Stuck is the 1st of my Moment Series that I’m creating through Theatre Junkies. The idea is that it is a single moment in time in a character or characters’ life. There is no exposition, no denouement. Just a slice of life moment that lets the audience decide what is really going on. It takes serious prep on the actors part. Our first one took 2 weeks of rehearsal and 3 different shoots over 2 and a half months (and its only 6 minutes long). I watched all the daily’s from the first shoot and said “We can do better.” then the second shoot “We can do better.”, finally decided we had gotten specific enough on the 3rd shoot to have completed moment #1: STUCK. The actors tell the story, not the writer (who is me) and not the director (there actually is no director. I guide the shoot in terms of what I’m after in that moment, then we have a camera operator, but the goal is to never CUT, so it’s a single take, and as little camera as possible. So no swooping shots, no establishing shots, no editing cuts at all.) Anyway, that’s the idea. Even on set, there is no “ACTION, there is no “CUT”. The actors are in character the entire time while the shoot takes place. Why did I create The Moment Series? So that we actors could get back to the root of what we do, AND to focus on a single moment filled with many beats, ultimately to sharpen my own craft as an actor and that of my company. So it’s very experimental. I don’t think most people will get it, nor do I think most people will like it, hahaha, but we are having fun doing it while we continue to explore the process of my moment series through Theatre Junkies productions.

NEXT IN PRODUCTION: We will start shooting more of the Moment Series, as well as a series of shorts we Theatre Junkies will make what I’m calling Shoot-to-Shoots. Simply my group doing what we’ve been doing since college together, grabbing a camera and shooting little things for the sake of shooting. i.e. for fun. Shoot-to-Shoots are somewhat the opposite of MOMENT SERIES in that shoot-to-shoots have NO rules at all. WE can do whatever we want. Just to play. We just met last night to plan our first one that we will shoot here in LA in the next many weeks.

ALSO: Before the year is out, we will refocus our attention on completing the Kurt Kuenne black-and-white film series which includes a.) Rent-a-Person b.) Validation c.) Slow d.) The Phone Book, all of which have been shot and have played the festival circuits. We will shoot 3 more of these films to complete this series which all together will be about 90 minutes long. But our trusty comrade Kurt needs to rest after we complete Shuffle, so we may not tackle these until the end of the year.