Chasing Ghosts at California Extreme (CAX)

This just announced - Chasing Ghosts will be screening at the California Extreme festival. The festival runs from August 11-12 at Parkside Hall in San Jose, California.

See here for the official announcement:

http://www.caextreme.org/forum/index.php?topic=24.0

I'm not sure if I'll be going or not. I'd love to go, but just don't have the money to spare for another trip right now.

If you don't know what the festival is about, here's the description from their website:

"California Extreme is the "Classic Arcade Games Show". In a nutshell, it's an annual celebration of coin operated pinball machines, video games and other novelties you once found in game arcades. It's two days that celebrate this exceptional entertainment medium, featuring tournaments, speakers, parts vendors, and an opportunity to play games you may have not seen for years. All the games on display are set for free play, so leave your quarters in the ash tray in your car. You won't need 'em."

LA Film Festival Screening of "Chasing Ghosts"

Last weekend we had a screening of Chasing Ghosts at the LA Film Festival, which I attended.

Here's some photos of the event.
http://peterhirschberg.com/arcade/laff2007/

Just to remind you, the trailer is viewable online here:
http://chasingghoststhemovie.com/

We had pretty good attendance. It was an 1100 seat theater (huge!), and I think we had 700 seats filled. Not bad.

I had a couple nice folks come up to me after the event and introduce themselves. That was really cool. One of those folks, Mike Kennedy, even posted a nice review of the movie here:
http://www.monroeworld.com/forum/showthread.php?p=119155

The weather was certainly nicer than the Sundance event. :-)

The E.T. House

I had promised myself that if I ever made a trip to the West Coast I would visit the E.T. House - that is, the house they used when they filmed the movie E.T.

I was delighted to find that the house, according to my GPS, was only a 30 miles drive from my motel where I was staying to attend the LA Film Festival.

So as promised - me and Lincoln, Lincoln's girlfriend, and Michael all drove out there Saturday morning before heading off to check out a couple films at the festival.

I brought home a pinecone that was sitting in the driveway (figured it was fair game). You can see the pinecone in the lower right corner of the 2nd photo (thank you Michael for grabbing it for me).




Here's a couple shots of the house from the movie to compare what it looked like back then.



It was SOOOO FREAKY being there in that neighborhood and seeing that house. With the dramatic mountain behind it just as I remembered it.

E.T. is one of my 2 top favorite films of all times, and by 2 top favorites I mean tied for first place. It was one of two films that quite literally changed my life after seeing them. Standing there in front of the actual house gave me a feeling that's very hard to put into words. At one point I was on my knees in front of the driveway rubbing my hands around on the asphalt of the street in front of the house.

As we were driving through the neighborhood and driving up to the actual house, I was shocked at how different things looked. The entire neighborhood was literally brand new when the film was made, so add 25 years of vegetation, trees, and the houses themselves getting run down.

In-person, everything seemed so much smaller than it appeared in the film.

You can get pretty stunning aerial photos of the house with this link to Microsoft Live Search. Use the control in the upper left corner of the screen and you can actually rotate around the house. Very neat.

After this, we rolled by the apartment complex used in the movie "Karate Kid" and took some photos. That movie doesn't mean anything to me, so I'll skip posting the photos from that place here. We went there because of Michael and Lincoln.