Richard Glatzer on writing/directing “Grief”

There’s a well-worn adage that says you should “write what you know.” That’s what the late Richard Glatzer did when he decided to make his first feature film. He took his experiences as a writer/producer of the TV show Divorce Court, and combined it with the loss he had recently suffered after the death of his partner.

The subsequent film – filled with such indie stalwarts as Craig Chester, Illeana Douglas, Alexis Arquette, Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov – is really a quintessential independent film: Funny, sad, personal and in its own way, universal. 

What was going on in your career before you wrote Grief?

RICHARD: I had sold some scripts to Disney and had written afternoon specials for ABC -- one of which actually got produced -- but mostly I found that I was making some money as a writer and getting very frustrated at never seeing any of my words come to life.  I basically had given up on the idea of doing anything in Hollywood; I was doing a nightclub one night a week and just goofing off, after having produced Divorce Court for a couple years.

Producer Ruth Charney suggested that we work on a movie together. I said I had no interest in doing anything unless it was a movie that we could make on as little money as anyone could make a movie. Otherwise it wasn’t going to get done. I had enough experience trying to get things done through more conventional channels. So, I thought if I conceive of a movie that’s basically one location, and think of it as an independent, independent, independent film, then maybe we can actually do it.

She suggested that I do something inspired by my experiences working on Divorce Court. I thought about it and thought I didn’t want to do some Soap Dish-y thing; that I wanted it to have other stuff going on. A lot of the film is autobiographical, and I had been dealing with my lover dying at the time I was working on that show. And I thought that would make it more interesting then if it were just some sort of satire of Divorce Court.

So then the idea of it began to take shape. To me, that became more interesting, if you limited it to one location. To conceive of a film from the outset as ultra-low budget is the way to do it.  You don’t start with a bigger idea and then whittle it down.

Let’s back up. How did you get into producing Divorce Court?

RICHARD: I sold these two scripts to Disney, when there was a different group of people in charge there. And then one of them ended up as the producer-story editor for Divorce Court. I was still living in New York at the time and thinking about going to LA. I spoke to the guy who had been the head of the studio and he said I should talk to this woman who’s over at Divorce Court and see if she can get me some work there.  And I thought, “Oh my god -- Divorce Court.” 

But it ended up being more regular employment and more fun than anything else I ever worked on. I thought I’d be there for a week and it ended up being five years. I ended up producing the thing.

Once you had the idea, how long did it take to write Grief?

RICHARD: I wrote it quickly; it was the easiest script I’ve written. I usually don’t keep journals, but I happened to write down in a little notebook the day that Ruth suggested thinking about this. It was the end of October in ‘91, and I had a draft of the script by early January ‘92; and I hadn’t even started thinking about it at the end of October, ‘91. So it was pretty fast.

How did you go about funding the movie?

RICHARD: I had about $20,000 saved and we raised another $20,000 from people who were willing to put up $5,000 investments -- none of which was easy. 

I think the gay content helped a little bit, that people felt that it was some sort of community function or something. But it also, obviously, limited the film in terms of people thinking they were ever going to see a lot of money coming back. Ruth put up $5,000. It was mostly little bits and pieces, mostly from friends.

We raised $40,000, and at the same time we were doing that, I put together my cast just by going to Sundance and seeing Craig Chester in Swoon and meeting people at parties or wherever.  

That’s where I met Illeana Douglas. Just as I was leaving -- I hadn’t even spoken to her, really -- and I got my coat and was on the way out the door, it suddenly clicked that she was perfect for Leslie. I just went up to her and said, “Hey, you wouldn’t by any chance do some low-budget, independent fag film, would you?”

And she said, “I bet you’re the kind of guy who loves Edgar Ulmer movies.” And I was a big Edgar Ulmer fan, so within a day or two she said, “I’ll do your movie,” as soon as I got her the script.

So I assembled the cast and felt like I had this really great group of people. We’d all been hoping to get more money than $40,000, but there was nothing coming. 

Did you write the script with particular actors in mind? 

RICHARD: No. Alexis Arquette and Jackie Beat I knew from this club I was doing; they both performed there. I was thinking of them as I was writing the script; not from the outset, but as I was writing it, I started to realize that I was hearing Jackie Beat saying these lines. 

So by the time I finished the script I definitely had them in mind for those two roles. But it wasn’t like from the beginning I was going to write a role for Jackie Beat or write a role for Alexis.  

How long did you shoot?

RICHARD: We shot for ten days. It was ten days for the bulk of the shooting and then we did an extra half day in the courtroom.  That was our big production value, which of course we made look like shit by deteriorating it. We shot it on film and it looked really good and then we went and shot it off a monitor.

At the time we didn’t know how it was going to work. And I thought if I shoot it on film, I have the option to use it on film and if I shoot it on video, then I’m stuck with video. It was basically a half day; we were out of there at three, three thirty. 

Did the script change much during shooting?

RICHARD: It was an ongoing process; I was always scrutinizing it and always fiddling with it. Then working with the actors was really helpful. 

We did have a week of rehearsal and that was really great and crucial, especially for doing a movie that fast -- and one like this, which was so character and performance oriented. I felt that was the highest value of the film, the quality group of people I put together and I wanted to make sure that the parts really came alive.

Did you change the script after the week of rehearsal?

RICHARD: There was a lot of re-writing in rehearsal and throughout the whole process -- in the editing room as well. The finished movie is maybe 75% of what was in the original script, but there are little things tweaked here and there.  

This was especially true of emotional stuff; you’d see it and think, "Wait a minute, there’s not enough here, it’s not sounding right." So I would scribble things down on slips of paper and hand them to them. Later I had to get a continuity script together for TV stations and I was like, “Oh my God, where did I put that scene?”

It’s not really like I threw the script out, it’s not that. It’s basically about three-fourths of what was in the script. It’s trying to make all of it right. It was just constantly fiddling with it.  

And I felt really good about that, because I think everyone’s hesitation about a writer-director is that you’re going to think that every word is sacrosanct. I felt like I was very able to put the writing behind me and just listen to it and watch it and see if it was working or not.

My actors were a really smart group of people, so I could trust them, if they said “Wait a minute” about their character.  Most of the time they were right and that was really good, because it was a great sounding board. Actors are always like that, but I think some actors are better able to see what’s missing or know when something’s not sounding right than other actors are. I credit them with a lot of that.

Then also, in the editing room, I thought, “Oh, everything’s fine,” and then you’d put it together and realize, “Wait a minute, there’s a beat missing here,” or you’ve got to move this thing before that thing or it doesn’t pay off. Just all that kind of stuff.   

So you were re-writing even while you were editing?

RICHARD: I shot the bulk of the movie in ten and a half days, but six months down the line -- after I had a rough cut of the movie -- I realized that there were some important emotional beats that were missing. So we went back and shot an extra day’s worth of stuff. 

These were pretty crucial scenes. There are other scenes they replaced. All the stuff that was taking place near the stage -- because we couldn’t have access to our original location again.  

The big scene where Jackie Beat talks about being fat and the scene where Illeana asks Craig to marry her, that was done somewhere else and we just made it look like it was part of the sound stage in that same building. 

There were things that were replaced by those scenes, but those new scenes were really crucial.

The Love Judge scenes were very funny. Did you ever intend to include more of them?

RICHARD: I wish I’d had money to really do the whole shooting of The Love Judge, rather than just do scenes from the episodes -- to actually see the judge carrying on, to see the actors have the scripts re-written under their noses, and all that kind of stuff. I thought that could have really been fun. 

But it just seemed like then we’d have to rent real video cameras and real lights and all that stuff that we didn’t have a budget for. That was the closest we could get to it.  

Since you lost your original set for the re-shoots, how did you come up with the idea to set the scenes backstage at the show?

RICHARD: It was just a way for us to make up for not being able to re-shoot in the original location. I don’t know if I would have even tried that if we’d had access to the original location. So it turned out to be a blessing that we didn’t have access to it, because it let us fake it. And all that set was, was a stage at this place called Lace, which is a performance art theater/gallery downtown. There was nothing there, it was this black, empty space. So we made it work.

Do you think there were any advantages to not having a larger budget?

RICHARD: I set out to make a movie in one location for financial reasons. I think the whole idea of grieving and the fact that Mark’s dealing with the death of his boyfriend, to me is so much more interesting indirectly and seen only in the office. 

I think if we’d had money to go shoot Mark crying at home, or something -- just because we maybe had the money, and you’d think, “Oh, we have to cover that” -- to me the movie gained its identity and meaning from giving him that sense of privacy and from being limited to the office. That was a budgetary limitation that ended up working in the movie’s favor.

Of course, it probably would have been distributed wider and seen as a more mainstream movie if we’d had more locations -- a lot of running around and all that stuff.

Did you write the scenes from The Love Judge for an existing set?

RICHARD: No. My producer, Yoram Mandel, made phone calls to see what he could get cheap. The people liked him over the phone; he explained how there was no money in this film, and they said “We’ll let you have the set for $500,” which by LA standards for a day is great. The only thing they said was that we had to go with their schedule and I never knew from one day to the next when it would be available.  

So we only had two days notice to get up there. I had Tim Roth and a couple other people who were going to do cameos in those scenes and they couldn’t because of the last-minute scheduling.  But I was thrilled that Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov were willing to do it.

How long did it take to finish the movie?

RICHARD: It took forever to post it. We didn’t have enough money; the $40,000 was to shoot it, but we didn’t have anything left to do any of the post. We were trying to raise money and trying to find freebie stuff. There was this UCLA student who had this KEM deck at home and she was synching dailies for us. She let us in there to cut some stuff.  

It’s so frustrating when you’ve got this in the can and you want to work on it and you can’t. It took us about a year to edit the thing, getting a few bucks here, a few bucks there and begging favors everywhere.  There was a post house near me, an editing facility that would let us go in there for free. They were sympathetic and trying to help us out.

And really the only reason it ever got finished was because Mark Finch, who was the head of the Gay & Lesbian Film Festival in San Francisco, saw a rough cut of the film and loved it and said he would give us the closing night if we could finish. So then it was this panic to finish it.

I put up more money -- fool that I was -- in order to finish it. No one was coming up with any money. I made him a personal guarantee that I was going to get the film done and we had two or three months and there was no money and so I finally just put the money up.

Did that festival help?

RICHARD: It was a partial success story.  It was a huge hit there and it was like a dream come true to be there. It’s a 1,500 seat theater and that town’s just insane. These people go there and they have these wild opinions -- they either love it or they hate it -- and luckily with me they loved it. They just decided very early on that they loved this movie and they were screaming and carrying on throughout the whole movie.  

Then we got a great review in Variety and all of a sudden all these festivals wanted the film and there was this big Hollywood producer who had to meet with me and who loved the film. It just felt like, oh, now everything’s happening.  

Festival-wise, the film did really, really well. It played everywhere. St. Petersburg, New Zealand, Jerusalem, just every corner of the globe I could think of, it’s been.

Most of the time I went with it; a lot of these people can’t afford to fly you all around. But I went to Australia with it and I went to Berlin with it and I went to Italy and London a whole bunch of times. I could have gone to Hong Kong if I wanted to pay half my airfare, but I said no. I also could have gone to Jerusalem and I stupidly didn’t. It was right when it was with all these Italian festivals and I would have had a day here and a day there and it just seemed like, what’s the point?

I traveled with the film for about a year and a half, which was fun.

How was your Sundance experience?

RICHARD: Not very good. The film had been to Toronto and to Vancouver and to the Gay & Lesbian Festival in San Francisco and in Los Angeles. Most Sundance films are pretty new to the public, so by the time the film got there, it was sort of considered old news. I heard that in the first half audiences were pretty good, but by the time the second half happened, it was all these Hollywoody people. And they’d literally walk out during the opening credits.  

I’ve talked to a lot of people who have had similar experiences. And then we didn’t win any prizes and however stupid that is, you still want it. And you have to keep reminding yourself that Sundance prizes don’t really mean a hell of a lot. It’s usually the audience award that seems to indicate something about any commercial success. But nothing else seems to indicate anything.

I guess for my film, Sundance wasn’t that important. I’ve seen my film with audiences, like in Germany where the film was not subtitled, where they loved the film. Or in Toronto, where the film went over really, really well. 

And then I was there at Sundance and it felt like a total bomb. The audience, those Hollywood people, were completely inattentive and didn’t get it and didn’t give a shit and it just felt really bad. 

That’s not the festival’s fault, but that’s who’s going there these days. And they go there wanting the new Tarantino or something. My film is very quiet and you have to pay some attention and stick with it. And I definitely don’t think Sundance is the place for a film where you have to stick with it. Because they just don’t; they get up and they leave after five minutes. So that wasn’t fun.

What have been the positive effects of writing and shooting Grief?

RICHARD: Creatively, it’s the most gratifying thing I’ve ever done. No question. And financially, not. If I had it to over again, I would absolutely do it.  

It’s been an amazing thing to me, just really amazing to think how many thousands of people have seen this thing around the world and that it’s really moved some people and really gotten to some people and that I’ve gotten to meet so many people, filmmakers, through this. 

I really feel that there’s this great community of independent filmmakers, which is so unlike the Hollywood community and which has a real integrity to it. I’m just amazed how open filmmakers are. I’ve met so many people -- and I hope I’m this way, too -- who really are encouraging with other independent filmmakers. There’s no sense of competition, there’s only support. That’s been fantastic.

What were the downsides?

RICHARD: The financial, really.  Because of the financial thing, at times I’ll get down. I’ll see a film like Go Fish, which I really enjoyed, but which to me was like, that film, there was such a hoopla over it, such a huge amount of money given to them and such huge distribution for it. And I would think, “Is my movie not as good as Go Fish and why can’t my movie get that kind of release?”  

And I get resentful -- not toward Rose, who’s great, and not because of the film, because I really enjoyed the film -- but because of that sense that the marketing thing, that this is the first hip lesbian movie and so it’s going to get this big send-off and my movie’s just not.  

I’ve always fought with myself not to be resentful over -- especially over films I like -- but still there is such a freaky quality to what’s hot and what’s not. It doesn’t have anything to do with the reviews, because my film was really well reviewed. It doesn’t have anything to do with anything but how we can market this film and we can’t market that film or somebody at one of the distribution companies suddenly gets really worked up over something or whatever.

It’s hard to be satisfied. At one point I would have been satisfied just to finish the film, because I thought we’d never get the money to finish the film and I thought, “Oh, if I can only finish it -- it doesn’t matter if it’s distributed, if only I can finish it.”  

Then you get it finished and then you see it received well, and then you’re like, “Oh, well now I want more and I want more and I want more.” And then you think of all the films, independent films, that never get finished or never get out there or get to two festivals and then they disappear. I was so much luckier than that. 

Mostly, I’m really grateful for the whole thing and feel like -- absolutely -- if I had it to do over again, I would do it over again, because it was a really great experience.

One last question: Am I nuts, or is the actor who plays The Love Judge doing an impression of Lionel Barrymore?

RICHARD: Yes, the Love Judge is doing Lionel Barrymore. You’re the only person who’s ever figured that out. 

The actor, Mickey Cottrell (the clean freak in My Own Private Idaho) loves to do shtick. That morning, when we were at the location of the courtroom scene and he’s getting dressed, he said, “You know, I do a really mean Lionel Barrymore.” I said, “Let me hear it.” And he did his Lionel Barrymore. And I said, “That’s perfect, just do that.”  

It was perfect, it was just what I wanted -- a curmudgeonly character. But no one else has picked up on it. That’s so funny. 

Dying to make a feature? Learn from the pros!

"We never put out an actual textbook for the Corman School of Filmmaking, but if we did, it would be Fast, Cheap and Under Control." 
Roger Corman, Producer

★★★★★

It’s like taking a Master Class in moviemaking…all in one book!

• Jonathan Demme: The value of cameos

• John Sayles: Writing to your resources

• Peter Bogdanovich: Long, continuous takes

• John Cassavetes: Re-Shoots

• Steven Soderbergh: Rehearsals

• George Romero: Casting

• Kevin Smith: Skipping film school

• Jon Favreau: Creating an emotional connection

• Richard Linklater: Poverty breeds creativity

• David Lynch: Kill your darlings

• Ron Howard: Pre-production planning

• John Carpenter: Going low-tech

• Robert Rodriguez: Sound thinking

And more!

Write Your Screenplay with the Help of Top Screenwriters!

It’s like taking a Master Class in screenwriting … all in one book!

Discover the pitfalls of writing to fit a budget from screenwriters who have successfully navigated these waters already. Learn from their mistakes and improve your script with their expert advice.

"I wish I'd read this book before I made Re-Animator."
Stuart Gordon, Director, Re-Animator, Castle Freak, From Beyond

John Gaspard has directed half a dozen low-budget features, as well as written for TV, movies, novels and the stage.

The book covers (among other topics):

• Academy-Award Winner Dan Futterman (“Capote”) on writing real stories

• Tom DiCillio (“Living In Oblivion”) on turning a short into a feature

• Kasi Lemmons (“Eve’s Bayou”) on writing for a different time period

• George Romero (“Martin”) on writing horror on a budget

• Rebecca Miller (“Personal Velocity”) on adapting short stories

• Stuart Gordon (“Re-Animator”) on adaptations

• Academy-Award Nominee Whit Stillman (“Metropolitan”) on cheap ways to make it look expensive

• Miranda July (“Me and You and Everyone We Know”) on making your writing spontaneous

• Alex Cox (“Repo Man”) on scaling the script to meet a budget

• Joan Micklin Silver (“Hester Street”) on writing history on a budget

• Bob Clark (“Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things”) on mixing humor and horror

• Amy Holden Jones (“Love Letters”) on writing romance on a budget

• Henry Jaglom (“Venice/Venice”) on mixing improvisation with scripting

• L.M. Kit Carson (“Paris, Texas”) on re-writing while shooting

• Academy-Award Winner Kenneth Lonergan (“You Can Count on Me”) on script editing

• Roger Nygard (“Suckers”) on mixing genres

This is the book for anyone who’s serious about writing a screenplay that can get produced! 

Brent Kado on "A Short History of Drugs in the Valley"

What was your filmmaking background before making "A Short History of Drugs in the Valley"?

Brent: This is my fourth feature film. I have done many commercials, some music videos, web series and shorts. 

Where did the idea come from and what was the process for writing the script and getting the script ready to shoot?

Brent: The idea came from growing up in a small town and the stories that you hear or are told growing up. People love to idealize how peaceful and joyous small-town life is, but often it's as unpredictable a place as anywhere else.  

I wrote the film. It was a combination of two scripts I had. I decided to combine and refine the two stories, which is a total independent film thing to do. My wife and I collaborate on many of our projects, and we had decided to do another feature (this is now my fourth) after she had just completed a personal short film that I produced. So, we agreed to do this film that I had wanted to do.  

Combining the two screenplays and adding some more scenes was the bulk of my writing which I did over a three-month period. Knowing that I am shooting it with actors who I've worked with before and producing it ourselves, the screenplay is definitely not a completed project. Plenty of room to work in setting the scenes and tweaking dialogue. It wouldn't win any screenwriting contests, that's for sure.  

What was your casting process, and did you change the script to match your final cast?

Brent: Casting was all hand selected. We did not audition anyone. We'd worked with many of them in other projects before. The rest came out of my wife's improv classes or local community theater actors I'd seen perform.

We only made minor changes. The biggest change was that my wife, who is a successful commercial and theatrical actor, was also producing the film with me (we work in tandem on many projects) decided to reduce her role and we cut it down in the script considerably to make the story flow better and add extra shooting time for the remainder of the script. 

What type of camera did you use and what did you love (and hate) about it?

Brent: A Canon 6D and a few scenes with a Canon 5D Mark III. The cinematographers did all the shooting, so I just trusted their comfortability and vision. 

Did the movie change much in the editing, and if so, why did you make the changes?

Brent: The editor (Lee Bacak) gave me two cuts after his first pass. One was close to what I had in the script and the other was his ideal version. We went with his version because it was very concise, clear and only about 5 to 6 minutes shorter. Turned out to be a good choice. 

Can you talk about your distribution plan for recouping costs?

Brent: Our initial plan was pretty undetermined. I work in the YouTube ecosystem in various capacities, and I hoped that with the recognition of the musicians involved that getting it up on our YouTube would give us some nice views and maybe a bit of ad dollars. But getting released on Amazon changed all that of course. 

What impact did the length of the movie (around 50 minutes) have on getting a distributor interested? 

Brent: When the editor and I settled on the final cut, the Youtube route (and possibly using the film as a "pilot" for a sequel or series) seemed like the obvious direction we were going to go.  

I had another film in The Rhode Island International Film Festival and met an Amazon Video representative there and they said they'd look at it. Getting a micro-budget film of this length up on Amazon is just a testament to the changing world of independent film. 

What was the smartest thing you did during production? The dumbest?

Brent: Smartest- There are so many. Haha. I have to list two.

One, casting actors I trusted and giving them the space to do what they are best at. 

Two, scheduling in extra half-days of shooting as buffers even though it was hard to make that happen. We shot in two time blocks: six days, then a week off and then six more days. I needed the extra half day during the first time block. We did not need it in the second and it just became a time to experiment in the final scene of the day and give everyone a couple extra hours to relax and sleep.  

Dumbest- There are so many! Again, I'll have to list two.  

