Back in October, I reviewed a performance of The Last Starfighter. It recieved a lot of attention and helped the creators of that musical in terms of recognition and attendance. About a week ago, they sent me a very special gift: a Demo CD of the Last Starfighter Musical, performed by the Original Cast at the show I saw at the Storm Theatre in New York City.
I asked if I could make copies, and they said yes, except that it could not be sold, because of Actor's Equity rules. It is to function as a demo of the musical (created by Skip Kennon and Fred Landau) and for the people performing it.
In the spirit of that and the holiday season, I am now providing this music to the world. This is going to kill my bandwidth connection, and I hope some kind soul could put up a bittorrent or a mirror to help me.
THE LAST STARFIGHTER, THE MUSICAL (Zipped File Removed)
I hope that this will open doors for the cast, crew, and creators of this musical; information on the production is included in the pack and of course I can be contacted if there are any theatre groups or performers looking to run this musical; I think it's pretty timeless.
Happy Holidays.
Update: The creators of the musical have signed with a label and their soundtrack is now for sale.
It's nice to think of stuff in theory, speak as if you're an expert, and then, in practice, have it shown to you why you were dead wrong.
Such as it has been in this, the most top-heavy portion of the documentary, the last 10 percent or so of work. I had thought I was going to update all the time, since that drove me nuts with other documentary sites. Yet, I have not! The reasons for this are not unlike the reasons I've given in the last number of updates, which are, all told, "steady as she goes", with work progressing but no particular amazing events or breakthroughs that really warrant a new news entry.
But honestly, things are coming to a head so I should really talk about stuff in a more concrete manner, for people who are waiting for this to become "real".
First of all, about 300 people have pre-ordered copies. This means two things: they have stories that will go on the DVD-ROM section of one of the three DVDs in the set, and there are 300 people who believe in my project enough to have dropped money for something not out for a few months. I am still floored and delighted at this, and all those people know, I hope, how appreciative I am about that. Various parties and people in my life were a little concerned that I'd just invested in the most bright and biggest of white elephants with this project, and they are now understanding that there are going to be real, actual people who will want to watch this.
The box art, that is, the slipcover and the 3-DVD box that will house my work, is coming in from the DVD duplication place tomorrow. We already had a round of revisions to it, to make sure the colors and a few other details were right. Here's a small preview of the art. The top is the slipcover (exploded) and the bottom is the 8-panel DVD case (also exploded). Obviously, the art is not to final scale.
The "Beta Premiere" went well; I was rather nervous about the whole thing, but on the whole people liked the episodes. It was especially worrisome because as it turned out, nearly 20 people who I'd interviewed were there, and got to see themselves. Nobody punched me, which was an excellent sign. And in fact most seemed to be really happy about how the whole thing came out.
A common comment from the daughters, spouses and girlfriends of people who were in it was "finally, I understand what they've been talking about". So I guess it's a tool to help explain people's pasts, as well as everything else. It's also a meditation on being online, an album of concepts long forgotten, and a jumping-off point for months of deeper research. It's got a lot of uses.
One thing that IS obvious is that I was right to focus this project on DVD; it is a lot of information and only a complete maniac would handle it all in one sitting. It is a massive collection of information and history, and is not a singular epic. Perhaps the project is epic, but it should not be all watched in one setting. Maybe I should make a warning label.
The episodes were originally planned to be seven 1-hour episodes. It looks like, after editing, it will be 8 episodes of sizes ranging from 40-50 minutes, as well as a bunch of bonus footage that is really neat but doesn't fit into any of the episodes by themselves. (Mostly because the stories take a number of minutes to tell.) So it's still a metric ton of footage in action, just spread a different way than I expected. I'm really happy with the whole thing.
A team of translators are adding a spanish translation to the subtitles, and pretty much everything in the episodes are being subtitled. So that's apparently unusual, but I wanted this done right. 'Doing it Right' has been the theme, and the reason I'm now rather older than when the project started.
Now, as it is turning out, this will not be ready for Christmas. I mailed everyone who pre-ordered this documentary, and only had one refund, so that's not so bad. It is 100% a question of quality. I am going over all these episodes and bonus features, shot by shot, making sure everything works, everything's accurate, everything flows. It's quite a task.
The goal is to give the finalized DVDs to the plant by Christmas, and then get everything going out in January. I'm going to stick with that and will let everyone know in a timely fashion if this is not the case. But I expect it will be; everything is pretty much together.
What a project! I'm looking forward to never doing anything like this again!
Two issues that are on the forefront of my mind as of late. They are not related, but they are both minor issues in the context of most of my work, so I'm just combining them in one entry so I can be done with them.
TEXTFILES.COM is slow this week. The main reason this time is because the nice folks at planetmirror.com are mirroring not only the roughly 1.5 gigabyte collection that comprises textfiles.com and web.textfiles.com, but also a lot of my larger sites, like audio.textfiles.com and pdf.textfiles.com, which are now getting into the a-lot-of-gigabytes realm and aren't slowing down.
As discussed perhaps too many times before, I do not accept advertising, and do not put banner ads or other such trickery on my sites. I actually recieve the very occasional sparse criticism for this, but mostly, I get either a spare compliment, or even better, a complete lack of noticing this fact, the way it should be. It's encouraging because it means people are living their lives, browsing information, not having to notice the lack of advertising. Excellent.
But I do get a lot of complaints the site is slow. Yes, this is true. Slow and free. I made that choice a long time ago, and I am happy to live with it. Someday I'm sure I'll get something faster than a T-1 line, but the monthly cost falls under "hobby" level as opposed to '"sacrifice" level, So I expect it will stay as such. Every once in a while there is a flare-up and the site is particularly slow. This is one of those times, and I thank folks for their patience. Mirrors are important things; I will not always be here, and as my popularity (or at least my site's popularity) grows, I am trying to expand it without comprimising too many principles.
The other issue is that I have been making a concerted effort to avoiding dabbling in politics. I am not engaged in too much in the way of political criticism and I do not look out among the users of this site or of the world and haplessly cleave everyone into designations and names, then leave them in these bins to rot. I should state emphatically that I favor a set of laws and social mores that allow textfiles.com to continue to exist, but beyond that, I do not see what it solves to have my thoughts added.
But I will say that I have seen a number of my favorite sites, lists, and destinations ruined, absolutely ruined, by derisive and inaccurate name-calling, classification, and a level of perceived teams that rivals professional sports. It has reached the level that I now find it disturbing and troubling, and I am finding less reason to engage myself in many sites or discussions as a result. That's sad, and ultimately my problem and my problem alone.
Nothing I can say will be effective in imploring people to stop, so to go into too many details would just add to the ball of hate. I will simply say that I will continue to make my best effort to bring what I do to as many people as possible, without attempts to gift-wrap it in my critique of percieved flaws in the world that have no place in the transaction. I love all of you, even the broken ones, and I wouldn't run these sites if I didn't.