iMix Musical Preview

While you're all waiting for the movie's imminent release -- early in 2006 -- here's a little musical preview for you, an iTunes mix of songs that inspired the movie:

Blood + Kisses iMix

All of these are pretty kickass songs. Some of them we actually used to cut certain scenes to ie: the opening seduction/kill scene (Courtney Love - Hold on to Me) and the confrontation between the Countess and Raven (Tricky - Aftermath). Others were inspirational in a more thematic way (Joy Division - Love Will Tear Us Apart, Johnny Cash - Hurt) both of which in one way or another sum up the themes of love & loss, pain & pleasure, guilt & sin, sex & violence, that run through the film. Others were used as musical touchtones for creating the final score (the scores for Suspiria and The Good, the Bad & the Ugly).

Finally, there's the music of Octavius. When I heard this CD I thought "Here's the man who should be creating music for this movie." Then we went out and hired him. His music is amazing. But you'll hear that soon enough. In the meantime, check out these tracks on iTunes.

Enjoy. G

Simmering...

Things have been quiet on the surface, but simmering underneath. Robert, Denise and I took a trip to the AFM, or American Film Market, in Santa Monica a few weeks ago. Armed with a handful of screeners, we met with a number of distributors. Offers are already starting to come in, but we are waiting to present the finished movie after the beginning of the new year when all the finishing touches are in place.

Standby for further details.

G

Colors and Shadows

Our new colorist, Lyn Gaza, continues to do an amazing job with the movie, giving it a rich, deep look with a few unusual surprises. She's crushed the blacks so that the shadows in the movie are a crisp, impenetrable, cold, creepy darkness. One of the reasons we hired her was because of her own work as a photographer. It is truly gorgeous work. You can check it out here: GAZAPHOTO.COM . Her husband, Michael Manning, too, is an accomplished artist. Although I haven't met him, I have admired his sexy and lushly illustrated graphic novels. You can check out his work at THESPIDERGARDEN.NET . Be forewarned, it is very erotic and not for the faint of heart.

B+K FFFand IMDB

In preparation for the AFM, the American Film Market, where we are meeting with distributors to negotiate the upcoming release of our movie, we are working furiously on two fronts...

1) FFF (a.k.a. Finishing the Fucking Film). What can I say. After 10 months of editing, we are still fine-tuning this beast. And it continues to get better. Those of you who saw the film at the festival in Vegas will be surprised by some of the changes, including three new scenes and a lot of new music by William Marshall, a.k.a. Octavius. In addition to putting the finishing touches on the music, we are doing the fine-tuning of the color, with the help of artist and colorist Lyn Gaza who is doing some amazing work. Thinking out of the box is the mode we're in and we've got a couple surprises in store here as well.

2) PROMOTION (a.k.a. The Hype Machine) At a seminar recently, Eli Roth (director of Cabin Fever) touted the importance of posting pictures and trivia on the IMDb as his single most important marketing tool. Since Eli seems to have done a thing or two right, we decided to follow his lead. We spent hours selecting just the right pics. Actually, if you count all the time we've spent selecting pictures and scrolling through the entire movie looking for frame grabs, the process has collectively taken more like... weeks of work. You can check out the IMDb listing for B+K and go to PHOTOS to see the pics. Many of them are already on the official website, but there are a couple of new ones as well. Here's the link: BLOOD + KISSES IMDB. In addition, Denise has posted a small gallery of some of her most gorgeous shots (photography courtesy of Robert) on her individual listing. But with thousands of images in her master collection we can promise more to come. Here's the link for that: DENISE MASINO IMDB. No photo gallery for the director, but here's my listing and some of my previous film credits in case you're curious G SIMPSON IMDB. Still working on the Trivia items but those should be posted soon...

More to come.

G