Al Gore and the Deluxe "Face/Off" DVD

The Astaire & Rogers project is finally winding down, with our deadline being the end of this week. Thank Christ! Although I've actually had somewhat of a creative good time working on it this past week and weekend. It's going to be a great piece after all.

Last week Eric, the head of Sparkhill, came by my edit bay and asked if I'd be interested in a specific project that had a two and half week turnarond; the DVD supplement for Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth". Cool. I'm definitely up for that, I said. I've been wanting to see the documentary in theaters for some time and now have an excuse. Even though they have a screener here which I will use for the piece, I'd still like to check it out on the big screen first. So tonight I'll be heading over to the Arclight for a viewing. There's actually some talk of having Al Gore come to Sparkhill to do an interview.
Wow! However they seem to think a shooting crew may have to go wherever he is at the time.

In the meantime, one disappointment turned into more than I could have hoped for.

Last Friday there was a scheduling meeting in the conference room. Later I went in to check the project board only to find that "Face/Off" had been completely removed. Hey?!!! I was living for that project! But again, that board changes every few days, so I tried to keep optimistic that it would reappear down the road.

The next day I learned that Director John Woo, John Travolta, and Nicholas Cage had talked with one another recently about the lack of a special edition for the film, and that they were interested in participating. So at the moment Paramount is reassessing the whole thing with the notion of creating a deluxe edition DVD. Woohoo! The previous version I was scheduled to take on would've been sort of a cheapy version; one featurette and a few trailers, probably with commentary. The studio's goal now is to pull out all the stops, and I have to say I am extremely happy about that!! Still nothing on when we'll actually be starting the project but it sounds like it'll be sometime this year. Because thisis now going to be a much bigger undertaking I probably wont be the only editor working on it. However I'm sure they'll give me first crack at which ever pod I want to tackle. So in the end all is well. Aaaahhh.....