Trailer for PRIDE/PREJUDICE
October 11, 2009
You may have noticed that most of my "newsletters" weren't really newsletters. They were blog posts masquerading, not very successfuly, as news. (This site that I use has a blog feature, but it's relatively new and I haven't yet learned how to use it)...and since I have genuine blogs, at LiveJournal and Amazon.com, it hardly seems worth it.This time, I hope, I'm sending a real newsletter--an announcement of something interesting. A friend of mine, Marco Antonio Olmos, who's a film editor--and damn good one--made a trailer for my forthcoming Pride/Prejudice. To do something different from most book trailers I've seen, talking heads or shots of the cover with voice-over, I thought I'd stand on my apartment building's roof deck, in Downtown Brooklyn, and speak my piece with the gorgeous Lower Manhattan skyline behind me.
I had written four little "scenes," snippets of monologue short enough that I hoped I could memorize them and say them on camera (I was overly confident!) My plan was to speak my lines in order, and that would be that. But Antonio shot this two-minute blockbuster like a real movie. He did multiple takes of each scene, at least six, until I got it right. After we went through all four scenes, he set me up at a different angle or location and we started in again, all four scenes, muliplte takes, and then...you guessed it--a third set. I learned one thing: those "overpaid" movie stars earn every penny. It was a long day, and I was exhausted--and sunburned--at the end of it.
Then Antonio's work really began: editing over two hours of footage down to a two-minute film. (That, apparently, is the maximum length that wil not overtax the YouTube audience's attention span). Not only that, he had to filter out the noise from the non-stop traffic on the BQE (Brooklyn Queens Expressway) that runs right below my building.
So here it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5MVJTo9jto
I've also put the link into various places on the webiste.
Hope you enjoy it.