Table Read

I sincerely hope the sprained ankle I sustained yesterday is not a severe problem in the making of this film. It sertainly hurts like hell and makes it difficult to walk. This happened under extremely strenous circumstances: I stepped off the front porch on my way to the mailbox.

Laste night we had the first table read with the actors. A few important cast members, like Brandyn "Merlin" Cross and Kayla "Jenny" Dudley, were absent, but overall I was quite happy with the result. In particular, I was thrilled with the performance of Chase McKnight, who will be playing Lance. Lance is not an easy character to pull off, and Chase hit it out of the park, giving what may be the best performance I've ever seen at a first read-through. And remember, this kid is, like, 13.

All in all, a great begining for the rehearsal process.

Casting Change

It's not abnormal to have to make a change in casting early in a production. Liz Ashby, the talented girl we cast as Jenny, was forced to bow out for personal reasons, namely, her parents were uncomfortable with Liz playing a pseudo-romantic role at such a youg age.

The love story between Arthur and Jenny is, in my view, a completely inoccuous puppy-love romace. it's not like we have these kids going at it in the back seat of a car. I'm actually very sensitive to the problem of Hollywood sexualizing young people at an early age, but . . . what we're doing here is cute and harmless. And the story would lack the necessary dramatic heft without it.

So, the role of Jenny now goes to Kayla Dudley, who I think will do a marvelous job. This may, in fact, be serendiptious. Kayla has a lovable glow, charisma and humor about her that I think will give Jenny and added spark.

Life finds a way.

Casting

The audition process is long, grueling, and stressful. And that's from the director's perspective. There are those who will tell you it's harder to be the one making the decisions than it is to be an actor auditioning. Those are the same people who tell you it's hrader to dump someone than to dumped. There is little more terrifying than having your destiny completely in someones else's hands, so I have to say, my experience directing auditions is better than acting in them. At the end of the day, as the director, it doesn't matter if I'm short.

But there is a great deal of pressure to casting. You're trying to remember a vast array of people who only have a short time to make an impression. If you're not a shallow jerk, you try not make decisions based solely on looks. Divorcing personal feelings auditioners from your professional assesment can be nearly impossible. And there's always at least one Sanjaya in there who comes close to bringing out your inner Simon Cowell.

The auditions for "Dreamworld" were the largest over which I have ever presided, surpassing the previous high I experienced for the 2002 stage production "MorMan." We must have had something like 70 people read. I lost count rather early on. The most difficult task proved to be in finding kids who equaled each other's talent level AND fit together in age range. Our "kids" ranged from looking like infants to looking 18-year old models who belonged on the covers of fashion magazines.

About halfway through the day, we discovered a young boy, Porter Bagley, who nailed the lead role of Arthur. He had the olvable innocence and pluck of a Spielberg kid. He also happened to be a few years younger and inches smaller than what we had in mind. But there was no question, he was out Arthur. Much of the rest of the day was devoted to casting the other child roles around him. I'm excited to direct this kid. His potential is exhilirating.

Many of the other roles went Pink Wombat veterans. Give me a choice between Rosalie Bertrand and and top Hollywood talent, and I'm going to pick Rosie. She is an amazing actress who can take the most impossible direction from me and instantly convert it to genius. While others read well, no one else could truly compete with her for the role of Tristan. And Patrick, my twin brother, my proiducer and partner, the Ethan Coen to my Joel, was not necessarily supposed to end up on camera this time, but, as the reader every auditioner played off of, all day he gave the best performances. It made no sense not cast the best actor we saw yesterday.

Brandyn Cross, also a member of the production team, embodied the role of Merlin in a way no other auditioner could match. Thsi role was, in essence, written for Jack Black, and Brandie has the right mix of goofy charm and quirky depth to pull off the "crazy" wizard.

So, after a long, grueling day (highlighter perhaps, by the terrific cheeseburger I had for lunch at a small Blakan restaraunt. How terribly "ugly American of me" to always order the cheeseburge at ethinc restaraunts), the casting process is nearly complete, and we prepare to plunge into our short rehearsal period.

"Dreamworld" blog

I have never written a "blog" before. I've never been interested. As a child I tried to keep a journal, but I was never good at it or had much patience for it. My childhood journal is more of a scrapbook of the movies I went to see than it it anything. My most vivid memory of journal writing was trying to do decide whether I liked or disliked "Superman III" (this was actually one of the epic internal struggles of my childhood. Disliking the sequel to "Superman II" was a staggering disappointment). I only share the details of my personal life with a select group of close aquaintances, and, as far as pithy-observations about every day life, I'd rather do that in conversations on my favorite message board (where anything I say sounds cooler and more important because it's posted by someone called "The Dark Knight"). So, I considered it rather unlikely I would ever keeping a "blog" (I still find it difficult to even use this term without quotation marks, both because I don't understand the origin and meaning of the word, and because it automatically makes me think of "Bob Loblaw's Law Blog" on the brilliant sitcom "Arrested Developement".

However, growing up, I did thoroughly enjoy reading production diaries of films I loved. Quite possibly my favorite of these was Bob Balaban's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind Diary", because, rather than being written by a Unit Publicist, it was an actual perspective from an actor on the film. I've always wanted to have a book like that about a film I made.

This week, I got the greenlight on my short film "Dreamworld", a comic/fantasy/adventure which is a very loose retelling of the Arthur legend. This is not a major feature film. It's a stuydent/independent film. But I have extrememly high hopes for it. The budget and resources considerably surpass anything I've worked with before. The HD cameras we're working with are amazing. I love the crew I'm working with. I think this is going to LOOK like a major feature film. At least, I hope it does. So, I decided I wanted to document this experience in detail.

"Dreamworld" is, perhaps more than anything else, a nod to the sorts of films that inspired me to love movies in the first place. I'm relying heavily on the work of my hero, Steven Spielberg, as inspiration here. I always do, but this time I am really trying to catch the imaginative wonder and emotional uplift of the master. I will not make something on the level of "E.T. - The Extra-Terrestrial". I'm just being realistic. That achievement will never be duplicated by anyone, no matter what their resources, and certainly not by me on what is still a rather modest budget. But this is the sort of movie "Dreamworld" aspires to. It's meant to be what Bob Balaban, in his "Close Encounters" diary, described as "a movie movie".

So, with a little trepidation, and a lot of excitement, we now set out on the adventure that lies ahead.

For Camelot!