Blood on the Backstory

Welcome to the first blood on the highway blog posting. (Or should we call it blog on the highway? No? Yeah, you're right. That's fucking stupid.) My name's Blair Rowan and I'm the co-director / co-writer of this little extravaganza of exploitation and idiocy and somehow this blog responsibility landed in my lap. My co-director, Barak Epstein, told me to write something clever and funny, but more importantly, he specifically told me to not "write anything gay". That's a lot of pressure, but I'll see what I can do.

I'm not even entirely sure what the point of this blog is at this juncture, considering that we're still editing the damn movie, so there's not really that much news to post. And I'm probably too hungover to write anything worthwhile. Oh well. As long as I don't write anything gay, it should be alright. No torrid stories about sweaty construction workers wrestling on their lunch break or firemen entertaining themselves with a risque game of truth or dare on a slow night. Nope, none of that.

So I guess I'll use this space to briefly explain what the movie is and how it all happened. That sounds exciting, right?

My close friend and long-time co-writer, Chris Gardner, and I wrote the first draft when we were sophomores in high school. We came up with the idea one day when we were really trying to think of something original and groundbreaking, something nobody had ever seen before, and that's when it hit us: a vampire movie. It seemed so simple, why hadn't anybody ever thought of it before? So we set about writing the world's very first vampire movie. Somewhere in the process we realized, "wait a minute, vampires are fucking lame". We quickly switched gears and began to write an intimate story about an established professor of firemanology falling in love with one of his students (who worked nights as a construction worker) after an ever-escalating game of truth or dare that ended with a condom being slid over a coke bottle and then lovingly inserted- wait, wait, sorry. The synopsis of that script might be too gay for Barak. Anyway, after repeated refusals from investors, Chris and I realized the world wasn't ready for such a powerful story of man love, so we went back to the vampire script. As I previously stated, we had determined that vampires are fucking lame, so we decided to approach it as an anti-vampire movie and get rid of all the lame shit commonly attributed to vampires. Since we had always intended the movie to be a comedy (with a shit ton of gore) the script became more of a satire (although that word's too smart to call the movie that) on the formula's and archetypes of typical horror movies. We completed the second draft of the script when we were 18 and convinced ourselves that we could film it with our group of friends as the actors on a hi-8 video camera. Essentially, we were fucking oblivious to reality. We quickly became discouraged and forgot all about the goddamn thing.

Five years later, Barak calls me up while I'm living in Portland, Oregon to ask if I've got any screenplays that might work as a follow up to his last film, Prison-A-Go-Go. I had known Barak since high school as well, and I acted in his first feature, Cornman, American Vegetable Hero, so I knew that he was drawn to complex, gritty story lines that worked to expose the unjust hardships of modern American life. I asked him what he had in mind and if I remember correctly, he told me "nothing gay". This was a slight disadvantage because all of my scripts at the time had at least one hardcore butt fucking scene that would last for thirty pages, but I pitched what I had to him. He decided that none of the scripts were edgy or thought provoking enough and that's when he asked me: "What about that vampire movie?" After some slight deliberation as to whether American audiences were ready for a vampire movie, we decided to give it another shot. Within a month, Chris and I hammered out the third draft via long-distance, shitacular cell phone reception. Barak deemed the script as "yeah, yeah, it's good, it's okay" and then asked us to work on something else.

After three years of adamant disinterest from various investors, Barak begged us to take out the thirty page hardcore butt fucking scene and we begrudgingly acquiesced. Around this time, our good friend Robert Bell was serving his duties for our nation in the ARMY and one day he decided that being in Iraq kind of fucking sucked and he'd rather produce movies. He spoke with Barak and Barak sent him a few scripts he had lying around. As Robert tells it, he knew it was the movie he wanted to make when the script had him laughing out loud while sitting in one of Saddam Hussein's pleasure palaces. What he usually leaves out though, is that his testicles were attached to electrodes and an interrogator was screaming "LAUGH, LAUGH IMPERIALIST SWINE, LAUGH!" at him. Anyway, long story short, Robert fronted the dough and was the coolest executive producer you could ever ask for since he gave us all the trust in the world and let us make the movie we wanted. Poor sucker.

Alright, that's all I'm going to write for now. I know I've already exceeded the average internet user's attention span by 280%, so I'll wait until the next posting before going into the production itself and how insanely rad it was to work with Nicholas Brendon and Tom Towles. Besides, I need to get back to work on Blood on the Highway 2: Butt-Fuckmagedon.

Later, nerds.