• The Lovecraft Chronicles movie trilogy is in post-production.  It should be finished this month in time for Darkstone’s tour of the convention circuit, hopefully beginning with Monster Mania.
• The Good Parts is also in post-production.  I saw a second cut of it last week, and it looks great.  There are just a few details to work out concerning sound effects and end credits, then I think we’ll be good to go.

Stay tuned for more news!

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Jeron Criswell Konig (1907-1982) was a mentalist known for his flamboyant style and crazily inaccurate predictions about the future, such as that space rays would convert all metal in the city of Denver to a rubber-like substance, and that the world would end in cannibalism in the year 1999.  (He also predicted the world will end in 2012, according to the Mayan calendar.)

He was sometimes a guest on the Johnny Carson Show, but his most celebrated role was as the MC to Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space, a 1950s sci-fi film that’s legendary for how bad it is.

Well, my friends (as he would say), although the Amazing Criswell is no longer with us, he has been given a new life in the form of Mr. Lobo, comedy host of the syndicated horror TV series Cinema Insomnia. Darkstone Entertainment has cast Lobo as Criswell in their forthcoming remake of the Ed Wood film, now titled Plan 9.

Where do I come in to this?  The answer is Darkstone’s ongoing web series to promote Plan 9, Criswell Predicts! (with the exclamation point).  The episodes reuse the Ed Wood title screen and always contain Lobo/Criswell’s hilarious intro and outro about the nature of time.  What changes is the meat in the middle of this sandwich — which brings me to the airing of the first episode I helped to write, “Weight Wars”:

Watch my headline feed for news about more Criswell Predicts! episodes co-written by Matthew Warner!

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Excuse me. Let me explain.

Dexter season 5 has just started on Showtime, which means that the season 4 DVD box set just arrived in my mailbox. I’ve been very excited to see it; Showtime’s series about the serial killer who only kills other murderers has really sunk its teeth into my head. My only regret about it is that since I don’t subscribe to Showtime, I have to wait one year for them to release the DVD box set.

The word on the street is that there’s a huge, as in, G-A-R-G-A-N-T-U-A-N, earth-shattering change at the end of season 4. So I’ve been very careful to avoid reading all things Dexter. A friend in nearby Crozet said to avoid Entertainment Weekly magazine, whose article about Dexter apparently spoils the season 4 finale its headline.

Deena and I have been meticulously careful.  When the Horror Homemaker Apron Hall of Fame posted our silly Dexter homage picture and I needed to test the link to the Dexter homepage for the caption, I clicked on the link only long enough to see the show name appear in the title bar of my browser before closing it up again.  When Deena’s brother Ricky posted the season 5 trailer on her Facebook wall, we elected not to watch it.  Ricky, by the way, is the same guy who uttered the fateful phrase to me, “You know, when Snape kills Dumbledore,” a year before the release of the Harry Potter movie in which that happens.  (Yes, I’m the one person in existence who hasn’t actually read the Harry Potter novels and who would rather watch the movies.  Maybe I’m gun shy about drowning in J.K. Rowling’s Tom-Swiftie dialogue technique.)

So, anyway (you know where I’m going with this, don’t you?), immediately upon receiving the box set, we popped the first DVD into the player and watched the first two episodes.  Magnificent.  Moving.  Can’t wait to watch the rest.

Fast forward a couple days to this morning.  My one-year-old son woke me up at 6:45.  Yesterday, we removed the bumpers from his crib on the theory that he doesn’t need them anymore, but it wasn’t until this morning that I discovered this action had exposed an electrical socket bristling with plugs, and the plugs were within reach of my son.  When the lights came on, Owen saw where my gaze went and immediately lunged for the plugs to play with them.  My stomach did a barrel roll as I pulled him away.  (We’ve since blocked that section of wall with a piece of plywood.)

When I left his room, I went down the hall to un-block the cat door.  Moody last night killed a rabbit and dumped it in our bathroom, so before bed I dumped the rabbit and the cat outside and blocked the door so they couldn’t come back in.  Percy went outside too — and I think it was probably Percy who violated that poor bunny’s corpse, the remains of which I found just outside the door this morning.  My stomach did another barrel roll as I picked up the door mat the guts were lying on and watched them slurp into a garbage bag.

Back inside, Deena was fixing pancakes.  Owen was whining about something, but I was determined to have a good breakfast.  I opened up the newspaper and pulled out the Sunday morning copy of the USA Weekend magazine.  Drew Barrymore was on the front cover worrying about what she’s going to do with “the second half” of her life.  Oh, please.

I turned the page, and on the inside was a picture of Michael C. Hall, who plays Dexter, in the Q&A section.  The question was how he’s recovering from cancer.  I was interested in this question, especially since the lead actress in my movie received phone calls on set from entertainment reporters digging for information on this very topic.  (She, admirably, kept her mouth shut.)

