Mick Erausquin - our co-writer and spirit in the sky

After college I shared an apartment on the beach with a gal named April. She was a gorgeous, funny girl with talent oozing out of her ears. I always told her, "A, if I could sing like that, I wouldn't do anything else." I've always had this thing for talent, only because I really wasn't born with any -- just a lot of stamina.

So when I started writing this script, the first person I called was Mick. Mick is my talented production/shooting/writing guru. Neither of us was enamored with the idea of a "bridal shop film," but it's what I had and we used it as an exercise in discipline, crafting and writing. It took us a year to do it, but we created believable characters with sharp dialogue and a no-frills backstory.

I first met Mick maybe 20 years ago. For almost a decade our siblings were married to each other, so he was, and always will be, family. He is a talented writer, creator, artist, and all that cool stuff. Plus, I'm not really that funny but he is. His ideas are all over this film and I miss him every day as I plow through the work to make it all happen.

We were truly sad when he left this film project. Despite his personal ownership of it, he left early on. It's not his bag, baby, and that's okay. When we talked last week, he admitted to me that he just didn't have the bandwidth. He's working on a documentary and he's got a demanding home life with two adorable little girls. He said "I'll ride your coattails" but it's really me riding his.

Last fall, I wrote another feature film treatment that I'm currently shopping around, and for this I called in Mick yet again, as well as the awe-inspiring "idea man" AD Wyatt Norton. As a firm believer in the old adage, "You are only as fabulous as the people around you," I bow in humble gratitude and awe at my production team, and most importantly my co-writer. His spirit is here as we make it happen.


MICK ERAUSQUIN is an experienced filmmaker in both the nonfiction and narrative genres. His credits are many and varied, ranging from Canvas, a documentary he directed about the lives of professional skateboarders, to Down and Out with the Dolls, an independent feature film edited by Erausquin which chronicles the rise and fall of an all-girl punk rock band. Beginning in 2005, Mick joined the Emmy-winning and Academy Award-nominated team at the Promises Film Company in Berkeley, California where he has been working as a producer on the international documentary My Summer in Tehran.

An impassioned traveler and adventure-seeker, Erausquin journeyed to Porto Alegre, Brazil in 2002 to document the annual World Social Forum, a gathering of progressive-minded social-justice organizations, educators and individuals from across the globe. While there, he shot and edited a video, funded through the French-American Charitable Trust in San Francisco, which has helped educate nonprofit groups around the country. In 1997, while still in film school, he edited Caught in the Crossfire, a project focusing on the struggles of children with gay and lesbian parents that was nominated for an IDA Student Achievement Award.

Mick Erausquin holds a bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of California, San Diego and received his M.F.A. in film production from the University of Southern California School of Cinema in Los Angeles.

In 2001, after moving back to his Bay Area roots, Erausquin founded Oceanhive Productions, an Oakland-based independent digital video service, to fully pursue emerging creative opportunities.