I won a Filmmaking Weekend in Montana from God!

365: My filmmaking pardner (bink, above, left) and I are off to Montana next weekend to make a movie.

bink's mom wanted bink to help her drive the 570 miles (917 km) to Glendive, Montana. bink was uncertain that she wanted to drive 12 hours straight, mostly across the flatlands of North Dakota--the World's Largest Buffalo roadside sculpture in Jamestown having lost its allure after a few hundred viewings since childhood--just to be stranded in Smalltown USA (pop. 4,670) while her mom attended her all-class high school reunion--and on bink's birthday weekend too.

But I said, "Are you KIDDING? That's prime moviemaking location out there: Take me along--we'll make a movie!"

See, Glendive is in flat, flat, flat eastern Montana, but it's also right next to a strip of the badlands of Makoshika State Park. The land looks sorta like one of those landscapes Captain Kirk scampered about in. They find dinosaur bones out there.

And besides that, some of bink's relatives still own the land her German grandparents used to farm, so we can go shoot in the wheatfields, which look like Days of Heaven (1978, shot in Alberta, Canada, roughly the same part of the world).

bink's mom being amenable (I having promised to provide my own Cheetos for the road and pay the $5 surcharge to sleep on the floor of the Motel 17 room), and bink having bought us a couple of made-in-China cowboy hats ($2.50 each), we are good to go. I feel like I won some "Spend a Filmmaking Weekend in Montana" sweepstakes from god.

We don't have much time to get anything together, of couse, so what I figure is, it'll be like a dry-run for the 48-hour film project: We'll take along a few basic props, and improv the whole shebang.

I work better if I'm not doing several things at once, so what I have to do before we leave is finish The Making of Orestes and the Fly. I don't want to be tripping over my own work when I come back.
The Fly movie itself, all 8 minutes 18 seconds of it, is done! (Well... there are those final 3, or 10, tiny things to fix.) I'm just waiting for the premiere in early October before I upload it in on youTube. I don't know how intelligible it'll be to watch, but it's definitely a work of some kind of genius.

The Fly is my movie, but I couldn't have made it without bink, from the very beginning making the papier mache fly head. I'm like my Pisces zodiac sign: watery. I seek the lowest level of physical exertion. My energy tends to spread out into swampland, where I sit and muse. I think I'm generally interesting to talk to, I just don't get a lot done. bink does. She's a Virgo, an earth sign, and she provides some pressure and direction to my wateriness, like riverbanks do.

bink is always saying we're like French and Saunders, and I am always saying Powell and Pressburger (mostly because I find it reassuring that these collaborators couldn't work on a script together in the same room).
But really, we are well on our way to becoming bink and Fresca, pardners.