Cravenomena

Fifty. When you're counting pennies in your change jar, that's not a very big number.  But when you're Craven, fixed and quivering like a fly in agar as the big five-oh barrels down upon him from the realm of What-Was-Once-Distant-Old-Age, it seems impossibly large. Perhaps it would be closer to our experiential reality to measure our lives in seconds -- in which case, my age is around 1,539,529,440 as I write these words.  It is surely true there are moments nowadays that I feel ... Read More

Here's another spot Craven wrote, directed, produced and animated for the Cabaret Dinner Theatre in Grand Junction, Colorado. My local readers know the Cabaret closed its doors this year, after a decade as the Grand Valley's primary theatrical outlet. During most of that time, it was up to Craven to produce all of their television commercials, and here's one he did for their first production of ALWAYS... PATSY CLINE. The Cabaret commercials often posed interesting production challenges, and this spot was ... Read More

One of my goals for this blog was to create a space where I can display some of my work as a filmmaker and animator, as well as discuss techniques and reminisce about past projects. In upcoming weeks, I will be writing about the making of SHOCK! SHOCK! SHOCK!, the strange, low-budget feature I co-wrote and -directed with Todd Rutt about 20 years ago, as well as "Fun For Men!" the live-action/animated short I created a decade later. For the past eight ... Read More

I was a teenage Straight Man. Okay... so I am once again sacrificing truth upon the altar of a good lead. But admit it: "I was a middle-aged Straight Man" doesn't have quite the same zing, now does it? Among his many vocations, Craven has worked as a professional actor and, on several occasions (all of them, he admits, long after his teenage years), he has been cast as the Straight Man in a comic duo. Many Broadway musicals over the years ... Read More

Run, man, run. Though your lungs are splayed across your ribs like the tatters of a burst balloon, and your feet are hard lead cakes that send rivulets of white-hot thermite squirting through your nervous system every time they piston against the Times Square cobblestones below — run! Run like your life depends upon it. Because it surely does. There are more than a hundred men hot on your heels, shouting epithets, their teeth bared like dogs and glinting in the pale glow of ... Read More