Prozac Productions

Get Your Copy for Just $7.99
with PayPal

“What a long strange trip it’s been.”

…. The Grateful Dead.

Torn up promo packets, personally signed rejection letters followed by ¼ page form letters that reject you. Friends abandon you then new friends come out of the woodwork to help you. Bands that say you’re the best then don’t want to show up and play a gig to premiere the movie. And after all that, after you’ve simply run out of money to keep paying the submission fees and making promo packets someone calls you from a film festival on three separate occasions begging you to submit the film. After you’ve already given up, someone calls you out of the blue and puts your film in a festival in LA at the Vogue theatre. It’s been a long strange trip, indeed.

The first rejection letter I got from Telluride was beautiful. That’s why I put a copy of it on this site. It was personally signed; it indicated a genuine love of my Documentary. Even though it was a rejection. It pumped me up. Unfortunately it was followed by form letter after form letter that didn’t even specifically refer to the Documentary. Just said it wasn’t accepted due to lack of space. One wasn’t even a full letter. It was a ¼ of a page. One paragraph that had been printed out on one page, probably four or more times and then cut up and sent out. Why even go through that much effort? Why not just write: “Hey thanks for your $50 entry fee. It’ll help us screen our friend’s films and films that have famous actors that don’t need the publicity anyway. Now go fuck yourself.”

Of course, that would only pale in comparison to the treatment I received at the hands of SXSW. They never even sent me a rejection letter. Instead they tore up my promo pack and sent it back to me in pieces. Very effective. That one actually had me crying. Someone said it was because one of the interviewees in the Doc, Mike Halloran, had a lot of enemies. Others said it was because of a rivalry between San Diego and Austin as music scenes. All the more reason to get the documentary out if that’s the case.

Meanwhile, word of mouth is being generated by people who loved it. It gets airtime on the radio (requires QuickTime). More people talk about it. Film Threat reviews it. Now that’s funny because Chris Gore, the editor, had said to me many times to just go out and do it. Grab a consumer video camera and just go shoot it. That underground music is a natural subject for an underground aesthetic. Of course the review gives it 2 ½ stars. Stating that it looked like it was shot with “crappy consumer cameras.” In fairness there were actually some good lines in there about our “passion for underground music” and he didn’t write it himself, it was some reviewer I never heard of did.

Screw film festivals. We’ll self distribute. I thought. We’ll start off with a premiere where the bands can play then we’ll show the film afterwards and rent out small theatres and go from there. One problem. All the bands said they would do it but would never give me a date. After six months of trying to nail a date I ran into the Dragons at the Casbah. I said look the owner is here, you’re here, I’m here: let’s do this. Set a date. Then they finally told me that they felt playing in front of a movie was “lame.” The other bands kept saying yes but never nailed down a date they would be available so I finally gave up.

Meanwhile, I’ve got people living in Indiana who saw a copy and said they loved it so much they would design posters, postcards, T-shorts and hats for free. In fact they designed a whole marketing campaign just like the one they charge fortune 500 companies thousands of dollars for. And all this for free, because they liked the documentary. So much for the people who said it wouldn’t appeal to anyone outside San Diego. I’ve still never met Tom Gulley and his associates. But they are amazing!

Then I get a phone call from the New York Independent and International Film Festival. Then another. Then another. We submit our Documentary and, surprise, we’re in!

I don’t know if it’s due to the surging popularity of POD or Sprung Monkey. Maybe they just thought the Doc was funny. But the important thing is that after everything that’s happened my little, gritty documentary is finally going to be shown I front of a live audience at the Vogue theatre in Los Angeles.

There will be an opening gala November 28^th 2001. Then on Dec 5^th at 2:00 pm, a FREE screening of “…at the street level” at the Vogue Theatre on 6675 Hollywood Blvd.

I can only hope that all the people who have helped me along the way can attend as this is as much a success for them as it is for me.

[Home] [First Review] [Synopsis] [Bands & Links] [Rantings] [Biography] [Mock Reviews] [Contact] [John]