August 10, 2008

Micon Cinemas is getting ready for us. They're sporting us on their marquee and in their poster boxes inside and out. We're under two weeks away from premiering to the world, or, at least to a portion of it. Make plans to come see our movie! And make plans to bring everyone you know!

August 5, 2008

For centuries, the Internet Movie Database (IMDb.com) has served as the final arbiter of whether one has made a movie or not. If it wasn't there it meant it never happened, and we at Wut Wut Alma have been told as much on more than seventeen occasions throughout our production by people who know more than us. (We were even once told this by Wikipedia, the overseer of all truth in the universe.)

Well, we're here to proclaim we're now as legitimate as a zygote with married parents! IMDb put Illegal Use of Joe Zopp into their proverbial Bible this week, thrusting, for example, Nick's 61-year-old, retired-kindergarten-teacher mother -- who was our caterer and appeared as the character "Make Out Patty" -- into the annals of movie history. Kinda cool.

Check out the Zopp page now, rate our movie a 10 even if you haven't seen it yet, and fuel our IMDb ratings duel with The Godfather. You're gettin' served, Mr. Coppola.

July 27, 2008

The Landlocked Film Festival announced their schedule this morning, and Joe Zopp is on it! (We had reason to believe we would be.) We'll be bringing it all home Saturday night, August 23rd, right after the Awards Ceremony at the gorgeous Englert Theatre in downtown Iowa Rock City.

Illegal Use of Joe Zopp, Saturday, August 23rd, 9:30 pm
Englert Theatre, Iowa City, Iowa, Official Selection of the Landlocked Film Festival

This will be quite a weekend indeed. Click on the Landlocked logo below and check out the lowdown on the festival and all the other fine films showing there. Oh, and it's FREE!

July 19, 2008

Still waiting on the schedule for Landlocked, and Nick has once again literally made himself sick working on the DVD. (If you're scoring at home, that's strep, mono, flu, and the common cold. Next up: non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.)

Hey, are you a fan of Joe Zopp on Facebook or a friend of Zopp on MySpace? Well, you freakin' should be. Join us in connecting the virtual alter-egos of nearly every being on the internets! Click on the corporate registered trademarked logos to link to our pages. We cannot possibly wait any longer to get SuperPoked! by you.

By the way, Joe and Melissa's wedding rocked. Seth's speech killed. And "Wonderful Tonight" was the first song played during the dollar dance. Were you in the money?

July 10, 2008

We made the Landlocked Film Festival! Yay. The folks at Iowa City's International Film Festival notified us recently of Zopp's acceptance, and we received official selection notification this week. We couldn't be more pleased. As it turns out, it makes our premiere weekend in Chippewa Falls all the more action-packed because it's the same weekend. Debuting in two cities on two screens is a lot closer to a 3,500-screen opening weekend than we could've imagined.

The Landlocked Film Fest takes place from August 21st through the 24th, and schedules for Zopp screenings there should be announced very soon. We'll have them for you here, of course, but here's a link to the Landlocked web site. Iowa Rock City!



Meanwhile, things are brewing on the premiere front. If you're in Chippewa Falls, you might begin to see some flyers for our opening around town. An exclusive premiere screening for our actors and crew will happen on Thursday, August 21st, and then Micon opens to the public on August 22nd. We have five showings a day for seven days, so find a way to be there and find out what this mess is all about.

Stay tuned as updates are going to be a little more frequent over the next month. Our webmaster (me) has also been on DVD-creating duty, so, you know, lots on the china. But we'll make it happen, and the DVD release is also up around the bend too.

Big doings in Wut Wut Alma don't usually happen without being preceded by a wedding. Joe and his sweetheart, Melissa, tie the noose this weekend. Seth is the best man. Fun is in store. And odds on "Wonderful Tonight" being played during the dollar dance? Even.

We blast off in 42 days.

-- Nick

May 20, 2008

There was a nice article about our premiere and the post-production progress of Zopp in the Chippewa Herald today. Check out Rod Stetzer's article here!

May 4, 2008

Due to some scheduling conflicts with the theater, the Illegal Use of Joe Zopp premiere week has been moved to August. Zopp will now open August 22nd at Micon Cinemas in Chippewa Falls.

Zopp now opens Friday, August 22, 2008.

