Dreddhead's log, Nov 2005: I was in the midst of pre-production for a Dredd production in Gweilos Eastwood. It was our spoof on the upcoming NU Rock Awards, called The Club Dredd Mock Awards. Raul de Castro of Gweilos thought of the idea of filming the awards and making a TV show out of it. “Bahala na kayo,” I said since I was too loaded with the work on the actual show to give it much thought.

So the night of the show (Nov 25), Raul got Havy Bagasting and his “film crew” (actually just a couple of guys with  handheld DV8's to come over and film). He asked Dylan of NU to “host” and Erwin Romulo to “direct.” I put quotes on those as well because there was no script and no storyboard to follow. In fact when they weren't even sure what they were supposed to do.

The show was itself a riot! Everyone had a good time – performers, “awardees” and audience. Rob and I got pretty sloshed with all the Jaegermeister flowing and everyone was enjoying a sort of Dredd reunion. All the while Erwin, Havy and Dylan (who was also getting tanked) were following the different personalities around, interviewing them. Another camera was pointed to the stage filming the show.

Negotiations for the TV series(!) began with Jack TV and Red Horse, who were both interested in doing a weekly show about the local rock scene. I'm not sure when talk about an actual series began and don't even ask about the budget. On top of this, no one had any real experience creating a TV show, much less an entire series!

Eventually the concept ended up centering around Dredd, so before I knew it I got quite involved. Havy and I came over to Big Sky Mind that December to shoot Karen Kunawicz's “Back From the Dredd” photo exhibit. It was an exhibit of Karen's photos from Club Dredd. For the exhibit, Big Sky, which really does remind me a lot of Dredd Timog, did a great job transforming their second floor into the old club – painting it grey with the black and yellow tramlines, graffiti and such.

A couple of weeks later I finally got to see a draft that Havy put together with footage from the two events. It was a sort of documentary on Club Dredd, but I felt it was missing a lot. The footage was limited since audio and lighting were terrible. I felt we couldn't do justice (pardon the pun) to Dredd without interviews of many personalities that weren't filmed just because they weren't in either event.

As negotiations were ongoing, I began to conceptualize a show that would feature the counter-culture scene as it is today. I worked out a 12-episode guide featuring current trends, bands and venues that I felt embodied the “Dredd” spirit. The first episode, of course, would be about the original club.

We engaged the services of Street Park Productions and we started work on the pilot. We began filming interviews of people that were involved in Dredd throughout its 8-year existence. Lacking a budget and an actual film crew, a lot of the interviews involved only me, as both interviewer and cameraman with a handheld DV8 (I never actually handled one before!).

I then remembered some footage I had on an old video 8 that Regiben Romana shot during Dredd Timog's last day. I unearthed this and we converted it to DV8. Now what about EDSA? Apa Ongpin hooked me up with Vintage, the company he worked for when he produced the MVTV Dredd Sessions in 1996. I was shown a dusty box hidden in some corner filled with U-Matic tapes of each of those two seasons. It was a wonder those tapes and the Video 8 of Timog still worked!

Since no one these days uses U-Matic players, we had to copy the episodes manually into Raul's handheld DV8, with a jury-rigged converter (thanks Apa). I only got to copy a couple of hours worth and there are still a lot left there in that corner gathering dust and mold. We had Karen's photos and some of mine. Papadom gave me some great achive shots as well of the old punk days. Street Park's, Alex Queri and Nikki Lanaz set about to put all this together with a storyboard I made.

The OBB was mostly Nix's work. She did a great job of putting action on the still shots and archive footage. The theme music was “Kill Your Television” by Ned's Atomic Dustbin. We showed this to MTV, and they said that they wanted the show! Since negotiations with Jack TV had stalled, and we had grown up watching the moonman (when MTV was still worth watching), we were all excited about this turn of events.

Thanks to all who helped, mostly for free and for the love of it. You are all part of the Dredd family. No thanks to the MTV management, who jerked us around for eight months, and then decided to dump the show. I probably missed many more credits and twenty-two minutes isn't nearly enough time to relate all that happened in those eight mad years, but I hope this will be enough of a glimpse for those who were lucky to be there and those who weren't but wanted to be.

With YouTube now around, perhaps if we're feeling ambitious, we just might make more of Dredd TV!

Patrick Reidenbach, February 2007