I didn’t even think about the potential of a Dexter season 4 spoiler in the article, nor do I think I should have.  It was about the man’s cancer, for godsakes.  And yet, there it was, a parenthetical aside that blows the whole finale.  My stomach did its final barrel roll, and I couldn’t finish my meal.

Why do they do this?  Do some writers just have an insatiable need to show how hip they are?  Is it that they want the satisfaction of sharing some juicy bit of gossip with you?  What are they thinking — that if you don’t have Showtime on your cable box that you’re not important?  “You’re assuming that these people think,” Deena said when we discussed this.

There should be a statute of limitations on spoilers.  Not until the DVD box set has been out for at least two weeks should writers be allowed to blab.  I have a whole line of friends waiting to be loaned Dexter season 4 once Deena and I are done with it.  God help them.

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Dumas and another episode that will be filmed this weekend, Leviathan, will premiere at the Horrorfind Weekend film festival in September.  (The tentacled Leviathan, as you might have guessed, is a previously unknown creation of H.P. Lovecraft.)  It will also be for sale there as a limited edition DVD, with a booklet insert containing a special fourth episode written by me.

Here are a few pictures:

The crusader codenamed Stoker kneels during a magical blood rite that will locate the vampire Dumas.

The crusader codenamed Hitchcock prepares to have his chest ripped open by a vampire. Special effects were provided by Bio Duck FX.

Actress Teale Davies in the course of being buried alive for a vampire-birth scene.

Brian Wimer made for an effective and menacing vampire Dumas.

Overall, it was a great experience, but good God did I sweat a lot — not from nervousness, since the production was in great hands, but from the freakin’ 90-degree weather!  It wouldn’t have been so bad except we spent the first two nights filming in un-airconditioned warehouses.  I’m sure all the sacrifice will be worth it, though.

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The first thing to go: some of the 17 bazillion “I’m sorry” lines that Jennifer says!  It’s totally my fault, because I wrote it that way.  But I didn’t realize until watching the movie how jarring it is to hear so many of them.  “She sure apologizes a lot,” I said to director John Johnson during the screening.  “Well,” he said, “she is going crazy.”  Still, I hope we can trim them down.

While I was there, we listened to Richard Adams’s latest version of the title music, and I think we have a winner.  To test it out, John played it on his computer while the movie’s opening sequence rolled in a separate media player.  “I think I want to cry,” I said.  His response: “Have you read your script lately?”

Another area he’ll be retooling in the next cut of the movie is the opening scene’s pacing.  Again, thanks to my scripting, there’s a special effects shot within the first few seconds of the film.  I’m now concerned that that’s not enough time for viewers to register the basic facts of the scene — that there’s a woman sitting alone in a restaurant — before they have to parse this new thing we’ve thrown their way.  Is the answer to slow the effect down, front-load the scene with some extra footage, or reorder a couple of the shots?  I expect this will shake out in the next cut of the film, when John starts to add sound effects and music.

Anyway, it’s all coming together!  I think we’re on track to finish up in July.

When I got home, I had an email waiting for me from a reporter at the Staunton News Leader.  She was writing about the Virginia governor’s signing of a new law that gives tax credits to film makers.  I didn’t have much to say on the topic other than, “Duh, me makey movie good,” so I referred her to John.  His quote wound up on the paper’s front page this morning.  You can read the article here.

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Anyway, I saw the first 15 minutes of the rough cut today (about 1/2 of the movie), without sound effects and music, and it looked pretty cool. It was weird to watch footage that I’d previously seen in the raw now put together in order. For those of you following the saga about the “They’re pretty good, aren’t they?” line versus the “They’re not very good, are they?” line in the basketball scene, John went with the latter.  (Sorry, Chris.)

Sitting with me was Richard Adams, a renowned local composer and musician who will be writing and recording the theme music.  We had small comments and questions for director John Johnson about the special effects, audio, and transitions, and some discussion ensued about where things like the credits and music will be inserted.  Overall, I’m very pleased with how it’s turning out, and it’s exciting to see something I wrote coming to life on the screen.

We’re hopeful that the film will be in final form by the end of June, but production delays are always possible.  More news when I know more!

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• Holy.  Crap.  That was a lot of people under one roof.  (200,000+)
• It was nice to see lots of stuff designed by Deena on display, such as the Constellation logo and website in the Perseus Books booth:
  
  More pictures at the DWDLLC 5/27/10 blog entry.
• Every time I talk to Matt Schwartz of Random house, it’s like attending a master’s class on publishing.  Wow, does he know a lot of stuff.
• The timing of Garrison Keillor’s latest column, “Missing the heydey of books,” is ironic.  “Call me a pessimist, call me Ishmael, but I think that book publishing is about to slide into the sea,” he writes.  Because of vanity presses, the future of publishing is “18 million authors in America, each with an average of 14 readers, eight of whom are blood relatives. Average annual earnings: $1.75.”  He has a point, but Jesus Christ, I think what I saw at BookExpo shows that there’s some kick left in the industry.  If the Horror Writers Association spent $6,000 for a booth the size of my shed, then I can only imagine what Simon & Schuster spent for a booth the size of my house.  If the industry were about to slide into the sea, I doubt anyone would be spending so freely.
• Speaking of the Horror Writers Association, the HWA is pretty damn lucky to have Vince Liaguno on its side.  Besides being a good publisher and a very nice man, he’s extremely hard working and dedicated.  One of his ideas is to open up the Stoker Awards banquet to the general public to attend it (provided they buy admission, of course).  It’s a great idea and the kind of thing the HWA should do to up its profile.

