Hey, guess what? More wedding pictures, this time courtesy of our kickass bridesmaid and Washington Interns Gone Bad producer and actress, Karen Zamperini!

George W. Bush, working overtime to protect us from porn! Now can you do something about protecting us from unemployment, ya moron? (via metafilter)

These are the sort of congressional staffers that Washington Interns Gone Bad is all about!

Pumped from being on a film shoot this weekend, I have not one but two short projects on the near horizon... First up is Cinemasports, "the iron chef of filmmakers and actors." Even faster paced than the 48 Hour Film Project, they announce a set of things that must be included in each film at noon. You have until 6pm to shoot and edit a 4 minute piece. I'd like to do something fully improvised and shot with multiple cameras, all outdoors and all handheld, possibly in black and white. The second possible project is a political ad contest called Bush in 30 Seconds. I get to submit a 30 second ad about our wonderful president. 15 finalists are chosen by web voting, those 15 get judged by a panel of celebrity judges including Jack Black, Michael Moore, Donna Brazile, Gus Van Sant, Michael Stipe, James Carville, Janeane Garofalo, Margaret Cho, Eddie Vedder and Moby! The winner gets broadcast during the next State of the Union Address!!! If anyone has any ideas for this, please let me know. When I worked at the DNC I got to cut an attack ad on Bush that was going to run the day before the New Hampshire primary. I had cut it just for streaming, but they liked it so much they wanted me to cut a broadcast quality one to air in New Hampshire. They wound up cancelling it because the polls were favoring McCain and they didn't want to waste the money.

Just in time for Halloween, Retrocrush has the 100 scariest movie scenes of all time!

Thin skinned Fox network threatens to sue themselves over Simpsons parody of Fox "News." (via metafilter)

I hope that this off-off-off Broadway play wins a Tony so that some showbiz bigwig presenter has to say "I'm Gonna Kill the President" on live TV. I wonder how long before Ashcroft's goons come in and shut this down. (see also Salon's review)

Some behind the scenes photos from this weekend's film shoot taken by the documentarian and the DP.

Last night we got to see the 48 Hour Film Project film that I got to work on this weekend, as well as half of the rest of the films from the San Francisco project. 22 teams took part, every last one of them finished a film (which I believe is a first), 15 of them got in before the deadline (not including ours which was 1/2 hour late). Each film had to have a character named Hugh Simon who was a bouncer, a vinyl record used as a prop, and the following line of dialogue: "I've been lied to, and very much deceived." The way we incorporated those was that the paralyzed guy's name was Hugh Simon and he had been a bouncer before his accident. At one point Dave, the body he has taken over, puts on a record, and the line is well incorporated into the dialogue. Other films revolved the story around some of these elements. There was a mystery about a spate of DJ murders. There was a horror about a girl who was slashed with a record. There was a comedy about this apartment that had a bouncer in front. There were two films where the line "I've been lied to and very much deceived" was sung. While some of the films looked or sounded better than others, all of them were really funny, and amazing in that they were all completed in a weekend.

Who will invite people to "Come on down" now that Rod Roddy is no longer with us? I'm sure he's wearing a sequined suit to announce the great showcase showdown in the sky. (via metafilter)

OK, I'm awake and alive after the longest film shoot I've ever been on. I was script supervisor on a sci-fi short for the 48 Hour Film Project yesterday. They're setting up to shoot the last couple of scenes right now but I couldn't make it today. It was so much fun! We all got to the editor's house early yesterday morning, most of us on little sleep from the night before. Anne and I had been out late the night before at the SF World Film Festival (the films we saw were really cool, and I got over enough of my bitterness about being rejected from it to enjoy them). Many of the crew members were up all night getting ready. The script was called "In the Dark" and the premise is that this guy who was paralyzed in an accident now controls the body of this guy who was catatonic in a mental hospital. Puppet man meets girl and things go bad. There were 5 locations: a park, a house, a roof deck, an alleyway and a futuristic hospital room. We did the park first, then the house, and by the time we were setting up the hospital of the future, it was past 10pm. We wrapped that after midnight and they're meeting today (probably as I type) to pick up the alleyway and rooftop deck shots which should be nice quickies. Here's the cool thing... they were able to get the guy who runs DVGarage to do their CG shots. This is the guy who created Queen Amidala's ship in the Phantom Menace! Last night he was taking wide shots of the SF skyline and futurizing them up. They've been editing since last night and need to turn it in to the organizers at 7pm tonight. Tomorrow and Wednesday night they'll be shown at the Roxy theater in the Mission. While toward the end it got exhausting, it was so much fun to be working on a film again, and particularly one that I wasn't completely in charge of. The crew were awsome! The DP and cameraman had all sorts of lighting, gels and screens and knew what to do with them. The cameraman had even built his own steadycam out of bike parts (and I'm hoping that he starts making them to sell sometime soon!). They had a boom operator (yeah, I know, every film except Washington Interns Gone Bad has a boom operator). They even had craft services in the form of lots of food which they were able to get donated from different places. I got to meet a lot of very cool people who I would definitely work with in the future. I can't wait to see this thing.