One, not confirming my shoot with a local State Park that I had gotten a permit for. The ranger on duty had no clue what was happening and shut us down. That is when we had to use one of those buffer half-days and shoot at a local farm instead.  

Two, not keeping up with all the dailies and confirming I got everything I wanted/needed. 

And, finally, what did you learn from making this feature that you will take to other projects?

Brent: Going with your instinct on length, structure and approach concerning the final product. With the changing landscape there are viable homes on quality platforms for all types of projects. 

Dying to make a feature? Learn from the pros!

"We never put out an actual textbook for the Corman School of Filmmaking, but if we did, it would be Fast, Cheap and Under Control." 
Roger Corman, Producer

★★★★★

It’s like taking a Master Class in moviemaking…all in one book!

• Jonathan Demme: The value of cameos

• John Sayles: Writing to your resources

• Peter Bogdanovich: Long, continuous takes

• John Cassavetes: Re-Shoots

• Steven Soderbergh: Rehearsals

• George Romero: Casting

• Kevin Smith: Skipping film school

• Jon Favreau: Creating an emotional connection

• Richard Linklater: Poverty breeds creativity

• David Lynch: Kill your darlings

• Ron Howard: Pre-production planning

• John Carpenter: Going low-tech

• Robert Rodriguez: Sound thinking

And more!

Write Your Screenplay with the Help of Top Screenwriters!

It’s like taking a Master Class in screenwriting … all in one book!

Discover the pitfalls of writing to fit a budget from screenwriters who have successfully navigated these waters already. Learn from their mistakes and improve your script with their expert advice.

"I wish I'd read this book before I made Re-Animator."
Stuart Gordon, Director, Re-Animator, Castle Freak, From Beyond

John Gaspard has directed half a dozen low-budget features, as well as written for TV, movies, novels and the stage.

The book covers (among other topics):

• Academy-Award Winner Dan Futterman (“Capote”) on writing real stories

• Tom DiCillio (“Living In Oblivion”) on turning a short into a feature

• Kasi Lemmons (“Eve’s Bayou”) on writing for a different time period

• George Romero (“Martin”) on writing horror on a budget

• Rebecca Miller (“Personal Velocity”) on adapting short stories

• Stuart Gordon (“Re-Animator”) on adaptations

• Academy-Award Nominee Whit Stillman (“Metropolitan”) on cheap ways to make it look expensive

• Miranda July (“Me and You and Everyone We Know”) on making your writing spontaneous

• Alex Cox (“Repo Man”) on scaling the script to meet a budget

• Joan Micklin Silver (“Hester Street”) on writing history on a budget

• Bob Clark (“Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things”) on mixing humor and horror

• Amy Holden Jones (“Love Letters”) on writing romance on a budget

• Henry Jaglom (“Venice/Venice”) on mixing improvisation with scripting

• L.M. Kit Carson (“Paris, Texas”) on re-writing while shooting

• Academy-Award Winner Kenneth Lonergan (“You Can Count on Me”) on script editing

• Roger Nygard (“Suckers”) on mixing genres

This is the book for anyone who’s serious about writing a screenplay that can get produced! 

Roger Corman on "Little Shop," Demme, Bogdanovich and Coppola

Tell me about the genesis of Little Shop of Horrors.

ROGER CORMAN: I would take advantage very often of what is called a scene dock in a studio. When a picture is finished, they break down the flats and store the flats. 

So, I would be aware of what was in the scene dock, so that I could pull out existing flats and re-arrange them to fit. In that way, I didn't have to spend money building the flats -- we would assemble the sets for what we wanted, generally from flats in the scene dock.

In the Edgar Allen Poe pictures, we built the first sets, then we broke those sets down, stored them, then used those and built new ones for each film; so each film got a little bit bigger as we used what we had before and then added to it.

So, in essence, you had the set for Little Shop and built the movie around it. I understand you paid the actors for five days on that film and spent three of those days rehearsing.

ROGER CORMAN: I'm a strong believer in rehearsals and in pre-production and preparation. I want to be able to come onto the set and shoot. Ideally, everything is worked out in advance; practically, it never quite works that way. You always are faced with new problems, or maybe you get a better idea. But at least you have your framework before you shoot.

If you don't have time for a full rehearsal, I like to have at least a reading with the actors, in which we read and maybe do some improvisations and do some loose rehearsals -- not on the set -- taking at least one day before shooting for that.

What’s one of the best ways to save time while shooting?

ROGER CORMAN: What I do, and what I tell my directors working with me, is that you waste a lot of time after you get a shot, where you're congratulating everybody, discussing the shot, and so forth. And that shot is already yesterday's news. You've got it. 

So what I do is I say, 'Cut, print, thank you.' Then maybe one sentence saying how good it was to the actors. And then, 'The next shot is over here.' And we're on to the next shot.

Why do you think Little Shop of Horrors is still so popular today?

ROGER CORMAN: It's partially the idea. It's such a wild idea: A plant that eats people and the little guy who, for reasons not necessarily important, has to murder to feed the plant. It's just a wild, original idea. 

And then I think it was the spirit in which the film was made. The fact that nobody took the work that seriously; we took it with humor, and even the crew were laughing and joking. I think that spirit permeated the film.

What key lesson did you take away from that experience?

ROGER CORMAN: The main lesson: I sacrificed too much by shooting that fast. For instance, I was using two cameras, simultaneously, photographing from two different angles. If two people were talking, I'd have a close-up on one person and a close-up on the other. Because it was a comedy-horror film, you could use flat lighting, but the lighting clearly suffered. In any other type of film, the bad lighting would have hurt the film. 

It was done partially as an experiment, partially as a joke. It succeeded, and then I went back to a normal style of shooting, because you really can do better work with a little more time.

You gave Peter Bogdanovich his first directing assignment with Targets. How did that come about?

ROGER CORMAN: As a result of various complications in a contract, Boris Karloff owed me several days' work. So, I wanted to do a horror film, starring Boris Karloff, in which he would only work for those days.

Peter Bogdanovich had been my assistant. (My assistant before that was Francis Coppola and after Francis had worked for me on a few films, I gave him a chance to direct.) I did the same thing with Peter. I said, 'Here's the problem: The picture must star Boris Karloff, but he can only work for these days.' 

And Peter came up with the idea of Boris as an actor doing a traditional horror film, and in that way,  we could take some footage out of some of the horror films that Boris had done for me before, and also cut away to the boy and tell a parallel story.

Bogdanovich has a couple sequences in the film that are long, continuous takes, with—apparently—no coverage. That would appear to go against your preferred style of shooting.

ROGER CORMAN: It goes a little bit against my rules, but on the other hand, all rules are made to be broken. I do like to get coverage, to get as much coverage as possible. Yet, at the same time, when you're on a very tight schedule, sometimes you have to sacrifice coverage. And when you do that, sometimes you can make a virtue out of necessity.

Peter is highly intelligent, and he had a great knowledge of film. He had written some added scenes for me on previous pictures, and had directed some second unit, so I was aware of his ability as a second unit director and his ability as a writer. I had the feeling that he had the talent.

You mentioned giving Francis Coppola his first chance at directing, with Dementia 13. How did that come about?

ROGER CORMAN: I hired Francis out of the UCLA film school as an editor. I had bought the American rights to two Russian science fiction films, which had wonderful special effects, but they were filled with outrageous anti-American propaganda. And so I hired Francis to re-edit those films, and delete the anti-American propaganda. 

And then he went along and worked with me on several films as my assistant, and particularly on a Grand Prix Formula One race car picture, called The Young Racers, in which we traveled from track to track. 

Francis and our key grip built racks and various compartments into a Volkswagen microbus, so that the microbus was actually a traveling small studio. We used that, with a crew of six or seven professionals, and then we would hire local people. 

When the picture was finished, I had to go back to do a picture in the United States, but it occurred to me we had efficiently functioning crew and everything in microbus, so we could stay and do another picture.

We were finishing at the British Grand Prix, which that year was at Liverpool, but the problem was that British labor laws were very difficult. We only had permits to work in and around the track. But I knew that the Irish labor laws were looser. So I said to Francis, 'If you can come up with an idea for a horror script, you can take the microbus and several of the crew and just put it on a ferry and go across the Irish sea and shoot there.'

He came up with a very interesting idea for Dementia 13, and he contacted some people he'd been with at the UCLA film school and they flew over to Dublin and everybody lived in a big house there while he shot the picture.

It was a very interesting psychological suspense story. We took one idea from Hitchcock, which was that the leading lady would die early in the film, just as she did in Psycho. I always thought that was great, because nobody ever expects the leading lady to die halfway through the film!

You also gave Jonathan Demme his first directing credit, with Caged Heat.

ROGER CORMAN: Jonathan was working out of England, writing publicity for United Artists. I did a film in Ireland for United Artists, and he came over on behalf of UA. It was clear he was a very intelligent young man. He said he was writing publicity but was interested in writing screenplays.

I told him a couple ideas I had and I said, 'If you're ever write anything on this, let me know.' He and his partner, Joe Viola, wrote the script and Jonathan produced and directed. They did one more for me, and then they did Caged Heat, on which Jonathan made his debut as a director.

He had been doing some second unit directing when Joe was the director. I've always liked the idea of a new director shooting some second unit. He gets a feel for what's going on, and I get a chance to judge what he can do.

If you can give a filmmaker only one piece of advice, what would it be?

ROGER CORMAN: Be flexible. Even though you've done all your preparation, don't stick absolutely to the preparation if it doesn't seem to be working. Know that you've got the preparation, but situations change, so be prepared to change with the situations.

Dying to make a feature? Learn from the pros!

"We never put out an actual textbook for the Corman School of Filmmaking, but if we did, it would be Fast, Cheap and Under Control." 
Roger Corman, Producer

★★★★★

It’s like taking a Master Class in moviemaking…all in one book!

• Jonathan Demme: The value of cameos

• John Sayles: Writing to your resources

• Peter Bogdanovich: Long, continuous takes

• John Cassavetes: Re-Shoots

• Steven Soderbergh: Rehearsals

• George Romero: Casting

• Kevin Smith: Skipping film school

• Jon Favreau: Creating an emotional connection

• Richard Linklater: Poverty breeds creativity

• David Lynch: Kill your darlings

• Ron Howard: Pre-production planning

• John Carpenter: Going low-tech

• Robert Rodriguez: Sound thinking

Write Your Screenplay with the Help of Top Screenwriters!

It’s like taking a Master Class in screenwriting … all in one book!

Discover the pitfalls of writing to fit a budget from screenwriters who have successfully navigated these waters already. Learn from their mistakes and improve your script with their expert advice.

"I wish I'd read this book before I made Re-Animator."
Stuart Gordon, Director, Re-Animator, Castle Freak, From Beyond

John Gaspard has directed half a dozen low-budget features, as well as written for TV, movies, novels and the stage.

The book covers (among other topics):

• Academy-Award Winner Dan Futterman (“Capote”) on writing real stories

• Tom DiCillio (“Living In Oblivion”) on turning a short into a feature

• Kasi Lemmons (“Eve’s Bayou”) on writing for a different time period

• George Romero (“Martin”) on writing horror on a budget

• Rebecca Miller (“Personal Velocity”) on adapting short stories

• Stuart Gordon (“Re-Animator”) on adaptations

• Academy-Award Nominee Whit Stillman (“Metropolitan”) on cheap ways to make it look expensive

• Miranda July (“Me and You and Everyone We Know”) on making your writing spontaneous

• Alex Cox (“Repo Man”) on scaling the script to meet a budget

• Joan Micklin Silver (“Hester Street”) on writing history on a budget

• Bob Clark (“Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things”) on mixing humor and horror

• Amy Holden Jones (“Love Letters”) on writing romance on a budget

• Henry Jaglom (“Venice/Venice”) on mixing improvisation with scripting

• L.M. Kit Carson (“Paris, Texas”) on re-writing while shooting

• Academy-Award Winner Kenneth Lonergan (“You Can Count on Me”) on script editing

• Roger Nygard (“Suckers”) on mixing genres

This is the book for anyone who’s serious about writing a screenplay that can get produced! 

Dylan Kidd on writing & directing "Roger Dodger"

Roger Dodger is an example of how – sometimes – all the pieces just fall into place. Writer-Director Dylan Kidd recognized that he’d created a great character when he came up with Roger Swanson. 

Actor Campbell Scott obviously agreed and stepped up to the challenge, bringing an amazing cast – Isabella Rossellini, Jennifer Beals, Ben Shenkman, and Elizabeth Berkley – along with him. Roger Dodger proves that it’s always a good idea to carry your best script with you wherever you go, because you just never know who you’re going to run into.

Where were you in your career before Roger Dodger happened?

Nowhere, really. I had gone to NYU film school and graduated in 1991 and then most of the 90s was spent struggling to get any kind of entry into the industry. I loaded cameras for a couple of years; I worked in real estate for a couple of years. I made a short film in 1996, which was the first directing I had done since school, and that was a nice little thing to get my confidence up a little bit. I spent a couple years doing training videos for hair salons, industrial films, you name it. So really Roger Dodger was a very dramatic beginning to my career.

What the value of all those jobs when it came time to do your first feature?

At the time I was absolutely thrilled to have the work, and I still feel that any time you are -- and this is more from a directing standpoint than from a screenwriting standpoint -- any time I was on a set, calling "action" and "cut," it was an opportunity to learn. And it's always good to shoot and go into the editing room and slap your forehead and think, "I should have gotten that!" It's all part of the training.

And in terms of screenwriting, it's all just fuel for the fire. In the case of helping the script for Roger Dodger, I was just getting more angry and frustrated at not being able to break in, so I ended up putting all that anger into the mouth of the main character. 

In my case, it was a long struggle, but absolutely worth it. I don't know how to do anything else, so for me there was no option. 

How many scripts had you written before Roger Dodger?

I had written two other feature scripts and then one that had been sort of abandoned. So I guess, two and a half. 

One screenplay was based on my experiences in real estate. Although it was nice to get it out of my system, I think I was aware when it was done that the script really wasn't good enough to show anybody. 

The other one was a horror movie, an attempt to do something in a genre. It was fine, but wasn't anything that I was that excited about. Roger Dodger was the first time that when I finished a script, I was like, "Okay, I want to make this movie." 

What was it about the script that made you feel that this was the one?

Probably the quality of the writing, but also the fact that this was the first time that I felt like I had a character that an actor would want to play. For me, a big thing about writing something that could be done for no money was trying to write a role that was so good that we could attract a name actor to work for what turned out to be peanuts. 

That was a big part of my strategy: write something that somebody would walk through broken glass to play. Most of your expense in a movie is the above-the-line costs. It's difficult but possible to make a movie for a low-budget. What's really hard is getting someone that anyone's ever heard of into that movie.

Every time an actor wins an award for stepping outside of their comfort zone, like Halle Berry for Monster's Ball or Charlize Theron for Monster, I think it sends a message to other actors that sometimes you need to take a chance. If you're making $12 million a picture, you don't need the money. So why not take two weeks, go shoot a little indie, and maybe you'll get a statue? That was my theory, anyway.

Where did the idea for the story come from?

The real estate script I had written was big in scope and so, apart from the fact that I didn't think it was that strong, even if someone did fall in love with it, it was still a big movie. So the idea of Roger Dodger was to give myself the assignment of writing something that could be done for no money. That lent itself to a series of conversations and monologues. 

It started with the idea of a guy who feels like he can tell everyone else what they're thinking. It was based on a friend of mine, who in college had this strange ability to go up to strangers and take their psychology apart in minute detail. It struck me as disturbing but also very compelling.

I started with Roger. It ended up being a buddy movie, but his nephew didn't come in until later drafts. You go through a certain amount of time thinking, "Well, maybe this guy is compelling enough, maybe people will sit and watch a train wreck for an hour and a half." 

And then there was a point where I realized there has to be some foil, a character who we want to protect has to enter the movie. There has to be a reason for people to hang on and keep watching.

Did you have a theme in mind when you started?

I was interested in how somebody's work could bleed into their personal life. I feel that New York is very much a place where you can be so ambitious in your career that you end up translating those techniques into your personal life. 

I liked the idea of a guy who works in advertising and actually ends up bringing that kind of rhetoric into the singles arena. The idea that he's literally trying to sell himself as a product, by creating insecurity in other people.

But the nephew didn't show up in early drafts?

I think I had one breakthrough draft, which was the first time when the nephew, Nick, came in, where it felt like this was the structure of the movie. After that there were endless tweakings.

Campbell Scott was very helpful, too. We were lucky enough to be able to rehearse quite a bit before we shot and Campbell helped me cut a lot of dialog. Because as wordy as the film is, the script was even more so. 

Usually actors are begging for more lines, so if an actor is saying, "I think we can cut the scene here," their instincts are usually pretty right on. They're not going to tell you to cut a line unless there's a real reason for it. And Campbell is also a writer and a director, so he had a really strong sense.

Probably the most important draft of the script was created two weeks before shooting, going into rehearsal and realizing that a ten-page monologue was finished at page seven; that we didn't need to keep ranting for another three pages. We probably would have figured that out in editing, but it was great to not actually have to go shoot all that.

How did you come up with the title?

I honestly can't remember. I think I remembered hearing that as a nickname for Roger Staubach and I like titles that have an alliterative quality and stick in your head a little bit. 

I also thought of this character as somebody who is dodging a bit. This is a guy that the audience is sort of chasing through the movie. And so our visual approach was that this was a guy who always had a cloud of cigarette smoke or something obscuring him. You could never really get this guy to sit still. 

What is your writing process?

I used to hate writing, because I didn't feel I was any good at it. It was so hard, and it takes you a while to realize that it's hard for everybody. If you spend the first two weeks of a project staring at a page, you learn to forgive yourself a little bit and realize that that's part of the process. 

I seem to work best in the morning. Roger Dodger was written while I had a job, so I was mainly writing at night. But now, I feel like my best hours are probably 8:30 to noon. I have a really hard time being at the keyboard for more than three hours, at least in the beginning. 

To me, the hardest part by far is the beginning. That's the easiest time to get discouraged and give up. But I have an almost religious faith, based on the scripts I've written, where there is some point where you break through. 

So for me, the first couple of months is a lot of not writing: thinking, obsessing, thinking this is a disaster that is never going to happen. Then something clicks and you start to write and you realize that all that worrying was really part of the process.

But I've never been somebody who can get up and put in a nine-to-five day writing. I just can't do it. At the very end, when you're racing to the finish line, then I probably could. But up until that point, if I put in three to four hours, I consider that a good day.

You're the first person I've talked to who has used the words "faith" and "forgive" to describe the process of writing.

And I'm an atheist! 

I remember reading a great quote that Stephen Gaghan said about writing Syriana. He was describing what he goes through when he writes a script and at the end he talked about self-loathing and not being able to get out of bed. 

The beginning is hard. You're trying to make order out of chaos, and chaos doesn't want to be ordered. If you can just get through that hard part, the first draft, then I think you'll be rewarded for your perseverance.

Do you follow a three-act structure in your scripts?

I guess so, but without really thinking about it. I read the Syd Field book when I was at NYU, but I think, for me, things work internally. I can't even remember thinking about the act breaks when I wrote Roger Dodger. I just had the sense that we were at this stage of the story and this is what should happen. 

If you go to 5,000 movies in your life, then without even knowing it that structure is going to be in there when you're writing. I don't think it's a front brain thing; it just ends up being in there.

I feel like the last thing you want to do in a first draft is to be thinking about what page is the act break. I'm the exact opposite of someone who knows the ending before they begin. For me, the first draft is the “spill it” draft. And after that you can look at it and think, "Well, I have a 70-page first act, that probably can't work. 

But your first time through is when your unconscious is really trying to tell you what the movie wants to be. For me it's important to follow your bliss in that first draft, even if it ends up at 180 pages or you hate everything but ten percent of it. At least you've got that ten percent, which is ten more than a lot of people have.

So you don't subscribe to the "the first act needs to end on page 30" philosophy?

The first draft, because there was no Nick character, I think there was a point where I read a draft and I literally started to get fatigued around page 25.

Once I realized that we needed Nick, the original plan was to introduce him very early in the movie so you had some sense that it wasn't just going to be about Roger. Campbell's performance was so great that we decided to roll the dice and I said "I think we can hang with this guy for about 20 minutes." Then we have the kid show up in the office, and a few minutes to get to know the kid and see how they relate, and then the movie can kick in.

There's something to be said for trying to fit it into a structure that people who read scripts for a living recognize. But for me it's always been a little more organic than having file cards and saying, "By page 40 I need to be here." But everyone's different.

Although it's a buddy movie, it is all from Roger's point of view. Do you think that's a function of the character of Nick essentially being a late addition in the scripting process?

Part of what we discovered was that Roger is controlling the tempo of the movie and the subject matter of what's being talked about, but in some weird way, Nick comes in at a moment when we're really starting to figure out something about Roger. 

Even if the movie isn't told through Nick's point of view, there's some way that we're linked to Nick, in that we're sitting there listening to this guy go on and on, and there's an interesting split that happens. We're aware that, as responsible people watching the movie, we feel that this kid should get away from this guy, but he doesn't. 

So the more that Nick buys into everything that's being told to him and the more we realize that, "Wait, this is the last guy you want to be asking for advice," there's something interesting that happens. 

