Below you will find photos from both the New York and Seattle premieres of Haymaker & Sally.

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There are only about 14 left, though, so get to the Admiral Theater ASAP to get yours!

Yesterday, I was interviewed by the fine folks at West Seattle Blog. Click on the Haymaker & Sally action shot below to read what I had to say!

I don’t know if I’ll be able to make it, and it is a little pricey, but this one sounds really cool, and the money goes to a very worthy cause, the Innocence Project Northwest. Darryl Hunt’s a guy who did two decades in prison for a crime he didn’t commit–the second decade after DNA tests showed he wasn’t the culprit. I’m just gonna copy the press release from the UW Law School site:

Innocence Project Northwest Celebrates 10th Anniversary with Special Screening of “The Trials of Darryl Hunt”
Innocence Project Northwest (IPNW) will celebrate its 10th anniversary with a special screening of “The Trials of Darryl Hunt”, with Darryl Hunt, and his attorneys Mark Rabil and Ben Dowling-Sendor, in attendance to discuss Darryl’s 19-year struggle for freedom.

THE TRIALS OF DARRYL HUNT
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Screening begins at 7 p.m. (Please allow at least 15 minutes for check in)
Varsity Theatre
4329 University Way NE, Seattle, Washington

Since 1997, the IPNW has represented prisoners in Washington with credible claims of actual innocence. Originally a volunteer organization, the IPNW is now a clinical law program at the University of Washington School of Law. The IPNW students, professors and volunteer lawyers have successfully challenged twelve convictions in just ten years.

Most recently, the IPNW Clinic won the first reversal of a conviction in Washington based on newly discovered DNA evidence. The Washington Court of Appeals granted Ted Bradford a new trial and reversed his 1996 rape and burglary convictions on the basis of post-conviction DNA evidence. The IPNW was previously involved in overturning convictions in the Wenatchee sex-ring investigations. Forty-three people were charged with more than 29,000 counts of sexual abuse involving some 50 children. Many of the accused were poor, uneducated or developmentally disabled.

Tickets: Purchase tickets on-line: General Public $50 // Friends of IPNW $100 // Angels $250. $25 student or limited income tickets are also available. The fair market value of the event is $25.

After-party: Following the screening of “The Trials of Darryl Hunt”, the IPNW Clinic will host a reception at the Burke Museum (located just 3 short blocks from the Varsity Theatre on the northwest corner of the UW campus at the corner of 17th Ave and NE 45th St.). There will be complimentary hors d’oeuvres and beer and wine.

RSVP today!

Lincoln Playa (Chip Baker) and the Shah of Southtown (Nirav Shah) pose with Lincoln’s famous cards. Photograph taken and painted by Andrew Miller

The reviews are in, Readers, and it seems Haymaker & Sally is a hit!

Print Media:

“With enough crass dialogue to make Tarantino blush and more gunfire than the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan, the film succeeds due to its adroit pacing, silly-but-smart one-liners, a gloriously realized undercurrent of sleaze, and a bearded Special Forces villain (played by Reid himself) who’d whoop John Rambo in a staring contest.

The Seattle Weekly (emphasis theirs)
(Be sure to read this review—it’s the best summary of the movie I’ve read)

The Blogosphere:

“Isn’t destined for Cannes any time soon…some great one-liners and hysterical performances.”
B.W.o.P.

“Super cool graphics…the writing and performances were terrific”
Medusa’s Castle

So if you’re going to be in Seattle Saturday night, do yourself a favor and buy a ticket. It’s showing at the Admiral Theater in West Seattle at 9:30 PM. Tickets are $5.00, $6.12 with service fee. Get yours now—they’re going fast!

The time is upon us, readers. The Haymaker & Sally production team departs tonight for New York, where on Saturday we will premiere our opus. Stay tuned for pictures and an account of the grand showing.

The H-Man and Clyde say “if we can make it there, we’ll make it anywhere!”

You can now purchase your tickets to the Seattle premiere of Haymaker & Sally online. For just $6.12 ($5.00 ticket + $1.12 service fee) you can ensure that you’ll be present to witness cinematic history:

http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/21516

In other news, we added the trailers to YouTube. I’m embedding my favorite of the two below. Audio NSFW.

Dear Chris,

I don’t know if you’ve been reading my blog lately. I can only hope.

I can tell you that I’ve been thinking of you. You’ve had such a great career–Get a Life, Saturday Night Live, all those appearances on Letterman, your novel, and, of course, Cabin Boy.