When I got home, I caught up on things like finishing the latest Sookie Stackhouse novel, which unfortunately really didn’t get going until the last three chapters, and cheering that another webzine has interviewed me about Blood Born.  I also played my latest video game purchase, Alan Wake, which tells the story of a horror writer suffering from writer’s block who has gone on sabbatical to the Pacific Northwest.  While there, his wife goes missing, and he battles mysterious shadow men as he searches for her, along the way finding manuscript pages of a novel he doesn’t remember writing.

Alan Wake has a great premise and is beautifully executed, but I have to say I am extremely displeased with the character himself.  Alan Wake, the person, is an asshole.  From the very beginning, he’s full of the “oh, I’m such a famous writer, and I wish the public would just leave me alone” movie star angst.  He blows up at his wife when she encourages him to use their vacation as a time to conquer his writer’s block.

The worst was the scene I just played last night, when he’s in the sheriff’s department, conferring about his missing wife.  A pop psychologist who specializes in writer’s block enters the station for presumably some unrelated reason, and Alan attacks him.  Alan knows that this is the doctor whom his wife wanted him to see, and he assumes that the doctor has something to do with her disappearance.  Maybe he’s right; I haven’t played far enough to find out.   But a few things about this cut scene especially bother me.  First, why would anyone get up in somebody else’s face and punch him out for no apparent reason?  (And why would any self-respecting sheriff, who watches this transpire in her police station, right in front of her, fail to arrest him on the spot?  The game’s realism went right out the window there.) Worse, Alan’s literary agent, Barry Wheeler (named because he’s a wheeler dealer, I suppose), suddenly storms into the police station, screaming and swaggering as if he’s some high-blown Hollywood lawyer, which he’s not, and pulls his client out of there.

I could forgive this if I believed the game’s writers knew they were setting up Alan Wake as an asshole.  Maybe their plan was to give him a character arc so that he’s a humble, nice guy by the end of the story.  But I suspect that that’s not the case.  I have this niggling thread of doubt that we’re supposed to be on Alan’s side, sympathizing with him because his wife has disappeared–particularly since we’re using our Xbox 360 controllers to puppet him through the story.  So, basically what I have here is an unsympathetic protagonist whom I care little about, which discourages me from continuing through the game.

The character of Alan Wake particularly bothers me because I’ve known writers like him, and I simply don’t understand how a writer can act that way.  I scrape and work hard for every fan and positive review I get.  I’m grateful when an editor thinks highly enough of my writing to publish my work.  When someone tells me he’s read my stuff and liked it, or asks me for an autograph, I’m thankful for the validation that I haven’t wasted my time writing that story: that my creation was worthy of spending some time in somebody else’s head.  That’s the way writers should be–not these angsty, self-absorbed assholes who think they’re very smart and clever and wonderful when they’re really not.

The writers of Alan Wake did themselves a great disservice when they wrote their character to be a Hollywood-style figure of arrogance.  And Garrison Keillor needs to stop griping like an old man lamenting the Good ‘Ole Days, even if that’s what he is.  They all need to attend the next BookExpo and inject themselves with a little bit of humility and a little bit of hope–because most of the time, as a working writer, that’s all you have to power you through the day.

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• The Good Parts is in post-production.  Just watched the rest of the dailies yesterday, and everything looks great so far.  The Augusta Free Press just ran an article about it.
• I’m now under a tight deadline for an upcoming movie project with Darkstone Entertainment, fleshing out someone else’s concept.  It’s challenging to write in another person’s sandbox.
• I had a cameo in my friend Alejandro Rosa’s parody trailer for a TV series called Captain Puerto Rico. My role was just to look cool as “Bootsy Tulane as Dr. Chaos” starting at 01:13.
  
  Alejandro made this for a party in which the theme was to come dressed as a superhero—either a “real” one or one you’ve made up—and to give a presentation about it.  Deena came as this character from Howl’s Moving Castle:
  
• I also had a slightly more substantial cameo in episode 7 of John Johnson’s SPADE, again as a villain (of course!).  SPADE is worth following if you were a fan of the old Choose Your Own Adventure books like I was because you get to vote on how the story develops.

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