Woman sues Stephen King after claiming she's real-life "Annie Wilkes"

Ooh-boy, this is just too rich. Ever notice how sometimes things just seem a little TOO coincidental? Today TheForce.net posted on their fan films section about Forcery and turns out it comes hot on the heels of this item from the Celebrity Justice website. A woman is suing Stephen King because she claims she was the basis of the Annie Wilkes character from Misery and that King never credited her. She's sued him before, saying that King has ripped-off a lot of stuff from her over the years. Sounds like a pretty scary lady.

Then again, anyone claiming to be the REAL-LIFE Annie Wilkes is gonna be someone you want to keep away from sledgehammers and firearms.

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"Weird Al" Yankovic watched Forcery... and he liked it!!

The entire cast and crew was really thrilled to hear that "Weird Al" Yankovic - the crown prince of parody himself - wrote in after watching Forcery. Yup, our first-ever movie was seen by the one-and-only Weird Al (which is only fair 'cuz over the years between me and Ed we've amassed quite a lot of Al's CDs and merchandise and t-shirts and we can recite line-for-line all the dialogue from UHF and are patiently awaiting the arrival of "The Weird Al Show" on DVD... we've watched HIM and now he's watched US!). Here's some of what Al had to say:

"...Nice job! Wow, how'd you ever get Ron Howard and Steven Spielberg to be in it? What a coup!"

It wasn't easy, let's just put it that way Al :-)

It was one of those things that you overlook when you're doing something like this, but the updated "Definitive Edition" we just made available this evening has some additions to the end credits: for all the inspiration that they provided us over the years, the cast and crew of Forcery thanks not only Weird Al, but Mel Brooks and the guys who made the Airplane! movies. We really strived to make Forcery resonate with the same tone of comedy that they're the masters of. Ed and Chad and I grew up with their music and movies, and we often talked on the set about how our own was a sort of homage to them and that period of our lives. Hope we did them an honor with it :-)

And so it begins: the start of my filmmaking career that will one day find me directing Weird Al and Leslie Nielsen in Spy Hard 2: Spy Another Day. In the meantime I must bide my time and climb the ladder...

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Forcery - the Definitive Edition - download now available!

Am using Ourmedia.org to host this on for the moment. We may get other hosting soon. One offer to mirror it has come up.

Folks, I'd like to ask something of you, but only if you really, truly enjoyed watching our little movie here. If you laughed and thought it wasn't a waste of your time and were genuinely entertained by it, I for one would REALLY appreciate it if you could spread the word on Forcery wherever you can. Point people to this blog and the links we have to it. There's a reason I'm asking this and I'm still collecting some thoughts on that. Right now, it means more to me than you can imagine if this film - which had a LOT of good people working on, and sacrificing for so that it could be made - could get a little (actually a LOT) more exposure. Some really good e-mails and comments have come in already, and I'm wanting to see this fly a little higher and keep on flying.

Consider this to be Version 1.1 of Forcery. In all respects the same as the initial release but we managed to fix a few things. The audio, for one: sounds MUCH better! A few of the special effects were recomposited/refined. The final scene was rebuilt completely from scratch (you'll definitely notice it when you see Frannie's lightsaber and the changed dialogue of the Mel's Drive-In waitress). Quite a few scenes were "tightened-up" to make it flow leaner and meaner. You probably won't notice these things if at all, but to me they came to stick out like a sore thumb. Right now, there's not much more that I know we could do, with what we had to make this with already. I'm more proud of it than ever :-)

As before, there are four versions of Forcery for you to download:

480 x 270 Extra Large - 508 Megabytes: the biggest/most robust version outside of the DVD.

448 x 252 Large - 355 Megabytes: the "regular large" version.

384 x 216 Medium - 192 Megabytes: medium-sized version.

256 x 144 Micro - 96 Megabytes: the "micro-sized" version. Still my favorite because it fits neatly onto a 128 MB USB flash drive (along with Quicktime installer) so I can take my entire motion picture around with me in my pocket. Or around my neck on its lanyard. Like the dead albatross from Rime of the Ancient Mariner...

By the way, if the download doesn't work for some reason at first, try again one or two more times: you will get through to it. Ourmedia's servers are a bit quirky sometimes but I've yet to see them totally fail to deliver the goods.

Anyway, enjoy the show! And please spread the word about Forcery! :-)

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Inmates in British prison watching Revenge of the Sith bootleg DVD

This story made me laugh for some reason. From contactmusic.com...

