5 Things: 5) Completion Is An Accomplishment

 5 Things I Learned Making a $4,500 Movie

 

5) Seeing project from concept to distribution is it own accomplishment

Features, from concept to distribution, are beasts constructed from hundreds of moving parts that are controlled by thousands of decisions made from an infinitude of possible choices.  The project will wear you down with debt and/or time waiting.  Completion timelines are guides, at best.

I spent almost five years on Holiday.  At this point, I can’t afford to spend any more time on it.  And that is because of a truth only Director/Producers know: no one, not the people you live with, not the people you worked on the project with, not your friends and family, none of them will ever have any idea how much time you spent getting you project to distribution.  Only you know all the dotted “i”s and crossed “t”s that had to be done by a particular time, at a certain cost, with no errors.  This last stipulation means checking and re-checking everything all the way to the release.  No one will know all the tedious hours you spent filling out this, filing that, waiting on replies in order to move to the next step.

So if you make it all the way to distribution with your project, you have accomplished something even if you never make a dime.  The great thing is, in today’s digital delivery world, there is an audience for almost everything and they have access to your product in a way never possible before for independent filmmakers.

5 Things: 4) Health More Important Than Age

 5 Things I Learned Making a $4,500 Movie

4) Health more important than age

Clint Eastwood still directs.  As does Woody Allen.  But the process is grueling for producers and directors for the duration of the project.  Everyone else plays a part or performs a task and moves on.  You are there, working all the way up to the release, and then on to promotion tasks.

A friend of mine who directs studio features told me, “It’s a marathon, not a sprint.  Stay healthy.”  I thought, sure six months, a year, maybe.  It took five years.  If you are the energy moving the project forward, when you stop the project stops.  It happens at all budgets.

On the Fox lot I met a mid-thirties director completing his latest $45 million project and had only slept one night in the last four days.  Two forty-hour days with an eight-hour break in between was his reality.   It was a week before release and he would only sleep once or twice more, only when absolutely necessary as work is being done 24/7 at the studio.

I’ve been on the set of a $100 million project and watched a young director, who was not properly prepared for the job, wear themselves down to exhaustion and have to be replaced halfway through principle photography.

Exhaustion can happen to anyone, regardless of age.  The culprit is the never-ending to-do list a piece of intellectual property like a feature generates.  If you’re lucky and the work you do develops an audience large enough, you might be working on something related to the project until you die.  So stay healthy.  You want to get to release.  And even if you never make much off your project, just getting it done still being mentally and physically healthy is an accomplishment.

5 Things: 3) Don't Work With Assholes

 5 Things I Learned Making a $4,500 Movie

3) Don’t work with assholes

This is critical to stick to and almost impossible to follow.  You will say to yourself, “It’s just for this one thing.  I can put up with it if it means getting the project completed.”  You will regret this later.

Twice even on my little project I pushed this aside and have paid for it ever since.  Although the assholes were of a different nature—one was up front and the other stealth—I foolishly agreed to work with them.

I worked with one person who made it clear they were going to be a problem child on the first day.  I sat them down and explained their behavior wasn’t going to work and thought I had addressed the issue.  This person continues to this day to be a pain in the project’s ass.

Another person involved with the project became my best new friend, willing to go all out for the project.  Later, when it came time to sign the contract for what we agreed on, the person refused to sign, demanding gross percentage points.

The truth is, whomever you involve in your project, you are tied to them forever—even when you die, your relatives will have to deal with these people because the product will be out there in perpetuity.

All budgets.  No kidding.

5 Things: 2) Make Your Movie With What You Have

 5 Things I Learned Making a $4,500 Movie

2) Make your movie with what you have

This is the logistics flipside to lesson one on the financial side.  I waited 25 years to make a feature length project mainly because I couldn’t afford the equipment necessary to create images to be projected large in theaters.  This didn’t stop me from making films and videos, I just worked in short formats.  You should always do what you can with what you have.

In my mid-twenties I was complaining to my mentor about not having the computer equipment I wanted to complete a video piece.  He told me I should be able to make art out of two sticks and a rock.  His approach to the video and performance work he did was very low-tech.  I embraced that approach, moving from still photography into video, digital, and film long form projects in the 1980’s.  At that time, video was not a viable format for high-quality theater projection.

But 1980’s video improvements did have an impact on feature filmmaking, especially with low-budget production.  Anything I’ve ever shot on 16mm or super16mm since the mid-1980’s was transferred to video.  My days hunched over a Steenbeck with a chopping block and glue ended when I left college.  But I still couldn’t afford to pay for the film and processing costs to make a feature.

Robert Rodriguez, however, was able to put together $7,000 (in late-80’s dollars), just enough to make, El Mariachi.  Almost all that $7,000 went to film stock, processing, and transfer costs.  He used video to edit a version of the project that got him a distribution deal.  Another $1,000,000 was spent on the film for its 1992 studio release. 

By the late 90’s video was good enough for The Blair Witch Project to be shot almost entirely on that format and survive theatrical projection once transferred to film.  The project’s original budget of $25,000 (in late 90’s dollars) was then augmented with another $750,000 in studio post-production costs and $25,000,000 in marketing for release.  But you still needed access to very expensive editing equipment because magnetic tape was still being used and those player/recorders were pricey and high-maintenance.  My only access to such equipment was through employment by universities.  And the “video found footage” genre bloomed, but still could not be projected at high quality without expensive post-production.

Now, in 2018, things are very different.  My feature, Holiday, will not generate the revenues of those two features, but it does stand at an important moment in filmmaking history: I shot a feature for $4,500 with my phone—and projected it theatrically.  I had additional post-production costs, primarily for the score, totaling $25,000. 

5 Things: 1) Don't Spend More Than You Can Lose

 5 Things I Learned Making a $4,500 Movie

Here are 5 things I learned making a $4,500 feature that are scalable to any production budget level.  These are five things you already know, but offering a specific example might be helpful in remembering them when it matters:

1) Don’t spend more than you can afford to lose

A deceptively simple rule, but much trickier to negotiate the further you get into a project.  Movie making is a money sinkhole that gives you the illusion that you can see the bottom.

I thought I could get project shot and edited for $4500, which I did.  I thought that would entice finishing money.  I tried for a year and got nothing.  Finally, I chose to bite the bullet and raise money from the usual friends and family to complete the project.  The development process and completion took two more years.  Then I needed cash to enter contests.  We were accepted and awarded at festivals, but in order to screen in a theater, I had to pay for digital projection version.  Even after winning awards and being picked up for representation there were more costs.  All in, I spent about another $25,000 to get the project to distribution.

It is very easy to spend more than you can earn in the movie business because there is always a little more you could spend to make the project that much nicer looking and or sounding.  My project was an experimental feature with a very narrow bandwidth of the market.  There were many issues in the project that would have been resolved with further investment.  But I don’t think that would make much difference to the audience I’m attempting to reach.  My project was a filmmaking and storytelling experiment and despite the small audience I believe I can make all the investment back.  But I don’t know that for certain.

I was working at $4,500 but I saw this at the $450,000,000 level on Lord of the Rings.  The production for the first film ran short of money and time, releasing the initial version with multiple digital effects incomplete.  These were imperfections most audiences wouldn’t notice, but my point is there will be costs you won’t know about until you get there at all levels of filmmaking.  Be prepared for these.  If you can’t follow through to completion you will certainly lose all your investment because an incomplete feature project has no value unless you name is Kubrick.