Make A Movie

Five years ago, Lutherville native Derek Waters was a struggling comedian in Los Angeles. Like thousands before him, he had dreams of being cast on "Saturday Night Live" or making it in Hollywood as a funny guy. But Waters wasn't having much luck. "My auditions were like, 'Stoned Guy No. 7' and 'Drunk-looking Guy No. 8,'" Waters, 33, said. "So I could've been bitter about it or write my own stuff, like shorts and sketches. " Trusting his "dark" sense of humor, which Waters says he inherited from his grandfather, he followed the latter path.

With its room for interviews and other opportunities for documentation, DVD can be especially good at catching fresh filmmaking experiences, particularly by first-time directors. "Never let them see you sweat," John Singleton says on a two-disc special edition of Boyz N the Hood (1991) released this week by Columbia TriStar. He was four months out of film school at the University of Southern California, and Columbia Pictures had given him $6 million to make a movie shot in the South Central section of Los Angeles.

The symbol of Carroll County's war on drugs -- a toe tag on a body -- is everywhere. The toe tag reads "Heroin Kills" and appears on 10,000 bumper stickers, 30,000 refrigerator magnets and up to five billboards along county highways. "Heroin Kills" is also a Web site; thousands of litter bags read "Heroin Kills"; and the graphic movie "Heroin Kills" is playing in Carroll County's eighth-grade classrooms and at schools and community forums throughout the state. Three-thousand drug awareness booklets with the "Heroin Kills" logo are being distributed this year to schoolchildren and community groups.

A record number of teams, 53 as of Friday afternoon, are out frantically making movies in and around Baltimore this weekend, part of the annual exercise in creative cinematic anarchy otherwise known as the 48-Hour Film Project. "There will be at least 500 people out on the streets," said Rob Hatch, project organizer for Baltimore. "If they're aiming something at you, it's just a camera." Under the competition's rules, teams of filmmakers have exactly 48 hours to make a film between four and seven minutes long.

It was annoying enough to purists when Harry Potter and Twilight books were split into two movies -- a blatant attempt to squeeze more money out of rabid fans -- but now we learn that "The Hobbit" is going to be carved into three movies. If you do the math, that means director Peter Jackson will make a movie for each 90 pages of Tokien's book. And I'm guesssing that each movie will be epic-length, so we're probably in for seven-plus hours of screen time. That's more than enough time to read the book at least twice.

John Ward Tower, a would-be film producer from Forest Hill, was sentenced to 60 days in prison for stealing money from a bank account set up with a partner to make a movie called "Cocoa Beans."Harford Circuit Judge Maurice W. Baldwin Jr. sentenced Tower to five years in prison during a hearing Thursday, but suspended all but 60 days of the sentence.Tower, of the 800 block of Bear Creak Court, will be eligible for the work-release program while serving his sentence.He also was ordered to complete three years' probation and pay $1,585 in restitution to his former partner, Christopher Boardman of Joppa.

NEW YORK -- "Gone Hollywood" is not an image attorney Lawrence Otis Graham expects to cultivate, despite having just earned a cool $100,000 for optioning the film rights to his recent first-person article in New York magazine about going undercover as a busboy at a tony Connecticut country club.But that doesn't mean he would turn down a cameo in the movie if asked by Warner Bros., the studio that paid top dollar for his story "Invisible Man," or actor Denzel Washington, who will play him in the screen version.

Mothers, don't let your novelist sons grow up to be screenwriters.That's the dreary message in the dreary and misbegotten "Father Hood," with Patrick Swayze, which was written by no less an eminence than Scott Spencer. Yes. The same Scott Spencer who wrote "Endless Love," that lambent, achy-breaky blast of teen-age love, lust and madness. And now . . . this?Yes . . . this.Clearly, yesterday's best sellers don't pay today's bills.The terrible problem with "Father Hood" is that no one involved seemed to have any idea of what kind of movie it should be, and one feels their conflicting visions at play throughout.

WASHINGTON -- A former Naval Academy midshipman who appears in sex DVDs allegedly recovered from a Navy physician's house asked his former girlfriend to make a pornographic movie with him when they were dating, the woman testified yesterday. The woman, a senior midshipman testifying in the court-martial of Navy Cmdr. Kevin Ronan, said her ex-boyfriend asked on several occasions to film them having sex and made her feel guilty when she declined. Defense attorneys for Ronan sought to use the woman's testimony to support their contention that the sex videos were made by one or more of the midshipmen who appear in them - not Ronan.

I wish they hadn't decided to make a "movie" out of the wonderful play Jane Wagner wrote for her friend Lily Tomlin. I wish they had just set the camera in the cheap seats, turned it on and said, "OK, Lily, you can start now. We're going for coffee. Turn it off when you're done."But Noooo-ooooooo. A "movie," complete to jump cuts, "special effects," costumes, coy filmic conceits like split screens, snappy editing, all of which simply get in the way of the Tomlin genius.Cut the stuff! Shaddup with the tricks!