Who is Dragon Boxer?

First up, Have a great Veteran's Day! To all us vets, Thanks! Go out and find one vet during your day today and simply say, "Thanks!" 

Then find one politician who didn't use enough politics, what they are elected FOR, and who found us into yet another war, for corporations and profit and say,

"Hey pal, do your damn job! War is failed politics! And we've failed too many times on that too many times on purpose."

Then thank another Republican for all these wars of profit.

And remember Republican Pres. George W. Bush took us to war, forced the intelligence into existence that would support yet another war we didn't need and took us into Iraq murdering thousands upon thousands and thousands of Iraqis for no God damned good reason whatsoever! 

That's not partisan crap, it's fact. Read a book! The information is out there, vetted, and reality.

Now...

Dragon Boxer. The international star from 2011, is back! Sort of.

Dragon Boxer, 2011

Who is Dragon Boxer?

Well, that's the question, isn't it? The first appearance of Dragon Boxer was in 2011 in Europe when I made a short happy birthday video for my daughter who was traveling Europe alone, with her backpack, and her accordion. Paying her way singing around Europe, even touching briefly in Eastern Europe. She lived in caves on the southern Spanish coast.

She lived in empty buildings with artists. She was in Greece during the labor riots when she detailed to me heading "home" for the night through streets with cars on fire and rioting. She called me one night from a truck stop on the French border at 2AM when it was freezing cold and she had no idea how she was going to get ... somewhere.

A truck driver gave her a ride and eventually, she ended up in that cave on the Spanish coast. For a while, she lived in an apartment with other musicians. they would play music in the kitchen and at least once, had the police arrive to ask them to tone it down as other tenants were complaining.

I tell you all this because it becomes apparent how reasonable it might have been for at some point, her spirits to have lowered to the lowest. It was her birthday. I was frustrated in being so unable to control her spirits, her happiness, she safety.

Head Employment Representative Ramon Soliz, left, my self with my first meeting
with Dragon Boxer and, my wife at the time at my exit party from UW Personnel Department

I was in my bedroom at one point and I came up with the only thing I could think of. To take the hand puppet I had been given as a joke when I left my employment in 1994 of over seven years at the University of Washington, in various departments, and make a short video in order to try to cheer up my daughter, off somewhere, in Europe.

This short stupid little video had the desired effect and did indeed cheer up my depressed daughter. I put the video away and didn't think about it until some years later. I brought it out again for a Happy New Years' video.

Over the years I had shown both the puppet and the Happy Birthday video to kids and even some adults and they all laughed. The kids especially loved it. And when they met Dragon Boxer, they seemed to be very attracted to it. I don't think I've ever gotten so much out of a joke gift before over so many years.

It occurred to me that there was something there. And so Dragon Boxer, International Star was born!

I have been in pre-production on my short horror film, "Gumdrop, a short horror" which I shot during the summer of 2019. During that, I asked Dragon Boxer if he'd like to make a short film for fun and he said yes. Thus, "Below in the Dark, A Short Halloween Enigma" was created in 2018.

I mention all this because we have been putting Dragon Boxer to work. He's open for management by the way. He's a real pain in the ass to manage and I don't want to do it. But someone might and that would take him off my hands. And he eats...good grief. Well, that's another topic.

Anyway, he interviewed actor Jason Lockhard who has worked with director Kelly Hughes and is now in my film, "Gumdrop, a short horror."

Actor Jason Lockhart (left), Tom Remick (right) in
Gumdrop, a short horror (2019)

Here's the Dragon Boxer interview:

Dragon Boxer: Hey, so, Jason Lockhart, actor, father, raconteur, whatever, how are you and thanks for visiting and being my first interview.

JasonL: Sure.

DB: We've grown a man.

JasonL: Sorry. You've what? What is that, thing? Over there?

DB: We found human DNA from 10,000 years ago, recovered, reconstituted it, grew it, and produced, a man. Oh, that. Jay's handy work. It was a... ? We'll have to get another one, that one's trashed beyond repair. Only took him a second. Said, he didn't like it. It made him uncomfortable.  New people seem to make him a bit uncomfortable, too. Anyway, now that just makes him laugh. Interesting talent, that.

JasonL: A man? A man from 10,000 years. Ago? Why not a dragon? You're a boxing dragon, why genetics?

DB: Yes. Well, resurrecting a dragon would be stupid. They're mythical creatures and...I'm the only one so far, so... anyway. We named him. Jay. But that's not...it's not what's so, amazing, about, all this. Did you know that synesthesia is like other things, a part of all of us, as children? As we were all once female, we all once had to learn to differentiate, to compartmentalize our senses. We had to be trained out of seeing sounds or smells, or hearing colors, and so on. There may be other sense mixes going on but typically a child saying, Mommy, I can see the music playing," leads to Mommy saying, "No, honey, you can HEAR the music," when in all reality, the child may ver welly be hearing AND seeing the music.

JasonL: I really don't see what this has to do with any...I thought this was an actor interview?

DB: Yeah, you've thought a lot of things. Like what the hell is this about?

[Shown  Kelly Hughes/Jason Lockhart clip. Jason is flummoxed.]

JasonL: That was from Kelly's film I was in, Green State.

DB: Okayyy... You have heard stories from the past of miracles, magic, and so on, all of which you don't hear about anymore, right?

JasonL: Surely. I've always figured that was just ancient people's misunderstanding of things they can't explain.

DB: Right, and so have most people, a reasonable assumption. But what if...what if we were a more simple people? We certainly seemed to have been more passionate about our beliefs. What if...what if witches did have powers... sometimes. Not always, as certainly many innocents were killed in so-called, "witch hunts".

JasonL: Again, what's your point?

DB: What if the brain chemistry, who knows, maybe the entire human anatomy, was conditioned so that these magical acts actually could happen?

JasonL: Okay, but I don't think I'm following you, yet.

DB: Modern physics has learned a great deal recently. And much of that indicates some very bizarre things. What if this universe is a holographic projection? What if we are existing in the event horizon of a black hole or are projected from one? What if we create the universe every time we look at it, but when we don't look at it, it simply doesn't exist?

JasonL: Yes, yes, I've heard all of that.

DB: Okay then, what if we have, as we have taught children that they cannot see sounds, hear colors and so on, taught ourselves that we cannot see magic? Not so much, "magic", but what appears to be magic. Now, what if we found someone who was alive back when we believed it, what if we could access the capabilities of someone like that? What might happen?

JasonL: Wait, so you're saying, someone from the past could produce magic, and you've now produced someone like that? Surely not all of them could be magical and you may have produced only one who cannot do this? How...odd.

DB: That's what you find odd about this conversation? Okay, well, yes, there's that possibility. But I conjecture we all had that capability, thousands of years ago. But we merely convinced ourselves, mentally, socially, biologically, that we couldn't do it. No doubt many of the strictures of churches, various religions, came about to be precisely because of those capabilities and that added, with extreme prejudice, to our ending such marvelous gifts and practices.

JasonL: I see what you're saying. That sounds ridiculous. Both, our rebuke and the situation. As does so much of quantum physics I suppose. But if what you're saying is true, my God...then what?

DB: Exactly. So. Would you like to meet our new friend...Jay?

In Memory, Yet Crystal Clear, A New Audiobook

It is finally UP and Available to the public on Amazon, Audible and iTunes:

Original artwork by Marvin Hayes

In Memory, Yet Crystal Clear. The title, an homage to science fiction writer Isaac Asimov's 1979 first autobiography which I found so affective and orienting to me as a writer, In Memory Yet Green.

My story is a tale of how a dystopian society comes to be through the efforts on a single man who takes over much of America's thinking through his managing their daily feed of information.

Sound familiar? Seem a bit too real? A bit too much like today? It is. But this is a reality we can easily escape, simply by finishing listening to or reading the story.

From the Amazon description:

A short story about a world reminiscent of a Philip K.Dick story since the 2016 US Presidential election, or this story here where a world famous surgeon helps his missing son's best friend. Only to find that his actions lead to monumental changes in the United States and as well around the world. All in ways he would never have foreseen.

I wrote this story in the 1980s and eventually saw it sold to an east coast horror quarterly magazine. It became my first published short sci fi horror fiction in 1990. Then in 2012 it became the first story in my first book Anthology of Evil (to which I'm currently shopping to publishers its sequel, Anthology of Evil II). That first book of mine is a collection of my original older short sci fi and horror, including its ending novella (Andrew) that evolved through one other short short story (Perception) into my second book, DEATH OF HEAVEN.

In 2013 I had produced and narrated three audiobooks on my own. The Conqueror Worm (first and standalone short horror which opens my DEATH OF HEAVEN book), The Mea Culpa Document of London (also in Anthology of Evil), and Expedition of the Arcturus (the title an homage to the 1920 book,  Voyage to Arcturus, by Scottish author David Lindsay) and was first published in the hard sci fi free online magazine PerihelionSF.com (thanks there to publisher Sam Bellotto).

I am now putting out audiobooks with friend and professional voice actor Tom Remick in a collaboration we are both finding rewarding and just fun to do. Here is a short video intro to Tom's work. We have since changed our equipment and recording setup for the current audiobook, In Memory, Yet Crystal Clear.

Next up... first, I am narrating my most popular piece, a science fact article I've renamed, On Psychology. It details the history of psychology, proposes new research on synesthesia and schizophrenia and offers some perspective on today\s related political environment.

We already have audio tracks for the next story recorded for Mr. Pakool's Spice, a short story about a single father trying to get his two young kids to safety through the back winter woods of Oregon during a zombie apocalypse. With no food, barely surviving, and with of all people an international terrorist hot on their tail. It's a well drawn and heart wrenching tale.

Included with that story in the ebook and now audiobook is the short short story, The Regent's Daughter, a medieval tale which won Best Tension, in a short short story contest among a group of writers.

After that we will be recording the engrossing and tense sci fi horror story, EarVu about a new and frightening technology. It seems like a fun technology... at first. Then the several scientists who developed it find strange things happening around their top secret lab.

Tom and I are having a great time. Producing audiobooks is not easy and takes a lot of work which we hope genre fans and others, will appreciate. It's especially rewarding for me as some of these stories I wrote a very long ago. My older ones even going back to my university days in the early 1980s.

Having read and re read them so many times during the crafting process, over the years and then to hear a talented voice actor read them, to bring them alive, brings another level entirely to these stories. Some of which I have now updated to be more relevant to today's sensibilities. And in some cases as with this current audiobook, our present reality has only enhanced the intensity of the story.

