Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Medicine Run on MovieHatch!

One of my screenplays is currently a part of the MovieHatch script competition. Please click through on the link to vote for it! Five Stars is what we're looking for!



http://www.moviehatch.com/index.php?option=com_moviehatch&task=detail&movie=145



As always, your support is appreciated!




Thursday, September 17, 2009

Temecula Skeletor!!!

Generally speaking I'm a writer, and don't really want to get in front of the camera. However, I have a lot of friends who are directors, and occasionally they come running at the last minute looking for a warm body to fill in. That warm body would be me.

So here is the trailer for "Temecula Skeletor", a comedy horror film that I did a bit in for my buddy King J. I play Billy Doosh, the skeezy television reporter.





I apologize in advance for any trauma this film may cause you, but the love interest is bodaciously hot, and my lip ferret is one for the ages. Enjoy my friends...

Temecula Skeletor!

Thursday, August 27, 2009

Moresville

Karen Goolsby-Braun never set out to bring peace, justice and the green chile to Moresville, Michigan. However, excrement occurs. More properly, shit happens. Dr. Goolsby-Braun did not like to use vulgarity outside the coital arena. It was, well, vulgar. To be perfectly frank, at first glance Moresville, Michigan, might strike some as being rather vulgar. One would be making a rash judgment on a fleeting first impression, and one would be surprisingly accurate.

Found lurking in rolling miles of grey-green pastureland draped tweedily around every curve of the sluggishly flowing Kalamazoo river, Moresville leaked menacingly from its swampy basin like methane from beneath the brackish waters. A wisp here, in the hand-painted small engine repair sign nailed to the tree in front of a slowly disintegrating house, a waft there in the weed-strewn beach volleyball court outside the Mustang Tavern (Karaoke Wensdays). As Wilmer Braun guided the softly shuddering 1974 Volvo station wagon along the poorly maintained state highway, his wife became increasingly aware of the miasma flooding the car through the vents.


MORESVILLE 4 MILES
Home of the Moresville College Fighting Trojans


Trojans. Dr. Goolsby-Braun wrinkled her nose, a fresh gust of Moresville skittering across her palate. The college mascot was a brand of condom. She could hear the jokes at the faculty cocktail parties already. If there were faculty cocktail parties. Silty visions of faculty hog roasts where associate professors with painted on smiles sipped plastic cups full of watery domestic pilsner from a keg grew more substantial with every passing barn. Of course there would be condom jokes.

“Trojans.”

Dr. Goolsby-Braun started, broken from her reverie by the clipped word from the back seat. She turned, finding her only offspring sitting up and taking in his surroundings with a look of slowly dawning horror. Felipe Goolsby-Braun had spent the better part of his fourteen years in the arid mountains of northern New Mexico. The skinny blond boy was entering his freshman year of high school, and had not been in favor of the move from Albuquerque to Moresville at any point. Once cajoled into the boxy car by equal parts threat and promise, Felipe refused to speak for three and a half days. It had been rather pleasant, all things considered.

“They were a brave and hearty people several thousand years ago.” Dr. Goolsby-Braun was not going to let this opportunity for intergenerational communication slip away from her.

“Yeah, and now they’re a cheap and trusty rubber.”

“Felipe! Please take your mind, and your mouth, out of the gutter.” Lessons were an ongoing part of parenthood, and no opportunity for education should be missed.

“It’s the truth, though.”

“You know that’s not what the sign refers to. You’re being deliberately vulgar.”

The boy smiled, genuinely pleased for the first time in months. He pointed out the window. “So are they.”

Dr. Goolsby-Braun turned slowly, without enthusiasm, wondering what new tendril of Moresville had seeped into the confines of the Volvo. In a muddy field beside the road a flock of grayish sheep stood unconcernedly as one of their own was mounted with enthusiasm by a large ram. Vulgar, vulgar, vulgar. Her head swiveled as the blissfully rutting livestock drifted out of sight. Enthusiasm and endurance. There had been a time…

“Yo, Dad, keep your eyes on the road, huh, Sport?”

With a twitch, Wilmer Braun tore his eyes away from the roadside procreative display and concentrated once again on his driving.

“Just stretching my neck, Felipe.” Wilmer murmured. “All this driving gets me a bit stiff.”

Felipe chortled again. “Stiff.”

A slight blush suffused Wilmer’s already pink scalp, and Dr. Goolsby-Braun wondered briefly if his thoughts had touched on the same wistful terrain as her own. Possibly. Despite his sensitive demeanor, her husband was at his core just a man, and suffered from the basest instincts of his species.


Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Brett Favre is Back and You Should be Glad!

