Author: remedy

We are pleased to announce that REMEDY is officially opening CineKink 2013 in New York City on February 27!!! (That’s two days after the director’s birthday.)

We are still accepting (and needing) donations and investors — now more urgently than ever — so please do not hesitate to contact us at info@remedyfilm.com or donate by clicking the button on the home page.

For more information about the festival, here are some links…

CineKink
“The kinky film festival”
NYC – February 26-March 3, 2013
web: http://www.cinekink.com
twitter: http://twitter.com/cinekink
facebook: http://www.facebook.com/cinekink

Expect new trailers, new photographs, and new everything else over the next few weeks!

From the IMDB: Lost in La Mancha is a documentary depicting “Terry Gilliam’s attempt to get The Man Who Killed Don Quixote off the ground. Back injuries, freakish storms, and more zoom in to sabotage the project (which has never been resurrected).”

There are two recent films first time directors are cautioned never to watch. They are the film equivalents of referencing Macbeth in a theater. One is Living in Oblivion, a narrative feature about the making of a flawed low-budget independent film starring Steve Buscemi as the frazzled director. The other is the movie referenced above. A documentary. And it is not as easily dismissed as a fictional comedy — for this is the TRUE story of a director who never realizes his dream project.

I have of course watched both these films in the last month. Consider the “biography” of Remedy and you will understand exactly how masochistic this is.

Fall 2007: I conceive of a short experimental film for my MFA thesis about my experience working as a pro-domme and sub. I wrote a treatment for an “experimental narrative” about my time working in a dungeon, weaving a “contrapuntal relationship between extreme subjectivity, dizzying close-ups, uncomfortable intimacy” and “very normal, expository, almost sterile atmospheres once the sessions are over.” It was also going to include “intentional digital degradation” and “possibly some stop-motion animation.” (Direct quotes from my thesis proposal.)

October 19, 2007: I break my leg playing roller derby and am bedridden for 6 weeks at my parents’ house in New Jersey. I limp back to New York with a feature length script.

2008: I hold casting for the main characters, including Remedy. I cast many Remedies, and many agents then veto the project on the actors’ behalf. I am having significant trouble casting certain clients. I finally have a chunk of cast and a Remedy (Kira Davies) signed to the film by the winter and I start shooting in December.

December 2008: Our first day of shooting is in Herald Square on the coldest night of the year. We have a successful few hours and return to the parking spot to find my car towed with Kira Davies purse in the trunk.

2009: Much of the year is spent shooting, albeit sporadically, when I have enough money to pay my cast and crew *anything*. That fall, a personal tragedy (not mine) thwarts the production schedule, and we are on hold for another three months.

Early spring 2010: A camera falls off the tripod. This camera belongs to the school and it takes two months to repair.

Fall 2010: I purchase a newer version of the camera I borrowed from the school. I shoot furiously. I work furiously to make money to afford more shooting. By the beginning of 2012, I’ve completed shooting and started post production.

Now a lot has happened this fall since the final sprint to completion began. We’ve had technical difficulties, scheduling problems, ADR-thwarting illness, and even a freak power outage for no reason. But the last week has been a special sort of torture, something to which Terry Gilliam would most certainly relate.

As of two weeks ago, the film had most of the ADR recorded (and it’s fantastic) both at Thump Studio in Greenpoint and my father’s studio in New Jersey, which after a bunch of microsurgery and maintenance, is finally creeping toward state of the art again, despite the imminent obsolescence or meltdown of my 2008 Mac Pro that runs it.

Despite limitations and inconveniences, the results have been astoundingly good, and we’ve even gotten a good chunk of the scoring done. To that end, we wanted to send a cut with a mix of these new elements to the SXSW, Rotterdam, Berlinale, Ann Arbor, and Cinefest festivals — we’re always looking to disprove prejudices against the production and post-production qualities of low budget film.

Now, each of these festivals had their received-by deadlines on either Halloween or November 1. I recognized that we were cutting it close, and figured, if I got the mix from my engineer in time to synch it before last Friday, I would be in good shape. But it wasn’t possible. The NYC studio had scheduling conflicts, so I’d have to wait until Sunday… one day before a FRANKENSTORM was to hit New York, possibly shutting down the postal service, but as many of these festivals accept digital uploads, I thought I’d be reasonably okay.

So my engineer arrives in Jersey with the Pro Tools session. It doesn’t open. We trash preferences. The session doesn’t open. We reinstall ProTools. The session doesn’t open. It’s starting to get windy. I have to get back to the city. My boyfriend has rented a Mac Laptop for me to edit this on after I’ve dropped the wav into the timeline, and the session file will not open and there’s a FRANKENSTORM on the way.