So many authors have said their stories are in a way, like children to them. This experience has been like my stories have gone from high school to college and who knows, perhaps one day they will achieve professional status to become produced on film. Part of the reason I retired in 2016, buying film production equipment and restarting up my LGN Productions (AKA Last good Nerve Productions, started in 1993) company was to produce my stories in new formats.

But until that happens these stories are available as print, ebook and now audiobooks as we produce more and more of my stories. Please take a look and a listen. I think you'll be very pleased with the result we have culled out of them in bringing new life to them as audiobooks. If you do like what you hear and read in my stories, please do share with friends and feel free to post your reviews. I look forward to seeing what you think.

All the best and do... keep reading and listening!

From the ever beautiful American Pacific Northwest... JZ Murdock.

Slainte!


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About the production of, The Rapping

We are currently deep into pre-production of Last good Nerve Production's short horror film, The Rapping. Originally intended as a three minute short horror film it is currently around ten minutes and will hopefully be completed under fifteen minutes in length.

Originally we had planned to have as our first narrative horror short film be one titled: The Bremerton Mea Culpa. It is a story I first wrote in college, published in Anthology of Evil and was further expanded in my book, Death of heaven.

I have built a tiny universe of my characters. In reading all of my fiction you at times can find characters from one story popping up elsewhere. So I have decided to build on my written fiction now in my produced films whenever possible. I love when I find characters I like in other places than where I expect to find them. Also some of my stories in books are available as short ebooks or audiobooks.

One example is from my story, Poor Lord Ritchie's Answer to a Question He Knever Knew. And yes I researched it, believe it or not back in that character's era there was indeed a Lord Ritchie. He also pops up in the World of Pirates anthology in a story titled, Breaking on Cave Island. It details a piece of Ritchie's life previous to "Poor Lord Ritchie's Answer..." during a time when he was, of all things, a pirate. I am currently also compiling a sequel, Anthology of Evil II, with some of these stories that were in anthologies. I'm hoping to have that out and available sometime this year.

When the World of Pirates anthology publisher offered to include a story of mine, I decided to use a previous character of mine and Lord Ritchie just seemed an obvious one to expand upon. Odd how these things pop up, altering things, heading you into directions you had never seen coming. Up to that point I had never even considered Ritchie might have been a pirate but it does fill out his background and perhaps explain some of his damage in life (you'd have to read the original to see what I mean). And trust me, his life is pretty damaged. But then, tampering with things one shouldn't bother can affect one in those ways.

Expanding on previous works is pretty much the same with my Mea Culpa Document of London story. That one is about a medieval witch hunter and judge. It too will be added to that overarching compendium of my characters as yet another branch of its own storyline.

So when we finally do get to that project after wrapping up The Rapping, it will already have a rich background to draw from. As the screenplay for Mea Culpa was being written, along with considerations of SFX, it grew, if not out of control, then much larger than we had intended for an initial project. A project that should be selected for its simplicity. But then, I always do tend to go full crazy...regardless.

So it was decided to first film a shorter and easier to shoot production. I've also been practicing writing "smaller" for years now. Consider my first screenplay, Ahriman, involved massive special effects and two planets. Good story though. One I may well update and put back out there to be produced. It has elements of Brainstorm, The 13th Floor and other such films.

Looking around at my writings of what to choose from, as these films were initially going to be drawn from my writings, nothing easy or simple was rising to the surface. As we had easy access to a location, a house with a sizable yard and garage where we can shoot literally any time we want, that was in part how the concept for the first film came up and the Garage Tales series was born.

However while discussing all this with fellow producers Nik and Gordon Hayes, we started to consider the attic in the home. The garage for Garage Tales lent itself to a larger concept. While the attic allowed (in my tiny mind anyway) a much smaller consideration somehow. Even though its square footage might just be greater than the garage. But an attic, well, attics have a built in fear factors. It's the unknown, the seldom gone into. The "what in the hell is that creeping around above us?"

It was right there, in the house. The attic, with its built in spookiness factor. Like basements, but different. Basements tend to be used more after all. So from there we developed a smaller conceit and delivery for our first narrative.

We just needed a story. We came up with the concept of a couple in a living room who hear a sound, seek it out and well, things happen. But what sound? Perhaps just a knocking sound, a tapping, sound a rapping. Why did rapping pop into my head?

Because it was Poe, pure and simple. I've  always been a fan of Edgar Allan Poe, since I was a kid. I was a fan as a child of the Roger Corman films and the British Hammer horror films. I immediately realized I had been thinking about Poe's poem, The Raven. Just the first stanza though:

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,

Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—

While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,

As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.

“’Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door—

Only this and nothing more.”

And there it was. "The Rapping".

Immediately it was brought up about a conflict with modern Rap music and how it can be confused with that. But that is really just a double entendre. How is that a bad thing, at least in this case? Besides been there before. "JZ" Murdock, right? Not my fault and I'm older than Jay-Z after all.

Originally I was just thinking as executive producer and as screenwriter and editor, of using only the first stanza. But as the project developed I realized I needed to read the entire poem again and consider it in its entirety.

Which made me realize that it is really about grief and a lost love. Not a direction we were headed in. We had built this story with the love, the significant other, right there. The "love" was named Poppet, not Lenore as in the poem. I realized we needed a rewrite. The screenplay had already had some major changes made to it by then but this was much bigger.

I had to rethink that. In fact it stopped me dead in my rewrite. I also had to submit the paperwork to SAG\AFTRA (more about that later). To submit to them as an Indie signatory, I have a few documents to submit. One of which is the screenplay itself. As we now have a SAG\AFTRA actor (more about that later, too), we have to go this route if we wish to use her. The documents we have to initially submit to get the ball rolling are:

-Pre-Production Cast List
-Line-Item Budget
-Copy of the Screenplay (Treatments/Outlines are acceptable for non-scripted projects.)
-Signatory Verification
 Copy of Personal Photo ID (If signing as an Individual)
 Formation Documents (If signing as a Corporation, LLC, etc.)

So I had to have a good version of the screenplay to submit. I already have all the documents signed by the actors. But I was jammed up as there was now a reversal to my (our) original concept. As we have been realizing through this entire project and development, every stoppage like this has led us to a better project.

I took some time off and thought about it over a few days, all the while having it bouncing around in the back of my mind. I took my Harley out for a ride around Port Orchard, which was quite beautiful and a great repast after too many months of cold and rain.

Eventually I got back to it. Sitting down one day with Nik, I told him my problem and we discussed the storyline. It just all started to fall into place. Feeling rejuvenated, I began again to rewrite the screenplay. This time I got it done in one quick sitting. I now have a screenplay I can use to submit all these docs with. As I'm writing this the day before this blog is published, I just need to go over it one more time today and submit it.

Backing up... what have been the issues we've had that kept stopping us? We have brand new equipment, new software for editing the shots, and we've never done a narrative film, just documentary. So we have the experience of building a film, just not a narrative, and one with FX.

The story is of an entity that invades a home and affects the inhabitants. But what kind of an entity is it? Alien, specter (ghost, interdimensional being), demon, military invention, technological horror? What? Is the, are the invaded crazy, on drugs? This is all reflected in the opening establishing shots around Bremerton leading to the home.

Backing up again... Starting on a Friday, I was at the Port Orchard Dragonfly Cinema Film Festival. I had so much fun and got to be in another Kelly Hughes (Leprechaun Productions) horror film. Alison Arngrim (Nellie Oleson in Little House on the Prairie) was also in that film. Last year she had "murdered" me in another Hughes' production. So I knew her a little. I got to hang with Kelly and helped him with Alison over the weekend.

At some point it occurred to me to ask her if she'd like to be involved in our project. But how? She was busy and leaving on Sunday to speak to legislators in Sacramento on Monday. I couldn't let this opportunity pass us by. At the beginning of the film there is a place where the words of the first stanza of The Raven are superimposed on the screen. After a while I'd thought to have someone read those words rather that put them on the screen.

We'd found in a friend of Nik's and mine, Tom Remick, that he used to be a professional announcer. The fix for these words on the screen was obvious. But then Alison came into the scene and this was the obvious and a reasonable possibility of how to get her in the film. As a narrator of the poem I simply couldn't turn down this opportunity. And what actor wouldn't want to be involved in a Poe project?

So I asked her and she was happy to be a part of our project. She said when she was a child she had her mother read Poe to her before bed. Perfect! I spoke with Tom and he was happy to be a team player and understand the importance of having someone like Alison on the project. This led me to consider how to keep Tom on the project. Again it enhanced our project.

Thoughts were that he could do an underlying deeper voice to enhance the oddity of Alison's voice, or have him do some voice work at various places as an audio FX. Or perhaps have Tom read the stanza again at the end of the film. Perhaps having Alison's voice underly his at the end in a reversal of the opening lines. Having text read again at the end as well as the beginning of a film has been done many times before. Reading text at the beginning that when reread at the end, has an enhanced meaning by that point to the audience.

This past weekend I submitted the documents to SAG\AFTRA and have therefore begun the process of becoming a SAG\AFTRA signatory and actually being able to use Alison on this project. It's been a vastly educational project for all of us so far. Not Alison really, as she already has vastly more experience in film than all of us put together do, having started in TV\film back in the late 1960s.

We have now set the official start of the project for early July and need only to submit to SAG\AFTRA. This has already been a rich and rewarding experience.

And I only see more coming. I'll keep you apprised.

Delicate Nature of Creativity

I am a writer. I'm a solid writer. I was a Senior Technical Writer for companies like US West Technologies, The Regence Group, Holland America Cruise Lines and others. It's not a job for the weak of constitution. Managers do not hold back on critiquing your work, your writings. But after years of that job, I had gotten pretty damn tough on a mental abuse standing. Something my childhood fed into quite well.

Anyone getting through a childhood like I had or my last marriage for that matter, isn't a weak minded person. It didn't make for a weak minded artist in my endeavors either. I have written much non-fiction, horror and sci fi. My book Death of heaven testifies to that.

I am now striving to be a filmmaker. I've produced two documentaries. One at Western Washington University in the Psychology Department, one for Public Access Cable TV. I would have done more for cable and would probably have gotten my own show on a fledgling Cable TV industry back in its beginnings, but as it happened, I moved out of town and got involved in other areas. All water under the bridge now.

My first film now is a short horror film. Shooting for three minutes, at seven it was only half done. Now I'm at 9.5 minutes. I'm doing it all by myself with the help of two others living in my house. Family and friend. But it's led to an interesting epiphany and a realization in working with family rather than a crew you hire on.

