Sharky Baby was, for at least a couple of years, the next film I wanted to make after Foreign Correspondents. But it looked like it was going to cost at least a million dollars to do right (this is nothing in terms of film financing, but far more than I could scrape up personally). So instead of waiting forever for my ship to come in, I made the low-budget Claustrophobia instead. But the script for Sharky Baby is finished and I'd still film it at the drop of a hat.

A satirical comedy about a geeky college freshman who becomes, in short order, a loan shark, a pornographer and a criminal - while remaining a geeky college freshman - Sharky Baby sounds like a lot of other movies about horny college kids getting into trouble, and to some degree it is. But just as Claustrophobia is not your average horror movie, Sharky Baby has a lot more going for it in terms of character, story and satire than the usual run-of-the-mill teen junk. And people who've read the script seem to agree. I entered it in the very first Project Greenlight contest and it won recommendations by every online reviewer who read it - and remember, this was the competition. I made it into the Top 250 (out of over 7000 entries) and advanced to the next stage of the contest, which was to make a "filmmaker's video" introducing myself to the Project Greenlight team, explaining why they should give me a million dollars to make my movie, blah blah. I got nowhere with that video, but I have since learned that it is included, in its entirety, on the Project Greenlight DVD Box Set. If you come across it, I'm the one riding around in the trunk of my car. I'd like to think that my whole presentation was just too weird for them, and so they let that poor schmuck Pete Jones (with his middle-of-the-road Stolen Summer) make a complete ass of himself on national TV instead. I shed no tears.