So maybe Thanksgiving has Turkey and Christmas has presents but Halloween has been my favorite holiday for as long as I can remember. There is something about any holiday that makes tubes of fake blood and plastic Freddy Krueger gloves commercially available that just does my soul good. I love to look at the window at the legions of little goblins, ghosts and Darth Vaders and furthermore I like to contribute copious amounts of sugary substances to their treat bags. Here are a few simple guidlines to assure that your holiday is a safe one.

1. Adhere to the five second rule. There are plenty of treats readily available this season so if you drop one you were about to consume on the floor make sure it’s been on the ground no more than the standard five seconds (which is the magic number that is scientifically proven to keep your treats cootie free)

2. Stop Drop and Roll (it’s not just for flames anymore)

3. Black Ghost may have seemed like a pretty cool costume idea when you thought of it but it isn’t (try reflective day glow ghost it’s never been done and you’ll be a trailblazer)

4. Those black and orange peanut butter taffy things…don’t eat them. Their very existence is just some sort of a cruel joke. Ick man just ick.

5. In the words of Tom Waits “never trust a man in a blue trenchcoat, never drive a car when you’re dead”

So there we have it. Follow those simple guidelines and make sure to keep plenty of horror films in constant rotation and you’ll have the best Halloween ever. From all of us here at the Doc Channel happy Halloween! Now i’m off to see Saw III again. Carve a pumpkin and sugar myself into a small coma. God bless this great nation. Hope the Great Pumpkin pays me a visit.

Ok so I could have just said one more week until Halloween, but then I would have missed my opportunity to make a semi-obscure “Halloween 3″ reference. All is well at Doc HQ though due to the insatiable sweet tooths (sweet teeth?) of my co-workers my supply of holiday themed sour gummi-worms is beginning to dwindle. We even had a pumpkin carving party last week and learned alot about ourselves in the process. What life lessons can be gleaned from such a childish ritual you ask? Well i’ve got one for you, me + steak knife + sharpie + pumpkin = equals bad idea. Luckily no limbs were lost in the process and the folks whose place we used had the foresight to spread newspapers so it all went pretty smoothly other than my lack of hand eye coordination. Afterwards we left our pumpkins in the trunk of Roxanne’s car for a few days (totally unplanned and not part of proper pumpkin procedure) and learned another important lesson…that mold can grow quickly if provoked. I’ve also begun assembling a small stack of all our screeners of supernaturally themed documentaries so that I might further frazzle my nerves pre-All Hallows, exciting stuff. So there you have it, thems the headlines. From all of us here at The Doc Channel we hope you have a safe and happy Halloween and should you stumble across a large supply of sour gummi worms or maybe just a cache of nougat…then friends your course of action is clear and you know who to them to the attention of.

One of the Documentary Channel’s main objectives is to inform. As such, we would be failing in our duties not to bring up the midterm elections that are quickly approaching. We know that with the candy hangovers of the week before still lingering and the fall chill in the air, many of us have been guilty of skipping out on that all-important November 7th trudge to the voting booths. We would be doing ourselves a huge disservice to let this November 7th slip by unnoticed, however, as control of the House and Senate are at stake. We here at the Doc Channel love all of our viewers of course. We don’t want to oppose or support any parties, but only urge you to make use of your right to choose who you want to represent you. Below are a few links that might be helpful. Go ahead, check them out. And come election day, we’ll be holding up our red and blue equality cookies in support.

• If you aren’t registered to vote yet, hit up Congress.org’s registration page. Congress.org’s 2006 Elections page is a great place to learn more about your candidates as well.

• Yahoo’s interactive Senate Race Map provides overviews of each state’s candidates and views.

• Project Vote Smart provides a wealth of information on candidates, elected officials, and most importantly their stance on the issues.

• A must-read for students, parents, and those struggling with student loan debt can be found on the Campaign For America’s Future site:Groups Nationwide Making Rising Cost of College an Election Year Issue

• MTV’s Rock the Vote site is surprisingly informative on why the youth vote is important in the upcoming elections.

