A Note on my Work

On Sunday, August 9th, I did something I've always wanted to do - screen a few of my short films for my friends in Austin. I've had a chance to show these movies on the big screen in New York over the years, but never in my hometown. I was honored to have a small gathering of dear friends join me at the Violet Crown Cinema for the screening, which also served as my belated 31st birthday party.

In preparation for the event, I wrote down a few thoughts about the films themselves, hoping to provide some insight into what I've been trying to accomplish with my film work. I thought I'd share those thoughts here on this blog.

Thank you all so much for being here, and I hope this isn’t too self-aggrandizing. This is something I had wanted to do last year for my 30th birthday, but that wasn’t possible due to COVID-19.

I thought I’d offer a little context for what you’re about to see. These are three short films I made, preceded by sort of a throwback joke trailer I made in high school. The first film, You Can't Put Your Arms Around a Memory, was my senior thesis film at NYU, which meant it was a script workshopped for a semester in our Advanced Production class. That semester ended with students pitching their films for an allotment from the school, as not everyone gets to make a thesis (at least not with the resources and equipment NYU has available). I was lucky enough to get the allotment, and as we were still students, I didn’t have to pay my cast and crew. Even still, the shoot was costly, and so many of you contributed in some way to make it possible. That's one of the primary reasons I wanted to do this, to thank you and also show you that we did actually make something. I don’t know if it’s good, but we didn’t go on vacation - your money was definitely spent on a movie.

The last two films, Jack and Lucas Go to a Wedding and Harvey's Last Night on the Avenue, are independent projects I wrote and directed after college. The main difference on these shoots was that most of our crew members were working professionally and we weren’t operating with the support of a university, so everyone had to be paid and all camera gear and equipment had to be rented. I did fundraising campaigns for both films, and again, so many of the people in this room helped out, for which I am forever grateful.

Of these two post-grad films, the first is a movie I made with my old friend Lucas Loredo, which we shot entirely in a hotel room. The second was a collaboration with the lead from my thesis, an excellent actor named Mike Wesolowski – so you’ll see him in two different movies.

Looking at these films now, I see a lot of things that I didn’t necessarily see at the time. The primary one being judgment – which is not to say the movies themselves are judgmental of the lead character, but rather the character is often very judgmental and critical of himself.

I can’t say that any of these films are autobiographical – despite the fact that the character I play in one of them is named Jack – but they do to a certain extent reflect versions of things I've felt over the years in an exaggerated way. But I see myself toeing the line here between trying to have an empathetic protagonist while also presenting a character with some pretty extreme qualities. Sometimes the challenge was - how far can I take it before the audience says, "This guy is out of his mind!" A film of mine I was going to include in tonight’s line-up but ultimately didn’t, Jake the Cinephile, was described by one of my professors as an empathy dare – as in, I dare you to empathize with this character. He’s so off-the-wall. And I don’t think he meant that in a positive way. With that particular short, though, I’m getting the chance to sort of get a do-over, as I’ve developed it into a feature film which we’ll be shooting at some point this decade (production isn't easy these days).

A question I got once when someone watched one of the films was, is this really how you see yourself? And the answer is no. But that comment stuck with me, and a progression I’ve noticed in the projects I’ve been developing since making these shorts is a kindness and – I hope - a more multi-dimensional quality to my lead characters that acknowledges their positive, engaging attributes alongside their less-desirable ones.

That being said, I’ll always be attracted to losers, for lack of a better term. They’re just more interesting than winners. And I am proud of the movies you’re about to see. Theoretically, they should get better with each one, but I can’t promise there won’t be some regression.

So thank you for letting me make films where I was able to refine my style and articulate what I was feeling at the time and learn a lot about how I want to make movies - which ultimately you can only do by making them.

It feels weird to say this at a screening of my own work, but if you have cell phones, it’d be pretty cool if you silenced them. My attitude toward talking during movies is sort of well-known at this point, too… but again, I feel weird saying this at my own screening. Thank you all so much.

