Okay, members only

My ideas are as follows:

A Pretty-Scary Annual Calendar. Beginning with the calendar for 2008, which should be ready to send to the printer by November 15th, 2007. Members select a theme ("Naked Men of Horror", "Turning the Tables", "Women Directors") and a medium (photography, paintings, film stills, etc.). Then we can decide on the procedure--whether we want to showcase our own artwork, or solicit entries from all and sundry, judge them based on our entirely arbitrary and individual personal tastes, and publish the resulting calendar. All proceeds go to the organization, which can then use the money to do cool things.

Pretty-Scary Anthology: It would be nice to do this once a year as well. We could solicit original stories and re-prints from female horror authors, including famous ones, seek a publisher interested in printing and distributing it. If we aren't able to pay the authors, then all profits from the anthology should be donated to a worthy feminist cause--perhaps to help women who are SUBJECTED to horrible things, like rape, breast cancer or domestic violence.

Pretty-Scary Movies: I think we should work toward an eventual goal of producing and marketing original horror films and/or re-packaging old films to distribute them on DVD. There are a lot of movies which are significant to women in horror, either because of signature performances from great horror actresses or because they were written/directed by women, or adapted from the works of a female horror author.

That's what I've got thus far. Any other thoughts?

--Arinn

I think those are all excellent ideas.

I think we need to have Pretty Scary Awards to give to women in the horror industry. I don't know anyone who doesn't like to receive some sort of an award. And a West Coast Pretty Scary Con would be very nice.

We're also going to need some sort of a way to promote this. I would think the different horror mags would like to do a story on us.

My ability to help out time wise will be limited - I'm stretched beyond the breaking point right now, and am looking for responsibilities I can dump. For starters, I'm only going to teach one class next quarter instead of two.

Jessica

An excellent idea, Arinn.

We could always self-publish too (or start our OWN publishing type company,perhaps? That would be killer. The Pretty-Scary publishing company...)

Jess, that is awesome! Awards are good stuff! and I would love to attend a P/S Con! Sadly, I live in the square state no one knows (or seems to care) about. But hey, it IS the equality state and it IS the FIRST state to give women the right to vote!

Okay folks...

This year, we're gonna be having the Pretty/Scary Film Fest in Los Angeles.

I haven't heard from amy about a con and I think it might be nice to run it out here this time round.

So what i did was ask myfriend Denise Gossett (she runs www.shriekfest.com ) to help out. She said yes.

Here's what's going to happen:

This year at Shriekfest in Sept 2007, we are going to give out a Pretty/Scary award, eligible to films written/directed by women, OR a film that represents women in a cew, innovative, amazing, or most progressive way (even if the filmmaker is a male).

I would like to give out more than one award and have our own festival, but this year It looks like this is the best way to go. After Shriekfest is over, Denise and I are going to sit down and see if doing a separate Film Fest for pretty/scary (which I envision as one night of films and wards only) is something we'd like to plan for spring 2008.

I haven't written the press release about this yet.

Members of the Organization will have free access to Shriekfest, since it is put on by us as well,

and we may be sponsoring one of the parties. yay!

anyway, that's the one event so far that's planned.

What we need to do is have a vote and create a board of 4 or 5 people who make decisions.

You know, like Republican Rome.

Sounds like a very good start. Sponsoring and running a film festival is a lot of work, and I would assume it takes a good deal of experience to pull it off. Might as well start off getting involved in other local cons and film festivals and slowly pull together a crew of people who can make something like this happen every year.

Heidi, have you considered pitching a Pretty-Scary television show to Spike TV? Like, every Saturday at midnight you dress up sex-ay and invite a Scary Movie personality--actors, actresses, directors, writers, whatever--to come and watch a horror movie with you and talk about their latest work.

There are other ideas for shows, if course, I just thought it would be fun to see you as a Horror Hostess, and I gathered that you had ties to the network.

I think we need to have a membership drive for this Organization. With enough people paying dues, we might be able to accomplish a great deal in terms of publishing and distributing the work of women in horror. I can easily see a Pretty-Scary DVD line and a Prett-Scary book imprint that would put out quality products for a discerning audience. *shrug* The sky's the limit, really, especially if we can persuade some of the more established women in this industry to join.

