Pretty Scary Stuff!

I have been working my butt off to create some new material for my class on Horror and Thriller screenwriting on Sunday. Tuesday I wrote 10 single spaced pages on Contained Thrillers (5,327 words), and Wednesday I was a slacker and only wrote 2,234 words on Creative Kills for the horror half. Thursday I'll do more on the horror half and hopefully a piece on Paranoia Thrillers. I've also been watching a stack of horror films, both old and new.

The Sunday Class - Info!

Sometimes people ask why a guy with a bunch of produced thriller and action films is teaching a class on horror... and aside from having written a bunch of horror scripts that almost got made - including a horror movie for *Lifetime* - when I first moved to Los Angeles a couple of friends of mine and I produced a series called THE DEAD BEAT (hey, I came up with that title!) that was kind of the Entertainment Tonight of Horror Movies. My friends would drive down from the Bay Area and crash at my apartment and then we'd go out and shoot interviews all day for a few days, they'd go back and edit them and then when the Fangoria Horror Movie Convention came to town they'd be crashing at my apartment and we'd sell the tapes at the show. After spending three days at Fango a little over a week ago with one of the guys - Rod - and he e-mailed me a link to this Behind The Scenes of the Dead Beat Videozine from 1992! Shot by one of Rod's friends from the crew, which is why he's the star (beard and ponytail then, now... bald). I have horror stories about shooting these...



I was so much thinner then! Did you see Frank Darabont? My old apartment was in there, too (PSYCHO poster) - we'd sometimes shoot interviews there, and Jeff Combs (RE-ANIMATOR) almost died in my office chair when he leaned back in it and it snapped... and he slammed onto the floor! But we had some of that green reanimation fluid and injected him and....

- Bill

PS: I missed free chicken two days in a row! On Monday, I biked past a KFC and there was no one there, but when I biked back at dinner time - the line was halfway down Lankershim! Pretty much the same story with Pollo Loco on Tuesday, except when I went back at 8pm... they'd stopped giving away chicken. Pisser! I ate there anyway. Wednesday was 31 cent ice cream day at Baskin Robbins... and I got my ice cream!