 |
 |
|
RESET PAGE
Are you Sure To Reset Page Selections?
Are you Sure To Reset Page Selections?
CURRENT COMPETITION: Writing & Pitch Competition DEADLINE Feb. 24 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Close Box
| © NexTV Entertainment. All rights reserved. |
NexTV's MUSIC BLOG by DJ SHARK...THIS WEEK IN MUSIC HISTORY
Every Friday, on NexTV's music blog, DJ Shark takes us on a ride through the industry that is so inextricably linked to Film and TV.
A few highlights and curiosities from my radio show on Indie1031... Episode #29 - Broadcast
date January 29th, 2012
THIS WEEK in 1980 Loco Mosquito by Iggy Pop Punk Rock video. Literally filmed in Iggy's hotel and in a cab on his way to see The Clash play.
THIS WEEK in 1988: When We Was Fab by George Harrison George looks back at his younger days, cameos from Ringo, Jeff Lynne, Ray Cooper & Elton John.
THIS WEEK in 1975: The #1 Canada, #3 U.S. hit, No No Song by Ringo Starr. Here he is performing it with The Smothers Brothers on their show...
HAPPY BIRTHDAY to... Lead Belly on Jan 20th (1889) For all Nirvana fans... the traditional song first recorded by Lead Belly in 1944...
THIS WEEK in 2011: Amnesty International benefit four disc set of Dylan covers features 80 artists, including Johnny Cash, Pattie Smith, Sting, Elvis Costello, etc., etc. And I'll be damned if one of the top five tracks on this whole set is this tasteful Americana version by none other than Miley frickin' Cyrus. But if it sounds good, it sounds good.
THIS WEEK in 1979: HAPPY BIRTHDAY to... Robin Zander on Jan 23rd. One of the greatest Rock lead singers ever. From their fourth Long Player, Dream Police here's Way of the World by Cheap Trick.
THIS WEEK in 1978: HAPPY BIRTHDAY to... Warren Zevon on Jan 24th (1947) Warren's third Long Player, Excitable Boy came out. Here he is tearing it up live with John Would on lead guitar.
THIS WEEK in 206: The Kooks release their debut Long Player, Inside In/Inside Out. This was the fifth single from the LP.
THIS WEEK in 1964: The original version. This song (famously covered by The Animals) was written for Nina Simone and appeared on her Long Player, broadway • blues • ballads.
But after all is said and done, It's only Rock 'n' Roll.
Shark
ALL TIME is NOW with DJ Shark
Every Sunday at 2PM till 4PM (PST)
on www.indie1031.com
Past podcasts can be streamed and/or downloaded at... www.alltimeisnow.net
DJ Shark is a Los Angeles-based musician and founding member of Wild Colonials, an alternative rock and Americana band for whom he writes, sings, and plays guitar. His film scores and music have been featured in over 30 movies. Over the years, Shark has DJ'd everything from Hollywood street parties to magazine photo cover shoots to film premieres and other special events, including ESPN's 2004 Super Bowl party in Houston and The Sopranos private Emmy party, among many others.
Shark's show on Indie 103, All Time is Now with DJ Shark, takes you on a journey through time and features the best music from the last 70 years. "The songs I'm spinning tap into the current week in years past; that is to say... LP releases, debut 45's, #1 hits, classic gigs, or a brand new single - all the tunes from this week across the history of great music. TIME, after all, is just a metaphorical concept." But then you already knew that.
To make Comment, You will be prompted to login to post.
Dont have account? Login now or Create NexTV Account. (Free)
FOR EVERYONE WHO ALREADY SUBMITTED TO THE 2011 ACTING & DIRECTING TALENT SEARCH...
FOR EVERYONE WHO ALREADY SUBMITTED...
