FOOLCiRCLE

Time to talk about the money-shot, the World Wide Clout premiere!

Click here for all the pictures from our Austin, TX trip!

Saturday: Saturday was the slow day. We all sort of woke up at our own speed. I originally set an alarm so we could all get up together to grab the free breakfast at the hotel, but when the alarm went off no one budged, so I just rolled over and went back to bed. And then minutes before the breakfast was suppose to end Erik and Robert jumped out of bed and ran to go get breakfast, only to return to be lazy again. I took my time to get going, took a shower, and rolled out to get some coffee and something to eat.

While I was out I stopped and grabbed a gross breakfast sandwich from under a heat lamp at a WaWa type gas station place, I made it two bites in and the rest went out the window to the birds. I also scooped up some Starbucks coffee which I typically do not enjoy too much but found to be a nice change after the shitty hotel coffee. I also took a short drive around to check stuff out. I found a decent little liquor store that we could buy some local beer at, though the clerk suggested I go down the street to the H.E.B. if I wanted an even larger selection – OK, I won’t shop at your store. The liquor store that I found was in a funny location, it was a liquor store, gun store, and a bank all in a row – it made us laugh every time we drove by.

When I got back to the room, nothing was still going on, Erik was lost in his iPhone (Shit Pickle) and Robert was getting twitchy. There was talk of going down and hanging by the pool with some beers so that got us slightly motivated. We drove out to the H.E.B. (we pronounced it “heeb” the whole time, the the locals said the initials) to check out the beers. We had the video camera out again and were rolling through the store checking out the beers. For some reason the manager came over and told us we couldn’t film in there, and we said “OK, we were just being stupid, no problem”, and he was all “I bet you were” – damn totally got punked. Unfortunately we didn’t get that on tape, it would have been classic. We picked up three sixers, some water, and some snacks – what we really should have picked up on Thursday, but hey, better late than never.

After the H.E.B. we went back to the hotel with the intent to hang by the pool, but we all realized we wanted food and decided Mexican was what was called for. We walked from the hotel to this little Mexican place we passed a bunch of times walking back and forth to the Alamo. When we went in we were the only white people, sweet, this was probably going to be a good spot. They brought out some chips and hot-ass salsa, it had Robert sweating and we barely even had anything. We all looked at the menu for something different, but that we thought we would like. The special for the day was Barbacoa, which none of us knew what that was so we asked – beef cheek – yum, cow face. So, of course we all ordered a barbacoa taco with the rest of our food, and, in my opinion it was delicious – tender and well marinated. We also each had a huge ass plate of food that was delicious.

When finished stuffing ourselves, we talked again about possibly hanging at the pool, but when we went by the pool (very small) there was a man and his little daughter hanging there, so to be polite we chose not to go down and hang there. The funny thing is, we all got back to the room and fell out – I know it sounds really exciting and all, but between the traveling, and the trip the day before to San Antonio, and all the drinking we were all whooped-up. So after a spontaneous two hour nap we tried to get ready to go out to the Alamo Draft House again for the world premiere of our short film World Wide Clout. Getting ready involved drinking beers for some, taking showers for others, and repeated cigarette breaks.

We finally went over to the theater about 6PM for the 7PM start time. This time we ordered some DFH beers and hung at our seats waiting for the event to big. After it started, Sam from DFH was the emcee again, things got rolling in a more film and less beer oriented way. First, sort of to warm up the crowd, Sam showed a bunch of DFH short films they had made like the music video for the Pain Relievaz song “Pinchin’ Pennies” and the DFH mock-campaign against the new MADD stance called “Lupulin Madness” based roughly off of the stoner flick “Reefer Madness”. They both were hilarious. After that they showed about 12 short films from the runners-up that didn’t make the top three. Some were funny, some were a little lame, and some had a good idea with a bad translation. One was a local Austin guy who had a whole crew with him, so that was very cool for him.

After the also-rans were done, they started with the winners from third on up. So, Sam was like “where’s my Delaware crew at, come on up here!” and Erik, Robert, and I rolled up on stage to talk about the movie. Of course we had the video camera rolling, which initially Erik was shooting, but eventually I was, which was OK. Since Erik was listed as the director Sam focused his questions on him, and since Robert was the closest to Sam he answered some too, I sort of got “stuck” on camera duty which wasn’t a big deal, I just felt slightly disconnected at the time. I actually can’t wait to see the film we shot while up on stage, especially since the pictures (see the link above) from us on stage turned out a little crappy since we were so far away. Basically Sam asked us how we came up with the idea and asked Robert how long he worked with the bottle-chucks and thanked us. He also mentioned to the crowd that we had called the brewery and asked to film on the roof and he “had to say no to that” and told the crown to pay attention during our film because “these guys make a Dogfish Head reference like every two seconds” – really cool.

