1/16/08 - You Know You’re Really Developing a Film When…

Plan A was dead.

So what was plan B?

How the hell did we raise the money for Still Green?

It started with two amazing people. In the past three years this list has grown to encompass a whole crew of amazing people but it started in January of 2005 with two… our lawyer Douglas Kirkpatrick and my father, Byron Menides.

I’m going to clarify something right off the bat. My father is a successful start up business man who has successfully started up a myriad of successful companies and his name is listed as one of the film’s two “Executive Producers” and he deserves that title ten fold and then some. But before any assumptions or rumors start to circulate that Daddy bought his daughter a movie (and there are plenty of people who would probably love to spread those rumors,) let me dispel them quickly by breaking down exactly what my father actually did for Still Green.

My father’s opening move was to intelligently and insightfully shoot down our original plan B of hosting an elaborate fundraising party, inviting everyone we knew on earth who had money, including 10-20 of my fathers wealthier friends, pitching the project and our team as hard as we could, asking for some hefty donations, and shooting with however much we raised. He guaranteed us that none of his friends would ever donate this suggested $5,000, or even $1,000 or even $500 to our movie. He also doubted any of his friends would drive to Worcester MA for a fundraising parry in the first place…but he thought they might invest in our film. Maybe.

He said “Figure out how much money you need to shoot this movie, call your attorney, and write a business plan. If you do that I will send it to some of my friends, if they seem interested when I call them.” We thought this sounded like a reasonable idea. 

Except for the attorney part. We didn’t have an attorney.

We did have an article my mom had found in the local paper about an entertainment lawyer who had just moved  back to Worcester MA from Hollywood, determined to develop and manage talent on the east coast. The article name dropped some of his past projects involving people like Gwyneth Paltrow and The Game and that his bother had been the president of Paramount at one point in the past. We decided to call him and set up a meeting.

Douglas Kirkpatrick, as it turned out, was looking for clients. He had every intention of helping upstart filmmakers on the east coast. He had heard of Andrea and Jon and of Freedom Park, and he liked my writing. He agreed to work for us, and that we would only need to pay him his full price if we actually raised the money we had determined we now needed to shoot Still Green.

So this is what we did in January-May of 2005. We worked with our attorney and formed a corporation, we learned what the hell a business plan was and then wrote a solid and convincing one, and we started sending it out, not just to my father’s friends but to everyone else we knew or almost knew or didn’t really know who could afford to invest at least $5,000 into our newly formed corporate account.

And we did have a fundraising party, not to finance the film but as an excuse to get few articles written about to movie to spruce up our business plan, as another way to bring the excitement of the film to potential investors, to get a press buzz about Still Green into our community that might draw unknown potential investors out of the woodwork and into our lives, and to at the very least raise the $5-10 k we needed to pay our lawyer, our postage fees, our corporate fees, our rent, our very very late phone bills, and the many other start up production expenses that neither my temp job doing data entry in a seafood warehouse or Doug’s job at Starbucks were going to cover. And our party ended up doing all these things and more. It was not in the least bit fun for any moment of planning it up until that day, but that day was so fun. It was glamorous, elaborate, fun, full of positive vibes, and we ended up with some start up cash and two new potential investors.

Back to my father…my father called 20 of his friends and asked them to look at our business plan. One of them did end up investing in the film and another send us a donation. He also invested the first $25,000 into the movie once he realized he couldn’t very well suggest that his friends invest in a film he wasn’t himself investing into. As production went on and the film grew, he has invested more money into the project, particularly to fill in some gaps during post production, where we were in between checks from other investors, and needed money fast. More than that, he guided us through some of the nuts and bolts of owning a company and accruing investors at a time when this was all new to us.

The majority of Still Green’s budget was not raised though my father. My father is not the biggest investor in Still Green, nor are any of his friends. Still Green’s budget, in the end, came from investments from ten investors from Florida and Massachusetts we found from calling, pitching the project, and sending our ever improving business plan to many people over the course of these three years, most of who said no, or said yes but meant no, or said yes and then changed their yes to no, or who laughed us off the phone or who were completely condescending with that “why don’t you get a real job” type of attitude. But ten people did not say no. Ten people said yes to this movie. Raising money for a film is possible. Yes it helps to have financially successful parents who support your dreams and aspirations. No that is not at all it takes, by a long shot. 

Back to development.

January to April of 2005 were exciting times, and by exciting I mean that they sucked. Yes it was exhilarating to bind that last page of our business plan. Yes it was thrilling each time a donation for our silent auction arrived in the mail. Yes it was amazing to see our corporate bank account grow into the double digits thousands. But make no mistake; this part of production is a total bitch, and it is not for the faint of heart.

You know you’re really developing a movie when you’d rather punch numbers in an office in the middle of a big seafood freezer than come home and have to endure one more heartbreaking day of calling up people who have read your carefully crafted business plan and hearing them say no, each time feeling like your dream is a little patch of sun becoming harder to see under the accumulating clouds. You know you’re really developing a movie when you and your homeless wiccan friend are in your apartment chanting and lighting candles the night before your fundraising party praying to gods you aren’t sure even exist in hopes that the blizzard will stop. You know you’re really developing a movie when you are running through the kitchen of the Higgins Mansion with a piece of raw chicken meat because you’ve found out the wife of one of your strongest investor leads is allergic to dairy. When your eyes are bleeding from lack of sleep, when you realize you haven’t spoken to your boyfriend about anything except work in the past four months, when you are pretending that you’re sick, just so you can have a day off the pressure on you to find this money, when the millions of other things going on in this macrocosm called “the rest of your life and the world at large” all shrivel into non existence in comparison to the one and only thing you can’t stop obsessing about, when you are standing inside your bathtub at three in the morning with tilex scrubbing off the months of grime the night before your Hollywood actor arrives for the fundraiser, when you are holding your boyfriend in your arms but can not give each other comfort anymore because you both have the same exact problem, when your friends have completely given up on even calling to see if you are available on a Friday night, you know you are really developing a movie.

Filmmaker blog by writer / producer Georgia Menides