MovieMaker Breakthrough Award Winners Tell Their Stories

The script turned out pretty good. The first person to read it was a producer-director friend who was looking for scripts. She called me the next day to tell me she wanted to option it. I told her I was dead set on directing it and she said it wouldn't be a problem because she had a three-film producing deal coming together. This was back when home video was booming and there was lots of money around. As you can imagine, I was pretty stoked to have reached paydirt, fulfilling my dream to direct a feature film so quickly. I began having glorious visions of the huge career that would follow. Little did I realize this was just the beginning of a long process of waiting around in futility for others to produce my movie. During this I realized that movies really only get made when one person with fanatical persistence commits themselves to the task, refusing to ever be denied.

The eight years that passed were far from a complete waste. I continued learning the craft of moviemaking while working as an assistant cameraman, then camera operator on big studio features and as director of photography on over a dozen low-budget movies. I also met and worked with a lot of great people. I was able to call on them to return favors by working on Sand Trap. I also did more writing, and I re-wrote Sand Trap with Jerry Rapp, another USC classmate. The script got tighter, funnier and more edgy. The one thing I would advise to anyone wanting to make a movie is to work on your script until it's the best it can be. Then spend even more time after that making it tighter. That time is free! You'd be a fool not to use it. There is nothing more frustrating than cutting out scenes from your film that you spent valuable portions of your already rushed shooting schedule, meager film allotment and expensive telecine time on.

After a while I decided that I should raise the money myself. I got together with my brother Erik, a business school graduate and Jerry Rapp, my writing partner, and together we worked on a game plan. I called a couple of guys I knew from USC who went to the business school there, knowing they had raised money for real estate projects. I sold them on the idea that we could make a movie with very little money. It would be a great investment because of the ever-growing foreign markets. I used the usual examples of successful independent features that everyone does. We were going to try to raise half a million through a limited liability corporation. I got my `business' partners to pay for the legal work while we created a great prospectus packet with a movie one sheet on the cover and a slick demo tape. It was pretty impressive. A lot of people told us so. Unfortunately, nobody with any money was interested, not even dentists. The big problem seemed to be that we had no track record, or that people heard bad stories about losing money on movie investments. The only exception was an old high school buddy who promised me 30 grand when he was drunk at a wedding. Our momentum slowly ground to a halt and the movie seemed dead again.

In late 1995 I finally reached critical mass when I could no longer shoot other people's films. I now had to make my film or my head was going to explode. I had just shot a really beautiful film, Ocean Tribe (see HTDI MM #27 ed.), and was about to shoot second unit on The Cable Guy, and I just proposed marriage to my girlfriend to boot. This was it. I felt like it was now or never. It was time to fish or cut bait.

I called my business partners and said, "Look, we don't have the half a million, but we have 30 thousand dollars (my drunk friend was serious) and if we raise 30 thousand more we can do it on 16mm with a crew of friends and some actors I know (I made up a budget to show them we could do it). The start date is going to be the first Monday of May." Well, sure enough, once we set a start date, more money came together and the next thing we knew we had 60 thousand, then 75.

I revised the budget a bit and said, "You know, if we can come up with 90 thousand we can shoot this thing on 35mm and have a real movie here." My financing partners said, "Wait a sec, didn't you just say if we only had 60 thousand we could do this thing fine?" This required some more selling, telling them about the look of 35mm and how it will increase the final sale. But I was also thinkingHey, let's make a real moviesomething we can screen for an audience in a theater.

Sure enough we came up with the 90 thousand. After languishing with only 30 thousand for more than a year, we tripled it in a month thanks to a start date. We celebrated by drinking champagne out of plastic cups. Sand Trap Part-ners, LLC was born.

We obviously didn't have money to pay real salaries, so we made deferred deals. I had learned from working on other no-budget movies that if you ask people to work for free/deferred on anything longer than a week or so it's hard to expect them to go the distance. So we paid everyone 200 dollars a week `per diem' for the three weeks we shot so that they could at least pay for gas and food while working. It was the best money we spent.

