The Girl in the Holograph - Part 2 - The Mistress Episode

"Look at Roosevelt. Look at Churchill. Look at that old fella whats-his-name in The African Queen."
Schatze Page (played by Lauren Bacall) in How To Marry A Millionaire*

People often ask producers how low-budget indie films get funded. The answers are as diverse as the movies themselves.

A movie I did that won Slamdance was truly funded by friends and family of the co-producers. A horror film I did was funded by a couple of deli owners. Town Diary was funded by PSA's my partners and I did for the American Dental Association.

Dentists have been a joke answer to that question for years. I don't know why dentists would have a specific attraction to the film industry, other than maybe they are attracted to anything other than the boredom of being dentists.

Stan has a great story, which I have told before but is worth telling here. A dentist had put together enough money from his practice to fund his dream of directing a movie, which was shot on location. Stan had a full crew in the last week of prep when the dentist walked up to him and told him this:

"Last night, Jack Nicholson came to me in a dream and said, 'You're not a director. You're a dentist.' He was right. Pay everyone out. I'm going home." And that is what Stan did - a movie ended by a vision of Jack Nicholson.

The Mistress

There is another old cliche that is sometimes true. Stan, again, tells of a mob guy who funded a movie for his girlfriend. When she hooked up with the lead actor, he had one of his guys get on a boat with the negative of the film and dump it in the ocean.

This cliche is the premise of a movie that I think is under-rated called Mistress, where Eli Wallach, Danny Aiello and Robert DeNiro are men who invest in a movie by Robert Wuhl - as long as their girlfriends are in it. Stan and I watched the movie together, and he loved a moment when producer Martin Landau meets a potential investor in a meat locker. "I met an investor in a meat locker!" he blurted out, leading to some strange looks from the people around us.

One of my favorite moments was Wuhl and Landau chasing Ernest Borgnine (playing himself) around a parking lot to try to get him to do the movie. It was the perfect metaphor for the way producers and directors sometimes chase name actors.

Having struck out with that attempt, as Landau and Wuhl do with Borgnine, we hit unexpected paydirt** with the main premise of the movie.

Director Phil had been looking for the perfect person to play the Girl, and he found an unknown who he felt had exactly the quality he wanted. We will call her Abbie***, and as it happens, Abbie, in her early twenties, had an older friend, Mark.***

This is the point at which I should be clear that we never discovered that Abbie was Mark's lover; in fact, both characterized the relationship as a caring "older uncle," though they were not blood relatives. Our suspicions went in a more salacious direction, but those suspicions were never proven true nor proved false. This would also be the point where I make clear Mark was not a mobster.

I forgot the amount of money I had budgeted for the film earlier, but the top end that Mark, and more importantly, his lawyers, were willing to invest was around $300k. That was certainly less than our mark, but Phil and Donna were not about to walk away from a chance to make the movie. Once again, we were working with the budget we had, and not the budget I thought was needed to complete the film.

The Drawdown

Once that lawyer got involved, actually getting Mark's investment became much more difficult. They insisted on doing a drawdown, which, to be fair, is not unusual in film financing, even on bigger budgets. People who finance films rarely want to put all the money up front. so they will want to work out a schedule of when they deliver the money, which means the line producer (me) has to come up with a cash flow.

In preparing a cash flow, it is essential that you always have the money in the bank before it needs to be spent. For example, I should have the payroll for any given week in the bank before the beginning of that week, not waiting on it when checks come due.

Financiers want to pay it as late as possible. Filmmakers want the money as soon as possible. One of the things you have to explain to first-time investors is that low-budget films are very front-loaded.

Let me explain.

Pay Me. Pay Me Now

Studios and large production companies keep accounts with major vendors, from grip and lighting to trucks to camera gear, and alike. A purchase order, which is basically a promise to pay, is enough to get equipment on set.

While low-budget films also use Purchase Orders to keep track of spending, the nature of working with start up LLC's - or other corporate entities - means they have not established credit, so everything will be COD - Cash on Delivery. Locations should be secured before shooting, and, again, payment usually goes along with a location agreement. Similarly, the costume designer has bought the wardrobe during prep, and art department will spend the largest portion of their budget before principle photography.

There are many analogies between armies and movies - feeding the crew, moving the crew and equipment - etc. Another one is that most of the money is spent before a single shot, such as it were, is fired.

