Matthew Scott Krentz, Streetballers Mastermind, Now Working on Blaze Brothers Graphic Novel and Film

blazebrothers.com

Somebody's about to get blazed.

​It's MasterMinds week (and Artopia night) here at the RFT, so it seemed like a good time to catch up with a previous recipient of the award -- one still making good on his artistic vision.

Matthew Scott Krentz was named a MasterMind back in 2008 for writing and directing the film Streetballers. The movie, "a Shakespearean-themed drama about two aspiring basketball players forced to deal with troubled families and the perils of street violence," stars Krentz and former Mizzou and Vashon High basketball star Jimmy McKinney.

It won the Best Dramatic Feature honor at the St. Louis Filmmakers Showcase and also netted an Audience Choice Award at the St. Louis International Film Festival.

While Krentz is still pushing Streetballers, he is also hard at work on a new project -- a graphic novel and potential movie and video game franchise -- titled The Blaze Brothers.

The project is being done in tandem with Streetballers producer (and Webster University alum) Vernon Whitlock III.

Krentz describes the plot as "Kill Bill meets The Matrix," and the two main characters as, "The Rock meets Colin Farrell." The tagline is "We ride...they die."

"[Vernon] is a bigger black dude and ex-football player and I'm a sknny white kid," Krentz says. "Those are pretty much the characters in the actual comic."

The first seven pages of the book are already available on the Blaze Brothers website and, judging from those, it looks like a bloody revenge story with a healthy dose of comic relief.

It starts with one of the characters visiting a priest to confess and "ask forgiveness for all the people I'm about to kill." Cut to a sexy skinny-dipper at "the Yamamoto Estate" who gets beheaded by a mystery assassin.

The cover was produced by Glenn Fabry, of HellBlazer fame, and the illustrations inside are the work of Marat Mychaels, a Marvel Comics artist with credits on the Deadpool and X-Force series.

Krentz, who still makes his home in St. Louis, says he's been "shopping around" the script in L.A. hoping to land a movie deal and, if its successful, a video game spin-off.

"We're about 12 pages into production of 140-page book," Krentz says. "Hopefully we'll be done in early 2011 and we can work with a top director. The estimated budget is in the $80 million range so no one is considering us to direct even though we already have a feature film under our belts."