We got our few locations in town donated. I knew the desert by then like the back of my hand so in three weeks we were ready to go. The thing you have to remember about making movies is that it's all damage control. You will lose locations at the last possible moment. The truck with all the art department stuff won't show up on the day it absolutely has to be there. The P.A. with the film doesn't get it to the lab on time, causing you to miss your telecine, which costs you three percent of your budget. There are some things you just can't keep from happening, whether you have 90 thousand dollars or 90 million. So at least knowing those things are coming won't freak you too bad when they do. Try to adjust and make do with what you have. Not problems. Challenges. If you want a less challenging job, go work in a bank.

When we finally wrapped after 19 intense days, I couldn't fall asleep without waking in a panic thinking we had to move to the next set-up. But that passed after a week or two.

The lessons we learned about post-production could fill a book. But a real basic one is to know how you're going to post the movie before you get there. Whether you're going to cut on film or tape? End up with a film print or a video on-line? If so can you cut on an older Avid? Mix on a Pro Tools or a mixing stage? Do the research. Ask around. But I have to tell you, some ignorance isn't totally a bad thing. If you knew some of the ugly realities ahead you might never make the film in the first place.

We were able to get an older Avid Media Composer for eight weeks from a video rental and post house that I had done lots of business with in the past. The owner agreed to it by becoming an investor in the film equal to the value of the rental.

Having been lucky with the Avid, I thought we could also get post sound people to work for deferred pay, which wasn't a problem for production. It didn't happen. So to get our sound finished we ended up having to go to our investors for more money. Fortunately we had the locked picture from the Avid to show them, so they could see we had something. But the additional money we raised was only enough to scrape by. We still had to do a lot of work ourselves wherever we could.

You can't believe how important good sound is. When you begin to post your movie you realize it's an entire layer of emotional information and production value as important as what we see on the print. You take the tens of thousands of man hours and millions of dollars invested in sound on Hollywood features for granted until you have to do it yourself. Plan ahead!

Our music was done by an amazing composer named Bennett Salvay. His music editor happened to live next door to one of our actors who got him a tape of the movie. To this day I can't believe he agreed to do it. It was one of the most exciting days on the project finally watching Bennett conducting musicians while the movie played on a monitor behind them.

When the movie was finally done, of course we applied to Sundance. I had attended the festival the previous five years (I really like to ski). I thought we had a shot. My dream was to premiere there, have a great screening and the distributors would be fighting for it in the tiny men's room at the Egyptian theater. Instead I got the form letter that 870 other filmmakers received indicating that their dreams wouldn't be coming true this year. Oh well, so much for that marketing plan.

Several more festivals turned us down when I read something about the Newport Beach In-ternational Film Festival. My brother and I grew up in Orange County and he lives there now. We figured if they don't take us, who will. Sure enough, they welcomed us with open arms like hometown heroes. We made a huge assault on the local press prior to the festival and before you knew it, our faces were everywhere. Sand Trap even won the Audience Award. I think taking advantage of any local festival is a great idea. It's easy to send out press packets to the local papers. They love the local filmmaker angle.

We played a few more festivals and not all are well organized or as well attended as others. It's worth asking around. But nothing beats a free screening of your film in front of a live audience. One thing I would highly recommend is the IFFM in New York. It's a good place to screen your film for both buyers and festival programmers, and it doesn't count as a world premiere since it's an industry screening. Plus there are lots of great seminars and panel discussions which are included if you screen there.

Some final thoughts and words of advice. Know that you will be working for at least a year, maybe three, for no money at all. In the end your determination and love for the project will be the only things to get you through. If you don't have a script ready to go now, go out and work on other people's movies. If you don't learn valuable lessons about how to make a movie, you'll certainly learn what not to do, which is often more valuable.

Everyone believes that their film will be amazing, that it will get accepted to Sundance, everyone will love it and they'll become an important director who earns lots of money. It could happen. It's just good to play the odds and have a back-up plan. Pace yourself and, who knows, maybe even make a second film.

So you're probably wondering if our investors ever got their money back. The answer is YES! We made a deal with P.M. Entertainment to handle our foreign rights and they've done very well with it. We've received several large payments already and the deferred salaries should be getting paid by the time this is printed. We're currently shopping for a domestic deal.