It seems official once again. In yet another sign of the impending apocalypse, Brett Favre’s coy flirtations with football have resulted in a contract with the Minnesota Vikings, a team that is considered by many to be just one player away from a possible championship this year. That one player, of course, is quarterback, the most difficult position in the sport and conveniently enough the spot where Favre plays. The mercurial gunslinger from Kiln, Mississippi has long indicated that he’s not in the sport for personal glory anymore, and that the only goals that matter to him are team championships.

While many football aficionados, fans and pundits alike, disparage Favre for his on-again/off-again love affair with America’s favorite sport and the megawatt spotlight that comes with it, I have to disagree. I don’t see this as about a swollen ego and a last desperate grasp at a lifestyle available only to the chosen few. If Favre was truly ego-driven and concerned with the public perception of himself and his legacy, he’d have happily retired two years ago from the Green Bay Packers and trundled snugly into a broadcaster’s jacket, a sure-thing first ballot Hall of Fame induction and lifetime Godhood in the state of Wisconsin. The path was open to him, lined with cheerleaders, paved with green and gold.

Watch Brett Favre is Back on tomorrowpictures.TV!

Yet Brett Favre didn’t take the easy road. He stuck to the principles that had carried him to the heights of his sport in the first place – that personal glory and individual accomplishment were nothing without the accompanying team championships. It’s why he left Green Bay, his football home for the better part of two decades, in order to take a shot at another Lombardi trophy with the New York Jets. That’s something the Great Vince Lombardi himself would understand. The namesake of the Super Bowl Champion’s trophy didn’t end his career with the Packers, his legacy team, either. He left for one more shot with the Washington Redskins. It didn’t work out for Vince, but he did what he did – coach football, with no regrets.

I think that’s why with the Vikings, a team that is the natural rival of the Packers, Favre’s tempting fate and the football gods by turning his back on History and living in the Now. The Vikings need a quarterback, and Brett Favre is one. It’s all he’s ever wanted to be. Not a broadcaster, not a legend, not a god, just a quarterback. And a pretty darned good one. So here’s to you, Brett – you may never have this chance again, and that’s the best reason there is to strap on the helmet and wade back into the fray. If this is your last shot, make it a good one.

Sunday, August 9, 2009

10 Beautiful things I saw last week

10 Beautiful things I saw last week.

1. The shimmering multi-hued green of southern Michigan's fields and forests.
2. My 92 year-old grandmother's smile when we saw each other for the first time in two years.
3. The three does and four fawns gathered around the salt lick at dusk in my parent's back yard.



4. My great-nephew Alexzander: chubby, smiling, blonde and blue-eyed.
5. The bluebells and tiger lilies scattered like pebbles along the side of the back roads of Jackson County.
6. The stabs of lightning flashing from a thunderstorm 200 miles to the south while flying west on a moonlit night above the clouds.
7. Jama Rizzi.
8. The last fireflies of the season performing their ghost dance in the Michigan night.
9. The twin Latina actress/models jogging together down Runyon Canyon, their skin glistening in the late afternoon sunlight.
10. Ryan Taylor-Smith in facepaint with a sockpuppet.

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

The Ghosts Who Walk Among Us...

Lewis Straw woke up that morning to the smell of onions frying. His roommate, Von, was cooking breakfast; and the sly brown scent of the pearly vegetable transitioning from sharp to sweet hung like a mist in the morning air. Lewis found himself vaguely irritated. He didn't like having a roommate, and that first breath of wakefulness alone in his bedroom was one of the few moments of solitude he got in the course of the day.

January 1, 2007. A New Year. Of sorts. Lewis realized it was a relatively provincial way of looking at things- this was the first day of the next year for probably less than half the population of the planet; but it was here and so was he, and thus the resolutions began. There was a time when Lewis didn't make resolutions- in his youth he was arrogant enough to know that if he wanted to start/stop/accomplish something, he could simply Do It without needing to make a vow to himself on any culturally symbolic date. As he'd matured (or at least grown older) it had become clearer that his resolve wasn't so easily kept, and if he was to carry through to whatever conclusions he sought, he must have concrete challenges to overcome.

Lewis lay in bed with the ghost of breakfast present for companionship, and considered his short term options. He could masturbate, even though he'd made a resolution to quit. He'd made the same resolution the year before, and managed to hang with it for six weeks before breaking down at the end of a particularly frustrating Wednesday in February. The idea of starting a brand New Year with an unsatisfactory 15 minutes of resolutional failure was more than he could bear. Heartened by his show of moral fiber, he rolled out of bed and padded to the bathroom.

His apartment had two bedrooms and two baths. The master bedroom had an attached bathroom, the secondary bedroom did not. Lewis occupied the latter, so each morning was a fresh gamble- did he walk to his bathroom naked (which is how he slept), or did he fumble around for a pair of sweatpants or shorts? The odds of his roommate actually being in the hall when he made the two step trip to his bath were relatively low, but he generally tried to be considerate- Lewis certainly didn't ever want to see Von's hairy ass parading through the apartment, and he assumed he felt the same.

