"Word Forward"

Hi Friends!

I always mean to keep you all updated far more and make these more frequent rather than just do one biggie and barf details all over the place, but hope everyone had a few months of peace and solace in a weird strange little time for us all. I've been goofing off in New York playing Jared Kushner. The crazy thing about that, is that the world news is changing so fast, I'm sometimes writing jokes as the show is starting just to keep up. Thought of filming it all would be such a monumental task as we do this show in real time and there's the terrifying feeling of having everything outdated by the time we get that thing edited. The whole show has really been a great excercise in attempting to write fresh current event driven jokes and takes as it's all happening in real time.

The Bigger The Kushner The Sweeter The Pushner

All the while I'd been tinkering with this movie I'd been wanting to do. We played our last film festival for RIPKEN in April, and that film has played over the world, about 10,000 miles of geography and film screens, and in all of that, I'd had the chance to see this great little films, meet great people and see all of this great work all over the place. So when it was time, I wanted to do something big. Lots of story lots of actors, sort of something that would give the viewer the same feeling of me listening to a Wu Tang or Dropkick Murphy's record, where we think "this is so fun AND there are like 400 people on this track!" So I got to work. I'd always loved the way Jim Jarmusch did this film called "Coffee and Cigarettes":

  it was a feature film with all of these vignettes pieced together, almost like little short films and the connection is...well, coffee and cigarettes.Huge cast of wonderful actors, comedians, musicians, all working off each other. A highlight of the flick for me with RZA and GZA of Wu Tang.....and Bill Murray as himself...

"Are You A Bug, Bill Murray?"-RZA

Loved it, wanted to do something like that. So my way of taking it on, was to go through my idea notebooks (these things, all these fragments and lines and ideas pretty much look like the serial killer notebooks in SEVEN) and I'd had about 50-100 fragmented, half cooked ideas, so I had to make some sense of all of that madness. I wanted to bring the flavor of all the great talent I'd met on the RIPKEN tour and figure a way to incorporate as many people and as much diverse talent as I could. So I hit the road with these pages and this project, tentatively titled "Rum" and wrote pages of it while on the way to the United Kingdom (Hello Manchester, Liverpool, Frodsham and Wales!) in New York, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Ohio, West Virginia, each time trying to capture that flavor of where I was, who I was meeting, what I was doing.

So after plenty of miles and wonderful, people, places and things, we got this thing finished, it's no longer called "Rum" and it's no longer strung together stories like "Coffee and Cigarettes" (though someday I really want to do that vignette piece), this just became it's own thing it'd evolved into, this narrative piece and it's called "Bartender's Song", and now comes the part where I start chasing actors down to ask hem to come be in this thing with me. We'll talk to agents about getting it made, but agent meetings are so "hurry up and wait", we can do this movie with or without 'em. But as soon as I finish talking to you all, I'm going to a rewrite/polish this piece up one more time before I get some other eyes on this thing (my sister Meg and my wife Jacci  are normally the ones who keep it the most real when reading these things, so fingers crossed Meg and Jacci like it!), and fortunately some great talent I've already talked to have committed to it (which I'm really excited about, really funny people and really dramatic actors you've all seen, have already said that they're "in" just on the pitch alone, so we're on a good foot already woooo hooooo!) So here it is and here we goooooooooooooooo, I'm proud of this and hope you all dig it when we get it out there:

So with a show, new movie in the works, with way too many black and white posters for them, and a ton of miles on the car and passport, wishing you all great love and peace as we head into another season with all sorts of new excitement, possibilities and  adventures. Now if you'll all kindly excuse me I have to go work on my begging of actors, producers and crew, do you all like a quick "Please?" or prefer a drawn out "Pleeeaseeeeeeeeee?" or prefer a sort of crying weeping "please...pretty please?" I'll likely be doing "CHOICE D: all of the above"!

Take care and be good. You'll never walk alone,

Tim