There came to be a few issues in viewing the dailies. I now understand some directors locking down the dailies for only a select few. Some comments are useful, most aren't. Some also, considering how they are delivered and the mindset of the messenger, can be somewhat damaging. Both to the project and the creative involved. Me. I'm the creative I'm referring to.

This has been going on for weeks on this, my first narrative film project titled, "The Rapping". An issue came up about an F/X shot. I knew it would be judged as weird, but then that was my purpose. Over a week or so it kept coming back up. The two others in a relationship discussed it separately, then it came up in a viewing of the latest version. All as I'm building the shots into the project as new shots become available.

Understand, I've been studying cinema since before these two crew member and talent (it's a small production), were born. They are viewing this as if they have as much experience as I do. Yes, they have watched films. Yes, they are both very intelligent. Yes, their views have relevance. Yes, I try to listen and adjust accordingly. I have after all cut some shots that took a lot of time to get. I have even altered the pacing (in one instance, I cut shots, then later heard it was now too fast...so, too slow or too fast, make up your mind?).

The point I'm trying to make here is that I know what's best for my own project. I have the talent, skill and experience. It's the confidence, and the desire to be polite (and not lose volunteers, always a problem in situations like this), that are the problem.

They do also have cred for being an audience. Trouble there being, it takes skill to watch dailies or rough cuts of a film and "see" where it's going, or "see" the screenwriter's and the director's intentions and overall vision. But that's not all of it.

I admit it. I have an odd creative style. I don't know where I'm going much of the time, but in my subconscious, from what I see in the end products, I do know where I'm going. I just don't always see it or understand it until much later in the project. That's not only hard on others, but near impossible for me sometimes to see exactly where I'm going.

Example. I went through the same experience with every manager on my technical writing. And at every company I worked at. It goes old always having to prove yourself again and again. However once they got used to me, to my style, they got very comfortable and trusted me. Depended on me. Sometimes to absurd degrees and impossible deadlines. But up until then, I had to listen to their vision. I had to attend meetings. I had to research. Then I would take my notes and write.

When I turned in my first draft (second draft really, NEVER show ANYone your first draft), things got interesting. Frustrating, but after a while, after getting used to it, it became an interesting test of patience. Both mine, and theirs.

I'll use one manager and paper I wrote as an example. On his reading my first draft (second, remember?), I warned him that it was only an initial draft. He read it. He was horrified. He said in fact that he was worried I wasn't getting it at all. But I took notes from hism and told him to relax, it will come out fine in the end. Still, he wasn't so sure. I remember his worried look on his face as I headed back to my cubicle.

I wrote a second (third) draft and showed it to him. This was days later. He read it and said that although it was better, he still doubted I could finish it in time and get it correct, as he still thought I way off path from what he wanted. So again, I took my notes from that meeting and went back to writing.

A few days later, only a couple of days before the paper absolutely had to be perfected and finished, I showed him my third and final draft. Typically, I never hod to do more than three drafts but also typically, it usually took me three.

Tenuously he took it and read it while I waited. This time he was quite excited, and pleased. He said he couldn't see how I got to that draft from the previous drafts. He said it was far better than he had expected even before he had read any of my previous drafts. I then handed him two other very different forms of the finished draft, again much to his surprise.

That was something that happened again and again just like that throughout my tech writing career. I would go through three drafts, they wouldn't like what I was doing until the final draft which they would then simply love, AND, I would give them two other very different forms of the same product. I also always finished this much faster than any other writer they had worked with.

That's just how I worked. The first time that happened I was myself very concerned. But then it kept happening that way so that whenever a manger reacted poorly, even angry almost, it just no longer bothered me. I understood my process.

Now that I'm producing a film, once again I'm not concerned that I'm the only one who can see my personal vision of where I'm headed and what I'm doing. When I tried to explain that to my helpers on this current project, blank stares and a belief that perhaps I don't know what they were saying.

In reality it is actually they who cannot see what I am doing. To be fair, we're all new to this. Although I have done other projects, documentaries, but it was years ago. Honestly I have probably forgotten more than they ever knew about cinema and filmmaking. Still, in the end I would expect them to stick to their guns as an audience, even though in watching the final form they will hopefully no longer see their concerns on screen with what I have been doing.

I'll even give it to them that there could be negative audience comments about the shot in question from its initial public screening. And yet, the overall piece will still be cohesive and work just how I planned it. One has to be careful in forgetting the forest for the trees. A short shot zipping by can be lost as an issue, if it blends with the narrative, supports the vision, enhances the format, uses the movie magic that is being applied overall.

"To thine own self be true" never meant more than this. Stick to your guns, and work toward making your truth a reality.

My first screenplay ever is titled, Ahriman. I wrote it in 1984, the summer after I received my university degree in Psychology from Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA. I had taken one final summer quarter just to finish a screenplay. I wanted to leave my college years with a completed screenplay.

I wrote it for two professors, one in psychology and one in the Theatre department. I got As from both of them on this. This was all after a year long special team screenwriting and script writing series of classes I had been chosen for from a playwriting class. One I was sent to take because my first fiction writing professor said I needed practice writing dialog. Mostly because I hated writing it into short stories. Also, I had been disappointed that we didn't get to write a full screenplay to take into the real world with us, in our post university years.

One professor asked me why I had written three screenplays in one. I told him, I was trying to blend things. To experiment. One experiment was never to see the lead character. Well, that didn't' work out so well. But at least I tried.

I also tried to peddle that screenplay for several years but didn't have the connections and it never got sold. Actually, years later I worked remotely as an unpaid screenwriter for over five years with a production company. One of the producers nearly sold it to exactly who I told him not to market it to. A group of Middle Eastern investors.

Angra Mainyu (also: Aŋra Mainiiu) is the Avestan-language name of Zoroastrianism's hypostasis of the "destructive spirit". The Middle Persian equivalent is Ahriman (Anglicised pronunciation: /ˈɑːrɪmən/). - Wikipedia


Ahura Mazda (/əˌhʊrəˌmæzdə/;[1]) (also known as Ohrmazd, Ahuramazda, Hourmazd, Hormazd, Harzoo and Hurmuz, Lord or simply as spirit) is the Avestan name for the creator and sole God of Zoroastrianism, the old Iranian religion which spread across Asia predating Christianity, before ultimately being almost annihilated by Muslim invasions and violence. - Wikipedia

I had warned him that I had taken ancient deities of Ormazd and Ahriman and reversed them. I was sure they'd hate it and I didn't want anyone tracking me down and killing me out of disrespect for their beliefs. To the contrary, he laughed and said that was one of the things they loved about it. Alas, he had a falling out with the east coast executive producer and he headed for Hollywood. He said he'd be in contact and I never heard from him again.

Ahriman is a story about a  prophet prince on a desert planet. Scientists on Earth accidentally sucked him up during an experiment and he was transported to Earth. His people were a warring people and he knew they would attack Earth once they knew of a portal. Once they found a way to get to Earth, they would attack.

It was a bittersweet story with a great ending. It also has another relevance in this story about the current issue I'm writing about. About the delicate nature of creativity. My point there being that it was ten years before I saw in other films some of the things I had written into my own screenplay. Which sucks because once that starting happening, if I did sell it, someone would say "but that's been done in other films." Yeah, but I wrote those ideas years before those were done. Which in the real world has no bearing. If you don't sell it, don't produce it, you don't count. Tough beans old man.

Apparently I was ahead of my time. So I must have some kind of understanding for film, something I've studied all my life since childhood as well as in college. And I'm twice the age of my current crew and talent for the current production. Just saying.

Years after I wrote Ahrman, web sites popped up like Keven Spacey's Triggerstreet.com, so named for his childhood street he grew up on. It's gone now. Another similar screenplay peer reviewed web site lab was Matt Damon and Ben Affleck's Project Greenlight. Many may now know that name as something else.

On those sites, you posted your screenplay and you reviewed other's works in a quid pro quo format. I rewrote my 100 page screenplay nine times one year, taking comments and reviews from others and incorporating them.

Finally one day I read my now 180 page basically, a mini series and realized I had completely lost myself in other people's opinions. Some not such great opinions. But it was a great learning experience. There is after all a balance in following your own vision and taking constructive criticism and comments and incorporating them. But it can most definitely get out of hand if you're not careful and protective of your original vision.

To get to the point.

In sitting here one night this week alone and yet again ruminating on this situation about the commentary from my crew (and talent), something unmanageable was happening to me. It was damaging my vision, my creative understanding of my screenplay and my production.

I likened it in my mind to a road (the screenplay) supported by an intricate and delicate framework of underlying supports, the concepts. I was seeing this in my mind as a train trestle.

Holcomb Creek Train Trestle

That underlying structure isn't just the screenplay, but my mind as elements in the screenplay are situated therein and the supporting structures in my mind as they created and supported the overall concept and storyline.

Each critique from my crew alters or removes one of those struts, the top beams touching and supporting the road that is the story. Changing one of any of those alters the overall structure, if not in the overt storyline then in my underlying understanding of the story structure. That also delves into emotive elements, my self esteem, even more dangerously, my motivation.

When I said I'm a solid writer, I'm also a pretty tough individual. I won't bore you with proof of that from my history and experiences. Just know it's true. To say these critiques to affected me emotionally, isn't quite accurate. But then they did, at least somewhat.

I came to realize all this the other day. While I had been greatly enjoying producing and directing this film, it was becoming a burden. But why? Not because of the critiques that were going against what I was doing, but because of their recurrences.

On set if a director asks for critique, opens it up for comment, make it brief, positive and production. Give it once. If you think it's not being understood, you can push the point, making it clear that you do not think your concern is being understood, or given the weight you believe it needs. . For the good of the project.

However once the director understands, or even if it's simply made clear to drop it, then drop it. Because as important as your concern maybe, and this is important, it is the director's vision that is most likely going to be more important not to disrupt. While one shot or issue may be important, it cannot possibly be as important as maintaining the integrity of the director's focus and therefore the project overall. While a single shot affects a portion of the film, the director affects the entire project.

I was losing the momentum, the energy I had used in order to work on and finish this project. Hearing critiques is one thing. Hearing them again and again and it turning into an argument, is counterproductive. Even damaging.

A film is indeed a collaborative process. Even if you're an Alfred Hitchcock. But there is one head to it, the director. It is in the end a kind of dictatorship. The director takes the screenwriter's vision and the screenplay and runs with it.

