All in the Family: The Making of Town Diary - The Good...

"Letting go gives us freedom, and freedom is the only condition for happiness"
-Venerable Thich Nhat Hahn*

(This post picks up on the series of posts about a film I produced and co-wrote, called Town Diary. The last in that series is here (it started here), which ends with the end of pre-production. Here starts the story of production.)


Low budget indie films are about Plan B. They are about letting go, which is definitely the only path to happiness in making your movie.

Understand what I'm not saying. I'm not saying that you drop your basic vision for the movie - and you have to have one. Reality is that it will never be exactly what you envision. Ted Hope, a great producer and a source for sage advice in the indie world, in part described it this way recently:

I often say that there is the role of the producer and there is the role of the director that are remarkably similar. The producer comes in and has to extract the big vision, the dream of everything that you want to accomplish, and then cut the legs out from under it and say, “That’s where we’re going. But with these funds, with this story, with this cast, we’re only going to be able to capture forty percent.” And then through work and through structure, hopefully [you can] achieve a place where you get another twenty or twenty-five percent. And then through good engineering, having built a structure where serendipity can occur, where the miraculous might be achieved, you get something more. And then to be able to sit and help the director recognize that you still may not have hit that full vision that you had before you ever shot, but you have something very unique and distinct that you were able to capture.

I can't say if the world owes anyone anything, but I know that the world owes no one a movie. If you get to produce or direct a film, it is a privilege. In this case, while I didn't get to see my name on the slate, I did get to see a script that I wrote actually shot. To hear my words on set and on film spoken by really great actors like Terry Quinn and Angelica Page and Annie Grindlay and Bob Hogan and so many more that I have mentioned.

Making an indie movie is hard - but not as hard as getting one financed, and JR and Jack put down their money and let this come true, all while trusting my decisions as producer.

Some of the good days included seeing Annie do a scene with her "children" not being excited to see their dad, the lead character of Brian, her ex-husband. While my ex and I never had children, I could still feel the heartbreak in the room.

Terry Quinn was every bit as terrifying as we imagined, all while being a very real and human character.

Luke Reily, as Frank Ryan, sold a scene where he talks about the vagaries of 'doing what's right' when it harms other people.

My dear friend, Angelica Page gave me maybe my best day.

She came in off the red-eye from LA, a flight, for those who are not familiar, leaves a person having lost three hours and landing early in the AM NY time. It often takes a lot out of people.

She had one scene where she is interviewed by a reporter. The reporter has a few questions, but it is pretty much a four page monologue where she coldly describes viaticals, a practice of buying insurance policies for pennies on the dollar which became "popular" during the AIDS crisis of the 80s and early 90s. Angelica is an amazing actress, and it took that to pull this off and make it believable.

She got out of make-up, showed us the wig she chose (she gave Jack and I cursory right of approval - of course, it was perfect) and then sat down to rehearse the scene.

All through the rehearsal, when she would try something out, she would call for "line" from the script supervisor. Usually, this is a clue that the actor may not, in fact, know their lines.

Jack was concerned. Was she going to be alright? Was it maybe the flight?

As I've said, her mom was the great Geraldine Page, who was not only a great actress but a founding member of The Actors' Studio. Angelica is on the board. Professionalism runs deep with Angelica, so much so that she once related a story of chastising a rather famous actor in an airport scene for not knowing his lines.

It was this discussion and others about professionalism that made me confident, and I told Jack she would be fine. I never asked her if there was a problem.

The minute we rolled camera, the lights went on; not just those that provided an image for the camera but within Angelica. She nailed it the first time. We did a second master for safety. She nailed it again. We did her CU - she nailed it once more.

As we were relighting for the reverse on the "interviewer," I stopped by her holding room. She grabbed my arm and asked "JB, was that okay?" She really did care what I thought, and thanked me for giving her the opportunity to do the role.

"It was more than okay," I told her. "It was great."

He face changed from questioning to recognition. She grinned and said, "Mommy knows how to get home." As she had told me often before, she knew that if you show up and do your job, it can be a short day for everyone with none of the stress. Her reaction was classic, and almost as good as the scene for me.

There were many other great performances and days of satisfaction. But, of course, there were those days that were not. If this post is entitled "The Good..." you can imagine what the next two posts will be entitled.







N.B. Sorry for the delay between posts. Been dealing with some personal issues, and also basically outlining and roughing all three posts about the making of - this and the ones to come - to make them part of a whole and not miss anything. I'm certain as soon as I hit "publish" I will think of more good things - but it's time to put it up there.



*At this writing, the Venerable Thich Nhat Hahn, the great Vietnamese Buddhist leader, is battling a brain hemorrhage. It may be why he was in my thoughts as I searched for a quote this week. Please send out whatever good vibes you can.

