If I were going to ask a few questions to the actors/actresses playing one or more minor characters in the film, what questions would you have me ask?

Sadly, the most recent shirt I got in the mail wasn’t really my size, so I had to recruit my girlfriend into the posing game:

Damnation-Inc continue to put out cool variations on their theme. You can find their new, female friendly shirt at their site. Enjoy.

Who likes headless photos? I do!

All previous Fan Shirts.

This morning the CBS Evening News came by and did an interview with me for a piece running probably during Saturday or Sunday evening’s newscast at either 6:00pm or 6:30pm (you’ll have to check your own schedules).

Update (5/20/06 at 10:51 am):

CBS let me know that the piece won’t air until NEXT weekend at the earliest, meaning either Saturday (5/27/06) or Sunday (5/28/06). I’ll let you know if/when I find more.

A few weeks ago the CBC interviewed me for a radio story. The piece, similar in feel to the NPR piece, is now online (scroll down to Part II). The producer asked Roger Ebert about the comparison between Snakes on a Plane and Casablanca, unfortunately they didn’t record him scoffing at the question. At about 16 minutes in, Ebert goes on a rant about “the age of irony”:

I’m tired of the age of irony. The age of irony is just an attitude that excuses you for consuming junk as if it were worth consuming. And irony is also just an excuse to avoid doing the heavy lifting of important art, you know? If you don’t go to see great movies, or read great books, or go to great theater, or look at great television, then you don’t have to think about it and you can just master trivia. And then when you’re 35 you can sit around drinking beer with your high school buddies and, you know, chat^* your life away. People who embrace irony are living in a little bubble brained universe of lost time.

It’s possible he said “shat” or “shit” rather than “chat”, it was a little bit unclear. It sounded like “shat” but that didn’t make any sense. When asked about the quality of the title, he had this to say:

It is a good title. How about this for another title: “Hands Down the Garbage Disposal.”

If anyone can get an MP3 of this, I’d appreciate it. Ebert also makes a passing reference to Snakes on a Plane, without nearly as much anger, in his recent review of The Poseidon Adventure.

Also, if you’re bored, here’s a quick clip from WPLJ in New York where they discussed Snakes on a Plane a little bit.

My dad chastised me last night for not posting my monthly recap.  I had forgotten about it.  Whoops.  My first one was three months ago, the second one was two months ago and the third one was last month.

I’ve been online for 121 days. I’ve had about 487,000 visitors. I’ve posted 257 stories which received 1,614 comments (and 792 blocked comment spams) as well as one contest. There have been 1,530,000 requests for pages, and a staggering 31,200,000 requests for all files (these are mostly people hotlinking to images and comics that I’ve hosted and posting them on other forums around the net). I’ve transferred 772 gigabytes of data (slowly approaching a terrabyte!). The most popular day of the week is Friday. The most popular hour of the day is between 1pm and 2pm.

I’ve gotten eight free t-shirts, one free hat, one free button and one free mug. A fan started petition requesting I be allowed to attend the premiere is over 1100 signatures. There are currently 49 translations of “Snakes on a Plane” into foreign languages (including ASL). I’ve been interviewed by two TV crews. According to Google, SnakesOnABlog.com has appeared in 151 newspaper stories, been linked to by 829 blogs, and over 5,500 other webpages.

But my goal was not to build stats. My goal was not to get free t-shirts or high hit-counts. My goal was to attend the Hollywood premiere of Snakes on a Plane. If that doesn’t come to pass, then all the rest of this work was for nothing. Read my first, second and third pleas to hear more.

My goals are looking pretty good at this point. David Ellis, the director, has said that I’d be coming to the premiere in several interviews… but the quest doesn’t end until I’m standing on the red carpet.

Things are looking good, though. Thanks for everyone’s support.

As you may have noticed, there’s been a countdown to the film’s Opening Day in the right-hand column of the site for a while now. Today it’s reading that there’s only 100 days left until the August 18th official release and I thought you might like to celebrate this occasion with me by adding your own countdown to your own website. If you’re interested, you can download the code, slap on your website, and you’re good to go.

Only 100 days left, are you excited yet?

In other news I took my second 9 hour final today and I’m pretty tired.  Constitutional Law felt a lot harder than Criminal Justice.  However, if anyone wants to ask me a question about the Dormant Commerce Clause, now will be better than any other time for the rest of my life.  Also, the contest I posted yesterday got a lot more response than I expected, over 50 emails with over 100 submissions.  If you haven’t already submitted your two entries, then keep them coming.

This all means that sadly, I’ve been derelict at handling new submissions and responding to general email requests.  If you’ve sent me something and I haven’t responded, this is why.  Feel free to send it again if you’d like.  I’ll have more time when this month is over, it’s going to be a good summer.

