Hollywood Noir

A break in the filming for dinner at El Coyote

I'm not the first writer who's turned to film as another creative outlet. Countless word scribes like Norman Mailer, Sam Fuller, and Sam Shepard, have utilized the motion picture camera as an extension of their typewriters. Much of my work has been considered for film by companies like Dreamworks, George Clooney, and a bunch of others that I can't remember right now on a Sunday morning, my first steaming cup of coffee set out beside the laptop. Nothing has ever been produced, but that doesn't mean it won't be. It also doesn't mean I can't dabble in the medium on my own.

This past February, indie film maker Edward Alves asked me to write, direct, produce and star in (if you wanna call it that) a short noir piece that I could use as a promotional author trailer. It took us a few days to actually shoot the film down on Sunset Boulevard and at the close by Avalon Hotel, and many more days and nights in the production room, but here's what we came up with.

I think the film captures perfectly how I was living while writing Everything Burns...the paranoid, tense, living-on-the-edge quality of the life that flashes by day in and day out when you are writing all alone in a room with nothing but your story, and the invented people who occupy it.

Everything does indeed burn. So too does this trailer...

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