Reinventing ...

The project, as it was, is now dead.

I’ve killed the Getting Lear website.

What happened (on a very long road to completion) is the film split into two pieces. These pieces are as separate and as distinct from one another as two films cut from the same footage can be.

There have been many delays, hang ups, shut downs, and frustrations with this film - many of my own making, but perhaps the biggest block was trying to make one cohesive film out of two separate ideas.

It took the gentle, brilliant, and supportive Stu Omans to show me the way on this. He looked at my forty minute cut of “Getting Lear” – a cut that focused more on dolls than actors, that focused more on directing than acting, and that focused very little on Shakespeare’s King Lear and more on Stu trying to make a movie about King Lear – and said to me “how do we make this work for the grant people.”

I could see in his eyes that my forty minute film was not what he thought we would be delivering to the English Speaking Union. And yet, he never flinched, HE NEVER SAID “NO.”

All along this has been my experience with this Stu Omans character: I bounce an idea off of him and he would commit one hundred percent to it -- “Hey Stu put on a speedo and let me film you swimming,” or “Hey Stu, can you do the scene in a hospital bed instead of a palace?”

Always, Stu said “YES.”

So, when he looked at me, with the glow of my FINAL CUT PRO program bouncing off his face, and said he would back me up “one hundred percent” I knew I owed him a huge debt of thanks – and a movie that would easily satisfy the English Speaking Union grant.

Out came a 60 minute educational doc about King Lear and aging. Employing everything I learned over the last three months editing GETTING LEAR, I am fairly impressed at how well this one hour film flows.

It is not a film that will play festivals, but it should play classrooms.

I cut the film together in five days – five ten hour days.

More important than anything, this is the film Stu was expecting.

The other film is my film: my film about my time with Stu Omans. It’s personal, quirky, and I love it and cannot wait to show it to the world.