On the Beauty of Art Weekends

During a dark week at The Daily Show last month, I had the rare opportunity to spend a whole week charting out a new screenplay with my dear friend, Lucas Loredo, back in Austin (Lucas is currently in the MFA program at UT's Michener Center for Writers). We relived past glory years in the service of creating something new, spent time with our beloved theatre directors Annie and Billy Dragoo (who changed the course of our lives) and reminisced on the formative years that made us who we are. We had an excellent time looking back, and more importantly, ahead.

The screenplay, which recounts our wonderful experiences performing in Austin High School's renowned theatre department, is something Lucas and I have been talking about writing for a long time. We finally decided we weren't going to make any headway unless we took a full week and bunkered down to structure the piece. During that time, we charted out the events and character arcs in the film, and mapped out the entire movie and its events on foam boards attached to the wall. In the evenings, we cooked dinner and watched coming-of-age films which have inspired us over the years, including Almost Famous (2000), Lady Bird (2017), Dazed and Confused (1993) and The Spectacular Now (2013), taking notes for our script along the way.

Leading up to our self-imposed writing "residency," I spent the last several months working on a quite long document in which I recall every single thing that happened to me in high school. Even though I've only made it about halfway into my junior year, the document is already over 150 pages long. It's a bit overwhelming, but the document has provided a wonderful well of memories from which to cherry-pick for our film. Lucas is particularly talented at story structure and the hero's journey, and I think his discipline, combined with many of the specific memories and ideas I've written down over the last few months, make us a great writing team (we've already made one short film together, Jack and Lucas Go To A Wedding, in 2014).

A final script is a long way away, but we're finally on the beginning path to a dream project that means a great deal to me. On its tenth anniversary, here’s Lucas and me in action back in high school, in the Red Dragon Players' seminal 2008 production of Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me, directed by Billy Dragoo and filmed here by Paul Schattenberg. One day I'll put up the whole show in its entirety.


Someone Who'll Watch Over Me - Scene Seven from Jack Kyser on Vimeo.


Someone Who'll Watch Over Me - Scene Eight from Jack Kyser on Vimeo.

Speaking of Jack and Lucas Go To A Wedding - this is a bit belated, but the film had its festival debut at the 2016 Black Cat Picture Show, followed by a screening at the Hudson Valley International Film Festival! I was thrilled to screen the film at the Black Cat Picture Show, only one year after my film You Can't Put Your Arms Around A Memory won their Best Student Film prize. You can see a clip from our film in the trailer for the festival.

In a bit of related news, I applied last fall to the University of Texas at Austin's MFA Film and Media Production program, which was a great experience in and of itself, as I was able to obtain letters of recommendation from my advisors and mentors and write about my interests and aspirations as an artist in detail. I had been considering applying to UT's MFA program for some time (it was the only graduate program to which I applied), but I certainly didn't expect to get into the school (they accept twelve students every year). In February, however, I was delighted to learn that I was offered admission, and for a time, I did not know what the immediate future held in store for me. When I was in Austin for my writing retreat, I also had my official UT campus visit, and I was astonished by the school's facilities, professors and classes - it had everything I could possibly want in a graduate school program. It was a very difficult decision. Ultimately, I decided that I was enjoying my current job too much and should stay in New York for the immediate future - but I was beyond honored to have been accepted to the program, and it was a wonderful experience touring the campus and imagining what my life would be like as a University of Texas graduate student.

Still, just being in Austin for a short period time makes me long for the opportunity to make movies there - specifically, one about growing up with my mother and father in the 1990s, and then the aforementioned film about the Red Dragon Players I'm currently writing with Lucas. They're both dream projects of mine, and ones I intend to make in the coming years.

