My Dearest Friendos,

In the interest of taking a break from bludgeoning you with bulletins about the AUDIE AND THE WOLF PREMIERE, but not really, I offer you the top ten reasons why you should come see the World Premiere of Audie & The Wolf on Thursday August 14 (details at http://audieandthewolf.com)

TOP 10 REASONS TO ATTEND THE AUDIE & THE WOLF WORLD PREMIERE

10. The Downtown Film Festival - Los Angeles is making its debut. This is the first festival ever for the DFFLA. You get to be a part of Los Angeles history and help make it happen. Also, you can put this on your resume. But not really.

09. The party afterwards is sure to be a saucy, delightfully shallow endeavour. Come get loaded and pretend you’re not one of the shallow ones.

08. Boost your street cred and take the subway to the theater. Super close! Walk 2 blocks and you’re there. Perfect for all you health conscious fucktards who think exercise is good for you.

07. Free alcoholic drinks in the theater lobby before the show, courtesy of the festival sponsors and your liver.

06. This is a one-time event. A film only premieres once. You’ll be able to say “I was there.” Or “I was there. And it sucked. Holy fuckballs, did it suck.”

05. The film will be screened in High definition HDCAM projection with 5.1 surround sound. So it’ll look like a real movie. You know - the kind of movie you’ll fork over $14 for at the Arclight this Friday night starring Jack Black which will hit dvd and pay-per-view in 12 minutes and no one will remember in 13.

04. You can meet the stars of the movie, live in person, and harrass them for autographs, real estate, or financial advice.

03. It’s playing at a beautiful old-fashioned MOVIE PALACE. http://losangelestheatre.com to see what I’m talking about. This place was once saved from ruin during the Depression by a donation from none other than Mr. Charles Chaplin himself. (He’s the funny movie guy who looked like Hitler.)

02. The only thing on TV you’re missing that night is the Olympicsand Big Brother, and Ugly Betty. And Assmasters 12, if you have adult pay-per-view.

01. 100% of all ticket proceeds go to the Retarded Childrens’ Poker Fund. Yes! It’s true! Nothing beats a helmeted Royal Flush.

And yes, these will probably be repeated via another email blast. Get on the list at http://audieandthewolf.com

Shamelessly,

B. Scott O’Malley

“It’s brewed. Rich. Tastes incredible!” — Agent Dale Cooper.

Think about your favorite books, movies, and even TV shows. Were you happy with the final page, or the final frame? What if they left you hanging? How did you feel then? For my twisted money, the last episode of Twin Peaks features the ultimate cliffhanger which has yet to be topped. Our hero, Agent Dale Cooper, gets trapped in a place called the Black Lodge and can’t get out.

What is the Black Lodge? It’s not of this world. You enter in through a strange portal located inside a circle of sycamore trees deep inside the Twin Peaks forest. Once you arrive at the Lodge, you step into the Red Room, home to the worst variety of mischievous spirits. More specifically, they are “doppelgangers”….distorted reflections of the people you once knew, who have since kicked the bucket.

None of these doppelgangers have irises. They also talk backwards (well, sort of). And if you fail to leave the Red Room at a brisk pace you meet your own doppelganger, who laughs wildly, and sets out to trap your soul. According to Twin Peaks’s resident Indian, you must face your doppelganger with “perfect courage” or he will get the best of you. The Black Lodge has been mentioned in the 1930 book Psychic Self Defense. The author, Dion Fortune, claims it is quite the real place (see what we have to look forward to when we die?).

It never seemed fair to me that the best detective in television history met with such a fate. Agent Cooper utterly lost his final battle. Now the Black Lodge is his new home, and I don’t like it one bit.

So much for perfect courage. But then again it was a lot to ask, don’t you think?

When the Twin Peaks movie came out in 1992, I was so hoping for an epic continuation of the last episode which would set Cooper free and restore him to his favorite habits: eating donuts, solving crimes, and drinking coffee. Instead the movie scoffed at my request and delivered a prequel. And, to add insult to damnation, Cooper would have a mere 4 scenes.

What???

I vowed that if I ever saw the director in person (anyone know his name?), I would do a thing or two to his soul.

So the years passed, and I crafted such demonic plans. However, before I could carry any of them out, Twin Peaks got a couple of DVD releases. The most recent release, called The Gold Box Edition, contains hours of additional material. The most valuable being a series of coffee commercials that save Cooper’s soul.

That’s right. In the end, it was coffee that did the trick.

These commercials were filmed a year or two after the show was canceled and the sets were destroyed. Happily, the director of the Twin Peaks movie was at the helm of these commercials, cementing them as official Twin Peaks canon (at least in my opinion).

The commercials open with Cooper back in town, and in charge of the Twin Peaks Sheriff Station. He is hot on the trail of a missing Japanese woman. Her boyfriend, Ken, assists Cooper in tracking her down. The only clues are some origami and a deer’s head.

However, finding this gal is a total side thought. Cooper and Ken are much more interested in taking as many breaks from this case as possible to try a new brand of Coffee called….Georgia Coffee.

Watch closely. Cooper looks like a cat in a bird store.

