It Starts With Murder!

I've never really been a fan of sports. I directly attribute this to being beaten up by jocks through most of my formative years. Watching those same jocks get the academic glad-hand for possessing basic ball-handling abilities didn't help my attitude much, either. It's the classic high school story: musclebound boneheads get all of the privilege, while trod-upon weaklings become angst-ridden delinquents. Get John Hughes on the Ouija Board, please.

Anyhoo, as an adult my attitude hasn't changed much. Many of my former "punk rock" friends have grown into rabid sports buffs-- a side effect of living in one of the most successful college sports towns on the map, I guess. That situation tends to have the opposite effect on me. Whenever Game Day approaches our fair city, I find myself enveloped by a cloudlike misery that hovers over me for most of my waking hours. Everything in town grinds to a halt so that we may cater to this infestation of rage-addicted knuckleheads and their tailgating, half-witted followers. And what do we get in return? A sharp spike in date rapes, bar brawls, and hit-and-run accidents. Fratboys puking in our yards. Sounds like a fair trade to me.

Organized sports seem to encourage a specific kind of passive participation, one that is encouraged on a mass scale. I somehow doubt that the average sports fan would rush out and join an athletic team-- their swollen livers and hardened arteries would probably prohibit this, anyway-- and why should they, when the most active way to support your favorite team involves sitting around a keg with your buddies, stuffing hot wings in your face, and shrieking at a plasma screen TV?

"Now, Mr. Manilow," you may say, "For someone who spends much of their time sitting around and watching movies, you sure seem to sling a lot of mud at the televised sports industry." As true as that may be, there is a key flaw in your reasoning: televised sports encourage most people to sit on their asses. Watching movies encourages me to go out and be creative.

Which brings me to THIS (a point that has absolutely nothing to do with my previous rant):




Our first movie-- three years in the making!-- is going to screen locally at Liberty Hall!

Shot for the low, low price of 500 bucks (700 if you count the price of the camcorder), IT STARTS WITH MURDER is much less than low-budget-- it's ZERO BUDGET. The image and sound quality are a little rough-- we had no money for film or boom mic, so we shot on a handheld DV camera and beefed up the audio in post-- but I really think that's part of the charm. This is an UNDERGROUND movie, after all-- anyone who shows up expecting Michael Bay-style production is going to leave sorely disappointed.

Here's a trailer-- NSFW, by any stretch of the imagination:



Thanks for tuning in. You may now continue with the rest of your day-- enriched, I hope, by what you have just seen here.

It Starts With Murder!