OUTRAGE AS STAR WARS ILLEGALLY SHOWN IN UK PRISON

A bootleg copy of the brand new STAR WARS movie, EPISODE III - REVENGE OF THE SITH, has been illegally screened in a British jail.

The pirate DVD was shown to prisoners at the Coldingley Jail in Surrey, despite the fact that the blockbuster has only been on release in cinemas for three weeks.

And police were amazed when an inmate reported the illegal screening, which is believed to have been organised by a prison officer.

One prisoner says, "Most people loved it. The last place you'd expect to watch pirate films is in jail.

"We don't have access to the DVD, so presumably a officer to put it on.

"It was a nice gesture - but pretty stupid really."

06/06/2005 14:02

This is sort of a step up from China, where they have prison inmates making bootleg DVDs :-P

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Okay, so it wasn't by LAST night, but Forcery Definitive Edition WILL be today :-)

Encoding to Quicktime is something I'm still striving to have some finesse at. Right now Media Cleaner is busy churning out four versions of Forcery - same sizes as the initial release - but with a few extra bells and whistles now that I learned how to do 'em. The movie should autoplay as soon as you open the file, and if you're downloading from the web it should start playing as soon as it's got enough info to run on while it's still coming in.

We'll have the website for it updated in the next few days too. Which'll include a VERY cool endorsement of the movie that I've been sitting on the past few days :-)

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Forcery version 1.1 available this evening

It's not a "special edition" like I referred to it as Saturday, more like how it SHOULD have been originally released had Fate smiled on us a little sooner. As it is, we did get lucky enough to have some things fall into place that let us improve on it a lot in places where it needed it. So no new material, but it is a better viewing experience. Melody and I happened to find ourselves each calling this one "Version 1.1" so that's what this, the definitive release, is going to be known as. When it's online later tonight just forget that the first release ever happened. Strike it from your mind. It never took place. You just imagined that you saw it already. "This isn't the movie you're looking for." Forget about it. Forget it, I say!! Maybe someday with a million dollars of funds I can give it a total work-over including new scenes and that'll be a real "special edition" but for now, let's just say that our first baby is walking around a bit.

In addition to a blooper reel, I'm also considering posting a "viewer's guide" to all the little in-jokes and sight gags that we stuck in this movie. Like, that's Chad's brother who's picture on one of the wanted posters in the sheriff's office. There's about five of them on the "Filks Found Guilty" newspaper clipping alone. All told, there might be a hundred such items spread throughout Forcery for both Star Wars and Stephen King fans (and everyone in between) to look for :-)

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AMC is showing Independence Day right now

Lisa said it was on earlier but it didn't register until now that she also said "it's on AMC!" Yup it's official now: Independence Day is an American Movie Classic. Funny thing: as much as I berate myself for the fact that I watched this seven times in the theaters when it first came out in '96, every time I wind up watching it again I understand anew what it was that kept me coming.

You see, this isn't a movie about evil aliens in fifteen-mile diameter spaceships blowing up the White House at all. Yeah the effects looked wicked cool, especially the scenes where the fighter jets are engaging the alien fighters beneath those monstrosities. Speaking of which, Independence Day probably ranks as the VERY LAST of the old-school special effects blockbusters given how ridiculously LITTLE computer-rendering was used in it, compared to something like Revenge of the Sith. That was neat eye candy but Independence Day was much like Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich's previous effort Stargate in that it focused on the characters more than the techno gimmickery involved. To me, Independence Day was and always will be about the way America should be: a land where there really is no division or meaningless factionalism. A country where every man (and woman) really is considered equal, and not a favored elite by virtue of birth or corporate backing. Independence Day is not a movie that either so-called "liberals" or "neo-cons" should enjoy: a Jew and a black man fly a spaceship together and save the world, and no one ever takes notice of that. The President of the United States is a REAL Air Force flyer who's not afraid to strap into an F-16 and take off after the bad guys alongside refugees from an RV flotilla. No one is stopping to figure out how to capitalize on this mess: they're just fighting to make sure that their children will have a world to wake up to tomorrow.

Man, Independence Day may be one of the most politically mocking movies of all time. No wonder it's always resonated with me somehow.

Anyway, glad to see that it's now being played on AMC alongside such other classics of the American screen as Every Which Way But Loose, Smokey and the Bandit Part 2, Death Race 2000 and National Lampoon's Animal House :-)

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