The screenwriter can at times become disheartened over what is being done to his or her work because of money, direction, producers, studio, or any of various elements. But the screenwriter has typically finished the job by time the production begins. Whereas the director is dealing with all this in an ongoing manner.

While the screenwriter can have a nervous breakdown over all this, he can. While the director has to be there, day in and day out, in top form to complete the project. The crew, simply has to do what they are told to do, to find ways to do what is being asked of them. The talent (actor) is the same with some more need and input to the process because they are the focus of the action and the camera. Same can be said for the sets and costume and so on, but it can be argued that the talent have more directly invested in an ongoing manner.

Still, the weight of all this rests on the director's head (and to be sure above that level, the producers). The crew (and talent) need to remember that. As long as they do their jobs well, the overall potential for failure of the project is not on their heads. Not if people can point to their work and say, "Well, they did excellent! The direction, or editing are what suck."

This is why on most, certainly larger productions, there are people to screen and protect the director. Like the assistant director (AD) for the most part, or production assistants (PA) who can take the brunt of these interactions that would otherwise be aimed directly at the director. Something the director cannot suffer because they for one need to helm the project and see it to its finish.

In the end the creativity needs to be protected, not so much the individual. In the end, the project has to be completed as well as it can be done. To thine own self be true, is true enough. But also to the project be true. The mission, in any endeavor is important to complete in the best form possible.

Sometimes that simply means one has to protect one's own vision, and oneself.

Making of Mea Culpa the Film by JZ Murdock

This is a personal journal of how I wrote, shot and produced my new film, Mea Culpa. An LGN Productions project. I'm still at the initial stages. But how did I get into this? How did it get to this point. Where is this going and...what IS this, anyway? For one, it's a way to break into film again. To create a new piece, a business card if you will. A way to create something new, network with new people, build a crew, exercise creative muscles new and old and have a new, fun product to show.

It's a story about a Medieval Witch Hunter, based upon a story I wrote with the help of one of my University Theater Professors back in 1983 titled, The Mea Culpa Document of London. It has something to do in this current reincarnation on video with today and here.

But it reaches all the way back to the 12th century.

The Mea Culpa Document of London front cover

I am writing the screenplay in order to shoot my own screenplay. It is a business card, a show piece, a way to translate my written words to an easier form to view. A door by which I hope to see it opened and other opportunities to come about, to meet other like minds, and to produce even more in the future.

Selling screenplays is a pain. More than writing them and that's not easy. Getting the attention, going through the process, working with producers, money people, whomever. It's a lot.

Just doing it, is doing it. You can wish, desire, think about, but doing is...well, doing. You don't need super studio quality high production values, or a big studio. Really just grit, determination, perseverance, networking, a good knowledge of cinema, equipment and of course, help.

Oh, and skill doesn't hurt.

So I thought I might also try to write a kind of intermittent journal of the process here.

Something I last (had) to do at Western Washington University. Always looking to rack up more class credits toward my degree in Psychology, in Awareness and Reasoning division, I discovered I could get credit by shooting a video on half inch reel to real black and white video tape. I had also decided I had enough credits almost to get a second degree but rather than stay longer than four years including summers in classes, I'd settle for a minor in Creative Writing, in fiction and screen and script writing.

All along I had been studying cinema however, both in and out of class. I took classes like Cinema, Film into Documentary (taught by an almost British stiff but quite intelligent and at times funny, ex Yale professor).

I studied sometimes on my own, specifically the works of Hitchcock, Kubrick and... Woody Allen. Years later I worked with an east coast production company for over five years as a remote "in house" screenwriter. I never got anything on screen, but I learned a lot about things I'd never expected to learn about. Like dealing with producers, and studio squabbles.

When I was a kid, I was an odd kid. No surprise, right? At five I would sneak watching TV detective shows. I watched Perry Mason with my grandmother, and The Twilight Zone. I loved them. I also watched westerns, cartoons, and kid fare as many kids did back then in the 1950s and 60s.

But I also used to listen to an eclectic collection of music. Classical, experimental, blues, hard rock, all which got me some pretty weird looks from friends how came to visit. I remember in junior high a kid came over and I had on Bach Piano Fugues (Glenn Gould). He scrunched up his nose and said, "WHAT are you listening to?" I said, "Oh, sorry, it's Bach." I took it off and put on a rock album which pleased him.

I got into science fiction books and TV very young. Mostly from first watching old sci fi films on TV in the very early 1960s. My mother had always been a fan of Hollywood. Oscar night was an event. Every year our mother made a party of watching the Oscar Award show. They were our American royalty. She especially loved the troublesome, beautiful and talented Liz Taylor, an idol of hers and of course Liz's Richard Burton. Lucille Ball, her biggest idol.

Thank God for that because mom acted crazy fun at times, even though she could be still be strict as hell at times.

I kind of grew up at a drive in theater where my step father was Assistant Manager. My sister worked there as her first job and it was one of our oldest brother's first jobs also.

My first job was (ignoring having shined shoes in a cantina near the beach in Spain in 1958 at about three or four), was in ninth grade in cleaning the field of the theater during the day. I later worked my way up to Snack Bar Manager, then Box Office Cashier. Before graduating high school.

While growing up we were at the drive in watching whatever show was on every Friday night, rain or shine. We had little money and it was quite a benefit. Because it was free. Because we got half off on snack bar food and just had to charge it to my step father's account. So I saw a lot of films. Many I probably shouldn't have seen so young. Like biker movies. Which scared the hell out of me. What if they showed up in our town?

Eventually...I discovered PBS. Ah... Public Broadcasting! Channel 9, KCTS in Tacoma.

In the 1960s they played foreign stuff. I got to learn who Monty Python was but never found out what his Flying Circus was really about, till years later. But I loved them.

I got to watch, to learn about the Auteur directors in Europe, like Francois Truffaut. I saw Samurai movies (Ikura Kurosawa's films anyway). I came to love Francois Truffaut. Also, Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, Luis Buñuel, Ingmar Bergman, Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Jean-Luc Godard, Werner Herzog, Lina WertMuller, and many others.

I'd already grown up with so many other directors and actors and later learned of others still. We loved Hitchcock and I saw his old films on TV and new ones as they came out in theaters.

The point is, I grew up with film. I learned to appreciate Cinema. I studied it on my own as a kid not knowing I was studying it. Then in college and at a university where I studied screenwriting and team script writing. Later still I was a public access cable TV producer with Viacom in Seattle, and late in 1993-early 94 I produced and aired the "25th Anniversary Lost In Space documentary". No one did that. There was only one other I found in the world who celebrated that show, a documentary from Australia for that anniversary. And honestly, with higher production values. But I thought we had more interesting information.

I have a background in film, it's in my blood since childhood. Before through my mother. It's literally in my DNA.

I've just never been able to find a way to have a creative career in writing or film. I was a Senior Technical Writer for years but that is in IT work on computers in information and internet technologies.

Until I got tired of writing where there was simply no character development, no story structure, no tension. All information had to be put up front.

Yet, it was an excellent way to learn to be a writer, but not lots of fun. Rewarding though. You learned attention to detail, to produce on demand, to take the stress (and trust me at the high level I was at, lots of stress!), how to think out of the box, on your feet, and quickly, how to take complicated information from people smarter than you and turn it into something usable they would love. Even if you didn't understand a word of what you were writing about.

So my creative side was put on hold for years, decades to raise a family. I'd tried before that but never could get anything to click. Many times, almost, but then it never just locked into place. Sad, and frustrating, but you do what you have to do.

Finally in August 2016 in retiring from a decades long career in IT, in computers all things complex and annoying, fascinating and frustrating, I got my chance to get back to my original intent. IT had paid well, it had helped to pay for raising my kids and it had situated me now and finally for writing and producing... films, or whatever I liked.

What a feeling, what a breathe of fresh air! But now I also had to do something.

So here we are today, right now. After 2010 I wrote and produced a couple of books, multiple short story ebooks, several audiobooks, published stories in magazines and I am in several other author\s anthologies. I've written screenplays, worked with producers from both American coasts so that here I am, ready to just do... stuff. Interesting stuff.

I've currently been finishing up a new story for publication. "The Unwritten." I wrote the first draft on Wattpad as an experiment. I will finish and put that in as a novella in my sequel to one of my books, Anthology of Evil. When I retired in August I bought thousands of dollars of film equipment and software all of which I now have to learn and utilize.

Now finally is the time. And I'm going for it.

So I'm writing to shoot a story I'm calling for now simply, "Mea Culpa". As I had said, it is built upon the original story I wrote during my university years titled, The Mea Culpa Document of London. It is a tale far more twisted than most people realize when they read it, unless you know some history.

This story is further explored in an extension story in my second book, Death of heaven, and is titled, Vaughan's Theorem. And no, the lower case "h" in "heaven" is not a mistake. You'd have to read the book to understand why.

What I am doing in this new version of the Mea Culpa story is to update it, to localize it, to translate it into a short video. But how does one do that? Take a narrative piece like that, and put it into film. The obvious way is to shoot it as told, to "show not tell". But I wanted as always, to do it differently, to creatively break the rules I've spent so much time learning.

The story originates in 1100CE in England. It continues in more recent times in England. It is now continuing in America, in a city called Bremerton, in Washington state. Where I now live as of August 2016. Located about thirty miles from where I was born, in Tacoma, it is a Navy town. A town I thought I'd never live in. Because it was the first and only place I was ever incarcerated in jail. At seventeen. For something I had nothing to do with. But that is a story for another time.

When in high school in twelfth grade, I was dating a girl in college in Bremerton. It was funny. The old, "I have a hot girlfriend but you can't meet her, she lives in Canada" routine. No one except close friends believed me. But she was real and named, Char (Charlene). The new assistant manager of the drive in theater who replaced my step dad when he moved to a brand new 112th Street Drive In Theater, introduced me to his old girlfriend. She was only a few years older than me, as he was only a few years older than her. But I'm getting off the point here....

The current filmic version of my Mea Culpa story is a story about a descendant of one of the main characters and his peculiar discovery of the Mea Culpa document in his garage workshop, the bizarre way it got there, and why it is there.

Weirdness runs rampant in this short extension of my now nearly ancient Mea Culpa story.

Originally it was a story that was done for no real reason. I was sitting in my Professor Perry Mill's office in the our university theater department in our PAC theater building. Where my girlfriend and I first saw Road Warrior and learned of Mel Gibson for the first time, the crowed loved it. Nothing like viewing a great action film with a university audience. Perry and I were just talking and I got an idea for a short story while listening to him talk about medieval stuff.