It's the classic Hitchcock situation, where you've told the audience that there's a bomb under the table -- you told the audience, "here's who Roger is." And then you introduce someone who doesn't know what we know. It creates suspense, because you want him to get away but you also want him to somehow redeem Roger.

That's absolutely right. And somehow we thought that would work better if you were introduced to Nick early, because we thought if you set up that collision course, people are really going to be on the edge of their seats. And then we discovered that it was actually better to have the first 20 minutes be all about Roger and then you have the kid show up. 

Under the guise of a talky, chamber piece, we're actually using every trick in the book to keep people in their seats -- it's a buddy movie, it's a Hitchcock movie, it's a sex movie. We were shameless in what we were doing. It's hard to have people just sitting and talking without there being serious subtext.

Were you writing to a particular budget?

No, but having a background in production was definitely a help. I had the understanding that if you could tell the movie in one night there would be only one wardrobe change. 

There are basic rules that are pretty commonsensical, like don't have a car chase, don't make it a period piece, keep your locations to a minimum. 

Also, a big thing for us was that we knew we were going to shoot with two cameras and that allows you to really burn through scenes more quickly. Basically, the whole second act of the movie is four people sitting at a banquette, having this extended conversation. We were able to shoot that entire thing in a day and a half because we were rolling two cameras.

There's a scene where Roger takes the kid out into the street; it's the first time where he's instructing the kid. It's a long, extended scene and even when it was written it was intended to be shot in one take. That was a 12-page scene that we shot in half a day. If you have two sequences like that, that's twenty percent of your movie that's shot in three days. 

Did knowing that you were writing for a small budget cramp your creativity in any way?

Not really. This was one of those movies that felt like it wanted to be tighter. There were earlier drafts that took place over a longer span of time and it just felt like it wanted to be as tight as possible. 

So there's nothing in the movie that I feel we would have done differently if we'd had more money, except for the luxury of being able to shoot more. But if somebody had said, "We love it, here's 2 million dollars," I wouldn't have written in some dream sequence of Roger when he was young. It just felt like it is what it is, that we were dropped into the middle of this guy's meltdown, and we hang on just to make sure that the kid's going to get out of there okay.

Did you write with specific actors in mind?

I didn't and I still don't. I have a hard time doing that, because I don't want to get too attached. I didn't have anybody in mind, so when we stumbled upon Campbell in this really crazy way, it was nice not to have some presupposed notion of it has to be this guy or that guy.

How did you get Campbell Scott?

My producer partner and I got to a stage where we realized, "we're not going to get this movie made in the standard fashion." It's like that New York thing, where nobody ever finds an apartment by actually going through the real estate listings. It's always somebody you know; there's always some backdoor.

So, really in a fit of insanity, thinking if I don't make this movie I'm going to go crazy, I started carrying the script with me every day. I thought, "Well, I live in New York, maybe I'll run into somebody." And that's how it happened -- two weeks after starting that routine of not leaving the house without the script, I walked into a café and there was Campbell.

I didn't realize that most people will not accept an unsolicited screenplay, because it opens you up to all kinds of potential litigation. But I was so clueless at that point.

Any advice to someone who wants to try the same thing when they spot the perfect actor or actress for their script?

The only advice that I have is to be really polite and make sure that you really do have a killer part to offer.

I'm not necessarily somebody who stalks people or is really aggressive or goes up to people, but I was so sure that this was a great role for somebody, I really believed. I might not have believed that the movie was going to work, but I knew this was a lot of meaty dialog for someone to perform. So I really believed that I wasn't wasting his time. If I wasn't sure, I would not have gone up to him. 

If you get to the stage where you feel like you have this great gift that you can give somebody, then it allows you to feel like you're not just disturbing this guy's lunch.

Did you do any re-writing to fit the cast?

Nothing to fit the cast. We were lucky. Basically every actor in the movie was our first choice, so there wasn't a whole lot of "Oh, this person can't handle this type of thing," or "This person is really good at this – we should add more." 

Fairly late in the game we added the epilogue where Roger goes back and sees Nick in Ohio. That was something that came from doing a reading. We did a reading where we found Jesse Eisenberg, who played Nick, and he was so good at the reading that we got really excited because we thought, okay, we actually have someone who can play this role. 

That reading was a huge epiphany, because we realized there was an actor who exists on planet Earth who could play this role. It really lit a fire under us, because we thought Jesse would grow a beard in a year and his voice is going to drop, or whatever, so we've got to move. 

It was sort of our "That's our Hitler!" moment from The Producers.

The other thing we learned from the reading was this huge sense of when the movie ended. The original ending had Roger putting Nick into a cab to the airport and you could just feel the air go out of the room, because the audience cared so much about Nick, because Jesse was so good. They wanted to know if he was going to be okay.

So it was combining that sense of wanting the narrative pleasure of following through and also, just for me, I really wanted to stick Roger in a cafeteria full of kids. I don't know why, it's such a guilty pleasure for me. The movie starts with Roger having lunch in this restaurant with all these adults and then by the end of the movie he's actually found his peer group.

So I think it was a combination of sensing that the audience would feel ripped off if the movie cut to black at that point and also having this visual of Campbell Scott bopping above all these other heads in the cafeteria.

Do you show drafts to friends or use readings to gauge how you're progressing?

I like readings. I'm not a fan of too much feedback. I'm stubborn that way. I like feedback, but for me the whole point of a reading is to sit in the room and you just know -- you just know if something's dead or if something's working. 

I do have people that I turn to and that I care about what they think. But my feeling is that, unless the comments match something I already felt in my gut anyway, or if every person has the same comment, then I know I have an issue. I generally have found that putting too much stock in feedback can get confusing, because people are going to have a hundred different opinions.

Is there anything in the movie that people tried to talk you out of that you're glad you stuck to your guns on?

I tend to be the opposite. I tend to be the guy that cuts too quickly. I loved when the Coen brothers released their Director's Cut of Blood Simple, and it was like eight minutes shorter or whatever. That would be me.

My experience has been that if I have a gut feeling, if I know something isn't working, I don't need to be told to take it out. And someone says it isn't working for them, but some gut things says I want to keep it in, I guess the reward I get for writing the script and putting myself through this is that I get to say, "No, I don't want to lose that." 

There has to be something in the script that gets you juiced, otherwise it's dead on arrival. I think you have to fight for that, even if you're not going to be the one directing it.

Did knowing that you were going to direct it change the way you wrote the script?

I don't think so. But I think that's probably why I say I don't enjoy writing. It's mainly because I love directing and I think of myself as a director. 

So the writing is this very necessary part, but it's not the fun part. For me it's less about hating writing and more about getting impatient, because I want to get to the point where I can go and start collaborating with others.

What is the most fun part?

I really like editing, which is very much like writing. It's just more fun, because you get very tangible results very quickly. 

For me, I enjoy the entire process, but I probably add the most value in the editing room. I think I'm fine as a director on the set, but I'm not some Ridley Scott genius who always knows where to put the camera, and I'm not John Cassavetes, where I would say the right thing to the actors. 

But the editing room is a place where my tenacity pays off, because I just keep working the footage and refuse to stop tweaking. I just find it really enjoyable, not walking away until a scene is as absolutely good as it can be.

There's a shot right near the end of the movie where Roger is sitting alone on his couch, smoking and thinking, and the smoke disappears in front of him, like a cloud of fog lifting. Was that in the script or a happy accident?

That's the one effect that was completely scripted. 

There was a deliberate structure, where the first image of Roger was of him expelling a plume of smoke. Then, we really labored over that last shot of him smoking. It's the only dolly shot in the film. Our poor cinematographer had to light it in a certain way, so that the smoke would read. 

I don't know if anybody even gets it, but I still get a kick out of it when I see it. "Oh, look, he's coming out of the fog." It was even written in the script that way, something like, "Roger exhales and then the smoke lifts … 

Although you created Roger, I'm sure there was a point where Campbell took him over and knew him better than you did. Do you remember when that point was?

Probably by lunch on the first day. 

I had a really interesting thing happen with Campbell. I think good film actors work really small. There's a great interview with John Travolta where he says he always has to remind directors that they might not see what he's doing on the set, but they'll see it on the screen. These guys are working at a level where the camera can almost read their minds.

My initial concept for Roger had been much more manic. But Campbell brought this total James Bond sophistication to it, where he's saying these horrible things but it's going down so smoothly. That was a total surprise to me and I had a panicked reaction. We talked and he said it's going to be fine. And I thought, I've cast this guy and he's great. Maybe this is not what I had in mind, but maybe that's the whole point. 

Since then I've learned that that moment of surprise is the very best feeling you can experience on the set. If you don't feel surprised, you're in trouble. The whole point is that you write a script and then the actors turn it into something so much better and richer and different than you ever thought. 

It wasn't until the end of the shoot that I realized how right Campbell's choice had been. The only way people would stand this guy was if he was kind of suave about it. If he had done what I had pictured in my head, the movie would have been a disaster. So that was a great lesson. 

I think I imagined the character as constantly pushing people away and what Campbell was doing was more of a push/pull thing, where he reels you in and then pushes you away. That's so much more interesting than what I had in mind. 

I don't think I'll ever make a movie that turned out so much better than I imagined. I thought the script was good, but the actors added so much. 

You were quoted once as saying you wanted every character in this movie, even if they only had one line, to be so well-drawn that they were worthy of their own movie. How do you go about doing that?

I think that's something that's easy to say, but in the end it comes down to the actors. It's very easy to say that you want people to feel that you could go off with any character, but unless it's Jennifer Beals who's riding off in that cab, maybe you're not really going to give a shit and you'll say, "I'll let her ride away."

I think it was more about just wanting to instill in the actors some sense that everyone is important, that there are no supporting characters. But I do believe that it's the responsibility of the writer to love every character equally. Once you start writing a character who is only there in order to fulfill some piece of plot machinery, then nobody is going to care about that person. 

I have this clear memory of being about twelve years old and going to a James Bond movie. There was a scene in the movie where the main henchman gets in a fight with an extra character in the movie -- some Secret Service guy we'd never seen. And it ends up being a really long fight. I remembered being so thrilled that this guy, who you'd think would be dispatched immediately, gets a nice scene. 

I always enjoy it when characters come in and you make a snap judgment about them and then they surprise you, either by claiming more of your attention than you thought or just being richer than you thought. 

It's our job to remind audiences that every character has something going on and everyone has a story to tell. It sound pretentious, but that's where our heads were at when we made the movie.

What did you learn writing Roger Dodger that you still use today on higher-budget projects?

The main thing that I learned from that script was that it was the first time ever when I was writing something that I thought, "This is good, this is working." 

My other scripts had been okay, competent, but the hair on the back of my neck didn't stand up. For me, the most important thing now is trying to make sure that I get as close as I can to that feeling. I never want to settle for, "Oh, this is okay." You want people to read it and get genuinely excited about it and want to shoot it.

You’ve got to get to a place where you are genuinely pumped with what you're doing. As hard as it is, you can't give up on a script until you've gotten to that place.

What's the best advice you've ever gotten about writing?

I have to say it was that Stephen Gaghan quote I mentioned earlier. That was the first time that it really hit home for me that it's hard for everybody and that 90 percent of writing might just be staring into space or reading a book and feeling like you're procrastinating.

Writing is so hard that I only want to do it if I'm absolutely dying to tell that story. My advice would be, particularly in the beginning, the only thing that is going to make your script jump off the page for a reader who's read a hundred scripts that day – the only thing that's going to make a difference – is that there's something about it that's getting you up each morning. Even if it's the least commercial idea in the world, I have to believe that somehow that passion translates to the page.

My experience with Roger Dodger was that I had written two other scripts that I thought were good, and then it wasn't until I wrote Roger Dodger that I realized that there's a difference between just "good" and "holy shit this is good." The industry is tough enough and competitive enough that if you're going to go out to somebody, whether it's an agent or an actor or you're going to submit it to a studio, it has to have that holy shit feeling.

Dying to make a feature? Learn from the pros!

"We never put out an actual textbook for the Corman School of Filmmaking, but if we did, it would be Fast, Cheap and Under Control." 
Roger Corman, Producer

★★★★★

It’s like taking a Master Class in moviemaking…all in one book!

• Jonathan Demme: The value of cameos

• John Sayles: Writing to your resources

• Peter Bogdanovich: Long, continuous takes

• John Cassavetes: Re-Shoots

• Steven Soderbergh: Rehearsals

• George Romero: Casting

• Kevin Smith: Skipping film school

• Jon Favreau: Creating an emotional connection

• Richard Linklater: Poverty breeds creativity

• David Lynch: Kill your darlings

• Ron Howard: Pre-production planning

• John Carpenter: Going low-tech

• Robert Rodriguez: Sound thinking

And more!

Write Your Screenplay with the Help of Top Screenwriters!

It’s like taking a Master Class in screenwriting … all in one book!

Discover the pitfalls of writing to fit a budget from screenwriters who have successfully navigated these waters already. Learn from their mistakes and improve your script with their expert advice.

"I wish I'd read this book before I made Re-Animator."
Stuart Gordon, Director, Re-Animator, Castle Freak, From Beyond

John Gaspard has directed half a dozen low-budget features, as well as written for TV, movies, novels and the stage.

The book covers (among other topics):

• Academy-Award Winner Dan Futterman (“Capote”) on writing real stories

• Tom DiCillio (“Living In Oblivion”) on turning a short into a feature

• Kasi Lemmons (“Eve’s Bayou”) on writing for a different time period

• George Romero (“Martin”) on writing horror on a budget

• Rebecca Miller (“Personal Velocity”) on adapting short stories

• Stuart Gordon (“Re-Animator”) on adaptations

• Academy-Award Nominee Whit Stillman (“Metropolitan”) on cheap ways to make it look expensive

• Miranda July (“Me and You and Everyone We Know”) on making your writing spontaneous

• Alex Cox (“Repo Man”) on scaling the script to meet a budget

• Joan Micklin Silver (“Hester Street”) on writing history on a budget

• Bob Clark (“Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things”) on mixing humor and horror

• Amy Holden Jones (“Love Letters”) on writing romance on a budget

• Henry Jaglom (“Venice/Venice”) on mixing improvisation with scripting

• L.M. Kit Carson (“Paris, Texas”) on re-writing while shooting

• Academy-Award Winner Kenneth Lonergan (“You Can Count on Me”) on script editing

• Roger Nygard (“Suckers”) on mixing genres

This is the book for anyone who’s serious about writing a screenplay that can get produced! 

Will Slocombe on “Cold Turkey”

What was your filmmaking background before making "Cold Turkey"?

Will: Well, I didn’t go to film school. I went to the University of Chicago, where we spend 4 months reading Ulysses, then 6 more months talking about it. I think film school is so expensive – just spend that money on your first movie; you’ll learn so much more.

I’d made a bunch of short films and commercials, and written a few scripts. And this is actually the third feature I’ve directed (although the first one both I’ve written and directed). My big thing has always been to just MAKE stuff. I don’t care how cheap it is (which can sometimes work against me!); I just think the actual process of creating stuff is the most important thing.

Where did the idea come from and what was the writing process like?

Will: The short answer is the idea came from my own family. The long answer is that I was deeply inspired by two things: the honesty of Lena Dunham’s Tiny Furniture, and the explosive dinner scene midway through Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County (which I saw at the Kennedy Center about 3 years ago [actually on Thanksgiving – with my parents]. I thought if I could inject the honesty of Tiny Furniture into a family saga like August: Osage County, that might wok well for an indie movie, all in one location, with no money.

The writing process was terrible! Like it always is. Directing is SO much more fun. You actually get to talk to people. Be social. You’re the leader of your own little gang of misfits. Which is fantastic. But writing’s the WORST. Just so much self-loathing and terror. For Cold Turkey – I wrote the first draft in like 2 weeks (which is obviously fast – I must have had to get something off my chest!), but then spent like a year actually making it good, and not just Dear Diary.

Can you talk about how you raised your budget and your financial plan for recouping your costs?

Will: We raised some initial seed money from friends and family, a buddy from Birthright here, a supportive uncle-in-law there; but about 2 weeks out from production, after we had already attached Peter Bogdanovich and Cheryl Hines, we were in SERIOUS financial trouble. 

That’s when a company called Cinetic Media got us in touch with a company called Burn Later Production, and saved the movie from a horrible, premature death. Our company, Midway Films, will always be grateful to them.

Well, from what my distributor FilmBuff tells me, you make about 80% to 85% of your revenue from iTunes. So, tons of stuff is contingent on good iTunes placement. Other than that, we’re definitely looking into media buys with cable and other digital platforms.  DirectTV has actually been super supportive of the film already, so we hope that works out.  And obviously, we’re looking into foreign distribution. I’m sure your readers know this, but for indie movies (and movies in general), you don’t make ANY money in theaters. Theatrical releases (on the whole) are advertisements for digital releases, just because the advertising costs are so astronomical. Movie theaters are in the $7 popcorn business, not the movie business. 

Having said that, I am EXTREMELY grateful that we got a theatrical release in LA, New York, and other cities. It helped build the profile of the movie (again, an ad for digital). But I’m under no illusions about the financial viability of said theatrical release.

What was your casting process and where did you get the great idea to cast Peter Bogdanovich?

Will: Casting was far and away the most successful part of the movie, taken objectively. And we owe it all to a genius Casting Director named Paul Ruddy. Paul read the script, loved it, and had the savvy and connections to get me into meetings with agents, who similarly loved the script.

In terms of Peter, I had seen him on a bunch of talk shows (notably Charlie Rose), and he just had this…presence. A real command of the room. The three things I wanted for the Poppy character were: (1) an authority (because the movie is basically about that authority crumbling) (2) an intellectual heft (we had to believe he was a Stanford professor) (3) a complicated history with women (haha). Peter fit the bill! I will also give full credit to my producer Graham Ballou, who was always very supportive of the Peter idea and thought it would be really interesting. We were just never sure if Peter Bogdanovich was the sort of man who cried (as he had to late in the film). But thank god he secretly is. (With a little help from an old Frank Sinatra record he put on right before we shot his breakdown scene.)

What kind of camera did you use to shoot the movie -- and what did you love about it and hate about it?

Will: My DP Lucas Lee Graham shot the movie on a Canon 5D Mark III. Lucas claims the movie was the very first feature shot on that camera (we shot in May 2012). And I won’t disagree with him.

A few things I love about the camera (which I’ve also shot a bunch of short-form stuff on myself): (1) the cost. DSLR cameras in general have lowered the barrier to entry in really exciting ways. (2) the size.  It’s tiny (it’s really a still camera) which makes it very quick on its feet, very nimble. (3) the look. I legitimately think it creates beautiful, rich images.  DSLRs are famous for their shallow depth of field, which gives you an intimate, “cinematic” look, but, beyond that, I just love the color temperature on them. I actually learned to make movies on a Canon XL1, so maybe I’m just partial to Canons in general.

What was the smartest thing you did during production? The dumbest?

Will: Hm. Good question! First time anyone’s ever asked that.

Smartest: casting Peter Bogdanovich.

Dumbest: well, it’s not production, but if I had to re-write the script again, I would DEFINITELY start it with more of a bang. A visual, explosive hook. I re-watched PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE last night. One forgets this, but that movie begins with a crazy car crash. I think there’s a reason for that: PTA wants to get your attention IMMEDIATELY. And also maybe threaten that you better stay on your toes, cause that sort of thing could happen again, at any time, without warning.

And, finally, what did you learn from making the film that you have taken to other projects?

Will: That the script and the casting are the absolute number one most important things. Would I make another feature film with actors who weren’t folks like Peter Bogdanovich and Cheryl Hines? Sure. I love movies, I’ll make anything. But it probably wouldn’t be the smartest thing in the world. Having actors like them on board has just meant so much for the movie, and for me personally. I would be crazy not to learn from that.

Dying to make a feature? Learn from the pros!

"We never put out an actual textbook for the Corman School of Filmmaking, but if we did, it would be Fast, Cheap and Under Control." 
Roger Corman, Producer

★★★★★

It’s like taking a Master Class in moviemaking…all in one book!

• Jonathan Demme: The value of cameos

• John Sayles: Writing to your resources

• Peter Bogdanovich: Long, continuous takes

• John Cassavetes: Re-Shoots

• Steven Soderbergh: Rehearsals

• George Romero: Casting

• Kevin Smith: Skipping film school

• Jon Favreau: Creating an emotional connection

• Richard Linklater: Poverty breeds creativity

• David Lynch: Kill your darlings

• Ron Howard: Pre-production planning

• John Carpenter: Going low-tech

• Robert Rodriguez: Sound thinking

And more!

Write Your Screenplay with the Help of Top Screenwriters!

It’s like taking a Master Class in screenwriting … all in one book!

Discover the pitfalls of writing to fit a budget from screenwriters who have successfully navigated these waters already. Learn from their mistakes and improve your script with their expert advice.

"I wish I'd read this book before I made Re-Animator."
Stuart Gordon, Director, Re-Animator, Castle Freak, From Beyond

John Gaspard has directed half a dozen low-budget features, as well as written for TV, movies, novels and the stage.