1. We have all of your info from when you initially submitted. If you've sent a dvd, we have that as well...BUT, we'd hugely appreciate you signing up again on our NEW SITE (http://www.nextventertainment.com/signup.php?id=3)
NOTE: WE KNOW THAT, IN MOST CASES, YOU'VE ALREADY PAID. DISREGARD THE AUTOMATED EMAIL THAT COMES INDICATING THAT YOU NEED TO PAY YOUR ENTRY FEE.
TWO IMPORTANT THINGS FOR YOU TO READ:
1. We have an optional SHORTCUT TO THE FINALS, peer-voting "mini-competition" that we let all submitters participate in if they'd like. This is an additional way for you to get to the FINALS of the competition. While the internal judging process is happening on our end, the 4 submissions with the most votes (from the public) will bypass our process and go straight to the finals where our incredible panel of judges awaits.We make it optional in case you'd rather not have your submission posted on the voting page of our site...it will not effect our internal judging process!! WE WILL ASSUME THAT YOU DO WANT TO PARTICIPATE IF WE DON'T HEAR FROM YOU...AND YOUR SUBMISSION WILL BE POSTED.
2. To help us bring your submission over to the new site, WE NEED YOUR HELP. It will take LESS THAN 5 MINUTES (I JUST TRIED IT MYSELF). Because we are now giving you passwords so you can go back and check your submission form, we prefer that you do this yourself.
A. Go to: http://www.nextventertainment.com/signup.php?id=3
B. Fill out the required info
*C. Mark that you will PAY BY CHECK (so you don't have to pay again)
D. Mark how you will be submitting (if a link, please add it to the form, even if we already have it).
- You prefer to upload a file it's easy to do here.
- If you've sent a dvd, we have it, so don't worry.
WE WILL BEGIN THE VOTING ON WED, FEB 7 (AND WILL SEND ANOTHER EMAIL WITH SPECIFIC INSTRUCTIONS).
Thank you for helping us out. We're very excited to have you as part of this competition!
Please email rbecker@nextventertainment.com if you have questions.
Randy Becker
NexTV Entertainment
To make Comment, You will be prompted to login to post.
Dont have account? Login now or Create NexTV Account. (Free)
BUILDING A SUCCESSFUL WEB SERIES - Jake Jarvi Speaks #71:Back to the Editing Room
With no money and no corporate ties, Jake Jarvi creates a web series called PLATOON OF POWER SQUADRON which he submitted to the NexTV Web Series & Indie Film Competition. He has developed a following of over 36,000 loyal, active fans…here is how he keeps them engaged and continues to grow his following…in his own words.
You can see all of Jake's work at:http://www.youtube.com/user/pineappleboyfilms.) And, remember, THE WRITING & PITCH COMPETITION has just begun.
AND NOW...JAKE JARVI SPEAKS: JAKE JARVI SPEAKS: BACK TO THE EDITING ROOM.
The video below finds me talking about wrapping Episode 6 production, showing pre-roll from the last two nights of shooting, and rambling on, as I’m want to do.To make Comment, You will be prompted to login to post.
Dont have account? Login now or Create NexTV Account. (Free)
SCRIPT DEVELOPMENT SERVICES: DEVELOP YOUR WORK...SELL YOUR WORK!
*HISTORY OF SUCCESS:
We’ve recently done development for pilots commissioned at FX, HBO, SHOWTIME, CBS, LIFETIME and more. We’ve set up feature film projects at PLAN B (Brad Pitt’s company), PARAMOUNT, FOX SEARCHLIGHT, and various independent FINANCIERS, developed Nicholl Fellowship-Winning Scripts, developed and sold a graphic novel to Harper Collins, and more.
***
“TOTAL SHOCK! I am currently negotiating a significant option agreement (for significant money!), thanks to Randy Becker[NexTV]...”
-Jason Braum
EMAIL FOR MORE INFO: rbecker@nextventertainment.com
——————————————————
*PACKAGES
The GOAL is to prepare your work for the marketplace and the people who are most relevant to your career in the entertainment industry.
