Peter Wick

Peter Wick is an independent filmmaker and stand-up comedian. His first film, Long Strange Trip- or The Writer, The Naked Girl, and the Guy With a Hole in his Head, won the "Most Promising Director" Award at New York Int'l Independent Film Festival in 1999. His second film, Movie Pizza Love, won the Feature Film Award-of-Merit at the Indie Fest in 2008.
Wick has also worked professionally as a stand-up comedian at clubs around the country.
He is also a writer and occasionally a musician.
While still a teenager Wick played drums and occasional did vocals for seminal Seattle punk band Mr. Epp and The Calculations, with Mark Arm, who later co-founded "Grunge" band Mudhoney. Journalist Craig Joyce has written several articles in which he recounts Wick reading a story titled "The Pigeon in the Fountainbed" while friends made "noise" behind him. This recording was apparently played on a local radio station with the DJ referring to the band as "The worst band in the world".
Wick later quit the band in what has become a legendary story told by Mark Arm in several Mudhoney interviews; Wick called a band meeting and said that the music might take too much time away from his writing so he had to quit the band in case they became "too successful". At this point, Arm looked at him and said, "Let me get this straight you're quiting the band because you think we're going to be successful?"
Wick remained friends with the band though, and returned occasionally to play drums. He also participated in the band's last show in 1984, a show opened by sixteen-year-old Andrew Wood and his band Malfunkshun. Wood would later front Mother Love Bone, the band which recruited Eddie Vedder to sing, and changed their name to Pearl Jam, after Wood died in 1990.
Meanwhile Wick was becoming a stand-up comedian working comedy clubs around the country in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
He had also become a dad during this time and in 1993, moved his family to Los Angeles.
During the following two years Wick became a regular Extra on the television show Babylon 5. He can be seen as a human in a few episodes from the first season of the show but in many he is unrecognizable in Alien headgear and make-up.
Wick also worked as an Extra on shows such as L.A. Law (jury member in one episode final season), Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman and movies such as Wayne's World 2, Speed, and most notably, Forrest Gump on which he reportedly was yelled at by Director Robert Zemeckis for sneaking back to the "Brain trust" area where Zemeckis was conferring with his special effects team about removing a woman from old footage of John F. Kennedy and replacing her with Tom Hanks.
In the late 1990s, Wick moved back to Seattle and appeared on local stages in theater productions, including John Longebaugh's "Cafe Angst" and Theater Babylon's "Playing Chess With Joey".
Wick wrote the script for "Long Strange Trip" with Seattle Actress Hannah Logan and cast Jennifer France as the Lead character "Becca", a stripper who leaves her job and goes on the road trip in the film to her father's survivalist compound.
Although the film was well received critically it failed to make an impact at the box office. It has grown, in the years since, into cult classic status.
Wick spent several years struggling to finance a would-be second film titled "A Slice of Pie". In 2001, he was told at one point that the money was available and production would soon begin, only to learn that the financier was suddenly killed in an auto accident. The accident put the brakes on the production and Wick was back at square one.
Also in 1999, Wick met and became friends with a former Miss Italy Roberta Orlandi who had left Italy to pursue a career in Hollywood. Orlandi had appeared in a number of award-winning Italian films but was looking for something more challenging. She read Wick's "Pie" script and fell in love with it. The two shopped the project together with Orlandi attached to play the lead character "Lana."
After getting nowhere with the project Wick made a short film in 2005 as part of the 48-hour Film Project entitled "Jerry's Mentor, Jerry's girl." By all accounts Wick hated the experience of trying to shoot something in 48 hours as the shoot was hit by a series of technical problems. Wick later expanded the five-minute short into a feature-length script though, which would be "Movie Pizza Love."
"Movie Pizza Love" received four grants - equipment, editing time, etc. - from Seattle's Northwest Film Forum, and would be shot for the ridiculously low budget of Five thousand Dollars. It is a figure unheard of for a 90-minute film. Nevertheless, the film won the Feature Film Award-of-merit from the Indie Fest for 2008.

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