“What I’m up to” is where I’ll write about what I’m up to, pretty simple, huh? I could call it a journal but I’m not gonna. You might have noticed that this site has taken forever to be constructed, the welcome page has been up for months, but no content. That’s not my webguy’s fault , it's mine. Thanks to a combination of me being super busy and super lazy, if that makes any sense. I write all day and the last thing I want to do at night is write about myself. (My web guy's name is Jared and he has his own site that is updated like daily.
Anyway, I'm working on a piece that will sum up the last four months and then once I'm caught up I will post updates whenever I fucking feel like it. This is going to be fun.
Sept. 1, 2005
my summer part one
Short summer, yet it felt long. Know what I mean? Same shitty summer movies as last year(only with different names and actors). Can't even think of what I liked(other than Devil's Rejects of course). The wife took me to Vegas to see JUDAS PRIEST for my birthday. It was sooooooooooooooooooooooo fucking METAL. Man, there were a lot of headbanging forty-somethings. I was one of
the youngest people there, and I'm old as cock. Halford changed jackets seven times. It says something that he was the gayest thing in Vegas that night. He's gayer than Sigfried and Roy having Cirque De Soleil over for a swimming party. I can't believe we didn't know he was gay when I was a kid. Queensryche opened. I know they are an acquired taste, but I like them and I'll punch your mouth off if you make fun of them. Although I will admit they're a little gay. Like as gay as one dude licking another dude's stomach, nothing sexual - just a little stomach licking.
Comic Con was fun. I wish Comic Con lasted all year. So much shiny stuff to look at, there aren't enough nerd hours in the nerd day to see the whole thing. I love all the hot girls that are paid by companies to stand in front of their booth and pretend to like nerds. Man, there are some hot ones and man, there is some low-rent booth pussy too. Sorry, ladies. Note to guys running booths: if the girl you have "greeting" at your booth makes me want to look away or gouge my eyes out and stomp on them, then maybe things aren't working out with her. Unless you want me to avoid your booth like it's a bum getting stabbed. I wonder how much it costs to have a skank sit around and make boys run away. I saw this one chewed-on bar fly. She was totally out of it, with her dog-tits about to fall out of her old shirt. She made my weiner cry. The guy probably paid her in gas rags and gut punches.
Sorry about the harshness and horrifying visuals, but I'm just reporting what I saw. I've had night terrors ever since.
Comedians of Comedy tour of the east coast was a lot of laughs(you'll get to see how much fun we had when our show starts airing on Comedy Central). It's Patton Oswalt, Zach Galifianakis, Maria Bamford and myself in a motor-home driving to rock clubs in NY, Philly, Boston, Maryland, Atlantic City and Martha's Vineyard to do our comedy show. I was crying laughing most of the the trip. Zach makes me laugh so hard. What a funny, furry bastard. Oh, and Patton and I almost actually died while laughing. It was raining super hard and traffic comes to a stop. We realize a power line is hanging right in front of us. The other end of it is sparking like crazy on the other side of the freeway. It seems like something really bad is about to happen. Patton and I tell the driver to gun it while giggling, not thinking he'll actually try to drive into the cable. He does. He fucking guns it like Hooper trying to clear the bridge. As soon as he drives into it, the cable pulls tight. Ten of the scariest seconds of my life later we get free. While everything slowed down and we all knew we were going to die the cable sawed through our front bumper, ripped the sky-light off of the camper and went flying and sparking onto the highway behind us. The best part our camera man didn't get any of it because he was too busy almost dying.
More to come later.
Dec. 13, 2004
Hey, I did two pilots for comedy central in the last two months, waiting to hear on both. The first one is a daily entertainment news satire show created by the super funny Hugh Fink, it's called Gone Hollywood. I did a segment that I wrote, which would be a weekly feature if the show goes. It would be my take on all things entertainmenty.
The other show, Happy Game Fun Bomb was created by another old friend, Rob Cohen (not the shitty director). It's a video game competition show where each week a team of viewers would challenge the show's team of experts(including Mr. Show alumni Jay Johnston and Eric Hoffman). Patton and I co-hosted the pilot.
As far as the CD, it's coming. I had a ton of tape to wade through after the tour. I have the cover art done. It's me sitting on a toilet cramming one out and it's called Feeling Kinda Patton.
I have a couple of other cool things brewing, I'll post here when I have news. Or I'll forget to and only do it after a member of the message board guilts me into doing so.
May 17 2004
There's a reason I haven't written much (and by much, I mean anything) in this section. I've been very busy, but not much I could talk about. I spend six days a week locked in my office writing with my writing partner and good friend, Dave Anthony. We spent the end of 2001 and all of 2002 writing a spec we are very proud of. It was optioned in 2003. We spent all of 2003 and some of 2004 waiting for it to be made. It's not happening. We never got paid, it was a miserable experience (I'll document it someday in my tell-all). We will try to get interest renewed in it, because we both love our last draft. The up-side is everyone who read it loved it and we've been super busy working on other projects since then. We're currently doing a re-write for a funny Disney movie and working on new ideas and trying to get other re-write jobs going.
I wrote another script with my buddy Gerry Duggan that made it's way around town. Now this idea was nuts, one of those things that not everybody's going to get. I can't talk about what any of these scripts are about, because they're still alive. The one with Gerry is now being turned into a comic book. I will make a formal announcement when everything is nailed down.
Patton Oswalt and I spent part of 2003 working on a new idea together (we sold a spec in 2000 and have been trying to work together again since then). We came up with a new idea and started to hammer it out - we're both busy with our own stuff so it took a lot of work to finally get our pitch done. It was really only suitable for one studio(because they own the rights to the movie we were re-working), they passed. So that's dead. We have other ideas and hopefully we'll find the time soon to work on them. This all sounds depressing as I'm writing it down, but that's what life is like when you're a screenwriter. Most of what you write will never be seen by anybody.
I'm currently working on a horror idea of my own. And I'd love to direct horror at some point. That's my dream. I liked horror before comedy. As a teen I was obsessed with King, Fangoria, Chainsaw, Romero, Carpenter and Craven. I wrote a ton of short stories, straight horror. Most of them had funny dialog or situations, but I was always more into scaring or grossing out the reader. For as long as I can remember I've wanted to make a horror film or be in one.
Which brings me to an announcement. I will be shooting a part in Rob Zombie's sequel to House of a Thousand Corpses, The Devil's Rejects this month. I can't say much about my part. I can tell you his script rules. It takes what he did in the first one and heads off in a new and very cool direction. I can't wait for people to see it. More to come soon. I have some other acting announcements to make and I'm currently figuring out a plan for my stand-up record that I'm shooting to release in the fall. I was supposed to record my album two weeks ago in Athens, GA - but I had to back out for an acting gig. More about that later.