I’ve been revisiting all kinds of wonderful memories from those glorious high school years lately. Nearly ten years after it first premiered, I re-watched the Red Dragon Players’ production of Jim Merillat's original musical Radio Eyes, in which I played the wildly erratic Inspector Riley. I received a copy of the musical from Jim (my DVD copy of the play was scratched), and it was a tremendous joy viewing the show with fresh eyes (it was one of my favorite musicals we performed at Austin High). I’ve also been looking at our productions of Round and Round the Garden (UIL), Over the River and Through the Woods (UIL), the aforementioned Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me, Willy Wonka, Seussical: The Musical, Into the Woods, Urinetown: The Musical, High School Musical and others. There’s an overwhelming amount of material from which to pull for our film, and I’m thrilled to have recordings of many of our productions (although I wish we had recorded our productions of George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara, Carson Kreitzer’s The Lovesong of J. Robert Oppenheimer and Jason Milligan's …And the Rain Came to Mayfield).

The memorable writing retreat in Austin has been surrounded by a welcome succession of what I'll call art weekends in New York, mainly spent with my wonderful girlfriend Sophia. After the production of our short play White Castle Valentine’s Day 2018 in February, she and I have embarked upon a series of escapades on the weekends, hoping to take advantage of what New York City has to offer.

On March 16th, we saw Kenneth Lonergan’s Lobby Hero on Broadway, which was, honest to God, one of the best plays I’ve ever seen. Then again, it was written by Lonergan, so what did I expect? Michael Cera, Bel Powley, Chris Evans and Brian Tyree Henry were all exceptional – I’ve since bought a copy of the play, and I’m in the midst of learning one of the many outstanding monologues from the show. The next night, on St. Patrick’s Day, we screened one of my favorite films of all time, Martin Scorsese’s The Departed (2006), at my apartment – I mean, how else was I supposed to spend St. Patrick’s Day? Scorsese’s film has lost none of its immediacy and power in the now twelve(!) years since its release, and the picture still stands as the defining cinema release of my lifetime (seriously). On Sunday, I treated myself to a double-feature of Francis Lawrence’s riveting Red Sparrow, which way exceeded my expectations, and Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther, one of the first Marvel movies actually about something. The immensely talented Coogler also gives us the best and most complex superhero villain in some time, with Michael B. Jordan excelling as Eric Killmonger.

This is a bit of a brief tangent, but in the fall of 2016, I had the pleasure of seeing Kenneth Lonergan in person three times within a two-week period. The first time was at the Museum of the Moving Image, where Lonergan spoke after an early screening of his new film Manchester by the Sea, which was the second-best film of 2016 (after Martin Scorsese’s Silence). I saw him again shortly thereafter at the opening night screening of Nancy Buirski’s By Sidney Lumet, on which I was an associate producer and assistant editor.

By Sidney Lumet opened on October 28th at Lincoln Plaza Cinema (which has sadly now closed after thirty-five years of business) and received rave reviews. On opening night, there was a Q&A after the film with Nancy and Christine Lahti (who starred in Lumet’s Running on Empty), followed by a great after-party at the Tisch WNET Studio in Lincoln Center. Lonergan joined us for the after-party, as well (our editor, Anthony Ripoli, edited the Director’s Cut of Lonergan’s masterpiece Margaret), but I didn’t actually get to meet him until after a screening of Margaret the next weekend (also at the Museum of the Moving Image). MOMI screened the Director’s Cut of the film (they were doing a retrospective of all of his films), and Lonergan held yet another fantastic Q&A. After the screening, I shared with him my adoration for both Margaret and Manchester by the Sea (not to mention his first film, You Can Count on Me). It’s always an honor to get to meet your heroes, and I’ve truly enjoyed familiarizing myself with his work as a playwright this year.

But back to the present! The next weekend, Sophia and I went to the David Bowie Is exhibit at Brooklyn Museum, which was astonishing – an aural and visual experience like no other. On Saturday, I saw The Panic in Needle Park (1971) at the Quad Cinema as part of the Pacino’s Way retrospective. I could have lived at the Quad during this run of films, screened mostly on 35mm. At this particular screening of The Panic in Needle Park, director Jerry Schatzberg introduced his film, and discussed working with Pacino in depth. He also directed the masterful Scarecrow (1973), with Pacino and Gene Hackman, which has long been one of the unheralded highlights of 1970s cinema. I was sad to be working during Pacino’s visits to the Quad, where he screened his passion projects Salome and Wilde Salome – but I cherish my memories of seeing him onstage in The Merchant of Venice (2010) and Glengarry Glen Ross (2012). Pacino recently turned seventy-eight, and he continues to inspire and amaze – most recently in his magnificent performance in Barry Levinson’s Paterno on HBO (less than a year after Levinson’s great The Wizard of Lies with Robert De Niro, also on HBO).