So I get in my car and instruct the engineer to attempt to download an update (that will take 8 hours for the farm speed internet connection to muster), and I haul ass to Manhattan and brace myself for the winds. My hope: the ProTools update would allow the session to open and I’d get a wav in my Dropbox in a few hours, with just enough time to marry the sound and video, trim out a bit, and upload the film to somewhere and then…………….

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSH!
FZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZT.

I live in Lower Manhattan. (No water. No heat. No power. Two cats.)

My boyfriend lives in the East Village. (Water. Gas. No power. No heat.)

The machine that can open the ProTools file lives in Greenpoint. (Flooded.)

My father’s studio is in the middle of nowhere, NJ. (Generator only works in the house. Studio is without power indefinitely.)

That transformer that blew and plunged half of Manhattan into darkness was a mere seven blocks away from where I was tensely curled on a sofa with a laptop. If you want to see some serious end of Kiss Me Deadly shit, click here.

So, yes. I was a victim of the blackout. I still am. I’m typing this from an apartment in Brooklyn and I got here by walking over the Williamsburg Bridge. I have a car, but I can’t use it without 2 other passengers until the subways are running again. I am finally getting that mix tonight after I skate up the East River bank to Greenpoint, and will wed it to the video and spend tomorrow cutting and burning so that the festivals, which GENEROUSLY agreed to accept late entries, will still welcome Remedy into the submission pool. He just tested to confirm we’re meeting.

Oh, note that I said I’m skating to Greenpoint… did I mention that when we were walking through Williamsburg this happened…

Anyway, if all goes according to plan, which it never does, this cut will be on its way to the Midwest, Texas, The Left Coast and Europe by Saturday… just in time for lights to come on at home, the fridge to experience a thorough cleaning bordering on baptism, and for me to Escape from La Mancha.

If you’re feeling charitable, please give some bucks to people who really need it — I’ve got friends in Jersey who won’t be going home for weeks. Many people from my neighborhood can’t return to their basement apartments at all. There are people in my building who have been residents since the 1950s who cannot answer the door and need volunteers to climb 19 flights to deliver them food and water.

As for me, yes, it got dark — very dark — but I was lucky.

But if you have a few bucks left over, Remedy could certainly use it. These delays have been costly. Remember that we get the money as it comes in, not after the end of the campaign — Indiegogo is wonderful that way.

The Remedy team is working hard to get the perks for the last round of donations together, so that we can make people happy with tee-shirts and posters. In the last week, I’ve written twenty dirty poems, and I will continue to write more.

So that’s the update. More as conditions improve. Thanks for reading.

This weekend please join us at SMack! for their 16th Annual Halloween Fetish Ball “HELL-O-WEEN II”
NYC’s Premiere Multimedia Fetish Play Party returns with this years Debauchery
New York City’s Longest Running Fetish Event!

Xris SMack is a talented multimedia artist and has inspired many things, but his world famous events are where Remedy got her start. Please join us this Saturday 10/27 to celebrate kink and see some very salty sneak peeks of Remedy for your visual stimulation.

To purchase tickets please visit:

http://www.smack-fetish.com/

I don’t make people work for free.

I remember what it felt like when people asked me to work for free and I accepted. First, there was a self-reflected warmth from my benevolence and charity bedazzled by the heap of compliments from the favor-asker about my talents, my hair, my pants, my parallel parking skills…

Second, there was the realization that I was about to be very much exploited, indefinitely, and without recourse.

I resolved, when I made Remedy, never to put anyone in that position. I simply would NOT ask anyone to work for free. No interns. No unpaid non-union actors. If someone said they wanted to donate services, I accepted — but I slept better if I knew I had an invoice coming.

As of right now, I’m in the middle of my second Indiegogo campaign and while its hits exceed that of the first campaign (which raised $5001) by about threefold, the money just isn’t coming in. This is troubling because just one day of post production costs me between $400 and $1500.

Let me break it down like this:

I get the studio time for free. It’s my dad’s barn. I’m fucking lucky.

But I have to pay the engineer, the actors, the musicians, update or repair equipment, buy software so that it won’t take three more months to finish this thing (which would be a disaster if I make it into any one of the six festivals I’ve applied to), and hope that my computer makes it through the day.

Add the cost of promotions, advertising, and marketing — even on a minute scale…

Add the cost of color correction, special effects, music licensing…

Legal fees, accounting fees, festival fees, liability insurance…

You get the point. Or maybe you don’t.

The point is, I cannot finish this film without money, and it’s more money than I can make and still have enough time and energy to complete the film. This is why I’m pimping on every social networking site I can think of. This is what true independent filmmaking means.

But I also cannot bear to ask my friends for *more* money after they’ve already been so generous.

But I can ask my friends to ask their friends to ask their friends to interview me for their blog, and I can hope that the right stranger hears about it and decides they have a few thousand dollars of disposable income to invest.

I can finish this fucking movie, goddamnit.

Now I just need you people to prove me right.