Well, I would definitely say that the Chicago premiere of The Neutrino Project was a success. For starters, the whole thing actually worked. We had a few sound problems in the final scene, and it turned out that Greg didn't rewind one scene far enough and the audience only saw half of it, but that was the worst.

Minor victories: we got the 8' screen for the 6' price. Michael got popcorn nearly donated by the Davis Theater. Lots of people said they loved it. The door take covered the cost of the beer we had for the cast after the show. It worked!

There were lots of fun, weird improv-synchronities. From the suggestion of "nepotism," we somehow ended up with four stories of relationships gone wrong. All the stories had people getting wasted. Two different pairs of characters got thrown out of establishments. The whole thing ended in a big make-out scene that was high-larious.

Fortunately for us, there was no midnight show this week at WNEP, so after the show, we cracked open the aforementioned beer and the cast and crew got to watch the movie. Several of the cast commented on the same thing I thought would be weird -- knowing that people were watching the show while we were still making it. Oh, I did bring the camera to see what the audience reactions were like, but I forgot to turn it on. Oops.

I have to give a special shout-out to the runners -- Sean Cusick, Adam Devlin-Brown, Lance Hoffman, & Scott McNulty. Those guys acted as crowd control, were extras, ran like demons, and were really draconian time-keepers. Early on in the process I empowered the runners to be the final arbiters of when the tapes absolutely had to be back to the theater. And they were on it, barking orders at the camera people -- "gimme that tape now." We didn't have any late tapes...

And a super-big thanks, again, to Neutrino in New York for inventing this thing and then sharing their hard-won knowledge so freely with us.

"But say, Fuzzy, I just noticed from the time stamp of this post that you're up pretty late on a Sunday night." It is definitely time for me to get my own miniDV camera. When we first stared working on the show, I was trying to convince myself that I needed a new camera. But I managed to talk myself out of it, because I figured my Sony Digital8 camera was good enough. I think it is for the show (you can tell the difference between my camera and Michael's, but I think mine is OK). But tonight I'm blanking all the miniDV tapes for next week's show and I have to stay up late to do it, because I only have the loan of Michael's miniDV deck for tonight. If we do a run of this show, I'm definitely getting a new camera, just so I can do tasks like this at my leisure.