And then, on Sunday, Sophia and I saw Wes Anderson’s new film Isle of Dogs, which filled me with joy. It’s an emotional, beautiful movie – I was smiling the entire time. You can read my full review of Isle of Dogs for Austin Family Magazine here.

In Austin, in addition to my residency with Lucas and my UT campus visit, my mom and I saw Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One, which was a total blast (and just flat-out mind-boggling that Spielberg released the film within the same three-month period as The Post). We also saw John Krasinski's A Quiet Place, which I wish I could say I viewed in a very quiet place. I loved the movie (between this and 2016’s The Hollars, Krasinski is one talented director), and I think filmmakers should slowly start conditioning audiences to this level of silence in more movies. It is a truly effective dramatic tool – and it requires audiences to shut the hell up.

When I returned from Austin, the art weekends continued. Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here was a strange, beautiful and mesmerizing movie with one of the world’s greatest and most interesting actors, Joaquin Phoenix, at its center. Ramsay strikes gold once again, after her masterful We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) - there was no scene in this film that unfolded how I expected. And this picture could have been so violent, reveling in the brutality of our protagonist's methods - but Ramsay isn't interested in close-ups of hammers bludgeoning heads. She's interested in more specific details, and the effects trauma has on the human body.

Seeing the film a second time, I was struck even more by the connection between Joe (Phoenix) and Nina, the young girl he rescues from a New York City brothel. Subtly over the course of the movie, they recognize each other as having both experienced abuse and trauma in their lives. Both characters use counting mechanisms to cope with their suffering – as a child, Joe held a cellophane bag over his head and counted down in order to repress the brutality exacted upon him (and his mother) by his father. Likewise, Nina counts down in her head when she is preyed upon by men inside the brothel. These elements are beautifully woven together in an underwater sequence in which Joe attempts suicide, and as he counts down, he begins hearing Nina’s voice counting instead of his own, leading him to abandon his suicide attempt and attempt to rescue her. When I was in Austin, the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar had a You Were Never Really Here promotional photo booth, and you can bet I spent some time in there. Very well done, Amazon Studios.

The next weekend, I travelled down to Charlottesville with Sophia, where we stayed with her family and had a truly great time, as always. We even held a photo shoot with her friends Ivy and Clara, in which Sophia’s mom Maiya took some fine and truly strange portraits of us – you can see some of them throughout this post (I’m smoking a fake cigarette, by the way). While we were there, we spent time at a nearby reservoir, held a lavish banquet with friends, ate outside near the Blue Ridge Mountains, and, on our final night, watched Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) with Sophia’s dad Walter (I first saw this film when doing research for Blood and Thunder, and it remains one of the best and most original westerns I’ve ever seen).

Once back in New York, Sophia and I ventured to the Tribeca Film Festival the next weekend. On Friday, April 27th, I had my first virtual reality experience at Tribeca’s Horizons program. I was mainly attending because the program featured a short VR film by Terrence Malick, and it was beautiful (it’s telling that I finally tried out VR only because of Malick’s involvement). The next day, Alexander Payne spoke at Tribeca, with fellow Nebraskan Dick Cavett moderating the Q&A. What an amazing filmmaker and human – I sat in the front row and took notes, as every piece of filmmaking wisdom Payne offered was so valuable. Afterward, he told attendees he’d be around to talk in the lobby, and so I got to speak with him and share my adoration of Downsizing (2017). I could tell I was among devoted Payne loyalists, as much of the audience was quick to share that they loved Downsizing, too (which I maintain will be considered an ambitious modern classic in due time). I wish there were more like Payne – humble, Midwestern, authentic voices who make soulful movies about real people.