This is funny. But what is missing from this article is how a road got named "Butt Hole Road" in the first place. There must be some innocent, non-anal explanation.

I might have to buy this action figure. Think of the fun I could have doing stop motion animation between her and my Jay and Silent Bob action figures! I could even use sound clips from Clerks. Snoogans. (via metafilter)

So the SF World Film Festival is in full swing this weekend. It kicked off last night at the Palace of Fine Arts with a pair of documentaries which I didn't bother checking out. Instead, I went to meet with the crew of the film that I'll be working on this weekend. It's part of the 48 Hour Film Project. Tonight, a film genre will be pulled out of a hat, and then each crew has 48 hours to turn in a completed short film. I got connected to this crew through Amanda, actress and production coordinator, who had met Anne on Craigslist. I'm script supervisor. I'm very much looking forward to being part of somebody else's project after making my own film. Given the choice between attending all three days of a festival that has given me an overabundnace of grief, miscommunications and rejection and actually making a film, it was a no-brainer. Anne and I will be attending at least some of the festival tonight. There are a couple of films that I'm interested in seeing. I don't know how much my bitterness of having my own film rejected has to do with my lack of excitement over much of the lineup, but there really isn't much on there that appeals to me.

More good old Bush hate today straight from America's heartland! Check out John Mellencamp's beautiful bitchslapping of the liar in chief.

Bush gets heckled by members of Australia's parliament! If he keeps it up, perhaps we can see a repeat performace of that sort of heckling the next time he addresses congress.

Two celebrity deaths today. Fred "Rerun" Berry and Elliot Smith. I haven't heard much of Elliot Smith's music, but I REALLY liked the song he had on the Royal Tenenbaums soundtrack (coincidentally played while Luke Wilson's character was attempting suicide). And I will never forget that What's Happening episode when Rerun was sneaking a tape recorder into the Doobie Brothers concert and it fell out when he was dancing around. They haven't determined a cause of death for Fred. Elliot stabbed himself in the chest.

Yay! Another excerpt from Michael Moore's Dude, Where's My Country? A few more of these and I won't have to buy the book.

Just when I thought things here in California couldn't get any worse, I have to go and read about this. Somebody please just kill me now.

Yesterday I spent the day having the Washington Interns Gone Bad DVD authored. Travis Ballstadt is the man! He's currently putting together a DVD set for a band called the Nadas, who are apparently bigger than Zeppelin in the midwest but nobody knows about them on the coasts. They shot 2 shows with 8 cameras and 40 audio channels and what I saw of it looks really nice. When rendering Interns out to mpeg2, we dropped the frame rate to 24fps to make it look more like film. This is the best and most crisp and clean I have ever seen this movie look! For some reason, every time I dumped it back to my camera, it looked crappy. Text was aliassed and there was lots of pixelation. The movie itself took 5 hours to render (which on my machine would have taken somewhere around 3 days if it would work at all), and then we cut the film into chapters, built the menus, added all the extras, and then negotiated the bitrates for the extras to make them all fit on the disc (since we encoded the movie as high quality as possible). It all fit nicely, and now I have a DVD! He's going to burn a few more for me so I can give them out at the film festival I'm attending in a couple of weeks before I go and have a bunch duplicated, plus dumping it to DVCAM tape for tape duplication and right to my camera so I can do a few tapes myself at home if I need to. This thing is packed to the gills with extras, some of which has been seen on the film site and a few things never seen before by anyone.

