What is Starbox?

Starbox Productions is a recently incorporated production company that has even more recently spawned Starbox Pictures -- our feature motion picture wing, which is in the first trimester of gestation of our first feature-length motion picture: "Suicide Squad."

As you can tell by that first sentence, we at Starbox pride ourselves on our extensive use of varied forms of punctuation.

Depending on how you look at it, I am either 4 months or 33 years late on starting this blog, which I (we) plan to use to chronicle the misadventures of a couple of first-time movie producers as we plod our way through the conoluted maze of writing, casting, financing, and ultimately assembling our baby.

Who am I?

I am a former journalist and current finance geek at a technology company, who's long had a hankering for the craft of spinning yarns and collecting rejection letters from the finest publishing houses in the continental United States.

Who are we?

We are the misguided, misunderstood, misplaced, and misanthropic force behind the Star box.

The other half of we is my cousin Adam Hatley, whose hankerin' for acting is as strong as mine for writing.

What the hell are we doing?

We're making a movie.

History of Starbox

Adam recently competed in the ubercheesey "Mr. Romance" surreality TV show on the Oxygen Network. Adam competed against a bevy of wannabe Fabios for the title of Mr. Romance. Adam was a staunch competitor, but ultimately lost to a gargantuan man, who will soon be appearing on the cover of romance novels.

While Adam didn't win the contest, he and co-contestant Tom "TJ" Jones were popular contestants on the show -- catching the producers' eyes with their devious plots and caustic wit.

While Mr. Romance was still airing, Adam, TJ, and I worked with the development team at Oxygen in an attempt to capitalize on the popularity the two had gained during their run on the show. While we never managed to get anything off the ground with Oxygen, this got us moving in a unified direction -- attempting to pool each of our resources to create some form of entertainment.

We started small by doing puppet shows at street fairs throughout Central Europe for most of the summer months. We crafted highly detailed puppets from bars of soap and bits of tin foil, and wrote elaborate operatic scripts for the puppets to act out. Several weeks in to our puppet theater run, a kindly street vendor from the Ukraine suggested that maybe we were thinking too small with the soap puppets.

"You boys should go to Hollywood," he suggested.

So we loaded up the truck, and ...

right.

Decided to retire the soap puppets and take on this whole independent film thing all the kids are talking about these days.

In the months following our falilng out with the fine gals at Oxygen, it has been suggested that the European soap puppet tour was nothing more than a figment of our hallucinogen-adled minds, and that we really spent the time lying on our backs in a crappy apartment in North Memphis, drinking Bud Light and playing balloon volleyball -- a game with much more elaborate rules than one might imagine (e.g. the balloon is in play if it bounces off the coffee table, but not in play if it bounces off the couch, UNLESS it hits both the couch and the recliner, but not the coffee table).

It has further been suggested that it was in one of these mid-afternoon drunken balloon volleyball matches that Adam might have said something like, "What if we wrote a movie completely set in one location? Like an abandoned barn or something. We could put a bunch of young, hip intellectuals in a barn in the middle of nowhere, and have them kill themselves."

And if that is how it might have happened, then those three sentences might have been the nucleus of "Suicide Squad."

But I'm only guessing at this point.