I first met Jason Rzepka when he worked at mtvU and was helping spread the word about HowDoISayThis? – my mtvU digital incubator project. Now, he’s VP of public affairs at MTV – in New York and a genuine MTV mucky-muck… All of which adds up to – he’s a colleague, not someone I know that well. But, I follow him on Twitter. In honor of his “Jesus Birthday” – he’s been tweeting his autobiography. It’s a simple idea, but interesting and revealing and a …

If I had to pick one YouTube channel to watch on a desert island, it would be Everything is Terrible. Rather than resist the statistical dominance of garbage online, they’ve made it into its own art form – scouring thrift stores for instructional videos, industrials, infomercials and random “Christian” programming. Making fun of the 80’s usually feels like shooting fish in a barrel, but the EIT videos tend to hit a higher mark of cheesy, vhs-soaked pop criticism/surrealism.

My reflexive response to stress is to draw… On the page, the gunfight by the vat of acid seems daunting, but as a comic book it’s a scant 13 panels… Easy-peezy.

They got it almost right. The headline reads “Alums Harris and Wolske inflict killer rednecks on the birthplace of the king.” (For clarity: the king of rock n’ roll, not pop). But, there’s a lot more team spirit than they realized. There are actually 5 UCLA alums involved in the project in critical roles. Daniel Alvarado wrote the script with me (UCLA MFA Screenwriting). Corey Wish is one of our three producers (Justin Wolse and Erin Hagee the other two), and Corey was the …

Derek Steiner is our location scout/coordinator, training under $5 Cover’s Martin Lane – he’s a horror fan and he’s done a great job of finding us some very creepy places to shoot. Here are some photos of key locations from Derek and Justin Wolske (producer)

The first two days on the road produced pictures of a rainbow in a dust storm and the western hemisphere’s largest cross, not exactly horror fare.

The last day – a snake farm – more like it!

I’m writing this from a Motel 6 in Grant, New Mexico, on the road to Memphis Tennessee to begin production on Savage County, my first “real” project as a director. I decided to blog the process, in hopes that it would be of some use to somebody to have a window into my particular route into first-time directing and to see a little of how we’re attempting what we’re attempting with the time and resources we’ve got.