Adam Baran

In case you missed it at the LA Shorts Film Festival last week, and that’s probably most of you, my short film “Jinx!” will be having it’s TV World Premiere this Friday, September 21st at 10:45PM on the Independent Film Channel (IFC)! (Channel 81 in NYC)

Jinx! tells the story of a bitter rivalry between two second grade girls that spirals out of control. When nerdy second grader Eleanor tries to join a schoolyard game, a bully named Rachel “jinxes” her. Unable to speak until someone says her name, Eleanor sets off on a madcap quest to break Rachel’s diabolical spell before the 3:00 bell rings. As she navigates the cutthroat world of second grade, Eleanor seeks help from a stern math teacher, a deranged abstract artist, and a clueless father – with disastrous results!

The film will be on IFC in their short film blocks during October, and after that you can check IFC.com for screening times - the film will eventually be up on IFC.com as well.

http://ifc.bside.com/?_view=_filmdetails&filmId=33662540&timezone=America/New_York

If you enjoy the film - feel free to add a review on the IFC site, and you can also be our friend on MySpace at www.myspace.com/jinxfilm

I hope everyone is haveing as good a week as I’m having and please, check out “Jinx!” this Friday on IFC at 10:45PM and tell your friends!

In case you missed it at the LA Shorts Film Festival last week, and that’s probably most of you, my short film “Jinx!” will be having it’s TV World Premiere this Friday, September 21st at 10:45PM on the Independent Film Channel (IFC)! (Channel 81 in NYC)

Jinx! tells the story of a bitter rivalry between two second grade girls that spirals out of control. When nerdy second grader Eleanor tries to join a schoolyard game, a bully named Rachel “jinxes” her. Unable to speak until someone says her name, Eleanor sets off on a madcap quest to break Rachel’s diabolical spell before the 3:00 bell rings. As she navigates the cutthroat world of second grade, Eleanor seeks help from a stern math teacher, a deranged abstract artist, and a clueless father – with disastrous results!

The film will be on IFC in their short film blocks during October, and after that you can check IFC.com for screening times - the film will eventually be up on IFC.com as well.

http://ifc.bside.com/?_view=_filmdetails&filmId=33662540&timezone=America/New_York

If you enjoy the film - feel free to add a review on the IFC site, and you can also be our friend on MySpace at www.myspace.com/jinxfilm

I hope everyone is haveing as good a week as I’m having and please, check out “Jinx!” this Friday on IFC at 10:45PM and tell your friends!

This just in: Now you can rent Jinx! on DVD in Los Angeles at the best video store on Earth - Eddie Brandt’s Saturday Matinee, located at 5006 Vineland Avenue in North Hollywood.

Here’s how that happened : While I was in Los Angeles last week, I mentioned to a friend that I was looking for a place like Amoeba Records only for videos, where I could scour the racks of used rare and hard to find VHS tapes. I didn’t know where that could be but, I figured there must be someplace in L.A. He told me about Eddie Brandt’s Saturday Matinee Video, located in North Hollywood. So on Saturday morning, I got in my car, punched the address into my GPS and set off for what would become the most mind blowing shopping experience I’ve had in a long time.

Ever walk in a store and want everything in it? That’s what it was like to walk into Eddie Brandt’s. They have tens of thousands of videos on both VHS and DVD, and what’s more, they can make you DVD copies of any VHS tape they have. They have a special loaner library of hard to find, never been released stuff - bootlegs accumulated over many years. I started going through the shelves of used videos for sale, and within minutes I had ten videos I had to have already set aside. “Just put it on the counter and rest one of those red bean bags over it,” the guy behind the counter said. I hadn’t even gotten to letter C yet. Already I had The Amazing Dobermans, a film about a crime fighting gang of pooches, starring Fred Astaire, The Annihalators, a Death Wish/Rambo knock off (I picked up quite a few of those), and Brotherly Love - a good twin/evil twin movie starring…Judd Hirsch!!

I went to the counter and asked if they had Good Luck Miss Wyckoff, an extremely hard to find film - or so I thought. They checked the system and didn’t have it, but one of the extremely knowledgeable customers soon piped up - “That was released as The Shaming!” On second check, they had it - and Donovan, the son of Eddie, the store’s namesake, threw the film into his computer, transferred it, and made a DVD copy for me (not for free of course, but not for a lot of money either). I had to wait about 90 minutes for the transfer, but it didn’t matter. I stayed for hours picking over the shelves. Among the more amazing other titles included Hell Comes to Frogtown, Daddy’s Deadly Darling (aka Pigs), Rainbow (a made for TV Judy Garland biopic starring Andrea McArdle as Judy and Piper Laurie as her mama), and Exterminators of the Year 3000.

