HOME | BUY THE FULLY LOADED DVD | READ THE REVIEWS | WHAT'S ON THE DVD?
BLURBS ABOUT THE MAKING OF BLEAK FUTURE
Foolishly
encouraged by the successful do-it-yourself independent films of Robert Rodriguez
and Kevin Smith, O'Malley shot the film on Super 8 filmstock. The sound-striped
film cartridges were the consumer favorite of the 1970's but were quickly made
obsolete by the video revolution of the 1980's. The filmstock came in 2-minute
cartridges, and were able to record sound on a magnetic stripe alongside the
actual film itself. Kodak ceased production of this sound-striped film about
mid-way into Bleak Future's production.
Two $800 Super 8 cameras were destroyed by the rugged desert filming, which took place on the outskirts of Death Valley, California.
O'Malley funded the film entirely with credit cards and what little money he raised from delivering pizzas while chasing his Film Degree at Cal State Fullerton.
O'Malley went on to work for Roger Corman in 1997, legendary filmmaker whose proteges include Ron Howard, James Cameron, Francis Ford Coppolla, Martin Scorcese, Bill Paxton, and many more cinema titans. O'Malley worked his way up from Secretary to Co-Writer and 2nd Unit Director on several Corman films and the Sci-Fi Channel television series Black Scorpion.
In 1999, O'Malley wrote and directed his follow-up feature film comedy, Minimum Wage. It was written as a satirical take on the "talking heads" indie film genre, but the point was lost on the financier/producers, who took the film out of O'Malley's hands and cut the film themselves, turning it into the exact type of film O'Malley was hoping to satirize.
An unfinished, unmixed Avid output of Minimum Wage won Best Actress and Best Cinematography at the 2000 No Dance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.
O'Malley's most recent feature film directing effort is Audie & The Wolf, a reverse werewolf horror comedy about a wolf who turns into a man and goes on a killing spree in Hollywood. audieandthewolf.com
O'Malley has recently co-written and produced the feature film Boppin' At The Glue Factory with writer-director Jeff Orgill. He is currently in development with Brooklyn Reptyle Films on his next feature film.
After nearly 3 years of painstakingly re-cutting the film, returning to the desert to shoot several missed pick up shots, re-recording every last bit of dialogue and sound, restoring over 500 photographs, compiling over 50 minutes of behind the scenes footage, assembling 8 different subtitled language tracks (including one in Pig Latin) and designing and animating 30+ menus, the DVD of Bleak Future is now complete.
BLEAK FUTURE FACTOIDS
* Bleak Future was featured in a 1997 issue of Fangoria Magazine.
* Bleak Future won the Bronze Seal at the 1997 IAC Awards in the
U.K.
* Bleak Future is well-known to many fans of Super 8 filmmaking.
* B. Scott O'Malley and actors Frank Kowal, Wendie Newcomb, and
Steven A. Kowal all worked for Roger Corman after Bleak Future was completed.
* During shooting, the Bleak film crew had the Nevada State Police pull guns on them, thinking
a decapitation scene was real.
* B. Scott O'Malley's truck, with all the film equipment in it, got stuck in the mud at Bristol Dry Lake for 36 hours. It took two tow trucks and a military vehicle from 100 miles away to get the truck dislodged.
* The film's premiere was at night during a record torrential
rain in Santa Monica in Decenber of 1996.
* During the 2006 DVD authoring, primary and backup data drives
crashed, forcing a 3 month/$5000 process of forensic data recovery from the
failed harddrives in a laboratory.
* Two cameras died from the desert heat during the production of Bleak Future.
* The film was shot predominantly on weekends from June 1995 through September 1996.
* Only one actor refused to come back and re-record
his dialogue.
More questions? Contact writer-director B. Scott O'Malley directly:
Buy this awesomely-cheesy no-budget indie cult film, available on our EPIC DVD-9 PACKED WITH TONS OF BONUS MATERIAL AND EXTRA FEATURES for just $14.99! Limited edition! Order while you can!
BLEAK FUTURE HIGH RES PRINT-QUALITY PHOTOS
 1789x1272 1200 DPI JPG 1.03MB Writer-Director Brian S. O'Malley at El Mirage Dry Lake Bed, California (1996) Photo by Marc Campos |
 883x606 600 DPI JPG 274K (R to L) Wendie Newcomb (FEMME) , Frank Kowal (SLANGMAN) , Brad Rockhold (ATLATL), Steven A. Kowal (BROTHER ALFONZE) (1996) Photo by Marc Campos |
 1770x1176 300 DPI JPG 1.7MB Filmmaker Brian S. O'Malley with the Super 8 Camera in Death Valley (1996) Photo by Marc Campos |
 3432x2377 600 DPI JPG 8MB Bleak Future (1996) Photo by Marc Campos |
 2000x1312 300 DPI JPG 647K Bones (KING MALICE) and Writer-Director Brian S. O'Malley Near Death Valley, California (2005) photo by Marc Campos |
HOME | BUY THE FULLY LOADED DVD | READ THE REVIEWS | WHAT'S ON THE DVD?