In an effort to maintain our bond and keep the gang together, we hosted the 2nd Annual Official Lion Pride Holiday Celebration at Chateau Charlemagne.  It was great seeing everyone, and the mulled wine flowed freely.  We discussed a very interesting new project, slating the first reading in mid-January.  More details on this later.

I managed, somehow, during my efforts to get the baby back to sleep, to fall asleep myself, mid-party.  I woke up around 10:30pm to an empty house and sadness anchored deep in my gut.  Tina said everyone had a good time regardless, so that eased my melancholy.

Lion Pride is a tremendous group of multi-talented people and their mates.  20+ people, all who feel like family, all brought together by the alloying fires of taking on a massive theatrical endeavor.  There is no higher emotional state than when complete strangers are let into your heart and you find yourself enhanced in ways you never imagined for their presences.

Be well, be happy.  Until next time.

Cheers,

Chris

It was spring of 1995 that our partnership formed, and after spending the next 4 years basking in each other’s presence, and stewing in our own creative juices, until one fateful day forged our little company.On closing day of the 1999 Sundance Film Festival we were having lunch with a new friend who asked how we met, and when we told him, he said he thought that would be great subject matter for a documentary. We had been thinking about doing a film on the subject, but had a narrative feature being scripted. Our new friend made us an offer we could not refuse; he would act as DP and loan us his digital camera and lenses for free if we jumped on the project.

We scripted the story we wanted to tell on the flight home from Salt Lake City that very day. We spent the week doing research on the just-burgeoning digital video movement and setting up rentals of additional equipment.

That Friday we left San Francisco (where we were living at the time) with our 1st A.D., for L.A. to pick up our DP and the equipment, and then off to Goodyear, Arizona to film a massive 12000+ person week-long event. That was our first day of shooting “In Service to the Dream,” a feature-length documentary on the Society for Creative Anachronism.

Sadly, the style we chose to tell the story in did not look or feel like the documentaries that distributors were used to, nor did it match Showtime, HBO, or the History Channel’s format. We were left with independently distributing the film through Mythos Distributions.

And thus a production company was born…