Welcome one and all! It is my absolute pleasure to bring to you the official blog of the making of The Dead Matter. Over the next month or so, I'll give you as candid a look as is possible into the daily ins and outs of our experience shooting the film. It's been a long road getting here and I've been walking on it almost from the start, so I thought I'd devote this first entry to giving you a little bit of background.The version of The Dead Matter we'll be filming this August has been, in some sense, over twelve years in the making. In 1994, Ed Douglas and Tony Demci completed the first script for The Dead Matter and Ed took the reins producing, directing and scoring it. It was shot on video (not even digital video, as that was a few years away from being a financially feasible option for us) and involved a cast and crew largely culled from John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio. The JCU gang included Ed as the director, Mark Rakocy as the director of photography, Kenlyn Creech as "Gretchen", me as "Frank", Jeff Kasunic as both "Mike" and as our digital effects guy, Samantha D'Angelo as "Jill", and Joseph Guay as "Mayor Osborne". Non-JCU notables, who were also greater Cleveland locals, included Tony Demci, the co-writer, as "Mark", Tracy Brown as "McCallister", and Paul St. James as "Vellich".
Our first official day of shooting coincided with John Carroll's winter formal. I recall many of us rushing off the set that day, which was at a bar in Chardon, Ohio, to get home, get fancy, and head out to the dance in the evening! So ended day one. It took us about six months to tape the whole thing. And then a year passed as Ed edited it. The Dead Matter premiered at John Carroll University in the spring of 1996.
Some local video stores carried the movie. (Notably B-Ware Video in Lakewood, Ohio, now sadly gone. B-Ware, that is. Lakewood's still there, last time I checked.) It also made a brief appearance on the shelves of a few online stores. And that, it seemed, was that.
But movies like The Dead Matter don't die easily. Or better: if The Dead Matter did die, it was perhaps inevitable that it would come back from the grave.
Skip ahead a decade. During that time, Ed and Gavin Goszka formed the delightfully macabre band Midnight Syndicate. Jeff and Mark moved out to LA, where Jeff now works for Dreamworks and Mark now works for Hammer Filmworks. I found myself at MIT pursuing a doctorate in philosophy. Ed and Tony came back to the table and rewrote The Dead Matter. And after much sweat, tears, and some pronounced sacrifices on many persons parts, The Dead Matter was given new life--or unlife, as the case may be.
And that brings us to now. I'm extremely excited to have the opportunity to reprise my role as "Frank" and am even more excited to be working with the rest of the amazing cast Ed has put together. And all of us are very psyched to be teamed-up with Robert Kurtzman's production company Precinct 13 Entertainment. We'll be filming near Precinct 13 in the Mansfield-Crestline area of Ohio.
On that last part, I promised candidness, so here it goes. Earlier this summer, I had the opportunity to visit Precinct 13 with Ed and tour some of the locations in the area that were being considered for the shoot. We were both very excited by what we saw. The locations were perfect. Really perfect. As if--and I know this might sound a little strange--we didn't find them as much as they found us. The locations found us.
I mentioned this to Ed and he brushed it aside, saying that maybe I've been listening to his music too much! We laughed it off. I definitely think that laughter's the ultimate panacea for such things. It's the smiles that keep us going, don't you think? The little giggles and bits of good cheer. That's at least what gets me through things, like working on a doctorate. Let me tell you, few horror stories compare in scope of anxiety, fear, or dread to the process of writing a dissertation!
So I think I've blabbed on enough for this first entry. Please visit often! The first official day of the shoot will be Monday, August 6. But there'll be plenty of entries leading up to that. And comments are more than welcome!
