....and so my promotional article was rejected and instead of allowing my writing to evaporate into the ether, I am promoting my movie in stealth mode on the Beacon of Speech site. Here was my article:
As for even the most diehard soccer fan, the red-headed step-child of the soccer family is Indoor Soccer. With that being said, somewhere there’s a Zapruder-esque film of yours truly outrunning other 10 year olds at halftime of a Cleveland Force game in the late 70’s and clanking shot after shot off of the goalposts. The dream of professional stardom never came any closer than stepping on that artificial turf of the now bulldozed Coliseum in Richfield, Ohio. But I never stopped loving indoor soccer, as my playing days eventually wound down and finally ended in a 30+ co-ed league.
Much like Indoor Soccer itself, my moviemaking dream was plagued by false starts and cash flow problems. Determined not to be the film version of 2004’s National Soccer League, my stab at filmmaking was dealt a near death blow 2 days before start of production when the lead actor bowed out due to very under-diagnosed malady of “not feeling it.” Stepping out of a cameo role and into the lead role was born out of necessity and not out of any form of narcissism, no one else knew the lines of the lead actor.
The first official day of production was cancelled due to the producers’ dog diabetes complications. Defiantly shaking my fist at the soccer gods, I swore that I would finish my movie Blasphemers, even if it meant filming 50 hours of me kicking a ball into the wall and awkwardly spewing all the character’s lines into the camera myself. Fortuitously, my remaining actors gelled, probably due to the healthy doses of alcohol flowing from the bar on the first floor of the German Club. I digress, but the movie wasn’t saved by any of my genius, it was whoever laid out the floor design of the Cleveland Donauschwaben. Planting a nice, fully functional bar about a hundred feet away from the exit of the indoor facility was a pure stroke of luck that I couldn’t have planned for any better if I had tried.
Starring in an independent film on short notice didn’t allow me to dwell on two major deficiencies, self-consciousness over a clear deterioration of skills that had begun in my mid 20’s and over an inflation of girth that had onset in my 40’s. And again, and I can’t stress this enough, the actor that I had pegged as my lead had the freakish good looks of a Dave Navarro-Brad Pitt hybrid. You ever watch a horrible movie because the lead was so good looking and charismatic? That was my ace in the hole. My looks were something that was an additional obstacle to production. The young girl on the set said “the movie should be called Revenge of Dad-Bod.” By the second week of production, lines were frantically being re-written as the script was being trimmed due to the fact that the indoor arena was only secured for two weeks. Few scenes were shot more than twice. At the end of production, the repeated mantra of don’t break the camera, don’t get hurt were eerily similar to the last season of bottom-level soccer, where a smart aleck was heard to say, “rec league: where wins and losses aren’t measured by the score, but whether you survive injury free and able to go back to work on Monday.” Like the hippie that my sister the… well, she was more of an accomplice than a producer, everything was given away on the last day of filming. So basically the actors were paid in cheap t-shirts and props.
A movie is only half done after filming, but how much can really be said about locking yourself in the basement with your Mac Book Pro? The mental struggle of editing movie files by the frame vs. the carnal instinct to play FIFA video games away from your mind-numbing day job. By the end of the editing process, the final product received a lot of backhanded compliments from the assorted actors. “It was good, for how much you spent on it.” Or the always strived for, “at least you had fun making it.” Which I did, along with the stress that feeds so many bleeding ulcers. So instead of the Clerks vs. Slap Shot hybrid I was aiming for, I got an amateur film sprinkled with only hints of the charm that you need to make a film a success. Love it or hate it, ultimately the sliding scale of success slid from making money to hoping for Blasphemers 2: Everyone Gets Paid. Or hell, if you finance it, you can name the sequel, I already have an outline. In the meantime, you can watch the original here for free: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CT8HK1gogIg
In case you were wondering, the title comes from the simple concept of where would you rather be on Sunday? At church, or playing rec league with your soccer buddies. In the age of over-sensitive feelings, I should let you know that there's no hard-core blasphemy, only cartoon-level blasphemy.