So This Is Where It Begins...

Let's start with a question: how the fuck do you start a blog, exactly?

I've never read the first post of a blog, so you die-hard bloggers out there, please do excuse me if I'm doing this wrong. Oh, and get a life.

My name's Paul, and I work in film -- working on becoming a feature director and producer. I've been to USC Summer Program for five months, and I've studied at the New York Film Academy in Manhattan for a year, and now I'm in business. I'm still working on editing my latest short film (working title -- The Fantastical Story Of Movie Trailer Voice Guy & Phone Voicemail Voice Lady, current title -- Love In Sound; actual final title -- whatever you suggest, I'm still working on it), and I'm also working on getting a couple other short films I've produced into film festivals. They're all good, trust me, so hopefully you'll see something of ours around.

The name I sign this blog with, Ten Cents, is a reference to the name of my in-the-process-of-being-founded production company, Ten Cent Adventures. The name comes from how comic books were called in the Depression era when, for ten cents only, a kid could buy himself an adventure -- any kind of adventure. Superheroes, explorers, detectives, anything. It just throws back to plenty of images (a kid standing in front of a wall covered in all different comic books, looking up, trying to pick what world he wants to explore this week) and ideas (democracy in entertainment, anyone?) that I love. The fact that these days feel like a fucking Depression too, or that the first few films we'll be making are going to cost about ten cents, is only another fun level to it.

I currently live in Windsor, England, along with Mary, my girlfriend of six months and a week, whom I've met in film school, and who is going to be a brilliant, brilliant director. We moved here from New York because, for visa reasons, Europe is the best place for us to work right now. We've been here since August, and we've done some good work -- we've both worked as film runners on The Golden Age, at Shepperton Studios, which stars Cate Blanchett, Geoffrey Rush, Clive Owen and Samantha Morton and is a sequel to Oscar-winner Elizabeth. And since then, I've also gotten some work on 1408, starring John Cusack and Samuel L. Jackson, and based on a Stephen King short story; and The Other Boleyn Girl, starring Natalie Portman, Scarlett Johansson, and Eric Bana, where I served as a stand-in for the latter (don't ask). All of them coming soon to a theater near you.

What else do you need to know about me before we can start this stuff? I'm Swiss born, also hold a French passport, and have two brothers (older one, 23, used to be a computer engineer, and is now studying to get his MBA and get into consultancy; younger one, 19, just graduated high school and is currently driving himself mad in one of the best prep schools in France), both living in Paris, France. I'm not a big TV watcher -- when at home, I watch what my brothers watch (Friends, The Shield, British version of The Office), and the rest of the time, I really only regularly watch Scrubs, Robot Chicken, The Daily Show, and tons, tons, TONS of Biography Channel (there really isn't anything as cheesily inspiring, man. Try it.) Favorite book has, for a long time, been Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers, but for the past year or so has been the absolutely, mind-blowingly amazing (thanks for that Pete). Great fan of Steven Spielberg, Tim Burton, Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, John Huston, Guillermo del Toro, old school Steven Soderbergh (c'mon -- how do you go from Out Of Sight, Ocean's 11 or Erin Brockovich to making Ocean's 12, Bubble, or 2-hour HD commercial The Good German?), and plenty, plenty more. I have a thing for Rachel McAdams, and to a lesser extent for Natalie Portman (having met her and spoken to her days in a row didn't help).

It's a long first post, I know (whaddya gonna do? It's my house). I'll be back in a tiny bit, posting a little bit about my recent trip back to the US (ten days, flying between New York and L.A. -- lots of good stories), and then...well...after that I guess we'll be seeing each other regularly.

Or not.

Cheers,

Ten Cents

PS: All my blog posts are, and will be, first drafts. I don't like rewriting posts -- defeats the purpose to me. So I apologize in advance for any misspellings, weird grammatical twists, unsentencelike sentences, ramblings, and so on. Peace.