Burned at Both Ends (Archives 11.2.04)

Interesting developments. First we discovered that the package we sent to Harpo Productions never made it to Oprah, even though she requested it in the first place. It was intercepted by an intern who took it upon herself to never even relay our phone messages. One time we called and asked for this intern (who claimed to be the assistant), and we were told that no one by that name worked there. Yet with the next call, that intern answered again and gave us her canned response. When we finally got the real assistant on the phone on November 1, it was too late. The election was the next day and the timeliness of doing a story about our film was pointless. The package was sent back to us by the assistant, with a letter worded in such a way that still ignored the fact that Oprah had asked to see our movie. Of course, this is the way we would prefer to perceive the situation, because if Oprah was truly yanking our chain, then that would shatter the illusions we had of this beneficent woman.

We were up until 5am putting together a rough cut DVD, designing a DVD jacket, and waiting for a courier to pick up the package to whisk it to the airport. Obviously all of that effort was for naught thanks to the powers that wannabe. The other piece of news was our discovery that Paramount Studios had somehow taken an interest in our movie; so much so that people from the studio seemed to be monitoring our website very closely. There were hits almost every day emanating from Paramount's web servers, which made us wonder - if they were so interested, why didn't they call us in for a meeting? It was also relevant to note that a monster law firm that specializes in intellectual property (and appears to represent Paramount) had also been watching our site. And on went the saga. Just one more tale of woe from the indie filmmaker toolbox.