Ramblings of a 20-Something
Posts tagged Joe Ripple
They’re All Going to Be Somebody
Jul 26th
I apparently had nothing to do this past weekend so I went to Maryland. Just like that. Well, not really. I planned it ahead of time. Joe Ripple was holding open auditions for his upcoming film Jebediah. Stewie was going to be there along with a few other people from the HorrorTalk board and I was really interested in seeing the whole process at work so Monica and I trekked down to the Baltimore area on Friday night. On the way down, my check engine light came on again. (More on this later in a separate blog post.)
We got in late on Friday and crashed. Auditions started up at 9 the next morning. Monica went to try out the gym while I met Stewie and a few new faces (to me at least) downstairs. Joe, whom I’ve only spoken to online and on the phone once, walked by as I said Hello. Stewie said “Hey Joe, do you know who that is?” Joe turned back and said “I know who you are” and gave me a hug. It was sweet…and a little creepy. This would become the theme for the rest of the weekend. Fun!
Joe also asked me to read for a part which I politely declined to do (although he asked a few more times). I told him that I’m interested in coming down to see a day or two of shooting but our schedule is going to be too hectic in September when he’s planning to being production. We’ll have a month before the wedding and I’ll be crazy trying to keep Monica from losing her mind.
I’ve never seen open auditions before. This was an interesting process. People filled out their release form and then picked out a character to read for. Then they waited on line to be called in to a room with Joe, a couple of the actors that have already been cast, and a few other local directors to read. This went on all day. Stewie and I BS’ed throughout the day while we helped out. It was actually pretty cool.
We went out to Chili’s for dinner and I got to chat up Zig from HT for a bit about video stuff. I got some pointers on music videos that I will have to put to good use in the coming weeks for a project I’m working on for the Neon Gloworms.
The next day was more of the same but I made sure to get some pictures.
Monica and I ended up leaving around 3 or 4 to head home. We drove right through a crazy big storm. I’m really glad that we went down there even if we just hung out for a couple days. It’s stuff like this that reminds me that I have great friends that just live too far away. If only I could wrangle up all these people and keep them in a large prison like building and force them to hang out with me all the time. Then life would be so grand.
James Knows…DVDs: Stakes (2002)
May 24th
Through the wonders of the Internet, I sort of met writer / actor / director, Joe Ripple. I met him as much as anyone can meet anyone else on the Internet and not in person without having cyber sex with him (not that I didn’t offer). Ripple has done several low budget horror movies over the past few years and he even has an IMDB page. I heard some jokes about his movies from the now defunct DVDSpot forums and the currently operational Bullet Point Review forums. These were all mostly about the quality of his films. I couldn’t say much of anything though because I haven’t seen any. Now I have.
My first entry into the work of Joe Ripple was Stakes, a 2002 film featuring vampires from a parallel dimension. These pasty bloodsuckers come through to our world and start creating a vampire army since they ran out of people to turn into vampires in their own. It’s up to a crack detective and a band of humans from this other dimension to stop them. Oh, and some little kid gets kidnapped for some reason. Sounds like an OK set up, right? It is actually. Stakes, which is co-written by Ripple, is a fairly interesting take on the vampire genre. Instead of going into the origins of the vampires, they come from a parallel Earth, similar to the recently released Marvel Zombies
