Kristi witnesses her faith to Staci in the high school quad.

[Vimeo 6697527]

(This is what I look like while talking to Dan Bernstein.)

Had a great time catching-up with old friends at the Petaluma Film Series screening a while back (including Dan, who I hadn’t seen in years). The projection, and especially the sound, rocked. Thanks to Virginia Travers, Peter deKramer and Aqus Cafe for hosting.

This was a special night for me because my Dad was there, and it was the first time he saw The Master Plan on a big screen with a real audience. Dad has pancreatic cancer, and he couldn’t make the screenings at the Landmark Opera in SF, or The Rialto in Pasadena. He’s been a strong, silent supporter, and I couldn’t possibly have made this movie without him.

Cast member Nicole Mosbacher (Staci) and Tim Wheeler, her new fiancee, made the trip from Sacramento, and I couldn’t help but recognize a warbling maniacal horse laugh during the Q&A, which must have been Virginia Wilcox (April). As for me, I mainly sat in the back squirming like a 3 year-old guzzling White Zin, waiting for my girlfriend Monica to slap me upside the head, like my Grandma used to in church.

Eric J. Adams, co-producer and co-writer of My Suicide was also in attendance, as was author John Hewitt (Stranger in Baja).

Note: A benefit screening of Eric’s movie, My Suicide, is playing at The Mystic Theatre in Petaluma, Friday, September 25th at 7:30pm. The screening will benefit Regenerate and Five Alive, two non-profit organizations working to prevent teen suicide. Be there!!!

Cool to see Jared Wright and Misty Green at the P-town screening, too! Coincidentally, they both did a bang-up job on the new Adventure!!! promo/trailer, which is, as they say, coming soon. (Yesss, and so did you, VW.)

Are you a member of The Master Plan’s Facebook group yet? So do that!

It’s going to be an interesting Fall…

Friday, May 15, 2009

WARREN, Mich. — Warren police responded to a 911 call about a cougar on the prowl.

“It’s huge; it’s like a 150-pound cat,” the caller told the operator.

Approximately 10 officers arrived at Bates Park on 14 Mile Road east of Van Dyke and saw what looked like a big cat in an old cement drainpipe.

“And I went back behind there and shined a light there — and it’s in there,” said the caller.

Warren police shot a Taser at the animal — hitting what turned out to be a large toy cougar.

Police Commissioner William Dwyer said officials now believe the incident was a prank, but he said his department could not take any chances since it was near a playground.

“We did what we had to do. We want to keep the city safe,” said Dwyer.

Dwyer said the prank cost the city more than $1,000 in wasted police hours between the response from 10 officers and the paperwork they had to file.

If the prankster is caught, he or she could have to pay the city back for the wasted police officers and could face 90 days probation.

I was listening to an old Nirvana song today (Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge On Seattle) which drove me to dig up something that Frances wrote in high school in 1931.

High school. In 1931.

Her essay, below, won a Scholastic award that year and sparked an intellectual witch hunt in what was then a small town in northern Washington.

Ironically, like many icons, Frances has become a mythical figure, but the origins of her myth are more than a little profound:

“God Dies”

No one ever came to me and said, “You’re a fool. There isn’t such a thing as God. Somebody’s been stuffing you.” It wasn’t a murder. I think God just died of old age. And when I realized that he wasn’t any more, it didn’t shock me. It seemed natural and right.

Maybe it was because I was never properly impressed with a religion. I went to Sunday school and liked the stories about Christ and the Christmas star. They were beautiful. They made you warm and happy to think about. But I didn’t believe them. The Sunday School teacher talked too much in the way our grade school teacher used to when she told us about George Washington. Pleasant, pretty stories, but not true.

Religion was too vague. God was different. He was something real, something I could feel. But there were only certain times when I could feel it. I used to lie between cool, clean sheets at night after I’d had a bath, after I had washed my hair and scrubbed my knuckles and finger nails and teeth. Then I could lie quite still in the dark with my face to the window with the trees in it, and talk to God. “I am clean, now. I’ve never been as clean. I’ll never be cleaner.” And somehow, it was God. I wasn’t sure that it was … just something cool and dark and clean.

That wasn’t religion, though. There was too much of the physical about it. I couldn’t get that same feeling during the day, with my hands in dirty dish water and the hard sun showing up the dirtiness on the roof-tops. And after a time, even at night, the feeling of God didn’t last. I began to wonder what the minister meant when he said, “God, the father, sees even the smallest sparrow fall. He watches over all his children.” That jumbled it all up for me. But I was sure of one thing. If God were a father, with children, that cleanliness I had been feeling wasn’t God. So at night, when I went to bed, I would think, “I am clean. I am sleepy.” And then I went to sleep. It didn’t keep me from enjoying the cleanness any less. I just knew that God wasn’t there. He was a man on a throne in Heaven, so he was easy to forget.

Sometimes I found he was useful to remember; especially when I lost things that were important. After slamming through the house, panicky and breathless from searching, I could stop in the middle of a room and shut my eyes. “Please God, let me find my red hat with the blue trimmings.” It usually worked. God became a super-father that couldn’t spank me. But if I wanted a thing badly enough, he arranged it.

That satisfied me until I began to figure that if God loved all his children equally, why did he bother about my red hat and let other people lose their fathers and mothers for always? I began to see that he didn’t have much to do about hats, people dying or anything. They happened whether he wanted them to or not, and he stayed in heaven and pretended not to notice. I wondered a little why God was such a useless thing. It seemed a waste of time to have him. After that he became less and less, until he was…nothingness.

I felt rather proud to think that I had found the truth myself, without help from any one. It puzzled me that other people hadn’t found out, too. God was gone. We were younger. We had reached past him. Why couldn’t they see it? It still puzzles me.

“Frances Farmer, “God Dies,” The Scholastic, May 2, 1931, p. 14

Frances Farmer, early 1930's

From NASA, September 10, 2008:

Naked-Eye Gamma Ray Burst Aimed Directly at Earth

I also just started my second movie, Adventure!!! (yes, three exclamation points), so if you’re not our Adventure!!! MySpace Film friend yet, ya’ gotta be! We just got some press on it, too.

Adventure!!! is a Hitchcock-style “philosophical thriller” (as I like to say) about famous twentysomething murders in California.

 The new movie was also covered in FilmStew. More later!

- Aron

P.S. I’ll have screening information for The Master Plan, soon.

And a shot-out to SuperCandid for the recent post!

http://supercandid.blogspot.com/2008/06/master-plan.html

Just waiting to hear back from a few festivals that only receive, you know, three or four thousand film submissions (and seem to prefer documentaries about grocery bagging competitions). So let’s be like Heidi Van Horne and make this movie happen ourselves!

Thanks for pimping the movie, Heidi!

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- Aron