That last item is what I want to talk to you about. Now, I know Nathaniel Mayweather wasn’t your most successful character, but I’ll be damned if I don’t laugh when I think about him. His haughtiness, his crucible on the high seas, his hallucinations…

Thus, in the hope of bringing the franchise (and sexy) back, I present the following:

Cabin Boy 2: Poppycock!

2008: Fancy Lad Nathaniel Mayweather’s father has commissioned for his son’s birthday a Fancy Lad Time & Area (T&A) machine. This machine can transport its occupant to the time and area of his choosing. Having recently fancied himself a sporting fancy lad–specifically, the sport of fencing–Nathaniel enters the machine with the intention of traveling to China, 2010, so he can compete in the 2010 Olympics (here I take a little poetic license to give us time for production!). He does so wearing his fancy fencing gear and a generous codpiece.

But just as with his last journey, things go terribly awry. Nathaniel’s machine lands him in China, but rather than taking him forward two years, it takes him back 140. He lands in the middle of a poppy field being cultivated by seven stunningly beautiful sisters. They live on the land with their stern father, who is making so much money off of the crop that he doesn’t want to lose production by seeing any of them married. When they see Nathaniel in his T&A machine, the sisters lose control of their sexually frustrated, overworked selves. Their father is the only man they’ve seen in years, so Nathaniel arrives as a generously endowed knight in white armor!

Delighted at their turn of fortune, the sisters make like their father and hold Nathaniel hostage, hiding him in their cabin (their father has his own). Nathaniel’s duties include serving them meals when they return from the field and satisfying them sexually. He is made to wear revealing outfits and preen about the quarters. (I believe you can still preen with the best of them, Chris. Remember Sparkles?) :

The Sparkles bit ends at 2:00 to go or so; no need to watch beyond that

However, while he enjoys the attention from the sisters, Nathaniel chafes at the serving and cleaning responsibilities he has been given. He is a fancy lad, not a cabin boy; what’s more, he still hasn’t had his shot at Olympic fencing, the reason he entered the T&A machine to begin with. Thus, after another night of passionlessly satisfying the desires of one or more of the beautiful sisters, sequentially or simultaneously, he slips back into his fencing uniform and slips out the backdoor.

Thus begins his journey through swamps, fields, and epochs, wherein he meets historical figures large and small, friendly hybrids, and all sorts of other unusual persons and creatures. Personally, I recommend resurrecting Spewey.

This letter shall serve as a petition. Readers, should you want to see Cabin Boy 2: Poppycock! become a reality, merely sign your name and/or add your message in the comments below. And, of course, feel free to pass this along to other Cabin Boy fans/web activists who might want to help make Poppycock! happen.

Don’t play Coy, Chris. Your fans want it. Your oeuvre wants. You want it.

Let’s make some Poppycock!

Damon

PS–If you get the chance, come to the premiere of my movie. We’ll give you the VIP treatment! (Leave Spewey at home, though.)

-The kid looks and sounds like Dirk Calloway
-He’s precocious like the Tenenbaums or Max Fischer
-His racing uniform has a European, 1960s look about it, like everything in Rushmore
-While the fact that he wears a uniform in daily life conforms to athletes-as-pitchmen conventions, it also matches Anderson’s movies (all four of which involved uniforms for the protagonists)
-Ari and Uzi race go-carts with Royal in The Royal Tenenbaums.

I would’ve thought this too obvious to point out, but when I googled all sorts of permutations of Geico, Wes Anderson, go-cart, and Wallace (the Nascar dude), I didn’t find any results. Maybe I’ve just watched too much Wes Anderson.

Monday, September 10th
General Petraeus testifies before the Senate.

Tuesday, September 11th
The Washington Post reports that Col. Pete Devlin, the Chief of Intelligence for the Marine Corps, filed a secret report describing the situation in the Anbar Province as dire and beyond the potential for improvement. Summarizing the report, one Army officer said, “we have been defeated politically—and that’s where wars are won and lost.”

Wednesday, September 12th
The Los Angeles Times reports that the United States has secretly been negotiating with Shiite cleric Muqtada Al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, the fearsome militia that made Fallujah such a hornet’s nest for U.S. troops. Their demand? A starring role for their leader in the next Matrix movie.

Thursday, September 13th
In his speech on Iraq, Bush says “Anbar Province is a good example of how our strategy is working.”

Friday, September 14th
Catching up on the week’s sports news and his fantasy football lineup, Dick Cheney reads of Bill Belichick’s troubles. “Send him a signed waterboard,” he tells his secretary. “Put a ‘Patriot Act’ pun in the note and be sure to let him know we’ve got a tap on Dungy’s phone.”