Well it’s Friday and here at Doc HQ i’ve got my copy of the Nashville Scene in hand and Fandango.com bookmarked in anticipation of the insane cinematic bounty that this weekend has to offer us. There are four films that demand to be seen before Monday rolls around and by god i’m a gonna hit ‘em all. First i’ll be headed into Christopher Nolan’s latest “The Prestige” a film i’ve looked forward to both as fan of all of Nolan’s other works (even his unnecessary remake of Erik Skjoldbj?ɬ¶rg’s Insomnia) and also since I read that none other than David Bowie will be playing Nikola Tesla in the film. Next I’ll be making my way into Sofia Coppola’s “Marie Antionette,” a film that I’m curious to see after hearing reports of it being booed at it’s premiere in Cannes (but then I also heard the French audience gave a standing O to Kevin Smith’s sophmoric “Clerks 2″). Coppola’s casting choices (including my hopeful future wife, Asia Argento) as well as her decision to include some choice 80’s pop on the film’s soundtrack and even using New Order’s “Age of Consent” and “Ceremony” (two of my favorites) in the film’s trailers makes me sure i’ll likely enjoy this one. Then it’s on to Clint Eastwood’s latest epic, “Flags of our Father’s” which we’ve been running classic wartime docs by legends like John Ford and John Huston in pre-celebration of all week.Now admittedly ole’ Clint’s last two films have been a bit of a bummer (it’s true, though I enjoyed them both, “Million Dollar Baby” and “Mystic River” each made me feel a bit blue afterwards). But that’s why i’ve saved the final of the four films i’ll be catching for last, to act as a palette cleanser, filmmaker Andrew Bujalski’s “Mutual Appreciation” which is playing in town at The Belcourt and we doubtless have our own contributing blogger Toby Leonard to thank for. I really dug Bujalski’s wry 2002 debut “Funny Ha Ha” and the black and white, modestly budgeted “Mutual Appreciation” strikes me as a damn good way to return to my roots and shake off the much larger budgets of the weekend’s first three screenings. So if you are down, drop us a line and maybe you guys can come too. We can share sourpatch kids and discuss the films over coffee and pie afterward. I’ve said it before but this weekend gives me plenty of reason to say it again, God bless motion pictures God bless us everyone.

?¢‚Ǩ?ìA Cheaper Way to Go?¢‚Ǩ¬ù just screened at its first film festival; Indie Memphis in Memphis, TN of course. Once you?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ve had a film on the festival circuit you come to a bitter realization; you are wasting your time if you?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢re doing festivals for the sole reason of getting distribution. Unless you play at Sundance, Cannes, Toronto, and a scant few others you won?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t find distribution opportunities. We learned this fairly quickly when our first feature film ?¢‚Ǩ?ìFans and Freaks: The Culture of Comics and Conventions?¢‚Ǩ¬ù played the festival circuit. The film was fairly successful, especially for a quirky documentary (more often than not serious issue based docs get the attention at festivals) but there were no distribution opportunities. That, in fact came later from cold calling and sending out screeners. It wasn?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t just our film, no film we were acquainted with got a deal at the festivals we attended. So, once you get to that point you have to decide why you want to go to festivals at all. It?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s a pretty expensive endeavor with the entry fees, the travel, posters, and other marketing materials to do a festival run. We do festivals to be able to put those laurels on the material we send to distributors, to network and just meet other filmmakers, and for mini vacations. We?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢re filmmakers, we love film, so what better vacation than to spend a weekend having real film chat with filmmakers and seeing indie films we might never get to see anywhere else.

?¢‚Ǩ?ìA Cheaper Way to Go?¢‚Ǩ¬ù is a short film though, so festivals are the obvious place to go. There are a few other opportunities, such as here on the Doc Channel, to show your film but mostly short films are tailor made for festivals. We always seem to finish our films in mid summer so the first screening opportunity for us is almost always Indie Memphis. This festival focuses on southern films and filmmakers so we often see familiar faces at this festival. We were excited once we heard the film had been selected because we also saw that some other filmmakers we met at previous festivals in the past. We ran into Craig Brewer (?¢‚Ǩ?ìHustle and Flow?¢‚Ǩ¬ù) an always humble and interesting guy, another husband and wife filmmaking team who live in Memphis, and Jay Edwards (?¢‚Ǩ?ìAqua Teen Hunger Force?¢‚Ǩ¬ù). We spent most of the weekend with Jay and the local couple seeing films and chatting.

Our film was set for a Saturday afternoon screening which could be good or bad. The time seemed good but most people tend to come out at night so we weren?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t sure what to expect. Ten minutes before the screening the theater was basically empty. We started to settle into the idea that this would be what another filmmaker called a ?¢‚Ǩ?ìpeer to peer?¢‚Ǩ¬ù screening. A ?¢‚Ǩ?ìpeer to peer?¢‚Ǩ¬ù screening is basically a screening with other filmmakers in the audience and no general festival attendees. Our first time at Indie Memphis we played at 10:30 am on a Thursday, most definitely a ?¢‚Ǩ?ìpeer to peer?¢‚Ǩ¬ù screening. Being the grass roots marketers that we are we struck a plan at that showing to bring in some audience members. Our film was about comic book freaks, the theater is in a mall, so we handed out flyers in front of the Hot Topic the day before the screening. We ended up with a few other audience members other than other filmmakers. Anyway it looked like we were in for something similar this year. Just two minutes before the screening, the theater packed up! The audience seemed to really enjoy the film and by the end of the festival we were approached by representatives from three other festivals.

So, Indie Memphis was a great success. It?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s a small festival that focuses on southern filmmakers and southern films. They throw some good parties for the filmmakers too! Now that?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s really what these trips are about!