So I went home and wrote it, then showed it to him the next day. Being a student of medieval literature he loved it and offered me some ideas, clarification and some history which he could go on about forever in the most enlightening and entertaining ways. He liked the story so much he wanted me to turn it into a one man stage play for him to play. It would have been brilliant to see him in it. Brilliant. But my skills at the time in play writing simply weren't up to the task and it never came to be.

However, I did walk away with a story I eventually published. I later expanded it into a much larger story in Death of heaven and now, here we are decades later and I am turning yet another version of it into a short movie. I love expanding the universe of my characters as I love when other authors do that with their characters and literary universes.

I've also done that with my Lord Ritchie character who is in my Poor Lord Ritchie's Answer story, and in an anthology with other authors detailing his adventures as a younger man and pirate in the Caribbean ("Breaking on Cave Island" in the "Giant Tales series "World of Pirates" anthology, edited by Heather Marie (H.M.) Schultz.

I also have another story I did a similar thing with in the Giant Tales series book, "Final Ships", with my "Gravity Up" story, based upon my Death of heaven book. A great little story I had wanted to title, "In the Shade" but acquiesced to the editor's suggestion. While you learn what is going on in Death of heaven, I thought it would be interesting to experience the bizarre things happening in that larger book of mine as a character who simply experiences some of all those terrifying things in having absolutely no clue why it is happening.

Anyway, for my film I was shooting for a ten minute length but as happens, it grew beyond that.
Ten minutes is very good for film festival submissions and the director in the directing class I was in yesterday highly recommended getting it back down to ten. And so I will.

So that's it for now. I'm currently working on finishing up Anthology of Evil II, but have to finish, The Unwritten, story first. It's currently in the hands of beta readers and my editor. I'm learning a lot about my new camera equipment, trying to remember and relearn cinematography, and overall relearning filmmaking after decades of absence, and also finishing up the writing of, Mea Culpa.

More to come...stay tuned.

#JZMurdock #MeaCulpaFilm #LGNProductions

On My Retirement - The End - Part 1

I wish you all a pleasant Veteran's Day.

UPDATE November 11, 2016 - 2:20PM PST - turned in my equipment at work. Had lunch at Kell's Irish Pub, pint of Guinness, shot of Jamesons 21 year old whiskey, clam chowder and enjoyed it very much.

Took the ferry home on my first and last commute ride from Bremerton to Seattle. Didn't realize I had the radio AND the dash fan on and killed the battery. Ferry worker gave me a quick jump and I zipped off the boat. Got home, trickle charging the battery to condition it happy and having a shot or two of Taliskers. Retirement, is here. Now the hard work begins and as I designate it. I'm a tough taskmaster, too.

UPDATE November 11, 2016 - 8:47AM PST - I am in Seattle. Took the Bremerton ferry over with my car, to drop off my things and retire from my company. Seeing old friends, experiencing nostalgia. So much here has changed since I was in town to work a year ago. Seattle it is said has more boom cranes putting up buildings than any other city in America, even San Francisco. It's noisy, there's a lot of people, many younger people probably in high tech companies. Amazon and Google are right next door. But then Amazon is everywhere it seems, even has entire floors of this building. I have turned in some of my stuff, my monitor, peripherals, my cell phone for being on call. I still have only my laptop and my ID badge which I'll turn in as I leave. Twenty-one years here and so much has changed. I had a family, a wife, two kids when I started here in 1995. I was a tech writer contractor for nine months before being hired on April Fool's Day. Once I leave here today, that is all behind me.


"A new life awaits where you can begin again." Blade Runner film reference. Love that film. I have new adventures. My son's gold mine which he just got the claim on. Video productions with my new equipment. And massive amounts of writing I can finally delve into. All I can say is thanks all and Cheers!


And now, back to reality....



I am crestfallen. But humor will help...some. Trump was voted to be president. America is in disarray. He has damaged us, with more to come. Capitalism will run rampant now. Republicans are in power. I won't say we are doomed, or that some good may come of it, if we don't all die instead. But dark times are ahead of us.

I wrote this blog and the next, part two, last week when I thought Hillary Clinton would win. I voted for Bernie, I voted for Hillary. There was no way Trump, a real sad person for a president, could win. He's Vice President Pence is not a good person either. Both guided by Gods. Trump by money, Pence by a Roman tradition in the Catholic church (maybe the Pope who is awesome most of the time, will have some sway with him).

Please world, wish us luck. Many of us are for America, for the World. Not for capitalism at all costs, not for conservative beliefs, but for progressive beliefs. We want to push the world into a better place, not go back to the defective and delusional 1950s.

Returning to our regularly scheduled programming now, today I start my retirement heading into uncertain and possible miserable times. I will write. I will not be censored. Stay tuned. I will always be honest with you, or you will know if I can not be and I will make it painfully obvious.

Putting aside now for a moment all the dark in our world,..

Cheers! I'm retiring!

I was in the Air Force in the late 1970s. I like to take today off for my years in service, for my friends I knew back then in the service and for the many friends I've lost who have been in the service. So I have today off.

Today is also the day I retire from the general workforce.

I am now sixty-one. How can I be that old? I have stayed mentally young because I have an open mind, I embrace positive change, and I seek truth. I had wanted to retire by fifty but I can't really say that I actually had tried to achieve that. It was more wish fulfillment. Family and life kept me from retiring that young. My own inattention perhaps kept me from it.

In 1995 I had been out of work for months. Fifteen hundred were let go from US West Technologies that January in 1994. But I was kept on, my contact extended for months. Then, I too was out of work. I got a few short contracts, I took on other contract agencies in a desperate attempt to find work, but then things dried up. There were a lot of people out of work that summer who did things just like what I did.

Bills were piled up. Thank God for unemployment as it paid our mortgage. My wife made a little money as a horse trainer but she was stressed out. I was stressed out. Then I got a call about a job but with an $8/hr cut in pay, I turned it down. I had to. Three times over the next couple of weeks they called back about it and I turned it down. Then I got a call from a woman recruiter.

She painted a very pretty picture of a new contract as a Sr. Technical Writer. Suddenly it started to sound real familiar. I stopped her and asked if this was the same job they kept calling me about. There was a hesitation and I knew it was. She then admitted it but talked me into just calling the guy who was the manager hiring and to talk to him.

From that point on as I see it now in hindsight, I was lost. I was hired before I hung up on the phone with her. I called the guy, I went in to see him. I kept hesitating and he finally just said to come in, meet people, look around and then say no if I wanted. So I went in. I accepted the job. I got him to try to raise the pay but they didn't have the money for that. At five and a half months out of work, I talked with my wife about it and ended up taking the job.

Nine months after I started the position, I was hired, on April 1st, 1996. Twenty-one years later, I am now retiring. I have in work there, gone from a subsidiary company, then after being absorbed by the parent company, we then became a part of a four state group.

Originally I had said I would take the job if and only if two things. One, I get my birthday off as I have never, against all odds, ever worked on my birthday. We get one day a year for us and only us and I take it. Although, as my mother was born on my birthday, I have never actually had it all to myself. Which explains much of that mindset.

But, you say, weren't you born on your mother's birthday as you're obviously younger than her?

She had always said that I was God's gift to her on her birthday. A pleasant, sweet motherly like thing to say. My being a smart ass teenager when she first told me this, my response was: I think you should reconsider that because considering I was the gift, perhaps God hated you. She laughed and said, Oh don't say that, you were my bundle of joy."

And at eight pounds, thirteen ounces (the same exact weight my son weighed at birth), it was quite a bundle indeed. When I was born my father called his mother and told her in his confusion that I was thirteen pounds eight ounces and almost gave my grandmother a heart attack.

The other thing I wanted a guarantee on if I took that job was that I would never, ever work for the parents company. This was a thirty person company and I didn't want to work for a big entity. I had recently worked for US West Technologies on a high level development team. It was an amazing opportunity to see corporate workings at such a level. And I never wanted that view point again.

So I took the job. It took me over two years to recouperate from my recently acquired debt in my loss per hour of a sizable sum. But I learned a lot and loved the people I worked with. Then in the last years of the dotcom boom, the manager left along with others. My phone rang so much with calls form headhunters trying to steal me away, I had to stop answering the phone as I couldn't get any work done.

I had wanted to go but my wife was fearful of the months out of work and was looking the current job as a bird in the hand. Others went off, made lots of money, bought hot cars, paid off houses with stock options and so on while I remained.

As each person left, I got their server. I started as a tech writer, but one who could become a webmaster. Then I became by default as other left, the network guy, the DBA, the security guy, the hardware guy, the software guy. I took servers out of the box, physically built them up, installed software, secured them, put them on the network and ran, updated, upgraded, secured them.

At one point I didn't have a manager for eighteen months. I was ordered to see the network assimilated by the corporate group. I was now just part of a team, not what was once a standalone company. Bill Gates stole our president. Paul Allen stole others. We did good work. But the new headquarters in Portland didn't like our little group. We had a bad reputation. Because we did good work. But that's for another time and is part of a previous blog a while back.

I saw that network into the bigger picture. I was derided, ignored, people didn't know me and didn't want me because I was part of a now defunct entity. And yet I continued. Eventually the main money making network in Washington state was part of the overall new network.

The entire company once was hit by a virus and in a teleconference across four states once about it, this being after it was all over, I was derided again. But I was able to point out that of all the parts of the network the only part that was not affected at all was the one I ran. During that time and after I was associated with a group started by our head of computer security. An amazing guy.

I’ve had a secret clearance for nuclear weapons in the Air Force, been involved through the aforementioned company and elsewhere in the past, with cyber security issues and as well being a member from the beginning of our private international Agora, a group started by our head of security for computer security experts and law enforcement, drawing from national and international police forces (Secret Service, NSA, Australian police, Canadian Mounties, etc.).

This was set up by our previous security head in Washington, Kirk Bailey Chief Information Security Officer of UW, whom I worked with in that group for tech setup along with a few others. UW is also one of my alma maters and I worked there for seven and a half years. Worked in the Personnel Office and with the Psychology Department on their Marital Research project and other things.

Over the years in the late 1990s and early 2000s, we were given briefings from people like now the famous Richard Clarke (former National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection and Counter-terrorism for the United States), the NSA, President’s Committee on the Infrastructure, and so on.

The Agora set up an ad hoc team that built Seattle Police Department’s first cybersecurity unit.

I was a system/network still running that network until we got a new manager. She further restructured things and moved me to another team. A new team of web/internet systems administrators. Finally I would have someone to talk to about my job, about issues and problems.

