"Any kind of artmaking, of course, in aggregate of the arts has profound impact on the culture and society,…but it’s important to make something that adheres to a strong personal impulse or personal vision. It’s important to follow through with that in an uncompromised fashion whether the film is highly personal, whether it’s political, whether it’s a work completely dedicated to aesthetics, whatever it happens to be. Thinking about a broader social impact is just going to kill a project; it’s just going to kill the personal investment. You just have to do what you want to do, put it out there and hope that people respond to it.

"Each individual work of art, even if it's very successful or even if it’s profoundly moving, will not have any major cultural impact most of the time. It all just works as an aggregate; it works as a mass of product. A filmmaker’s duty is to his or her own personal vision and towards making a quality work. Anything beyond that is out of your hands. You can’t worry about that." ~ Andrew Semans (I'd Rather Be Dead Than Live in This World, All Day Long)

Although Eugene Hernandez argued that the Cannes Film Festival kicked off on Monday, the festival officially begins tonight with the screening of Wong Kar Wai’s My Blueberry Nights. In a nod to the festival, this teaser for Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis.

Less than a year after completing work on The Routes of Wild Flowers, actor CJ Hammel packed his bags and moved out to Studio City. In the last six months, he's already landed two national commercials and hopes to pursue work as a character actor. Below he talks briefly about what it takes to make it in Los Angeles.

"It’s just a matter of working hard. It’s a tough work to break into becoming a full time actor, but you just have to have the will. It’s a war of attrition. A lot of people out here obviously get discouraged, but you just have to keep going every single day and stick it out. Ultimately, you will succeed. I’m glad that not all actors realize that because there’s a ton of them out here that don’t. There’s a ton of them out here that make a lot of mistakes. For as many who don’t, there are as many that do, who are professional, who do want to stick it out, and I appreciate that. I’m just hoping that I become one of those."

Kendra Skeene hadn't planned on co-producing PEZheads-the Movie along with her husband Chris Skeene and director Chris Marshall. It was much more than an active desire, a happy accident. "(Chris) dragged me along to the first convention, and I just kind of figured that I'd be in the way," she says. "But, then all of the sudden I realized that they needed someone to take care of things like making sure people signed release forms or setting up interviews so they could go do other things. All the sudden it was like, "They need me to just run around and harass people and not worry about the filming aspect." It was just a random, "Well, I guess I'm doing this too."

"Chris and I would be thinking all these lofty things about what we were doing, going here and going there," Marshall says. "Kendra would ground us and say, "What are you actually doing? Do we need to pay for it? Do we need to get hotel rooms?" So we were like, "Oh, we're glad you're thinking of all those things."

Chris Skeene adds to this: "The one big trip we took without Kendra we went up north to interview Robbie from The Goo Goo Dolls, the PEZ factory and Easton Musuem, all of that stuff we did in one long trip. We just got in the car and drove up there. We didn't really make any phone calls until we were up there, and we were like, "Hey, we're up here. Can we come talk to you? Can we come to your house? Yeah, we're next door. Can we come over and hang out?" It would never have happened like that if Kendra were there. Everything would have been set in advance. We'd have a "this day we're going here, this day we're going here." But, of course, that means we didn't get release forms signed. We got some."

"The ones we waited for six months to get, we would have gotten if I was there," Kendra says, smiling and laughing, traits very much indicitive naturally of her personality.

"If she was there, it would have saved time later," Chris says. "It was totally a different process because it was just me and (Chris Marshall), and it was totally flying by the seat of our pants."

For more information on the film, visit www.pezheadsthemovie.com.

“When writing (Hohokam) the ‘friend from out of town’ was a girl, and it was going nowhere. Struggling with it, I was about to get somewhere until I went out to a bar with Tony and saw this guy, who looked gay–I know that sounds ridiculous, but he was wearing capris and had a man-bag. Anyway it hit me that Lori’s friend should be a gay man. That would be a more interesting and relevant relationship to touch on. Then add in this marine dude (Anson) who has never met anyone gay and doesn’t know the guy, but it is a guy and he is hanging around his girl–that’s it! So I was scribbling all this, and more, down in my pad; Tony interrupts me and introduces me to the man-bag fella that inspired this revelation.

He was Danny Rhodes an actor that Tony knew, and Danny had wanted to work with me after he saw the tire swing scene in Quietly on by. We shook hands and Danny said as much to me. I told him I am working on a part for him right now. Sometimes you have to trust things like that.” ~Frank V. Ross (Oh! My Dear Desire, Quietly on by, Hohokam)

A trailer, as much as a full-length film, needs to tell a compelling story yet so often trailers leave the audience in the dark, staunchly refusing to explain what the narrative is about or do so much as offer a solid hook for the audience to cling to or care about.