Mick McCleery's video: The Altruist FULL MOVIE feature length film

Every year in the United States 30,000 people commit murder. In that same time 60,000 people commit suicide. Wouldn't it be great if someone could get these people together? THE PLOT: Tom Taylor is a sick man. His prognosis is final, his illness fatal. But he has one hope. To exit this world with his pride intact and on his own terms. The only good news is, he has found a company that can help him do this. That company is 'Terminal Assist', and they have agreed to match Tom with a professional killer. Tom waits in his house for his all-too-willing executioner. Things go awry when the killer decides to murder Tom's wife, too, and Tom must become a killer to save his wife. This blood bath results in a double homicide and is soon all over the local news. This doesn't suit the purposes of Terminal Assist, an altruistic service that strives to hook up terminally ill people with low-life hit men that enjoy killing. Founder Nick Andrews has established a working relationship with local police authorities, based on an understanding that they won't kill anyone living in the same community. The double homicide presents problems, and the police expect Nick to find a way to relieve the pressure. Complications ensue when it's soon apparent that Nick has a thing for the grieving widow Teresa, and he has competition—namely, Tom's doctor buddy Carl. THE STORY: Looking back in my writing journals I see the initial inspiration for 'The Altruist' came in the Summer of '96, when I read an article that gave me the stats that start the film. On average, in America, there are 30,000 murders a year and 60,000 suicides. First off, I was shocked because with the media reporting and the like, I would have guessed there are far more murders. The other thing that struck me, is that that is a lot of waste death. I tucked it away as something to work on in the future. Then, in 1998 while I was working on 'Track 16' I mentioned the idea to Billy Franks and he said he would be keen to be involved. 'Track 16' took until 2001 to be done it's 'run'. After that I started to work on the script in earnest. I was pretty ready to go by the Summer of 2002. Billy flew out to take the role of 'Nick Andrews', but he never made it closer to New Jersey than the airport. Seems he had overstayed his visa way back in 1997. He had been back numerous times since and they had always let him through. But this time, with the nation still reeling from 9/11 he was promptly sent straight back to London. Awful for him and the movie. Billy was gracious enough to tell me he would understand if we pressed on without him, and I briefly even considered it. In the end I decided I could take the year to revise the script and by the next Summer Bill would have his visa worked out. By the Summer of '03 we were ready to go. TECHNICAL STUFF: This movie was shot on mini-dv tape on a Panasonic DVX100. The bulk of the movie was shot in the Summer of '03, but some shooting continued right through October of '04 (a month before the premiere!). Overall I shot some 70 hours of footage and through that time whittled it down to the film you see here. As a note - Back when I uploaded it youtube in 2006, the file limits were 100 megs. So this nearly 2 hour film had to go through some serious compression and it does look pretty lo-res. The full resolution version (as youtube allows much larger uploads now) can be found here: http://youtu.be/DoVFBFVYiLA NEW TWISTS: As this movie was uploaded in 2006, it is pretty much as it was shown in theatres (at the premieres and fests). Though there is five seconds of 'dropped video' at 14 minutes from the conversion. (this is fixed in the higher rez version) REFLECTION: The movie start quite violently and then moves straight into a cursing tirade by Nick (after one of the premieres, someone came up to me and said they had counted and he says 'fuck' 66 times in the first ten minutes -- I never bothered to check this, but probably true). Some commenters on youtube find issue with this. What follows is not a defense. Merely an explanation. My idea at the time was this: This movie, I knew, would not be everyone's 'cup of tea'. So, I figured I would provide this one-two punch of violence and profanity right at the start. If you didn't like it, you could leave the theatre, push eject on the DVD player, click away and not have to waste your time with the rest of the film. Also, only SOME people in the film curse. To me that's part of their character. AND someone on screen actually calls Nick on his cursing, which I think at least points out that I knew he is cursing too much (the person on screen gets to act in the interest of the offended audience). Having said all that, I do 'get it'. That's a lot of profanity. But there was where my head was at the time. If I had it to do over again, I too, might lighten the load. Who am I kidding? Fuck it. m mccleery