Last night Anne and I watched DC Sniper: 23 Days of Fear. Having lived in DC during the sniper attacks, we were interested to see if a made for TV movie could even come close. Charles S. Dutton played Chief Moose. His acting was great but he didn't look a thing like the real Moose. There were some real cheesy bits of dialogue, particularly between the John Muhammad and John Lee Malvo characters. There were some events that I'm not sure even happened, like the original suspect who was arrested (he saw his hotel being surrounded by the cops live on TV and tried to get out the bathroom window in the movie). We watched each murder go down, remembering where we were when we heard that there was yet another shooting. As soon as we saw a man and woman pushing a red shopping cart through a parking garage, we both looked at each other and said "Home Depot." What the film did portray quite accurately was the climate of fear, parents rushing their kids to their cars, people looking nervously whenever they were outside. Even though Anne and I lived in the District while the majority of shootings happened in the outlying areas, we were both quite on edge. She was a nanny and had to pick up two kids from two different private schools and shuttle them off to horseback riding lessons, dance lessons, soccer, etc. She had even gone to a Home Depot (not the Falls Church one where the shooting happened, but it was still out in the suburbs) with Karen and Zoe a few nights before that woman was shot at Home Depot, and they were both nervous and making jokes with each other about the sniper. A few days into the sniper spree, Elizabeth and I went to a Comp USA in Rockville, driving past some of the Kensington crime scenes (Elizabeth's family lives in Kensington) and running in zigzags through the parking lot (on the drive back, she broke the Rick Santorum story to Lloyd Grove at the Post). A couple of weeks into the sniper spree, I had to go out to Fairfax to meet with my sound guy. Anne and I were both pretty nervous about that. I was waiting for him outside of a metro, walking around and keeping my eyes toward every grassy knoll. We even drove past the Falls Church Home Depot. It was a freaky time to be in DC, possibly even scarier than the few days after 9/11. A mix of gallows humor and excitement about our upcoming film premiere helped.

Rough crowd! I asked the folks on Craigslist's film forum to check out the new Washington Interns Gone Bad trailer. People suck.

I am such a sucker for Celebrity Prank Phone Calls. The Arnold Schwarzenegger ones are pretty funny, expecially now that they have new sound boards that mix his campaign blurbs with his movie clips. Be sure to check out the Jack Black pranks while you're there.

The Washington Post wouldn't run today's Boondocks comic because it makes fun of Condaleeza Rice. How is she not a fair target for satire?

Cool blog alert: Margaret Cho has a blog. She has some funny posts on there, though I sure wish she'd allow commenting.

Ladies and gentlemen, at long last, the full 2 minute Washington Interns Gone Bad trailer!

My cousin sent me this link (wmv & probably NSFW) today. I know nothing about the origins of it, but it's really funny.

A sequel to 16 Candles is apparently in the works without the benefit of John Hughes having anything to do with it. Hopefully this will answer the question that has been keeping most of Gen X up at night for over a decade now... What ever happened to Long Duck Dong?

The Washington Interns Gone Bad DVD is coming along nicely. Rendering it out to one huge file wound up crapping out on my computer after about 23 hours, so I've gone back to rendering it in two halves which I've done before with success. The first half rendered last night and I'll do part 2 tonight. I've also been going through all of my footage (and I'm talking about 14 hours of tapes here) to find all sorts of fun outtakes. I'm also including the two internet teaser trailers, the behind the scenes featurette, and a brand new full trailer (which I'll be cutting tomorrow). So I've been looking into DVD duplication and it looks like we'll be able to afford a run of about 100 right off the bat! I might take some pre-orders at a reduced price from friends and fans to help finance a larger run at a reduced rate. Cast and crew can look forward to their free copy within a month or so!

No good could possibly come of this: Bush to Meet Schwarzenegger in California.

Well, I started rendering out Washington Interns Gone Bad with the new sound mix, the updated credits and the tweaked video bits into one big file to be mastered to DVD at around 8pm last night. The progress meter said "about a day" when I started it. When I woke up this morning it said "about 8 hours." Now it's saying "About 11 hours." My computer is ridiculously slow! But, it's all coming together finally. Today is the third anniversary of the day that Anne and I first met in person. Three years ago tonight I had resigned from my job at the DNC, took a cab over to Union Station, and met the woman who I had been corresponding with over the phone and email for the previous 6 months. I got there a little bit late and was a bit nervous. We cabbed back to my place, had some dinner, hung out, watched a movie and cuddled. We spent the weekend doing all the Washington sightseeing stuff and had a great time together. Everthing felt so right and so natural and we've barely been apart since (even though the first 6 months after that we were long distance). It's been a wild ride over these three years! We moved her down from NY to DC, we made a movie, we moved across the country, we got married, and I could not ask for a better, sweeter, more wonderful person to spend the rest of my life with. Happy Anniversay, Sweetie!

Oh SHIT! New push to deregulate energy / Schwarzenegger electricity plan fuels fears of another debacle. If this isn't grounds for a pre-emptive recall, I don't know what is. Thanks to all the idiots who voted for this assclown even after hearing about how he met with Kenny Boy Lay and Michael Milken during the last energy crisis. Looks like it's not just makeup artists and production assistants that Arnie wants to screw, but every last person in California. Somebody needs to send a robot from the future to make sure this steroid-brained Bush puppet was never born.