The Moving Target - A Line Producer Looks Back at 2013

I have decided I am no longer going to produce films for my living.  To do so requires me to deliver quantity over quality. Or to not contribute as fully as I like since I won’t be fairly compensated.  Or to make something that is virtually guaranteed to not have the cultural impact it warrants.  Those are three things that I am refusing to be part of.
-Ted Hope, Truly Free Film

Last year at this time, as my birthday approached, I offered this somber look back through the words of Neil Young. This year, I reflect back through the words of Ted Hope above, and also my own experience this last year.

Much as I lamented last year, the business is still changing; more specifically here, I am referring to the business side of our business, the side of raising money and selling movies. My own small part in this process over the years has been as a line producer helping folks to raise money for a film.

This process is confusing to many people. The answer to "how much will it cost to make my movie" is not a simple or straight-forward one.

My first response is always, "How much can you realistically raise?" Without that answer, the rest of the work I do is meaningless.

On the indie scale, most scripts presented could be done on any one of a number of levels. There is the bare-bones level, the full-blown budget (if you had everything on your wish list), and any series of numbers in between. The answer usually lies in the middle somewhere, and I often discuss it in terms of the different levels of the different unions, if one is to even use union workers.

The union that is relevant to most projects is SAG, which has modifications of it's guidelines for New Media (web series and such), Ultra Low, Modified Low, and Low. A quick check of the SAG INDIE site will explain all this in more detail; suffice to say here that you can still work with union actors for less than general scale, depending on your budget.

The important numbers for this year to me are as follows: 34 budgets prepared, none has yet to raise the money. The other important number is 1: one feature that I actually shot this year, which I refer to here as The Unattainable, raised it's money from a budget prepared by the producer on the Modified Low Contract.

I know how people used to sell films on the indie level: regular investors, pre-sales, direct-to-video, etc. I don't know how they do it today, with distributors seemingly only being interested in no-budget projects they can pay insultingly-low fees to acquire, or larger budget films. One of the producers on this movie assures me there is a path in between, and I hope she is right, as she has done it before.

What all of this means is that work for folks like me is scarce, at least as it comes to actually line producing a film. I have no interest in line producing a film on a budget that requires me to bring on mostly film students and get almost everything for free. Additionally, one of my maxim's is that the work is just as hard on a bad movie as a good movie, so you might as well make a good movie. Too many of the extremely-low budget projects are just not very interesting projects, and at my age, if I'm going to put the effort into it, I want it to count.

On many of the budgets I prepared this past year, the numbers kept moving; hence, the moving target above. People would hire me to prepare a budget on one level, then get investors who swore they were ready to invest if they budget were either higher, or lower. For some people, they experienced both.  In almost all these cases, after chasing this moving target, the so-called investors did not come through.

As Ted Hope regularly points out, this is no way to sustain either an investor class for film, nor encourage experienced producers to make their living producing features. Almost all have the need to create some other form of "content" to keep afloat.

Two of the young people on my feature have approached me on learning line producing. Sad that they are afflicted with this dreaded disease to actually do this for a living, I will help them anyway.

Most crew seems to thinks producers make lots of money for less work than they do; on this level, in fact, the exact opposite is true. The producers on this film would have made more money and worked significantly less days and hours if they had worked crew. Money cannot possibly be the motivation for them; it is that determination and possibly-naive belief that this may be "the one," as a love-lorn friend of mine used to describe almost every boyfriend she dated for more than a few weeks.

In this atmosphere, I feel lucky to look back at my 55th year to have worked on one great feature where I worked with a great team, read some incredible scripts (which I still hope get produced), had the opportunity to work with some great actors and actresses and directed my first project, a short. My producers and director on the last project proved they valued experience that comes with age, and that was a nice thing to see.

This, for me, is what qualifies as glass-half-full. If it sounds less than optimistic to you, then you don't know me very well. The folks from my last film characterized me and my production coordinator with this picture below, from Despicable Me 2.

My coordinator was a cheery redhead. You can imagine which one I am.

Cheery is not the description of a person whose role is to very often say, "no," as is the case with a line producer. Crew thinks you give them too little; producers think you give crew too much.  Making people happy? Not as often as you like.

Every year, I wonder, as Danny Glover's character used to say in the Lethal Weapon series, if I'm getting too old for all of this. Every year, I find myself like Michael Jordan, threatening to quit more many times before it actually happens.

As Michael Corleone once famously said, "Just when I thought I was out, they PULL me back in." I expect I will be pulled in a few more times next year.



NB: Yes, I will still finish the Series "The Unattainable." I am trying to put a little distance between the end of the project and when I look back at it in order to have perspective, and with the added difficulty that as a line producer, NDA or not, so much of what I do is proprietary and I feel it is a breach to share, even if I don't mention the film or people specifically. Still, there are stories I can share, and I will in the days and weeks to come.