Throwing caution to the wind, Lewis opened his bedroom door, peeked around, saw no other living creature, and skipped to the bathroom. He'd left the window open overnight, and there was a slight chill in the small yellow room. When his building was constructed in the late '40's, the secondary bathroom was given a tub, no shower, and no ventilation fan in the ceiling. At some point in the past someone had installed a shower head to the tub faucet, but neglected the fan. This resulted in a seriously humid post-shower bathroom, and although he kept the window open constantly, the walls were slowly disintegrating. Tiny chunks of plaster floated into the tub, swirling down the drain to find the ocean. For several years now he'd been dreading the day the entire wall peeled off while he showered, depositing him, naked and lathered, into the alley below. Alas, that day was not today.

Following his shower, Lewis shaved and brushed his teeth. Back in his bedroom, he pulled on a pair of jeans and a t-shirt with great purpose. The first of the month was payday, which meant it was also grocery shopping day. He'd been scraping by the past week on Ramen noodles and hors devours at holiday parties, and was looking forward to actually having food in the pantry. Not that this task would be accomplished easily. Logging on to the internet, he first looked to see that his check had arrived at the bank. Yes. Not much, and slightly less than the bills he had to pay, but he was used to that. Next he went to the Metro Transit website. Were the buses running on New Years Day? Yes. Not very often, but beggars can't be choosers.

The final stop of the morning on the information superhighway was the website for the 99 Cent store. Their hours weren't listed, but there was a phone number to call. The Latina who answered on the first ring informed Lewis that they are open on New Year's day, from 9-9. He would eat this day. Gathering his grocery list and wallet, he ventured in to the living room, where Reilly was parked on the couch, shoveling eggs into his mouth and watching college football. Silently Lewis tied his shoes and slipped out the door. The January sun shone warmly in southern California, and he basked in its glow as he trotted down the sidewalk.

The bus stop was two blocks away on Melrose, and by the grace of god a bus rolled up only five minutes after the scheduled arrival. Lewis let the emo chick waitress get on before him, and they joined the few other souls riding the big orange beast eastbound into the sun. The driver was a fat bald white guy who seemed to be talking to himself the entire trip. While it was not at all unusual to observe people talking to themselves on the bus, rarely was it the driver experiencing communication breakdown. Tuning him out, Lewis rested his eyes on the sharp grey corners of The City slowly sliding by. The emo chick waitress got off at Western. His stop was Hobart, where he walked another block east to his destination.

Lewis couldn't afford to shop at a real grocery store, so he took the bus into the fringes of the hood, where he rubbed elbows with Latins, Asians and Blacks at the 99 Cent Store. They used to eye him somewhat suspiciously when he wheeled his cart through the aisles, as though he were some sort of spy sent by The Man to keep tabs on their shopping habits. No longer, though. Now there were just as many whites folks looking for bargains, and he could blend right in. The economy was suckerpunching everybody. 20 minutes later, at the checkout line, Lewis sweated through the scanning process, taking a relieved breath only when the total was announced- 39 dollars. He'd allotted himself $40, and because he couldn't find a calendar with hot girls on it, only some with puppies and ducks, he'd squeaked by.

Back out on the street, he offered a small prayer of thanks when a bus met him at the corner. Lewis had spent an hour waiting there before, and so learned not to take the appearance of the bright orange beast lightly. At the back of the bus he found two adjacent seats, so he could sit and rest his bags at the same time. Near him were four teenaged girls, all chattering away about the night before. One of them got wasted drunk, and wasn't sure if she hooked up with a guy or not. Lewis idly thought about which of them he would hook up with. The Latina on the end first, then the white chick beside her, the Latina beside her, and finally the white chick on the other end. Right down the row, in descending order.

Perhaps he should've felt somehow dirty about imagining sex with girls young enough to be his daughters, but Lewis didn't. He'd come to realize that he was still 18 inside his head, and he strongly suspected he always would be. If he was 18 on the outside, he might talk to them and see which one was insecure enough to respond to his advances. Since his face was pushing 32, he merely observed. The first white girl (#2 on his mental list of fantasy encounters) caught him looking at her, and brazenly looked back. Lewis couldn't imagine that she found an old guy with his 99 Cent bags on the bus particularly attractive, but stranger things had happened. Or so he could temporarily convince himself. When he disembarked at La Cienega, he looked back to see her watching him through the window, her blue eyes gaining depth and mystery as she receded slowly into her future.

Thursday, July 16, 2009

My day on the Instinct Magazine chain gang...

