1/09/08 - The problem with plan A

The duality in the reality of developing a film, determining the budget and actually raising that money, as it turned out, surprised me in way that was polar opposite from the reality of finishing my script...this time I wasn’t prepared for the light.

I wasn’t prepared to be in so far out of my comfort zone with a project that grew to be 30 times our original budget, 30 times the visibility, 30 times the potential for success coupled with 30 times the stress and the pressure. The gradual understanding dawned on me that our original plan of making an artistically successful low budget film to enter into festivals as our calling card for future projects simply wasn’t going to cut it anymore. Our original plan of how we would make Still Green couldn’t have been father from way we ended up making Still Green, it was a beautifully scary constant escalation of bigger options, requiring more money, paving the way for bigger options, requiring more money and so forth and so on for the past three years. There is no comfort zone.

Our original plan A was to find someone to loan us their beach house to live in and to shoot in for a month, to raise enough money to rent a dvx100 for Doug to shoot on and maybe for a few lights (although our friend Evil Tom worked in the theatre department at Clark and was not above “borrowing” some lights for our production if need be) and fortunately, we already had a boom mic. We would also raise enough money to feed ourselves and the ten high school theatre majors we would cast to play these characters, happy to work for free on their first feature film, which we would then edit on the adobe premiere system already on Doug’s computer from the public access station where we volunteered.

There were two major problems with plan A. One was that apart from being our friend, the director we wanted for the project, Jon Artigo was also talented, experienced, and the kind of guy everyone wanted to work with, and that “everyone” extended pretty far. His business partner Andrea Ajemian who we wanted as our third producer came ridden with the same problem, everyone wanted to work with her as well. We were part of this “everyone” and had worked with them on their last feature, Freedom Park, which had blown up in Central Massachusetts, even screening in some national chain theatres, and elevating them to a quasi local celebrity status in Central Massachusetts. Andrea and Jon had already proved to our community and to the community of Naples FL where we were shooting, that they could successfully deliver a legitimately awesome “real” movie.

Doug and I did not have that reputation yet, clearly, as we had never produced a feature before. We had the reputation of being really nice, easy going, maniacally hard working, and on successfully delivering whatever we put our minds to delivering. And yes, people knew I could write pretty well and that Doug could shoot some killer video, but whether or not our first feature would even make it through production was still a huge question mark to most people, even our friends.

But the moment Andrea and Jon were attached, Still Green became a project people believed in and wanted to be a part of. Suddenly we not only could, but absolutely had to, pull off a feature that was at least on the same level as Freedom Park, which was shot on a real camera and real lights not borrowed from anyone’s college theatre department, and a film that won real awards at real festivals and actually screened in real theatres.

The second problem with plan A was this was a character driven script which meant meaty roles, which meant that the actors who read the script wanted to be in the movie. The by product problem was we did know a few Hollywood actors, two to be exact. We knew Trevor Morgan and Douglas Spain and if you don’t know who they are you can imdb them, this is a blog not a sales pitch. We knew them, so of course we pitched the project to both of them. They both loved Jon, they both loved the script, and they both wanted to be in the movie.  With two Hollywood actors interested, that meant even producing a movie at the Freedom Park level wasn't going to cut it.

The long story short is that by the time our first two attempts at finding angel investors in Florida to finance a dream budget inevitably fell though with an embarrassing splendor, we had too many people attached and were in way to deep to revert back to plan A.

Filmmaker blog by writer / producer Georgia Menides