Happy Halloween! I'm the only one in my whole damn office who bothered to bring a costume and I feel like a bit of a dumbass in my jumbo afro wig, big sunglasses and big gold dollar sign bling bling medallion. At least my coworkers got a good laugh. Tonight a bunch of us are going to the Art-o-matic opening/halloween party and there better be more people dressed up!

Mark your calendars, we have a premiere date!!! Friday, Nov 15th at 8pm at Art-o-Matic, we will be showing Washington Interns Gone Bad on the big screen for the first time ever! I'm not sure of the capacity, but I'm pretty sure we should expect it to be beyond capacity, so get there early. More details as they come.

Wow, that was a fun protest! We handed out somewhere around 500 flyers to a fairly good response and a few people stuck around to ask more about it. One woman took a flyer from Anne, looked at it and then handed it back, but that was definitely the exception. The protest itself looked pretty cool too. I ran into a few people I knew, and a bunch of people recognized Britannia the Radical Cheerleader from "her" performances at other protests and at the Billy Bragg show. People also really liked the Washington Interns Gone Bad t-shirts, though one older lady did point out our little "geurilla" typo on the back. So tonight I'm off to plug the film on the radio, WFPF, 89.3 on the FM dial in the greater Washington DC metropolitan area (or you can listen online from worldwide at www.wpfw.org). That's happening at 7pm (EST) so tune in and feel free to call into the show at (202) 588-0893

OK, we're in my office now and I got to see the streams of people flowing out of the metro station and toward the protest and it's a beautiful thing to see so many regular folks of all walks of life turning out in such large numbers to protest this ridiculous war. Whenever I see little kids with their crayon-ed peace signs, it gives me hope for a future world better than George Bush's twisted vision. Of course, the whole Wellstone thing is such a blow. We lost the only remotely leftist populist man in our government, shifting our political landscape further to the dark side.

OK, we're on our way to go flyer that protest! I'll report back on that later.

Billy Bragg pictures are up here and video is here. Enjoy. This Saturday is going to be the largest anti-war protest in Washington, DC since Vietnam and I plan on having as much of the cast and crew there handing out flyers. It should be a good old time.

Just got back from a free Billy Bragg concert in the lobby of the AFL-CIO. I didn't really get much chance to flyer the crowd, but Billy got one and he says he can't wait to see the film! I captured the whole thing on video and it was great. He only did 4 songs, but he spoke in between on topics such as war with Iraq, European anti-americanism, globalization issues and union organizing and it was very inspiring. He also invited our very own Britannia, the radical drag cheerleader, up to give a cheer and wave the pompoms during There is Power in a Union.

Cool blog alert! We've got Rob Carlson who runs a very cool site that takes hours to fully explore for all sorts of interesting things, including this picture of Elizabeth taken during the A20 protests. Ever since he linked to this blog, I've been getting mad hits here. Thanks!

I just got eyeglasses for the first time and while I can see a whole lot better, they're sort of freaking me out a little. My depth perception seems all askew. The ground looks closer than it is, and my computer monitor has a trapazoidal shape now. My co-worker says that I'll get used to it. I hope so!

Tomorrow Billy Bragg is giving a free concert in the lobby of the AFL-CIO and I'll be there handing out Washington Interns Gone Bad flyers. I also heard from our drag cheerleader today and he was handing out flyers all weekend at a Clarendon street festival and people were telling him that they had seen the Citypaper article and were excited to hear more about it!

I am dragging my ass this morning. We were up late last night seeing Sleater-Kinney. It was a great show, and the perfect way to wrap up a weekend of dealing with an abusive cast member. I was also out in sniper country yesterday to try to get some of the sound mixed. These damn firewire drives are a ridiculous pain in the ass. After going all the way out to Falls Church, we needed to come back here to get a Windows 2000 CD so that the NTFS drive would show up on our sound designer's system, and after that installs we plug in the drive and fire up Premiere but there are a bunch of gaps in the project and clips aren't where they're supposed to be. So now he has to come out here to work on it on my slow ass computer. Luckilly when I plugged it back in here, everything was normal. I also saw Punch Drunk Love this weekend, the new Paul Thomas Anderson film. It was great in a very strange sort of way. Seeing Adam Sandler playing a very different kind of role was refreshing, and I loved seeing all of the P.T. Anderson regulars like Phillip Seymore Hofman and Luis Guzman (and I thought I caught an uncredited John C. Riely in there too).

OK, as promised, the Citypaper article has been scanned. After you read that, be sure to see the corrections.

