Rodney Redbottom

Rodney Redbottom is the first in a series of short movies I'm writing/directing titled the Benefits of a Small Town series. Believe it or not, this first chapter is based off of a very true story: Back in the day my good friend Brando inherited his Grandpa's car when he passed away. One day while driving said car he had a flat tire and as you do, he went into the trunk to pull out the spare. What he instead discovered wasn't a wheel, but tons of BDSM paraphernalia addressed to what turned out to be his Grandpa's pseudonym, Rodney Redbottom. After he begrudgingly confronted his Grandmother about the subject of Rodney, she enlightened him as to his Grandpa's more *ahem* interesting side.

It was Brando's constant drunken regaling of this story to me that struck a chord. What a wholly original and weird tale it is to discover such a thing about a patriarchal figure. Sometimes truth is indeed stranger than fiction. So with his permission I wrote up a treatment of the project and we both sat down and wrote the script. After a few months of planning I enlisted my wife Olivia Roush to produce it, my buddy J.C. Reifenberg to shoot it, and we got to work on preproduction. We shot the movie in May 2014 over the course of a few weeks on a Canon 5Dm3 DSLR shooting RAW. My uncle William S. Abramson financed the project with the majority of the money buying me the laptop that I've used to make all of my content for the past three years.

Dylan and I at the Premiere

To star in the project we recruited a friend of mine who was collaborating with John Roecker on their debut album (which just got released) to play the young version of Charlie Thomas*. We grabbed Joe Karam to play the older version of Charlie, the ever-amazing Elaine Rinehart to play Grandma, and William Gary Penn to play Grandpa. To fill out the cast of the "play parties" we recruited all of my friends to dress in bondage and smack each other around for an afternoon. I am truly lucky to have such stupidly loyal friends. My personal favorite cast decision though is my buddy Brandon playing the younger version of his own Grandpa.

*Charlie Thomas will be the name of my first son (if I have one) due to me promising a man on his death bed I would name my first son after him at thirteen years old.

Never one to shy away from researching the actual topic that we
were committing to screen, we talked to several individuals in the BDSM community and my wife and I even visited a "play party" in an industrial section of Los Angeles. Eventually we found an amazing lady named Trea Wallis-Taylor who amazingly came out and helped us add an air of realism to the portrayal of bondage in the film. During the timelapse section of said BDSM scene we even had a buddy of mine who works at NASA come out and design a motor to move the camera in a way in which we could create a seamless shot over four decades. Yes, you read that correctly, we had a NASA engineer design a bondage shot in our short movie.

I love and am proud of this weird, strange little flick we made and I look forward to continuing this universe in other shorts, the next of which you'll see is The Mission which we're currently screening in festivals. At the end of this year we'll also be shooting the third chapter of the Benefits of a Small Town series titled Dick Burrito followed by several more in 2017.

Thank you to all my friends that helped make this happen.
Hope you enjoy.

Download the Score for Our Upcoming Short "The Mission"

"The Mission" is about a day in
the life of two Mormon brothers
experiencing the opposite
ends of their faith.

Apologies for my two month hiatus from the blog, it's been an insane time finishing post on our new short, dark-comedy, "The Mission". Wearing many hats in post-production doesn't exactly lend itself to an abundance of time to write. But to hell with all that, the flick is done and has already been submitted to the first of many film-festivals. As always, I'm unable to just sit idly by and watch the fruits of our labor, thus Liv and I are already prepping our next short "Dick Burrito" (co-written by Omid Ghaffarian and myself) for production. 

The only bummer of this ever-repeating cycle of making our short movies is that these flicks cannot even see the light of day until well after their film-festival run... so that got me thinking. Since I can't publicly share the movie for fear of ruining it's festival life (and the top-secret plan for afterwards), I began to think of things from the movie that I could share. Hence, the newest edition of the AntiCurrent.com Archives!

Cam and I at band practice

Though I haven't been an active participant in the Southern California Punk Rock Scene in a few years, for a good long while I was the bass player for the band Piss N' Blood. It was through that experience that I met some of the best friends I've had in my life. One of them being the guitar player for the band in question, a brilliant songwriter named Cameron Mosavian. During my time "in the trenches" with him both in the studio and in rehearsal, I noticed the dudes uncanny ability to perfectly capture the mood of any given moment and (often hilariously) put it to music. 

Front Cover

About halfway through editing I began to get concerned with music for the project. I had temp music put in to maintain momentum, but it wasn't a good fit. I experimented with using existing scores and even Creative Commons domain music off of Free Audio Archive like we did for Rodney Redbottom, but nothing was working so I turned to my good friend. He watched the flick and described right away the audio-fueled emotions I was struggling to convey and had great ideas about the genres to use when emphasizing each beat.

Cam immediately set my mind at ease and I was able to worry about the whole of the project knowing that the score was in good hands. The files he would send back to me as I was editing put emphasis on the perfect moments, punch-lined the jokes, and created the exact atmosphere I was looking for. The score he turned in is so damn good, he makes me look like a better editor due to the choices his music helped inspire. I'll never not use him again.

Back Cover

But enough about that asshole, let's get back to the point shall we? Since I can't show you a trailer, here is what I can do at the moment. I'm proud to introduce to you Cam's entire score for "The Mission". I've taken his original files, done some minor tweaking to make them flow better as an album and output them as both MP3's and FLAC's for free download via my website. 

I'm so proud of this little flick and I cannot wait to share it with you the second I can do so. Until then, here is the full, free download of the score to our new flick, "The Mission". 

Right click and choose "save link as".

FLAC Version: 

MP3 Version:  

Tracklist:

1: Theme to The Mission

2: Mormons on the Run

3: Clothes Make the Man

4: Proselytization

5: To Come of Age

6: Confectionery Canaan

Follow Cameron on Twitter here: