Just because it's been over a year and have completely let this blog go to waste.

Hello Peace & Riot (aka Girl Meets Boy) fans,

I haven't posted in a long time, mostly because the movie has taken so many turns that were beyond my control and I wasn't aware of much of them.  So for those 15 or so followers I decided to give you all a little bit of a treat.

Peace & Riot got renamed Girl Meets Boy and came out on DVD June 4, 2013.  It was also available in June on Pay-Per-View in millions of homes.  Audiences have enjoyed watching it on Xbox Live, Amazon streaming, PlayStation, Google Play and illegal downloads/streaming.

Around the first of May, I received a text that Girl Meets Boy was on TV.

It was true.  The movie got released to broadcast television. Fox, The CW network and CBS played the movie that I wrote/directed.  Seeing my movie on TV was amazing.

It was hours/days later that the scope of the broadcast became apparent.  It was on several nights a week on stations all over the country.  From the left coast to the right.  I went and grabbed some screen shots of different programming schedules.

Here are a few.

Off to the ratings.

Hey folks.

Lots of stuff has happened since I last posted. 

The biggest bit of news is that Peace & Riot has signed a distribution deal with a very cool company (happened the first week of January 2013), which means that it's just a matter of time before the movie will be available to the masses.

It's being submitted to the MPAA for a rating.  Which is kind of neat.  I mean, I'd like to know where it falls.  In 2012 PG-13 movies included The Dark Knight Rises, Red Dawn, Taken 2, The Hunger Games... while getting the R rating were Ted, Argo, Magic Mike, 21 Jump Street and Zero Dark Thirty.   

Where Peace & Riot will end up?  I'll let you know.

Happy New Year

Hello there friends and fans of Peace & Riot. 

I would say that I have made a New Year's resolution to post more about the movie.  The truth is, instead of wanting to post more, I have decided to give up peanut brittle. 

But for the few of you who are following Peace & Riot blog posts.  There isn't much going on.  It's more or less a waiting game to see which film festivals we will get in and which company or companies will want to distribute our movie.

Once I know something more I will post more.   In the mean time you can come and "like" our facebook page (which is getting more popular as friends speak to friends and I keep posting about it on the Boy Meets World facebook page).

Please turn off your cell phones...

For the dozen or so actual followers that I have right now, I apologize for not keeping up with this blog.  Perhaps it's good that I'm not keeping this so-up-to-date that it become like one of the obsessive posters on Facebook who just eventually gets blocked. Though I did intentionally slow down my posting on Facebook, I didn't intentionally slow down my production blog on Peace & Riot.

Monday, October 17th was a big day for the movie.  It's the first time we screened it for anyone.  Sure the producers, color correction folks, composer and sound mixer have been watching it all the time, but the majority of our cast and crew had no idea what the movie was shaping up to be.

I don't want to give any spoilers, but I will say that I'm happy with the movie.  And even though we are still making small changes, the majority of the audience was happy with it too. 

It was good to show people how their hard work paid off.  It was good to have friends and family share that experience with us. 

I was actually planning on giving this great speech at the beginning. I was going to thank specific people for specific events.  But when I got the chance, I got too nervous.  My nerves actually kicked in when the crowd swelled to about 50.  Even though I knew we were having over 70 people show up, once I saw more than about 50 people I started to get this feeling like "what if they don't get it?" 

They got it.  Our audience was a mixture of men and women.  From 15 to 75 years of age.  They all laughed when they were supposed to (well some of them didn't laugh at all my jokes) they got quite when it got important, but they all enjoyed themselves. 

When you make a movie, you're basically saying "I want to tell you a story for 89 minutes. But the good thing is, I've got these other really talented folks who are going to help me tell the story. Hopefully it's a good experience."

The Damion is in the details?

The movie is getting better every day.  

We’re now in the final stages of completing Peace & Riot.  I recently went work at the home/studio of our sound mixer Michael Kelly .  It was at this time that I could see some of the original score composed by Jonathan Price, mixed into the movie.   One of the jobs as the sound mixer is to lay all the music into the movie and adjusts the levels of the dialog.  

