THIRD TIME AROUND - Lovecraft Film Festival - Day Three By Derek M. Koch on Oct 12, 2003

Well THAT was a humbling experience (but more on that later).

So Saturday was the other day Casonetto’s Last Song was scheduled to play – once in the afternoon and once in the evening. Brenda was able to attend the festival today, and we decided to skip the afternoon showing of our movie and opted to catch THE DREAM-QUEST OF UNKNOWN KADATH. This feature length adaptation of one of Lovecraft’s longest stories was INCREDIBLY well-done. The director, Edward Martin III, was inspired to do this film as an animated feature, working with the artist of the comic book adaptation of the same name – Jason Thompson of Mock Man Press. Working with the artist (who ended up re-doing nearly 90% of the original drawings from the comic), director Martin created what we all believe to be the world’s only known adaptation of Lovecraft’s Dream-Quest… story. There are plans underway for a DVD release of this film, and if it does become available, I would HIGHLY recommend it.

After the movie, there was some down-time, so after getting a picture taken with Craig Mullins, webmaster of Unfilmable.com, we headed out for some lunch. We ran into festival Andrew Migliore briefly on our way out, and he asked if we had seen the Casonetto’s… screening and commented about some laughter, but we didn’t pay it much mind.

Lunch sucked. If you’re ever in Portland, and you find yourself in the Hollywood district, and you end up at a Chinese place called The Pagoda, you might want to skip it. The food was greasy, and their General Tsao’s chicken sucked. But moving on . . .

We get back to the theatre and watched THE ELDRITCH INFLUENCE: THE LIFE, VISION AND PHENOMENON OF H.P. LOVECRAFT directed by Shawn Owens. This documentary was a nicely put together package, interviewing authors Neil Gaiman, Brian Lumley and Ramsey Campbell, Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi and filmmakers Stuart Gordon, Aaron Vanek and Christian Matzke (along with Andrew Migliore) and commenting on all things Lovecraft. The “history portion” of the piece was a good crash course for people not overly familiar with his life, and apparently, Owens shot some of the interview portions of this documentary at last year’s film festival as that’s where he caught Stuart Gordon and his comments on Lovecraft’s work being adapted into film. There was a brief dive into the stereotypical portrayals of role-players when the role-playing game and LARP aspects of ‘Call of Cthulhu’ were mentioned, and there was a bit too much supposed “archival footage” for my tastes (some supposed film sequences found in the archives of Miskatonic University and a ‘Blair Witch’-style sequence investigating a supposed Lovecraftian cult in Wisconsin), but all-in-all, it was a good documentary.

I sat in on a question-and-answer session with S.T. Joshi next, and learned asked him what his views were of Lovecraft’s contemporary (and writer of the story on which Casonetto’s Last Song is based) Robert E. Howard.

Mr. Joshi doesn’t like Howard all that much.

Then it was another showing of ‘Shorts Block One.’ I sat through the shorts preceding ours with a lot more patience than I expected. I felt bad for Brenda because The Pagoda was threatening to revolt in her stomach while she waited to watch our movie on the big screen for the first time.

The house was a lot fuller this time around.

And less than a few minutes into Casonetto’s… it felt like more than half of them were laughing at the movie.

At first, it sounded like it might be a good thing, or at least, on okay thing. But as the movie continued, the laughter continued. I started hearing comments – nothing distinct, but definite uttered voices making some sort of less-than-positive comment on the movie.

When the end credits rolled, one guy behind me and slightly to my right uttered, “What the hell was that?”

Okay, I know out movie wasn’t the best film ever, but I thought it was better than that.

I had to walk out of the theatre again. My legs were wobbly, and I was a mix of very unpleasant emotions that had nothing to do with The Pagoda.

Now, there’s a part of me that wants to be all cavalier and take an opportunity in my column to tell those who laughed to go to hell and that I can’t WAIT to see THEM try to make a movie . . .

. . . but I won’t.

I caught up with Andrew and Aaron Vanek. Aaron Vanek is a director who’s done four Lovecraft or Lovecraftian shorts (including The Yellow Sign, which is, by far, the best Lovecraftian short I’ve ever seen), and was one of the recipients of the Howie Awards this year at the festival. He had just seen Casonetto’s…, and offered to talk with me a bit after I asked Andrew just HOW MUCH laughter he was referring to when he mentioned it earlier regarding the earlier showing of our movie.

I don’t know how much of it was designed to sooth my ego or what, but talking with the two of them DID make me feel better. Yeah, yeah, I should have just grown a thick skin and dealt with it, but it did do me good to hear some very constructive criticism from two guys who seemed to genuinely care about some filmmaker that just wants to make good movies.

Most of what Aaron shared with me was stuff I already knew. But I think they were things I needed to hear from somebody other than myself. Does that make sense? We spoke about a lot of little things that all made a lot of sense, and he even gave me his card and told me he’d be more than happy to answer any further questions I have down the line via e-mail, and even look over any of my scripts or anything like that. I respect Aaron Vanek a lot, and really enjoy his short films, so to have him take the 20-or-so minutes he took and tell me not only what he thought was wrong with our movie, but how some of those things could have been made right was perhaps the best moment of the festival for me.

But it was still a humbling experience.

Tomorrow (Sunday) is the last day of the festival. I’ll be catching the other two ‘Shorts Blocks’ tomorrow, and spend some more time just trying to take pictures and network a little bit and such. And in my last installment tomorrow, I’ll post a good assortment of all the pictures I’ve been hording since Friday . . .