It’s been more than a minute since I’ve blogged, but life caught up with me - Pops took a standing 8 count, I’ve been chasing down cash for the film and we’ve been getting our ill, ill submission packages out to actors - I don’t mean to make excuses, but rather to say that I’ve really missed writing on the site and almost feel like I’ve been cheating on 3stonesback.com with the rest of my creative life…

Since I last shared any news, we formed a producing partnership with indie producer Michael Roiff who just completed a picture with Keri Russell called Waitress. Michael’s good a great sense about him and, what’s more, he’s brought half-a-million into the mix for our little film. This is huge. It allows us to stop talking about it and start being about it. He now behave like we are real. We are flexing and, all of a sudden, folks out here in Hollywoodland are beginning to sit forward. An initial investment means that this film is happening and it is going down soon… We look forward to a November 15 start date knowing that we will have an ill cast and an amazing crew.

I need to run out to meetings with potential investors now, but I wanted to quickly hit the blog with the great news and the promise of more posts to come over the next few days… There is a lot to share. One.

Spent every free waking moment during the last two days redesigning the director’s mood books for the film from my pop’s hospital room in order to have them included in our packages that will be going out to actors as early as friday… The packages are sick. I defy anyone to show me a submission packet more ill than ours. Dare I say that they knock anything given to actors on a movie this size out the box. I suppose only thing more ill is a brick of cash in an agency envelope (which I have heard of happening more than once by the way)…

We may be doing it gutter and keeping it street, but we are doing it and we’re doing it big pitbull style. I’m running Tees from the swap meet on Lincoln in Venice out the trunk of my whip - they’re nice, too — with the book jacket on them and putting together a real sweet package courtesy of AND1, WMA and our designers. If you wanna support the cause, you can get yours out the back of my ride, too. Holla at your boy for more info.

In the meantime, I leave you with the flick that ends the mood book…

So I take a break from hospital detail with my pops and cruise over to my favorite little, out of the way, taco spot on the westside and who walks in the door but Pharrell. I literally hadn’t seen him since we filmed our short for Visa together, so you can imagine my shock and awe. He remained his humble self, thanking me profusely for the opportunity to try acting and we rapped for a minute about his extensive branding world takeover. I think my man is done with the acting game (he says it takes too much time) for the moment, but I did float the idea of scoring our flick without him frowning on the suggestion. I’d like to take the score away from the obvious and go with something more creative and off the beaten path, the quantry in this is finding someone who’s cutting edge, but also meaningful to our audience. Who knows, maybe little skateboard him will deliver a score that fits Venice, Sticky and our desire to make this special?

Since the flick is on the brain, here is a still from our short film The Ecology of Love.

When I first read the manuscript of BDL,one kid popped into my head, a kid from Santa Monica, much younger than me. This cat is 6′3″ with closed cropped blondish-brown hair, somewhat artistic tats up and down his arms and game for days with an attitude to match. He is Sticky in every sense. He breaks his English, he slurs his words, and he sits back in the cut, trying to high-post. He rolls through town with hip-hop blasting his headphones out and a flair to his game, a cock to his step that would make J-Dub proud. But like all special white boys from the westside, he has a chink in his armor of cool. He has some missing ingredient that I could never quite put my finger on… Something to hold him back. He once had a sea of basketball experiences ahead of him, with an unlimited potential, but somewhere he got derailed along the way.

This shot is one of my first memories of Santa Monica. The dark, graf blasted, urine-smelling tunnel leading to paradise. In here, you will hear lines like, “I’ll tell you what that is right there, that there is a catch 21 if I’ve ever heard one,” from a dude donning a free Burger King paper crown and a sleeveless shirt with I’m the Big Mac across the chest in cursive script. This is a very real part of Dallas, Dreadlock Man and Crazy Ray’s worlds. It is the hidden, gem of truth on the westside - A westside long forgotten by most.

It’s interesting how life works. I’m sitting in the “family room” at St. John’s Hospital reading de la’s blog on sadness and loss, while I wait for my pops to have invasive surgery on a cancer that is literally eating away at the bones in his spine. He’s been in chemo for the last few months and is set for radiation after the surgery. If the magic of medicine has its way, my pops will return to his old self. Without the skilled hands of these wizardly doctors, he would end up paralyzed with cancer slowly taking his body one minute at a time. It always comes back to hands, doesn’t it?

For obvious reasons, I’ve been thinking a lot about fathers and sons over the past few days.

Sometimes seeing an old friend, someone who knew you back when you were young and a little angry, someone who’s seen your formative days as well as some of your darkest hours, is enough to shake loose the cobwebs and remind you to crank up the heat that defined you when you’d use to bring it. I saw one of my people yesterday. He didn’t say anything that called a brother out, he didn’t do anything to move the crowd, but his presence did take me reminiscing like I was Little River Band. Those memories in turn reminded me of the bravado, the defiance I used to have in the face of doubt, in the presence of haters.

Yeah, I’ve directed as many feature films as your mother.