FAVORITE FILMMAKERS: Alexandre Aja, Clive Barker, John Carpenter, Michael Mann, John McTiernan, Russell Mulcahy, Christopher Nolan, Robert Rodriguez, Kevin Smith

TOP 10 FAVORITE BANDS: Alice in Chains, Billy Idol, Forgeinger/Lou Gramm, Megadeth, Metallica, Motörhead, Pantera, Prince, Red X Rebellion, the Rolling Stones

TOP 15 FAVORITE TV SERIES: Angel, Burn Notice, Cheers, Criss Angel: Mindfreak, The Equalizer, Highlander: The Series, Law & Order, Law & Order: SVU, Miami Vice, Nip/Tuck, Quantum Leap, Rescue Me, Seinfeld, Terminator, The X-Files

TOP 10 FAVORITE HORROR MOVIES: American Psycho, The Exorcist III, Friday The 13th, Part 2, Friday The 13th, Part VI: Jason Lives, Hellraiser, The Hills Have Eyes (2006), In The Mouth of Madness, Lord of Illusions, The Lost Boys, John Carpenter's The Thing

TOP 20 FAVORITE NON-HORROR MOVIES: Big Trouble in Little China, The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy, Clerks, Collateral, Die Hard, The Empire Strikes Back, Free Enterprise, Heat, Highlander, The Lord of the Rings, Manhunter, Ocean's Eleven (2001), Payback, Point Break, Predator, The Prestige, Purple Rain, The Stöned Age, The Warriors

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION: I've been a resident of Tinley Park, Illinois my entire life.  I've also lived in the same house all 26 years of my life.  After that many years of living in this southwest suburb of Chicago, things can get rather mundane.  For a very long time, I was so very burned out on this town, this whole area I lived in.  That was winter, 2004.  But seriously, living in the same town all my life has really gotten to me, turned me spiteful, and really forged me into the person that I am today.  It has fueled a series of comedic scripts that have yet to be completed featuring a great host of characters that represent various facetts of myself.  In fact, nearly every character I create has some degree of myself integrated into it.  It makes these characters very personal to me.  When you pour so much of yourself into your creations, you cannot help but be strongly, personally connected to them, and my characters are certainly the most personal creations of mine.

I've certainly wanted to make movies, or have my stories turned into movies for a very, very long time.  But the real passion started to surface sometime after the conclusion of my four year term as life's cruel joke in the tenth level hell known as high school.  It also wasn't until after high school I really started to become a different person - a starkly different person.  I really started listening to more heavy metal - Metallica, Pantera, Judas Priest, Motörhead, Guns N' Roses, Salyer - and that forged my realistic view of the world (which tends to be a pessimistic or skeptical view more times than not).  In 2000, I started growing my hair out long, and it took about a year to really grow it out to the desired length.  I had already grown a trimmed goatee by the time I chose to grow out my hair.  I also attended my first concerts that year - OzzFest 2000 and Megadeth / Mötley Crüe.  It was the total turning point year in my life, and it's effects are still hitting me today in more ways than I care to recall.  I attend OzzFest every year, and always find at least one other concert to see at the Tweeter Center (formerly the New World Music Theatre) here in my hometown.  Also in 2000, my new friends & I attempted to start up a garage metal band, but with them still being in high school and me with little knowledge of musicianship, it was doomed from the start.  We flopped around trying to do something with it for three years, but we never even completed work on a single song nor could we settle on a stable lineup.  I don't even know how many bassists we went through.  It was a very disjointed and directionless attempt at something we just weren't at all ready to tackle.  Rehearsals were only jam sessions, and nothing coherent every came from it.  Not to mention, I was the only one in the entire band that was truly serious about making music.  I currently have around 40 sets of lyrics without any real music put to them.  They can viewed online here.

As I was saying before, I had the desire and passion to create my own films for a long time, but never did I ever have anyone to make them with - no one competent anyway.  It wasn't until early 2003 when I met Jason Pavlik of Darien, Illinois on FridayThe13thForum.com that I had a filmmaking partner with a real passion for it.  Jason was dead set, and still is, on making a Friday The 13th fan film.  He had tried to get one going a number of times, but it never got off the ground.  Now that he had met and joined up with someone with equal desire and ambition, there was potential.  Unfortuantely, despite our best, yet rushed and spontaneous efforts, we never shot a complete fan film.  As listed in my filmography below, we did make two fan films, but neither are really what we had wanted them to be.  One was just an afternoon of shooting that got edited together in 2003, and then, re-edited with newly shot footage in May, 2004.  The crossover fan film is a subject I'll just skip over as it's just too long of a story to mull over any more.

I became a Friday The 13th fan back in 1997 or 98 when I truly got into horror movies, and eventually joined up with Joe Benedetto of Webster, New York to create the FOREVER HORROR website.  My enduring horror fandom is evident by the fact that I have run that website all by my lonesome since September 2002, and before that, a summer of redesigning, relocation, and relaunching of the site.  Joe has been a very hard working student for last several years, and he regrets that he just is not able to contribute to the website any more.  Though, he originally created the website in August of 1998 (I joined him in October), and so, his name will always remain on and attached to the site.  Unfortunately, as my filmmaking endeavours began to take up more and more of my time in recent years, the website has become semi-abandoned.  There's only so much time in a day, and only so much energy one can expend.  Still, it is not yet declared dead.