In the final installment, Cooper tracks the missing gal down to the Black Lodge. A final showdown is inevitable! Cooper lets us know that he is quite familiar with this place, implying that he has been here before. In five seconds, he jumps in, grabs the gal by the hands, and gets the hell out. When the boyfriend arrives on the scene he pats his long lost gal on the shoulder and…..turns to Cooper for more Georgia Coffee! Cooper is only too happy to oblige. The last shot is Cooper and friends standing outside the sycamore trees giving us the thumbs up.

So ends the greatest saga in television history.

What is the moral?

I leave that to you……

Yours in perfect courage,
Steven Kowal

Dear Chuckles,

I just added Bleak Future and Minimum Wage to the site. Click on Watch A101 Feature Films below. Minimum Wage is especially exciting because it’s a version nobody’s seen. The director’s cut, made by yours truly, from the VHS dailies, after the producers cut their version and left it on the shelf to rot. It’s still not a great movie, but it’s a lot better than it was. Watch it full screen and tell me what you think.

http://anarchy101.com/feature-films/

Maybe the old features will make it up there soon too.  But don’t hold your breath.

Also, keep checking iTunes. The AnARcHy 101 podcast will be up soon, featuring all the old shorts. And maybe some new ones if I ever get a free minute.

B.

I recently worked on the musical Oklahoma. After a day or two I started paying attention to the show, rather than my job (running the sound). I noticed something rather particular about this little classic. IT’S ABOUT SEX! Every character in this show is trying to fuck someone else. Sometimes it’s subtle subtext of a song, an odd throwaway line, or downright obvious in your face. Here’s what I’m talking about…

The “A” story is about a girl who has to decide which guy she wants to go to the box social with. The “B” story is about a girl who has to decide which guy she wants to marry.

In the “A” story, Laurey likes suave Curly, but is being pursued by creepy Jud. The Box social is an auction for a picnic basket, which comes with a date from the girl who packed it. This is just prostitution. Throughout the first act, Laurey is a tease. Jud, who is the hired hand on Laurey’s farm, lives in the smokehouse. There are 4 different references, as well as a lengthy conversation about the pictures of naked women he has tacked to his wall. So Jud sits alone in his room jerking off. Jud also has a monolog where he tells how he stalks Laurey, and then tries to rape her. Curley, the hero, is constantly avoiding Laurey’s flirting, obviously in denial about his own homosexuality.

There is an odd line in “Oh what a beautiful morning” where he mentions a cow winking at him. Then there’s Aunt Eller, the matriarch of the little rural community. She has her own little way of flirting with the men, and in one scene when all the guys are looking at a “scandalous” peep show device called “the little wonder”, Aunt Eller reveals her approval, if not interest in pornography. It’s clear that Aunt Eller owns a bondage outfit, and has a secret sex slave operation in the barn.

As for the “B” story, it’s about Ado Annie and her two potential beaus’. Ali Ahkim, a Persian traveling salesman very clearly states that he wants to take Ado Annie to a hotel and fuck her. Will, Ado’s cowboy suitor, has just returned from Kansas City. He has song’s singing of burlesque shows, and sowing his wild oats. Basically, this small town cowboy, went to the big city, fucked some whores and came back to small town nowhere with the clap. Will has also brought back $50 (a lot for the time) to buy Ado Annie’s hand in marriage from her goat fucking father Mr. Carnes. OK, I made up the goat fucking, but really, what kind of asshole sells his daughter. To a cowboy none the less. That’s almost as bad as letting your daughter marry a marine! But miss Ado Annie, she’s the worst. She has a song called “I cain’t say no” where she confesses openly to not being able to turn down the sexual advances of every man in town.

Finally, a few side notes about the show itself. The dialog is campy and the songs feature such classics as “Oh what a beautiful Morning”, “Oklahoma”, uh…”Somewhere over the rainbow” and umm…uh…”Cabaret”. And lastly, about the title. “Oklahoma”. Somewhere, buried in the bottom of the second act, nearly 2 hours into cowboy sex hell, there is a throwaway line of “soon you’ll be living in a new state!” proclaims Cowboy Rapist #4. Then the whole cast breaks into the show’s title song. WHAT THE FUCK!?! The show is called Oklahoma, and the entire thing has nothing at all to do with Oklahoma except that one day this unincorporated territory of sex and perversion with someday, SOMEDAY be a state.

UHG! This show made me long for “You’re a good man, Charlie Brown”, which, if you seen it, is like taking a sharp blow to the anus. Which is one of the songs in Oklahoma incidentally.

Audie and The Wolf, the feature I wrote, directed, edited, and produced with Brooklyn Reptyle Films, and have been working on all year, is almost done with post-production. Smart Post Sound in Burbank is handling the entire sound package, from sound design to ADR to foley to mix. Composer Karl Preusser had a bit of a setback when his mixing engineer was hospitalized briefly, but the engineer has recovered and is finishing up the mixes this week. Devon Read continues to crank out CG and compositing shots - the details of which I’ll keep under wraps for now - and we’re close to locking down a colorist for the final colour correction the film’s gonna need. Just a few more weeks and Audie and The Wolf is flatass finished, fucko.

click to play the Audie trailer