We are BEYOND excited to announce our first title!
We are even more excited that it's this one.
Jack is stuck in neutral. He lives with his mom in suburban New Jersey, works as a security guard, and can barely get out of bed in the morning. All that changes when he sees a cute girl on the bus - and then realizes seconds later that his gun is missing. Desperate to find it, he enlists the help of a fast-talking middle-aged maybe-gangster named Eddie, who sends Jack on an epic quest to explore the darkest, strangest corners of American suburbia. Will Jack ever find his gun? Or better yet, maybe that cute girl from the bus?
Too Much Sleep is a film that means an awful lot to me, personally. Back in the spring of 2001, when I was living in New York City for film school, my parents and sister drove in from Detroit to visit me. While in town, we agreed that we should all see a movie – one of the interesting little indie films that you could never see in Detroit, but were plentiful in NYC. After checking our local listings, we settled on this one.
You have to understand that we are a family that values its dark, deadpan humor. Seinfeld was (and still is) quoted as if a second language. So, when I read Roger Ebert's review, describing it as "rich and droll," filled with a bunch of bizarre and bizarrely entertaining characters, it seemed like it was for us.
And boy, was it. Despite not really being a laugh-out-loud movie, we were DYING. My dad has a habit of wheezing for air when a comedy really hits, and by the end of the film's 82-minute running time, he was wheezing so hard that I think other theater patrons were staring. Delighted, I waited for a DVD release.
But there never was one. Little did I know, the film's original distributor went bust merely weeks after we saw it. A few questionable burn-on-demand discs popped up over the years, but never an actual, well-made release.
Decades went by, but I never forgot Too Much Sleep. It was such an unexpected, joyous family memory. When I decided to start Whole Grain Pictures, this was one of the first films I had in mind that I should look into.
You can imagine director David Maquiling's surprise when my email showed up. He's now a film professor at USC and UCLA, two of the world's top film schools (way better, and WAY more expensive, than my alma mater, frankly). Too Much Sleep was a film that he had worked on for a huge chunk of his 20s (he shot it 6 years before its release, back in 1995), and the fate that befell the film was a bitter memory.
David has been an incredible partner. By some luck, we found the original camera negative, which we had presumed was lost when the original film lab closed. We did a new 4K scan and color grade, stopping for a thorough dust and scratch removal along the way. With the help of modern tools, Too Much Sleep now looks even better than it did during its theatrical release all those years ago.
We'll have a lot more info to share once the disc is up for pre-order. It'll be out on Blu-ray and on demand on May 7, 2024.
-Justin