This is free week here at Snakes on a Blog, my collection is burgeoning. Anyway, here is my latest addition from ScaryLion.com:

This is the first one in blue, and it’s broadened my wardrobe. I’m usually more of a black and grey sort of person. You can pick up this shirt design at their site. Enjoy.

All previous Fan Shirts.

I just did one of these yesterday, but I got another package today. ShelfLife sent me one of their new model shirts, and a snazzy mug:

Check out ShelfLife’s CafePress store for the shirt, the mug and lots of other things.

All previous Fan Shirts.

Ok, it appears that the current burst of activity is because CNN just reprinted the AP story from a few days ago (providing a link here). To accomodate the crowd, I’ve temporarily shortened the lengths of pages dramatically (reducing server stress). Sadly, this website does not have as much capacity as I would like… so…

Hey folks, do any of my readers run a web hosting company looking to take on a little website about a little movie?

My current webhost provider is not providing me with adequate server facilities and will not allow me to purchase a higher level of service (I can’t imagine why). I’d love to trade adspace for server space/bandwidth/etc but I can also pay. Any advice from anybody would be appreciated.

For everyone from CNN.com, I highly recommend you check out everything this site has to offer: Fan Art, Fan Songs, Fan Comics, Fan Shirts and Fan Videos.

I’ve been very slowly messing around with a forum script to see if it was worth integrating into the site. I haven’t decided if this is worthwhile yet, but check it out and let me know if you think this is something you would use:

Snakes on a Forum

Please go check it out, post something, mess around with it. See if it something that’s worth using, or if I’m wasting my time with it.

Hey, sometime in the next day this counter will cross over to 300,000 visitors:

I’m going to have a mini-contest. The first person to send me a screen capture of that counter above 300,000 will win an exciting prize. Please don’t cheat. If you’re not technically savvy enough to do a full screen capture, you can right-click on the image and choose “Save Image As…” then save it to your hard drive and let me know.

UPDATE: Damin gets it.  I’ll be touch shortly about your prize.

A few weeks ago I filming an interview for CNN’s Paula Zahn, and it aired last night (4/13/06) at 8:00pm.

Snakes on CNN video captured/edited/encoded by Andrew

The video is encoded in Xvid (download the codec and follow the instructions on the website if you’re having trouble viewing it). You can also apparently get a streaming video of this from CNN, but you can’t link to it from other sites so you’ll need to dig for it yourself. Also, here’s three screenshots for those of you not interested in downloading the whole video:

The monthly recaps continue. My first one was two months ago, the second one was one month ago.

I’ve been online for 90 days. I’ve had about 265,000 visitors. I’ve posted 185 stories. There have been 770,000 requests for pages, and a staggering 18,100,000 requests for all files (these are mostly people hotlinking to images and comics that I’ve hosted and posting them on other forums around the net). I’ve transferred 375 gigabytes of data (slowly approaching a terrabyte!). The most popular day of the week is Friday. The most popular hour of the day is between 1pm and 2pm.

I’ve gotten seven free t-shirts, one free hat and one free button (more please). A fan started petition requesting I be allowed to attend the premiere is currently standing at nearly 600 signatures (more please). There are currently 31 translations of “Snakes on a Plane” into foreign languages (more please). I’ve been interviewed by two TV crews. According to Google, SnakesOnABlog.com has appeared in 34 newspaper stories, been linked to by 521 blogs, and over 6,500 other webpages.

But my goal was not to build stats. My goal was not to get free t-shirts or high hit-counts. My goal was to attend the Hollywood premiere of Snakes on a Plane. If that doesn’t come to pass, then all the rest of this work was for nothing. Read my first, second and third pleas to hear more.

My goals are looking pretty good at this point. David Ellis, the director, has said that I’d be coming to the premiere in several interviews… but the quest doesn’t end until I’m standing on the red carpet.

Things are looking good, though. Thanks for everyone’s support.

There was an article about me and this blog in Saturday’s Washington Post. I missed it entirely, they snuck it by me on a weekend. I hate the way my spoken words read when they come out on paper. I guess I’m more eloquent in my head than I am out loud. I should start tape recording myself and transcribing it to see how it looks on paper. Additionally, they give me too much credit for starting the phenomenon or creating the internet interest. For example: “When the director went back to do more filming, he says he incorporated some of the blogger’s ideas. At least the tone of them.” The ideas that were incorporated were certainly not mine. I’m just cataloguing, nothing more. Anyway, here’s the most important part of the story for me:

Ellis says he should stop worrying. His tickets are ready. “We talked about Brian in the marketing meeting, and we have got to fly him out,” says Ellis.

Cool.

