THE MAN WHO LOVED: NEW DVD, $15.

There's something wrong with Sarah. Something inside her that she doesn't quite understand. Her husband, George, hopes it'll just go away on its own. But his passivity only seems to make things worse.

A tense yet delicate portrait of a marriage in crisis, The Man Who Loved is directed by wife-and-husband filmmakers Mary and Tom Russell with verve, humour, honesty, and an eye for everyday beauty.

SPECIAL FEATURES:
+ Directors' commentary.
+ Trailers for future Turtleneck releases Son of a Seahorse (# 2) and Olivia Forever!!
+ Cinema du Kitteh: a collection of three 2006 shorts (Cat Singles, Cat-astrophe, and The Invaders From Above) created by the Russells and starring the feline thespians of The Man Who Loved.

You can purchase this film either through CreateSpace or Amazon. The cost to you is the same either way, $15, but CreateSpace gives us a significantly larger royalty-- $7.80 per disc, as opposed to Amazon's $3.30.

MAN WHO LOVED GOING OUT OF PRINT!

With some considerable new tools at our disposal, Tom and Mary Russell are proud to announce new-and-improved but every-bit-as-scrappy DVD releases of our films The Man Who Loved (2007) and Son of a Seahorse (2008), coming in 2010. Not only will each disc be given a spiffy packaging redesign, but each film is getting a new sound mix and a host of bonus features, including, yes, that holiest of holies, Directors' Commentary Tracks.

More details (sneak peaks of the new packaging, lists of bonus features, and release dates) will become available in the next few months. But as a consequence of this shift, the previous DVD editions will no longer be available for purchase as of January 30, 2010.

Now, if you want to wait and buy the new ultra-spiffy editions later in the year, that's cool and the gang. But if you can't wait to get your hands on some ultra-indie self-distributed goodness and want to buy the cheaper and (comparatively) bare bonesier editions we put out last year, now is the time to do it.

Each of these old editions retail for $15 and are eligible for Amazon's Free Super-Saver Shipping. But remember, these editions of The Man Who Loved and Son of a Seahorse will no longer be available as of January 30.

Best Advertising We Could Hope For

You can buy THE MAN WHO LOVED here.

Should be noted that its cousin, SON OF A SEAHORSE, is also available on DVD.

DVD guarantee

There are two "burnable" DVD formats: DVD-R and DVD+R. DVD-R are compatible with 90 to 95 percent of players, while DVD+R are compatible with about 87.6 percent of players. (The players that can't read -R's can read +R's and vice-versa.)

The copies of our films available through amazon.com are burned onto DVD-R discs. Our own DVD burner burns DVD+R discs; our player, like most newer players, plays both formats just fine.

If, for any reason, your player cannot play the DVD-R disc, we will be happy to replace it with a DVD+R copy. Our e-mail address is on the back of each DVD slip-case.

Son of a Seahorse should be coming out in early June.

DVD now $15 on Amazon

The title says it all.

Interview at The Counter Project

The Dearborn-centered culture and entertainment site "The Counter Project" recently asked us a few questions about our films and our decision to distribute our films ourselves, starting with The Man Who Loved. You can read the entire interview here.

This is the first time we've ever been interviewed, and so as you can imagine we're pretty psyched about it. Go ahead and give it a look!

The Man Who Loved Price Cuts

Our film The Man Who Loved was on sale on dvd for $19.99. We've slashed the price (and our royalties) by twenty-five percent. That's one geniune DVD-R copy of our film, complete with its handsome packaging and our eight-minute bonus feature, for only $15.00.

This change in price is already reflected on the film's CreateSpace page. As of this moment, the Amazon page still reflects the original price but that should change soon.

Clips from the movie!

Boo-yah!

Buy Us on Amazon

The Man Who Loved is now available for purchase at amazon.com.