OK, I'm a bit slow on this bit of news. It's been buzzing around the blogs and message boards all day, and I'm just getting to it now because we caught a double feature of Pirates of the Caribbean and Once Upon a Time in Mexico. Nothing like 4.5 hours of Johnny Depp and action movie violence for a Friday evening. We also met a friend from craigslist who seemed pretty fun and lives nearby. So anyway, the news, of course, is mister holier than thou Rush Limbaugh coming out and admitting he's been a popping pills for years and is taking a month off from spewing right wing hate on the radio to go into rehab. Here are a few of his thoughts on the subject of drugs... "When you strip it all away, Jerry Garcia destroyed his life on drugs. And yet he's being honored, like some godlike figure. Our priorities are out of whack, folks. What this says to me is that too many whites are getting away with drug use. Too many whites are getting away with drug sales. Too many whites are getting away with drug use. Too many whites are getting away with drug sales. Too many whites are getting away with trafficking in this stuff. The answer to this disparity is not to start letting people out of jail because we're not putting others in jail who are breaking the law. The answer is to go out and find the ones who are getting away with it, convict them and send them up the river, too." - Oct 5, 1995 "There's nothing good about drug use, We know it. It destroys individuals. It destroys families. Drug use destroys societies. Drug use, some might say, is destroying this country. And we have laws against selling drugs, pushing drugs, using drugs, importing drugs. And the laws are good because we know what happens to people in societies and neighborhoods which become consumed by them. And so if people are violating the law by doing drugs, they ought to be accused and they ought to be convicted and they ought to be sent up." - 1995 "So we're not going to get on -- we don't fault these animals for a lack of discipline, but we get on human beings who are fat for lack of discipline and you know it and I know it. But here's the thing that struck me about this. We have alcoholics and drug addicts in our society, don't we? And what do we say about them? Well, they can't help it. Why, it's genetic. Why, they have a disease. Why, put one thimbleful of scotch in front of them and they can die.' We totally exempt them from any control over their lives, do we not? Some athlete will spend two years snorting lines of coke. 'He can't help it.' You know, it's -- it's just -- it's not -- it's -- it's genetic. These people -- they're predisposed to having this addictive syndrome. They -- they can't help -- yeah, like that line of cocaine just happened to march into the hotel, go up to the athlete's room and put itself right there in front of him on his blotter." - Dec. 16, 1994

Where can you go after your attempted "prayer offensive" for the death of liberal supreme court justices fails? How about wanting to nuke the State Department after reading some crackpot book? Why is Pat Robertson still on the loose? If a couple of leftists had a conversation like that on national television, they'd be labelled enemy combatants and shipped off to Cuba in Hannibal Lecter gear.

The good Doctor Hunter S. Thompson on Rush Limbaugh: "Rush Limbaugh is a lame professional Swine and he makes a good living at it. He is like a hired Geek in some traveling backwoods carnival -- the freaks who bite the heads off Chickens -- but Limbaugh is a modernized Geek who thinks he can bite the heads off of people." I'm quite surprised to see no mention of drugs in this article. (via Exit Stage Left)

More on recalling Arnold: an official campaign and an online petition. Edited to add one more recall link.

It's time for the California recall part 2! Good old Gary Trudeau offers a recall petition for Arnold along with Doonsebury. I think that whoever can campaign on the sole plank that they will fight to remove the recall provision from the California constitution and then immediately resign from office could easily win.

I cannot fucking believe it: Voters recall Davis, elect Schwarzenegger as governor. What the hell is wrong with people to go and elect this idiot? I know people are stupid, but this is ridiculous. I hope the recall ball gets rolling for Arnold ASAP. How funny would it be for there to be a recall scheduled before he's even sworn in? I've only lived in California for 6 months now, and I've got to say that it hasn't been that great. This is the icing on the cake.

Anne and I just got back from our neighbor's garage the official polling place for our neighborhood. Above is my ballot reciept. I voted against the recall, for Bustamante as a replacement, and against prop 54. This morning I looked up where our polling place was going to be and it just had an address and said "garage." It was just a block up from our apartment, so I checked it out and it is indeed just in somebody's garage. The ballots are just a large sheet of paper and to make a selection, you take a black felt tip pen and draw a line between two ends of an arrow next to whatever or whomever you're voting for. Then you feed it into a machine that counts it and then puts it into a locked ballot box. Before we voted, we got two phone calls reminding us to vote. One of the calls was from the San Francisco Labor Council who I did some anti-recall work with a couple of weeks ago. The other was from Martin Sheen. Both were recordings, which is too bad because it would be nice to be getting real calls from Martin Sheen. "Hey Jason, it's Marty. I'm just wondering what's up with Washington Interns Gone Bad..." If Martin Sheen (or Charlie Sheen, Emilio Estavez or anyone else for that matter) really did ask what's up with WIGB, the answer would be that I just got the remastered sound back from my sound guy right before we left to go vote. This puts us one step closer to being ready to self distribute. But I digress... For more inside information on this interesting political situation here in California, be sure to check out Pollworker.com, a blog by an actual poll worker here in San Francisco.