Flashback to New York City – October 2008.  I am in the Metropolitan Museum.  I’ve never considered myself an “art” guy but knew that on my first visit to the Big Apple, I needed to check out the museums. After a few hours of looking at paintings, some of them a thousand years old, I took out my cell phone and typed myself a note. 

 “Attention to detail can make good art great.”   A painting of a city by the sea from the 1600s, probably measuring six feet across stuck out to me.  The people in the background, they all had personalities:   one girl getting her haircut, a boy was swatting a fly away from his face, a fisherman checking his line.  Keep in mind these figures were no more than an inch in size on a painting that was twenty-four square feet.  With the choice of color and composition, the painting was beautiful, but was the fine detail that stood out to me.  

While watching the most recent cut of the movie, there is a scene in which Ben Savage talks to Anna Pheil – while she is holding a guitar.  I’d seen the scene a dozen times and it’s a good scene that moves the story forward.  However, this time I watched it Michael Kelly had mixed in some guitar sounds that Jonathan Price had recorded.  Now, I never asked Jonathan to do this for this particular scene as there were other scenes that we needed to brush up the guitar work.  So when Anna’s changes her grasp on the next of the guitar and I suddenly hear an almost silent hum/ buzz.  I am totally taken off guard.  

   

It’s the fine details like this that are making the movie that much better.

 

70 bucks for your opening credits.

Last update, I mentioned the end of the movie and how our audience would be so captured by our credit roll that they would keep watching until the very end.  And just like the end credits there are the opening credits. 

If you asked a handful of people you are bound to find a few that have their favorite title sequence.  I particularly like the opening sequence to the HBO series Entourage.  As I have lived in Hollywood for about fifteen years and watching those signs that I sometimes pass twice a day become the names of the people in the show is really nifty.  

 

Being my first movie, I wanted a cool opening title sequence.  I knew I didn’t have any money, nor did I have a kung-fu expert who could dodge arrows (and it really wouldn’t flow with the movie either.)  So I racked my brain and thought about various ways of putting names on the screen.

I decided that record albums for the opening credits of Peace & Riot would be a good choice.  We contemplated having the records come out and spin around or something, but it would end up taking some type of computer whiz to pull that off.  And a whiz usually wants money.  With limited funds, we figured something “real life” would be the cheapest route.

After discussing ideas with my brother and other people involved in the production I set out to create my own original artwork.  Though surely I’d be inspired by graphics I have seen while growing up and hopefully those influences would come out of me to create something visual.  I am no artist.  Let me repeat, I am no artist.  The only thing I think I got going for me, is that I know what I like when I see it.  So it’s not hard for me to say “that doesn’t work” or “that sucks” even when I just put a few hours into it.  Knowing that, I would just have to create hundreds of albums until I could bear to look at eleven of them.

I drew a couple of crude sketches on some post its and borrowed a digital camera and went out into the streets of Los Angeles.  Days later and a few hundred pictures that could become a handful of good ideas .  I then passed along some of the more creative concepts.  I asked my brother to take a picture of someone handcuffed.  The picture would then be put through the magic of photo-shop to get the savage look I was after.  Then I relayed some of my more visual ideas to Mari Kossman and we worked on some graphic art pieces together.

After calling a number of print shops, I found one that would agree to print up each cover for $5.  We also priced out printing on actual album covers, but that was way too pricey.

As I am about as good with crafts as I am with Photo-Shop, I took the prints to Ventura to again work with the ever-so-talented Ms. Kossman.  We went shopping for used/abused 12” Vinyl.   Cost was most important as we knew we’d be cutting and pasting on them (the old fashion way, not with a clicks of a mouse) and so we found the cheapest used records we could.

Sure enough we found a place that sold these pieces of the past for under a buck each.  Walking away with a dozen, we headed back to the art studio (Mari’s apartment) and scissor’d/glued the stuff like a couple of 4^th graders.    I inevitably destroyed a couple because I am a little excessive with the glue, so I’d have to spend a few more bucks on new prints, but she got them right after I completely handed over the task to her.

You can be a part of the movie if ....

