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Category Archives: Backlot

Two would-be filmmakers squat a Hollywood back lot while trying to score a deal. Partially true story.

Under Coverage

By Daedalus Howell | November 24th, 2004
In the screen trade, Readers are the proverbial guardians at the gate, the first line of defense the industry has against the teeming horde of wannabes, sycophants and otherwise undiscovered geniuses prostrate before the gaping maw of the great bitch goddess of Hollywood. These literate worker-bees are the oily cogs of the dream machine. They produce [...]
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The Bird

By Daedalus Howell | October 7th, 2004
I’d heard it before ? clink, clunk, clink, clunk ? like some nervous junior exec sifting pocket change in his chinos. Everyone on the Backlot claimed to have heard it at least once and reported, variously, that it was “like an alarm clock being wound,” or “thimbles on a washboard,” and perhaps most lyrically, from [...]
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Paint By Numbers

By Daedalus Howell | September 27th, 2004
My fashionably faux-bearded partner Cary Carpe and I just rescued our latest script, “Painting By Numbers,” a commercial spec of the proverbial “high concept” variety eleven drafts in, from being recycled by the studio as a coffee cup insulator composed of 33% post consumer waste. This is ironic seeing as the screenplay itself is already [...]
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Future Tense

By Daedalus Howell | August 30th, 2004
All this future-baiting (see below) reminds me of a moment that occurred last week at the Directors Guild of America, where my writing partner Cary Carpe and I screened our new spot for the 7th Annual Filmmakers Alliance Screening. The event served, in part, as a tribute to “Sideways” director Alexander Payne who was on [...]
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A Brief History of the Mustache in Cinema

By Daedalus Howell | July 24th, 2004
Sad to report that our documentary film, A Brief History of the Mustache in Cinema, has been shaved from the development slate of upstart cable network Hair TV. Collaborator Cary Carpe and I had been tapped to track the mustache through cinema for the new channel (a sort of E! for all things follicular) after producers [...]
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