Album Notes

MEET THE MOVIES
A BRIEF STORY TREATMENT

THE OBLIGATORY PROLOGUE:

It’s not many guys who can say that Clint Eastwood held up the release of their first album, but Howie Klausner and Ron Eng can lay claim to this alibi for their near decade-long tardiness. Playing coffee houses and clubs in Southern California as a duo and the nucleus of a larger band in the late 90’s, the boys were about to take a permanent break from playing Van Morrison, James Taylor and Eagles tunes for those fat sixty dollar a night paychecks and all the lattes they could drink... (funny how beer was never free).

On the eve of giving up the dream of selling that “big spec screenplay” to Hollywood, (after a seven year, twelve script quest), Howie was writing songs to record, and preparing to return to school-teaching in the Orange County corrections system when screenwriter Ken Kaufman called him to join forces on the script that would become the feature film Space Cowboys. “It was fast,” Howie recalls. “I was desperate, out of money till September, and we only had like a two-month window to write the thing.”

Guess that was enough. Warner Brothers bought the script after every screenwriter’s wildest fantasy, a studio bidding war, and Clint Eastwood agreed to direct and star in it. “Boom. After seven years of trying, lucky #13 was the one. I was in the movie business.” At the same time, Eng was getting busier and busier as a sound editor, and the time between gigs grew longer and longer. The Dream was on hold, and might very well have gone the way of most dreams, had they not agreed to play a yacht club beer blast just for laughs.

“It was a really good show, and we remembered how much we liked playing together,” Eng recalls. “And as we’re packing up in the middle of the night, Howie fumbles out Java Junky for me. When we both stopped laughing, we decided to pick it up where we’d left off.”

FADE IN. Eight years overdue, it's time to Meet The Movies...


HOWIE KLAUSNER

Singer-Songwriter-Screenwriter Howie Klausner grew up in Nashville, recording and touring on the gospel circuit as the “Christian rock” movement was getting underway. Moving to Hollywood, he acted in theater and commercials before graduating film school at the University of Southern California. A screenwriter by trade, he and Ken Kaufman teamed to write Space Cowboys, starring Clint Eastwood in 2000. Following his passion for space stories, he followed up with ROCKETMAN, the biography of astronaut Pete Conrad. Klausner and Eng have played live together for nearly fifteen years, formed the Movies in 2003. MEET THE MOVIES is their debut album.

RON ENG

Guitar Player-Sound Designer Ron Eng was born and raised in Miami, Florida, and was playing the coffee house circuit by the age of fourteen. Studying classical guitar and music theory at Florida State, Ron traveled west to Los Angeles after graduation to attend the Guitar Institute of Technology, and begin his career as journeyman Ax-Man all over the Western U.S. His interest in electronic music drew Ron into post-production sound in the movie business, and turned to be a pretty decent “day gig”, earning him a Golden Reel award for his first outing as editor on the Disney feature, Rescue Rangers. He now owns his own post-production sound company, Gigeng Productions, in Burbank, CA. As well as the guitar work and background vocals, Ron arranged and produced MEET THE MOVIES.

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Why “The Movies”, anyway?

The songs on Meet The Movies are all written and produced by song and screenwriter Howie Klausner (Space Cowboys) and Golden Reel winning movie sound designer, Ron Eng. Playing along happily are also a gaggle of fabulously talented “movies” who mostly make their living in and around feature films, but this is what they really want to do when they grow up. Very sorry to say that Clint eastwood had scheduling conflicts in the making of this album, and was unavailable for vocal overdubs.

FEATURED SINGLES

JAVA JUNKY... The Movies' Highly Caffeinated Ode to Coffee

ONE VOICE... The Movies' cry for peace in a troubled world

THE MORE THINGS CHANGE... Blues tune about good intentions