Something, Anything - World Premieres

Ashley Maynor and I spent a lot of time -- a lot of sweat, a lot of love, a lot of pain -- making SOMETHING, ANYTHING. More than either of us have ever put into a movie. Years. Friends of ours have raised infants to preschoolers in the time it's taken us to make this film. This film has been our baby.

Not surprisingly, as we finished the film we did a lot of thinking about where we would want to premiere it. We knew wanted it to be a festival with a lot of integrity, both in the films they select, and the way they treat their filmmakers. 

So we asked a lot of filmmaker friends, and we researched. What festivals were taking risks on premiering and screening films that we admired in the last few years? (Films like The Unspeakable Act, This is Martin Bonner, and The Color Wheel, among many, many others.)

And two festivals kept coming up again and again: the Sarasota Film Festival and the Wisconsin Film Festival.

So we shared SOMETHING, ANYTHING with programmers Tom Hall (Sarasota) and Jim Healy (Wisconsin). And we crossed our fingers. These guys look at thousands of films a year. I don't know how they do it, honestly. For the sections that we'd be eligible for, they maybe take a dozen films.

The fact that both of these programmers -- who we admire so much, and whose festivals are beacons of daring programming -- separately selected SOMETHING, ANYTHING for their respective festivals… well, to call it gratifying would be an understatement.

We're calling our screenings at both Wisconsin and Sarasota our "World Premiere" -- a co- or dual- World Premiere, if you will. The festivals happen over the same dates, and its a way for us to signify how honored we are to have all of our hard work -- and the work of so many others -- to be recognized by both festivals.

Thanks for following us on the journey so far.

Announcing our first feature: "Something, Anything"

Among my friends and collaborators, I have something of a reputation for being tight-lipped about films that I'm actively working on. This is one of the reasons things sometimes get very, very quiet on this blog.

Though the path to completing and premiering it is still long, Ashley and I are happy to announce that our first feature, Something, Anything, is in post-production. In fact, the Independent Feature Project announced yesterday that Something, Anything has been selected as one of ten projects from around the country for IFP's esteemed Narrative Lab.

You can read more about Something, Anything, the other projects, and the Lab in the official press release and the Filmmaker Magazine article. The projects are impressive and we're honored to be in such good company.

Friends of ours have taken their first features (The New Year Parade, St. Nick) through the Lab, and knowing how much they valued the Lab makes us especially excited to have this opportunity.

We'll try to do a blog post or two about our experiences at the Lab. Stay tuned. Until then, here's an image from the film -- one of the last shots of the movie, but one of the first we filmed.