Well, I saw the Citypaper article. Why on earth would a writer bother to fact check something if they're just going to run what they want to anyway even after being set straight. Oh well. I'm still fairly happy with it despite the obvious problems. It's all a learning experience, and what was learned through this interview was to be much more controlled about what we say, what we show and not letting our excitement get the best of us. I'll try to get a scan up later. Oh yeah, and would it have killed them to put our damn URL in there?

I woke up at 6 freakin' AM this morning because I'm so pumped about that Citypaper article that's hitting the streets today. It will be nice to have a positive piece out on this film. Not that I don't love the Post blurb, but I've gotten an email or two that didn't like it. One guy said: "The "oh he's driving a SUV so he must be bad" mentality wears real thin real fast..." Of course that isn't the case. The fact that he's an extreme right wing piggie senator with a miserable voting record who just happened to be driving a "pimped out gold colored SUV" is what makes him bad. He went on to say "I'm as much a liberal as the next guy, but that hardly makes those kinds of tactics any more correct. Frankly, it's those kinds of things that give liberal causes a bad name." So, for all liberals out there, please let me state that my actions in no way speak for liberalism. I stopped calling myself a liberal around the time when the democratic party's motto became "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em." And look how well playing nicely with the right has gotten us, shall we? It's gotten us an illegitimate "president" who in just under two years has dragged this country down the tubes and made us a global laughingstock. When you're up against the kind of people who have no qualms about hitting below the belt, you have to fight dirty or get your ass kicked. Being noble losers doesn't exactly give liberals a good name. But that's just my opinion. More later.

Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in! To shooting, that is... We've decided to do what we swore we wouldn't do, shoot more footage. But this is going to be very cool. When I was originally piecing together raw ideas of places I'd like to shoot, the idea of doing some row house rooftops came up and nothing ever became of it, until now. So tonight, Elizabeth and I will be running across the rooftops of Westminster Street! In other news, I came accross a mention of our Post article on another DC blog today. And speaking of that article, I've been doing some research on our friend, Rick Santorum, and while I'm not entirely surprised, his voting record SUCKS!!! We'll be hitting him on that shortly, so stay tuned. I promise it will be extremely funny as well as educational. Let's get ready to ruuuuuuuuummmmmmble!

Came across this today, another Washington intern gone bad!

Cool Blog Alert! Skarlet at punkprincess.com alerted me to the fact that Dreamworks pictures is comissioning some screenwriters to write a screenplay about, you guessed it, Washington interns. The problem is that they know nothing about the world of Washington interns so they're looking to talk to some. Of course, what they don't know yet is that there already is a film about Washington Interns that is already getting press. We're moving on this as quickly as possible. Perhaps a deal with Dreamworks?

Want to help us advertise this film? Please download this banner and put it on your own website and link it up to www.WashingtonInternsGoneBad.com.

OK, so it's after noon and I'm still just waking up. We were up very late last night at Elizabeth's birthday party which also was the first ever screening of the whole film in rough cut form. It went over very well. People were laughing mostly in all the right places and it gave me a good idea of what worked and what didn't. Nobody seemed to get the J-Lo's booty reference though. Oh well. We also came up with some ideas on where to go next. The marketing team will be meeting at some point today to go over this in more detail. Rick Santorum, watch out! We're not done with you yet, bucko. I see a t-shirt with your quote on it. Not on your top ten list indeed.

Here's a scan of the Post story

OK, here is the Post story! Once again, my work makes the Reliable Source. Last time was a T-shirt that I designed when I worked at the DNC which you can see here. Gotta love this... 'Santorum vowed that seeing her movie "will not be on my list of top 10 things to do."' Now, I've been making it my mission to mess with republicans online since back in the dialup bbs days, and these were such low rent pissant dittohead wankers, so it's nice to be able to graduate to at least indirectly messing with a guy who actually has power to use that right wing agenda to do real damage to the world. Now how can we manage to get Dubya pissed off at us?

So today is turning out to be quite exciting. Elizabeth and I started out early today to pick up the new firewire drive. Then several hours were spent waiting for the 70 gigs or so of data to transfer over, and now we're waiting for Premiere to create a new set of preview files so we can finally dump this sucker to tape. My fingers are crossed that this drive will work better than the crappy conversion kit that I've been using. But we are still good for getting submitted into Art-o-Matic. I've been emailing back and forth with the person running their film committee and we are still quite good for getting in. Now, here comes the real exciting part... Elizabeth broke the story of the Rick Santorum fender bender to Lloyd Rove of the Washington Post for his Reliable Source column. It should be in the Style section tomorrow, with a photo of Elizabeth from the film (the same picture that's on the lunchbox!) Also the Citypaper called about setting up a photo shoot of us for thier article which should be hitting the streets a week from today. That's 2 press hits in one week and we don't even have a date yet for the premiere!

