| H.P. Mendoza | |
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| Born | March 13, 1977
San Francisco, California, United States |
H. P. Mendoza (born March 13, 1977, San Francisco, California) is a Filipino American writer-director, and singer-songwriter based in San Francisco best known as the screenwriter and composer for the film Colma: The Musical, directed by Richard Wong. In 2006, he was listed as one of the Top 15 Creative Talents of 2006 by UCLA Asia Pacific Arts.[1] His most recent work, Fruit Fly, premiered on March 15, 2009 at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival and is the winner of their Best Narrative Feature Audience Award. Fruit Fly is his directorial debut.
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Mendoza was born in San Francisco, the son of Rogelio and Priscilla Mendoza, both from Alcala, Pangasinan, a provincial town in the Philippines. As a child, Mendoza used a Super-8 camera given to him by his father to make an at home roller coaster simulator that would project in the living room and would last for three minutes. The footage was never developed.
Having two older brothers who were forced to take piano lessons against their will, Mendoza was spared the obligation, but was determined to learn to play by ear. He learned his first song at ten years old, the theme song to The Legend of Zelda.
After studying theater and film literature in high school, he studied film at the College of San Mateo where he met future collaborator Richard Wong, director of Colma: The Musical.
In 2004, Mendoza decided to stop playing keyboards for various bands and decided to write an album that lovingly poked fun at various genres of pop music while covering several topics that pertained to his personal life including coming out of the closet, video games, and a failed long-term relationship. The two cult hits to emerge from the album were "Efren John", a song about coming out to a very Christian uncle, and the geek anthem, "In Ten Years", which plays in excerpt in Colma: The Musical. Everything is Pop is planned to be re-released on iTunes in 2009.
After writing a concept album called Colma: The Musical as a birthday present for his childhood friend, he reunited with film school classmate Richard Wong, who had just finished working on the television show, Arrested Development and was looking for a script to direct. When Wong listened to a track from Mendoza's concept album, he asked Mendoza how long it would take to turn it into a script. After seven days, a first draft was born, Mendoza flew from Philadelphia to San Francisco and the plans were set in motion. After 18 days of shooting and several months of editing, a feature film was made for a budget of roughly $15,000. The film, called "an itty-bitty movie with a great big heart"[2] by The New York Times went on to win three Special Jury Prizes on the film festival circuit and was acquired by Roadside Attractions and Lionsgate Entertainment.
During the production of Colma: The Musical, Mendoza had difficulty transitioning from living in the east coast to the west coast and decided to write an album chronicling his emotional state from leaving San Francisco to coming back. The two cult hits from the album were "No, That's My Phone", a song made up of cell phone interference noise and ringtones, and "Organ Donor", a song written to, his now partner, Mark Del Lima. "Wet Dreams and Funny Schemes" was used in the 2009 film, A Lower Power, while the song, "19th Morning" was used in the making of documentary for The Princess of Nebraska by Wayne Wang. Nomad is planned to be re-released on iTunes in 2009.
After experiencing a horrible breakup, Richard Wong wanted to create an experimental genre-skipping film based on the turmoil he experienced subsequently. He hired Mendoza to write a preliminary screenplay and score. After Mendoza edited the film, it premiered at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival. The film, heralded as "brave" by UCLA Asia Pacific Arts[3] stars Mousa Kraish and won a Technical Art Award[4] at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival for Richard Wong and H.P. Mendoza.
During the festival life of Colma: The Musical, Mendoza and actress L.A. Renigen would jump back and forth from gay film festival to Asian film festival for about a year. After experiencing the strange treatment Renigen would receive from gay men (automatically pigeon holing her as a "fag hag"), he decided to create Bethesda, a character based on Renigen. Bethesda, like Renigen, is a performance artist who moves to San Francisco to workshop her latest performance piece dealing with finding her biological mother. Also like Renigen, Bethesda finds herself going to gay bars every night and getting labeled a "fag hag". The musical film, called "irresistible"[5] by the San Francisco Chronicle was funded by the Center for Asian American Media and was awarded the Best Narrative Feature Audience Award at the 2009 San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival.
Like the original Colma: The Musical concept album, Elsewhere was written as a gift for Mendoza's partner, Mark Del Lima, known for his odd mixtapes and offbeat playlists. Mendoza tried to mimic the patterns, themes, and sounds of his mixtapes and playlists and wrote fourteen songs that follow the general arc of a Mark Del Lima mix. The album marks a temporary departure for Mendoza's music having virtually no lyrics and sounding as if it were recorded in various eras to evoke a sense of nostalgia. Elsewhere is due for release in late 2009.
Great Hymn of Thanksgiving takes place at a dinner table, where the sounds of conversation have been replaced by fragments of news reports from Iraq, scraps from the Army prayer manual, invented Arab folk tales, and a recurring State of Emergency pointing everywhere and leading nowhere. The sounds of the table itself struggle to bring this “conversation” into a confrontation with material reality.
The piece is a trio between the functions of music, noise, and semantic meaning, wherein each function can mingle with the others, lose itself in reveries (under fields of motive force that assert themselves with varying degrees of insistence), or, when necessary, take a solo.
Conversation Storm sees three friends from three sides of the political spectrum unwillingly argue their way through a "ticking time bomb" scenario, dissecting, revising, and even brutalizing their own positions in the process — but time has either stopped or entered an ugly loop, and as the friends assign and reassign roles, the scenario begins to dissolve the boundaries between real and hypothetical, past and future, day and night. [6]
In 2007, Mendoza was working for the San Francisco Fringe Festival and was able to see a performance of The Nonsense Company's Great Hymn of Thanksgiving/Conversation Storm and was determined to meet the troupe. In 2008, Mendoza gave his voice to Great Hymn playwright Rick Burkhardt for his award-winning composition "Calf", performed by the ensemble Ascolta and decided to ask Burkhardt if he would be interested in making a film version of Great Hymn of Thanksgiving/Conversation Storm, called "a delicious two-course evening"[7] by Time Out New York.
The film is currently in post-production and is due for festival submissions in 2010.
Mendoza has also contributed music to theater troupes like Precarious Theatre for their musical adaptation of a chapter in Don Quixote, I'm Yours! (or Deranged by Love)[8]. He also spent a lot of 2009 scoring the films Abuela and A Lower Power, directed by Paul Kolsanoff and Robert O'Geen, respectively.
Currently, Mendoza is developing the script for his next film, Clockwise, a non-musical dark comedy about Proposition 8.
Mendoza is openly gay and lives with his partner, designer/animator Mark Del Lima, with whom he started ersatzfilm, a division of ersatzdesign.
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