Jumping back a bit, my Friday The 13th fandom came out in the music video project that literally took about four years to create and finish.  I wanted to do a Friday The 13th music video set to Alice Cooper's "He's Back (The Man Behind The Mask)."  I came up with the idea in early 1999 as a promotional video for FOREVER HORROR.  The video would go through numerous incarnations and stages throughout the years, but it finally came into full force in 2003.  I had gotten a brand new Apple Macintosh G4 in October, 2002, and in Feburary, 2003, I got a Dazzle Hollywood DV-Bridge so I could now import video from external sources.  I immediately got to working on a brand new, high quality version of the video.  I worked on it, on and off, for a few months, but I finally put it into full steam to reach a deadline which ultimately became null and void (which ties into a number of other bad events from August 16th, 2003).  But the important thing is - I finally finished it!  You can download it through my TRAILER REALM website.

Late in 2004, I attempted to put together a comedic short subject.  I had the script complete, and worked my ass off to arrange everything possible for cast auditions and so forth.  Unfortunately, the cast audition was a bust, but I gave it another go shortly thereafter at another location which was even more of a bust.  I wrote a brand new script with fewer roles in about a week or two, and gave ample time for everyone to schedule themselves for the auditions at the start of December.  Though, when the time came, no one could give me a confirmation that they would be able to attend, and so, the audition did not even take place.  At this time, I was resigned to a hiatus until warmer weather came about, more resources opened up, and well, just until I felt like the timing was prime to get going again.

In 2005, I endeavoured to get several projects off the ground from a new Friday The 13th short to a comedic anthology film. Ultimately, what came together was Vengeance. A short form action thriller concerning syndicate hitmen who tried to take out one of their own, but pay a deadly price for not finishing the job properly. A wonderful cast was put together headlined by Jonathan Vukelich, a very dedicated and talented actor who really went the distance for this film.  John was so dedicated because he saw something very intriguing in the character of Vance Derricks, and enjoyed tackling it. The rest of the cast was just as great and friendly.  Shooting through the month of July was mostly smooth and very productive.  Two shoot days went bust, but important lessons were learned for me as a filmmaker.  Though, when principal photography spilled over into August, things fell apart.  Locations could not be secured, martial artists weren't locked in for a major fight sequence, and communication with John broke down.  In one month, the entire production went from strong and productive to disorganized and disarray.  I did eventually had all the things I needed to shoot John's remaining scenes, but he was leaving for Los Angeles in five days and I never heard a word back from him until the following year.  Despite an attempted and failed relaunch of production in the spring of 2006, no further progress could be made.  The final day of principal photography was on July 28th, 2005.  Several scenes reached the rough cut stage, and can be viewed here.

Despite a fleeting attempt at scripting a dark comedy, I took a haitus from filmmaking through the winter, but got revved up when my friend Jason Pavlik of Dead Rose Productions invited me to join him on his production of Blood Brothers in March, 2006.  That got me very, very excited, and drove me to start up Vengeance again, but as previously stated, it never got anywhere.  Several cast members were still communicating with me, but three key actors essentially were inaccessible.  I did speak with John Vukelich via phone, but it seemed fairly obvious that scheduling him would be near impossible with him residing in Los Angeles, California now.  In July, I focused on casting Kill or Be Killed - another short hitman thriller, but more of a character piece than an action film.  Unfortunately, despite over 25 valid casting submissions, only five actors ever showed up for scheduled auditions, and none of them displayed what I was searching for.  Three other actors scheduled auditions later on, but failed to show up for them.  After that, I aborted and delayed the production for a third time in over a year (originally meant to be shot in July, 2005).

After that failure, I decided to sit down and re-visit an old idea from the Spring of 2004 titled The Fixer.  It contained some of those characters from my comedic scripts, but at the time, I just couldn't develop a plot.  Over two years later, it started coming together, but it still took two months to write a 50 page script.  I continually jumped around in the script, writing scenes as they came to me, and eventually, making it all work-out.  casting began in October of that year, and while it was originally scheduled to be shot over the course of one month, it was not to be.  Certainly didn't seem like a favorable thing at the time, but every delay and setback that happened was ultimately beneficial to the final product.  The story of the production is a very long one with a lot of turbulence.  I would just about have to write half a novel's worth just to detail every twist and turn, but suffice it to say, after having every production problem in existence occur, the film has come to the final stages of post-production.

The highly talented and inspirational director of photography Eric Woltman was exceptionally crucial to how well the film turned out, and to solving some major production problems.  As Voltage Visual Studios and 'I Do' Videography, he and I will be endeavouring to build up a foundation for film and videography work that could lead to very lucrative destinations.  My goal at this time, with RavensFilm Productions, is to work towards obtaining the resources to produce the feature-length remake of Vengeance in 2009.  The main cog in that plan is a short film prologue titled The Van Owens Job which I intend to shoot this coming June in Chicago.

• "The Van Owens Job (2008)"
• Director
• Writer
• Producer
• Director of Photography
• Editor
• Casting Director
• "The Fixer (2008)"
• Writer
• Director
• Producer
• Location Manager
• Director of Photography (Secondary)
• Boom Operator
• Editor
• Sound Editor
• Music Supervisor
• Casting Director
• "Blood Brothers (2006)"
• Producer
• From Dead Rose Productions
• "Vengeance (2005)"
• Writer
• Director
• Director of Photography
• Producer
• Editor
• Special Visual Effects
• Casting Director
• "Star Wars: Episode XIII - The Voorhees Menace (2005)"
• Story Consultant
• Sound Editor
• Opening & End Title Designer
• "Friday The 13th: The Living End (2004)"
• Co-Writer
• Director of Photography
• 2nd Unit Director
• Editor
• Opening & End Title Designer

• "The Fixer (2007)" as "Jack Logan"
• "Blood Brothers (2006)" as 'Robert Jack "Snake" Russell'
• "Vengeance (2005)" as 'Robert Jack "Snake" Russell'
• "Star Wars: Episode XIII - The Voorhees Menace (2005)" as 'Darth Voorhees'
• "Friday The 13th: The Living End (2004)" as 'Jakk Maxwell' / 'Jason Voorhees'