The book covers (among other topics):

• Academy-Award Winner Dan Futterman (“Capote”) on writing real stories

• Tom DiCillio (“Living In Oblivion”) on turning a short into a feature

• Kasi Lemmons (“Eve’s Bayou”) on writing for a different time period

• George Romero (“Martin”) on writing horror on a budget

• Rebecca Miller (“Personal Velocity”) on adapting short stories

• Stuart Gordon (“Re-Animator”) on adaptations

• Academy-Award Nominee Whit Stillman (“Metropolitan”) on cheap ways to make it look expensive

• Miranda July (“Me and You and Everyone We Know”) on making your writing spontaneous

• Alex Cox (“Repo Man”) on scaling the script to meet a budget

• Joan Micklin Silver (“Hester Street”) on writing history on a budget

• Bob Clark (“Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things”) on mixing humor and horror

• Amy Holden Jones (“Love Letters”) on writing romance on a budget

• Henry Jaglom (“Venice/Venice”) on mixing improvisation with scripting

• L.M. Kit Carson (“Paris, Texas”) on re-writing while shooting

• Academy-Award Winner Kenneth Lonergan (“You Can Count on Me”) on script editing

• Roger Nygard (“Suckers”) on mixing genres

This is the book for anyone who’s serious about writing a screenplay that can get produced! 

Terry Linehan on "Don't Know Yet"

What was your filmmaking background before making "Don't Know Yet"?
Terry: I began as a screenwriter in 1991, after a career sailing tall ships all over the globe. Time at sea inspired me and gave me time to write - like every day. I developed the discipline of writing, and I discovered how much I liked writing for the screen.  Over the next ten years I took every screenwriting and filmmaking seminar in the country: Robert McKee, Michael Hauge, Maine Photographic Workshop, Dov Simens, Linda Seger, Judith Weston, and the Action/Cut seminar among others.  

During this time I banged out a screenplay a year, went through a few agents, placed in some big screenwriting contests, talked to a lot of Hollywood agents, and never sold a thing.  It was in the late 90's that I decided to make films myself. Being a sort of independent guy anyway, this seemed like the way to go.  

Since then, I have written, produced, or directed 7 short films, plus our feature film "Don't Know Yet" in 2013. DKY is the fourth feature I have developed with my company, A Bunch of Us.  Every feature I put into development was nearly made. All had money and actors attached, and one, "Sugarfoot," had a distributor and Gregory Hines - the world's greatest tap dancer - contracted at one point. Hines tragically passed away, the distributor was sold, and the investor's came knocking. I gave their money back.  

The experience of putting that project together around the millennium taught me how fragile the whole filmmaking process is. It helped me realize how many elements had to be synchronized in order to make any film possible.  

So, the short answer is, I began as a writer, and developed skills as an entrepreneur-producer-director.
Where did the idea come from and what was the writing process like?
Terry: I was channel surfing around Thanksgiving of 2011, when I happened upon The Addiction starring Lilli Taylor and Christopher Walken. Taylor spoke a line that would keep me busy for the next two years: “He picks up hitchhikers and takes them wherever they want to go.” I stopped in my tracks and turned off the TV. Who would become a taxi driver for hitchhikers?  My head began to spin with the possibilities, and, for the next few weeks, I jotted down ideas about characters and story.  

When New Year 2012 arrived, I blasted through the first draft of the screenplay, about 75 pages, in five days. Then I sent drafts to my trusted allies - people I knew in the industry who would be totally honest with criticism: professors, actors, a cinematographer, and an editor. I took what I needed from each - and then went with my heart until the writing ended, at 89 pages, in early June.  

I think there were only 4 or 5 drafts of the script. It sort of came out all at once, and was only modified and polished over the development period.  In the end, for better or worse, I listened to my heart whenever making story decisions. So, honestly, I rejected a lot of what I heard about character and conflict. I wanted to make the film that I wanted to make.  I also knew this would be a film that could be produced with a small budget and a local crew.  I was confident that it could also attract a talented cast and financing.
You broke a lot of low-budget rules -- large cast, multiple locations. What was your plan for overcoming those challenges?
Terry: I used a talented crew of young professionals - all of whom were former students of mine. They had a ton of energy and moved mountains on enthusiasm alone. We had a meticulous shooting schedule and were all determined not to let any delays get in our way.  We had a twelve-hour day max, which we rarely went over.  

With minimal takes and a lot of hustling, we were able to stick to our schedule.  Having great actors also helps, because there were few flubs. The weather also had to cooperate, which it did, and didn't. It was blistering hot on our 2 longest exterior shoot days at the junk yard.  We had to cut a couple of scenes short and one we just didn't shoot. That was the only scene we didn't get to.  We had to re-write that scene on the fly.  

I hoped that our editor, Nate Daniel, could make some scenes out of this.  He did. We also planned for a bunch of improv on set. Having a lot of extra improv footage made the story bigger, without much prep. We shot 89 pages in 17 days, which is just over 5 pages per day. Twelve days were within 20 miles of our home base of Wilmington, NC, and 5 days in the mountains of NC.  

Since this is a road movie, we shot a lot from the car on the road, which we knew would make it seem as if we had dozens of locations. Exterior shoots had no lighting set-ups, except for a couple fire scenes. Our longest days were interiors, because of the lighting set-ups with minimal crew. Most cast members had 1-2 days at most, which helped create the large cast feel.  James Kyson had 17 days. Lisa Goldstein Kirsch, only 9 days, although it seems like she appears in most of the film.
What camera did you use and what did you love and hate about it??
Terry: Our DP, Joe Ensley, used his Panasonic AF-100 with several excellent prime lenses. Joe had a very simple steadicam counterweight that allowed for smooth moving camera shots. We never used a dolly. We had access to several additional AF-100's due to my position at the University of NC Wilmington in the Film Studies Department. We used three of these for the balloon scene.  

One in the picture balloon, one in a following balloon, and one on the ground. I can't say I hate a camera. There was really nothing to hate about it. I loved it because it was so portable, easy to operate, and made an exquisite image in a variety of conditions. We shot a beach scene that went into deep dusk. I worried we were running out of light, and when Joe showed me the exposure, I was stunned. We could have shot even longer.  

Joe and I bought an affordable car mount for the camera, which was easy to set up and use. On the first day we experimented with the mount, we happened to be outside of Screen Gems Studios in Wilmington, NC where "Iron Man 3" was shooting. As we assembled the tiny rig, the gates of the studio opened and 4 huge semi-trucks rolled out with IM3 gear aboard, including several Cadillac SUV's picture cars.  Joe and I laughed as we waved at the union drivers passing by. The most expensive film ever made in North Carolina juxtaposed with one of the cheapest!
What is your plan for distribution and recouping your costs?
Terry: During principle photography, late June into mid-July of 2012, we were also editing. In August we had a rough cut.  Our plan was to get the film into the festival circuit asap, so I started submitting to more than 50 film festivals and film markets for 2013-14. We also knew that the AFM was a must attend event in November of 2012.  

Joe Ensley and I went to Santa Monica and presented clips from our almost completed film to nearly 60 companies in 3 days of marathon pitching. We had a lot of interest and made some helpful connections for the future, but no sales. At AFM we were testing the waters and finding out what kind of film we had made and what market it could find. I also wanted to get the film in front of producer's reps in LA and NY as soon as we had a finished film.  

In the spring of 2013, I began an email and phone campaign to several hundred producers reps, following up over the summer. In September 2013 it finally paid off when I went to LA for a meeting with Circus Road Films, who I signed with to rep us for domestic distribution.
How did you achieve the last shot in the movie -- the fly-away?
Terry: I have a friend who is a union driver for the film industry in Wilmington, NC. He was starting a side business with his home-built hexicopter camera rig - a portable six-bladed helicopter. We were his first shooting effort.  We used a small, lightweight HD camera - I can't tell you which one because I don't remember, but it was the size of a pack of cigarettes. It was a windy day, and we had to do a lot of post-production stabilizing to smooth out that image. Kudos to Nate Daniel, our amazing editor.
What was the smartest thing you did during production? The dumbest?
Terry: Smartest thing was to choose "go" over "no go" when we were faced with inclement weather. We shot at high altitude for two days in the mountains, clouds, and rain of NC.  We always showed up and were ready to shoot when the weather broke. Had we called a day because rain was imminent, we would have missed some great opportunities to let the weather contribute to the film rather than detract.  

Dumbest was having me as the driver of our RV. I ran into an overhanging tree limb that tore into the A/C unit atop the van, and I also smashed the rear-end when I hit a road sign while making a tight turn. These were the only two incidents that went wrong with the shoot.  If those were our only mishaps, then we got off easy!

Things could have been worse!  I did spend my whole contingency on those accidents.
And, finally, what did you learn from making the film that you have taken to other projects?
Terry: That young crew members who are well trained and eager will do the job and surprise you at every turn.  The average age of our 12-core crew was 21. We had some seasoned pros in key positions, all graduates of the same UNC Wilmington Film Studies program, but the undergraduates carried the load. Our production was a test case for a model of filmmaking that I have always wanted to undertake. This model uses several key professionals who guide less experienced film students with support from a university film program and some moderate financing. I learned that the model works great!  

I will continue with the same model in the future, but I hope this time, with a bigger budget.

Dying to make a feature? Learn from the pros!

"We never put out an actual textbook for the Corman School of Filmmaking, but if we did, it would be Fast, Cheap and Under Control." 
Roger Corman, Producer

★★★★★

It’s like taking a Master Class in moviemaking…all in one book!

• Jonathan Demme: The value of cameos

• John Sayles: Writing to your resources

• Peter Bogdanovich: Long, continuous takes

• John Cassavetes: Re-Shoots

• Steven Soderbergh: Rehearsals

• George Romero: Casting

• Kevin Smith: Skipping film school

• Jon Favreau: Creating an emotional connection

• Richard Linklater: Poverty breeds creativity

• David Lynch: Kill your darlings

• Ron Howard: Pre-production planning

• John Carpenter: Going low-tech

• Robert Rodriguez: Sound thinking

And more!

Write Your Screenplay with the Help of Top Screenwriters!

It’s like taking a Master Class in screenwriting … all in one book!

Discover the pitfalls of writing to fit a budget from screenwriters who have successfully navigated these waters already. Learn from their mistakes and improve your script with their expert advice.

"I wish I'd read this book before I made Re-Animator."
Stuart Gordon, Director, Re-Animator, Castle Freak, From Beyond

John Gaspard has directed half a dozen low-budget features, as well as written for TV, movies, novels and the stage.

The book covers (among other topics):

• Academy-Award Winner Dan Futterman (“Capote”) on writing real stories

• Tom DiCillio (“Living In Oblivion”) on turning a short into a feature

• Kasi Lemmons (“Eve’s Bayou”) on writing for a different time period

• George Romero (“Martin”) on writing horror on a budget

• Rebecca Miller (“Personal Velocity”) on adapting short stories

• Stuart Gordon (“Re-Animator”) on adaptations

• Academy-Award Nominee Whit Stillman (“Metropolitan”) on cheap ways to make it look expensive

• Miranda July (“Me and You and Everyone We Know”) on making your writing spontaneous

• Alex Cox (“Repo Man”) on scaling the script to meet a budget

• Joan Micklin Silver (“Hester Street”) on writing history on a budget

• Bob Clark (“Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things”) on mixing humor and horror

• Amy Holden Jones (“Love Letters”) on writing romance on a budget

• Henry Jaglom (“Venice/Venice”) on mixing improvisation with scripting

• L.M. Kit Carson (“Paris, Texas”) on re-writing while shooting

• Academy-Award Winner Kenneth Lonergan (“You Can Count on Me”) on script editing

• Roger Nygard (“Suckers”) on mixing genres

This is the book for anyone who’s serious about writing a screenplay that can get produced! 

Sarah Knight on "Vino Veritas"

What was your filmmaking background before making "Vino Veritas"?

Sarah: “Vino” is my narrative feature debut.  My last two films were documentaries - “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend,” a portrait of Nicole Sherry, Head Groundskeeper for the Baltimore Orioles at Camden Yards and one of only two women in that position in Major League Baseball. And “Hot Flash” about Saffire-The Uppity Blues Women.  I have also directed theatre and narrative shorts. Prior to that, I assisted directors Taylor Hackford & Mikael Salomon and producers Robert Shapiro & Peter MacGregor-Scott.

How did you work with writer David MacGregor on the adaptation of his play?

Sarah: David wrote the screenplay and much of his original stage play was kept intact. The changes mostly involved cutting dialogue which would seem excessive on film (including one long monologue). We also worked to tweak some of the more wildly divergent theatrical tones of comedy and drama to make them subtle enough to be plausible on screen.

How did you go about casting the movie? 

Sarah: I knew I only wanted actors with theatre backgrounds as this film was going to live and die on the performances. And I would require the cast to memorize the entire script prior to shooting. I had seen Heather Raffo in her extremely successful one woman show, “Nine Parts of Desire,” about nine Iraqi women, which she also penned. Bernard White first caught my eye as the charismatic lead in an off-Broadway play in 2004. Carrie Preston had just wowed me in “Duplicity” and “That Evening Sun.” A casting director helped me to find Brian Hutchison.

What was your visual plan for the movie (particularly with the very limited number of locations you were working on) and how did you and your DP achieve it?

Sarah: One of my main goals was to move the actors around the house so there were several different backgrounds. This helps to provide the illusion our story isn’t really unfolding in just in one space (where the stage play takes place entirely in the living room).

I wanted the beginning of the film - the pre-wine drinking section - to have a slightly muted, de-saturated look and we dressed the actors accordingly. I also wanted the camera to hang back and only frame the characters from behind, in profile or in ‘dirty’ close-ups (where the subject is partially eclipsed by something in the foreground).

Once the truth serum is imbibed, there is about an eight-minute color bump where the full saturation comes in which reflects the true colors and excitement that is about to come that night. Nothing as overt as say, “Pleasantville,” more of a slow seeping but hopefully it affects the audience subconsciously.  The camera also starts to move in closer and closer and head on to each actor.

What was your rehearsal process like and how did that impact the moviemaking process?

Sarah: The two couples needed to be believable as longtime best friends and neighbors, which would be difficult to achieve on a typical film shoot, where the cast often meets for the first time moments before shooting. To give the actors a chance to bond, I held a cast dinner (Peruvian, of course) and we had two days of table reads, by the end of which they had started to seem very comfortable with one another. A great deal of rehearsal would also be required and I pushed hard for that, ultimately getting six days with the entire cast, four of which were at the actual shooting location. The actors were so prepared by the final rehearsal day we just ran the show in its entirety like a play!

Since our story at its heart is about revelations and reactions, I told the actors during rehearsal I would shoot coverage of each them at all times, so to be aware that non-verbal moments would make up a great deal of their final performances. And while I required the cast to say the dialogue exactly as written, I gave them the freedom to ad lib and improvise in between lines. A great deal of that material made the final cut and really complements David’s original work.

What was the smartest thing you did during production?

Sarah: Shooting in Lincoln, NE. It is my hometown and there is a beautiful house which I had driven by almost every day of my childhood. It turned out to be the perfect location which almost serves as a fifth character in the film. In addition, the homeowner led us to the man, Mike Murman, who provided roughly three quarters of the funding.  My folks catered and did craft service so we were fed better than I have been on any big budget studio film which helped to make up for the cast and crew’s low pay. And there was a church right across the street which generously provided a space for our holding and crew meals.  Finally, graduate students from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln served as our production design team and did a spectacular job on the set dressing.

The dumbest?

Sarah: Shooting in Lincoln, NE, in July. It is always extremely hot in Lincoln at that time but that year there was a freak heat wave which lasted exactly as long as we rehearsed and shot.  It was about 110 degrees in the main location which had no air conditioning. So, the poor actors huddled around one single silver snake coming from a portable AC unit in between takes. To top that off, Carrie was wearing a 30-pound Queen Elizabeth costume and Brian was in a flannel shirt and chaps.  And we had a gas fireplace going much of the time. I was so focused on making our days I honestly didn’t really notice but the actors and the crew suffered quite a bit but thankfully remained troopers.

And, finally, what did you learn from making the film that you have taken to other projects?

Sarah: Simply by default of time, we shot very long takes, occasionally filming entire fifteen-minute scenes at a clip. While this is quite an unusual way to film, it is something I will certainly use in my future work as it created a wonderfully dynamic and real energy for the actors which you see reflected in their terrific performances.

Dying to make a feature? Learn from the pros!

"We never put out an actual textbook for the Corman School of Filmmaking, but if we did, it would be Fast, Cheap and Under Control." 
Roger Corman, Producer

★★★★★

It’s like taking a Master Class in moviemaking…all in one book!

• Jonathan Demme: The value of cameos

• John Sayles: Writing to your resources

• Peter Bogdanovich: Long, continuous takes

• John Cassavetes: Re-Shoots

• Steven Soderbergh: Rehearsals

• George Romero: Casting

• Kevin Smith: Skipping film school

• Jon Favreau: Creating an emotional connection

• Richard Linklater: Poverty breeds creativity

• David Lynch: Kill your darlings

• Ron Howard: Pre-production planning

• John Carpenter: Going low-tech

• Robert Rodriguez: Sound thinking

And more!

Write Your Screenplay with the Help of Top Screenwriters!

It’s like taking a Master Class in screenwriting … all in one book!

Discover the pitfalls of writing to fit a budget from screenwriters who have successfully navigated these waters already. Learn from their mistakes and improve your script with their expert advice.

"I wish I'd read this book before I made Re-Animator."
Stuart Gordon, Director, Re-Animator, Castle Freak, From Beyond

John Gaspard has directed half a dozen low-budget features, as well as written for TV, movies, novels and the stage.

The book covers (among other topics):

• Academy-Award Winner Dan Futterman (“Capote”) on writing real stories

• Tom DiCillio (“Living In Oblivion”) on turning a short into a feature

• Kasi Lemmons (“Eve’s Bayou”) on writing for a different time period

• George Romero (“Martin”) on writing horror on a budget

• Rebecca Miller (“Personal Velocity”) on adapting short stories

• Stuart Gordon (“Re-Animator”) on adaptations

• Academy-Award Nominee Whit Stillman (“Metropolitan”) on cheap ways to make it look expensive

• Miranda July (“Me and You and Everyone We Know”) on making your writing spontaneous

• Alex Cox (“Repo Man”) on scaling the script to meet a budget

• Joan Micklin Silver (“Hester Street”) on writing history on a budget

• Bob Clark (“Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things”) on mixing humor and horror

• Amy Holden Jones (“Love Letters”) on writing romance on a budget

• Henry Jaglom (“Venice/Venice”) on mixing improvisation with scripting

• L.M. Kit Carson (“Paris, Texas”) on re-writing while shooting

• Academy-Award Winner Kenneth Lonergan (“You Can Count on Me”) on script editing

• Roger Nygard (“Suckers”) on mixing genres

This is the book for anyone who’s serious about writing a screenplay that can get produced! 

Lauralee Farrer on “Not That Funny”

What was your filmmaking background before setting out to make "Not That Funny"?

Lauralee: I started producing other peoples' films, and made my first personal, handmade documentaries Laundry and Tosca and The Fair Trade (www.thefairtrademovie.com) less than a decade ago. With them I began to develop a style of storytelling that investigates the internal life of true stories. It intrigued me to go from there to making fiction by inserting narrative into documentary circumstances. I did that to a small degree with Not That Funny, and much more so now with my latest project Praying the Hours—with which I have much more creative license. 
Not That Funny was a sort of commission I was hired to make, even though I did write, direct and in some ways help to produce it. It was a departure in some ways, but it was invaluable experience. I am influenced by Errol Morris, Terrence Malick, Kristof Kieslowski, Paul Thomas Anderson. Those will seem strange influences for a movie like Not That Funny, but it's all part of a long process of learning the craft and finding one's voice. I came to the process of directing later in my life, so I bring a lot of eclectic experiences with me.

Where did the idea come from and what was your process for working with your co-writer on the script? 

Lauralee: The movie stars Tony Hale as a romantic lead, and this unique project started as a desire to show Tony's considerable range as a charismatic actor. We are friends and had been wanting to do a film for some time together. Then the executive producer of what became Not That Funny came to me with a low budget and a script that I didn't resonate with. I woke up soon after remembering a story idea that a friend of mine (cowriter Jonathan B. Foster) had—a story about a guy who tries to become funny to interest a woman he's taken with.

The idea of casting the funniest man I know as a serious romantic lead who tries to become funny and fails—that seemed like a great idea, and producer Jack Hafer went for it. I will always be grateful to him for letting us make the film we wanted to make instead of the script he had put a considerable amount of development time and money into finding. That was a bold risk. We brought in hands-on producer Terence Berry, and we were off.
As for the collaboration process, Jonathan lives in Seattle, and we flew him down to Los Angeles a couple of times, but mostly we wrote together through email and over the phone. I'd write at night after work, and he would write in the morning before work. We'd pass the drafts off to each other like relay runners. We have a very long and dear friendship, so we knew we would work well together, even though, as the saying goes, I hate writing—I like having written. But our collaboration could not have been more ideal. He's a gifted writer and a dear friend. Plus we did not kill each other.

Can you talk about how you raised your budget and your financial plan for recouping your costs? 

Lauralee: This is the first film I have made that I am not financially responsible for, so I can't really answer that. As I say, the exec prod came to me with a set figure and the hopes that I could pull off a feature with it. We employed all the basic tenets of no-budget filmmaking, even though (in order to use Tony and most of our cast) we had to be a SAG signatory.

What camera did you use and what did you love and hate about it?

