The Orphan Posts - Volume 1

"Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every afternoon."
-Raymond Chandler on rewriting

Maybe I'm over-thinking - that would be nothing new - but there are a number of blog posts that I've started recently that have gone nowhere. There was something in all of them, but none of them deserved a full post.

Full disclosure. My next series is on a film called Town Diary, which I co-wrote and produced with two dear friends. From writing to completion spanned over two years, and, because it involved so many friends, it was the most emotional journey in my career. Of course, that is why I am procrastinating starting it.

In this mode, I have tried to get out a few posts that have been in the germination stage for some time. Whenever I  approach a broad subject, I try to make sure I haven't covered it somewhere else. Often, I found that I have, but not completely. My last post on mentors is one example. I had talked about my dad, Stan and Kevin elsewhere, but never in that context. That post worked for me.

Others, not so much.

For the most part, I've avoided trying to "instruct" here directly, rather letting it filter through the stories of different gigs. This was also one of the points of the last post. However, some things do keep coming up.

I have certainly talked a lot about what a line producer does, about preparing budgets, about the real-life application of theory. Still, I see folks who don't get what a line producer does, and I want to put it in one place. Then, I Google around, and it's been done.

I may do a "So You Want to Be a Line Producer" post one day where I just clear up the misconceptions.  (If you posted an ad on Craigslist that started your job description for line producer with "you will be responsible for catering", watch out. I will find you and make you read that post.) I recently had a "producer" who wanted me to line produce and report to a local "UPM". That's backwards.

However, if you want a good clarification, you can find an excellent one at the site lineproducing.com. Stephen Marinaccio, who created the site, is excellent at breaking down the experience while being informative and easy-to-understand. He has resources galore. I've had the pleasure of both emailing and speaking with Stephen, and he is as nice as he is smart. If it's instruction you seek, this is an excellent place to start.

Of course, Stephen works on budgets that are higher than those I usually work on. There are plenty of sites that talk about "guerilla" or "no-budget" filmmaking. Frankly, that is not my bag, as we used to say.I don't particularly enjoy it, nor am I an expert at it, so I will leave that talk to others. I know I have some excellent horror film bloggers as followers, and they can be much more instructive than I can in this area - among them, the always entertaining and informative blogs of Mr. Kangas.

My realm has, for the most part, been the area in-between, the films that fall in the SAG indie contract arena. A full description of these are at sagindie.org. I am working on a series on producing on the SAG Modified Low Contract, one of the trickiest because you have a foot in both worlds, with not enough money to be a big film, but enough invested that you need to sell like a big film, with budgets from $200K to $625K (and up, with what is referred to as the Minority Exception.) That series I will do, but likely after the series on Town Diary, since I will have covered much of it there.

Then, there are other posts, which, as I look at them, are more rants than anything else, and I'll spare you those, or at least only spoon them out a little at a time in mini-rants within other posts.

I am working on a series about the line producer/First AD relationship, but will likely ask one or more ADs I know to chime in on that one.

There they are;  the orphan posts, as I call them. Some of them will likely become part of other posts, others, like screenplay ideas that don't pan out, will likely die a natural death. I started thinking of them as "where stories go to die," and, in Googling found this very funny story about a Washington journalist having a very bad few days.

While blogs are often stream of consciousness, I think it important that if you are good enough to take the time to check these pages, they should be worth your time.

This is what I am working on. Feedback on any of the above, and what you might like to read about, always welcomed.

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.