I decided to fill you in a little more. Like, how did we get into the real movies. It started way back in 1972 (most of you weren't even born) when I and my wife attended a film course in Banff, Alberta. If you haven't been there, it's an incredibly beautiful range of mountains and a school for music and art -- and film.
Before that I was working at a TV station in Ontario. But it was here where I met Phillip Borsos, a real talent in film. Both of us were among 12 other "students" and we all had to make a short movie. At the end, both Phil and I failed. The photo above shows us, Phil is behind the older woman and I'm beside him
Failed. But from that school, we were the only ones who went on to make movies.
A few years found Phil and me getting any jobs on films here and there. Then Phil told me about a barrel factory he had seen in downtown Vancouver. He wanted to film it since school and thought we could do it.
We asked the owner of the factory a few times but he said no. Finally one day he gave it. We got film and borrowed film gear. Phil worked at the film lab so we would come in the evening and get it processed. I filmed most of it but I was also working at the local CTV TV station and Phil directed and we got someone else to shoot the last bits.
Then we got a great editor but also expensive and we managed to get money enough for editing. Now we had a short film. But nobody wanted it.
But what happened next changed our lives.
Just a quick photo from the local news lady, Linda and a good friend. It works well when you've got friends all around. The only outsiders were probably the lead, Riva and the 1st A.D. who felt that he should be directing.
But it still was me.
More Monday and thanks everyone for coming back from my long space of time.
Sorry to be slow, still putting all this together. Catch the 1980 article, there's more to follow that. I'll be on track by end of this week.
That's me on the right, with lots of warm clothes, talking to lead role Riva Spier..more to come.
So, here's where Ghostkeeper began. As I mentioned, this is virtually the beginning of the movie, in fact before it was being shot. These were (are) the first few Production schedules. We had found the money, or at least most of the money (you'll see what happens later in the shoot. You can find all the stories as we began. Most of our paperwork was pretty much a long way away. This is what I kept.
So you've already seen the first aspect of Ghostkeeper, a poster.
Now, you'll follow the days and months and years that led to what began to build a cult for my little Ghostkeeper movie that was hardly seen anywhere. Here's the bottom half of the Schedule.
I'll post another blog Monday.
Okay, I get asked about my "cult classic" Ghostkeeper feature which was made in 1980 and released in 1981 by a cult classic distributor (as in those classic guys who take our money that they keep). Well, at least our first guy died.
I started thinking about this, not so much cult classic as how to make a film and keep it coming around from dozens of countries and in awful copies as in VHS (yes, they're still out there), and 16mm versions and DVD's and 35mm prints. And now Blu-ray.
I'm going back to 1980 at first, and how the world was when I decided to make a movie.
So I'm going to show you how I did it, well actually a lot of other people did it. I just watched.
That's our first "artwork."
This might be fun. Maybe even inventive and a little lesson on low budget feature films.
Hang on.
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