These days, independent filmmakers have a wide variety of resources at their disposal for achieving a professional look for minimal cost. Online DIY gurus like the folks over at Indymogul and Film Riot have done a ton of homework to bring you no-nonsense, cost-effective ways to build Home Depot versions of the gear the pros use. For our fundraising video we decided to save a few bucks while investigating whether or not DIY Kinos and a shoulder rig would be viable on the actual production.

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"Rock has always been the Devil's music. You can't convince me that it isn't"

     - David Bowie, 1976

"Only the watchdogs can hear the whistleblowers"

     - D'artagnan Bingemunkle, 1874



As the Rolling Stones "50 and Counting" tour grinds into gear, one cannot help wonder what the average age of today's Rolling Stones ticket buyer is. The Stones were spawned in a wilder musical era, when young people at least had the illusion that their idols were fighting the system. The older generation largely looked upon the younger with palpable horror. That gaping chasm between parent and offspring has undergone a pole-shift today, where an ex-Punk might look disdainfully upon his teenage Belieber daughter and ask: Where did all the filth and fury go?

When I was a 5-year old kid around 1971, I remember my Great-Uncle Tommy telling me that there was an evil man in this world and that when he roared, blood poured from peoples' ears. An imaginative child, I felt fear as I learned of this man's name: Mick Jagger. It sounded like a serrated knife, symbolic of that voice capable of inflicting such horrific injuries. Great Uncle Tommy was almost too old for Bill Hayley and Buddy Holly, so his abhorrence of Jagger was understandable. The late-50s and early-60s was a different time, when even the terrible Rolling Stones were still obliged to wear suits and ties on stage and in promo shots. By the time of my ears-bleeding lecture in 1971, things had changed beyond recognition. Bands like the Stones and Beatles, the Doors and Jimi Hendrix Experience, had introduced a new dark side into popular culture. Or had a dark side been introduced to them?



You may well think I'm referring to the Stones' 1968 single, "Sympathy for the Devil", but rock music's relationship with the occult goes back much further than that. Rock 'n' Roll began its Devil's Music association in the mid-1950s, when a lad could be expelled from school for growing his hair long enough to touch his ears. Girls were forbidden from wearing trousers and boys weren't permitted to wear denim jeans. The spectre of sexual activity loomed over every teen dance, as new expressions like "teenager" and "juvenile delinquent" were born. Most of all, parents feared a new form of music that had begun insinuating itself into the lives and homes of white suburbanites: Rock and Roll. Rock 'n' roll was an African-American thing more than anything else, and the thought of young white girls being ravaged by black rock musicians terrified white America. They called it Devil's Music, but it was really just the natural process of youngsters bringing the light into their lives via sex and interracial socializing. But this isn't what I'm talking about either...



In the mid-1960s John Lennon told close friend Tony Sheridan, "I've sold me soul to the Devil!" His friend might have thought Lennon was speaking metaphorically, but there's a growing body of evidence that shows a behind-the-scenes relationship between military intelligence services, Satanic cults and the world's biggest rock stars. The 1960s introduced drugs to society just as the 50s had introduced sex and racial diversity. The international drug trade is a multi-billion dollar industry, and certain criminal organizations were rubbing their hands gleefully when bands like the Rolling Stones and Beatles succumbed to the lure of the psychedelic experience; rock-stars, both then and now, are purely artificial constructs, owned by criminal promoters and record companies. John Lennon's marriage to wife Julia was kept secret, as was manager Brian Epstein's homosexuality. Keith Richards's heroin addiction was a product of him being created in a certain image by the people behind the Stones. In the beginning, all drug taking was kept secret, until their controllers felt society was ready to be shown the way. The controllers were the drug traffickers, and the biggest drug traffickers in the world are the CIA and MI6, the British and American intelligence services. Sounds outlandish and unlikely, doesn't it?



The Rolling Stones 2013 tour is proof that their influence has tremendous longevity, as it has been the number one event for Ticket Liquidator customers for several weeks. How do these old men continue to effect such a force in today's event tickets market, when rising "youngstars" like Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber are dominating the blogosphere and celebrity websites? The answer, obviously, is that their fan base is as old or almost as old as the Stones themselves, and they don't rely on the Internet for news. But even these presumably affluent oldsters are revolting about the price of Rolling Stones tickets for the "50 and Counting" tour. Are the Glimmer Twins simply cashing in on what will be their swansong, or are other, less creative, parties milking the public for all they can? It's worth noting that from their initial burst of fame until 1970, the Rolling Stones grossed somewhere over $200 million, yet they were all broke. Where did that money go?



The Rolling Stones promise a return to the filth and fury whenever they head out on tour. Comparing the rebels of the 1960s to today's pop icons is like night and day. Squeaky-clean tween stars keep sprouting up like mushrooms, each squeakier than the last. What happened to our youth, did they give up on "fighting the system"? Maybe the fight was all an illusion, as illusory as the motion trails and undulations of the acid trips. The rock bands worked in league with the drug traffickers to catalyze societal drug use, in the same way role models were used to encourage cigarette smoking in the '50s. How did the controllers manage to coerce all these young people into becoming facilitators for the decline of society? The answer is mind control.

