I just returned from the Woods Hole Film Festival in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where my short script entitled "NO LIMIT: The Extremely Short Story Of My Poker Career" won 1st Place in their Work-In-Progress Screenwriting Competition. The festival seemed like a good excuse for my wife and I to drive up to New England and visit my family for a few days, so we threw our tent in the car and a mere 17.5 hours later, we were searching for our Cape Cod campsite by flashlight.
Woods Hole is an adorable little ferry-stop town jam-packed with tourists and scientists (nearly the entire downtown area comprises a famous Oceanographic Institute that I had never heard of before, but everyone else apparently has). But for seven days a year, the tourists and scientists share the many seafood restaurants and the ONE coffeshop (a great one, I might add) with what must be to them a particularly unseemly crowd: INDEPENDENT FILMMAKERS! Armed with our all-access filmmaker badges, we were easy to spot all over town, eating in restaurants, corralling tourists into screenings off the sidewalk, and constantly waiting to cross the drawbridge (which is so low that it apparently needs to be raised for even the smallest of dingys).
SIDENOTE:
The underside of the aforementioned drawbridge is the only place in town where I saw graffiti, but it was the worst kind of graffiti... Bathroom Stall Graffiti. Every time the bridge was raised, the poor westbound vehicular travelers were faced with the red spray-painted words, "KISS MY BASS!" What kind of lame gang-activity is Woods Hole harboring?! For the sake of all anglers and graffiti-purists, I hereby recommend that the town of Woods Hole commission a REAL gang-member to paint over this atrocity with something better... something indecipherable, yet aesthetically pleasing to the eye (if you can't afford one from Boston, try Providence). Or here's an idea... repaint the bridge and install a simple security camera.
Sorry, back to the fest. I saw some great films (LIVE FREE OR DIE was my favorite feature), met some great people (JP, Roy, Jeremy, Corey, Erin, Andrea, DB, Jason, Mark, John, Kim, Kevin, Courtney, Tze, David, Gorman, and a bunch more who I had great conversations with before promptly forgetting their names), and ate some great food (italian sausage sandwich at the Lee Side B&G).
Now we're home and it's back to the editing bay I go. I am no longer a celebrity with an all-access badge... I'm just a guy in a dark room watching children have more fun than me.
Labels: Festivals, Independent Film, NO LIMIT, Woods Hole