We apologize for the false alarm and promise Zopp will now be twice as funny or unfunny, moving or unmoving, emotional, offensive, and sly as you thought it was going to be in July. Also, some of the filmmakers and cast who were going to be on hand at Micon during opening weekend will no longer be charging money for hugs. Those hugs will now be free. Thanks.

April 26, 2008

"Illegal Use of Joe Zopp will open in theaters this summer," has a nice sound to it. Well, it's true. Sure, maybe the plural "theaters" is a slight stretch at this point. But it sure as heck is opening in one. A night after we premiere the film to our actors and crew, Micon Cinemas in Chippewa Falls will introduce the movie-going public what we been shootin' our mouths off about for, like, years.

Zopp opens Friday, July 25, 2008.

Zopp will run for ONE WEEK ONLY from July 25th to July 31st exclusively at Micon. Tickets are actually available right now! Visit the Micon Cinemas web site to purchase for any of the showtimes that week (follow the link for "Now Showing" at the bottom and the info for Zopp is on the right side of the page).

Big propers to Micon for making these available now and on the World Wide Internets and not making our fans have to camp outside the theater for three months.

Nearly needless to say, we are freakin' exited about this. The City of Chippewa Falls was an unbelievably embracing and accomodating host to our shoot, so we'd always very much wanted to bring the movie to theaters there.

Micon stars in a brief scene early in the movie, and owner Mike Olson was already lobbying to premiere the movie there that night of shooting, standing just off camera, repeating between and during takes, "World premiere. World premiere." He and co-owner Connie Olson have been instrumental in making this all happen. Everybody give them a warm round of fist pumps.

More details are sure to emerge regarding some of the events on that opening weekend and the release of the DVD of Zopp later in the summer. So stay tuned here for that and buy your tickets now. We want to see you there!

 

March 23, 2008

Greetings, Zoppers. We've got a bad news and a handful of good newses to finally share with y'all. So rub off those sweaty palms, here we go!

First off, news on the festival admission front has been quiet. Or luckless, if you'd have it that way. Bad news is yet another. We've gotten a handful of rejections from festival staffers, generally explaining that our competition has been "friggin' fierce." We have no doubts about that. We've chucked Zopp at some of the most well-known festivals in America. What these letters generally don't say is, "Illegal Use of Joe Zopp sucks to the very core." So we've got that going for us.

Beyond the bummer factor though, we are continuing to submit to other festivals with audiences that we know will love, or even pretty much like, our movie. So it's all part of game, and at least the bad news is more of a "to be continued" for now.

Good news, though, is that there is about a 90% chance that the movie and DVD will pierce the public's eyes and ears at some point this summer. We're working on the dates, details, and the contents of the DVD, so as soon as we square away that last 10%, the news will be here.

More good: The Actor profiles are now available here on the web site. It took some finagling and some cooperation, but we're proud to put up more content about our killer cast who are great people, great actors, and who we are grateful for. So check that out by clicking on the Actor link with the maracas above.

Finally, and probably the best news of all, Wut Wut Alma's next project has moved into unshakably clichéd territory. It's about a group of sixteen angsty teenagers with lives full of...angst. But when they all meet each other through happenstance (their driving instructor is a genie!), they're forced to face the biggest choices of their whole lives. I mean every single sixteen of them come of age. Has a coming of age film ever had that many characters come of age? I think not. We are making this movie! We'll call it something profound, like Coming Of Age. Let's do this.

or click here to watch it on

January 27, 2008

The country's most famous -- and probably prominent -- film festival, Sundance, kicked off late last week, and as you can assume, we aren't there. It wasn't for lack of trying. We sent them a last-second copy of a mostly-finished Zopp in September. But, it seems, those cotton pickers had other fish to fry.

Truthfully, this wasn't too big of a blast to our collective ego. Despite its "independent" roots, Sundance boasts plenty of multi-million dollar pictures, starring actors with "names" and filmmakers who "know what they're doing." A helluva battle for our ambitious shoestringer.

To quote an impervious uncle of faith, "You guys are like David...only you have cerebral palsy and are slingin' rubber stones."

Not only that, but we went up against 8,500 other submissions, a good chunk of which were narrative features like Zopp. So had we gotten in, it certainly would have been surprise enough to fill my Jockeys. So we march on.

But we have consolation prizes!

