Back To Reality

Well, after a long lapse, I am back. Just way too busy away at the film festival (I worked prolly like 16 hours a day on average) to properly blog, not to mention the technology issues that I have in the Miami apt.

So anyway, Ive kind been outed. By my sis. She told people in her blog, Iendedupherehow, that I won the ABFF with my movie, My Brother. Which is true, and now you know. Just a brief bit about that before I proceed – I am totally uncertain about publicly blogging, giving the industry I work in and the nature of the personal reflections that I tend to include in my blog. I would like to hear from y’all about whether the blog should be put back in the dark (those who know, know, and maybe even a few of them give a shit). With respect to people I work with, well, I can do my best to keep you ambiguous, and I think I can do that, but undeniably that is part of the equation.


So about the festival. WE FUCKIN WON. Grand Jury prize, Best Picture. As in take the stage in from of 600 people at an awards brunch and give a speech to Eric LaSalle and Magic Johnson, and Robert Townsend and John Singleton and bunches of others and thank everyone who made this possible. The last award of this televised awards show – meaning, yeah, the top prize. Tony and I went up there, he did his thing I did mine, we brought up Nashawn Kearse from Desperate Housewives, who is our charismatic lead, and Chris Scott, who is the first African American actor with Downs Syndrome to play a lead in a movie – and we all just glowed. It was one of the greatest experiences of my life thus far. I’ve worked so hard on this movie, making it everything it could be, dealing with the limitations of working on it under very tough conditions, and it payed off on Sunday. Article hits variety Gotham tomorrow and was online today. Hopefully we’ll be posting a bunch of it at www.mybrotherthemovie.com very soon. (PS Anyone wanna send me the syntax for putting links in this blog, would be very much appreciated).


Chris also took home the founder’s award from the festival, which they award for outstanding achievement in Independent Film. No one thought he could do it (other than Tony, who absolutely believed) because he had downs syndrome and when he got up there and accepted his award and made a speech and got a standing ovation…. He was so proud. His parents and sisters, I cant imagine what they were feeling. Imagine the journey of his parents from having him born with Downs Syndrome and wondering and worrying for all those years to that time on Sunday when he was being honored by Hollywood’s elite black folks. And when he thanked his lawyer in his speech, that was priceless as well. And what a laugh he got. Im only mad cuz his speech was so much better than mine.

The rest of the week was a ton of work, meeting bunches of people, dealing with our leading suitor/distributor and getting Nashawn and Chris as much press exposure as possible. DB was a mess, self centered. Scott took off and went to Greece, unfortunate timing cause he didn’t get to come tot see the movie. But all in all, despite everything that was aggravating all week long about having little help accomplishing things and juggling a million tasks and trying to deal with preproduction on Hot Baby at the same time, hearing the buzz on the movie, how much audiences loved it and cried and thanked us for making it, made it very much worth it.

Course, when I came back to NYC to find that the Studio is in grave financial trouble (I knew it was, maybe not quite so imminent) and none of the financial supporters willing to help in the least (news to me), the elation of the festival is gone and it is back to the grind stone. Dealing with interested from a few mini-majors and one major now, but we have to find a way to keep the lights on in the mean time.

Oh and we’re ten days out from shooting.

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