Fan Cinema Today

JUNE, 2007 UPDATE: Writing this book is a slow, painstaking process that is driving me crazy, and I love every minute of it. With the first month of work officially done, I’ve written about 9,000 words or so; when you add that to the 14,000 I’d already written prior to signing the deal, it’s a great start on a book that is contractually required to be no more than 85,000 words.

Of course, people don’t buy a book based on word-count; they buy it ’cause there’s something interesting in it that they wanna read. Well, if you like fan films, comics, sci-fi or history, you’re gonna dig Homemade Hollywood; in the last month, I’ve interviewed people like Sandy Collora (Batman: Dead End; World’s Finest); Kevin Rubio (Troops and the upcoming Star Wars CGI TV series); Don Glut (TV writer for He-Man, Transformers, Land of the Lost, film director, and author of the Empire Strikes Back novel); Cris and Cort Macht (The Force Among Us); Bruce Cardozo (Spider-Man Vs. Kraven from 1974); and Michael Wiese (producer of Hardware Wars). Throw in hours of research on top of that, and you have a pretty hardcore month of hard work. It’s a lot of fun to write, though, and I’d enjoy talking with these folks even if it wasn’t for a book. Ironically, because I’m writing it, I’m the first person to legally make money from fan films!