Wednesday, January 27, 2016

The SoapBox Office Podcast

Tusk One Sheet
I first met my buddy Mitch Cleaver on the set of Kevin Smith's film Tusk. We were the two assholes that volunteered to fly ourselves to North Carolina in order to work on the film for free because we just wanted to be part of something cool. Almost immediately we both forged a friendship over a mutually extensive knowledge of films, music and comics. That worked out well because as it turned out, we were to be roomates with each other for the entire eight week shoot. During that time we'd wake up at 6am, visit Waffle House, go to set, work until the last person broke, steal boxes of cereal from crafty for dinner, go to bed watching Jim Jarmusch flicks, then wake up to do it all over again. Spend that much time alone with a man and you will either grow to love him or fucking despise him. Lucky for the bastard, it was the former.

Mitch is one of the good ones. One of the dependable ones, and there ain't many out there, trust me. He does things for the same reason I do: Because why the hell not. Life is stupid and life is shitty and as long as you're ok with that concept, then why not suffer to make some cool shit? We're like-minded in that sense, and it doesn't matter what the project is, if one of our friends is involved, we'll break our backs to help, even as a PA.

The Mission
Last year I was all set to shoot my short The Mission and the DP had to back out. I was fucked. At that time Mitch was based out of New Jersey so calling him with a weeks notice was beyond a long-shot. I phoned him from the office of my old bosses house and told him how incredibly and royally screwed I was. His response? "Yeah, I'll be out in two days". He came out, we studied and worked with the Ronin Stabilizer for four days leading up to the shoot, and we shot it. The entire time he stayed on a futon bed in the same small 10x12 room that my wife and I both inhabited.

For years, a multitude of friends have asked me to start a Podcast. For one reason or another, things just never worked out. Sometimes people would get lazy (mostly me), sometimes things were on too grand of a scale, but mostly, there was just never a fully-formed concept. Well after months of badgering I finally convinced Mitch to move out to Los Angeles and I used the concept of the podcast to lure him. Is it the reason he came? Not at all, but I knew it would sweeten the pot. However, now that he is out here, I'm stuck in the unfortunate predicament of actually having to follow through with this promise. Even worse, I have to listen to myself talk on recordings.

Logo
Back in those days in the hotel he had mentioned the podcast he was working on, it was titled "The Soapbox Office", a pretty genius title I do have to admit. He had already secured all of the major social media handles with the name, but didn't have a concept yet. Lucky for me, he never found one until he moved to Hollywood, makes my life a little bit easier.

So here we are, having just recorded/edited the first episode. The root of the concept we've came up with is deconstructing movies we feel have been too built up over the years (not movies we hate, just ones we feel are overrated). But you can't do a podcast based only on beating up on something, that's just cruel. So in the place of the movie we deconstruct, we offer up a little known gem that we feel is overlooked and deserves a bit of the attention. Also we're treading into the hotly debated notion of Torrents and the positive benefit that they also serve beyond simply taking money away from artists.

Episode 1
So here goes folks. Give it a listen, or don't actually. That's kind of the beauty of this little project. We talk like this every time we hang out, we just happened to put a little production effort into it as well. We hope you like it, sincerely we do, but it's just one of those things that we're gonna do regardless.

The Soapbox Office
SoapboxOffice.com
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