Exactly 10 years
ago today I wrote an email to everyone telling them
there was a location change for my last show.
Amazingly I'm doing the same thing now. The Journey
show is now at The Continent, Saturday January 2nd,
2010 at 7:30pm. However, the story leading up to that
change is one that will be part of Journey lore
forever...
So my mother got
me this print in 1997 after a particularly difficult
year...
Crisis
& Opportunity - Opportunity is always
present in the midst of
crisis
The
Chinese word for crisis carries two
elements, danger and opportunity. No
matter the difficulty of the
circumstances, no matter how dangerous the
situation, ... at the heart of each crisis
lies a tremendous opportunity. Great
Blessings lie ahead for the one who knows
the secret of finding opportunity within
each crisis.
Always lived like
this, I really believe it's either in you or not. It's
my one constant: take every single crisis or bad
situation and jump even bigger to turn that one bad
situation into something good. The Lemonade Life as my
biography will be entitled. :-)
However, I'm not
sure I've ever seen it work out this well or require
so little effort on my part. Simply put an absolutely
crushing crisis has turned into a nearly euphoric
opportunity that I'm barely processing. I think it
will redefine all of 2010. No
exagerration.
So when I went to
load my footage of my WTVN interview, my HD Camera
simply told me "remove the tape". Cleaning the heads
didn't work, and the tape worked fine in my other
camera (which can't load footage due to a bad firwire
port). No tapes worked in the bad camera and after
literally hours I realized I was in trouble. I had no
way of loading any footage... or shooting the big part
of the movie with Jess on the 3rd. I would have
to buy a new HD camera...
...except nearly
every HD Camera is tapeless now. Which meant,
I was really in trouble as I have about 90 HDV
tapes that in the future I'll need access to. For
fuck's sake. I put a status on Facebook and a day
later I hear back from Cassie (Smiley Girl for
longtime Journey readers). Yes my bizarre stroll down
Journey memory lane continues as 2005 jumps up and
saves my ASS. She's pretty connected in the film
community out here and after a couple of close calls,
find a guy with my exact Canon HV20 that was willing
to let me use it to load my footage.
On Tuesday I met
with Peter John Ross, he actually works for a
production house here in town, and we sat and talked
while I loaded the two 40 minute pieces of the
interview. Great guy, we could've talked for 2 days.
Both film geeks, camera geeks, editing software geeks
- and a FELLOW PC USER! HA! There Pat! We
have another brother in the war. Peter (or John or
Ross or whatever the hell first name he goes by, I'm
not sure yet) has actually directed some big films and
has spent some time in LA. So again, we could've
talked forever.
Topic shifts to
The Journey show on the 2nd and he says: "Man, I
hope you didn't pay too much for that, I could've
gotten you an actual movie theater."
<gulp>
"Seriously, the
guy running The Continent now has an incredible
digital projector - if your stuff is HD, you'll be
blown away."
<gulp
x2>
First of all, The
Continent was THE movie theater when I was a kid. I
saw ET the first time there. Back to The Future. My
greatest childhood memories were in those seats and...
holy shit I just had a flashback of Kathy Ann Martin
and Dances with Wolves. Remember how you'd pick the
really LONG movies with your girlfriend so you had
more time together? Yeah. That was awesome. Anyway,
the theater had shut down, and then reopened and
I honestly thought it had shut down again. It
used to be a happening area up to the mid-90s and just
dropped off after bigger places went in. But an actual
movie theater? If this place had room in the front for
me to set up my keyboard to perform the songs?
Sheeeeeeeit. This was a goldmine...
...I called the
manager up and went down earlier tonight to test out
my laptop with some of my HD files. I saw the theater
and gotta say, it's perfect. A good 20 feet from
screen to first row and the screen is just massive. I
was pretty excited. And then we got it up and
running...
No video will ever
do this justice. It looks so absolutely incredible,
I'm completely confused by the technology. The pure HD
stuff looks so filmlike, and so flawless, it's making
me reconsider every goal I've ever had in life.
I watched one section I had finished of the
show for the 2nd, and folks - it's a documentary.
Like, it's a real, full-fledged, professional
documentary. I came down into the theater and stood in
the middle watching it and absolutely welled up a bit
and couldn't close my jaw. I was a freaking
movie-star. Like that little 9 year old kid feeling
you got when you saw movies on the big screen? That's
how I felt. My dad sat in the back grinning ear to
ear, my little brother and his friend were there... we
were just dumbfounded. The scene when I'm on the phone
with my father waiting for the Living Room Live
announcement was so overwhelming to me I could barely
keep from jumping through the ceiling.
Simply put it
takes every ounce of emotion already in The Journey
and amplifies it 100 times. This coming from a guy who
has a 10 foot movie screen in his house. It's the size
of the room being so tall and wide... I mean I
believe it's 50 feet across. And with a couple hundred
people in there? I'm freaking jonesing. I am so
excited for the 2nd I can't even handle it. It
completely shifts the focus from the live singing part
to the movie and truth be told, I wish I had
planned differently because I could probably
have had the actual movie done for the show on the
2nd and just premiered it. Christ who am I kidding.
With Comedy Central running me to mid-November? no
way. That premiere will continue to be April 1st...
and I know exactly where it's gonna be.
And that film?
Whew - the first thing I do when I get back to LA
now is look into the copyright issues because if
I can get the OK from CBS and a few other
things, I will recreate all the rest of the music and
hell even pay for rights to a couple of songs just to
hit the festival circuit. To my knowledge, there's
just never been a film like this. The intimacy of
these thousand videos is something most people never
have and it's also usually done well after the fact.
To have chronicled everything this closely for this
long? Seeing it all together is just an unbelieveable
story. I wish every single one of you could be
there on the 2nd. No way in hell I could get a
theater this size in LA without spending
thousands.
YAHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOo!!!!
Adam
PS - Goddamnit
I just realized I can't load the footage because
I used Peter's camera AT his work. Never even thought
about future video uploads. Shit and with the
holidays? I'll never be able to get it until next
week. Oh well, The Journey will have to wait. Now,
back to editing the monstrosity...