--Arinn

P.S. I have an idea for t-shirts that men could buy and wear to support this organization...if I whip up a graphic and set up a link, can I post it here for approval?

--Arinn

Can I nominate myself? (It might be the only way I'm ever going to win anything.)

We talked about something very similar - a horror themed show somewhat similar to the Daily Show, a half hour of news (and jokes) with a horror slant, plus an interview with a famous person in horror. We didn't get far in pitching it.

Jessica

Here's what we could do, is get a show on Bloody-Disgusting.com TV. Brad Miska told me he'd be interested in hearing about one.

OR on Fangoria TV.

OR, we could do it on www.thestream.tv

OR I could pitch it to G4.

maybe start it on TheStream.tv and then pitch it to G4 based on that.

Staring in May the horror show on TheSTream.tv will be hosted by me, and I will be in full control of all of it.

Jessica, if you'd be willing to pitch in every wed night for the show, (they have a studio all set up and everything, i would just need help organizing. I can get all the guests myself) nd we can ask Amanda to do it as well.... We can get about ten episodes under our belt and then take that G4 and pitch it as a real show.

Would you be down?

Of course we would link it to this site.

Sure, I'd be willing to help out.

Jessica

That's so righteous! I can't wait to see what you gals do with it! Woo! I won't miss a single episode now...

and arinn, based on your pervious designs, I'd LOVE to see what you could come up with for a man's T-shirt. muahaha.

And I think a theme calendar is a great idea. The theme can be something that requires photographers to submit photos, or artists to draw, or women to pose, or whatever... I think it's pretty good.

But Arinn, do you think we could get a 2008 printed if we finished it in November?

We'd be wanting to send it to the printer no later than November 1st, and you'd probably want a limited press run, because you'd have no time to market it much. The problem with time-based products like calendars is that you want a lot of lead time so people can hang it up in January, y'know?

I would suggest that this year we do something simple but still classy. A wall calendar, perhaps--one large poster with all the months on a single very cool image. In future years you should have a single consistent theme that gets announced in January, and then solicit entries until the end of July. Calendar goes to print in August and gets marketed from September on.

T-shirts, bumper stickers and other basic fundraising items could be sold year round, so no problem there. It might be smart to start putting a "presence" package to take to horror conventions, though. I.e., start seriously thinking about films that you like, which fit the profile of the organization and its aims, and which don't have a publisher or distributor. Ask them if they would like to be marketed under an official Pretty/Scary label. Start thinking about some basic t-shirts and merchandise to lay out--the profits from sales might not be huge, but every item sold is promotional of the site, the organization and its goals, which is really what counts.

Still working on the graphics for the t-shirt, although I must say I already like this font for the words "Pretty Scary" at the end of the sentence...

Damn Arinn you are a marketing/idea machine, woman! What an awesome idea (you have a lot of awesome ideas---but then again you ALL DO!)

I like bloody graphics. and graphics with bad lettering.

One day, I would like to do that role-reversal picture/calendar where the women are dressed up like Freddy or Leatherface and the men are running in their underwear or screaming in the shower...

Yeah, I really like that idea too. But I like the idea well enough that I'd like to see it done really well. I think it could be a very popular calendar if we used high-quality photography or film still/promo pics.

If we want to try and put together a good "quickie" calendar for this year, we could do a "promotional" calendar for women's horror. Heidi could pick out twelve horror movies directed by women from the book she's been working on, and we could request poster art or promotional stills from the people who made them. Then we could print a twelve-month calendar which would include the glossy film image and a short blurb from Heidi to describe the film and the director's contributions and some interesting factoid from the film.

We'd end up with a calendar which 1) promotes Pretty/Scary and the Organization, 2) Promotes female directors in horror and 3) promotes Heidi's book.

Personally, I think we could pull that off relatively quickly and turn out a nice-looking product. Plus it might dovetail nicely in the future with a Pretty-Scary movie line.

--Arinn

Nice!