Lauralee: We bought two Canon 5Ds and borrowed a 7D as well. It was when the 5D was newly out and I think we were one of the first features shot with it. It was a risk back then because very few people were using the 5D for a product that was intended to hold up on a theater-sized screen. We ended up with an amazing look given the cost-point of the camera—I've seen it on large theater complex screens, and it looks amazing.

I started with the intention to have more than one camera and wanted the freedom of shooting in such a way that allowed everyone to keep their full-time jobs, so that meant having full access to the equipment. So, we purchased. Also, we scheduled over half the film with "micro-crews" in order to get authentic moments with a lot of ready-made production value by having a crew of 3-4 people (sometimes with a sound guy in a nearby van). In this case, the camera's low-profile SLR appearance allowed us to keep a relatively small footprint. We were very happy with how the film looked in the end.

Of course, there were challenges--it's a challenging camera to focus, it's not that mobile for hand-held, and it doesn't do very well with contrast, so we ended up with some blown out whites that we were unable to fix in post because there simply was no information there. We owe a great debt of gratitude to our DP Brandon Lippard, our editor Matt Barber, and our colorist Greg King for what they did with the limited resources we had. They made an amazing looking film.

Did the movie change much in the editing process, and if so, how?

Lauralee: As I say, our editor Matt Barber and our colorist Greg King were able to do wonders managing the great amount of footage we had and articulately cutting the film together, and then matching and enhancing that imagery. We all spent a lot of hours together, which was great because I came to love those guys very dearly. I was very lucky to work with this gifted team, and became very attached to them all, including Michelle Garuik who did miracles with the sound. 
We shot and cut basically the film that we wrote, but I ought to acknowledge that we wrote the first draft alongside doing pre-production and wrote throughout shooting to accommodate shifting locations, cast hiccups, etc. I remember losing a location at the last minute and calling Jonathan at work in the middle of a company move to ask, "what will shift if we make Kevork an auto-repair guy instead of a shoe repair guy?" And he rewrote while we were driving to the new location.

And it should be said that the film matured in the editing process because of the music, as always. Our composer David Hlebo's soundtrack was augmented by some very talented local bands who are also friends—Evan Way, the Parson Red Heads, Lauren and Matt Meares, Jeana and Mikey Master, to name a few. The music has been a big hit with festival audiences, and we were privileged to have that kind of talent so generously loaned to us.

What was the smartest thing you did during production? The dumbest?

Lauralee: The smartest thing we did during production was to make the loving treatment of people our first priority. We have a code of honor that we call the Kinema Commonwealth, articulated by our First AD Matt Webb and editor Matt Barber, which calls for three things: the respectful treatment of the story, the creative artists involved (and by that I mean all the filmmaking community) and the community within which the film is shot. We had a reputation for creating a supportive environment, and Tony was a hero as the leading man setting the tone, he was always encouraging and in a great mood.

Conversely, he claims it is the best shooting environment he's ever been in. One of my favorite memories is from after we wrapped: one of the grips texted to say "I started a new show today and the director did not hug ANY OF US!"

We had great food hand-prepared by our Associate Producer Ron Allchin and his team (including his wife Dolores). The night that we wrapped one of the featured actors, he put his head on my shoulder and cried, saying he'd never in his life been treated so well by a film crew. I know the film industry has a reputation for eating its young, but from my perspective that's intolerable. Life is too short to treat people unkindly.

The dumbest thing we did was anything that failed at keeping that respect for people our first priority. I am not saying we always succeeded. But when we didn't, it was our biggest mistake.

And, finally, what did you learn from making the film that you have taken to other projects?

Lauralee: Not That Funny was a terrific experience for me, even though it was a departure from the style of film that I normally make. My creative partner at Burning Heart Productions Tamara Johnston McMahon and I made two sober, thoughtful documentaries before it and now we are working on a very ambitious project called Praying the Hours (www.prayingthehours.com) which is also much less light-hearted than Not That Funny.

But this film taught us a lot about the challenges of making a film that is sweet, humorous, charming. We wanted very much for it not to be a film that was broad humor, but one that left people feeling good and also thinking about what it means to truly love. We have had a great reception from audiences—we've won the audience award several times in festivals.

I am very proud of this little film, and what we were able to do with the resources we had available to us.

Dying to make a feature? Learn from the pros!

"We never put out an actual textbook for the Corman School of Filmmaking, but if we did, it would be Fast, Cheap and Under Control." 
Roger Corman, Producer

★★★★★

It’s like taking a Master Class in moviemaking…all in one book!

• Jonathan Demme: The value of cameos

• John Sayles: Writing to your resources

• Peter Bogdanovich: Long, continuous takes

• John Cassavetes: Re-Shoots

• Steven Soderbergh: Rehearsals

• George Romero: Casting

• Kevin Smith: Skipping film school

• Jon Favreau: Creating an emotional connection

• Richard Linklater: Poverty breeds creativity

• David Lynch: Kill your darlings

• Ron Howard: Pre-production planning

• John Carpenter: Going low-tech

• Robert Rodriguez: Sound thinking

And more!

Write Your Screenplay with the Help of Top Screenwriters!

It’s like taking a Master Class in screenwriting … all in one book!

Discover the pitfalls of writing to fit a budget from screenwriters who have successfully navigated these waters already. Learn from their mistakes and improve your script with their expert advice.

"I wish I'd read this book before I made Re-Animator."
Stuart Gordon, Director, Re-Animator, Castle Freak, From Beyond

John Gaspard has directed half a dozen low-budget features, as well as written for TV, movies, novels and the stage.

The book covers (among other topics):

• Academy-Award Winner Dan Futterman (“Capote”) on writing real stories

• Tom DiCillio (“Living In Oblivion”) on turning a short into a feature

• Kasi Lemmons (“Eve’s Bayou”) on writing for a different time period

• George Romero (“Martin”) on writing horror on a budget

• Rebecca Miller (“Personal Velocity”) on adapting short stories

• Stuart Gordon (“Re-Animator”) on adaptations

• Academy-Award Nominee Whit Stillman (“Metropolitan”) on cheap ways to make it look expensive

• Miranda July (“Me and You and Everyone We Know”) on making your writing spontaneous

• Alex Cox (“Repo Man”) on scaling the script to meet a budget

• Joan Micklin Silver (“Hester Street”) on writing history on a budget

• Bob Clark (“Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things”) on mixing humor and horror

• Amy Holden Jones (“Love Letters”) on writing romance on a budget

• Henry Jaglom (“Venice/Venice”) on mixing improvisation with scripting

• L.M. Kit Carson (“Paris, Texas”) on re-writing while shooting

• Academy-Award Winner Kenneth Lonergan (“You Can Count on Me”) on script editing

• Roger Nygard (“Suckers”) on mixing genres

This is the book for anyone who’s serious about writing a screenplay that can get produced! 

Joe Gold on "Desperate Acts of Magic"

What was your filmmaking background before making "Desperate Acts of Magic"?

JOE: Desperate Acts of Magic is the first feature film that Tammy Caplan (my producing partner and girlfriend) and I directed. But back in 2005, we produced our first feature film, Never Say Macbeth. We asked our friend Chris Prouty to direct that one. Never Say Macbeth went on to do festivals and came out on DVD in 2008 through Vanguard Cinema. We've also made a few shorts. We both have acting backgrounds and degrees in theater.

Where did the idea come from and what was the writing process like?

JOE: I have a background as a magician, and have performed over 500 kids’ birthday parties, and used to compete in magic contests quite a bit. Many of the events in the movie actually happened to me.

Tammy and I were banging our heads against the walls trying to find money for two higher projects that we had written. I was struggling to come up with a new idea, and she suggested I try an acting exercise that we learned from the Pacific Resident Theatre called "A Perfect Scene" where you identify a moment from your life (real or imagined) that you can act out better than anyone else on the planet because it had such a huge impact on you. And I remembered this time that I competed at a magic convention, and the events that transpired there had a huge impact on my future in magic. So, I decided to tell that story. That was February of 2010 when I started writing it.

Meanwhile, I saw that the International Brotherhood of Magicians convention was going to be held that July in San Diego, and I thought If I could write the movie fast enough, we can shoot a lot of it at the convention and we can get locations, extras, and production values for free. I actually thought I might compete in the convention contest for real, and we would just capture it for the movie. I had been inspired by a film called "The New Year Parade" which was a sweet drama about divorce but is shot against the backdrop of the Mummers Parade in Philadelphia. I thought it was a brilliant way to have high production values without paying for them.

Unfortunately, the convention said no, and told me I couldn't shoot any convention activities. But we went anyway, just for one day with a crew of one, and shot tons of b-roll, and some small scenes, especially the scenes in the large dealer's room.

Can you talk about how you raised your budget and your financial plan for recouping your costs?

JOE: We shot a day or two per month for eighteen months, and Tammy and I both kept full time jobs the whole time. So, most of the money came out of our day job money. We would shoot a day, and then save up for the next day. We also kept our living expenses very low and didn't go out much. Meanwhile, we also set up a website with donation buttons, similar to Kickstarter. We did get donations from friends, family, fans of magic, and other supporters of the film. Since it was through our own website (as opposed to Kickstarter), we could keep those donation buttons up during the entire eighteen months of shooting.

As we shot the film, we would meet new people who would become interested and involved with the production, and they might donate or encourage others to donate. Kickstarter is great, but everyone who succeeds tells you it is a full-time job, and we already had full time jobs in addition to making the movie. Ultimately, we raised about $18K from donations.

Right before we released the film, TV producer, Lee Aronsohn, discovered the trailer, saw the donation buttons, and made a deal with us to come on board as an executive producer. He invested some money into our distribution costs. He also gave us some great feedback and guidance to tighten and improve the film. The entire budget was around $77K, plus an additional $60K for marketing and distribution and all of that was spread over three and a half years.

As for recouping our costs, well, we never expected to fully recoup our costs. It's very rare for a film made under $100K to do so. But our revenue is coming from theatrical box office (we released in NYC and L.A., both 4-wall rentals), screening fees from magic clubs, Tugg screenings (we had one successful Tugg screening in Dallas), DVD sales at magic conventions, DVD and poster sales off our website, DVD sales to magic shops, and V.O.D revenue. Gravitas Ventures released our movie on iTunes (in 6 countries) and cable V.O.D. on November 1st. 

How did you and Tammy Caplan share directing duties?

JOE: We both did everything. I was on-camera for most of the scenes ,so Tammy was watching the monitor most of the time. But we both gave notes to the actors, and guidance to the crew. The two of us also handled props, costumes, and production design. And we edited the film as we went. Sometimes, I would start editing a scene, and she would finish it, and vice-versa. Since we were shooting a day or two per month, we were able to edit scenes in between shoots, and see where things weren't working. And then if we needed a pickup, we could grab it at another shoot.

Did Valerie Dillman have magic training before you cast her? If not, what was your process for training her?

JOE: No. Valerie had no magic background. But she's an excellent actress and was excited to learn magic. I had acted in plays with Valerie at the Pacific Resident Theatre. Casting this role, the lead role of Stacy Dietz, the female street magician, was very challenging. There are so few female magicians in the world and even fewer who have an acting background. Due to budget constraints and the long drawn-out schedule, it was challenging to cast a magician outside of the Los Angeles area. So, we took a chance on Valerie, and it worked out very well.

Each month, Tammy and I would brainstorm methods for the magic with our magic consultants, Tony Clark and David Regal. Then we would teach Valerie the magic, and she would practice diligently for each shoot. It helped that we were only shooting a day or two per month. She only had to prepare magic for a few scenes at a time.

What kind of camera did you use to shoot the movie -- and what did you love about it and hate about it? 

JOE: We used the Canon 7D. We loved how small and unobtrusive the camera was. We didn't always have permission for our shoots. So the Canon 7D helped us with our under-the-radar guerilla shooting. We shot at the magic convention, at a hardware store, at a gas station, and in a hotel lobby, all without permission. We could never have done that with a big camera. The negatives are it goes out of focus pretty easily, and it can have a moiré effect, especially with busy patterns on clothing. We also had a dead pixel through almost our entire movie, which we had to painstakingly remove during post.

You wore a lot of hats on this project -- director, writer, producer, actor, editor. What's the upside and the downside of working that way?

JOE: The upside is you have more control over the process. When you hire someone, for props, or costume, or make-up, etc., it's their job to make that aspect the best it can possibly be. And the pay is so low, so the pride in their work is one of the biggest rewards. But sometimes their desire to do a great job can slow down the production and increase costs. They don't always see the big picture, and realize that their perfect prop, costume, or makeup is less important than getting the day in the can. But it's very hard to tell that to the crew member, and you end up having to choose your battles, and lose some of them. So, we didn't have a make-up person, a costume designer, or a props person. We did it ourselves so that we could focus on it when it was important and ignore it when it wasn't.

The downside to that is of course, things get missed. A shirt gets forgotten. Faces get sweaty. (We joked that this movie could be called Sweaty Acts of Magic.) And because I was acting in most scenes, I had to try very hard to stay focused on what I was doing as an actor. I had to struggle to not to think about the stresses that came with my producer hat - like when the owner of the bar we were renting told us in the middle of shooting that we'd have to pay triple if went over-time.

What was the smartest thing you did during production? The dumbest?

JOE: Probably the smartest thing was how we dealt with my car, which got rear-ended and totaled in the middle of production, with one more scene to go. It was an important location. We needed to find a matching titanium-colored 2000 Honda Civic with black stripes on the side. Although this may sound like a common car, it proved to be extremely difficult to find. We tried rental car places, picture car providers, used car lots, and Craigslist, but the car could not be found. Then one day, walking in my neighborhood, I saw an exact match. I ran up to the driver's window at a red light, and banged on his window, freaking out the driver who thought he was being car-jacked. Finally Tammy and I came up with an idea. We had a scene to shoot where we needed six audience members. So we put out a casting notice looking for actors who owned a titanium-colored 2000 Honda Civic with black stripes. Hundreds of actors submitted for the role offering various cars, including a blue Jaguar. Ultimately only one actor had an exact match and she was cast. But as backup, the other five audience members were all cast based on their similar colored cars.

A dumb thing we did was to shoot our three-shell game scene near an A.T.M. machine. Customers kept using the A.T.M. machine and there was a constant BEEPing that we couldn't shoot around. When we scouted the location, we should have listened more carefully. The beeping was a real challenge in editing. We didn't get a permit for that scene (or any scene for that matter). And we probably should have gotten a permit or shot in a more populated area. We only had a couple extras. That scene looks like the three-shell game hustler picked a rather secluded location to run his game, which doesn't make a lot of sense.

And, finally, what did you learn from making the film that you have taken to other projects?

JOE: We were really happy that we made a movie that a core group of people (magicians and magic fans) really want to see. And I always kept that audience in mind while making the movie. That's why we didn't use any special effects. That's why we avoided cutting in the middle of a magic effect. And that's why we cast a lot of well-known magicians (at least they are well known in the magic community).

By doing that, we had a real target audience that we could market the movie to, and because they have magazines, websites, stores, conventions, and organizations devoted to magic, it was cost effective to market to them. In other words, they were easy to find. So, on my next project, I will hopefully be able to identify the target audience for the film before we start shooting.

And if I cannot find that target audience, then I better keep my budget ridiculously low.

Dying to make a feature? Learn from the pros!

"We never put out an actual textbook for the Corman School of Filmmaking, but if we did, it would be Fast, Cheap and Under Control." 
Roger Corman, Producer

★★★★★

It’s like taking a Master Class in moviemaking…all in one book!

• Jonathan Demme: The value of cameos

• John Sayles: Writing to your resources

• Peter Bogdanovich: Long, continuous takes

• John Cassavetes: Re-Shoots

• Steven Soderbergh: Rehearsals

• George Romero: Casting

• Kevin Smith: Skipping film school

• Jon Favreau: Creating an emotional connection

• Richard Linklater: Poverty breeds creativity

• David Lynch: Kill your darlings

• Ron Howard: Pre-production planning

• John Carpenter: Going low-tech

• Robert Rodriguez: Sound thinking

And more!

Write Your Screenplay with the Help of Top Screenwriters!

It’s like taking a Master Class in screenwriting … all in one book!

Discover the pitfalls of writing to fit a budget from screenwriters who have successfully navigated these waters already. Learn from their mistakes and improve your script with their expert advice.

"I wish I'd read this book before I made Re-Animator."
Stuart Gordon, Director, Re-Animator, Castle Freak, From Beyond

John Gaspard has directed half a dozen low-budget features, as well as written for TV, movies, novels and the stage.

The book covers (among other topics):

• Academy-Award Winner Dan Futterman (“Capote”) on writing real stories

• Tom DiCillio (“Living In Oblivion”) on turning a short into a feature

• Kasi Lemmons (“Eve’s Bayou”) on writing for a different time period

• George Romero (“Martin”) on writing horror on a budget

• Rebecca Miller (“Personal Velocity”) on adapting short stories

• Stuart Gordon (“Re-Animator”) on adaptations

• Academy-Award Nominee Whit Stillman (“Metropolitan”) on cheap ways to make it look expensive

• Miranda July (“Me and You and Everyone We Know”) on making your writing spontaneous

• Alex Cox (“Repo Man”) on scaling the script to meet a budget

• Joan Micklin Silver (“Hester Street”) on writing history on a budget

• Bob Clark (“Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things”) on mixing humor and horror

• Amy Holden Jones (“Love Letters”) on writing romance on a budget

• Henry Jaglom (“Venice/Venice”) on mixing improvisation with scripting

• L.M. Kit Carson (“Paris, Texas”) on re-writing while shooting

• Academy-Award Winner Kenneth Lonergan (“You Can Count on Me”) on script editing

• Roger Nygard (“Suckers”) on mixing genres

This is the book for anyone who’s serious about writing a screenplay that can get produced! 

Jenny Abel on "Abel Raises Cain"

What was your filmmaking background before setting out to make "Abel Raises Cain"?

JENNY: This was my first feature film project, so I literally learned filmmaking on the job. Thankfully, I was able to gain some digital experience while I was at Emerson College as a video major, since the digital age was just taking off then. After I graduated, I decided to move to Los Angeles and look for work in the film and commercial industry.

Moving up the ladder from P.A. to Production Coordinator on various shows, the cumulative experience of working in the field became so valuable to the process of making my own film. Production is all about problem solving, organization and efficiency. DIY filmmaking comes naturally to those non-delegator types who enjoy micro-managing to an insane degree. That pretty much describes me! It takes an embarrassingly long time to get a film made working this way, on your own, especially when you don't have much previous experience. But it is possible to do it.

I can't take all of the credit, however. My boyfriend came onto the project toward the end, and we finished the film together. With his extensive TV news and editing background, he brought with him a way higher production value and without his creative sense, the quality of our movie would have undoubtedly suffered.

What's the upside and downside about making a movie about a family member?

JENNY: Where do I begin? My proximity to the subjects allowed for an intimacy that no one outside of our family could have captured. The funny thing was that even though I was my parents' only audience behind the lens, they still hammed it up. It took a long time for them to finally relax that tendency to 'perform' for the camera.

I can't imagine a crew of strangers attempting to capture the daily lives of Alan and Jeanne Abel. I was really the only one qualified for the job, although my father compared my following him around incessantly with a camera to getting a colonoscopy. And as a retaliatory measure, he mooned me one unsuspecting afternoon on the road somewhere in the middle of Pennsylvania. It was an eyeful that I would rather not remember. I don't think he would have done that to a director whom he wasn't related to. But then again, this is Alan Abel we're talking about here. So maybe he would have.

The documentary brought my family closer together in the end, but it was challenging at times. I have a very proactive father who wanted to be involved in every aspect of the film, from resurrecting cutting room floor material to soliciting distributors. Sometimes there were too many cooks in the kitchen, as they say! Some of the decisions I made, my parents did not agree with. But they were excited for us - and so were we - when things started to take off with the movie.

The roller coaster ride began with our winning the grand jury prize at Slamdance. It was pretty thrilling for us to go up on stage and receive the award alongside of my father. The documentary was the ultimate way to preserve his legacy. My parents experienced a rebirth as a whole new generation of fans were now discovering their work. This culmination point, which was a catharsis for me, also marked the beginning of a new chapter in their lives. That sense of fulfillment for all of us is indescribable.

Can you talk about how you raised your budget and your financial plan for distribution and recouping your costs?

JENNY: I initially applied for grants and I solicited funding from friends and fans of my father. I cut together a promo reel and sent out copies of it along with a publicity packet via snail mail. The targeted mail campaign was more successful than the blind application grant-seeking process. Grant-writing is a specialty unto itself and not exactly my forte. I kind of gave up on it, realizing that fundraising was taking time away from actual production. I only wish that Kickstarter or Indiegogo were around when I started this project!

Sadly, I went broke making the movie because I poured my own savings into it. The long and the short of it... there was no plan! I winged it the whole way though, financially speaking. I really had no idea what I was getting myself into. Between equipment purchases, deliverables, legal costs, festival submission fees, etc. we are talking tens of thousands of dollars right out the window. Even with sales to overseas TV channels and multi-platform digital distribution in the U.S. earning decent returns, we still have not recouped our total costs. Making a documentary guarantees you're pretty much already operating at a loss even before you've shot one frame. 

What camera(s) did you use and what did you love and hate about it?

