We live in a strange world where this can just happen. Thank you Mr. Apatow!

I’ve been hearing a lot about the music in The GHOSTS. In fact I hear more about the music than the film itself.

So here you guys go…a mixtape of music which inspired the look, sound, feel and attitude of The GHOSTS. These are some of the tunes we listened to while writing the script, while in the car driving to set or while cutting a scene together in the editing room.

DOWNLOAD HERE!

Music is always a huge part of filmmaking for me. These were the songs that helped me get in the world of The GHOSTS.

Hope you dig.

Eddie O’KEEFE

p.s. The original soundtrack should be out sometime this week!

TRACKLIST:

1. Roddie Joy – Love Hit Me With A Wallop

2. The Fleetwoods – Come Softly To Me

3. The Almighty Defenders – I’m Coming Home

4. Best Coast – Sun Was High (So Was I)

5. The Clinger Sisters – Shoop Shoop De Doop Rama Lama Ding Dong Yeah Yeah

6. The Orlons – The Wah-Watusi

7. The Raggamuffins – The Fun We Had

8. The Sapphires – Who Do You Love

9. The Shangri-Las – Give Him A Great Big Kiss

10. The Shirelles – Foolish Little Girl

11. The Tammys – Egyptian Shumba

12. Arch Hall, Jr. & The Archers – Vickie

13. Black Lips – B52 Bomberboy

14. Ghetto Cross – Dog Years

15. The Flamingos – I Only Have Eyes For  You

16. John & Jackie – Little Girl

17. The Rising Storm – A Message To Pretty

18. The Tammys – Gypsy

19. The 13th Floor Elevators – Don’t Fall Down

This summer, The Teenage Head produced a short film called The Ghosts. It’s been about three months since we wrapped and I get a lot of questions from friends/family & fan (yes only one; Riley TUCKER), about when we’ll be done and when it’ll be at festivals/winning awards/changing the landscape of contemporary cinema. In light of those questions and others, I’d like to catch everyone up with our progress.

To start things off, after months of being wait-listed (which is a fancy term for, ‘umm, we’ll get back to you if the really talented kids who we like better than you pick UCLA or USC instead), I received a phone call informing me that I had been accepted to the American Film Institute. AFI is both a film conservatory grad school and a notorious maker of lists. I got the word of my acceptance while on production of The Ghosts actually and had to rush off the phone with the head of admissions to get the last shot of the day in the can.

Long story short, about a week and a half after we finished shooting I had to fly to Los Angeles and get into MFA-mode. MFA-mode, as many of you know, isn’t the most conducive environment to editing hours and hours and hours of footage into a cohesive, tight short film, and although my initial plan was to have The Ghosts ready for festival submission by Christmas, it became clear as soon as I touched down at LAX, that perhaps that wasn’t going to happen. On top of the classes at AFI, I also have to direct three short films and collaborate and crew with other students on their shoots. Free time is, uh, not very plentiful right now in my life, and the post-production of The Ghosts had to take second priority to, you know, being an outstanding pupil.

I will also say that in the week directly after shooting The Ghosts, and before flying west, I had manically cut together a very rough, very ugly assembly version of the film. It ran a little over 19 minutes and was…well, not very good. In fact, it was quite bad. Not bad as in ‘Oh my God, I just wasted a month of my life and more money than I’m comfortable typing on a pretentious, discombobulated turd, although I will admit there were indeed a few sleepless nights where my brain was convinced of that very logic. The film was bad as in, ‘there is some great work here, our best work in fact, but it needs to lose seven minutes and it needs a lot of shaping-up.’

The Ghosts, unlike Sun Sessions, or the various other really bad short films I’ve directed, did not come together in the first edit as easily as I had hoped and anticipated. The film is really gargantuan; it’s scope is a little insane and I think I can admit that we bit off more than we could chew. That being said, if I could do it again I wouldn’t do a thing differently and the film is also going to absolutely knock you on your ass… eventually.

At AFI, I was lucky enough to meet a very talented editor named Lindsay Seyffert. Unlike myself, who is more of a writer than anything else when it comes to filmmaking, Lindsay knows what the hell she is doing in the editing room. She thinks like an editor (not a writer with some basic knowledge of Final Cut; myself), and she ‘gets’ the film and ‘gets’ what needs to happen in order to make it work. As a result of her great ideas and her passion for the project, Lindsay is currently cutting the film and coming on board as primary editor.

So, that’s that. You’re caught up. Instead of Christmas, The Ghosts will be done by late February. Although I’m disappointed in this delay and absolutely hate any sort of Chinese Democratizing, I guess in the span of what has been a two year process (from conception of idea to where we’re at now), an extra couple months spent fine tuning the film isn’t the biggest deal.

I hope our fan understands.

I love you all very much.

Thanks.

Eddie O’KEEFE (writer/director of pretentious, discombobulated turds)

I haven’t been updating this blog as regularly as I probably should. For that I apologize (again; this is like the fourth time I’ve started a blog post with that sentence). I find that I’m actually pretty bad at keeping a consistent blog. I go from brief periods of great interest and prolificness to long droughts of nothing but an occasional photo of some hip 1920′s black dude. Again and again. And it’s pretty frustrating.

Trust me, I really want to write clever little ditties about salami sandwiches and Pirana 3D and what not–it’s just that, well…when I’m in a dry spell, I can’t bring myself to do it, that’s all. As much as I love salami sandwiches (a lot) and as much as I have to say about them (a lot), when I actually sit down to write about them (which is surprisingly often), all I can think about is “would Neil Young write about salami?” (no), and so I just wind up making myself another sandwich and I moving on to something else (like changing my Twitter homepage background or Wikipediaing ‘cryptids’). Because trust me, I don’t do anything Neil Young wouldn’t do.

Anyway, enough about this lame blog and salami sandwiches and more about the lame author writing this post.

For those of you who don’t know, I have moved to Los Angeles, California. I am attending the American Film Institute for grad school and am currently living in the most depressing temporary housing complex known to mankind. As I type this, a watercolor picture of an antelope gazes at me from within a thin gold frame. Next to that painting is a sepia-toned photograph of a spanish bullfighter with an orange 99 cent sticker still stuck to the top right corner. It’s the kind of room you go to to get murdered. Or the kind of room you go to after you’ve murdered someone yourself.

It is a place where I drink Coors Lite, eat microwaveable mexican food, do school work and edit The Ghosts.

Thankfully I won’t be here long because today I signed a lease on an apartment in Los Feliz/Silverlake which I and Jack Guimon (who arrives Sep. 8, thank Christ) will be moving into on September 15th.

Below are some noteworthy anecdotes during the first 12 days of my California citizenship:

-Last week I hit a bicyclist with my brand new car as I was exiting the alley behind the temporary housing unit. I am still dealing with the repercussions of this.

- The next day, I ran over a nail.

- I went to a Malibu mansion party with this crazy cat, Michael Runion. It was nothing like Doc Ryan’s.

- Chloe Sevigny is more attractive in person.

- Nick Nolte is not.

Anyway, I hope this new post inspires me to get back in the rhythm. It’s easy to get in the habit of posting photos and songs and whatever and forget that a good blog should have a (good?) writer behind it as well.

Stay cool,

Eddie O’KEEFE