Ladies and gentlemen, we have a movie! Those of you who are fans of Scott Andrew (a.k.a. Scott Andrew LePera, or Scott Andrew and the Walkingbirds) will recognize the title of our movie as the title of one of his songs, which Scott Andrew was gracious enough to allow us to use, and, well, sort of adapt.
Here’s the thing. There are tons of movies based on other forms of media, mostly books. The Tohubohu film The Big Lie That Solves Everything, however, is sort of a lateral interpretation of his song. It was written independently, but with the knowledge that we had permission to use Scott Andrew’s music. On the way back from the writing session on Friday night, the director and I queued up the Walkingbirds on Bill’s iPod to pick a song. We already had the rough draft of the script in hand, so the way we were listening to the songs was obviously colored by the story in our minds, but when we hit “The Big Lie…” we were floored. When you listen to the song on its own, the clearest interpretation is that it’s a song about a relationship gone wrong. But when you hear it in the closing credits for our film, it’s scary how the lyrics transmogrify themselves into something completely different.
It’s funny. Of the three films I’ve produced with Tohubohu, The Big Lie That Solves Everything is probably the closest to my own personal storytelling sensibility. I had a hand in steering the direction of the story, but at root it was the brainchild of Lauren Walsh, Jeremy Sands, Tim Randall, and Ryan Williams. They wrote the story, crafted the dialogue and the scenes, and then Tim and Stuart Scotten (our lead actors) worked with Bill to make the story really live, but it’s scary how much this film feels like one of my short stories. It’s like experiencing something that another version of me wrote, and thoroughly enjoying it – which is teaching me something new about the world of film production. I create websites and software and stories because there are things out there which I want to experience but can’t because they don’t exist yet – and this weekend that really extended into our filmmaking. I’m tickled pink.
Is The Big Lie… likely to be as popular as Screening Process was last year? Probably not – its ending isn’t exactly happy, it’s not an over-the-top comedy, and so on, but at the same time I’m insanely happy with it. For the first time, I got to bring in my old friend Andy Rozsa to compose a kick-ass score for it, my friend Nick Ferraro showed up to help out as a production assistant, David was in town to provide photography services, and of course I got to work with my old friends in the Tohubohu gang – not to mention meet a bunch of new guys who are all absolutely incredible characters that I wish I’d known while I was living in DC. Oh, and I got to design the logo for this one too, and create the closing credits – which might or might not work, since they’re only the second thing I’ve ever made in Flash intended for video output.
All in all, this weekend was amazing. Educational, a lot of fun, and inspiring. Exhausting, too, but I wouldn’t trade it for the world.
Stay tuned. We’ll try and get the actual film up on our site this week. In the meantime, check out the logo and general aesthetic – the clash of mythology systems, of good and evil, of Arabian and sans serif fonts…

Coming soon to a website near you. 🙂