I had an epiphany about color vs. black and white while watch­ing Burn Notice. If you don’t know about the show, you should check it out. It’s like this decades A-Team/Remington Steele. A spy dis­avowed by his agency helps a new needy “client” each week. It’s mind­less TV fun at its best. Action and explo­sions with nary an indi­vid­ual get­ting hurt. But I digress. I’ve read all of these books about how some peo­ple pre­fer black and white over color because black and white has more inter­est­ing con­trast, shad­ing, and grayscale gra­di­ents. These books talked about how film­mak­ers of the past would use red lights and yel­low lights to cre­ate dif­fer­ent shades of gray on film. If you saw the scene lit in real life, it would look like a bad acid trip. But because all those col­ored lights turned to shades of gray on film, it just cre­ated an inter­est­ing play of con­trast and grayscale. As a film­maker that grew up in a world of color tv, where I Love Lucy reruns were annoy­ing because they didn’t have color, I’ve always felt too young to really appre­ci­ate black and white. And if I had the choice, I would have always cho­sen color. I mean, why would you choose mono audio over stereo? Strangely, I’ve always appre­ci­ated black and white pho­tog­ra­phy but hav­ing never seen the same pho­to­graph in color and B&W side by side, I’ve never had a true under­stand­ing of the differences.

But then while watch­ing the sea­son 4 episode of Burn Notice “Made Men”, a fade from color to B&W hit me like a ton of bricks and I finally get what peo­ple say about B&W. See, all the read­ing that I had done was too cere­bral. They were all just wordy expla­na­tions using high falutin art words. But what I saw on TV just got to me on an intu­itive level.

Burn Notice — Sea­son 4 Made Men — Color

Burn Notice — Sea­son 4 Made Men — B&W

To me, the color pic­ture has so much detail that your eye doesn’t pick out shapes. Your eye is draw more to col­ors and indi­vid­ual items as opposed to see­ing the com­po­si­tion as a whole. The best exam­ple of this is the big red siren on the cop car in the fore­ground. In the color pic­ture, you have white and red against a brown­ish gray street. The red pops out and draws your focus to the car. In the B&W ver­sion, the gray of the siren almost matches the street and it draws less atten­tion. Your eye is able to focus on the true sub­ject which are the four char­ac­ters in sil­hou­ette. In the B&W pic­ture, the car at the bot­tom, the white water at the top, and the dark under exposed side of the street on the right of the pic­ture cre­ate a frame for our sub­jects. All of these work together to draw your eye to the sil­hou­ettes and make a much more inter­est­ing com­po­si­tion. Even the sil­hou­ettes pop out more in B&W because they are a pure black against at lighter background. In the color ver­sion, the legs of the woman and the white shirt of the guy to the right of her get a lit­tle lost against the brown­ish gray street. This is prob­a­bly what all the experts mean when they talk about bet­ter con­trast in B&W. Overall, B&W made for a stronger and more dis­tinct com­po­si­tion. And there in a nut­shell is my epiphany on B&W.

The name of my film is back to Beyond the Mat. Orig­i­nally, the movie I’m pro­duc­ing was called Beyond the Mat but because there’s a WWE doc­u­men­tary from 1999 of the same name, we were advised to change our title to some­thing else. After much debate and con­ster­na­tion, we changed it to Near­fall. When we started the project back in 2006, only seven years after the doc­u­men­tary, it made sense that there might be con­fu­sion in the mar­ket­place. But we’ve always retained a fond­ness for our orig­i­nal name and now that things have picked up for the movie again, we’ve decided that a decade is enough water under the bridge and to rename our film Beyond the Mat.

Here’s a quick update. WE HAVE DISTRIBUTION! It’s a small com­pany call Catch22. We’ll be their first the­atri­cal release but we have some Hol­ly­wood Heavy Hit­ters on the team. I can’t dis­close who they are yet but there should be a Vari­ety arti­cle com­ing out in the near future.

Finally, the other big news is that we have signed on our pol­ish­ing edi­tor. He’s the Acad­emy Award win­ner, Scott Con­rad edi­tor of the orig­i­nal Rocky. Maybe you’ve heard of it. I remem­ber when we first started this film, we kept ref­er­enc­ing Rocky and how we wanted to be the next clas­sic sports film. No one would have thought that by the end of this long and ardu­ous jour­ney that we’d actu­ally be work­ing with the edi­tor of that sem­i­nal sports movie. Ask any­one for their top 5 sports movies and chances are Rocky will be on that list. Scott Con­rad helped cre­ate the mod­ern sports movie genre. Now he’s putting his skill and tal­ent into MY sports movie. Isn’t that crazy? Never in the wildest dreams of a first time film­maker would we ever think this was a possibility.

Here’s a brief update on some other things. The legal issue with the film was recently set­tled and that took a huge bur­den off of my chest. Because of the law­suit and the cash issues that it caused, I had to get a day job. I started work­ing at a mar­ket­ing com­pany whose main client is Suzuki. Then the econ­omy fell apart and the auto indus­try was slapped across the face with cut­backs. My com­pany was no excep­tion. I got put to part time sta­tus at only 12 hours a week. We the free­lanc­ing needed to make ends meet, the law­suit, and a moun­tain of debt; I was in no mood to work on Beyond the Mat. That’s also why I stopped writ­ing. But all that is over now. I’ve been back to full time since May 1st. We got the fin­ish­ing funds we need for our film. The law­suit is com­pletely over. I’ve paid off all of my legal fees. We’ve picked up dis­tri­b­u­tion. And we even have some guest celebri­ties appear­ing in our film. We shot pick­ups with Ken Sham­rock a few months ago and we are final­iz­ing our con­tract with Kurt Angle to film at the end of July.

Van the direc­tor has been stressed about sched­ul­ing and I have been hav­ing trou­ble moti­vat­ing myself through all the tribu­la­tions, but I’m feel­ing like I’m get­ting back into the groove. It’s time for me to rally to troops and get this baby done.