That evening, Sophia and I watched the recently released Criterion Blu-Ray of Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence (1993), which is just as astonishing and powerful as ever. I saw a restoration of this film at the 2013 New York Film Festival with Scorsese in attendance, and it’s taken this long for that stunning transfer to make its way to DVD and Blu-Ray. Thankfully, the Criterion Collection has given the movie a welcome home.

Sunday, April 29th was the sixteenth anniversary of my dad's passing. I know I share a lot of the same videos of him, but here's something he shot on our family's 1996 trip to New York. He was a wonderful soul, and over the years I've been overjoyed to transfer more and more of his home video recordings as a way of remembering him.


The Kyser Family in New York - 1996 from Jack Kyser on Vimeo.

In the midst of all of this, I caught a screening of Avengers: Infinity War before going to my evening shift one day, and I was surprised by the film’s effectiveness – particularly Josh Brolin’s performance as villain Thanos. You can read my full review for Austin Family Magazine here.

The next weekend, we saw Jason Reitman’s Tully, which was a delight, reuniting the dream team behind Young Adult (2011) – Reitman, writer Diablo Cody and star Charlize Theron. It’s exactly the kind of interesting film that rarely gets made anymore. Reitman never ceases to surprise and engage me – he never makes the same film twice (I remain a fan of his slightly un-loved Labor Day and Men, Women and Children). Tully is also a movie that I heard people dismissing before it was even released. I’m irked every time I hear people talking about a film they haven’t seen, prejudging it and having no real interest in what the picture might have to say – instead reducing the movie to its most basic elements. This happens with older films, too, as social mores change and folks want to reevaluate certain films based on a new set of criteria and whether it aligns perfectly with today’s ideas. What they don’t seem to understand is that the capturing of a certain time and place is precisely what makes a film interesting, and in time, today’s seemingly evolved values and ideas are going to seem outdated, too.

On Friday, May 11th, we saw Carl Theodor Dreyer's astounding film Ordet at the Quad Cinema, followed by a Q&A with one of the greatest of all filmmakers, Paul Schrader. He gave great insight into Ordet and its influence on his new film First Reformed. The impact Dreyer's film had on our audience was palpable - it's a thoughtful examination of the role religion plays in our lives, and it takes on a kind of meditative quality as it goes on. There's something nearly God-like in its slow pans and long takes, creating a truly spiritual feeling I haven't experienced since Martin Scorsese's Silence.

There is a shot near the end of the film in which the camera does a slow, nearly-360° rotation around Johannes (Preben Lerdorff Rye) and his niece (as her mother lays dying) that simply took my breath away. It was one of the most profound and haunting marriages of dialogue and camera movement I have seen in some time, and it will not leave my mind any time soon.

On Saturday night, Sophia and I saw one of my all-time favorites, Martin Scorsese’s After Hours (1985) in 35MM at IFC, as part of their Waverly Midnights: Scorsese program. It’s as much of a delightful and exhilarating ride as it was when I first watched it on VHS as a kid – frenetic, thrilling and truly bizarre. Over the past year, there have been a lot of terrific opportunities to see Scorsese’s work on the big screen – I saw Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1975) and The Last Waltz (1978) at the Museum of the Moving Image last year during their amazing Scorsese exhibit, and IFC has been screening much of his filmography over the last few weeks (I’m going back in June to catch another favorite, Bringing out the Dead, in 35mm). Soon enough, I’ll have seen most of Scorsese’s films in cinemas (so far, I’ve seen nineteen, including the ones that were released in my lifetime).

When back in Austin more recently, I watched Woody Allen’s Husbands and Wives (1992) for the first time. This is perhaps the most formally fascinating film of Allen's career, and yet beyond all of the breathtaking handheld one-takes and jarring jump cuts, there's something truly unsettling here, both thematically and in the masterful performances. Husbands and Wives also has some very memorable set pieces - Sydney Pollack's drunken, rage-fueled visit to Judy Davis's house in the middle of the night is downright haunting (and, as more and more characters enter, it becomes one of Allen's best-directed group scenes ever). Meanwhile, two sequences with Allen and Juliette Lewis (when they retrieve his manuscript from a taxi driver, and then later share a kiss at her birthday party) will both linger in my memory for some time to come. This film is a scorcher.