1. PROFESSIONAL SCRIPT DEVELOPMENT
Cost: $200
An in-depth analysis of your Script, Treatment or Pitch.
· 1-on-1 DEVELOPMENT SESSION
o In-Depth Analysis of your work, including thoughts on structure, character, tone and commercial viability.
· PAGE-SPECIFIC NOTES.
o This is a lengthy document/worksheet that ties the overall themes of the analysis with specific lines of dialogue, action, etc….
o It includes an ACTIONABLE PLAN for improving your work.
o The goal is to clarify and activate the story, make sure that this is a cinematic experience rather than a literary one and allow the audience to get immersed in the world of the characters.
EMAIL FOR MORE INFO: rbecker@nextventertainment.com
***
2. SCRIPT DEVELOPMENT + STRATEGIC SALES PLANNING
Cost: $250
The goal is to prepare your work for the marketplace and help construct a plan for getting it out to the folks that are most relevant in the industry.
· 1-on-1 DEVELOPMENT SESSION
o In-depth analysis of your work, including thoughts on structure, character, tone and commercial viability.
· PAGE-SPECIFIC NOTES.
o This is a lengthy document/worksheet that ties the overall themes of the analysis with specific lines of dialogue, action, etc….
· IN-DEPT DISCUSSION ABOUT THE MARKETPLACE as it relates to your project.
· STRATEGIC SALES PLANNING
o SALES TOOLS – to present your work in a way that professionals want to see.
o SALES STRATEGY for getting your work to the most relevant people in the industry
Note: We will not take a commission on the sale of your work.
EMAIL FOR MORE INFO: rbecker@nextventertainment.com
***
3. THE FULL PACKAGE - with UNLIMITED REWRITES
Cost: $350
SCRIPT DEVELOPMENT + STRATEGIC SALES PLANNING + UNLIMITED REWRITES.
This includes the entire process from Script Development to Strategic Sales Planning, but with as many rewrites as it takes to get your script in shape.
EMAIL FOR MORE INFO: rbecker@nextventertainment.com
——————————————————
*TESTIMONIALS
“TOTAL SHOCK! I am currently negotiating a significant option agreement (for significant money!), thanks to Randy Becker[NexTV]!”
I worked intensely with Randy on my feature for over 4 months, including 2 major rewrites and a polish. I’ve never written at this level before!
Then Randy helped me get to AGENTS and production companies at a level I had only dreamed about. I’m having the time of my life!”
- Jason Braum
————————
“Thanks to Randy’s attention to detail and his honest assessment of what the story needs, I am learning what it takes to be a professional writer. I will gladly work with Randy again.”
– Daniel Forrer
————————
“It is my pleasure to report on my first development meeting with Randy Becker, which lasted for an hour-and-a-half.
He was sensitive to the story I am trying to tell, probed for what I was trying to accomplish, pointed out areas where I was not clear in my intentions, helped me to see the problems with my main character, and made several suggestions for improving the plot, without attempting to get me to write a different story (as is so usual with development notes).
I found his approach to working with me exactly what I need: sympathetic support, sensitivity to the writer’s goal, an objective view of what has been written so far, suggestions for possible directions I could go and fixes I needed to make in my story and characters, delivered in a non-directive manner, while listening very carefully to what I wanted to bring to audiences. I recommend Randy’s supportive approach to any screenwriter.”
- George Schwimmer, PhD
EMAIL FOR MORE INFO: rbecker@nextventertainment.com
To make Comment, You will be prompted to login to post.
Dont have account? Login now or Create NexTV Account. (Free)
ALL 'LIT' UP AUTHOR ESSAY: KENNETH RODGERS - A Hell of a Story
Click HERE for the full archive....and check out James' latest book, CARRY EACH HIS BURDEN
ALL 'LIT' UP AUTHOR ESSAY FEATURE: KENNETH RODGERS - A Hell of a Story
Ken Rodgers lives and writes in Boise, Idaho. His short stories and poems have appeared in a number of venues. He writes two blogs and is in the middle of creating, along with his wife, Betty, a feature length documentary film about his company of Marines at the Siege of Khe Sanh. See more about the film, Bravo! Common Men, Uncommon Valor at www.bravotheproject.com. You can find out more about Ken at www.kennethrodgers.com.