Things are coming along very nicely. I dropped in the first of our effects shots last night and it looks great. I also touched up the ending, adding a song by Grandma's Mini (which features Marisa Torrieri who plays Becky and Ann Brandstadter who plays Rosa the waitress in the film) and fixing the titles so they look good. Next up tonight is to put together the newscasts and get them all put into their appropriate places. I'm also expecting more of our effects shots to come throughout the week, including the much anticipated republican decapitation. Tomorrow is the Art-o-Matic deadline and I'll probably be taking a personal day from work to get it done in time. I'm also looking for a viable workaround for the firewire drive that keeps choking on the data and won't let me extract video. The plan is to just buy another one and return it in a few days. The Blair Witch Project folks did that with their high 8 camera. Maybe I should do that with a high end laptop so I can really crank this sucker out. Maybe that's a little too far.

As the deadline for art-o-matic quickly approaches (t-minus 2 days now), I picked up a cutaway shot last night, and did some work getting the paperwork for using people's music taken care of. I got contracts out to Spur, the Nighties, and Grandma's Mini and will be working on others after Thursday. I still need a song to lead into the fight scene since the song that I'm using temporarilly is way out of our price range. Michael Jackson, if you're reading this, please let us use Beat It for free. Once we have a rough cut submitted, there will be more time to mess with songs and stuff. For now I have a bit more editing to do, putting in some transitions between the scenes already cut and cutting a few more small scenes. Elizabeth hooked us up with a friend who has a dv deck so mastering will be that much easier. Now I just hope that my second firewire drive will be able to export video without choking on a computer other than my own. Otherwise, I'm open to suggestions.

Just 4 days to go until we have to get a work print of the film to Art-o-Matic and it's looking like we're in pretty good shape. I only have a few more things to edit, and then it's all about getting this sucker mastered and then putting on the finishing touches for our world premiere! With the Citypaper article hitting the streets a week after this deadline, and our own mounting press and publicity campaign gearing up, this should be huge. But we're going to need some help. Anybody who reads this and wants to lend us a hand, now is the time. Please sign onto the mailing list and we'll get you some flyers that you can print out and wallpaper your neighborhood with. We really need some real Washington interns who work on the hill to start building buzz there as well. I've also designed more cool merchandise like a lunchbox, license plate holders and even barbecue aprons!

Crazy couple of days. First off, what the hell is the deal with this sniper who killed 5 random (or so it seems right now) people around the Maryland suburbs yesterday with one shot each? I would be surprised if whoever did this wasn't either in the military or the underbelly of the intelligence community, but that might just be my own paranoia. Then again, you know what they say... just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you. On a much more pleasant note, the Citypaper interview went extraordinarilly well. We're expecting the article to hit the streets on Oct 17th and in preparation to the increased interest that a press hit like that will create, I've been making tweaks to the official website. First off, you can now got to the site by either the usual www.slackfist.com URL, or with www.WashingtonInternsGoneBad.com. I've also whipped up a bunch of shirts that folks can buy, and added a field to join the mailing list from most pages on the site. While we were waiting to get interviewed, I mentioned to Elizabeth about missing Chuck Palahniuk's book signing, so she called up Ollson's and told whoever it was who picked up the phone that we big important Hollywood producers were in town and really wanted to catch his signing, but we had a prior press engagement which would prevent us from making it and if he would like to get together for drinks afterwards to please call us. Unfortunately, we never did hear from Chuck, which is too bad because I really wanted him to see our Fight Club reference. Maybe next time, Chuck.

OK, tonight is the big interview and I'm missing a reading and book signing by Chuck Palahniuk to be there! In preparation for this interview, I've posted some brand spanking new stills from the film itself which can be checked out at the Slack Fist site. I've also finally gotten around to registering washingtoninternsgonebad.com and that will be pointing to the Slack Fist site sometime within the next couple of days.

Tomorrow I get interviewed by the City Paper about the film! Apparently one of the arts writers had heard about our showing at the Bat Cave, called the DC Arts Center who put them in touch with Dee (who runs the open mic) who put them in touch with Elizabeth who put the wheels in motion! I'll have a full wrapup of the interview tomorrow night!