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."

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.