Today Fantastic Fest announced its schedule for their 2011 line-up.  As predicted, Curtain will be featured in a shorts block, but this year it seems FF is doing something new and cool with their shorts.  Besides the standard DRAWN AND QUARTERED: Animated Shorts and FANTASTIC SHORTS blocks, this year FF's SHORTFUSE block seems to be dedicated soley to horror films.  In past years, all live-action shorts were grouped together, which made for a long block, making it tough to predict when your film would screen.  So I definitely approve of this new scheduling idea.

Here are the dates/times for Curtain which will be playing twice at the festival:

• Saturday, Sep 24 at 3:15pm
• Monday, Sep 26 at 3:10pm

Curtain plays 6th in a line-up with nine other films (which all sound awesome, might I add).  You can see more over at the Fantastic Fest site.  They've also posted their full schedule.

If you're in Austin, TX around that time, I'd love to see ya there!

More on Curtain here!

On October 1st I am launching a new website venture called LitReactor.com. The site will feature a writers workshop, monthly classes taught by published authors and industry professionals and a bustling online magazine. To help promote the launch of the site, I had the idea of shooting a sort of promotional commercial. With Kevin in town that week for the Script Pipeline awards ceremony (our script Shed was a finalist) we got together with our buddy Brian James Fitzpatrick and cranked this whole thing out in 8 hours straight.

This is the first promo in a series we have planned to cover the different obstacles writers face when committing to their craft. In it, a man deals with the writer's most teasing seductress... procrastination.

For more, as well as a free PDF containing 8 pages of writing advice from authors like Chuck Palahniuk, Neil Gaiman, Bret Easton Ellis, Jack Ketchum, Amy Hempel and more... head on over to LitReactor.com!

Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer first joined forces in 1993 when they began writing screenplays together.  In 2003 they formed Parallactic Pictures and later that year, co-directed Postcards From The Future, a documentary on critically acclaimed author Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club, Choke).  They followed this up in 2006 with their first narrative feature, a dark, mysterious character study called Absence.  Made on a micro-budget of only $30,000, Absence became the duo's unofficial graduate film school and propelled them to a new level of filmmaking. Working with a large ensemble cast in multiple locations, the shoot spanned almost four weeks. Stay tuned for some long-awaited exciting news on Absence.

Following this experience, Kevin and Dennis focused the next few years on short films and in quick succession made Throwaway, an award winning horror about the perils of talking to bums; Identical Dead Sisters, an experimental film about revenge, obsession and absolution; EXT. LIFE, a dark and surreal coming of age drama about an aspiring actress who suffers an out-of-body experience, and most recently, Curtain an over-the-top horror comedy about a bathroom haunted by a succubus.

In-between all of this they continued to write together, catching acclaim for their horror script Shed, about a couple who encounters a deranged madman after discovering his latest kidnap victim in the shed of the cabin they're staying in for the weekend.  To date, Shed has gone onto to win the Eerie Horror Film Festival, the Great Lakes Independent Film Festival, and has placed as a semi-finalist at Screamfest, and a quarter-finalist at both The Page Screenwriting Awards and Scriptapooloza. 

Currently, the team is developing Shed as their second feature film.  You can stay up to date on their projects by checking out the News section.