For the few followers I have on this blog I apologize for not posting in quite some time.  Of the billions of other things you could be doing online you’ve chosen to read what I’m writing and I do appreciate that enough to not want to bore you with anything less than “real exciting stuff.”

We’re at the final stages of Peace & Riot.   After a few tweaks and the technical/artistic work of a few professionals (mainly music composing and color correcting) the movie will be done. 

One of the jobs that I’m handing off is performing the song to our closing title sequence.  If you haven’t seen the video of Jake Busey introducing this idea, I will break it down for you.

The people making the movie have a song called “Running Over Raymond” that was written for the movie “Peace & Riot.”  You can upload yourself performing this song to Youtube and send us a link.  If your rendition of the song is good enough, we’ll use your performance in the end title credits.

I don’t remember exactly why I thought this was going to be such a great idea.  But I knew that it would be fun if we had people playing the song in their style.

Opening it up to the internet and having global exposure (by posting all over the world on Craigslist) I figured some one with an instrument and a dream would love the opportunity to play a song in a movie.  And as the Youtube promo video has had some 1600 views, we’ve had about a half a dozen submissions.   I’ve also had my fair share of hate mail.  

I don’t expect nor did I ask for a professional singer/band to play the song and upload it for free.  If they wanted to do that, I would gladly accept their submission and rate it with the others, but I figured most people submitting would be doing it for the love of music and the chance to be a part of something.  

 

I won’t apologize for asking for volunteers.  I won’t say that I am too cheap or lazy to find someone and pay them to play the song for our movie.   That’s not what this is about.  This is for you, your friend or your sixteen (or sixty) year old cousin who plays/sings and doesn’t always have an audience – to have the chance to have an audience that you wouldn’t normally get to see you perform. 

Trust me, I'm a huge fan of your music... really, I am.

Who would have known that wearing a Minor Threat T-shirt to high school would have paid off almost twenty years later?

When I changed Crystal from a cello player to a punk rock singer, I wanted her to sing a classic punk rock tune during the opening scene.  After speaking with Joe Escalante (The Vandals bassist and an entertainment lawyer) I learned it would be easier to use music from band who had not sold their publishing rights.   

I made a list of favorite songs from my long history with punk rock and checked their rights.   One song stuck out. 

Minor Threat’s self titled song Minor Threat has been a favorite punk rock anthem since I first heard it while watching Another State Of Mind in the 7^th grade (circa 1986).  Twenty years later, it was the song I chose to sing when the Punk Rock Karaoke opened for Nerf Herder in Santa Barbara (Halloween 2007.)  If I was going to pick one dream song to license, that would be it.

Having followed Minor Threat and Dischord records for many years I knew that they don’t care much about making a quick buck at the expense of their reputation.    Dischord has been able to be a successful record company in an era when record companies are selling their chairs and copy machines just to keep their doors open. As I am not offering a lot of money, nor will Peace & Riot be a studio backed movie with millions of dollars pumped into publicity, the only reason a band would allow me to use their music is to make that fan happy.

I called Dischord Records (based in Washington D.C.) and spoke with a really cool guy who handles this type of stuff for the label. I explained my movie to him and he thought it sounded like an interesting premise. But to grasp it completely he wanted me to email him the details which forward to the person in charge (lead singer of Minor Threat and Founder of Dischord Record – Ian MacKaye.)  

If you didn’t know, it’s the details that scare people away.

I’m asking them to give me a blessing to do whatever I want with their original composition and make money with it.  This sounds like everything that Dischord has avoided for thirty years. 

  

As expected, I didn’t hear back from them.

I knew I was doing the right thing, almost like a religious experience, with Peace & Riot.  From three thousand miles away, I needed to convince them that I was not some chump scam artist looking to make a quick buck off of a song that started a music/sub-cultural empire.   I knew I had to disprove their skepticism and show my good intentions.  I thought about having my mom call the company and tell them I was a good guy and not to worry.  Not sure how that would work, I took another approach.

I went through my high school yearbooks.   Back in the day, when the school yearbook staff took the photo for the drama club in 1992, I was wearing my Minor Threat T-shirt.  Then, in 1993, when the photographers  took the picture for the Protect The Earth Club, I was wearing that same shirt.   I took photos of these yearbook pages and sent them to the Dischord Records.

