I can’t believe how long it has taken to write these words …

And now I can’t believe how soon it’s happening.

The Green Chain premieres March 6th at The 5th Avenue Cinemas in Vancouver.

This movie was born in 1985 when I interviewed a logger in Williams Lake, BC about his new “mill on wheels” and how it did the work of an entire crew, and how it was too bad the damn environmentalists were responsible for putting so many of his friends out of work.

Six years later, in the granite bunker that is the CBC basement, John Juliani and I started talking about telling that story and at least four more as a collection of monologues that John referred to as, “a string of pearls.”

John and I spent the next dozen years looking for ways to bring our string of wooden pearls to life.

In 2004, a year after John passed away, I finally wrote the script for The Green Chain, handed it to Donna Wong-Juliani, and told her that no one in the world would be crazy enough to do this with her husband gone, but I’d always promised I’d write it for him. She told me she was crazy enough to do it, that we’d make a movie and I’d direct it. Tony Wosk said he was crazy enough too.  And in September, 2005, Brendan Fletcher climbed fifty feet up a tree and we were really making a movie.

And “we” is a very long list… It’s tough to imagine a smaller film. Seven cast members. Seven shooting days. But once you get through the magic and madness of post production, I suspect it still took about 100 people to bring it to life and that’s not counting the friends and friends of friends and friendly strangers who helped get this movie to the point where it’s on the big screen.

So… congratulations to everyone who brought this to life.

Thank you… to everyone who helped us climb this tree…

And now it’s time to tell the world… or at least all of Vancouver… to show up at The 5th Avenue the weekend of March 6th.

I’m planning to intro every screening for our first weekend.  We’ll have q&a sessions with me, with the cast and with special guests from the environmental community.

Tell all your friends, tell all your enemies, tell strangers. Invite people to join our Facebook site. Invite people to join the MySpace site. Invite them to subscribe to our blog.

But mostly… invite them to the movie that first weekend when the future of our movie is determined by how many people buy tickets.

Tickets will be on sale March 3rd and we’ll add a sales link as soon as it’s available.

See you at The 5th Avenue.

Mark