After World War Two, the intelligence services of both the Allies and the Nazis merged to form a new age of mass manipulation. Operation Paperclip saw over a thousand Nazi scientists imported into the USA for the express purpose of denying German scientific knowledge to other countries, in particular the Soviet Union. The Paperclip scientists' knowledge was combined with monstrous CIA experiments that involved the torture and mutilation of children in order to condition them into the extensive MK Ultra mind control program. A large number of the child victims of MK Ultra were the children of military officers, as were many of the rock stars of the so-called 1960s "counterculture". These included Jim Morrison of The Doors (whose father, U.S. Navy Admiral George Stephen Morrison, commanded the infamous Gulf of Tonkin warship patrol that led to the Vietnam War), Frank Zappa (whose father was a chemical warfare specialist at Edgewood Arsenal, a place long associated with CIA mind-control efforts), "Papa" John Phillips (whose father was a US Marine Corps Captain and whose sister worked at the Pentagon with "Papa" John's wife, Susie)...the list goes on, but you get the gist. There was and still is a very fundamental connection between pop culture icons (especially "counterculture" rebels) and military intelligence.



"But what about the Satanism?" I hear you cry. Oh, there's more. While the Beatles were playing the seedy whorehouses of Hamburg's Reeperbahn and peeing on nuns, the Rolling Stones were in England, developing their rock/blues chops. The Beatles were the head of the coin and the Stones were the tail. When Lennon and Co. returned to England for a recording session at EMI, it led to their longstanding relationship with the company. The following year, Lennon and McCartney wrote the Stone's first hit and George Harrison organized their initial recording contract with Decca. EMI, meanwhile, were expanding from being a military intelligence electrical supplier via Parlophone, which was run by George Martin, the Beatles' recording director. Martin created the image of the Fab Four, using a combination of musical expertise and EMI's intelligence connections. Riots were staged, screaming mobs of girls were arranged. And then shown on TV. When the Beatles came to America, they were greeted by crowds of screaming girls at Kennedy Airport, and there are some who claim these riots were also staged by intelligence operatives.

The Rolling Stones were by now rising in the rock 'n' roll ether like a wild meteor. The public's reaction to them was the polar opposite of what it had been to the Beatles. Between them, the two bands were able to suck in millions of teenagers and young adults with an almost religious devotion. When the Stones released Their Satanic Majesties Request in 1967, they were involved with real-life occult followers, and their girlfriends in some cases were also witches. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, and their girlfriends Marianne Faithfull and Anita Pallenburg, were introduced to Aleister Crowley devotee Kenneth Anger at this time. Anger is infamous for making films of a dark and evil nature, and for being a Satanist. When he told them he was making a film dedicated to the "Great Beast" Crowley, Jagger composed the music for it. Jagger's brother, Chris, was in the film and Marianne Faithfull traveled to Egypt to take part in a Black Mass for one of the film's scenes. A young actor-musician called Bobby Beausoleil played the part of Lucifer. He was a Manson Family member. Beausoleil fell out with Anger, his gay lover, and left for California. There, he rejoined the Manson Family and committed the initial murder in a grisly series.



The madness didn't stop there for the Stones. Anita Pallenberg, a witch like Brian Jones, and a member of a Satanist cult called the Process Church, was sleeping with at least three of the Stones, including Keith Richards, said also to be a witch. Pallenberg was obsessed with black magic. (In 1980, the teenage caretaker of the house she shared with Richards was found shot to death in Pallenberg's bed. The suicide verdict seemed the least plausible and the investigating officers said they heard "strange singing" from the nearby woods) By 1967, the Beatles and Stones had both been semi-recruited by Satanic cults. The Beatles released Sergeant Pepper almost 20 years to the day that Aleister Crowley had died. And the opening line in the album's title song was, of course, "It was twenty years ago today..." Was Crowley Sergeant Pepper? The cover of that groundbreaking album was described by the Beatles as featuring all their heroes, with a note stating "People We Like". Crowley, claimed by some to have sacrificed children and indulged in sex acts with animals, appears on that cover.

The 1960s - call it an experiment, a project, an operation, or even a war - ended at the Altamont festival. The San Francisco racetrack seemed to have been chosen as the site where hippiedom and tolerance would be sacrificed. Altamont was, in effect, a snuff film. It showed the murder of a black man called Meredith Hunter. He was stabbed to death by the Hells Angels motorcycle gang, who for some reason had been given the job of festival security. Not only were the Angels killers, robbers and drug-traffickers, they were often ex-military men. In fact the gang was formed by ex-members of a top secret US airforce squadron called the Flying Tigers. According to witnesses, the entire crowd of hundreds of thousands, was high on LSD. Things had become frenzied when the Stones finally came out on stage. Jagger was imitating Lucifer, in a red satin cape. The kids at the concert were said to have been crawling, naked to the foot of the stage, where the Angels would beat and kick them mercilessly. The worse the violence became, the more the kids would strip off and crawl forward, as if summonsed by some unknown force. Meredith Hunter was provoked by the Hells Angels and, when he produced a gun, attacked viciously and stabbed numerous times. The band played on as the horrific scene unfolded, but Jagger threatened to stop the gig if things didn't cool down. It was too late; Hunter was dead. The 60s was over.

