Raising Dough & Rockin' the Gator Club

This is an extremely important week for us on many levels, but chief among them is the opportunity to raise the $'s we need to showcase Beautiful Noise at film festivals 'round the world in a non-stop effort to secure Distribution. I made a conscious decision early on in the process to wait until after we made the film and presented it for the first time at the Sarasota Film Festival before I started to ask for the financial support required to take things to the next level. It was a huge gamble 'cause if the movie sucked we'd have been dead in the water. Thankfully, the tremendous response from audiences in the first 3 Sold Out screenings and the rising number of Soundtrack Album CD's being sold at the SFF has me feeling pretty damn good this morning. Not smug, mind you...and not content either. It's just a knowing that comes from watching the faces in the crowd as the reaction to Beautiful Noise vibrates throughout the theatre. The general consensus is that we have a 'sleeper' hit musical-drama & soundtrack on our hands that moves people emotionally. What more can I ask for? How about lots of checks from lots of investors who wanna see this Sarasota motion picture production go global! Thankfully, that's already starting to happen...

The Monday night crowd skewed a bit older demographically. It was a different kind of energy in the room...a less boistrous group than Saturdays' premiere gathering and yet one that you could really tell was locked in to the Story. They laughed at the right places and you could here the sniffles when the Story's drama unfolded. And the audience questions afterwards were focused on how I came to find such an incredible no-name Cast and what's the prequel and sequel going to be about? All in all it was another great night at the SFF.

After the screening a group of us headed down Main Street to the legendary Gator Club where old pal Scott Curts was rockin' the joint. Kimber jumped on stage and delivered a blistering set of covers and original songs...Danielle sang  "Easy" from the film as well as a few other songs...and I got a chance to finally chill out for a coupla hours and reflect on the last few days. Our executive producer Wendy Williams is back in Vancouver producing the upcoming reboot of the "Planet of the Apes" franchise titled "Ceasar - Rise of the Apes", which is a multi-million dollar SFX-laden film starring James Franco, but I know she's also working hard to put Beautiful Noise in front of the studio execs she's working with. It was nice to know that while I shut the engines down to cool my jets, BN is being pitched to some heavy-hitter Hollywood decision makers.

The newspaper broke the news today about the next two BN movies - the prequel Serenade & the sequel Heartlight - that I'm filming back-to-back later this year. It's quite a rush to know that while I'm hitting the international film festival circuit with the current movie that pre-production is set to commence in just a few months on the next 2 films in the BN Franchise. Meanwhile, I'm meeting with people in town to develop the Beautiful Noise stage musical and TV pilot.

It's been a long, hard climb...but this is no time to take a breather. Beautiful Noise is the hottest film and story at the Sarasota Film Festival and the momentum we've created is gonna be leveraged to the hilt.

Timing is everything. And our time has come.

ST