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Rings Of A Tree

At the tail end of the summer of ’95 I went to a BBQ of a friend of a friend’s place in Burbank. There I met a crew member who’d worked in a key position on “The Usual Suspects, ” which had just come out in theaters six weeks earlier to much acclaim. Enthusiastically I asked what that experience had been like and they began to dump a bucket of vitriol all over the movie, and in particular, the director, Bryan Singer. They told me he was a clown, a fool, both clueless and nitpicking. He didn’t know how to run a set, direct actors, or how even pronounce ‘Keyser Sozes'’ name correctly. They said it was a miracle the film got made. There was more but it’s irrelevant. Because here’s the thing:

It’s obvious to anyone who saw “The Usual Suspects” that summer that Bryan Singer
knew what he was doing.

In fact, anyone who has
ever seen “The Usual Suspects” knows immediately that Bryan Singer is a world class director.

So… WTF, right?


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They Think We’re Making ‘Coven’

We went to a family reunion in South Dakota back in July and my sister-in-law and her husband asked how the movie was going. I said it was going well but that we’d had a lot of setbacks and we’re slogging through it. That’s when I noticed she was giving me That Look.

Glassy eyed.

Slight nod of the head.

A shadow of a smile.

Every facial tic and body posture that human beings have developed over two million years of genetic evolution to communicate,
"You sad fuckin’ loser,” without actually saying it.

When I mentioned it to Erika she said, yeah, she’d gotten the same Look when asked about the movie from a co-worker the week before. I wondered aloud, “What’s up with that? ” And she leaned in and whispered, “They think we’re making '
Coven.'"

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Tabernac

Right on cue the transmission on my car shit the bed. It’s a twelve year old Honda Accord with 156,599 miles on it (Not quite to the moon…) so, yeah, these things happen. Get a new car, right? Sounds good, except for one little problem. It’s the car the protagonist drives in the film and we’re not done shooting it out yet.

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