Next came A Beautiful Day, talk a little bit about making that movie and the thought that went into that script especially, because it is a pretty dark movie and its very interesting.
Adam: Well, we had spent a lot of time in post production on Bowling Alley and I wrote Charlie, goodness, like eight or nine years ago. Before we jumped into something that we knew would be pretty expansive like Charlie, I wanted to direct again something short – A Beautiful Day. I wanted to hopefully hone my skills a bit. So, at the time – it is kind of crazy the way world kind of cycles around – but at the time there was a lot of really fear about – I mean, it was post 9/11, so there was a lot of religiosity in the news, a lot of fear about that. I wanted to take that idea and bring it to a small town and play with this sort of haunted Americana. I wanted to be like Rob Zombie comes to Mayberry, although not gratuitous or anything like that – just trying to build suspense through the dialog.
After you got it made, you had the controversy with Bare Bones, do you feel that that helped or hurt in the short term especially and I mean it got you a lot of publicity that you might not have got otherwise but at the same time, is all publicity good publicity in that case?
(The festival screening was promoted through a viral campaign playing off the horror of the theme of a group coming to terrorize a small town. People in Muskogee, Oklahoma, where Bare Bones is held, were frightened the campaign was signaling a terrorist attack and called in the FBI. Bare Bones kicked out A Beautiful Day from the festival)
Adam: I absolutely hated, I absolutely hated it. I was despondent. A Beautiful Day had been entered in the festival, the controversy came around Bare Bones Film Festival, and A Beautiful Day and Bowling Alley were both in that festival – both nominated for multiple awards.
Kenny: … and the short – they all three were nominated.
Adam: They were nominated for multiple awards, and a lot of people worked really hard on those films and put a lot of themselves into them, and we were of course booted. I was absolutely despondent, and I was also upset because I felt like we had put together a thoughtful horror film that I wanted people to think about and compel them, and then it became known for a mistaken publicity stunt. I would never have OK’d that, that was not what was intended. So it got us some notoriety, we still have people asking about it, not you but other people. I can’t speak for these guys, but I was actually devastated by that response because I didn’t want to be seen as a jackass. You know, especially – I mean people were freaked out, people in Muskogee were scared and for the wrong reasons.
So were all three of the movies booted out?
Adam: Yeah, and that is the thing that I hated the most. Besides our product that we had done, people that had worked on it and had donated their time. Now their movie, people that were starring in these other films, they are not going to have their show time at a festival.
You were able to get in to other festivals in Oklahoma shortly after that.
Adam: we got into deadCENTER.
Kenny: Probably in some part because of it really.
Adam: I would like to think it was on its own merits. I know why I want to believe that it got into deadCENTER, but of course there was some publicity around it and deadCENTER gave us a showing, and we had a good screening, a packed house and great response. So yeah, we ended up screening it, getting some nice response to it, but it was certainly not the road we planned on going down.
