Trenches, the long-awaited webseries from Shane Felux, will get a sneak peek this weekend at Maryland’s Farpoint Convention, screening Friday at 10PM, and Saturday at 11AM, followed by a Q&A panel.
If you aren’t familiar with Trenches or it only vaguely rings a bell, you’re not alone. Felux made a big splash in 2005 with his 40-minute epic fan film, Star Wars: Revelations, which was covered on CBS, CNN, MSNBC, CBC, G4 and other networks, as well as hundreds of newspapers around the world. He followed that up in 2006 with another fan film, Pitching Lucas, which won the coveted George Lucas Selects Award at the annual Star Wars Fan Movie Challenge. The whole spectacular story is recounted in Homemade Hollywood.
Seemingly seconds later, Felux and his co-producer/screenwriter/spouse, Dawn Cowings, signed a deal with Stage 9 Digital, a division of ABC and Disney, to create Trenches. Shooting later that year, the series wrapped post-production nearly a year ago…so where is it?
Stage 9 sat on it for a while, waiting to get all its ducks in order, but now it appears the series will be delayed even longer. Felux recently revealed on his blog that Stage 9 has been gutted, with its entire staff laid off as part of a 200-employee purging across ABC, thanks to the economy.
From what I understand, Stage 9 still exists and is being rolled into the ABC Entertainment Group, but Stage 9 Digital as a separate division of Disney/ABC is no more. As for Trenches, ABC still plans to release the online series, and from last I heard was close to making a deal, but I am sure this whole company re-org might slow things down a bit.
So if you can make it to Farpoint, make a point of catching Trenches; it might be a while before you get to see it again.