I’ve been quoted in this week’s Entertainment Weekly, but I don’t really like how it turned out. I must have stumbled through my now standard answer to the “has the publicity already peaked” question. What I apparently said was “I feel bad, because this has hit a plateau, I don’t know if it will keep going up.” What I normally say is something about how it’s unreasonable to expect publicity for any event to build in a straight line from zero to extremely high, peaking right when the event occurs. You have to expect peaks and valleys along the way. No, I don’t think the media attention will stay as sharply focused from now until August as it has been for the last two weeks, but I do think that there will be peaks again again in the future… for example when they release the official poster, or trailer, or when the actors start doing real PR. This was but one peak in a long process. That’s how I meant to answer.

But then again, they really shouldn’t be asking me for publicity predictions. I don’t work in Hollywood and I know nothing about how to publicize a movie. They really should be asking “buzz” questions to New Line, or someone on their own staff. They’ve dealt with this kind of thing before, I haven’t.

Anyway, for those of you interested here’s a link to the Entertainment Weekly story (subscription required) on their website and here’s scans of the two pages from the actual magazine (no subscription required):

I am a big fan of their graphic, it looks great. They also mention in the story that to make the movie more ‘R’ rated they’ve added “blood and breasts” as well as gorier death scenes.

Every time someone quotes David Ellis, he sounds really excited about the movie. I wonder if that’s just something you do with every movie you work on, or if it’s genuine?

Contrary to my announcement last week, there will be no Snakes on a Plane segment on Paula Zahn this Friday. It has been pushed back for some news-related reason. I’ll update when I have more information about when it will be on.

Additionally tomorrow I’m tentatively scheduled to do an interview with SkyTV which broadcasts in the UK (and elsewhere in Europe? I don’t know). There’s been some dancing with the scheduling, so I’m not 100% sure it’s going to happen. We’ll see.

Think they’ll put makeup on me?

Please be gentle with my server, this is a large file (27 megs). Here’s all of the mentions of Snakes on a Plane on tonight’s (4/4/06) Countdown with Keith Olbermann on MSNBC:

Snakes on MSNBC video captured/edited/encoded by Andrew

The video is encoded in Xvid (download the codec if you’re having trouble viewing it). Also, here’s three screenshots for those of you not interested in downloading the whole video:

So, how’d I do?

I’ve added the transcript after the break:

Read the rest of this entry »

First of all a programming note.

According to the networks the Snakes on a Plane piece that I did an interview for (poorly) will air on MSNBC’s Countdown Tuesday night at 8:00pm (04/04/06). I don’t know at what point during the hour. Additionally, today I did an interview for CNN’s Paula Zahn for a piece which should air on Friday night at 8:00pm (04/07/06).

If somebody with magical tv/internet powers could get me clips from these two shows, it would be greatly appreciated.

The CNN interview went better than the MSNBC interview. I went down to their studio and did it in person. I got to sit in a little room by myself with a camera… AND I got an earpiece. It was great. I don’t think anybody really understood why I was there though. Here’s the jist of my day:

Q: Are you going into the Situation Room?
A: Uhm, I don’t think so. Maybe?

Q: Are you here to talk about Moussaui?
A: Uhm, probably not, but I can throw something together if you want.

Q: Do you need makeup?
A: Uhm, I don’t think so.
Response: Yes, you do.

Q: Do you need hairspray?
A: No, I don’t.
Response: Yes, you do.

Q: So, what are you here to talk about?
A: A movie called Snakes on a Plane.

Q: Oh, are you in it?
A: Uh, no.

So, I got both makeup and hairspray. It was really gross. I can’t imagine it actually makes you look better on tv, but whatever. I guess we’ll find out in a few days. I was in the makeup room with Paul Begala, I can pretty much guarantee that if he knew why I was there, he would have scoffed at me.

Anyway, look for the interviews. And, again, please record them for me.

UPDATE: Here’s the video.

Newsweek has an article this week entitled “Snakes on a What?” (Sound familiar? Check out the right-hand column) where they called me the “ringleader” of fans on the web. I most certainly am not the ringleader, but I’ll take the attention anyway… especially because of this quote from director David Ellis at the end of the piece:

Will Brian’s red-carpet dream come true? “Absolutely,” says Ellis. “We’re gonna fly him out here.” Or maybe he should drive.

I must say, this is looking pretty good.

Update, here’s a high quality scan of the hard-copy:

A package came in the mail today with a Snakes on a Plane hat and pin. Here’s the hat (I’m talking on the phone, hence the weird hand gesture… but wow, look at how big my hand looks!):

And here’s the pin:

You can pick up the hat and the pin at Shelf Life’s CafePress store.

I’ve been asked to point out that although I now have shirts, hats and a pin, nobody to date has offered me Snakes on a Plane pants. I can’t clothe myself entirely in Snakes on a Plane without a pair of Snakes pants. I need your help, people!

All previous Fan Clothing.