November is a time of changes

Well, it is I suppose, in that things seem to start going seriously strange in November. This could just be my perception of things though, but it seems once the birthday/Hallowe'en bit of the year wears off and I'm staring what can euphemistically be described as the "Holiday Season" in the face, things take a turn for the strange.

This year has handed me a doozy.

I've blogged before about the head pounding idiocy of the film I worked on last October, and how that went down the toilet bowl of what the freaking hell is going on here? faster than a bran sprinkled laxative.

I might have mentioned my utter bafflement at how I was seemingly the only one trying to get this film to see the light of day despite the best efforts of the director and executive producer to apathy it to death while ignoring their legal obligations.

Turns out I was wrong about that last thing. There has been a parallel effort on the part of the former producer for said film to get it released as well, and he was completely unaware of my struggles from the other end. We met up at the Small Town Film Festival (Chatham Kent REPRESENT!), where I was teaching a makeup class. We compared notes, then found things were even more baffling than before. You know the old story/adage about a group of blind men feeling an elephant, and trying to decide what an elephant looks like? One feels the ear, and declares that an elephant is like a fan, one feels the trunk and says that he is wrong, it feels like a snake, one feels its wang and agrees, etc. (I made that last one up, because I am immature). The point is supposed to be that without a big picture, you can jump to a conclusion based on incomplete evidence, and in fact many people can come to wrong conclusions about the same event, even though their data makes sense to them.

Well, that was a long journey to make a point, and the point is: we had been trying to figure out what was going on with the film, and what was happening made no sense. After we talked, it made even less sense, as if it turned out we were trying to figure out what an elephant looked like by groping through the crap at a garage sale.

I did mention in passing that the production had never actually signed a contract for the script I wrote, however. This led to a sudden silence on the other side of the table, then big smiles. It turns out they had all the other legal paperwork, but no clear leverage.

A plan is brewing. Things may not be lost yet, this corpse may rise from its grave yet!

Stay tuned for more wacky developments!