A Hell of a Story
by Ken Rodgers
I moved from one porthole to the other checking out the rough terrain as the big chopper ferried me and a bunch of body bags from Khe Sanh to Dong Ha. The chopper crew chief barked at me again and again to sit down, but I knew what happened to men who sat down in air ships. Bullets from the ground ripped through the hulls and shattered bones, blasted livers, heart, kidneys. I hot-footed here, then there, moved again and again, my heart on overdrive.
When we finally landed at Dong Ha, I exited the rear of the helicopter and stared back at Khe Sanh. After seventy-two days under siege there, I shook my head and thought, now that's one hell of a story.
In Dong Ha, and then Phu Bai, and then Danang and on to Okinawa, that thought rode me. A hell of a story. And after landing in Tucson and being picked up by my parents and my best friend and his fiancé, I couldn't wait to start telling my tale.
We went to a Mexican food restaurant and after I ordered tacos and a beer, I began to describe the raw, red-flesh metaphors of my war. As I jabbered and jumped up and gestured with my hands, I looked at them all sitting around the table digging into their green chili enchiladas and beef and bean burritos. They wouldn't look at me, or maybe they couldn't look at me.
At the time, I thought, they don't want to hear this. I remember asking myself what I'd done wrong, what we'd done wrong in Khe Sanh. Today I know that the problem wasn't me, or the war; the problem was that they couldn't understand.
Looking at my father's balding pate and my mother's fake strawberry blond hair as mariachi music played in the background, thinking what I knew about the absolute savagery that we all...we all...are capable of, and to have them not respond settled on my shoulders like a heavy coat of chain mail Norman warriors wore a thousand years before.
They don't care, I thought.
I recall going to a party in late 1968 in San Diego with a couple of Marine buddies. The party was mostly young people not associated with the military. On the way there, one of my Jarhead pals said, "Don't talk about the war, it bums people out." But I didn't pay any attention to him and marched into the crowded, smoky place with Hendrix' rendition of "All Along the Watch Tower," and the Stones screaming "Street Fighting Man," and the cheap red wine and the wide bell-bottomed trousers of the long-haired men and women, me yanking on tie-dyed sleeves begging people to listen to me about what I saw...What I Saw. But they were more interested in sex and getting loaded and talking about stopping the war and politics and sex and getting loaded.
I started keeping my story to myself. Even among my Marine Corps comrades, I kept my memories close. Once I walked into the admin office at the Marine Barracks at 32nd Street Naval Station in San Diego and saw a man who lived in the same bunker with me for two months during the siege. He looked at me, I looked at him and said, "Hello, Horne," and he said, "Hello, Rodgers," and for the next year we never said a word to each other about our common experience. I haven't seen him since.
During one fifteen-year period in the seventies and eighties, I was repeatedly told by World War II veterans things like, "You guys couldn't fight your way out of a wet paper bag." Or, "You lost the only war we've ever lost." I knew, in my war, we hadn't lost anything but our youth and in some cases limbs and lives, but how could I tell someone that? I didn't know how. The verbal spankings from a generation of warriors that I so admired for what they had accomplished at Guadalcanal and Tarawa and Iwo burned like flashes of gunpowder.
The way a story gets recorded creates the way a story is perceived. Could I tell the story so it truthfully rendered the way I remembered it? Right then, I didn't think so, so I told myself, "Shut your trap." Yet though I made both conscious and unconscious decisions to keep the story mum, my story of my war was stuffed back in my throat like a grenade and it wanted out. It wanted to explode and blow reticence to smithereens.