I am now retiring from that team. I was moved off of it along with many others from other teams in an attempt to build a team of experts on a middle tier team between the initial help you got in calling support, to the engineering teams such as I had been on and am now back on again. That middle level team lasted just over four years.

It is now twenty-one years later from starting at this company. Today is my last day.

The last day working with people I've known for decades. When I delivered the news at the end of our weekly team teleconference, you could hear a pin drop. Then we ended the meeting. I got several congratulations from teammates and one or two, "I'm envious". I will no longer have to deal with corporate issues. No more being, "on call" for problems where a computer could call me any hour day or night for problems.

No more on call. I had my first on call in 1976 in the Air Force for nuclear war. If I got called, we all went to the base, sent of nuclear bombers, and knew that cities were about to be nuked, people melted or disintegrated. Years later I would pull  on call support for medical centers when I worked on the mainframe for two major medical centers in Seattle for their Radiology and Pathology departments.

Then I got his job when I was on call for not cities dying, not people dying, but web sites dying in the middle of the night. People asked me why I was always so calm in this job when I first started it. I could only reply that masses of people wouldn't die, individuals wouldn't die, no one would die, so what's the panic?

Finally, no more on call.

I have for years wanted the luxury of writing at my leisure, or under my self imposed pressure. Of producing artistic things, not technological ones. Of seeking my bliss, not a paycheck. Because working for a company puts you on a fixed income. You do the same things over and over.

Now the sky is the limit. I can turn on a dime. I am the team. My potential now is the sky and beyond, not the corporate boardroom or someone's limited vision. Limited either from lack of vision or corporate restriction. I can delve into art and satiate my desire to follow my passions, my talents, the talents I seem to be best suited for, that have been restrained for so long.

Life now feels...wonderful. Like I can finally breathe, can finally follow my own path. I can post during the day where I want, what I want. I am not restrained by what my fellow workers or executives might see me say online. I can be fully open and honest, restricted by my own good taste and sensibilities.

Retirement. This isn't retirement for me. It is the beginning of actually doing what I've wanted to do, All my life. It is the initiation.

The future is the potential. My energy, my vision, my orientation, my skills, my ability to see, to act upon, to produce...whatever I want.

People complain about retirement. When should it be? Should we raise the age limit. Idiocy. We need to get our economy under control. We need to work toward people retiring younger and younger so they can then turn themselves to what is important to them, what is important to our nation, and humanity. We need to orient them that retirement isn't just vacations, doing nothing, puttering around the garden.

Retirement in that sense is empowerment, self-actualization to do what you can and want to, to seek your true potential outside of the confines of business or government. It should be a point to take risks,

A government should have as focus, empowering it's citizens, raising us as a culture above. It shouldn't just be to maintain, to just keep out heads above water so we don't drown. Days to work per week should be less, hours worked per day should be less. Age to retire should be lowered and lowered until one day you only have to work at all if you want.

However at that point we also need to educated our generations to have a certain orientation at retirement, or in life. To seek passion to produce quality. To seek to better yourself, our nation and the entire human species.

And so I reach for retirement with that all in mind.

I won't be just sitting around on vacation. I have revived my production company.
Stay tuned....

Lost in Space - a documentary (1994) Viacom Public Access Cable by LGN Productions

"Studio 100" presents...

Lost in Space - a documentary (1994) - now in IMDB.

I noticed I do have a YouTube link. There's been copyright issues and there is about a minute lead in of station requirements, silence, test pattern, etc.

For more on this, see below.

This was the first and only project produced by LAST good NERVE Productions (founded 1993, also known as, LGN Productions; AKA, Lateral Geniculate Nucleus Productions).

The show was only shown twice on public access cable in early 1994.

I was the uncredited executive producer on the project. Why that is, is a long, long story....I'll tell it to you some time, possibly over drinks. I had shot one previous video in college up at Western Washington University for my professors in phenomenology.

Now that project was a nightmare. No editor. If I wanted to put music into the reel to reel black and white video tape recorder I had to solder connections. At one point I put myself on camera as I had no actors. That led to my becoming an instant celebrity on campus when I later found that my professor had shown the film to all his classes!

For the next several weeks I had women stopping me between classes to talk about the video making me late for my next class. One time I was asked in class if I was "that guy", the "guitar man" in the video. I was tired of it by then, so I said, "No." She said, "but you look just like him." I said, "I hear that a lot." Then my professor walked up, gave me a stern look and said, "Yes, that's him."

I learned then and there I liked fortune over fame.

Back to the LIS documentary, a project that we made over twenty years ago. This, is its story.

Lost in Space - a documentary

This show was cablecast for the first time on Saturday, February 19th, 1994 at 8PM Pacific Time and for the last time about a month or so later.

The link goes to Dropbox. Too bad I can't just put it up on YouTube like we used to be able to. From Dropbox: "When you share a link to a video, the recipients will be able to stream up to 15 minutes of it on the preview page of the Dropbox website. To view a longer video in its entirety, they'll need to download the file or watch it using one of our mobile apps."

Pre-production began at the end of Summer 1993.

First a little background about how all this blog on it came to be.

I was recently contacted by Jeffro Brunk on Facebook. That's him on the right below. They are making a documentary about early 90s public access cable productions.

"Channeling Yourself" documentarians: JoanE O'Brian, Judith Card, Jim Yaeger and Jeffro Brunk (right)

Jason Hughes and Kelly Hughes (not related)

Jeffro had been told by filmmaker, Kelly Hughes, about our project. That's Kelly above on the right..

About Kelly and crew

Kelly contacted me on Stage32, a web site for people into film productions. He invited me to his showing about his films at Crypticon 2015 hosted at the SeaTac Hilton on the weekend of May 22nd. So, I went and I had a really great time. I also met some talented actors like Jason Hughes (no relation to Kelly), Noel Austin and Stephanie Lee and the rather amazing 76 year old Betty Marshall, representing actors from Kelly's newer and older works.

Here's another blog with more on Kelly and crew.

Kelly produced “Heart Attack Theater,” in 1991-1993, that showed a new 30 minute narrative film each week of locally produced horror. I got a chance to meet and hang with Kelly and associates at Crypticon 2015 here in Washington and we had quite a day and evening getting to know one another.

From Heart Attack Theatre

From a write up about Kelly:

"Kelly Hughes: "HEART ATTACK! The Early Pulse Pounding Cinema of Kelly Hughes. From 1991-1993, while Nirvana and Twin Peaks made the Pacific Northwest hip, Hughes quietly created an unprecedented body of work on Seattle's public access TV. His weekly series Heart Attack Theatre was the video equivalent of grunge rock. Aiming for a classy Twilight Zone style suspense anthology, he ended up with a John Waters-esque shock-a-thon, shooting most of his footage in and around his apartment near the University of Washington. In this documentary, Hughes interviews his actors to reveal a pre-YouTube era of do-it-yourself film-making. And showcases his native Seattle in all its trashy glory."

Now, about Jeffro and crew. 

They are working on a documentary about early 90s Seattle area public access cable producers and filmmakers. Jeffro and associate's documentary on Seattle's 90s cable public access is titled, Channeling Yourself. 

Both Jeffro and Kelly had displayed interest in seeing our LIS documentary, so I decided to dig it up. I found the original tapes, burned them to DVD, ripped the video from it so I could use it to make the show available to the public and finally, tried to upload them to YouTube as I mentioned above. But I got an array of refusals due to copyright infringements. Well, no surprise there, really. However it was something we didn't have to worry about in our not for profit public access cable TV productions.

I challenged the claim with YouTube about rejecting this video under fair use laws. Here is my challenge to YouTube submitted 5/27/2015:

"This is an historical document that was legally aired as it is here, on public access TV in 1994 and published here merely for historical purposes as related to cable television history. No money has ever or will ever be made from it. Those who own copyright are only receiving free advertising in a positive light by the existence of this document being made available online. Only bits and pieces of media are being used and not in their entirety. Credit is given at the end of the film as best as was known during the period of it's original airing.
"The published or unpublished nature of the original work is only a determining factor in a narrow class of cases. In 1992, Congress amended the Copyright Act to add that fair use may apply to unpublished works. See 17 U.S.C. § 107. This distinction remains mostly to protect the secrecy of works that are on their way to publication. Therefore, the nature of the copyrighted work is often a small part of the fair use analysis, which is more often determined by looking at the remaining three factors." http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/fair-use"

Here is a screen shot of the alleged copyright infringements on YouTube:

Rights issues with posting on YouTube

And here's their response to my challenge (I got a few of these emails covering all the disputes):

Hi JZ Murdock, 
Good news! Your dispute wasn’t reviewed within 30 days, so the copyright claim on your YouTube video has now been released by FOX. 
Video title: "Lost in Space - a documentary (1993) Viacom Public Access Cable TV Seattle" 
- The YouTube Team 

Awesome! And here's some other responses to my challenge:

"Hi JZ Murdock,
After reviewing your dispute, UMG has decided that their copyright claim is still valid.
Video title: Lost in Space - a documentary (1993) Viacom Public Access Cable TV Seattle
Copyrighted song: Force Majeure
Claimed by: UMG
View claim details
Why this can happen
• The copyright owner might disagree with your dispute.
• The reason you gave for disputing the claim may have been insufficient or invalid.
- The YouTube Team"

Okay that one wasn't so awesome. Since Fox dropped their claims on the video clips of LIS here's what it looks like now on YouTube:

latest rights issues Fox relented it seems

I could remove the music altogether (and with the editing issues I had regarding music, why should this surprise me?), and then I could post the video. Decisions, decisions....but what this tells me is the [Merlin] Beggars company are kind of jerks.

If I could make money on this video on YouTube, they're welcome to it. I got this also from YouTube:

"Appeal reinstated claim
Are you sure you want to appeal?
You will be required to provide your contact information to the claimant.
An appeal will result in either:
the release of a claim on your video
OR a legal copyright notification from the claimant. In this event your video will be taken down and you will receive a copyright strike on your account. If you have received additional copyright strikes, this may suspend your YouTube account Learn more"

Nice. Well, I'll let it sit there and see what happens over the next few weeks. My brother said this happened to him once using Pink Floyd music. Then a few weeks later his video simply went live. So, who knows?

Then the next day I received this email:

"Hi JZ Murdock,
After reviewing your dispute, SME and WMG has decided to release their copyright claim on your YouTube video. However, there may be additional copyright claims on this video.
Video title: Lost in Space - a documentary (1993) Viacom Public Access Cable TV Seattle
View claim details
- The YouTube Team "

So hey, I don't know....