Dischord responded.  Ian MacKaye had one requirement  before signing off on the deal; each band would be paid the same amount.  He wanted to make sure that no band would benefit more from participating in the movie than another group.  Ian wasn’t just looking after his legacy, but the other bands.  Minor Threat might be the “biggest” band to sign on (even though the band broke up in 1983), but he wanted to make sure that we didn’t exploit some lesser known band touting that they could be in a movie with such a punk rock legacy and therefore did not need to get paid.

A few days, inside a Dischord envelope, I received a signed contract from one of the coolest record companies of all time.

It is a really great feeling to know that if you liked a band for twenty-five years and you finally get the chance to do business with them; that they turn out to be a great bunch of guys.   

Seriously awesome.

Shooting Jake Busey.

If someone asked me “How did you get Jake Busey to be in your movie?” I’d tell that person a tale that involved police dogs, golf and a good script. 

My brother, Jason Stephens, is a sheriff’s deputy in Southern California and has made a few movies himself. Jason met Jake Busey some years ago through law enforcement connections.  Jake is a regular participant in a celebrity golf tournament; the money raised goes toward the purchase of Ventura County police dogs.  Jake's an talented actor, but also plays bass for the rock band “Sons of the of Lawless."  When we decided to cast for the role of Richard Allin we wanted approach talented actors with a musical background.  Jake combination of music and talent seemed to fit the role perfectly.

During pre-production, my brother watched Jake’s band play at the Viper Room in Hollywood and reintroduced himself since it had been a few years since their last exchange.  Jason returned from the nightclub and told me how much of a down to earth, and easy-going guy Jake was.  Personality was a factor in casting as we knew the shoot would be demanding for all our actors.  We didn’t want any Princess walking off the set because it was freezing cold outside or they were being bitten by bugs.  We also knew it would take a really cool guy who would do the job for the money we offered.

We sent Jake a script.  He read through it and told Jason he thought it was good, and that the character of Richard Allin was one he would like to portray. 

We were able to speak on the phone, and his demeanor was pleasant and welcome.  

We spoke briefly about the character of Richard, and I gave away just enough information to give Jake some back story.  I tried not to overwhelm Jake with information regarding his character because I wanted him to keep with the character on the page, meaning, anyone we cast as Richard would have a different interpretation of the character and I was anxious to see Jake’s.  If he went far off my original vision, I would certainly work with him to get it back on track. 

I had gotten his costume sizes and knew he was going to be tall, but that didn’t prepare me for when I met a guy who has killed giant bugs from outer-space face to face.

Jake shot for three days in Los Angeles before leaving the country; he returned for the last weekend of production.  In those few days, I came to admire him as a true professional. Jake worked certain scenes beyond the level that I wrote them.  I provided a good base of a character, and Jake shaped that base into a person with multiple levels. Watching Richard come to life on camera was the biggest surprise I had making this movie.  

On the set Jake approached me about specific lines of dialogue that if delivered incorrectly would have changed interpretation of such words.  I spent a short time with Jake going over my feelings about how these some situations can exist in your mind, which can make then even more painful in to you rather than if you were aware of their existence.

I don’t want to spoil the movie, but I will say that the impact that Jake Busey made is one that audiences will remember after the credits have rolled. 

Getting Legal Advice From a Vandal.

When I wrote Peace and Riot I actually thought you could use a few bars of music and not have to get permission from the composer.  My reasoning for this is because when you listen to talk radio, you often hear a bumper (a bit of music at the before/ after commercials) and I figured the talk radio station wasn’t paying any type of music license fee.  I figured I could do the same thing for my movie.  I was wrong.

I emailed Joe Escalante of Barely Legal Radio.  Joe is not only a radio lawyer, but he is has been playing punk rock for 30 years with The Vandals.  If you looked at his resume, you’d see he was an entertainment lawyer (for a main player in the business) and also ran a record label (that also distributed movies).  Somehow in his busy week he finds that time to do the radio show and keeps it entertaining and informative.  If anyone was going to know about what kind of rights I needed for this movie, he would be the guy.