JENNY: We shot the documentary on the now-defunct former 'high-end' prosumer camera, the Canon XL1. What I liked about it was that it had the option of creating a more filmlike look when shooting in 'frame' mode - only one field per frame as opposed to two. The effect was a softer warmer quality as opposed to the cold crispness of standard definition video.

In terms of audio recording, there were not a lot of options. I was too cheap to invest in or rent real XLR microphones. We ended up plugging in a mini jack external mic and using a crappy mic stand that always seemed to sneak into our shots. This was guerilla filmmaking at its best - no resources and no budget! But, all in all, the XL1 got us through the project and for that, I'm grateful. It's sitting in my closet now, in fact, and I don't know what to do with it. 

How long did shooting take and did your vision for the movie change much during the shooting and editing process?

JENNY: It seemed like an epic adventure. The downfall of shooting video is never knowing when to quit. It was five years of actual production, with two of those years in post. Editing in our own living room was a dream come true. FCP really opened up a whole new world of possibilities. A decade previously, we would have had to have rented an Avid suite and it would have been incredibly cost-prohibitive.

The vision definitely morphed as Jeff and I worked on the film together. Major pieces of the puzzle had to be taken apart and put back together again multiple times before it seemed right. We wanted to avoid too many talking heads as well as staying chronological with content. The 'a-ha' moment came when we realized the story should be told through my POV, giving the documentary a personal touch and providing a true insider view into the madness of my father.

On the flip side, we knew that this could not just be a film about Alan Abel's pranks. There needed to be more depth. So we interjected elements of the love story between my parents and their financial struggles along the way. We debated whether or not to include the latter depressing stuff, but realized that the pathos was necessary to counter-balance the friviolity of the pranks.

What was the smartest thing you did during production? The dumbest?

JENNY: Taking classes at Moviola in Hollywood to learn Final Cut Pro was the smartest thing I could have ever done. It permitted us to edit the movie without too many technical glitches because I learned the idiosyncrasies of the program and how to avoid disasters with media management.

There really are no dumb mistakes when you make your first movie, because the mistakes are necessary to learn from. That's why it's a process that cannot be rushed. We compromised the quality to meet several deadlines along the way, which is easy to do with festival submissions. You want so badly for your movie to get into a top level fest, but then you hand over the latest version with sloppy mistakes. In retrospect, I may have wasted money on some festival fees that were a long shot but, like they say about the lottery, "you have to play to win." And sometimes my scattershot approach paid off.

And, finally, what did you learn from making the film that you have taken to other projects?

JENNY: I have become hyper-aware of the fact that filmmaking is a process comparable to raising a child. It requires a tremendous amount of patience and nurturing. I don't think that I had realistic expectations going into the project in terms of just how much time would be involved not only in the completion of the film itself, but in the distribution end.

But having said that, I learned that passion goes a long way. I just have to find another film subject now that I'm equally as passionate about.

Dying to make a feature? Learn from the pros!

"We never put out an actual textbook for the Corman School of Filmmaking, but if we did, it would be Fast, Cheap and Under Control." 
Roger Corman, Producer

★★★★★

It’s like taking a Master Class in moviemaking…all in one book!

• Jonathan Demme: The value of cameos

• John Sayles: Writing to your resources

• Peter Bogdanovich: Long, continuous takes

• John Cassavetes: Re-Shoots

• Steven Soderbergh: Rehearsals

• George Romero: Casting

• Kevin Smith: Skipping film school

• Jon Favreau: Creating an emotional connection

• Richard Linklater: Poverty breeds creativity

• David Lynch: Kill your darlings

• Ron Howard: Pre-production planning

• John Carpenter: Going low-tech

• Robert Rodriguez: Sound thinking

And more!

Write Your Screenplay with the Help of Top Screenwriters!

It’s like taking a Master Class in screenwriting … all in one book!

Discover the pitfalls of writing to fit a budget from screenwriters who have successfully navigated these waters already. Learn from their mistakes and improve your script with their expert advice.

"I wish I'd read this book before I made Re-Animator."
Stuart Gordon, Director, Re-Animator, Castle Freak, From Beyond

John Gaspard has directed half a dozen low-budget features, as well as written for TV, movies, novels and the stage.

The book covers (among other topics):

• Academy-Award Winner Dan Futterman (“Capote”) on writing real stories

• Tom DiCillio (“Living In Oblivion”) on turning a short into a feature

• Kasi Lemmons (“Eve’s Bayou”) on writing for a different time period

• George Romero (“Martin”) on writing horror on a budget

• Rebecca Miller (“Personal Velocity”) on adapting short stories

• Stuart Gordon (“Re-Animator”) on adaptations

• Academy-Award Nominee Whit Stillman (“Metropolitan”) on cheap ways to make it look expensive

• Miranda July (“Me and You and Everyone We Know”) on making your writing spontaneous

• Alex Cox (“Repo Man”) on scaling the script to meet a budget

• Joan Micklin Silver (“Hester Street”) on writing history on a budget

• Bob Clark (“Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things”) on mixing humor and horror

• Amy Holden Jones (“Love Letters”) on writing romance on a budget

• Henry Jaglom (“Venice/Venice”) on mixing improvisation with scripting

• L.M. Kit Carson (“Paris, Texas”) on re-writing while shooting

• Academy-Award Winner Kenneth Lonergan (“You Can Count on Me”) on script editing

• Roger Nygard (“Suckers”) on mixing genres

This is the book for anyone who’s serious about writing a screenplay that can get produced! 

Phoef Sutton on Writing "Cheers" (and more!)

I understand that you wrote and acted in plays in high school and in college. Was that always the goal to be a writer or was acting a goal?

Phoef Sutton: Well, yeah, acting was a goal. When I came out here, I sort of thought I wanted to be a writer or an actor. And I decided I could only take getting rejected in one field at a time. 

And I thought getting rejected as a writer was more pleasant, because they don't do it to your face. I just didn't get any traction as an actor. I'm really glad that I did it when I did it, because it's very helpful for a screenwriter or television writer to have acted—to have known what it's like to be on the stage and to have to say the words. I can communicate with actors, I think, a little bit better than a lot of other showrunners who've just been writers. Because I know what it's like. I can understand that.  

And also, I think I learned—maybe from being an actor or being around actors—I learned how to write for particular people. I mean, when I know a person and I know their voice and I know what they feel. I could write for Treat Williams. I could write for Bob Newhart. I could write for Brian Dennehy. They have different cadences, different ways of speaking. Ted Danson, Kelsey Grammer, Woody Harrelson. And I was able to do that. So that stood me in good stead.  

And also, being a playwright, I mean, there aren't very many writers who start as playwrights nowadays. I think, just because there isn't really much theater in this country, or at least not in this city anyway. And I was in plays I wrote, too, so, I mean, there you have nobody to blame but yourself. You can't say, “Who wrote this shit,” or, “That actor screwed it up.”  

And the first thing that I did professionally—aside from some plays in regional theaters, where I got paid a stipend—was Cheers. And that was basically a play: the entrances, exits, one set, all that. And all the actors were theater actors. It was a play.  

They do stage plays of various sitcoms over the years. They've done The Golden Girls and all that. And I'm surprised they haven't done one of Cheers, because it's a play. 

And that set, that beautiful set, which was designed by Richard Sylbert, who did Chinatown and all sorts of other movies. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. It was a beautiful set. It was a beautiful set. So many episodes of Cheers were just on the set. I mean, we're just on the bar, never left the bar. Never even changed days, because we found that when we filmed in front of an audience on Tuesday nights—and we filmed pretty much the whole thing in front of an audience—we found that (this was later on in the run), we found that when we would have them change their costumes to be a day later, you could never get them (the actors) back. They would go to the dressing rooms, they would start playing foosball, smoking pot, and you could never get them back.  

So, there are plenty of episodes of Cheers that take place in one day that couldn't possibly have taken place in one day. But we just figured, we don't want to do the costume changes.

I remember hearing an interview with (director) Jim Burrows where he talked about Norm's entrance in the pilot. And he said he felt bad for the writers, because in the blocking, he put Norm at the far end of the bar. Which meant every time Norm came in, you guys needed to write a joke to get him across the room.

Phoef Sutton: Well, it was one of the trademarks of the show. And so, it was good in that sense. But yes, and everyone had to top the one before. At first, there were very simple jokes. But then they had to be, you know, very complex jokes or philosophical jokes.

We would go to great lengths not to have Norm enter; we would have Norm there at the beginning of the show. We didn't want to deal with it.  

I wanted to do an episode where they put in a new parking meter in front of the place. So, he had to constantly go and feed the meter. So, there would be like ten Norm entrances in it. And people wanted to kill me for doing that.

Let's just back up real quick here. I want to talk about your playwriting, because I know you had sort of a learning experience, you got an understanding of how the business works with your play Burial Customs. About how things look like they're going to happen. And then they don't happen.

Phoef Sutton: I was just out of graduate school at the University of Florida, and I moved to New York for a brief period of time. I couldn't really get in, couldn't get an apartment, couldn't get a job. But there was a brief period of time when Ulu Grossbard, who was a big director, wanted to direct that play. And it was very exciting. 

If I'd known more about the business, I would have been more excited [LAUGHS] because he just done Crimes of the Heart on Broadway. And he was really, really big and he was really into the play. I went to his office on—I don't know, on Times Square or something like that, I don't know where it was—but I felt like I was a part of the Broadway scene. 

And then he just sort of lost interest and it went away.

And that sort of thing happens over and over and over again with people in the business. Even if you're very successful, there are millions of times when things look like they're going to be great and then they fall apart.  

And my initial reaction to that was to say, “I'm not going to get excited about anything until it's real. Until it's really happening.” So that if I sold a script, a pilot script, I wouldn't get excited until they agreed to make the pilot. And then when they did the pilot, I wouldn't get excited until it was on the air. And then when it was on the air, I wouldn't get excited until it lasted. And then I realized that I was putting myself in a position where I never got excited about anything. 

So, then I changed my attitude to get excited about every little victory of what comes on. I was right to be excited about Ulu Grossbard doing the play. It was a wonderful opportunity. It didn't pan out. There was nothing wrong with being excited.  

You know, you aren't punished for being excited about something that doesn't come to the ultimate conclusion. I mean, even when we won our Emmys for Cheers, I basically wouldn't be excited, because I would think, “Well, I’ve got to go back there tomorrow and do it again.” 

So now I allow myself to be excited about things.

That's a very good lesson to learn. To find that balance.

Phoef Sutton: It’s a hard lesson to learn.

So, what happened with playwriting that got you into TV writing? What was that connection?

Phoef Sutton: I wanted to write for movies. I wanted to write for movies and I wanted to write for television. I wanted to write for theater and I wanted to write books. I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be a writer, in one form or another.  

So, as I said, I couldn't get into New York. I couldn't get a job, couldn't get an apartment. And in LA, I had a relative that I could stay with. And my brother was with the Crown Books chain. So, I knew I could get a clerk job at a Crown Bookstore. I knew I could get a job.  

So, I moved to LA with my then fiancé. And I just wrote plays, wrote screenplays. I had a friend from college, Barbara Hall, who was on Newhart at the time. She's since gone on to do everything. She did Madam Secretary and I'll Fly Away and all that.  

And so I wrote a spec Newhart (script), because she was on Newhart. And that was what got me the freelance Cheers job. 

I didn't know anything about writing for television. I didn't know anything about writing with a group, writing with a room. I was a very private writer, wrote by myself, didn't talk to anybody about what I was writing until it was done. So, I had to learn all that stuff. 

I had to learn how to pitch. I had to learn how to pitch in the room during the rewrites. It was really my graduate school, Cheers. And it was a good graduate school, because obviously there were the best writers in the business on that show.

So, you're learning from some really, really good people.

Phoef Sutton: Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. And it was very tense. It was very stressful. It was a hard room.

Why was it hard?

Phoef Sutton: Well, because you had to be funny. You had to be good. You had to say the right thing. You had to do it. I mean, there were long silences in the room, where people were thinking and crafting and doing stuff, and trying to do it. 

I didn't speak for the first six months in the room, I think. And I think that was probably a good choice. Because the year I joined the staff, two other writers joined the staff too. And I was the only one who made it all the way through the year. They were both let go. And I think part of the reason was that I knew my place. [LAUGHS] 

I didn't talk first. And then I would try a few jokes and they got laughs. I would try a few more jokes and they would get laughs. And then before you know it, you're doing it and you're just in the zone. It's a difficult thing to describe.

Were you breaking stories as a group?

Phoef Sutton: Yeah. Oh yeah. Every story on that show was broken as a group. We never came in with a story.  

At the beginning of each season, Glen and Les (Charles) would come in and we would talk about what to do. And it was very clear that they hadn't thought about it for an instant over the break. And everything was, you know, what do we do? What do we do? What do we do?  

And nobody—no freelancer, no staff writer, no producer—nobody ever came in and said, “I've got a story,” and pitched it. Everything was pitched in the room. And when a story is being pitched and formed and all that sort of thing, at some point—in the early stages—you would get assigned it or another writer would get assigned it. That was the way it worked.

What did you learn about story in that process?

Phoef Sutton: Well, I mean, you learned everything.  

I mean, obviously the stories for a sitcom, particularly a sitcom like Cheers, are fairly simple: There's a problem that's presented. Halfway through, it takes a turn and then it's resolved. [LAUGHS] And usually—for the first five years of the show—it’s getting resolved involved something to do with Diane, because she was pivotal.  

But I think more what I learned was that when you're first a writer and you write something—and it's good, it's bad, whatever—you generally think, “Well, that's it, that's what it is, and I can't come up with anything else. That’s what it is.” 

And when people give you notes or object to it, you resist the notes. And the main reason you resist the notes, I think, is that you can't think how to change it. You can't figure out anything different. And I just learned very early on that there's always a different way to do something. Anything, anything. Nothing is perfect. Everything—always—has a different way to go. There's always a different way to look at it. Always a different approach to take to it.  

And maybe that approach won't be better. Maybe it'll be a linear move. Maybe it'll be worse. On Cheers, it was almost always better. It almost always got better. I'd say it always got better in the room.

Cheers is well known for—unlike other series where major cast members left—you guys handled it better than anyone ever. Do you have any idea what was the magic powder that made it work where you guys did it?

Phoef Sutton: Well, there were a couple of things. First of all, the cast always changed. The cast was always changing. It was never the same. I mean, there were the people who were replaced, left and were replaced. But there were also the people who came in. Frasier, Lilith.  

One of the reasons the show lasted as long as it did was that when you were writing, if you were writing year eight, it was a way different show from when we were writing year three. A very different cast.  

I'd say the biggest thing that I learned—and I got to do this, because on Chesapeake Shores, we lost the star of the show too, and I had to replace him—was just to make the character as different as possible from the one you're replacing. So that nobody thinks, “Oh, this guy isn't as good as that guy,” or, “This girl is not the same thing as that.” 

When Coach died and they brought in Woody, there was still the dumb aspect of him. But in general, he was a very different character. He was a young character. He was a naive character. He was from the Midwest. Whereas Coach had been from Sam's life, and he was a ball player, and he was kind of old and kind of brain damaged from getting hit in the head with balls. And they were very different. 

When Rebecca came in, they made her a completely different character. And one of the reasons they were able to do that was, I think, just luck. Because they had the character of Frasier. And so much of the show was the intellectual versus the blue-collar type people. And Frasier was able to take that on. He had already taken it on from Diane, but he was able to take that on entirely.  

So, the new character didn't have to be an intellectual type, snobby type. What was originally intended was a hard-nosed businessman who clashed with Sam. It didn't actually turn out that way. She turned out to be more of a basket case, but that was because of the actress and playing to the actress's strengths.  

And that, I think, is the main thing I learned from that. Because really, when Diane left the show, the show had been on for five years, which is the run of most shows. No show had really survived the loss of its star and she really was the star. I mean, she was the pivotal point of every episode. She was the one, the audience was coming into the bar and seeing it through her eyes. Ted was certainly the costar, but she was really the focal point of the show. So, when she left, we were really scared. We did not know whether it was going to work. 

And the show shifted then, because it became much more of an ensemble show, because Kirstie—although she was a wonderful actress—she wasn't quite the dominant force that Shelley Long had been. The show really became about Sam and the bar. It had been moving that way already, but it became that way. 

If you were to describe the show when it first started, it would surely have been: it's a love story between Sam and Diane and will they get together or not? And then it became a show about a bar, about the patrons of a bar and their lives.

I think there's a really good lesson in your story about your first year on Cheers, where you didn't say much, and you just absorbed.

Phoef Sutton: I think the world would be greatly improved if people didn't say so much. People talk way too much. You know, there's that old saying, I don't know who said it, Mark Twain or whoever: “Better to be silent and thought a fool than to speak up and prove it.” Just don't talk. [LAUGHS] Just take it in. Be the strong, silent type. [LAUGHS]

Dying to make a feature? Learn from the pros!

"We never put out an actual textbook for the Corman School of Filmmaking, but if we did, it would be Fast, Cheap and Under Control." 
Roger Corman, Producer

★★★★★

It’s like taking a Master Class in moviemaking…all in one book!

• Jonathan Demme: The value of cameos

• John Sayles: Writing to your resources

• Peter Bogdanovich: Long, continuous takes

• John Cassavetes: Re-Shoots

• Steven Soderbergh: Rehearsals

• George Romero: Casting

• Kevin Smith: Skipping film school

• Jon Favreau: Creating an emotional connection

• Richard Linklater: Poverty breeds creativity

• David Lynch: Kill your darlings

• Ron Howard: Pre-production planning

• John Carpenter: Going low-tech

• Robert Rodriguez: Sound thinking

And more!

Write Your Screenplay with the Help of Top Screenwriters!

It’s like taking a Master Class in screenwriting … all in one book!

Discover the pitfalls of writing to fit a budget from screenwriters who have successfully navigated these waters already. Learn from their mistakes and improve your script with their expert advice.

"I wish I'd read this book before I made Re-Animator."
Stuart Gordon, Director, Re-Animator, Castle Freak, From Beyond

John Gaspard has directed half a dozen low-budget features, as well as written for TV, movies, novels and the stage.

The book covers (among other topics):

• Academy-Award Winner Dan Futterman (“Capote”) on writing real stories

• Tom DiCillio (“Living In Oblivion”) on turning a short into a feature

• Kasi Lemmons (“Eve’s Bayou”) on writing for a different time period

• George Romero (“Martin”) on writing horror on a budget

• Rebecca Miller (“Personal Velocity”) on adapting short stories

• Stuart Gordon (“Re-Animator”) on adaptations

• Academy-Award Nominee Whit Stillman (“Metropolitan”) on cheap ways to make it look expensive

• Miranda July (“Me and You and Everyone We Know”) on making your writing spontaneous

• Alex Cox (“Repo Man”) on scaling the script to meet a budget

• Joan Micklin Silver (“Hester Street”) on writing history on a budget

• Bob Clark (“Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things”) on mixing humor and horror

• Amy Holden Jones (“Love Letters”) on writing romance on a budget

• Henry Jaglom (“Venice/Venice”) on mixing improvisation with scripting

• L.M. Kit Carson (“Paris, Texas”) on re-writing while shooting

• Academy-Award Winner Kenneth Lonergan (“You Can Count on Me”) on script editing

• Roger Nygard (“Suckers”) on mixing genres

This is the book for anyone who’s serious about writing a screenplay that can get produced! 

Jared Moshe on "Dead Man's Burden"

What was your filmmaking background before setting out to make "Dead Man's Burden"?

I'd produced a number of independent films and documentaries including "Corman's World," "Silver Tongues," "Beautiful Losers" and "Kurt Cobain About a Son." "Dead Man's Burden" is my first time behind the camera as a writer/director though. I had never really directed shorts or plays or anything else.

Where did the idea come from and what was the writing process like?

The idea for "Dead Man's Burden" came from the 150th anniversary of the Civil War.  After the War, America manufactured the Western as a myth to reunite the North and the South by looking west for a fresh start. The result was we whitewashed over a lot of wounds and left them festering beneath the surface. I wanted to tell a story that explores those wounds.

The writing process was fast - the first draft was finished in a month. The reason it was fast was I sat down to write knowing  I wanted to make the film by the end of the year come hell or high-water. So I seized on my experiences as a producer to create certain rules that would allow me to do period drama for a budget. Limited locations, cast, extras, etc. But as much as you can make rules a script will take on a life of its own. As I wrote I came to realize that the choices I wanted the characters to make were not necessarily the choices they would make. In the end, what was supposed to be a story of reunification became a tragedy of ideology.

Why did you decide to tackle a western and what do you think were the pros and cons of that decision?

I love Westerns, and in stepping behind the camera for the first time there was no question in my mind on the genre. In this industry you better make what you love because you never know if you're going to get another chance. What I didn't realize was that making a western was living a western. We shot on location at the end of a two-mile dirt road that became a mud pit every time it rained. There was no cell phone reception, a limited amount of film, and I had to figure out how to be timely and efficient in directing actors in period costumes, who were riding horses, shooting guns and doing some of their own stunts. Thankfully I had an incredibly talented and dedicated cast and crew, and together we overcame everything that was thrown at us.

Can you talk about how you raised your budget and your financial plan for distribution and recouping your costs? 

