RonnieSortor.com

A friend has offered to host a website for me. "BorderlineEntertainment.com" has been taken since before Dan & Sandra made the old website, Borderline-Entertainment.net which is history now. I decided on the url in this post's title. At the moment it'll just go the SINISTRE MySpace page but maybe I'll make some time to work on a real website...

One foot in the grave

It's been well over a year since the SINISTRE DVD release and any kind of update. Back in April this year, I was running low on copies so I wrote to the distributor asking for more. His reply:

"Sinistre, still plenty, amazingly, mind-bogglingly slow seller. We never sold off the 1000 double feature discs and that includes the couple hundred sent out as screeners!!!!!!!!!"

Wow. Over a year in release, a couple hundred screeners (not to mention all the copies I sent to people who promised to review it and never fucking did), and only one review? (Shock Cinema magazine #31) Fuck. If I could've looked into a crystal ball and seen 13 years into the future, knowing what I know now, to the moment I read that message, I don't know if I would've bothered. If I could travel back in time, I would have shot it on super-8 film at the very least. Then it might stand a chance. Nobody wants a shot-on-analog-video movie anymore. They (the potential audience) never really wanted one in the first place! The VHS release(s) didn't pay off enough to even cover the negative costs and at this point, the DVD is a "mind-bogglingly slow seller" so what else can I do but throw in the towel. Everyone involved with the production had a lot of high hopes for it, but I'm to blame for it's failure. I made a lot of bad decisions concerning SINISTRE. Making it at all in the first place was the first one.

While I'm crying in my beer, here's AtomFilms' response to Dan Skinner's submission of "Remains:"
"Thank you for submitting your film to AtomFilms. We know how much hard work and energy goes into making a film and we appreciate you wanting to share your vision with our audience. Unfortunately, your film does not quite fit our current needs"
Then they suggest sending it to their version of YouTube for all the world to see.. blah, blah, blah...

Whatever.. Fuck it.

Thai RAVAGE

You haven’t lived until you’ve seen your movie dubbed into a foreign language! Wow. What a surreal experience! The Thailand DVD of RAVAGE arrived last week. I turned on the English subtitles, which made it almost seem like someone else’s movie. At last, evidence that my efforts at typing up those tedious dialog-continuity scripts weren’t futile. There were a couple of typos, but nothing as hilarious as your standard Hong Kong flick from the same time period. What was funny was hearing how over-the-top some of the professional voice actors sounded for their respective characters. Best of all, of course was Dan Rowland’s Thai baritone cartoonish bad-guy voice. The good guys & girls sounded a little too sweet and kind while the baddies’ voices were deep and tough. Awesome...
Hopefully, some aspiring filmmaker out there will learn from some of my sound-editing mistakes. A couple of the dialog scenes needed background sound like road noise during a driving-in-the-car scene full of dialog. I never bothered to proof the entire music & effects track other than the big action scenes. Footsteps and other clean stuff recorded on the live track went onto the hi-fi dialog track and I neglected to shift them onto the M & E track a few times. Pretty embarrassing. But that just gets chalked up to so many other flaws a filmmaker cringes at, viewing his own work that most often slips under the radar of the casual viewer. At least those scenes had music there most of the time. Of course, the sound quality of the dubbed Thai dialog was way better than the hissy, mono analog sound. Another artifact of my pre-digital age of micro-budget movie-making. However, a couple of times, I was aware that it was sounding richer than I expected it to. The DVD menu (which is really professional-looking; much better than what’s on the domestic release) identifies the tracks as being Dolby 5.1, so maybe the Thai guys put a little extra effort into sweetening the sound. There are no new separation effects into the surround channels; just the same stuff spread out.
Another oddity was some censorship in the movie. Two bits were eliminated: during the police-station shootout, “Game’s over mother-fucker!” and the shotgunning of the female cop was cut out. That shotgun just magically appears in Lei Renniks' hands! And at the climax, the money shot of Dan’s bloody, screaming death was trimmed. That kinda sucks for the Thai audience that the pay-off has been cut out! But they’ll never know it. From such a cheap little movie, they’ll probably just elicit it as sloppy editing with dime-store make-up effects. Oh well. In a way, it’s kinda satisfying to know that the ultra-violence in my movie was too extreme for Thailand!

diabolikdvd.com has the SINISTRE DVD listed as available. Dunno what's up with that. It's not supposed to be released until April 25th and I haven't heard from the distributor if it's really ready or not. Guess I better send an email to SRS Cinema...

note: Please don't email me via the Borderline Entertainment website. I cannot access my messages there anymore. MySpace is the best way to contact me for the time being. The link is at "Ronnie's blog" on the site.

Foreign DVD releases of RAVAGE

RAVAGE has been released in Thailand and the UK on DVD. I got paid for the UK deal, but not for Thailand. Maybe RAVAGE is still in the red from the Best Buy debacle. Todd got paid for the Thailand deal with KITTY KILLERS but strangely, KK isn't listed on eThaiCD.com yet...
Here's where I ordered my copy of the Thai RAVAGE: http://www.ethaicd.com/show.php?pid=21366
I've got my fingers crossed, hoping that it actually got dubbed into Thai. That'll be a hoot, listening to Dan Rowland screech in the most obnoxious language on the planet!

Sinistre DVD

This week, I'll be assembling masters and supplementary material for the upcoming DVD release of SINISTRE. It'll be a challenge since we no longer own any of the editing equipment that was used to make the movies in the first place. Thankfully, I'd already cut together a behind-the-scenes featurette using footage that Mike Strain and his wife shot eleven years ago on the sets. Even if I had access to all those tapes, there'd be no way to cut it together; let alone the fact that I'd have no time to even review all of it.
At least "Remains" will finally have a home because it will be included as a bonus...

No News.

Title says it all. Just for the two or three of you out there in cyberspace who actually check the Borderline site out of curiosity, here's a courtesy message for you. I showed "Remains" to some out-of-town guests last month, the first and only time since the big winners were announced by Fango, and I had a very difficult time even watching it with them. There's some unpleasant psychological shit going on with me and that little flick. I'm considering drastically re-editing it and resubmitting it for the Blood Drive III, if there ever is a Blood Drive III. That's the only filmmaking possibility for the time being. And it's certainly not definite. So don't hold your breath waiting for me to announce any new projects. I'm too busy. Life's too short. And I don't enjoy filmmaking enough to keep doing it for nothing.

Failure!

The winners of the Fangoria Blood Drive II were announced yesterday. Eight films were picked and mine was not one of them. I've got mixed emotions right now... Five of them came from California, which speaks volumes to me! Guess I should've had a big budget and a fancier-schmancier website and should've spent more time on the forum schmoozing with the judges and hyping my shit...
This just reinforces my philosophy against the whole concept of awards and contests. It's as if the work has no merit until some snotty little judge says so.
Now at least I feel kinda vindicated. I'll elaborate on that statement some day when I have more time and this experience has soaked in...

Fuck.