First, We Kill All The Lawyers

Once we got the Mark's lawyer involved, convincing him of all this got messy. His lawyer and financial advisor was not from the film world, and was skeptical. Given the ways films are financed and the way investors see their money back, I can't say that I blame him. See Coming To America.****

When the Money Finally Comes

There were certainly moments where it seemed the movie might not get done, with a good deal of the negotiations centering on if and whether the investor, Mark, could actually take the movie from Phil and Donna, who could approve - or turn-down - a distribution deal, and, to a lesser extent, whether the investor had any creative control. Without getting into details, all of these eventually were settled to the satisfaction of both parties.

Phil and Donna were happy. The investor was happy. I was, well, satisfied. Sorry, I'm just not a glass-half-full guy. Too many years in this business

Surely, the Girl was happy. Afterall, she was going to be a lead in the first feature film she had ever done. Isn't that an actor's dream? She must have been thrilled, and, most of all, appreciative of the opportunity she was getting, and appreciative both to her 'uncle' and the producers, and certainly would not have wanted to do anything to disappoint them.


So you would think. That, however, is for The Girl in the Holograph - Part 3 - The Girl Can't Help It.





* Obviously, a bit of an in-joke that an audience would have been in on, as Bacall had hooked up with a married Humphrey Bogart (the 'old fella' she refers to) on To Have and Have Not, when she was 19 and he was 44. Photo above includes Bacall's How to Marry a Millionaire co-star, Marilyn Monroe.

** My apology for mixing my sports metaphors, using a baseball and football reference in the same sentence. Mea culpa.

*** - You know the drill. Protect people by using aliases, and all that.

**** Coming To America is probably one of the most famous cases of a movie that made hundreds of millions at the box office and showed a loss. Yes, I said one of.

The Rook- Part 3 - Who Killed the Chauffeur?

"One day Bogie came on the set said to Howard [Director Howard Hawks], 'Who pushed Taylor off the pier?' Everything stopped" 

-Lauren Bacall, By Myself and Then Some




Bacall, above, is referring to the maze-like plot of The Big Sleep, in what has since become a wonderful bit of Hollywood lore, spurred in part by the response from the author of the novel when Hawks and the screenwriters inquired into the answer.

"They sent me a wire ...asking me, and dammit, I didn't know either," Chandler recalled in Tom Hiney and Frank MacShane's The Raymond Chandler Papers.

I have always resisted the temptation to take this response at face value, not sure that Chandler wasn't being cute, or whether the question was irrelevant to the plot for him.  Owen Taylor's murder is just a plot device to keep detective Phillip Marlowe from dropping the case, and it clearly didn't matter to Chandler who killed him.

On one level, this story tells you everything about what is wrong with the Big Studios today.  I'm not saying that the Studios in their heyday did not interfere in negative ways; indeed, much of the confusion on the plot of The Big Sleep was due to the Hays Code, which prevented the story being told as it was in Chandler's novel.  However, today, some focus group would have sent this movie back to editing room based on its twisting plot, and a good deal of the fun of this noir classic would have been lost in the "fix".

Sometimes mysteries are good; other times, not so much.

Plot was something of a mystery on The Rook,  and, if you ask me, it's part of its appeal.  Oh, the "who-dunnit" aspect isn't all that hard to figure out, but exactly where and when "Sutheridge" may be is another matter altogether.

The plot of the film is something like this; John Abbott, a devout religious man who is serious to the point of seeming humorless, is a detective and an official from a central theocratic government.  He is sent to a dreary industrial down of Sutheridge  to investigate the murder of a previous female investigator.  He encounters a revolution and a number of cryptic clues ( the working title of the film, "The Circle in the Square", was a reference to one of those puzzles).  The story is set in an intentionally ambiguous time period, where horse-drawn carriages take people to places that have archaic versions of modern devices, such as computers, telephones and inter-office communication.

He is met in Sutheridge by the same local official who met the last investigator, Bob Brice, whose loyalties come into question during the investigation.  Abbot's ultimate fate is determined by his own rigidity.

Neither writer Richard Lee Purvis or director Eran had any desire to explain the contradictions that existed in the story; rather, they reveled in them as part of a deeper philosophical discussion.  This led people to either love or hate the movie, depending on how literal they were.

The pejorative term that both plots shared at one time or another is "convoluted", which often means the reviewer wasn't interested enough to figure it out, or that the film didn't entertain them enough to care.

Mysteries are good for plot, but bad for production people.  Whether you are an AD or UPM, your most precious and important time is prep, where you lay the groundwork for how the movie will be structured.  I previously discussed that in breaking down a script, I like to go over it enough times that I feel like I even know it better than the director.  (How To Be an AD in BC)

As UPM or line producer, I start with a budget I prepare that is not only a financial plan for the movie, but a blueprint that determines all parameters of shooting.

