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.