We are now one for one. We have submitted to one festival -- Slamdance -- and we got accepted. We will screen in Park City, Utah, at the Silver Mine, on January 13th at 8 pm and January 17th at 12:30 pm. Hope to see you there.

For those who don't know, Slamdance is the renegade alternative to a more established film festival called Sundance. Slam has really come into its own in the past several years, premiering films by people such as Steven Soderbergh and Alexandre Rockwell. Exec producer Brian Clark and I have always felt that Slamdance would be the perfect place to premiere the film, so there has been much cheering and jubilation. You can probably hear it in my voice.

The acceptance to Slamdance forced us to make a hard decision on the title. Our advisors strongly recommended that we not try to retain "MacArthur Park" as the title, as a film of the same name went to Sundance last year, and we would just confuse everybody. So, sad as it was to lose the name that has been with the film just about since its inception, we launched an effort to come up with a new title.

Believe it or not, I suggested THE HANDMAIDEN OF JUSTICE early on. Why? Because an old quote by somebody says that "Truth is the handmaiden of justice," and our doc is about a group of citizens on a search for the truth.

This did not go over well. Soon after getting my email proposing this title, Brian Clark and his partner, Tammy Kearns, called me up jointly and asked if maybe we could come up with a better title (and they did--but more on that later).

I also came up with HAIR TRIGGER, which describes both the trigger mechanism on the Mauser rifle used to kill Bill Gates as well as the alleged assassin's supposed "hair-trigger temper," according to the Garcetti Report. A lot of people liked this title, but it was eventually considered too Hollywood-y and thriller-ey.

CITIZENS FOR TRUTH also came up again. I've always liked that title, because the film is pretty much about the group Citizens for Truth and their investigation into the Gates murder. But reaction from the masses (we sent out emails to all our friends testing various titles, with the notable exception of THE HANDMAIDEN OF JUSTICE) was that it sounded to earnest and boring. Documentaries already have a hard enough time overcoming that preconception that they are boring, so we decided to veer away from a title that might contribute to the problem.

But on Bartleby.com, Brian C. and Tammy found an 1830 quote by Daniel Webster:

"There is nothing so powerful as truth, and often nothing so strange."

Take away Webster's odd punctuation (I think opium was popular in the mid-19th Century, -- if I'm not mistaken), and it's a pretty good quote. So we decided to call the movie NOTHING SO STRANGE. It looked pretty good on a rough poster layout I made just to get a feel for the titles...

THE HANDMAIDEN OF JUSTICE. Whoo-boy, that don't look too good. I think, even with the poster, it makes you wonder when the handmaiden is going to show up. The more I think about it, the more I realize this title was a very, very, awful, awful idea. Steven Soderbergh admits in a book that one title he suggested for "sex, lies and videotape" was "Mode: Visual." This kind of feels like that.

So score one for Brian Clark and Tammy J. Kearns. Now we get to go to Slamdance without explaining that our movie is not about handmaidens.

See you in Park City.