film-fest screeners, who may have a sackful of others to get through before dawn.

Thus: the latter audience is a better index of the intrinsic value of the film than the former. And a warm reception from the former is no guarantee of appreciation by the latter.

But! (cry we, Apple Q-ing). A dedicated audience is what it's all about, always! It's the only kind of audience anyone ever wishes to have. It merely aquires different names and an abstract quality as its circles ripple further from our acquaintance.

That's what Advertising does, lather up a dedicated audience. It's what Celebrity does via glamour; what being the only person not yet on the bus does.

And also, O Happy Horrible, it's what Repetition does.

The film coach mentions a popular nerological hypothesis: that it takes no more than 36 repetitions of almost anything to create an addict out of almost anyone. We are sure this is an infinitely complex nutshell, but for us it means one delightful thing: if we can get everyone to watch HORRIBLE CHILD 36 times, we will have created a blockbuster.

Well, it depends on how many we can get inside the theater, and how many of those we can keep alive for, say, three weeks. Those of you who have already seen it will be released at first signs of dependency.Cool, whoa, relief. With such a prospect, who needs a Plan B?

July 4, 2008

HORRIBLE CHILD, in spite of its talking-head visual syntax, which ostensibly would seem to recommend it naturally to TV and PC monitors, comes to life only on the large screen. Little heads and big heads have very different presences. Easter Island key-chains never made anyone weep for the right reasons. Indeed, HORRIBLE CHILD is our attempt to create a [religious experience] (too toxic a phrase, but the best at hand): the origin and increasingly secular charge of all the arts, most certainly those which address people assembled in enormous rooms, facing in the same direction. The soul throttling, mindblowing aspects of large movie screens offer an audience the chance to become, for an hour or two, a congregation. Here at horriblechild.com, albeit by definition, we believe that HORRIBLE CHILD, for your purposes alas zooligically a "feature film," perhaps "experimental film" (the two terms suggesting opposite, perhaps overdelineated possibilities), is more specifically a 72-minute audio/visual recipe, quasinarrational, for a collective unusual experience via large image and loud sound. And so we would beg you, if you cannot preview our DVD submission on an enormous surface along with a full minyon, to view our Size Ratio Guide before watching it on a small one with your eyes ideally no more than an inch away, in the company of oodles of imaginary friends.

I acknowledge the somewhat bloated tone of this post. One wishes one's work to speak for itself - but there are fewer and fewer big screens around - a veritable dearth of larynxes. Thank you for reading. LK

Thank you so much to Michael Gardner, Robert Honeywell, Jeff Lewonczyk, and everyone of and at the Brick Theater last night, it was truly a moving, memorable evening.

FUN FACT: Being turned away from film festivals has come to 25 percent of the film's total budget to date.

Very excited about the Brick screening. The theatre has a good feeling, the festival is alive and the screens are GIGANTIC. Also playing keys for Paranoid's Guide & the You Bet Your Life shows. LK

Today Horrible popped its YouTube cherry! and mine. Our zealous gut is to put all of HC online and be done with it - it's that quaint, quixodic longing for the Large Screen Communal Experience that keeps our cards to chest. What I'd really like to do is screen the film on opening night of the Olympics in the People's National Stadium, maybe project it overhead on the thick sky. I could wait till then if Artistic Chairman Spielberg promised me it's a done deal.

Our personal version of an eagle on a cactus with a snake in its mouth. Viva HsbC!

More eyegorp, doodled off our editing monitor: [T. Ryder Smith] on the left, [Mike Daisey] on the right:

Speaking of Freud, a psychoanalyst friend has seen HORRIBLE CHILD and emailed me that "the film portrays in poignant fashion just about everything psychoanalysis tries to prevent human beings from doing to each other."

1:25: Expediter replies to pink slip with Nietzsche's proto-exaltation of Freudian slip: "Honor your errors as hidden intentions."

1:48: One wonders whether the philosopher's entire life's work was a (rather Freudian) attempt to take the "niet" out of Nietzsche.

1:49: One wonders whether the musician's entire life's work was a (rather Freudian) attempt to take the "no" out of Eno. Also wonderable is whether Nietzsche is most profitably understood as a composer, or Eno as a thinker.

Hm. Without providing detailed unpackment of that last hypothesis, we may appear to be on flimsy cognitive astroturf. Expound, stet, or delete?

Walter Murch, master film editor, pastes little paper cutouts of humans on either side of his Kem screen to remind him, as he works, of the ultimate relative scale of the image when seen in a theatre. Perhaps we might - Yes! Click HERE to see H.C. audience/screen ratio guide.