On The Rook, I was reading this crazy script before and after long work days, working with a schedule I had no involvement with, and a budget that was more like a rough draft.

I soon learned that there were better uses for my time than trying to decipher the plot.  One day on set, I was siting with Martin, our lead who played Abbott, and John, who played Brice.  I asked them a question about the plot, and both admitted they had stopped considering that particular point some time previous.

There were no cables to Richard Purvis.  I addressed a plot question to Richard some time after the film was shot, and his response was like one of the puzzles in the film; I got off the phone knowing less about the plot than before, if that was possible.  The closest I got to an explanation of the time period was "it's a vision of the future as seen from people in the past."

As a viewer, this makes it possible for me to watch this film endless times, and the DP Zack and production designer Sebastian created a look that the Village Voice positively compared to Brazil.

As production manager, I put deep understanding aside and satisfied myself with the elements of the script that affected shooting, and making sure we had all of those.

The less satisfying mystery was the budget, and the accounting.

One of the first things I would explain to students in discussing preparing a budget is that there is no line item known as "petty cash," or at least there shouldn't be.  Cash is a form of payment, like checks or credit cards, and you wouldn't create a line item for "checks", but somehow, people feel comfortable creating a catch-all category called "petty cash."   A more accurate term might be "those things I can't really think about right now, but I know we'll spend it someplace."  This is not to be confused with a contingency, which is, well, those other things you know will come up but you can't really think about right now.

I went about unraveling the mystery of our budget, which began with figuring out how much we had already spent, and Mr. Chandler would have been proud of the mystery there.  The checkbook was a bit confusing, but I could usually put vendor or contractor's name with a line item.  Credit card receipts were a little trickier, with some from places that could have been for any number of things, but this was just a matter of picking a line item.

Big costs, such as equipment, became a fun game of matching invoices, both paid and pending, with checks or credit cards.  This was like the Monday NY Times Crossword Puzzle, challenging, but if you know what you're doing, it can build confidence for subsequent days, which become increasingly harder.

If these big costs were like the Monday Crossword, cash expenditures, aka petty cash, was like Saturday's NY Times Crossword, a cruel invention of  the sick mind of Will Shortz where hyphenated hip-hop slang intersects with French interpretation of Greek mythology.

Eran had assured me that we had each and every petty cash receipt, and that turned out to be true.  When I requested these receipts of the production coordinator and her assistant, she was quick to hand them over.  Rather than the neat top sheets, numbered and listed by line item and followed by pages of receipts taped or stapled in order, what I got was two big, brown paper grocery bags, filled to the brim with streams of white paper that were, indeed, receipts.  Notes written on them?  Not a chance.  They pretty much looked like a larger version of your night table when you empty your pocket after a long day; I was just happy there were no gum wrappers.

Good

Very Good

Not Good

From Raymond Chandler at his home in Hollywood to Will Shortz in whatever leather-and-shackle filed abode he dwells in to my production coordinator, the look was the same, the look of "glad you're here, have fun figuring it out."

So, the priority was getting at least a big picture of how much was spent - Eran could certainly tell me how depleted his account was - and figuring how much we had remaining and how we were going to finish the film .  I did set up a two-fold system, one for accounting for past petty cash, and another for accounting for how we would track it moving forward.  The ladies of the production office became efficient versions of Bob Cratchit, assigning receipts based on a legend I provided and bringing those in question to me while also keeping the machinery of the movie, like sides and call sheets, in motion.

When you're in production, it's no time to look back, and no time to indulge in mysteries.  The mystery of the plot took a back seat to making sure we had what we needed to shoot today, then tomorrow, then the day after; the mystery of where the money was spent would not be solved before we figured out how to spend the money we had left.  It's not the way you draw it up on the drawing board, and it's not the way you teach people to produce, but it's the reality of making a movie under difficult circumstances.  You need to have rules, but you need to be able to adapt.

For the record, I have a pretty good idea of who killed the chauffeur.








The Big Sleep - Book Store Scene

Great artists can take limitations and turn them into advantages.  The Hays Code prevented writers from being sexually explicit, so the great ones found ways to to be clever and seductive in ways the censors would pass, but the audience would still enjoy.  The scene linked above from The Big Sleep has always been one of my favorite examples of this - do you really need to be told what happened during the time lapse?