Shooting Mike and Julie’s wedding was one of those dream days. Everyone got along, the wedding party and I hit it off, and the footage I was getting was just fantastic. Then it came time for the reception and things went a little long… to the point where I realized I needed to get all of my guest interviews and dance footage in only an hour (the usual allotted time for such a task is around three hours).

 

 

Did I pull it off? Yes I did, and without having the company who hired me needing to charge them any extra cash, which is always a nice touch. Then the editing began and this one will forever live in infamy for one specific reason: I had finished editing what I knew in my heart to be one of the finest wedding films I had ever done, and as I was preparing to finalize the transfers to DVD, I tripped over a cable that was attached to my external hard drive. The drive flipped off the table it was on and landed on the tile floor. To this day, the hard drive won’t spin and holds on it many locked away treasures, not the least of which is the original HD edit sequence for Amber Alert. Through some fancy footwork and a miracle of tape capture, I was able to restore the wedding with minimal work and deliver the product on time, but I almost cried when that hard drive hit the floor… As it stands today, the only ones crying were Mike and Julie when they saw this masterpiece. Here’s a snippet of their party.

 

Amber Alert is a film that reminds me of how good I can be as a director when the stars align. It’s a giant story that was shrunk down for the purposes of a student film festival. Shrunk down to the point where even some of the bare bones were missing. As I sat in the middle of a crowded banquet hall watching my film play before an audience, I thought to myself, Man, did I underwrite this movie…

 

 

We began shooting my rough draft in October 2006. There was no budget, very little time to plan, and I was working with untrained actors, some of whom I’d never met. But no one felt as untrained as me, with only five student films under my belt, none of which adhered to a narrative structure. Filming would go as late as 2 or 3 in the morning, the outdoor conditions we shot in were horrible, the film festival deadline dictated speed over precision so a tripod was hardly used, and one action scene required coordination of 11 people – how did I go from Bananas to this in only three moves?!

 

 

But alas, it all came together in the end. After placing third in Oakland University’s student film festival, more footage was shot and added in (everything that’s in color) to complete it as good as it was gonna get at the time. The end result is something I cherish… even if it does mean staring at my ex’s face and listening to her awful line readings haha. The counterpoints to that were Mike Dennie’s surprising performance giving a lot of emotional weight to the dialogue, and the revelation of Courtney Clogg as Allie, who walked into my home that second shooting day and improvised lines that had me jumping for joy behind the camera. She is a natural.

 

 

Over the years, as more people have seen it, it’s become one of my most beloved films among my friends and family – not as much as Purple Heart’s Final Beat, or in some circles, Bananas, but you get handed gifts of inspiration like those once in a lifetime. But lately there’s been surprisingly more and more people asking the question: “Have you thought about making this into a feature film?”

 

The answer is “yes.”

 

 

The story of the Youngs is ripe for expansion and fleshing out in a way that none of my other short films ever have been. Not to mention, Amber Alert concludes with what is hands-down the biggest bitch-slap I’ve ever delivered to an audience. It leaves virtually everyone emotionally shaken and unsettled, and if it came after a fully-realized feature-length vision of this story, I know in my gut it would bring the house down.

 

 

So maybe one day we’ll see a feature length Amber Alert. I’ve been developing how I would further the story in my head for a while now. I think it would be pretty kick ass. Enjoy the original and let me know your thoughts!

 

 

 

 

I wanted to keep these blog entries going in chronological order but it just wasn’t in the cards because apparently my router takes a steaming crap every time I try to upload anything to YouTube whilst multitasking. I’m getting ready to take all the technology in my house out into a clearing, put the song “Die Muthafuckahs” on an old school John Cusack-hoisted-over-the-head style boom box, and Office Space the living shit out of all of it until nothing remains but a pile of dented and/or shattered plastic and microchips.

 

Okay, just imagining it made me feel a little better. A Vicodin should help with the rest of my pain.

 

Anyway, even though I love the movie beyond compare, when I decided to become an online reviewer, I chose my first project to be John Carpenter’s Halloween. When you’re reviewing a movie and having to be funny about it, there’s nothing harder than choosing to lampoon a film you love, so when I said I’m “diving in with both feet,” I truly meant it.

 

Enjoy my first review for The Haywire Effect and stay tuned for more episodes, plus the director’s cut of this one, which will be shown theatrically one night only.