Mr. Escalante responded the email asking me to come on his show and talk about my movie.   It was great to finally hear a guy who has been in the music industry for three decades and also had a law degree.  He has been on both sides of what I was attempting to do.  The Vandals have licensed their music to movies like “Glory Days”, “Dudes” “xXx” and of course my favorite punk rock film “Suburbia.”  

During our on-air conversation, I learned from Joe Escalante Esq. that I needed publishing rights.  My actors would be playing the music and therefore wouldn’t be licensing the master recording.  He suggested going directly to bands that still owned the rights to their music.  Going through a publishing company would be costly and take more time.   However, if I could contact the owners (bands) directly and they thought my movie sounded like something the group could support, they might give me publishing rights at a discount. 

While on the air I described the movie briefly, which Joe thought sounded like a cool idea. I asked if The Vandals would be interested in licensing some music.  He said it would be considered.  A week later, I emailed him with the scene that I’d like to have included some tunes by his band.  He gave me a great deal on licensing “The Legend of Pat Brown” for my feature.  “Pat Brown” is one of those iconic punk rock songs by The Vandals which appears on their “Peace Through Vandalism” CD/Album and was featured in the movie “Suburbia.”  

Having the blessing of Joe Escalante behind your movie helps out a lot when talking with other bands.   With his endorsement, I became legitimate.  I was no longer some winky-dink production and also I had the credibility that I was not just another suit trying to make a fast buck off the punk rock world.  

As for The Vandals and “The Legend of Pat Brown”, I can only hope my movie just adds to their legacy. 

I was a fan before I set out to make this movie and after the little bit of communication I’ve had with them, I like them a whole lot more.

Finding Scott Kossman.

Looking for a Scott Kossman, I wrote a short list of about a dozen actors I thought could play this complex character.   The leading man had to find happiness in being alone yet not be so introverted that he would come off as creepy to the social butterfly Crystal Green.

I called a dozen or so agents and pitched them the idea.  We’d be shooting the movie with SAG (Screen Actor’s Guild) so I could approach every level of talent, but we’d also be shooting very low budget, so I was asking the stars to take a huge pay cut .  Most every approach was met with negativity, but there was one agent who never said no.  I’d call him every couple of days to see if he’d give me an answer, and he always responded that he’d be getting to my script in time.

Eventually I moved on and started calling other agents and managers.  No agent wanted to give up their client’s time for the small amount of money that we were offering.  Another strike against the production is that it was being orchestrated by an unknown writer/director.  With it looking bad, Unknown Productions decided to have an open casting call.

A few days before the audition, I received a phone call from one of the top agencies.  The agent that I had been harassing said that he had read the script and that he would be giving it to his client.  I told him that we were already holding auditions, but would suspend them if he gave me an answer in two days.  Two days later, he called me to say that his client, Ben Savage, was interested in the leading role.

The agent said Ben wanted to meet us before signing on to do the movie. I informed his agent that we’d suspend casting for Scott and that Ben was welcome to stop by and meet our crew at the casting session that weekend. 

We didn’t know Ben’s ETA, or if he would show up at all.  We started casting for the part of Crystal Green at 10AM and planned to be done by 6PM.  We went through about ten actors before I left the room to take a break.  As I stepped outside the room I found Ben walking the hallway, looking for us.

I ushered him into the room and we were greeted by the other producers of Peace & Riot.  After a few “hellos,” we called in the next girl to read with Robert Ryan (who was reading the part Scott).  Ben, interested in the whole casting process, was asked if he wanted to read with a few of the actors.  Like a seasoned professional, Ben took the script and read the part with charm and heart.

Ben stayed a few hours with us, even staying through our lunch.  He was polite, interesting, and charismatic –all the qualities you hope someone has before you meet them. 

Monday morning I called his agent and told him that we liked Ben and hoped he’s sign on to do the movie.  We were told that Ben also had a great time with our crew and that he would be available to do the project. 

 

I won’t bore you with the contract negotiation details; just know that it’s a lengthy process that involves lawyers and lots of time.  The important thing was that we had found our Scott.