I Survived WFF 08 (part one)

On Friday, associate producer Rod and I (I being Dan the director) picked up one of the stars of Nerdcore For Life, MC Router from Midway Airport.  Ignoring Router's pleas to stop at a deep dish pizza place, we immediately left chicago and sped off to Madison.  Because this was the first time I've ever had a feature in a film fest I thought I'd splurge a bit and book us a room at a Red Roof Inn a mere 5 miles from where the film was set to screen.  (Normally when I travel anywhere for the film I go Motel 6 all the way and jam the entire crew in one room)  Well, the red roof inn was the worst red roof inn ever so we bounced and headed to downtown Madison.  Rod insisted we check out a super swanky hotel right across from the Wisconsin state capitol building.  He charged in there, told the guy at the front desk we were with the Wisconsin film fest and somehow we wound up with most frickin' pimp ass SUITE north of Illinois border.  I'm not sure why but we got some kind of special WFF discount and the room (or rooms really, it was seriously pimped out) was crazy cheap. 

The awesomeness continued when I found one of the 50 bamillion Onion newspaper boxes that are all over that town.  I had done an interview with a reporter from the A.V. club about two weeks ago and I had a mild happiness-stroke  when I saw that we made had the paper.  Indie cred, thou are mine.  So things were off to a great start but then....then the drinking began.

Now as anyone who knows MC Router can tell you, that girl loves her Pabst Blue Ribbon.  And there we were, in Wisconsin, the PBR motherland.  When we saw that our pimp suite had a pimp fridge in it, we had to stop at a liquor store so that we could fill up said pimp fridge with liquid supplies.  Did you know that they sell 40 ouncers of PBR?  Neither did I.  Neither did Router.  That's one factoid neither of us, or really, anyone who attended the premiere, will ever forget.  We stocked up and headed to a party sponsored by the festival where we met up with another artist from the film (and Madison native!) Monzy.  Monzy by the way was good enough to take time out from FINISHING HIS PhD THESIS at Stanford and fly to Wisconsin to attend the screening of our rinky dink movie.  Now that's one hardcore dude that has his priorities straight!

So about Madison; it's a super cool town that seems like it was built to hold a film fest.  Every other (usually one way) street had some kind of cool, indie theater on it.  Seriously, it was surreal.  Even in Chicago doesn't have that many independent theaters.  Oh, know what else Madison has a lot of?  Really fun bars.  And that's exactly where we me, Rob, Router and Monzy spent the rest of Friday night.

I'm tired again just from trying to remember what happened this weekend so I'll have to cover saturday, tomorrow,