My job at Comedy Central is going well – it’s always a joy to work on an interview clip with a guest I truly respect and admire. Here’s Sean Penn on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah this past March – with a (hopefully good) still I picked out for him. I’m currently reading his first novel, Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff, and it is a wild ride – a truly original and fascinating peek inside Penn’s mind. I miss seeing him onscreen these days, but Bob Honey is holding me over until his next film.

I also got to work on a great interview clip with Matt Damon and Gary White of water.org, which you can find here.

The film I directed last October, Four Play, is officially finished, and the film’s writer and producer, Ben Krevalin, is busy submitting the movie to film festivals. I think we made a pretty strong movie, with four really charming lead performances and some creative blocking in there. I suspect it will be some time before it’s available online, but if you’re interesting in seeing it, please let me know. And, yes, I’m still editing Harvey’s Last Night on the Avenue. I’m getting closer and closer, and more and more excited with each passing day as it comes together. I’ve never taken this long editing a film (in fact, I used to pride myself on making and releasing new films with great regularity), but this one feels like it needs my full attention and focus. It’s already been in the works for two-and-a-half years – what are a few more months? Anyway, by the next time I post here, I’ll have a trailer ready – and a full film (and web series) shortly to follow.

A few extremely talented artists have passed away since I last wrote. Milos Forman was one of the greatest filmmakers of all time – and, in his incredible career, directed two films pretty much everyone can agree are among the finest ever made, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) and Amadeus (1984). Actor R. Lee Ermey (Full Metal Jacket, Seven) was such a presence onscreen – he will be missed. I had the opportunity of meeting him when I was a volunteer at Dennis Quaid Charity Classic Golf Tournament in high school, and he was extremely kind.

I don’t think I’ve written anything about this year’s Academy Awards. There’s really not much to say – they got nearly everything right except the biggest prize of them all. I suppose it doesn’t matter ­in the end – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri was always a little dangerous, and the film (thankfully) didn’t play by the rules of what’s expected in cinema nowadays. But I can’t imagine anyone in his or her right mind looking back years from now and thinking The Shape of Water was a superior film. But the fact that Sam Rockwell, Roger Deakins, Gary Oldman and Allison Janney are now Oscar winners is heartening (not to mention Frances McDormand receiving her extremely well-deserved second Oscar). It’s not every year that your favorite film has a shot at the big prize (see Silence last year), so I was certainly rooting for Three Billboards in a big way. But now the noise of awards season is gone, and the greatness of McDonagh’s film remains.

Lastly, I never thought it’d happen, but I’m going to Springsteen on Broadway with Sophia in July! I haven’t been this happy since the last time I saw Bruce Springsteen during The River tour and made something of a tribute video here.

Harvey's Last Night on the Avenue

Over the course of the past year and a half, I’ve been doing everything I can to make my latest film, which I first wrote in September of 2015. I wanted my friend and collaborator Mike Wesolowski, who played the lead role in my thesis film You Can’t Put Your Arms Around A Memory, to not only star in the film, but also to help me re-write and refine the piece. Together, we embarked upon the creation of my sixth film, Harvey’s Last Night on the Avenue.

Last summer, after going through dozens of drafts with Mike – meeting together in all corners of New York City to get the script right – I launched an IndieGoGo campaign and officially announced pre-production on the film, with the intention of shooting in October 2016. You can view our promo video below.

As hard as I’ve tried to stay in the ‘short film’ arena these last few years, I’ve reached a point where the themes I want to explore no longer fit within the confines of a twenty-minute-or-less story. Thus, Harvey’s Last Night On The Avenue is my largest scale project to date. A five-part web-series, the story takes place over the course of one long night, as we follow a sensitive young man named Harvey, who joins a group of his friends on a bar crawl the night before he moves from New York back to his hometown in Texas. The picture follows him and this ever-growing group as they hop from bar-to-bar in Brooklyn.