This is an article I wrote in 2001 for the "Let the Breeder Speak" column in Instinct Magazine...

“Why don’t you help him off with his pants? Yeah, and make sure the blindfold is tight. Oh, that’s so hot. Get the lint off his nipple! Good, good. Now stand back a couple of feet and make sure he doesn’t get hit by traffic.”

Sigh. Just another day on the Instinct photo shoot chain gang. We’re in the crosswalk at Crescent Heights and Santa Monica Boulevard, and Dave Bailey, the photographer, is prancing around on the corner snapping shot after shot. Matt, the brave and handsome model du jour, is standing in the middle of the intersection wearing grey CK bikini briefs, a red blindfold and a smile. A wavering smile. Me? I’m standing two feet to the left, willing the traffic light to remain red and idly wondering what actually counts as indecent exposure in West Hollywood. Mostly, though, I’m thinking that life takes some awfully unexpected turns.

Howdy. My name Patrick, and I’m straight. Hell, I’m not just straight, I’m a redneck from the swamps of Michigan. I own Nascar themed clothing. Cowboy boots. A Pabst Blue Ribbon belt buckle, for God’s sake. I enjoy the music of Ted Nugent for the aesthetic pleasure it provides me. And, at least for one afternoon, I’m the art director on a photo shoot for the world’s greatest gay magazine.

What’s going on? Why am I here? I blame it all on Dave. He’s a good friend of mine, and as our lives get busier, we see less and less of one another. So, when on a Friday morning he called and asked if I wanted to hang out with him on a photo shoot, I readily agreed. Dave’s shoots are always adventures. He’s a great photographer, but more than that, he has the ability to talk models into anything. Anything. I look forward to those days. Visions of busty, morality-impaired lingerie models frolicked in my head. However, when he arrived to pick me up this day, he waited until I was in the car and we were heading down the street before speaking. “Oh, by the way, I’m shooting for Instinct today, and you’re my art director.”

Oh.

So much for the busty lingerie models, and we’re going too fast for me to leap out of the car. Damn. Instinct? Gay boys in their underwear? Do I really want to do this?



Alright, I suppose here’s where I should have my Archie Bunker moment. I do like gays. Some of my best friends are of the pansy persuasion. No, really! I live near West Hollywood. My roommate is gay. There is a pink triangle magnet on my refrigerator. I could pick Ryan Idol out of a lineup (although, to be perfectly honest, I’d rather have a drink with Ron Jeremy). I’ve been a stage actor and director for 17 years, and one doesn’t get far in that world without rubbing elbows with a homosexual or twelve. I’ve met screaming queens, leather daddies, pre-ops and log cabin republicans. I once knew two men who found one another through a personal ad in American Bear. They had the ad enlarged and framed in their bedroom, right next to the Tom of Finland print. I’ve stood drunk in the toilet stall at 2:00am and heard that seductive phrase, “Just close your eyes, you’ll never know the difference.” Er, um…

Have I made my point that I’m not a homophobe? I’m just a slightly hungover redneck who isn’t altogether sure that I want to spend my afternoon observing a man more beautiful than some of my ex-girlfriends as he lounges around the pool in a thong. But, I gave my word to Dave, the sun is coming out after a few days of rain, and we’re almost to the model’s place. The pressure is increased when he offers me an autographed Ben Rogers 8x10 and a fistful of glow-in-the-dark Instinct condoms. I cave. I guess that I’m an art director.

Matt turns out to be a very nice guy, and he offers us refreshments and introduces us to his Siamese. N’Sync croons on the stereo. As Dave sets up his equipment, Matt and I discover all that we have in common. We like doughnuts and porn. We appreciate the efforts of Erin Brokovich in her fight against the Man. We’re both from the Midwest (he’s from Wisconsin), and we discuss the joys of road-side cheese stands and brewery tours with free samples. There is a bond building between two men. Before either of us can blurt out those words that will forever damn us and ratchet the patented Instinct photo shoot chain gang sexual tension even higher, the photographer is ready. Time to go to work!

The theme of the article is “blind dates,” and in Instinct’s typically understated fashion, it involves a hot boy walking around in his underwear wearing a blindfold. Being artistic director, I find myself helping Matt out of his clothes and tying a silk scarf over his eyes. As we share our tender moment, Dave looks at us and utters the magic words. “What if we did this out in the middle of the street?”

The model laughs. Of course the wacky photographer is joking. No one in his right mind would drag a helpless underwear model blindfolded into the middle of Santa Monica Boulevard just to feed the ravenous maw of some sleazy magazine! Matt turns to me, the fear creeping into his eyes. He is just joking, isn’t he?

Sigh. Art director. Model fluffer. Crossing guard. Well, I can’t say that life in the Instinct family is boring…