The staff were super nice, and soon the back and forth was basically “Have you ever seen this?” “Oh you gotta see this!” I of course recommended Street Wars, Yeti: Giant of the 20th Century, and Death Drug. But they of course topped me, and had everything on my wants list. Except of course that is, for the two white whales of my video dreams - HIM, a gay porn retelling of the story of Jesus, and Bruce Lee Vs. Gay Power, a kung-fu Bruce Lee rip off about a karate fighter battling an evil gang of homosexuals. But I have no doubt, to be honest, that even though they didn’t have it - they could probably find it for me in no time. We’ll see what happens.

At this point I decided I had to give them a copy of my movie, “Jinx!” and they gladly accepted. They told me it would be available on Tuesday (yesterday) and then they invited me to a BBQ the next day, where the men crowded around the grill and talked exploitation movies instead of sports, and I felt at peace, like moving to Los Angeles wouldn’t be such a bad thing if I could meet people like this.

You can also call them if you are looking for something really rare and they can burn it for you for a fee and send it over. Which I’m planning to do with some stuff I want, despite the fact that I bought so many videos there that I had to buy an extra suitcase to take them all home in.

So if you’re in Los Angeles, and you want to see Jinx! and you don’t have IFC or a computer, head over to Eddie Brandt’s Saturday Matinee and see if it’s available. And tell Donovan and his mom (and the cute dog, who parks it in the Western section) Adam said hi.

For more info, including directions and such, visit them online at www.ebsmvideo.com.

Thank you so much to everyone who came out for the “Jinx!” screening yesterday at the LA Shorts Film Festival. There were plenty of people in the audience, and we screened with a series of really great shorts by some very talented filmmakers. The film was the last film in the group, and it seemed a fitting end for a series of comedy shorts with an absurdist element. Now I can finally relax and focus on my next short and our upcoming screening on the IFC Channel on September 21st (Friday) at 10:45PM!!! More on that to come in the next few days.

Thanks again!!!

As I’ve been driving around L.A. there’s been a kind of unsettling feeling swelling up in the pit of my stomach, flaming up the spot where my ulcer used to be. It’s so quiet around L.A., I’m completely thrown off, and all the empty time sitting in cars driving here and there leaves too much time for pondering thoughts and obsessions that end up turning into depression. Maybe it’s the fact that I don’t know where I’m going a lot of the time that makes me so uneasy. Or it could be the fact that I have the strangest feeling that my GPS is playing tricks on me, lying and telling me to take directions that don’t exist. When I get home at night, or even when I’m walking to and from my car in a parking lot in the morning, I’m constantly checking over my shoulder to make sure something bad isn’t going to happen.

Even though the festival is going well, I’m still on edge a lot. One possible theory could be my total obsession with David Lynch movies, specifically his Los Angeles - dual personality trilogy Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, and Inland Empire. All three present a view of L.A. where horrifyingly strange things enter the calm existence of normal life. Mystery Men haunt his L.A., strange harbingers of death and memory who appear as if out of nowhere.
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“Somebody slap me. No, somebody slap me, ’cause I know I’m looking good. I’m giving attitude all over the room. People are staring at me - I just - I just look too good for these people.”

- Klymaxx “The Men All Pause”

I left for the opening night of the LA Shorts Film Festival around 5:15. I was wearing my new Uniqlo jeans, my grey Built By Wendy T-Shirt, and a black pin striped button down I’d bought at the GAP before I left. My hair looked good, but I was starting to get a zit on my right cheek. I hopped in my rental car, a red Chevy Impala which everyone who’s had the chance to ride in it has remarked, “This is a pretty sweet rental.” I ruffled through my bag from Amoeba music which had the CD’s I’d bought there on Tuesday - Cerrone, Bettye Lavette, Betty Everett, Soul Sides Volume 2, Oneness of Juju, and of course Klymaxx’s Meeting in the Ladies Room.

I picked the last entry from the bag and slid it into the CD player. “The Men All Pause” was the first song on the speaker - a tale of a lady who looks so good that everywhere she goes, duh, the men all pause. The thumping freestyle beats and the over-the-top attitude-y lyrics perked me right up, and I was ready to rape the festival of all it’s good times. I turned on V.I.C.I., which is the name I gave to my GPS Navigation device, inspired by the show Small Wonder.

V.I.C.I. : Turn right on Broadway, then turn left.

Me: Thank you V.I.C.I.

Of course it was rush hour, and there were moments of tense, semi bumper-to-bumper traffic, but I’d given myself enough time - not needing to be at the festival until around 6:30. The event was scheduled to start at 7:30, and as the festival stressed - tickets would sell out, filmmakers were not guaranteed a ticket (though I didn’t see a single person there who wasn’t wearing a filmmaker badge). But with the the Klymaxx ladies singing about being in love with a video gamer (”I can be the fruit, and he can be my Pac Man”), any worry I had about the evening sort of dissipated.
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