As a lifelong fan and lover of cinema, with movies of all kinds being a nourishing staple in my diet, I am excited to announce that I am going to be directing a short film I wrote, titled: Ballad of the Cuckoos. An existential torch song meets Laurel and Hardy in the Twilight Zone. Or: A man and pregnant woman find themselves trapped in a children’s room, with no memory of who they are and how they got there. What ensues is a surrealist romance in which full lives are created inside a single-room universe.
The film will star Rita O’ Connell and Clint Murphy, and I am grateful to have the experience and technical savvy of longstanding industry professional, Troy Paff, who will be the film’s Director of Photography and Camera-man. The film score will comprise original compositions from my Brooklyn brother and childhood pal, Anthony Distefano, an amazing musician and composer, whose haunting and etheric soundscapes were tailor-made for cinema. Cuckoos will also feature the bittersweet dreamfolk of Taos-based band, Art of Flying.
We will be launching a fundraising campaign at the end of June, as it takes a village to raise indie projects into the light, and in this case it will take a village of cuckoos to wing along with us and help raise our baby from the conceptual ground floor to the big screen. Our goal is to shoot the film late summer, and we will be assembling a tech/production crew, which will include a set designer who will be constructing our customized, one-room “set” from scratch. There’s gonna be a lot of folks involved, and a lot of creativity shared, in making this cinematic Cuckoo fly, and I am psyched for the process and its many cycles and phases.
I leave you with the fool’s wisdom dispensed by Mr. Ray Bradbury many moons ago: “If we listened to our intellect, we’d never have a love affair. We’d never have a friendship. We’d never go into business, because we’d be cynical. Well, that’s nonsense. You’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.”
May your wing-building and cliff-diving be graced by spirit and charged by heart. And may you become brightly, radically, unrepentantly you. God & goddessbless!
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About John Biscello
Originally from Brooklyn, NY, writer, poet, performer, and playwright, John Biscello, has lived in the high-desert grunge-wonderland of Taos, New Mexico since 2001.
He is the author of four novels, Broken Land, a Brooklyn Tale, Raking the Dust, Nocturne Variations, and No Man’s Brooklyn; a collection of stories, Freeze Tag, two poetry collections, Arclight and Moonglow on Mercy Street; and a fable, The Jackdaw and the Doll, illustrated by Izumi Yokoyama. He also adapted classic fables, which were paired with the vintage illustrations of artist, Paul Bransom, for the collection: Once Upon a Time, Classic Fables Reimagined. His produced, full-length plays include: LOBSTERS ON ICE, ADAGIO FOR STRAYS, THE BEST MEDICINE, ZEITGEIST, U.S.A., and WEREWOLVES DON’T WALTZ.
John Biscello 