SiL

After a small, yet catastrophic incident, we are back. What happened? While working on a new project, I overwrote the entire database for SIL Radio. Thank goodness for automatic backups.

Everything has its own time, according to Ecclesiastes. And it might just be zombie time–at least according to Time magazine. After enduring years of Vampires better suited for Duran Duran than scaring people, Time magazine reports the monster de jour is the zombie. And with Lost Boys 3 reportedly in production, this news comes not a moment too soon. That’s right, the working man (and woman) of the horror world is hip. Zombie Chic, if you will. According to Time:

f there’s a social hierarchy among monsters, zombies are not at the top of the list. They may not even be on the list. They’re not cool like werewolves. There’s no Warren Zevon song about them. They’re not classy like Dracula and Frankenstein, who can trace their lineage back to respectable 19th century novels. All zombies have is a bunch of George Romero movies.

But the lowly zombie is making its move. For the past few years, vampires have been the It monster, what with Twilight and all, but that’s changing. Diablo Cody, of Juno fame, is producing a movie called Breathers: A Zombie’s Lament, based on a new novel about life (if that’s the word) as one of the walking dead. Later this year, Woody Harrelson and Abigail Breslin will star in the zom-com Zombieland. Max Brooks’ best-selling zombie novel World War Z is being filmed by Marc Forster, the guy who directed Quantum of Solace. In comic books, the Marvel Zombies series features rotting, brain-eating versions of Spider-Man, Iron Man and the Hulk. The zombie video game Resident Evil 5 shipped 4 million copies during its first two weeks on the market. Michael Jackson’s zombie video Thriller is coming to Broadway. (See the top 25 horror movies of all time.)

Apparently no one is safe from the shambling, newly marketable armies of the dead — not even Jane Austen. Seth Grahame-Smith is the author of a new novel called Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, about a strangely familiar English family called the Bennets that is struggling to marry off five daughters while at the same time fighting off wave after wave of relentless, remorseless undead — since, as the novel’s classic first line tells us, “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.”

Teachers Jason McDonald and Michael Miler’s Intermedia class of 10th, 11th, and 12th graders at Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn wrote, shot and edited two stories on the media – one on Obama’s skillful use of the media with American Media CEO David Pecker and Star Jones, and another on media bias and public awareness with former CBS News President Andrew Hayward. This is a clip from PCN (Packer Collegiate News ), episode 1.1.

We’re working on movie pitches in class. Here is my selection of good, bad and instructive pitches. The Ask A Ninja my favorite. We’re using Paul Chitlik’s book, so although his video isn’t about pitching per se, I decided to post it here.

Paul Chitlik

Ask A Ninja Pitch:

What not to do:

This looks just like the CUNY 9th Floor Conference room on 41st street down to to same spaceship looking speaker phone.

Michael Weise (Hardware Wars)

This guy looks coked up. A little boring, but informative:

And remember, pitching is selling. Here’s Alec Baldwin with a little advice on selling:

OK, maybe you shouldn’t listen to Alec.

This is from our last shoot. We have a way to go to finish production on episode 7, but Patrick managed to make this promo.

You can watch it on TV or join us for a viewing party. From the ZH email newsletter (links added by me):

MNN (Manhattan Neighborhood Network) will be premiering Episode 5 of “Zombie Hunters: City Of The Dead” on Monday, April 13th, at 11pm. This episode shows what the Hunters do after one of their own gets shot in a weapons deal gone bad, and features great music by Bernadette McCallion and NYC’s own Kissy Kamikaze!

NOW

If you’re happy to be safe, snug, and at home in Manhattan to watch it, that’s great. By all means, enjoy!

BUT

They’ll ALSO be showing it at The Perfect Pint, 203 East 45th Street bet 2nd and 3rd Avenues, on the 3rd floor of the bar, on the same night …same time.

SO

If you’d like to meet members of the cast and crew, they’ll be there from 9:30 onward, so try to make it down and hang with us for the Manhattan premiere! And who knows? There might even be some Season One DVD’s floating around! For more information, drop us a line!

All the best,
The Hunting Party

Congratulations to Annette Calderon of The City University of New York and the team at www.cuny.edu for winning an Emmy award for the “Preserving the Past, Building for the Future” series of web documentaries. Congratulations to myself for sitting about 72 inches away from an Emmy Award winning editor one day a week.

Congratulations should also go to Neill Rosenfeld and Michael Arena, who produced the series. CUNY has quite a bit of videos on Youtube. Here is one of the winning episodes:

Not only is Jero (Jermome White Jr.) Japan’s first black enka star, he is the first black enka performer in known history. Jero made news last Saturday by singing on US soil at the Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington, DC.

Jero’s maternal grandmother is Japanese and he learned the style by singing to his grandma. Jero didn’t even understand what he was saying at the time. Enka music fell out of favor with Japan’s younger generation, but Jero’s appeal has virtually resurrected the out of date musical form.

Jero’s success underscores a cross-cultural obsession between the US and Japan (if you are really interested, here is a link to the proceedings of a conference in Pusan, Korea. A paper I wrote was presented there and contains more information). Japanese culture seems both foreign and familiar to many Americans and the reverse is probably also true. Much of the academic literature on the topic is about anime, but Jero’s hip-hop style of Japanese traditional song is an experiment of global culture in vivo.