A couple of weeks ago while watching High School Musical 2 with my nieces and nephew, I got a chance to post a whole pantsload of short movies we've made onto YouTube. (There were originally made for the old humor site FLYMF.com that I used to co-operate. It is now defunct, but the former editor -- and our very good friend -- James Seidler writes an odds-and-sods web log, The Ape-Mind Transcripts, which is good and should be perused.)

Anyway, the old shorts were done in a very traditional FLYMF way: shoot and edit in the same day. (I know, we should have adhered to this with Zopp.) So they're all pretty rough, but there's tons of bizarre and tasteless comedy there. So check it out by clicking here if you need a giggle or want to catch us doing presumably embarrassing things.

In "Next Project" news, the Sundance disappointment has effectively killed our plans to make Brach. But as of this sentence, a new epic has been officially anointed as Wut Wut Alma's next project. It's called Lasagna. At its bare bones, it's an action dramedy that takes place over two decades from the dawn of World War II to the assassination of Diem. It's about an alternate-universe where every person is a woman. (Yeah, even Khruschev.) But the gimmick is that all of these female characters are played by male actors. Doesn't that sound hip and groundbreaking? Obviously, there's more to it that that, but we can't give everything away right now!

Stay tuned. More festival updates and site updates are coming in February.

or click here to watch it on

November 23, 2007

Well, with a considerable dose of pride we're happy to finally unveil a small portion of Zopp to the general public. This is the official trailer for our movie, two and a half minutes more teasing about what we've been up to for the last two and a half years. It's available right here and on YouTube.

You'll finally get a peak into this bizarre story of ours, along with clips of the fantastic performances of André Egli, Corey Walton, Chris Schutz, Mike Cook, Donna Davidson, and the lot. Plus, you'll find that our music is one of the gems of the entire project. Skeletons with Flesh on Them, Megafaun, and Jeff White help rock the trailer.

While we spent a few days cutting this together last week, we're continuing to submit to film festivals across the country and bracing ourselves for the first responses in the coming month or so. Meanwhile, there are whispers that our next project is gaining steam already: a non-fact based period biopic about Brach's Confections founder Emil Brach, entitled simpy...Brach. This is a story that must be told -- soaring landscapes, Model-T chases, double-crossings, explosions, adulterous affairs, CANDY!!! -- and will be a guaranteed Oscar for Edward Norton or Paul Giamatti or whoever plays him. The only hitch is that we won't be able to make it for less than $200 million, so we'll see what happens...

Okay, people, enjoy the trailer!

P.S. The site will continue to be updated over the coming weeks. You can still access the old site with the links at the top of the page, exept "the music" and "trailers" ones.

or click here to watch it on

October 25, 2007

We're about to announce a pantsload of unofficial things, so buck up, busters. First off, an official thing: we've officially submitted Zopp to somewhere between 6 and 15,000 film festivals. And damn, it feels good. In our never-ending quest to never end the making of this movie, Illegal Use of Joe Zopp is still not officially complete. But notwithstanding some tweaks and sound mastering, it's time to pop the cork on that apple juice.

We'll begin to hear back on the status of some of our submissions in a few weeks. Raise your hands if your anxious. And as we prepare to celebrate or sulk, we'll be working moderately hard to improve the film and submit to more target festivals.

Also unofficial, as you can see, is the beginning of a redesign of the web site. We'll be giving it a Zopp makeover with all sorts of new information about all the people who pitched in to help us. As well as some more crap about the movie itself, like getting a taste of the music that will rock our film, the artwork from our production artist Danni Stephenson, the computer effects done by Brandon Knez, and the props from our celebrated propmaster Propmaster Blas.

Plus, we're suspecting that Thanksgiving will bring the first moving picture trailer from Zopp, giving the internet-browsing public the first chance to see what we we've been up to for the last twenty years since production.

And it's very possible that maybe, with a dose of old fashioned good fortune, we'll be able to announce the official World Premiere of Illegal Use of Joe Zopp before the end of the year. But we'll keep this space updated with any success and failure on that front.

On a separate note, Wut Wut Alma received some exciting news this summer but due to sloppy and lazy webmastering, we've not shared until now. One of our own, Joseph “Zopp” Ott, got engaged to his girlfriend Melissa. Joe and Melissa are currently in the throws of wedding planning for a bash that will occur next summer. Congrats and enjoy your pre-matrimonial bliss, dudes.

Back to the sound and administrative work. All of the new links above will take you back to the old web site. We'll get the new stuff up as soon as we can.