As far as I can tell now I only have to wait to see what happens with the [Merlin] Beggars group.

Regardless, the LIS video is available on Dropbox (see above) and I can still after all, show it privately.

Anyway, because of the editing issues (see below...somewhere) only a few of the many songs I used as background music are actually present anyway. I am assuming they are still actually on the master tape, I just can't hear them on a regular VHS player, so the possibility exists that at some point, I could see (and hear) the original version of this that I had edited.

Songs included (thanks to our music director, Joaquin Olson): Coil, Tones on Tail, Clannad, Brian Eno & David Byrne, Wang Chung, Tangerine Dream, Berlin, Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet, Julie Cruise, Soft Cell, Chris Isaac, James Horner, and Peter Gabriel. Also with "Love All The Hurt Away" (duet with George Benson) by Aretha Franklin, which was the music on the music video of LIS scenes which we got from someone else and is a funny and entertaining piece.

After having spent hours going through my boxes of media before and completely expecting this to happen this time too, I opened the first box in storage and there were both tapes, sitting right on top and together!

I watched it for the first time in many years as I was burning it to DVD and realized that Jeffro and Kelly were both right. That regardless of the issues and errors involved, I really should make it available to the public and most especially fans of LIS, as well as those interested in early public access cable TV shows.

the burned show to DVD

History of the project and LGN Productions

In the summer of 1993 I was looking for a project to do. I had separated from my son's mother and I needed something to capture my attention other than dwelling on my rather miserable life at the time.

I had previously tried to start a magazine, "The Journal of Extraordinary Diversions", which later became a web site under that title starting in 1994. And it's still up and running, though mostly unused for historical purposes just because it's been online for so very long. It was started as a web site for film productions and writers and extraordinary pursuits in general.

It is one of the oldest, continuously running web sites still on the internet. It has a Martial Arts section that won a couple of awards in the 90s.

I built another site, no longer running that I sold on eBay years ago. I set it up for my wife (my daughter's mother) who was a horse trainer. I called it, "The Equitation Station". It became internationally known and respected until she got out of the horse show industry (Arabian horses) and I sold it off sadly, to someone who only used it to direct people to their sales web for something un-horse related. Had I known that, I wouldn't have sold it to them. People were disappointed for a while over that.

Later yet, I tried to start an online company for displaying all restaurant menus in the Seattle area (of which there were more than 5,000). Start up money was an issue as were technology issues. This was an idea before its time. Something I keep running into in my life. Like with my screenplay, Ahriman, of which I didn't see some concepts used in that screenplay, in films for nearly ten years after initially writing it in 1984 in college.

The magazine software I had been using kept having issues, crashing repeatedly and requiring rebuilding until I just gave up. Such was the hardware and software back then with a dual 5.25" floppy disk drive system. Once the OS floppy filled up, that was it. I would lose whatever I had done. Once on that system, I lost what I felt was the most perfect short story I'd ever written. Though I tried to rewrite it immediately, it was just never the same.

Having just had a new born son, I finally and begrudgingly gave up on the magazine. On the restaurant company, I was going to call it, Cafe Menu. But as I said, it was just too soon technology-wise as I would have had to use BBS (Bulletin Board Systems) software which required people to dial up on slow modems and use a phone line for each connection.

Later on several years later the company Sidewalk.com (1995) picked up my idea on their own and went with it. It has since morphed into other sites and now basically is Yelp.com. But Sidewalk.com had not done as good of a job for what I had planned out in researching and developing it out, in how to give people a restaurant experience specific to each restaurant. Nor has Yelp although their customer review concept has worked out quite well for them as a business model.

I had been told about the Viacom public access cable channel 29 and so I started watching it. It was crazy. I loved it. My friends loved it. Essentially, it was the Wild West on cable. The Seattle PI newspaper has done an article on it that talks about the new Channeling Yourself documentary.

Some public access cable producers like myself (no I didn't do this) would stare at the camera and scream their frustrations. And people would call back in and yell back. There was a couple on a garden show that eventually went on to more legitimate (pay) cable channel. One woman would read interesting and weird stuff and dance naked around candles (“Goddess Kring,” Shannon Kringen, 1996 – 2011, Access’ most recognizable poet and artist. Best remembered for dancing and self body painting while reciting verse, often partially naked.).

Then, there was hot tub girl. What a riot she was.

Donna Marie on Hot Tub TV 1996

One fan favorite was Donna Marie who held a talk show at a different person's hot tub every week around the Pacific Northwest. Basically, hot tub, bikini and drinks. It was all pretty fun, intriguing and sometimes questionable, but always fun and fascinating. Donna went on to become a minor celebrity whom I would see in years later from time to time on various other shows including the Howard Stern Show.

So, I found out how to become a public access cable producer. I started talking to my friends John and Gordon about doing a documentary, my brother Marvin and my friend Joaquin. John, wasn't very into the idea however.

Still, I signed up. I attended the required class and was given access to the studio and equipment. Pretty cool. People were signing up to be on crews. I was, a bit shy about it. Dumb. Just dumb.

Anyway, the end result?

Lost In Space - a documentary (1993)

We decided to give the show overall a title of "Studio 100" in case our hopes that it might develop into other topics as it was with LIS, might eventually come to fruition. I had hoped for the first show to be on Star Trek, but John wasn't a big fan of that idea so that wasn't going to happen. Besides I didn't have the wealth of knowledge about Star Trek like John did about Lost In Space. We talked about several possibilities for topics but I always avoided Lost in Space. John didn't bring it up either because he didn't think about it, or thought I would reject it outright.

LIS Fan Tech Manual

Which was when it dawned on me that with John's being such a big (huge) fan of LIS, and with his having been an active fan and contributing to LIS fan Technical Manuals about the show, it would be an obvious draw for him.

As I remember it John got screwed over by one of the guys making one of the tech manuals. I seem to remember something about John submitting drawings and the guy redoing them (and not as well) just so he could claim credit or something like that, thereby cutting John out of it. Pretty low if you ask me. I don't remember if the one displayed above was the one John was working on or not, but it does look familiar.

Anyway, you get the idea.

Over the years we'd had many hours of enjoyable if pitched, but friendly debates over the importance of Star Trek vs Lost In Space, and TV sci fi in general. It was our favorite pastime.

So one day I pitched the idea to him. Even though he still was difficult about joining the project, I knew from the beginning that he would do it. Not that he made it easy. Then again, no one else wanted to get in front of the camera, either. And I know I didn't want to. I'd been there, done that. So I have to give him credit for at least doing it.

Half way through post production, I happened to meet the woman who would become my (next) wife. She is mentioned in the end credits in thanking Carin Anderson. We married in 1994, divorced in 2002). So I ended up moving out of Seattle and in with her better situation than my Sandpoint studio apartment ("You can see Mt Rainier...if you stretch and look hard), which made finishing the project more difficult than it already had been.

I would to stay late in town after my day job at the UW Personnel office in order to edit, sometimes until late into the night. I was seldom alone in the editing room. The next morning I still had to get up and commute that miserable I-5 commute from Auburn, Washington to be at work on time, bright eyed and well... you get the idea. And my boss was a stickler for being on time. This was after five years of working at the UW in MCIS on a VAX mainframe at night, autonomously, with "God" control of the Radiology and Pathology mainframe for two major Seattle medical centers.

It got to be a problem to finish the project so that at times, I wasn't as sharp in the editing bay as I needed to be. And due to various other issues I was the primary editor.

Had I not met my wife to be at that time, I originally had all intent of doing other shows. That just never happened with my new living arrangements. And so, "Lost In Space - a documentary" became our only production.

Once I had finished post on it I took it down to the cable production office and submitted it for an "air" date. On the Saturday night on which it was to show, and it seems to me that was a couple of weeks or so from my submission date, I sat down to watch it at my girlfriend's apartment. We were living on an expensive horse farm owned by the wife of a local construction company magnate where she was the junior trainer at that time on the White River in Auburn, Washington.Anyone who knows horses around there, knows who I'm talking about.

Now, if you used the Viacom station's equipment you had to air your finished product at least once, though you could submit as available for other cablecasting dates. Although I used my own miserable tripod without a fluid head which is readily apparent in the video, and I used my own VHS camera, I did use their editing equipment.. The tape I used was high quality half inch TDK brand HDX-pro (high def) 120 VHS video tape in my standard full sized VHS camera, similar to this one below. The same tape I'd used in college only now it was color and not reel to reel. And it worked.

I was also using an SLR still camera tripod, a typical rookie mistake. There is nothing like a good fluid head tripod for shooting video for that smooth panning action. You can see why in the first shots of John talking outside at NOAA as the jerking of the shot distracts you during the panning action of the camera in following him walking back and forth. Which I had told him not to do because of the tripod. But he was so nervous, he said he couldn't stop doing it. He WAS doing it, so there wasn't much I could say.

Sharp VHS Camcorder/Player; Model VL-L280C Photo

Also, as Viacom used public bandwidth, they had by law no editorial license to tell you what to or not to put on their cable channel. Which was AWESOME. I wish it still existed like that. Thus, you got to see some very interesting shows on public access.

For more, see Jeffro's upcoming documentary about it or visit some of the links I've supplied here about it.

A few things became readily apparent on my viewing our project on live cablecast for the first time. These were issues with the production tape that went on to be cablecast, which had slipped right by me.

Allow me to explain. Mid-post production I had shown up to edit one night only to be told that they had sent MY (okay, THEIR) Panasonic VHS to VHS editor to California for repairs. They said to just use another editing bay. So I signed in on another editor and immediately realized it simply wasn't working right.

That one editor sent off to be repaired had to have been haunted or something. Because my master tape wasn't working as it had on that other editor.I couldn't hear some of the music on the other editor.

I came to realize that I either had to start all over or simply wait for the old editor to be repaired and returned. Which is what I decided to do. See I'd had to use various VHS tapes from John that he had acquired over the years, for bits of scenes that I used and then returned the tapes to John. As well as various audio tapes. It was all pieced together on the master VHS tape. In case you don't know, many audiophiles back then thought video tape was superior to audio tape and recorded their audio on video.

So to start over would be a complicated mess. Not to mention resynching all the music... again.

I dropped by the studio several times, but no editor. It was delayed for some reason. So I started to call instead and about a month or so later (seemingly forever), the editor was finally repaired, returned and I was able to get back to editing. Which I did. I then applied the end titles on the rolling title machine in the back corner of the editing bays..