A final note: After eight years I finally finished the movie and all people say is, "That was great. What are you doing next?" So my last advice: Have another great script ready to go.

Matters of Consequence
by Morgan Higby

As I stood by the craft service table waiting for my D.P. to come and tell me how he was quitting because he was tired of the last-minute schedule changes, the image popped into my head like an out-of-control freight train. It wasn't the first time, or the last:

I'm saying goodbye to the last P.A. late one night (that went three hours over and accomplished about 50 percent of the day's shot list). I walk back to my house, go to my office and blow my brains out.

It was perfect. A way out of this horrible mess that I had disguised as some pathetic attempt at a low-budget film. There were only two problems with my grand new plan.

1. I didn't own a gun.
2. I knew the footage we had in the can was great. Not that I could afford dailies. I just knew.

Welcome to the glamorous world of no-budget filmmaking. I would love to tell you about the wonders of working with your friends and the life-changing experience of making your own film but, I can't. It was the worst three weeks of my life. Scratch that. It's been the worst two years of my life.

Mistake #1

Not paying the actors. I had written the script around all my friends whom I thought needed a break. The problem is that just about every one of my actors booked a paying job during the shoot. The most notice I ever got was one week but generally it was the day before they were leaving the country or state. One actress called me from another state to tell me she wouldn't be coming in that morning because she's working on a commercial for the next couple days or so. That was on the first day of shooting.

If you buy the actors time then they are committed to you monetarily because, truth be told, most every "artist" in our industry will take money over art any day of the week no matter how much they tell you they love the script.

Mistake #2

Producing the film myself. I actually anticipated this problem and got a producer ahead of time but she took a job that started in New York two weeks before filming and couldn't be there for the shoot. She still has a producer credit on the film though, basically because she has been the only person since I moved to Hollywood that actually believed I had talent. Just her telling me how great I was all the time was enough to get me through the shoot.

Having to produce the film myself though was a full-time job and took up about 60 percent of my energy during the working day. Rearranging the schedule to accommodate the the actors took a good 25. I did have a wonderful line producer who is a genius at getting stuff for free or cheap and that helped immensely.

Mistake #3

Acting in my own film. Getting an acting job with no credits is hard. Getting an acting job with no credits and being extremely choosy about the material and director you will work with is impossible. I wrote this script because I wanted to work on good material with a director I trusted.

That said, I should have never had such little respect for the craft of directing to not give it my full 100-percent attention. As it turned out I gave about 25 percent of my attention to my acting (basically just trying to be able to at least be close on my lines to the script supervisor wouldn't kill me). That left a whopping 15 percent of my energy left over for directing. I'm not saying I didn't get away with it. I did. That's the scary part.

Mistake #4

Not taking enough time with the script. I wrote this one last because it is actually a lesson I learned in post production.
Yes, you've written a script and you're excited to start shooting. Let me give you some advice... DON'T! Be patient!
I wrote my first draft in two weeks and showed it to my friend at CAA. She got coverage on it that said it was great and would do great things for me and everyone involved.

Guess what? CAA doesn't know what the hell they are talking about. They read so much crap all day that if they get a script that actually has a touch of honesty they flip out. It doesn't mean it's a good script. It just means one person that works at a "studio film" agency 10 hours a day, listening to people lie to each other, related to something you said in your script.

Find people that you respect as artists. Have them read your work. Be ready for some harsh, honest critique. Take your time with it because if it's a good script, it doesn't matter if you make it on Super-8 for three thousand dollars or at a studio for 200 million, you will be way ahead of the game. Having a tight script will save you a lot of time and money in editing and re-shoots.

The attitude that helped me with it was "If this is the only film I ever make in my lifetime...what do I want it to say?" Period. It's that important because it just might be.

So, will I make another film? Probably. As much as I'd like to say no, the truth is that I'm beginning to realize that I might want to say something else than what I was thinking and feeling two years ago. Until then, you can find me at the end of the bar replacing my soul with Irish Whiskey. MM

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