MAKING MOVIES, ON LOCATION, DON'T KNOW WHAT IT MEANS

Of late, I'm working on movies.  Two to be exact:  Strong Tea and Burning Man.

Strong Tea is a short about Thanksgiving, family, and murder.  And what is really weird is that when I tell people the basic plot, they all say "oh, that sounds like my family on Turkey Day!"  Weird in that, in the movie, people get killed so that other people in the family can move from the kids table to the adults table.  Apparently, most families have the dreaded two table system at Thanksgiving- the nice table for the adults, and the not so nice table for the kids.  In my family, the kids table was usually a card table, or on one infamous night, a ping-pong table in the garage.  It's one of those things that we laugh about now, but at the time was a source of tension.

And fodder for drama.

About a year ago, I needed to write a new one act for the Humana Festival.  My play Hela and Troy was just a finalist for the Heideman award there, and I wanted to enter something new.   It was around November, and the kids table came to mind, and in about a day, I wrote the play version of Strong Tea.  People liked it, one thing lead to another, and I decided to make  a short film of it.  And it's been really fun, so far.  We shoot in about a month.

Burning Man is the screen adaptation of my most successful play to date, Burning the Old Man.  This too is one of my stories that people say they can relate to- and that's weird, because this one is about some really messed up brothers stuck in the middle of the Nevada desert shortly after their father commits suicide.  The brothers fight, hate and love each other in equal measure, and can't seem to get where they want to go.   First produced by Boomerang Theatre Comapany, it won the 2005 NYIT award for Outstanding Full Length Script, went on to a production in Prague at Divadlo na Zabradi, and has been published in Plays and Playwrights 2006, several scene and monologue books, and is now available online via Indie Theater Now.

And on top of that, this Monday, Nov. 14 at 6pm at Solas, Harvardwood is presenting a reading of it.  If you're in NYC, I hope you come see it.

I don't know what any of this means, other than than when I write about sad, strange, lost people- the public seems to respond.  And that I think the movie gods are trying to tell me something about where I am going and what I should be doing.