Welcome to my web page. My name is Paul M. Mosher, and I've created this space to share my current artistic venture into the strange and wonderful world of machinima.
On February 18, 2006, a good friend, and a Surrey / White Rock local celebrity, Scott Wheeler died from colon cancer. As he had adapted several films to the stage, I wanted to convert The Big Chill, one of his favorite films to the stage. Unfortunately, Sony was not interested in granting permission for a theatrical adaptation, and I had to drop the project, but as a version of The Maltese Falcon was among one of his later productions, I thought it appropriate to create a stage version of John Huston's cult classic Beat the Devil, which has been described as "The Maltese Falcon as if Joe Orton and Oscar Wilde had written it," as a tribute to Scott. The piece is a parody and satire of various Humphrey Bogart film noirs, with references to his other works as well.
In the opening credits for the film, Claud Cockburn receives credit for writing the novel. Unfortunately, most critics have wrongly attributed the wit and humor of the film to Truman Capote. Anyone who has read the book and seen the movie, especially the superior 100 minute English release, will soon realize the majority of the best lines and much of the dialog comes directly from the novel. While there is no doubt Capote made some contributions, especially in the few segments that differ from the book, he never acknowledged Cockburn's contribution, and though he was one of the screenwriters, Claud Cockburn never received the credit he was due in regards to this wonderful movie. Hopefully, this paragraph does something to correct this unfortunate situation.
I'm still looking for means to produce the play, but as a side-note, I've been working on a machinima version of the piece. Created in ShortFuze's MovieStorm, it originally started out as a pre-visualization of the show; however, I realized 100 minutes of animated puppets walking around a wide stage from a long shot could get to be tiresome very quickly. Instead, what you'll see here is what I call an enhanced machinima stage play, or as I sometimes call it, the first of a sub genre I'm dubbing Macheater.
Acts One and Two are now complete, and a rough cut is available at google videos:
The project isn't quite finished yet, there's still some honing to do; however, there's enough here to allow the world to view a work in progress.
Enjoy.
Paul Michael Mosher