Harvey, an obsessive and socially awkward person, ruminates over many of his minor social faux pas that he perceives as huge errors. As the night goes on, he accrues more and more faults in his mind, and becomes increasingly unable to connect with the people around him. He even keeps a tape recorder in his backpack, and frequently retreats to the bathroom to confess his ill-advised behavior into the recorder.

But Harvey’s Last Night on the Avenue isn’t only about the outcast – it’s about the dynamic of the entire group. Each character has his or her own unique set of goals — we have fun watching the whims and aspirations of a large number of twenty-somethings out on the town, struggling to function in their own way.

Stylistically, this film has the feel of hang-out movies such as Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused (1993) and Everybody Wants Some!! (2016) – films that are built around a large number of vivid supporting characters, rely on a small number of varied settings, and take place over a short span of time (in this case, one night). Despite these influences, Harvey’s Last Night on the Avenue is unique in that it’s a story told from the perspective of someone on the outside of the fun. As the film goes on, we fall further away from connecting with the charismatic supporting characters. And as Harvey becomes increasingly removed from the situation, we gain more and more insight into the psychological factors behind his behavior.

In many ways, this series is a continuation and expansion of the character from my thesis film - someone who feels so bad about every single action he takes, he can only survive by confessing to another person (that film concerns a young man who compulsively confesses every detail of his anti-social behavior to his mother).

I think Mike and I both responded to the intense morality of the character he played in my last film. Naturally, we wanted to return to this character and explore him beyond the confines of a twenty-minute short film – and in particular explore why this person feels the necessity to confess his behavior. Where did this compulsion come from? What psychological factors are present when someone can’t get through an evening with friends without obsessing over their sometimes harmless and sometimes inappropriate social errors? Whereas my thesis film took place largely in an apartment with Charlie and his mother, Mike and I thought we should put our new character out in the wild for the entirety of this project. Let it all take place in social settings, where this character feels deeply anxious and trapped – which is why we ended up with a bar-crawl script.

So there's this tension the whole movie - between wanting to be part of the fun, and needing to reckon with the part of ourselves that questions each and every decision on a deeply moral, micro level.

And we felt strongly that a web-series was the right format for this idea. Because the screenplay moves from bar to bar throughout the course of one night, we realized that the story breaks up very nicely into individual episodes. And we weren't familiar with a web series in which each episode returns to the same, long painful night again and again. We felt this could be a very unique way of telling this particular story, especially as our lead character continues to return in his mind to events from the same ongoing night.

Originally, my producer, cinematographer and I estimated that the film would cost close to $30,000.00. We were planning to shoot over a period of two weeks in October, with ten shooting days and two rest days. But even though the shoot was planned in a relatively inexpensive way, it was clear I couldn’t quite raise enough money to make it happen. The IndieGoGo campaign brought in over $5000.00, but I was trying to raise as much as $15,000.00. Much of the budget came from the sheer length of the shoot – renting camera gear, grip/electric equipment, and production vehicles adds up significantly over the course of two weeks. And that doesn’t include food, which, for a crew of more than ten people and a cast of fifteen, is a significant expense. And then there were the locations – seven of our ten shooting days were at bars.

Despite our limited budget, I wanted this series to feel energetic and alive, and pulse with the intensity of the lead character's emotions. What we lack in resources, we will make up for in pure energy – that was my motto. Even as an October shoot date seemed foolhardy, I soldiered on – thinking that somehow we would be able to do it.

Before long, it became clear that we would be better served and prepared by shooting in the spring, and so I made the decision to move our dates. This would allow us a little more time to find the proper locations and to plan the logistics of the shoot – and, ideally, find more money.

During the winter, Mike and I scaled back the script to fit a more modest budget, and we were ultimately thrilled with the result. Through tightening the script to a leaner thirty pages, we found a way to shoot the series in five days rather than ten. Suddenly, the shoot seemed viable – we could make the series in a more cost-effective way that fit our budget.

