DRUM MACHINE

Finished the rewrite of AS HE FIRED UP THE DRUM MACHINE, originally written in 1996. Mally is a prostitute who wants out — she's dreaming of the ocean. Champ is her boyfriend, a loser musician going nowhere. She steals drugs from her pimp, and the two of them try to run. That was the story.

In 1997, I bought a Sony VX1000 digital video camera and set out to make it — my first feature, shot in Pittsburgh. Thirty years ago next year. Wild to pull the script back out and see what's still alive in it after all that time.

Haunting The Better

Hill Rossin is an Independent writer, director, and producer with three decades of self-directed work across thriller, drama, and dark comedy. His filmmaking career started early; in high school, he took a college film course at Pittsburgh Filmmakers. In the summer of 1992, he shot his first 8mm film — a music video for Sonic Youth's "Sugar Kane," from their then-new album Dirty — for a contest on MTV's 120 Minutes. Although he didn't win, the project helped him get into film school. He studied at the College of Santa Fe and later trained again at Pittsburgh Filmmakers, gaining comprehensive skills in writing, directing, producing, cinematography, editing, and sound.

He founded Haunting The Better in 1996 and moved to Charleston, South Carolina, in 1998, where the company is now based. Through it, he develops original feature screenplays and no-budget narrative films, and in the 2000s he directed two features, As He Fired Up the Drum Machine and Hey Android. Over thirty years, his work returns to the same concerns — place, voice, and the dark humor of ordinary life — shaped by roots in western Pennsylvania and a sensibility in which violence and tenderness sit at the same table.

https://hauntingthebetter.com
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