When we set out to raise our budget my producer Veronica Nickel and I agreed on a strategy to keep the costs low as the market for independent films is soft, and we wanted to give our investors the best chance of recoupment. At the same time we understood that there is a large market for westerns in the US, and it's an underserved market, so we knew we had a core audience we could reach. We did as much research as we could to get numbers on recently released westerns (both in theaters and on DVD) and used that to come up with what we thought was a reasonable budget level. With my background as a producer I had investors I worked with before, and Veronica and my other producers were able to put together the rest of the budget using private equity and the New Mexico tax incentives. Once the film was in the can we had a team working hard on outreach to the Western loving audiences so that when our sales agent Josh Braun brought the film to market at Los Angeles Film Festival we had information we could present about who would see this film and how to reach them.

What camera(s) did you use and what did you love and hate about it?

We used a single Panavision Platinum 2-perf 35mm camera with a Panaflex G2 as a backup. I loved that we were shooting film. In fact that was one of the most important decisions I made early on in the process. We were going to shoot 35mm no matter what. As much as I think HD can create beautiful images, it lacks the ability to capture the depth and scope of landscapes, and in any good western the landscape is a character. In our case the endless the landscape offered a sense of hope, a blank canvas where our characters could re-create their lives, but it was also a mote that kept Martha and Heck isolated away from the world. To have not captured it on film would have been to shoot ourselves in the foot from day one. Of course the downside of shooting on film is that you have to be incredibly frugal in your set ups, number of takes and how long you let the camera roll. I can't tell you how many times I wished I had extra film to get one more angle or additional b-roll. 

How did you and your DP, Robert Hauer, decide on (and execute) the look of the movie?

We really wanted a look that respects the rich history of the Western. First and foremost that meant shooting on 35mm film. We chose 2 perf 35mm because that created a natural widescreen look. Second it meant seizing on the tropes of the genre. Rob and I both indulged in watching numerous westerns: "High Noon," "Unforgiven," "Once Upon a Time in the West," and most importantly "The Searchers" as I wanted "Dead Man's Burden" to be a film that evoked John Ford. At the same time we needed to make the look work for the modern eye, and to that end Rob and I decided to embrace everything that was natural about our location; capturing the harshness of the light and the landscape which contrasted with the warm tones that were natural to the environment. 

How did the movie change in the editing and why did you feel the changes were important?

The biggest change in the edit involved the structure of the first act. In the script I really established Martha and her world before introducing Wade. In the finished film although we see Martha in the opening, Wade is the first character we really get to know. What this accomplished was to establish Martha and Wade as equally important to the story and not favor one over the other. The reason why this change was important is that I want my audience to come away identifying two very different points of view. The tragedy of "Dead Man's Burden" is that both Wade and Martha are very right and very wrong in their beliefs and the question that drives the film is: will they be able to see past their differences.

What was the smartest thing you did during production? The dumbest?

The smartest thing I did during production was to put together a talented team of collaborators who I trusted to help me learn what I didn't know and enhance my vision for the film. Given that we were such a low budget production I knew we had limited time on set so it was incredibly important to get my key cast and crew on board as early as possible. This allowed for everyone to discuss and share ideas before we got into the hurried and stressful on-set environment, and it allowed for my collaborators to take a sense of ownership in the film.

The dumbest thing I did was probably choose to step behind the camera for the first time ever -  I hadn't made shorts or directed plays or actors before this - and go make a period piece shot on location and on film, with horses, guns and stunts, and do it all in 18 days on a shoestring budget.

And, finally, what did you learn from making the film that you have taken to other projects?

What didn't I learn from making this film? I tend to believe you're always learning if you're willing to listen and after "Dead Man's Burden" I have a better understanding of how to embrace the realism of production design from Ruth De Jong; how light can enhance character thanks to Rob Hauer; how fabrics make a costume thanks to Courtney Hoffman; how a cut can twist a point of view thanks to Jeff Israel; and, well, the list goes on and on. Everything I've learned I hope will make me a better collaborator on the next film.

Dying to make a feature? Learn from the pros!

"We never put out an actual textbook for the Corman School of Filmmaking, but if we did, it would be Fast, Cheap and Under Control." 
Roger Corman, Producer

★★★★★

It’s like taking a Master Class in moviemaking…all in one book!

• Jonathan Demme: The value of cameos

• John Sayles: Writing to your resources

• Peter Bogdanovich: Long, continuous takes

• John Cassavetes: Re-Shoots

• Steven Soderbergh: Rehearsals

• George Romero: Casting

• Kevin Smith: Skipping film school

• Jon Favreau: Creating an emotional connection

• Richard Linklater: Poverty breeds creativity

• David Lynch: Kill your darlings

• Ron Howard: Pre-production planning

• John Carpenter: Going low-tech

• Robert Rodriguez: Sound thinking

And more!

Write Your Screenplay with the Help of Top Screenwriters!

It’s like taking a Master Class in screenwriting … all in one book!

Discover the pitfalls of writing to fit a budget from screenwriters who have successfully navigated these waters already. Learn from their mistakes and improve your script with their expert advice.

"I wish I'd read this book before I made Re-Animator."
Stuart Gordon, Director, Re-Animator, Castle Freak, From Beyond

John Gaspard has directed half a dozen low-budget features, as well as written for TV, movies, novels and the stage.

The book covers (among other topics):

• Academy-Award Winner Dan Futterman (“Capote”) on writing real stories

• Tom DiCillio (“Living In Oblivion”) on turning a short into a feature

• Kasi Lemmons (“Eve’s Bayou”) on writing for a different time period

• George Romero (“Martin”) on writing horror on a budget

• Rebecca Miller (“Personal Velocity”) on adapting short stories

• Stuart Gordon (“Re-Animator”) on adaptations

• Academy-Award Nominee Whit Stillman (“Metropolitan”) on cheap ways to make it look expensive

• Miranda July (“Me and You and Everyone We Know”) on making your writing spontaneous

• Alex Cox (“Repo Man”) on scaling the script to meet a budget

• Joan Micklin Silver (“Hester Street”) on writing history on a budget

• Bob Clark (“Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things”) on mixing humor and horror

• Amy Holden Jones (“Love Letters”) on writing romance on a budget

• Henry Jaglom (“Venice/Venice”) on mixing improvisation with scripting

• L.M. Kit Carson (“Paris, Texas”) on re-writing while shooting

• Academy-Award Winner Kenneth Lonergan (“You Can Count on Me”) on script editing

• Roger Nygard (“Suckers”) on mixing genres

This is the book for anyone who’s serious about writing a screenplay that can get produced! 

Jason Christopher on “Nobody Gets Out Alive”

What was your filmmaking background before setting out to make "Nobody Gets Out Alive"?

I always filmed stuff when I was a kid. I don't have those Super 8 Spielberg stories but I got those Handy Cam stories, ha. My producer Deven Lobascio and I did this movie that was called BarRats when I was like 10 and he was like 8 haha. I was obsessed with Mallrats. My parents were cool and let me watch whatever I wanted pretty much besides the nudity...had to close the eyes for that. I filmed a few movie stuff with friends and my brother around the neighborhood. I did my first serious thing when I was 17. My film study teacher asked me to submit a video for a film festival, cause I took the class seriously. Turned it in and I got sent to the guidance counselor and expelled from school for making things too ahead of my time and too violent. (My brother who plays the main in it shoots himself at the end and blood sprays everywhere) it was awesome. When I was like 20, I think, I made this pretty cool short that I did all seriously. Then reunited with Deven and we made this no budget flick called The Pendant, people really dug it. We sold out the local theater 187 seats and turned away 200 people. It was a great feeling so after that Deven asked if I had any scripts. That script was called Down The Road. (original title of Nobody Gets Out Alive) Now that flick has like 3 names people know it by, so annoying. Originally Down The Road, other territories Punishment, and in the US Nobody Gets Out Alive. 

Where did the idea come from and what was your process for working on  the script? 

I always wanted to write a script, a throwback, to those 70's and 80's genre horror flicks. They're the only kind I watched when I was a kid. Unfortunately, I was born in '87 so I didn't get to see them first hand. They're the only ones that stuck with me until Scream came out. It wasn't until my father died from a freak accident when I was 17 that I was like all right...I'm going to personally kill someone myself (from anger) or I'm going to write a script. I wrote the first draft when I was 17 years old (2005) and it went through drafts all the way up to filming in 2010.

Can you talk about how you raised your budget and your financial plan for recouping your costs? 

My producer found a majority of the money. I found a some of the budget. We had investor meetings and stuff and a lot of them fell out. Only one came through and gave a nice bit. We were stuck for a bit then we did the unexpected...we asked our family. It was so crazy how easy it was to get the rest of the budget from our family members. I thought it was going to be really hard because I don't come from a rich family or anything like that but the people we asked they were so for it and more. It was amazing. I definitely recommend other people to try that for their first flick. My family understood this is the only thing I was good at though, haha.

What camera did you use and what did you love and hate about it?

We used the Red Camera for camera a and camera b was the Canon 7D. Unfortunately, I'll probably never get to make a movie shooting on film. I love the look of film. Digital cameras leave this milky look. There's only a couple flicks I know that were shot on a Red and don't look milky. I didn't want that with ours. I threw a ton of grain on the flick, really set you back more to that 70's and 80's vibe I was going for. It's really cool though in post. There'd be some moments on set where the DP was like, just punch in closer in editing if you want a tighter shot. I was like get the hell out of here. But in post I tried it and with the resolution those cameras have, you could never even tell.

Did the movie change much in the editing process, and if so, how?

The original cut of the movie was like 87 minutes long and we shrunk it down to 78 minutes for the final cut. Some scenes just dragged on or didn't really fit with the tone of the flick. I edit my own stuff too and I used to be a control freak about nobody else helping me edit. I'm an idiot and my color corrector who is also a great editor did another cut, making things sharper, switching some things, and I couldn't be happier. He'll definitely be my editing partner from here on out. We share the same taste of a lot of things and it's just really great to have another eye.

How did you find distribution for the movie and what was that process like?

We knew we had to get the money back to the investors, family or not, not paying someone back is the absolutely worst. I wanted to tour the movie first. Nowadays YOU yourself have to build an audience. The system isn't how it used to be. I didn't want to just start looking for a distributor right away. We toured the flick to I think, close to 20 film festivals. Nothing big but they're film festivals with a small audience...even if two people watched it, that's two more people who know about the flick. Deven and I won two best feature awards, I won a best director award, and actor Brian Gallagher (who plays the villain Hunter Isth) got a best actor award. Those things would've never happened if we went straight to a distributor. We wanted to build buzz first. We sent it to a few distributors and just never heard back. We got a sales rep and that was another smart move. They sold the movie to 12 territories...like Germany? If we didn't have a sales rep that would've never happened. It was funny though, our US distributor we have now was one company that never got back to us but when our sales reps sent it they got right back to them. Companies seem to take you more seriously if you have one. So far they have me smiling. 

What was the smartest thing you did during production? The dumbest?

The smartest thing was getting as much as I could've with the access I had. I couldn't get into college so I went to movies. I went with my gut instinct. I went with my eye. I learned so much though. The dumbest thing I did was not be too demanding. I'm such a down to earth dude and like to make everything fun in the long run but when filming this flick, it was the first legit thing I ever did, so I was too nice. I got screwed for some shots I wanted and stuff. On the next flick, that's not happening. I always felt that the no budget flick I did with Deven was our high school movie, Nobody Gets Out Alive is our college movie, and the next one is going to be the first movie. Does that make sense?

And, finally, what did you learn from making the film that you have taken to other projects?

I learned about being responsible, being organized, and being planned. If you don't have those things, you're going to fail a ton. Those are crucial. This job is also perfect for people who can do more than 12 things at once, haha. My mind is always spinning and happy I have that body skill to get done a ton of things at once. 

Dying to make a feature? Learn from the pros!

"We never put out an actual textbook for the Corman School of Filmmaking, but if we did, it would be Fast, Cheap and Under Control." 
Roger Corman, Producer

★★★★★

It’s like taking a Master Class in moviemaking…all in one book!

• Jonathan Demme: The value of cameos

• John Sayles: Writing to your resources

• Peter Bogdanovich: Long, continuous takes

• John Cassavetes: Re-Shoots

• Steven Soderbergh: Rehearsals

• George Romero: Casting

• Kevin Smith: Skipping film school

• Jon Favreau: Creating an emotional connection

• Richard Linklater: Poverty breeds creativity

• David Lynch: Kill your darlings

• Ron Howard: Pre-production planning

• John Carpenter: Going low-tech

• Robert Rodriguez: Sound thinking

And more!

Write Your Screenplay with the Help of Top Screenwriters!

It’s like taking a Master Class in screenwriting … all in one book!

Discover the pitfalls of writing to fit a budget from screenwriters who have successfully navigated these waters already. Learn from their mistakes and improve your script with their expert advice.

"I wish I'd read this book before I made Re-Animator."
Stuart Gordon, Director, Re-Animator, Castle Freak, From Beyond

John Gaspard has directed half a dozen low-budget features, as well as written for TV, movies, novels and the stage.

The book covers (among other topics):

• Academy-Award Winner Dan Futterman (“Capote”) on writing real stories

• Tom DiCillio (“Living In Oblivion”) on turning a short into a feature

• Kasi Lemmons (“Eve’s Bayou”) on writing for a different time period

• George Romero (“Martin”) on writing horror on a budget

• Rebecca Miller (“Personal Velocity”) on adapting short stories

• Stuart Gordon (“Re-Animator”) on adaptations

• Academy-Award Nominee Whit Stillman (“Metropolitan”) on cheap ways to make it look expensive

• Miranda July (“Me and You and Everyone We Know”) on making your writing spontaneous

• Alex Cox (“Repo Man”) on scaling the script to meet a budget

• Joan Micklin Silver (“Hester Street”) on writing history on a budget

• Bob Clark (“Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things”) on mixing humor and horror

• Amy Holden Jones (“Love Letters”) on writing romance on a budget

• Henry Jaglom (“Venice/Venice”) on mixing improvisation with scripting

• L.M. Kit Carson (“Paris, Texas”) on re-writing while shooting

• Academy-Award Winner Kenneth Lonergan (“You Can Count on Me”) on script editing

• Roger Nygard (“Suckers”) on mixing genres

This is the book for anyone who’s serious about writing a screenplay that can get produced! 

Roger Nygard on "The Documentarian," Trekkies, fishing and more ...

Where did you first get the documentary bug?

Roger Nygard: It was a big mistake. I didn't plan for it. It is sort of like, “Oh, I'll try one bump of heroin. What could hurt, right? Just once.”

I made a documentary called Trekkies because an actress I met named Denise Crosby (who was in my first feature film), we had lunch a few years later and she pitched the idea to me. “Hey, someone should make a documentary about these Star Trek fans.” Because she'd been going to conventions as an actor and said these people are entertaining and we couldn't believe no one had done it yet. It seems so obvious and “Yes, of course.”

So, we brainstormed a little bit. We’d never done this before. How do you, uh, we have no idea how to make a documentary. But, you know, as the naive often say, how hard can it be? And then you dive in and it's really hard, especially if you don't know what you're doing.

And we just stumbled into it, watched a bunch of documentaries, absorbed what we could, made a lot of mistakes, which I learned from, and then put in a book about how to make documentaries, I made the mistakes, so you don't have to. So, I just kind of stumbled into it.

What was the biggest challenge you faced on that one, looking back on it?

Roger Nygard: It's always, the biggest challenge is always finding the money to pay for it. Every time. Even for Ken Burns, he said it was a challenge raising money. You’d think a guy like, in, in his career at this point, with dozens of films, they'd be writing him checks, but he says he still has to go searching for the finishing funds on every project.

One of the things when I saw Trekkies for the first time I was really impressed with--well, first the humanity that you treated every subject in it with. But also, your balance of the humorous and the serious elements within it. I imagine you found that in the editing, am I right?

Roger Nygard: I guess so. I mean, it's something innate. I don't really consciously set out to be, “I'm going to be balanced,” or “I'm going to be funny.” It's what I look for in my own viewing. I look for films where the filmmaker is not lying to me. I want a genuine take on something. They can take a position. In fact, it's better when you take a position with a documentary. You should have a point of view. If you are just presenting both sides equally, you're much less likely to have an audience than if you take a stand, make a position and lay out the evidence and let the audience decide.

But I look for that in a film, and so my films, I guess, are an embodiment of me. I'm the filmmaker. You're getting my perspective on the world. Any piece of art is the artist's perspective on the world. They're saying, “here's how I see the world.” And my documentary is me looking at people. I'm amused and I'm obsessed and I'm interested in human behavior.

I find it fascinating and really funny. And so that's what happens when I process what I'm making. And then, of course, then in the editing, that's where I'm refining that point of view.

So, when you sit down with someone, what techniques do you use to make your interview subjects comfortable and willing to open up to get the sort of responses you need?

Roger Nygard: First, you want to start off with some flattery. Obviously. “Thank you for being here. I loved your book. It's such a good book. I loved your movie. I loved your acting. I loved whatever. I love that broach.” You, find something to compliment.

And people love it. You bond with someone who likes you. We like people who like us. And so that interview is going to be a connection between two people and it's nice when it's like a friendly connection where they're not hiding their true selves. So, you want someone to feel comfortable enough so that they'll open up and give you the real stuff and not try to present, to pre edit their image. Those interviews don't work so well when someone's trying to make sure that they're going to come off a certain way. They need to be open and you're gonna take what they give you and edit it and make them look good, ideally, or at least give them a genuine, honest portrayal. But you want them to feel comfortable.

Another way to do that is to share something about yourself, before you start. Maybe a tragedy you experienced, if you're talking about their tragedy. Or a funny event that happened to you. But keep it short, because they are there to talk, you're there to listen.

So, mainly, you ask a question and then just shut up and let them fill the space.

How long did it take you to learn to shut up? Because I'm not sure I've learned that yet.

Roger Nygard: It's so hard. Especially for men. Men are the worst. I mean, I made a documentary about relationships, and that's almost the number one thing I learned from marriage therapists is that your partner needs to be heard. And men typically try to fix things, because that's what we do, right? But your partner doesn't need you to fix them usually when they're telling you something. Let’s say you've got a wife, she's complaining about her boss, she doesn't want you to, to say, “Oh, why don't you quit? Why don't you do this? Why don't you do that?”

That's going to make her feel worse. She wants you to just, just show empathy. And so in an interview, you want to do the same thing—show empathy—but don't intrude, just nod, “hmm, hmm, yeah, oh that's, that must have been awful, tell me more about how that felt.”

Instead of interrupting and trying to guide them, just ask the question, leave the space, provide silent empathy, because you don't want your voice all over their soundtrack.

How much pre-interviewing do you do and do you like that or not?

Roger Nygard: I used to do a lot of pre interviewing. On Trekkies, we did a lot because it was expensive to shoot film. We made that in 16mm film. Oftentimes, we would rehearse what they're going to say and get the soundbite we needed kind of ready. And then say “action,” have them say it, and then cut, and then move on. Or maybe say it in a couple different ways. But now, it’s much more typical to just let the camera roll, because we're shooting video, with maybe multiple cameras.

And I think that's a better way generally, because you might get things you didn't expect. I'd rather have a lot of extra footage that I can't use and yet get that moment that I wouldn't have had otherwise, than if I'm trying to save video.

But that said, you want to know what you're going there to get. You don't want to shoot a bunch of things that are useless, because you've got to sit in the editing room, or your poor editor has to go through all of this stuff. So, you do need to plan it out, and there's nothing wrong with preparing the person, pre interviewing them.

You know, early in my career, I was a PA on a documentary that HBO was doing here in the Twin Cities. It was about hockey goalies, I think, and suicide. And I'd never been on a documentary set like that. And the director of it literally would say, “when we talked on the phone, you said the following sentence, would you say that again?” Which appalled me at the time, because I thought, “let him really talk.” But then like you say, he was shooting 16 and he had to get what he had to get. But now, a million years later, having done hundreds of corporate interviews, while I'm absolutely on your side of let the camera run, you also need to know what it is you want to get.

But also, I remember, we were wrapping up an interview with a father of someone who, I think she had become ill, but she was fine now. And I said, “OK, well, that's just been great, Dave. Thank you for talking to me.” And the sound man—I was about to say cut—and the sound man said, “John, um, I just feel like Dave wants to say something else.” And I said, “well, yeah, we're still rolling. Go ahead, Dave.” And then he said the sentence that we needed for the whole video.

And the sound man had seen that because he was paying attention to the person that I was interviewing. I had not seen it. And I got better later on at seeing that, but it's finding that balance between we're done and we're almost done, but you're about to do something brilliant that I guess you can only get from having done it.

Roger Nygard: I agree. Yes, I've oftentimes said to someone, “That was a great story or a great thing you just said. Could you say it again? Because it's so important, I want to have you try again. And maybe we'll get it a little more concise this time?” Or if in your mind, you're thinking they didn't quite deliver it the way you wanted.

I might even suggest, “Why don't you start by saying ‘That time I was riding my bike …’ and finished the sentence.” I'll guide them, because I'm editing, I'm pre editing in my head. How am I going to use this soundbite? Can I use it? Is it usable? Or should we try again?

That's very common and they like that, because they want to come off well and they want a second chance to say the thing better. So, everybody wins. And by the way, did you meet Gump Worsley?

I did not. This was a high school hockey thing, it wasn't a professional hockey video. But I was surprised that at the end of the day they gave me all the film to take over to the lab. I'm just a PA. You're giving me everything to take to the place? It seemed like they were giving an awful lot of trust to this kid who didn't know what he was doing.

