“I can’t believe that actually happened.”

A friend of mine, Jason Schumacher, made a movie called “The Telephone Game” that played in a film festival this weekend. The premise of the movie isn’t that awe-inspiring—a bad play from auditions to performance that goes horribly awry in a multitude of ways—but how it was created was pretty impressive: there was no script, just three pages of notes. Aside from a song and a few lines of dialogue, almost all of it was improvised.

Because this was a film festival, there were ballots at the door of the auditorium so people could grab one and vote for “Best Movie”, “Best Cinematography”, etc. Sure, it might have been the only movie I saw, but I was so impressed with The Telephone Game that it got my vote in every category. Including “Best Documentary.”

Day 4 in Los Angeles

This was it: the GRAND MASTERFUL SERIOUSLY COOL FESTIVAL PREMIERE OF THE BEST SHOW IN THE UNIVERSE, THE WAZOO SHOW! (It’s already been world-premiered twice now—there had to be some other way to demonstrate its significance…) It was the culmination of our trip, the results of all our “hard” work and the chance to show off how sweet we were to more people than local Minnesotans. I think it went fairly well. People were laughing, so it couldn’t have been too bad. Continue reading “Day 4 in Los Angeles”

Day 3 in Los Angeles

Have you ever had the housekeeping staff walk into your hotel room while you were sleeping? Have they ever cleaned the bathroom without waking you up? Have they ever wandered around the corner and seen you rolling around in your bed naked? Well, I didn’t have to worry about that last one—Matthew came back from breakfast and asked the cleaning lady to leave before she finished up in the bathroom. (Plus I was wearing boxers, but two and a half out of three is still pretty bad…) Continue reading “Day 3 in Los Angeles”