In the nineties I took up creative writing. First came poetry, then I wrote a novel about my war, a novel that still sits in my desk drawer, incomplete. I composed short stories and essays, some of which were published, but none of it seemed right. The story seemed unfinished, its complexities left undiscovered.
In 2009, my wife Betty and I attended a reunion of Khe Sanh Veterans in Denver and a lot of men from Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 26th Marines—my company of Marines—attended. We sat around trading war stories, many of which I had never heard; bloody sandbags and severed limbs, defying enemy fire to carry a wounded Marine to safety , pranks around the bunkers and fighting holes, dead bodies scattered in the enemy trenches.
Betty and I discussed what we were hearing. Though the stories of war are as old as humanity, every story we heard seemed unique in such a way that you could read the memories, the experiences on each man's face. It made my heart thump and my imagination dredged up scenes of red mud, and M-16 rifles, the constant incoming that drove us all facedown into our trenches for hours, for entire nights. Each rendering of experience was unique in the way each man had responded by living the years during and between the events of the siege and the telling around those tables in Denver some forty-one years later.
While I was shooting the breeze with my old comrades, Betty went to our Skipper, the man who led Bravo Company during the siege, Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth Pipes USMC Retired, and asked him if anyone had ever told the story. When he said, "No," she asked him if we could tell it, and he gave his stamp of approval.
On the way home from Denver, Betty advised me we should make a documentary film about Bravo Company. I suspect I laughed at that. A film. I barely operate a point-and-shoot camera, but yet, the notion fetched me, and we talked and planned and dreamed and started writing synopses and treatments. If we knew what we know now, we probably wouldn't have taken on this monumental task. But what we didn't know might have been the draw, too. The unknown, the adventure of new craft, new medium, a new vehicle to tell the story that I knew needed telling since that day in Dong Ha when I looked back at the Annamite Mountains in April 1968. A hell of a story.
The Marine Corps Heritage Foundation gave us a start-up grant which was basically enough money for us to, figuratively speaking, hang ourselves, but “onward” was our motto. During 2010 we travelled from Idaho to San Antonio, Texas, back to Idaho, then on to Washington, DC, back to Idaho. We traveled by car and plane. We interviewed 15 survivors of the siege. We spent three weeks in the National Archives and at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia researching, looking for old film, photos, audio recordings, all from the winter and early spring of 1968, all from Khe Sanh. We hired a local Idaho camera operator named Mark Spear and flew him to San Antonio. We filmed interviews ourselves, we hired professionals to film interviews on our road trip. As we drove from Indiana to Springfield, Illinois, Brian Crowdson agreed to work for us for a day. In Omaha, Nebraska, Jesse Hassler shot our session. Meanwhile, the guys in the film were sending photos of themselves, of the combat base; they were sending old audio tapes actually recorded during the siege in 1968.
We had a lot of fabulous volunteer help with fundraising, with promotion. Family and friends, believers in our project, believers in us, chipped in to help fund the making of the film.
A Vietnam veteran with forty years experience in film, John Nutt, contacted Betty and me and offered to edit Bravo! He took our raw material and created art out of war and mayhem. George Lucas' Skywalker Sound graciously let us mix the film at their Marin County facility. Four-time Oscar winner Mark Berger orchestrated the final sound mix.
The movie captures history, it is a study in PTSD and psychology, it is a memoir of war, it is poetic, like rhythmic verse. It speaks on multiple levels in multiple voices. It is funny, sad, loud and profound.
And here we are in film festival mode on the brink of distribution.
The story of Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 26th Marines has now been told. The experience and the future make a heady present, as if one is leaping off of a bridge, hoping that when he hits bottom, he eases into the depths of happiness. It's a hell of a story. But there are no guarantees. So we soldier on. Or better yet, we Marine on.
The trailer for Bravo! Common Men, Uncommon Valor can be viewed here.
To make Comment, You will be prompted to login to post.
Dont have account? Login now or Create NexTV Account. (Free)