But there were further complications ahead. In January, I lost most of my original crew to other jobs and circumstances beyond their control, which was a major setback. Luckily, I had a cast who was dedicated to the script and wasn't going anywhere, and so there was still a team behind this thing pushing it forward, by any means necessary. Along with Mike, we had some of the finest young actors in New York City – including Justin Danforth, Matthew K. Davis, Connor Delves, Aubrey Elenz, Allison Frasca, Taylor Marie Frey, Michael Galligan, Justine Magnusson, Max Pava and Jamie Wolfe. Many of them came directly from the Atlantic School of Acting at NYU, where Mike studied alongside them.

Then, I received some wonderful news in January that helped us immensely - I was one of four recipients of the Richie Jackson Artist Fellowship, which includes a mentorship from the very successful producer Richie Jackson and a $5000.00 stipend, which went straight to this web series. You can view my bio for the Fellowship here, and read more about the fellowship here. Suddenly, the shoot didn’t seem so crazy. My mom, Gretchen Kyser, made a huge contribution to total up the funds needed. I wrote my contributors and let them know we were a full go for our spring shoot! (In case I haven’t said it before, I cannot thank the contributors to my IndieGoGo campaign enough. They helped make the series possible.)

As soon as I could, I found a new team – the extraordinary producer Alex Fofonoff (director of the feature film Blood and Thunder, in which I starred) had already been helping me scout locations during the summer, and his stepping in and taking charge of the project really saved us. Then, the immensely talented cinematographer Kevin Dynia joined the crew, along with assistant director Matthew James Reilly, sound mixer Nick Chirumbolo, and script supervisor Lain Kienzle.

In the months leading up to the shoot, I storyboarded the entire film and met with Kevin consistently to shot list the film. Alex and I locked down locations, insurance and all other logistical challenges – and I rehearsed with our large, magnificent cast (Mike now lives in Chicago, and so we did a large cast rehearsal without him before he arrived, and then individual, smaller rehearsals once he was in town).

In the end, we had a terrific shoot - four different bar locations (Beauty Bar, The Starlight, Phoenix and Syndicated), an extraordinary night of exteriors, and an on-set energy unlike any I've ever seen. We scheduled and planned the film the right way, and the work paid off - it was as smooth a shoot as you could hope for, especially considering the scale and ambition of the series.

I am so deeply honored and humbled by the hard work of our cast and crew members. We had two actors, Mike and Taylor Frey, fly in from Chicago and Los Angeles specifically for the shoot, and we called upon the talents of many local actors and filmmakers to help tell this story. We had two amazing actors who were part of the beloved Austin High theatre department, Aubrey Elenz and Zach Gamble, and renowned filmmakers running the set at a remarkable pace.

I feel confident in saying that this will be the strongest work I've made to date, and I owe so much of it to the extraordinary ensemble of actors in this piece. Every one of them added such vitality to this project, and I find myself cracking up and genuinely moved while watching the dailies.

Mike and I first started working together on this script well over a year ago, and almost exactly a year ago, we embarked upon casting the project. I can’t thank those who stuck with us from the beginning enough. It wasn't an easy road - from postponing our original shoot dates in October, to reassembling much of the team earlier this year - but I wouldn't have changed a thing about the way we pulled off the shoot in the end.

I will start working on editing the picture as soon as possible, and I feel confident, given the effort put into the film, that we will have a fantastic final product. Expect many more updates to come.

In addition to all of this news about Harvey's Last Night on the Avenue, I also want to share some news about my previous film, Jack and Lucas Go To A Wedding. Last year, this short film was named an Official Selection of the 2016 Black Cat Picture Show in Augusta, GA, and the 2016 Hudson Valley International Film Festival in upstate New York. The movie screened at both festivals in August, and Lucas Loredo won Best Supporting Actor in a Short Film at the Hudson Valley International Film Festival!

In June, the film will screen at NewFilmmakers New York at Anthology Film Archives, which is always an amazing place to screen a movie (I screened my film Jake the Cinephile there three years ago on probably the largest screen on which I’ve seen my work).

In addition, a clip from Jack and Lucas Go To A Wedding screened on WJBP NewsChannel 6 in Augusta, Georgia, as part of the promotion for the Black Cat Picture Show. You can see the clip (featuring my co-star and dear friend Lucas and me) here at 0:34!