As many of you may already know, on November 14 the final deadline for our Kickstarter fundraising campaign came and went, not with a bang, but with a whimper, and while I’ve never lost my faith in the project, us, or our Divine destiny, I’d be lying if I said it didn’t come with some disappointment (and maybe one or a few nights of angry binge drinking. What can I say, we’re not bullet-proof?)
Pity parties notwithstanding, the days that followed proved extremely productive in terms of determining the direction Raging Dogs is supposed to go from here. First let me get one thing out of the way: Whispers from the Dark, Vol. 1 will happen; it has never been a question of “if,” but when. Having said that, it’s going to have to be put back on the shelf for now; it’s time has not yet come.
Joel Osteen has said more than once (and I’m paraphrasing because I’m too lazy to look up the actual word-for-word quote), “If you can accomplish your dream on your own, it’s not big enough.” That was the case with Whispers the way we were going to make it. The plan was to keep it pretty simple: though it required a couple of pretty heavy effects and an amount of money we’ve never even seen before, much less had our hands on, it still seemed pretty easily doable while remaining a big step forward for us. And it was, just not big enough.
Just before I gave us the green light to move forward on Whispers, I had finished the first draft of a new script that completely took over my imagination. Each night after my wife went to sleep, I couldn’t wait to get back to my desk, light my antique oil lamp (I’m a dork), and see what happened next. Even though I knew more or less where the story was going, each night was filled with new discoveries and the result, at the risk of sounding vain, is a script that I would love even if it wasn’t my baby; if this was a film written and directed by someone else, I would walk out of the theatre totally in love with this movie. That’s the project we should have been focused on making all along.
Which isn’t to say that Whispers from the Dark, Vol. 1 won’t be awesome when we do get around to making it. On the contrary, we’ve re-thought our approach to it in a way that will make it even more exciting to watch: going back to its original Creepshow-inspired roots, the plan is to give it an all-star cast. It’s not about stunt-casting–the stories are strong enough on their own, they don’t need that in order to deliver–but how cool was it, for instance, to see Sam from Cheers get buried up to his neck by Frank Drebin from Naked Gun?
When trying to decide what his next picture should be, Robert Rodriguez once asked Guillermo del Toro which project he thought he should do. Del Toro’s response (again, not checked for word-for-word accuracy): “Whichever one give’s you the biggest boner.” I’ve had a real rager for Untitled Michael Angelo Supernatural Thriller (or as we affectionately call it around here, simply Untitled) ever since I first started working out the idea with sloppy, handwritten notes. Everything about that project feels right for this chapter in the history of Raging Dogs, and it’s a real page-turner (we’ll talk more about it in future posts). There’s another chapter later on called Whispers from the Dark, Vol. 1; I hear it’s pretty killer, too.
-Michael Angelo
writer, director, lead Dog
