Holding Patterns

If you’ve done much traveling by plane, chances are you’ve experienced flight delays. And not just long turns sitting at airports, waiting for tardy jets to arrive, but also protracted stretches aboard aircrafts, strapped into seating arrangements, impatiently awaiting clearances to land and/or gate.

These latter delays are especially frustrating. You’ve all but reached your destination, often after a long and turbulent flight, only to be stuck, loitering at the finish line. Aside from anxiety over being so-close-yet-so-far from home, you can sense the swelling restlessness from every soul aboard the vessel. The lingering sighs. The craning necks. The fidgeting feet. It sucks.

For the last twenty months, my life has been in a holding pattern, although not on an airplane.

For those of you who follow this blog, or my work in general, you may recall that in January of last year, the team behind my second musical film, The Devil’s Carnival, went live with an online teaser announcing the imminent release of a sequel. The nine-minute promotional piece featured rap star Tech N9ne as Heaven’s Librarian.

Even though it’s been over a year-and-a-half since the teaser debuted, the promised followup film has yet to manifest. This is not due to a lack of wanting or trying on the part of TDC‘s team, or yours truly. In fact, at the time that the aforementioned trailer dropped, months of negotiations had already taken place with a company set to finance and distribute the episode. Unfortunately, due to a series of unforeseen issues, the deal fell apart at the end zone.

As you might imagine, this sudden dead-end was disappointing as a lot of work and hope had gone into the lost deal.

Picking up the pieces, TDC‘s team and I went back to the drawing board to hunt for capital. The stakes were heightened by the knowledge that we needed to find funds quickly… that is, if there was any hope of achieving the 2013 release date boasted in the Tech N9ne teaser.

Even though this was a tall order—less than a year to find and close financing, plan and shoot a movie, write and record an album, and edit and prepare the final film and soundtrack for public consumption—we were optimistic. Because of TDC‘s awesome fanbase, episode one had such a buzz around it (and we were all so pumped about the project in general), that anything seemed possible.

Operating in good faith that we’d be in production before the year’s end, TDC‘s co-composer, Saar Hendelman, and I set out to write the book and music for part two.

Composing a musical is no small feat. In any scenario—even one where the tunes suck!—it would be a ton of work, but Saar’s and my specific and intensive writing process made the endeavor even more sprawling and bumpy (for a peek into our songwriting techniques, click here).

Believing that a green-light was close, however, and that it’d only be a matter of time before we’d be rushing into full-blown music production, Saar and I worked tirelessly on the episode’s tunes and lyrics, and, in November of last year, completed them. The year’s worth of creative labor culminated in twenty-two musical selections.

The writing journey was both exhilarating and exhausting, and since this twelve-month job was done on spec, it was also financially tasking… but we believed that movie funding was just around the corner, so we hung on by the foreskin of our teeth.

Throughout 2013, several encouraging production prospects arose, so our optimism seemed reasonable, but, one by one, the proposals evaporated. We were hovering in a holding pattern where we could see the runway, but a smooth landing was nowhere in sight.

Fortuitously, my first musical film, Repo! The Genetic Opera, was celebrating its five year anniversary in movie theatres at the same time that Saar and I wrapped TDC 2‘s compositions. To celebrate Repo!‘s theatrical birthday, director Darren Lynn Bousman and I booked a mini-double feature tour. In touring, we were also looking to find renewed joy in our creative accomplishments to counterbalance the year of limbo with TDC 2.

The tour was great, but its conclusion marked the beginning of 2013′s winter holiday season, where Hollywood all but shuts down. Because of this, I was painfully aware that progress on TDC 2‘s production would most likely stall and that our taxiing around the tarmac would continue into 2014.

Darren and I took this industry downtime to put together some flashy (and costly) new TDC sales tools. We wanted to hit the new year armed and running, fighting to keep the project we’d all sacrificed to make alive… especially knowing there was an audience out there just as eager to see a sequel as we were.

The elapsing time, however, especially the reality that much of TDC‘s team would be forced to move on to other projects, was making it obvious that TDC 2 might not happen, and that the music Saar and I slaved over may never see daylight.

Faced with this depressing forecast, as well as the hefty debt I’d incurred from a year without income, I was determined to break the holding pattern, so I started exploring an entirely new music project with Saar, one where we weren’t so at the mercy of factors beyond our control. I was still pushing along TDC part-time, but devoting the majority of my hours to this new endeavor. I even found an angel investor to cover the project’s start-up costs.

Renewed, I dove face-first into this new project with all the passion that creative hunger and financial desperation can inspire, and, six months later, was confident we had developed something every bit as cool and distinctive as Repo! and TDC.

In April, Saar and I were primed and ready to crawl out of limbo and into production on the new project. I was relieved and eager to make something great, and anxious to share it with all interested and sympathetic souls.

And then it happened. Just like with the initial investor for TDC 2, the financier for the new project inexplicably abandoned ship at the eleventh hour. The experience was confusing, depressing, and humiliating. And the holding pattern continued.

Below is the face of a man called Oblivion. Let she who hath wisdom, stare into its wooliness and reckon the number of months spent on stand by.

After careful consideration of the aforementioned mug, I hope it is plain that a man such as he would not waste breath vomiting over a thousand words merely to complain or elicit sympathy… not unless there was a happy ending to the saga.

That’s right, fair readers; the holding pattern has reached its limit. The beast Holdor, its belly, gorged with blood, sated and leaking, has finally released me from its terrible jaws. A production—a real production—is green-lit. I can’t divulge the details of said project yet. Official announcements will follow shortly, but the wait is over and a shinny new experience is a-coming your way. Thank you for your patience in the interim.

Who else is excited for the mystery project?