They actually started the film while we were still on stage, so we rushed to get back to our seats so we could watch it, again filming the whole time. The crowd reacted, with laughs mostly, at all the appropriate times so that was good. We sent in two versions of the movie with two different sets of music, one was all music we didn’t own the rights to (like Led Zeppelin) and the other was all original music (like stuff Erik wrote), they used the version with original music which was cool, but weird to hear Erik’s stuff blasted through the theater, though not as weird as actually seeing all of us full size on a movie screen – really, really weird in a really cool way. I think the movie was well received and everyone laughed and applauded. Afterward several people said to each of us separately how much they liked different parts of our movie so that was really nice. Then they showed the second and first place winners, treating them the same by calling them on stage and letting them speak. Second place was a weird psychedelic DFH beer commercial animation and first was a two minute DFH beer commercial with 25%+ archival footage from public domain, I am going to try and find a link to both and put them up. I do not want to argue with the judges, but if there was a fan favorite based on the people’s reactions in the crowd, ours appeared to be the clear winner.

After the movie session we wound up hooking up with Sam and Claus from Dogfish Head and this time we did go out. Sam’s broth-in-law, Pliney, lives in Austin so he suggested a pizza place that wasn’t too far that had OK beer. The place turned out to be almost half an hour away and there was mad traffic getting there, but the parking was free and the place was welcoming. Sam seemed genuinely grateful that we had come out to hang, it was probably a group of 15 or so, a little big to be intimate, but not so big as to be anonymous. We wound up eating some really good pizza and having some OK local beers for about two hours bullshitting with essentially Sam’s crew for the night; him and Claus, our crew, a couple other beer geeks, and some locals from the beer industry – it was pretty neat. We got a pretty decent picture of us hanging with him too, which is cool because I rarely ask to get my picture taken with people I don’t know. After the pizza and beers it was heading on 1AM and we chose to go back to the hotel to get some sleep instead of heading out to a club where a bunch of the group was going, it was actually a club where the first place winner was the DJ, go figure. When we got back to the room the intent was to go to bed, but we had just bought a bunch of beer earlier in the day and couldn’t take it with us, so we started drinking beers. Robert lasted for about two and then kind of drifted off, and Erik and I were too stupid to be smart and drank until after 3AM, fun times.

Sunday: So Sunday we woke up with the main focus of catching our flight back to Philly, always a drag and comforting to go home.

BUT, we couldn’t go out with out one last hoo-rah! So while Erik was poking around he came across something listed as a Gospel BBQ Brunch in Austin on Sundays – sounds like fun. So we made reservations for the Gospel BBQ Brunch at Stubb’s in Austin at 1PM, which was just enough time to catch our flight at 4PM. When we got to Stubb’s we had to wait to get in which was OK, but after we got in I was ready to grub. They had all sorts of BBQ and smoked meats, and grits, and biscuits and gravy, and sweet pecan pie – it was so good I had to work really hard at not gorging myself. The gospel was more bluesy, which was perfectly fine with me. Unfortunately where we were seated where we couldn’t see the stage, but we could hear the music, and we all made frequent trips to go check it out. Stubb’s was a really cool place with a really cool vibe with good BBQ, but I think I preferred the BBQ from San Antonio on Friday better – just saying.

After Stubb’s our objective turned into travel mode: fill up the tank in the Yaris rental car, return the car, and get checked in at the airport and then wait. Usually this part of the trip isn’t worth talking about, but another funny thing happened. As we pulled up in our car and started to unload we here “hey guys!”, it was Sam and Claus again – are these guys following us? So it was cool to go out seeing those guys again. It would have been really funny if we were on the same flight, Sam even started to follow us to check in and Claus had to kind of reel him it, it was too funny. Other than that it was a “normal” flight, nothing special happened, and then suddenly we were back in Philly. Thanks for reading.

(Come back soon, I have a really sneaky suspicion that you all will be watching World Wide Clout on the interwebs by the end of this weekend!)

This entry was posted on Friday, April 24th, 2009 at 6:37 pm and is filed under Side Trip. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.