The Greatest Rock 'n' Roll Band in the World are still going strong today though, and you should probably go and see them in concert.

We packed the night before and hauled everything out to the set bright and early. We had scheduled several interviews for the day along with two scenes and had to test out the lights and build part of the set before the actors arrived at noon.

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A mutual friend put me in touch with a playwright who was looking to make the jump into independent filmmaking. This is usually the part where I roll my eyes and think about the colossal amount of work that goes into producing a film. The playwright turned out to be the owner of an Irish pub I had fond memories of and we sat down to talk over a few pints. He did indeed have a screenplay and I was relieved to find that it was good. As an Irishman who emigrated to the States over 21 years ago, he stood solidly in the “write what you know” camp and had penned an Irish pub comedy in full-dialect. He was inspired by John Carney’s 2006 film Once and its Grammy Award-winning score as well as Roddy Doyle’s Barrytown Trilogy. As a world-class musician and gourmet chef with a knack for clever wordplay and an entrepreneur’s shrewd sense for cross-promotion he struck me as a natural. He wrote the script economically, most of it takes place at one location, the bar, with one caveat—all exteriors would be shot in Ireland.

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Look below for full lists of nominees by category and by show.

The nominations for the 2013 Tony Awards were announced today by Sutton Foster (Anything Goes, TV's Bunheads) and Jesse Tyler Ferguson (...Spelling Bee, TV's Modern Family). Leading the pack with an amazing 13 nominations is Kinky Boots, the musical written by pop star Cyndi Lauper ("Girls Just Want to Have Fun") and Broadway regular Harvey Fierstein (Hairspray). Following closely are Matilda (12), which was a smash hit in London last year, and revivals of Stephen Schwartz's Pippin (10) and Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella (9). The most honored plays this year include Golden Boy, the Tom Hanks-helmed Lucky Guy (6), and Christopher Durang's Chekhov remix Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike (6). Don't forget to tune in on Sunday, June 9 at 8:00 pm (ET/PT delay) to see who takes home the prizes!

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Rolling Stones 50 and Counting tour dates kick-off in just under a week for what could possibly be their last tour ever. Though it seemed a foregone conclusion that Mick, Keith, Charlie and Ronnie would hit the road again for the band’s 50th anniversary, it really is no small feat for a group ranging in age from 65 to 71 years old to mount a tour and muster the energy to entertain audiences numbering in the thousands for two hours or more at a clip. During a promotional video for the tour, Charlie Watts candidly says, “It takes Mick some energy to start me up.” Mick Jagger has been known to cover up to 12 miles of stage in a single show thanks to an Olympic work-out regimen and a low-fat, whole grain diet but other members of the band aren’t nearly as agile. Ron Woods claimed to have played his first sober Rolling Stones concert in 2006 while in the same year Keith Richards was hospitalized for brain surgery after falling out of a tree. The Stones will always be the Stones but that’s all the more reason to pick up Rolling Stones tickets now for the upcoming tour because you never know...

1992's Sister Act was one of the best comedies of the 90s, and its huge success is not forgotten today. Closely followed by a 1993 film sequel (Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit), it went on to inspire a musical adaptation that premiered at California's Pasadena Playhouse in 2006, London's West End in 2009, and on Broadway in 2011. Like the film, the musical has become a phenomenon with productions all around the world and now one touring the United States. I caught the show in my city, and I'm here to testify.

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She destroyed our communities, she destroyed our villages, she has destroyed our pits and she tried to destroy our dignity,” - David Hopper, General Secretary, Durham Miners Association.

Today was Margaret Thatcher’s funeral at London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral. Code-name Operation True Blue, the event was the biggest Prime Ministerial send-off since Winston Churchill in 1965. Her Majesty the Queen was in attendance, as she was at Churchill’s. You’d think that, with all this gravitas, Lady Thatcher was one of Britain’s best-loved leaders, but you'd be wrong.

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Trance
Director: Danny Boyle
Release Date: April 5

Danny Boyle is quietly becoming an event film director behind a surprisingly experimental and disparate body of work. Boyle is unconstrained by genre and his cinematic triumphs are often as much about style as they are about narrative. Trainspotting, The Beach, 28 Days Later, Sunshine, Slumdog Millionaire and 127 Hours are all wildly different but each exhibits his high energy visual imprint. His latest is a heist movie revolving around an art auctioneer who sustains a head injury while trying to double-cross his partners-in-crime. Rosario Dawson plays the hypnotist who’s hired to retrieve the location of the painting from his traumatized subconscious.

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