Michigan Accomplished

We love a good pun. And, apparently, a bad one, too.

A few weeks ago, we checked off a major “to-do” from our list: Interviewing Lenadams Dorris, the man who opened the short-lived but highly influential Newsroom coffeehouse on Maryland Parkway (following its equally short-lived stint in downtown Las Vegas), and later helped sustain and grow downtown’s Enigma Garden Cafe even after the wheels fell off the Parkway scene. We had to go all the way to Ann Arbor, Michigan to do it, but the film will be all the better for it.

And, yeah, while we were there, we also stopped by the Detroit Institute of Art, because why wouldn’t you?

Jack Kirby or Diego Rivera? You decide.

Anyway, I know, I know: Every update you read, I write “that’s the last filming trip for a while,” but then a month later, we tell you about another filming trip. But the opportunity arose, so we seized it.

(And we’re hoping for another big win to drag us away from editing in the next month or two, so prepare to be not surprised when we announce that.)

In the meantime, that script we mentioned last time around? Pretty much done now (except, of course, for whatever comes out of the aforementioned next not-yet-planned filming excursion). About 15,000 words over 44 pages–and those are regularly formatted pages, not screenplay formatted. (But we did drop the script into our handy-dandy screenwriting software, and it’s approaching the target length.) So now we can charge full-steam with editing, and having a “paper edit” is going to make getting to a first cut of the film so much quicker and easier. In theory.

We also wrapped up our initial consultations with our lawyer, who armed us with more paperwork, and we finished setting up all our fun banking stuff (got that credit card working!). Of course, the longer production goes on for this film, the more expenses we have, and therefore the funds from our Seed&Spark backers are stretched ever thinner. Hence why we’ve been applying for grants, so far unsuccessfully (though we did make it to the quarterfinals of the Fall 2018 ScreenCraft Film Fund competition back in January … remember?). But we’re going to keep plugging away (our Instagram followers might have already seen we applied for a Sundance Documentary Fund grant), as well as continue exploring other options, such as fiscal sponsorship.

(Of course, if you didn’t get a chance or weren’t able to contribute to our Seed&Spark campaign, but would still like to become a financial backer of Parkway of Broken Dreams, let us know!)