Here's the back cover copy, for those of you who are interested in such things:

Filmmakers Mary and Tom Russell create a compelling and tense portrait of a young marriage in The Man Who Loved. When his wife Sarah begins to act strangely, the laidback George takes the path of least resistance. But his passivity only widens the gulf between them. Implicit in the film's title are its two central questions: What does it mean to be a man? and What does it mean to love? George finds the answers one night when he must hurt Sarah in order to save her.

Newcomers Jacob Hildebrandt and Adrienne Patterson give sensitive and naturalistic performances in a film that is at once tough-minded yet unquestionably romantic. Directed with a sensual eye for moments of domestic beauty (the changing of bedsheets, the bruising of a plum) and written with a psychological deftness that eschews traditional plot structure in order to create a palpable but unnamable sense of tension, The Man Who Loved is a remarkable example of true cottage industry filmmaking.

The Man Who Loved on DVD

Our film The Man Who Loved is now available for purchase on DVD for $19.99 via CreateSpace. The title will also be available for purchase on Amazon within the next couple of weeks, and a VOD release is planned for the near future.

The disc includes an eight minute discussion of the film, in which we give some insight not only into our intentions but also into working as independent filmmakers.

We plan to release some of our other films, as well as Tom's novel Jolt City, in the near future.

Bookmark Turtleneck Films

It's been a while since we posted over at Turtleneck, and as more than one friend has remarked, we have so many blogs that it's hard to keep track of it all.

The New Turtleneck Films makes it a lot easier. Everything posted on our other sites-- for example, Son of a Seahorse and The Man Who Loved-- will be cross-posted here. And there will be new news on both sites (and, by extension, this one) very, very soon as we have some rather exciting things in the works.

You'll also get some movie and game reviews. All in all, we should be posting more frequently. So stay tuned and check back often.

IMDb Page!

We now have a page on IMDb: The Man Who Loved on the Internet Movie Database.

Not to jinx it, but I think there's more good news coming soon.

As you may have noticed in the sidebar, we've added one of these newfangled Amazon aStores. If you purchase dvds and books from our aStore, we get a whopping four percent of it. Just think: if you were to spend a hundred dollars, we'd get to keep four! That's seven White Castle hamburgers and a few extra cents that can go towards our mortgage. You can feed us and give us shelter, allowing us to continue to make entertaining, thoughtful, thoroughly-independent movies. What are you waiting for? Get your Christmas shopping done early-- it's only eleven months away! :-)

Trailer # 1

99.9% sure the film is complete. Burning dvds as we speak.

Looks like we've made some progress in the area of colour correcting, and we're almost there.

The next step is to show it to the cast, and send screeners to some filmmaker friends and festivals. We haven't really been looking too closely at what festivals are coming up-- better to get the film done right than get it done sloppy in time for this due date or that one-- but I think we've more or less missed out on the big January-February festivals.

Our basic plan is to ask some of our friends what festivals they think we have a shot at, and trying those first; then we'll try some other American festivals. I doubt we'll try any abroad, as our finances don't really allow for much travel. Heck, our finances don't allow us to apply to a whole bunch of festivals, either. $30-60 a pop is a whole lot of money to give someone on the off-chance they may watch more than five minutes of your film.

So our basic idea is to choose carefully and see where it goes from there.

We've still got to mix the sound for the new material, and do some colour correction for some earlier bits. But one marathon editing session later, it looks like we're done. The picture's running time will probably be just around seventy-seven minutes. While our "magic number" was eighty, and while the previous cut of the film was eighty minutes long before these reshoots, we feel that the cuts we've made and the new material we've added makes for an all-around better film. It's better to have seventy-seven minutes that "work" than to add three that don't.

As we said above, we've still got some finnessing to do, but we're very proud of the film and very glad to be nearing completion.

First editing hiccough; it turns out we forgot to shoot a fairly crucial line in a section where every line (quite literally) counts. We think we might have a way to save it that won't necessitate messy reshooting, but it will result in a "Who Shot Niceguy Eddie?" sort of error.

Editing of the finale has begun. We've just finished logging the 47 clips that we need to put this thing together.