Declaration

Heavy Hands stars Frankie Latina and Kumar Pallana

Well well well.

It's that time of the year when love is in the air. Parties, weddings, parties, wedding, parties. Then brunches and more weddings.

Two really awesome couples got married this weekend - Cesar and Bobbi and Micah and Genna.

There was buffets and wrestling and old friends and new friends and girlfriends and toasts and mini bowling and whole lot of other insane, fun, lovey, dovey, heart barf mastery.

But now it's time to get to business. I have a couple more shoot things this week and music and editing and soundtrack galore.

And goddamn am I excited.

With the help of my friends and kickstarter nation I'm gonna have an edit ready for festival submission come August 10th. That may seem an arbitrary deadline but let me tell you, it's not.

Let me declare it here and declare it now, Monday, May 14th 2012, starts the stretch run of Heavy Hands.

Are you ready? Are you ready?

For Starters

I can’t thank you all enough for the insane love and support you’ve shown me and my feature film Heavy Hands.

I ventured in this kickstarter campaign not exactly knowing if I could succeed or not. Lets just say I thought but I didn't know.

It became increasingly clear to me - throughout the campaign but especially at the end - that the people in my life would not accept this project falling short, they would have my back.

This revelation, at this point in my life, is one of the most important and humbling lessons I could be taught.

This isnt just a thank you letter - this is a promise - that with your support and overwhelming interest I will make Heavy Hands better than anyone imagined. 

We will make this film better than I ever imagined.

From Milwaukee with love, forever and a day.

Sean Williamson

Pick Your Poison

This is a choose-thine-own-adventure-type project. It's an exquisite corpse anthology that also functions as one story with 8 endings that also functions as 8 good stories. It was edited by Parker Winship and written by that fellow along with Lee Odeja, Bethany Price, Sean Williamson, Mitch Olson, Jim Winship, Ilse Griffin, Artie Nosrati, Dan Oberbruner, Nick Kotecki and Dustin Williamson. Artwork is by Micah Bennker.

It's called Pick Your Poison. Sometimes it's a hardboiled heartbreaker and sometimes it's an epic poem and hopefully it's always fun to read. I've never seen anything like it elsewhere.

Below is the beginning. If you like it, keep reading here.

WAIT.  Don’t go out there.  Easy, fella’.  Cool it down.  Nothing to be afraid of so knock it off.  Twist the heat to max and soak it in for ten more seconds.  You didn’t do anything.  You didn’t do anything.  You didn’t do anything.  … three, two, one.  Kill the ignition.  Pop the door.

SO MANY THINGS

Help me finish Heavy Hands. I'm doing a lot of work to get this film funded and a lil help goes a lonnnnnnng way. thanks. KICKSTARTER.

This can't be happening.

"This can't be happening," has to be one of my favorite phrases of all time.

In other news... look over there. What is that?

Fantasy

I saw John Carter last week. It was good. I wanted it to be great, which made it worse. Some people saw that movie and didn't like it at all. Some people saw it and it filled them with awe, which is what a movie like that partially aims to do. Take 700 people and $350 million dollars, 500 shots, 70,000 special effects, 12 script drafts, and combine them just the right way and it pierces something deep inside us. The ads for the Christopher Reeves Superman movie said, "You'll believe a man can fly!" And that's what we want. Childlike awe. We want to believe in Santa Claus and King Arthur and the Green Lantern. What Star Wars and Indiana Jones did to us when we were children, that's what we want from John Carter.

Some people did feel that. I didn't. I took a bus home and went to sleep. A couple days later, I started watching the 6th series of Doctor Who on Netflix. And what I saw on my laptop did for me what I had wanted from John Carter 3-D. I believed a man could travel through time and space in a box that's bigger on the inside. I believed two time travelers in love could travel in opposite directions and reach one perfect moment in the middle of their relationship, but every other one would always mean more to one than the other. I believed in anti-matter prisons and the most deadly foe in the history of Earth, who everyone has seen but no one can remember. I also believed that these things were fucking awesome.

What's cool about it is that one strip of cinema hit someone's brain in a movie theater this week and did the same thing to them that a compressed digital streaming tv show did for me in my apartment. What's cool is that there is no formula for awe. It hits you right and you're there and it does something for you unlike any other experience I know. A rarer sensation than some of the best ones out there. It's better that it's different for everyone. Your favorite lover usually isn't your neighbor's favorite and blue moon ice cream does for him what only mint chocolate chip can do for you.

Fantasy is delicate and it's intimate. In a balanced world, Spielberg and Lucas would get hundreds of kisses everyday instead of millions of dollars

Rivers/Museums

The river walk. Past docked empty cruise boats, reminded of Boston. The smell, the breeze, the thick ropes. How long have these boats been the same? The upper level cage, folded up chairs. Great-grandparents rode the same boats.

Another city with a river. Do all great cities have rivers? Is there a great land-locked city. We still live in the world mapped out by pre-industrial civilization. In hand-drawn maps.

Museums make you feel time, not just because of the history but because it's the place you went as a child. Don't know if it was time or fantasy I felt then.