It wasn't however until it aired that I realized that most of the show didn't have any of the underlying background music that I had so carefully edited in. You can see the list in the end titles of all the music that I'd included. Why I chose Tones On Tail's, "Christian Says", which you can hear in the first part of the documentary (the part done before the editor broke) is quite beyond me. Other than I simply liked the tune and the tone of it. That band's name by the way (Tones on Tail) came from the tones they always heard on the end of their studio master audio tape's tail end.

The music issue was beyond my control.

UPDATE: When Kelly Hughes read this blog he had this to say about my background music issues, which I found interesting:

"I think anyone who made programming for channel 29 can relate to the technical nightmares. I would always add my music to a separate track. And the playback operator needed to know to have a certain switch turned on. Otherwise, there would be no music. So every time I turned my tape in, I included a note. Since I had a weekly time slot, I think they got the hint after awhile. But it was pretty nerve wracking not knowing if your show would be presented the way I intended. I did have episodes where they didn't turn on that switch. And my music was missing. The playback deck was a Panasonic S-VHS. The identical deck to what I edited on at home. So luckily, I was pretty familiar with it."

Well nuts, who knew? I wasn't familiar with it. The studio employees possibly knew but I was shy and didn't ask for much help beyond my own crew. Who knew less than I did.

Anyway....

In reflection I can see now that I should have played the production tape once on another machine. Like mine, at home. But it hadn't occurred to me and I figured the station's players were far beyond the quality of my home player (which may prove the point, but hey, too late now). But why would it dawn on me to check the tape elsewhere? After all it worked fine as far as I could tell.

However there were other issues that were fully on myself in my editing. For instance?

My number one mistake is in the after-title description where it says clearly on screen in a superimposition.

 "Lost I Space"

Not "Lost in Space". "Lost "I" Space". Good grief. Face palm. Head banging on desk.

Sigh....that was my first sign something was going terribly wrong while I watched its first cablecasting from home that February of 1994.John watched it from his home. There was an after airing phone call. It was, interesting. Not fun, but interesting. I mean, we're both kind of perfectionists.

The Production

John had begrudgingly agreed to be the host and narrator. Gordon, the interviewer.

The interviewer was so talkative and aggressive because John needed to be prompted. As I indicated, he didn't really want to be the one interviewed but he had all the info and he knew it only made sense. I didn't think his screen presence was all that bad either, it just needed practice. Though he had to be prompted initially at the beginning, just to get him going, he then picked it up and did quite well.

I had wanted to do rehearsals but John wouldn't hear of it. He just wanted to get it over and done with. Well, I'll give him credit for actually doing it, and getting it done. Even if it did mean we couldn't reshoot some scenes.

For instance, I wanted to reshoot the part in front of NOAA (the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, at Lake Washington in Seattle. That is at Magnuson Park in the Sandpoint area of Seattle. It looked futuristic and not a building everyone knew. Meaning, it wasn't like the Space Needle or the famous Seattle Science Center arches, or something.

There is a scene where John is kneeling down with a model of the Jupiter 2 in hand. At first you don't even notice the model. He was holding it too low. I wanted to reshoot it, but he didn't want to. It works, but just barely.

That happened a couple of times but there were a few times we did reshoot right after, making the initial shoot a rehearsal. Such as his NOAA opening which I think we redid about three times. Each time he was getting a little more annoyed but he also did better each time as he was getting more relaxed and more into character in front of the camera.

There is a SUPERIMPOSITION on screen where we used the single word "SMEG" to offset a new section: The Interview. It was an obvious nod to Red Dwarf on printed plates and followed with other plates of printed commentary introducing that section. We had discussed that it was obviously off track from LIS and somewhat disruptive to the LIS focus. But hey, we were such fans of Red Dwarf we felt we simply had to add it in... somewhere.

The SUPER saying that the interviewer was "rabid" and that there was only one mic was an after thought. We just thought we needed to explain why he didn't have a mic at times and why he talked so much. Which again, was all to try and keep John on a roll and upbeat. You can see a few times where John is getting irritated but then he pushes on..We may have reshot parts of the interview as he was home and felt more comfortable.

John's "studio" for the interview segment was actually his apartment on Capitol Hill in Seattle at the north end of Broadway, about half a block north from the Harvard Exit theatre. We thought it would look on screen like a production company office or his personal art studio.

During the interview there is a short section that is repeated. First of all we realized we needed an interview. There was just too much info to get out and an interview was settled on for the most natural way to get it out. I also wanted the audience to get to know John better considering all he knew and had done in fandom. He just wasn't getting the recognition I thought he deserved.

Artistically we didn't think that would be such a bad thing having a few seconds of a previously shown section repeated, as it was a short middle of a bigger and previously unseen\unheard part framing it. But it was later realized to have been a mistake and should have instead had a jump cut skipping that repeated part as it simply went on just a bit too long for it to be reasonably ignored and seen as stylistic.

The shots of the interviewer (Gordon) were also an afterthought when it was realized that the audience really needed to\should see who was talking because of how much he ended up talking overall. Some shots of the interviewer could also have been held for maybe a second or so longer. These pick up shots were done after the interview had been shot.

In the interview John got more relaxed requiring less and less prompting as he started to get into it. But by then the interviewer was getting too used to talking so much and a few times goes on a bit long. The one mic situation at times only making things worse.

The reason we did the LIS doc was that I just wanted to produce something and I wanted John's help. I wanted to do something with someone and a close friend was most desired. Besides, he had a wealth of info on LIS and though he wasn't at all interested in doing a production, I realized LIS would or could suck him into the project.

Indeed, when I came up with the proposition to him I think he knew at that moment that I had him. Though he continued to grumble and needed to be led into it (dragged, coerced, threatened....). But honestly? I think he enjoyed it. Now? He doesn't seem to want anything to do with much of anything from those days, sadly.

Now for myself, I didn't exactly want to do a LIS documentary. But it was a meeting of the minds on that, which got it to happen. So that became the project. As it was, John was hesitant and took a lot of convincing (coercing? promises?) throughout the project and he threatened to walk a few times. Though I'm not sure he really would have, he certainly threatened it. It was a struggle for control between producer and talent. Bet that never happened before or since, right?.

John didn't seem to get that the interviewer needed to play ignorant as a process of an interview, to prompt him to talk about what he knew, to set him up with softball questions so that in his being asked for instance, who produced LIS, you can see the annoyance on his face in actually having to say the name, his hero, Irwin Allen. It was so obvious, but was it to the viewers? So he realized it was info that  needed to get out, to be included and to be exposed in an orderly fashion as the interview went on.

Though I was actually a fan of both (that is to say, I WATCHED LIS as a kid as much as it annoyed me at times and as much as I wanted Dr. Smith to die, Die, DIE, so very, many times....), I was a essentially for all intents and purposes a die hard Star Trek fan.

John was obviously a big LIS fan. For years prior to this we had many arguments over which was a better show, etc., in friendly confrontations that after years became a more cliche thing between us and lasted less and less time as we had grown a short hand in debating the issue. We already knew what each would say ahead of time.

Almost as if we were practicing through much of our lives to do a documentary on LIS.

Dr. Smith annoyed me so much during the show that I came to have a love \ hate relationship with the show overall. But in Star Trek, it was pure love. The first time I ever missed a Star Trek episode my mother and grandmother had taken me with them to return a vacuum. I watched the clock in the car with my grandmother while my mother was in the store, seemingly forever. I was maybe in 7th grade at the time and was in tears by time my mother returned to the car as I knew that the show had already started and for the first time, I knew I had missed the opening scene of a Star Trek episode. I never had that reaction to Lost in Space.

We got home that evening half way through the Star Trek episode and my younger brother was lying on the floor watching it. I was pretty upset. My mother said, "Well, you can watch the last half of it anyway." Not helpful mom!

Not understanding that would ruin the show for me, I left her in the living room confused and headed upstairs to my bedroom instead, hoping someday I'd get to see the full episode from the beginning. Not having any idea the show would last only three years... or, that it would go into syndication purgatory nearly forever. Or spawn other Star Trek TV shows, or films, or reboot films.

I had no idea I was watching the birth of franchise history in action. Lost in Space, but obviously, lesser so.

With John, LIS was pure love, perhaps as it was his first sci fi TV show. He was at the right age for it to imprint. I was older than him by a few years and grew up with more of the 50s early 60s sci fi films and TV shows. So I was a little more advanced when LIS hit the scene and then more so with Star Trek which he may have been too young for at the time, though he grew to love it in later years.

After LIS's first half season (we figured after the initial five or six original episodes, which were pretty good, Star Trek pretty much blew LIS out of the water... in my mind anyway.

But not John's. But then he is wrong. And, after all this is my blog and not his. He can write his own recount of history. No worry John, if you read this. I love you brother. He's since moved out of state years ago and we don't talk too often anymore.

I'm still hoping there is maybe a possibility to get a fully functional copy with all the music included, but then perhaps not. One of the great things about technology as it advances, that things that weren't possible only a few years ago, can suddenly become very possible.

As for Jeffro's documentary, I'm looking forward to seeing Channeling Yourself. I've given Jeffro and his crew (JoanE O'Brian, Judith Card, Jim Yaeger), a chance to hear about this project of ours and to view the documentary itself and we shall see what we shall see.

As for Kelly Hughes, I hear he's coming over to visit next week to do some location scouting for a new project.

20 Years, 5 Lessons

What I learned through our LIS documentary project:

- Preparation. The more you prepare, the less trouble you end up having.
- Know your equipment. First and foremost, know (learn) your equipment and use the best and most appropriate equipment available to you
- Volunteers. Use volunteers, but if they are trouble lose them (and as soon as is reasonable but finish the project if you can). Then if they were trouble in your last project, don't use them on your next project.
- Help. Don't shy away from asking for help, or finding it. You will always need more than you think you do.
- Resources. Use your resources in your studio, crew or talent. The quality of the end product is what is important, the viewer's experience. Make it as easy on the viewer as possible so they will want to view your work the next time.

In closing... whenever you get a chance to do something out of the ordinary such as we did as public access cable TV producers, I'd suggest you go for it.

Many thanks to John, Gordon, Marvin, and Joaquin, all who are mentioned in the end titles. As well, thanks to the Viacom station crew at the time, Erik, Patty and John: Jeffro was a part of that station crew at some point but I don't remember ever meeting him. Thanks to him and his crew and Kelly and his.

End titles thank you

To all of those cable employees, crews and producers from back then... hey, look how long we've lasted and all these years later our stuff is still being seen and enjoyed!

Cheers!