But you raise an interesting point, because as you're interviewing, you are both directing and editing at the same time. I think if you're good at it, you're figuring out, yes, no, yeah, I can use, no, I can't. And that's a weird dichotomy. How do you balance both those things? Be in the moment, but also be in the editing suite at the same time in your head?

Roger Nygard: That's the hardest thing, especially if you're a one-man band, or a one-person band, or maybe it's you and a sound person. But often, it's been just me with the person that I'm interviewing. And so I've got to make sure it's in focus, I have to remember to turn off the autofocus, I've got to ride the levels, ride the volume, I've got to remember to ask the question, and I have to listen to what they're saying, in case I want to go with a follow up. Doing all these things at once. I've got to remember that—if the lighting changes during the shot—I've got to fix the lighting because the sun moved.

So many things are happening. And so, you just practice. You get better every time you do another one, and it starts to become second nature. But the most important thing, after making sure it's in focus and the sound is good quality, is to listen to what they say, exactly like your sound person. What a great advantage to have someone who is paying attention like that and a good team member to remind you.

Every interview should end with, “Is there anything else you'd like to add? Is there anything that we missed or is there anything else you'd like to say?” Many of the best soundbites I've collected came in those moments when it was unprompted by me. They gave me what they needed to give me.

I remember being on one shoot for an NCAA athlete. She was a basketball point guard, I think. And we're about halfway through the interview and I asked a question and her response was this. She said, “Well as I said before, oh wait, I shouldn't say ‘as I said before,’ because I bet you're going to cut this up. Let me redo that and I won't say ‘as I said before.’” And then she said the statement.

She finished the statement, and I turned to the crew and said, “You guys do this much more than I do. Has a subject ever said that? And they said, “No, no subject has ever been that aware of the process that they were in that they fixed on the fly what they're saying, because they knew you couldn't use it.”

Roger Nygard: Those interview subjects are rare.

One technique you talk about in the book is something that started with Errol Morris and ended up being used in corporate America, corporate videos quite a bit. We called it The Interrogator, but that's not quite the word that he used. What did he call it?

Roger Nygard: Oh, the Interitron.

We call it just the Interrogator, and it's where you've set up a system wherein they're not looking at the camera, they're looking basically at a screen, which is in front of the camera, and they see your face, and so it is a conversation. And with many subjects, I found that that really helped break down any sort of barrier, because it's really hard to talk to a camera, it's much easier to talk to someone sitting next to the camera, and the closer they are to the camera, the better your shot's going to be. But having them look right at your face was hugely helpful.

Roger Nygard: There is a connection that happens, according to Errol Morris, that brings unexpected, well, I don't know, what do you want to call it, electricity between you and your subject. Maybe that you might not have when the camera's intruding on the relationship.

Have you ever run into situations where there wasn't a pre-interview and it becomes very apparent very quickly that this isn't going to go anywhere? If you have, what's your response to that and how do you handle that?

Roger Nygard: Oh, yeah, there are many times. Especially when I was shooting The Nature of Existence. I had 450 hours of footage. I interviewed 170 people. Something like that. Because I was fishing, I don't know what I'm going to get. And everyone is qualified to have an opinion on why do we exist. So, it's worth casting my lure into that part of the lake, even though I'm not sure that there's fish there, I didn't pre fish it. And when that happens, I just do the interview, and then I thank them and tell them it was great. And then I just don't use it, because there's nothing usable in there and it's part of fishing, right? Not every cast brings in a fish. Your Minnesota viewers are going to understand this metaphor.

Well, I think fishing's internationally understood. I've never seen anyone do it outside of Minnesota, but I've seen pictures. So, you mentioned, The Nature of Existence. We've talked about Trekkies, you've talked about the relationship documentary. Where do you get your ideas for what to follow? What's going to be your next project? Where does that come from? And how do you know when you, when you have a good fish on the line?

Roger Nygard: When you become obsessed with an idea, you have a message that is bursting to get out of you, and so you are compelled to see this through to the bitter end. Because it might take two years, or four years, or seven years.

The Truth About Marriage took seven years. Trekkies took one year. Trekkies 2 took 18 months. The Nature of Existence took four years. The idea has to captivate me enough, and obsess me enough, get me there. And then I'm hoping the audience will be just as interested in what I'm obsessed with as I present it to them. That's probably the most important ingredient to the success of a documentary, is your choice of subject matter.

What do you mean?

Roger Nygard: Because otherwise you might be making a whole movie that’s something no one else is gonna be interested in. Or you're doing it for some reason other than you are captivated by it. Because you're the filmmaker, you're the artist. It's your enthusiasm, your excitement that's going to come through and be felt by the audience.
But while you're doing that, in your case, you are producing, directing, and editing your projects. When do you know that it's done? I mean, on The Nature of Existence, you said you interviewed, what, 170? How do you know, “Well, that's it, I've got all the pieces?” How do you make that decision?

Roger Nygard: Yeah, it's hard sometimes because I had no idea where I was going to end up in with some of these films. I'm sort of like an investigator setting out to solve a crime, and so once I solved the crime, then I know where my ending is and I know how to get there, where to get to. I just have to answer the question.

For example, The Truth About Marriage. My question was, Why are relationships so hard for people? That's the mystery I solved. And once I had solved it for myself, by talking to enough marriage therapists, and couples, and married people, and divorced people, a divorce attorney, etc. I had settled in on an answer. And so that's what I present at the end of the film, is what I learned while seeking out that question.

That’s a concept documentary. With a narrative documentary, it is easier to know your ending because it's a story of someone's life, probably, or a slice of someone's life. Or a trial with a verdict. Okay, the verdict is the ending. Or, maybe it's basketball. And so, do they win or do they lose at the end? That's your ending, and you're working backward from that. If it's a biography, if they've lived a good three act structure in their lives, you've probably got a good documentary there.

If they haven't, you either have to manufacture it or find a way to present it. And many documentaries have succeeded despite a lack of a story structure and despite a lack of a solid core question. It's better to have the insurance of a solid story structure, but if you don't have it, you might yet still succeed.

Like, I think Trekkies is an example of this. It's a flawed documentary, which does not have a narrative structure. And there's no solid core question asked at the beginning. But it was a grand slam as a documentary because it was so funny. And it had a core group of people that were going to automatically be interested in the film. So, we had those two high cards despite the fact that we didn't have what typically a great documentary has, which is a narrative structure just the same as a screenplay has.

It feels like sometimes you're just rolling the dice, not you, but a documentary filmmaker, that you're gonna go into something and something's gonna happen and you're gonna end up with either The Jinx, where he confesses on tape at the end of your documentary, which you certainly could not have put in your pitch if you're that director. Or the folks who were working on the Alec Baldwin documentary about his trial, where the judge threw it out on the first or second day. At that point, you no longer have a documentary.

What would you recommend someone do when they're going out to pitch a documentary to investors or the network or whatever on the idea of something? How do you sell something that doesn't exist yet, even in anything more than like a one page document?

Roger Nygard: The best way to sell it is to make them feel the story in the room. You act it out and you bring the excitement because you're excited by it. And maybe you've done one interview already as a test. That's often where I get the feel when I'm interviewing that person. I feel it. I feel like I've got something here or I feel like it's not going anywhere.

I started a documentary about Scott Hanson, local Minneapolis comedian, and we did one interview, and I just didn't feel it, because I think he was trying to present an image of himself. He wasn't willing to be open. And so I didn't get excited, and we didn't really keep going.

The first interview, the first footage we shot of Trekkies, we felt it. We knew we had something. The first interview I did about this existentialist question, Why do we exist? I loved talking to people about this the way you do in a dorm room in college when you're talking about the big questions Why are we here? And what's our purpose? And what am I supposed to do with my life? That gets me excited. It gets people excited in life and death talking about death. What happens when you die? Does the soul exist? If so, where is it lodged inside your brain? Is there a compartment? You know, just fun, fun questions So, I knew, I had a sense that that was going to turn out okay, even though I didn't know my ending when I started because the idea was so gripping.

I mean, it's gripped people, existentialist philosophers, for centuries. I'm not the first person to ask this question or try to figure it. I'm just one of thousands or millions, who knows? So, I was tapping into something I thought, it felt like to me. I felt it.

But when you're in a pitch meeting, as you're asking, you have to make them feel the excitement either through your core question or the character description. If it's a character piece, then you are going to tell a story about this person. Who is this documentary about?

I asked Ken Burns about that. How do you make a documentary about things like a bridge? His first film was about the building of the Brooklyn Bridge. And he said, “You can't. You cannot make documentaries about things. It has to be about people.” And so that documentary is about the family, the Roebling family, that built that bridge and their struggle to complete the job through difficulties and challenges and near death experiences. That makes it interesting and exciting.

If you love the film— like a film about an octopus, right? It's not as exciting unless you learn about the person who gets infatuated with a particular octopus, and it's his life. Or a documentary about a TV show. It's going to have a limited interest to fans of the TV show. But if you want a wider audience, you do a film about the fans themselves, about the people.

The stories are about the people involved. Someone who collects owl figurines like my aunt did. She would have been a great subject. The owl figurines, who cares? You know, it's a five-minute short. Look, a bunch of owl figurines. But the person, the mindset behind someone who thinks they have to fill their house with owls. That's interesting.

And it gives you lots of cutaway shots, too, which is nice.

Roger Nygard: Always get your cutaways. Yes.

For your documentaries, you're directing and editing, but in the case of the Comedy Store series, you were just, I don't mean to say just an editor on it, but you weren't directing it. What is that process like? I dealt with in corporate all the time. I would go out and interview the subjects and I'd bring it back to my editor and say, “Hey, here's my notes, here's the best stuff, have at it.” And he would create something great that wasn't what I had necessarily intended, but he found the best stuff in the footage and turned it into a five minute story.

In the case of The Comedy Store, you're probably handed hundreds of hours of interviews with very interesting people and very funny people. What was your process for creating all those segments and deciding, this goes this stays? Because I'm guessing you could probably have done a couple more hours of just stuff that's funny.

Roger Nygard: Sure, we could have done more episodes. There was plenty of footage. I was hired by Mike Binder, who I had worked with before. I had edited his feature films in the past. And he had never made a documentary.

So, when he first asked me, I was busy. I was cutting Curb Your Enthusiasm. And I said, “I can't do it. But if, you know, if you can wait 11 months, I'll be free.” So, he hired another editor and started on the footage. And when that eleven months was over, they had crap. They had nothing. They had the beginnings of an episode, but he was flailing around trying to figure out what to do.

So, I said, “I'm available now, let's do it.” So, I jumped in, and the first thing I showed Mike was my rules for doing interviews. I said, “Mike, you gotta just shut up. Ask the question and shut up. Let them fill the space. Especially when it's awkward. That's great. They'll come up with things they wouldn't have said if you had just been quiet.” That's number one.

Number two, each episode needs a theme. And this is the biggest problem that I've seen, the biggest mistake that documentary filmmakers will make, is they don't know what their theme is. What is a theme? It's the idea or the premise behind the moral of the story. It's the idea you're trying to express.

And each of the five episodes has a different theme. One is called The Wild Bunch. And it was about the wildest comedians who ever performed at The Comedy Store. And we used some footage from the movie The Wild Bunch. Once it had a theme, then I knew what to cut, and how to link things together.

And once Mike started revising his outlines with that in mind, they started to take shape. And cutting the episodes made sense. You need to know your theme. I would write it down on a piece of paper, put it on the wall, because that's your roadmap. That's where you're going, and every scene should be connected to that theme in some way. Or if it doesn't, it probably doesn't belong in that episode or in the movie.

And it actually probably made it a whole lot easier to edit, because you could just immediately go, nope, nope, yep, nope, nope, nope, nope, yep.

Roger Nygard: It's your road map. Otherwise, you're just surrounded by a forest of footage and what do you do? I mean, there are tricks, like you start putting like with like and grouping them in your bins. And eventually you might start connecting like segments with like segments as you're building scenes.

But when there's a narrative, it's easiest. There's an episode that's about the comedy strike, which happened. And so that gave us a very specific timeline of what's happening and who caused the strike and what they were asking for. Now we've got protagonists and antagonists. The antagonist is the owner of the store, Mitzi Shore, who doesn't want to pay them what they want as comedians. And that makes it easier from a narrative perspective, because what is a narrative, right? You have a protagonist, or a small group of protagonists, and an antagonist, or a small group, and a goal.

The protagonists have a goal, and there's obstacles to that goal. Now we watch to see how they succeed or fail. That made that episode much clearer.

One part of the book that I found just fascinating and I'm wondering if the publisher gave you any pushback on it, because it is sort of its own mini book right in the book. Which is the whole process of coming up with a distribution deal for Trekkies. It's a long segment, but it disabuses you of any glamour of Hollywood of, “Oh, we went to Sundance and they loved the film, and we signed it, and two months later it was in theaters. This is pages and pages and pages of the process of taking what you know to be a valuable asset and getting it to the right people and getting it out. So, first question is, did the publisher push back on that at all?

Roger Nygard: No, they were remarkably compliant, helpful.  Because I'd done one book with them already, and they felt pretty happy about me doing a second one in a similar vein, and I had case studies in that book also.

But not like this, this is four chapters.

Roger Nygard: You're right, the four chapters after, I say at one point, at the end of chapter 10 or whatever it was, “Okay, the how to make a documentary part of the book is over. The next four chapters are, once you have finished, here's a case study in trying to sell your documentary.” Because it took us nine months. From our first distributor screening to sign a contract. There is no immediate, you know. I mean, Sundance turned us down.

And so, you have to persevere despite these problems toward a sale. The Sundance mega sale is like winning the lottery. And you're not likely to win the lottery. So you need backup strategies and backup plans. And we had tried lots of things, and it took us a long time and a lot of difficulties in fighting amongst ourselves to finally get to a point where we succeeded and got such a successful sale.

Those chapters—I mean, the whole book is great for anyone who wants to make a documentary—but it's also really good for anyone who wants to make a thing. Particularly a film or a TV show or something.You're trying to make a pilot, you're trying to do something. It's unvarnished as to what it takes to do these things, and then you get to those four chapters, you realize this is for anybody who's got a film under their arm, whether it's a short or a feature, here's what you need to be prepared to face.

I've always said that the problem with independent filmmaking is that we only see the successes. It's like having a cancer study where they don't tell you about the ones who died. We only tell you about the ones who lived. And this is a great, because look at this: this is what they did and they all lived, but there's so many that died because people don't understand the process. And that's what I love about that section of the book: it really just says this is not easy and you need good people on your side.

Roger Nygard: And persistence. It’s a marathon. You need to make sure your film sells. No one else is going to have the motivation to push your film over the finish line more than you. You gotta be in training to be that strong. You gotta make your short films, you gotta suffer a little bit, and that just makes you stronger.

We were motivated to succeed. Despite being turned down by Sundance and Telluride and Toronto and the New York Film Festival—all the big ones at the beginning of the season turned us down. We finally got some success with the Hamptons Film Festival and the AFI Los Angeles Film Festival, and we were able to use those to help us get where we wanted to go. But boy, it would have been so much nicer if we got into Sundance, and it was the rave of Sundance, and it was easy.

But here's a plan for those where that doesn't happen: There's a film agent I interview in the book, Glenn Reynolds, who said, “I don't need film festivals to sell your movie. Filmmakers like to go to film festivals, but there's just buyers, and it comes down to the product.

Is it good? Who's in it? What's their social media reach now? And, oh, okay, you did a film festival. That's great. That doesn't hurt necessarily, but these first three, and the poster. What's the hook? What's the marketing going to do? Those are more important than how many film festivals.”

We did 50 film festivals. The buyers don't really care. But if you picked up some rave reviews, and won some awards, that shows that someone else has validated your work. And so that's what you're hoping for.

And you're not doing that in a vacuum. If I remember the timeline, you're working on your feature Suckers in there somewhere as well, that's happening at the same time.

You once said to me something like, “It's good to have a lot of irons in the fire, you just don't want to have too many because you'll put the fire out.” You don't remember saying that?

Roger Nygard: I do, yes. That sounds like me.

Yeah, it is you. It was you. And I've remembered that ever since. And have tried to have a number of irons in the fire, but not too many. I think you sort of just say it in passing, in that section, that you’re also working on Suckers, and that's happening. But you've always had sort of multi paths happening at the same time. How has that helped your career as both a documentary filmmaker, and a TV director, and a TV editor, and now an author?

Roger Nygard: Yeah, you need to continually reinvent yourself and be trying new things and have multiple projects and have the stamina to, to work on them all and push them forward. Because that's who you're competing with. You're competing with people who are like that. They're working just as hard as you are.

I mean, a workaholic is just someone who works harder than you do, right? If you accuse someone of being a workaholic, that means you're probably a little lazier than they are. Okay, that's fine. Maybe you can make what you need out of life, not working as hard, and my hat goes off to you. But that doesn't work for me. What works for me is—maybe it's that Scandinavian work ethic I picked up growing up in Minnesota—I feel like a complete loser if I haven't put in my work during the day. By the end of the day, I better have pushed that ball down the field some more, or I'll feel, you know, guilty.

And so that helps motivate me. So, I work every day on something. Whether it's writing the book, or making a documentary, or editing a feature, or editing—right now I'm editing a Netflix series. Doing all those things. And my delayed gratification carrot is hanging there for me: Once I finish, I'm gonna go to Bali. So, I go to Bali every year once I've earned it.

And now you might say, “Oh, you're crazy! No one should work that hard. I'm tired.” Well, it's a very competitive world, and so you need to work just a little bit harder than the one you're competing against.

Yes. I believe it was William Goldman who quoted a basketball coach saying to their player, “Anytime you're not practicing, the guy you're going to go up against is, so you need to get out there and practice.”

Roger Nygard: It’s no different in the film business. Film business is the same, if not even more cutthroat.

Okay, two last questions on this, and then I'm going to let you go. So, what's the biggest mistake that you think someone starting out as a documentary filmmaker is likely to make?

Roger Nygard: One of them is to give up your ownership. You should always keep, if you can, own your projects. Own your product. Because it's a property. And if you own it, then you can continually relicense it over your lifetime.

I know a filmmaker who made the biggest mistake you can make, which is he sold his movie in perpetuity to a distributor. Now it's gone. He'll never get it back again. So you want to license whatever you've made to a distributor for two years, four years, five years, seven years. With Trekkies, we had a 20 year license, 25 if unrecouped. But that's because they paid us so much money, they bought that many years, but it was still a license.

And so Trekies came back to us a few years ago and so we restored it to HD. It had never been released in HD yet, and we’ve licensed it to a new company for another period of time.

You did the same thing with Suckers, didn't you?

Roger Nygard: I did it, I bought it, yes. The company, the same company that I made Trekkies with made Suckers with me. And they set up a corporation to own the film, which is typically what they do, every film has a corporation that owns that film. And that's where the money from the investor goes. And that's where the profits, if any, come out of. And in that case, Sucker's never reached profit while they owned it. It cost about a half a million to make, and it probably made back $250,000 from an HBO sale and an IFC sale and home video. And we had a distributor that went bankrupt who, so we had to chase them.

But at the end, probably like 15 years after we made the film, the company that I worked with, Neomotion Pictures, they were going to close their doors. They were retiring or going off to do different things, and they were shutting down the company they had made that owned the film. So, if they just shut down the company, then suddenly it goes into the public domain, because there's no ownership. The entity that owned it no longer exists. Nothing owns it. Meaning everybody, anyone can own it.

So, I said, Wait, guys, sell it to me,” which they did, “And I will restore the film,” which I did. I paid for the restoration. I collected what elements remained, some had been thrown away, but enough of the key elements still existed, so I was able to re-scan it and remix it and marry it together and find a distributor. And actually I put it on, it's on Amazon Prime. I put it there myself. So, I collect the money directly now, after putting my money into it.

So, be an owner. Own your films. And if you can't, be a co owner. So at least you're part of where the money goes first. I mean, ideally you want the money to go to you and have all your profit participants chase you for the money, instead of you chasing them for the royalties.

Okay, one last question. Someone has read your book, they've properly packed all their gear,  they're going off to begin shooting. What's the one last piece of advice you'd give them before the door on the airplane shuts?

Roger Nygard: Buy a copy of The Documentarian for everyone on your crew. That's the first part of the advice. And have them all read it.

Be prepared for your interview, practice at home before you get there, set up your camera and your audio and do a practice interview so that it's second nature by the time you get there. Maybe do a test interview on, on someone who's not your main interviewee so that you have done a dry run and you've tested all the equipment, you've tested your questions, you've refined your approach. And so you're ready for the big day.

Well, this has been great. Roger, is there anything I've forgotten to ask you? 

Roger Nygard: Yes, the names of all my projects. The last book was Cut to the Monkey, about editing and comedy. And this book is called The Documentarian. And I am working on another book, and I will probably, until the day I keel over. Hopefully I'll die fishing up in Canada.

And they won't find you for days and days and days.

Roger Nygard: It would be only fair if I fell in the water and the fish ate me after I've been eating them for years.

Dying to make a feature? Learn from the pros!

"We never put out an actual textbook for the Corman School of Filmmaking, but if we did, it would be Fast, Cheap and Under Control." 
Roger Corman, Producer

★★★★★

It’s like taking a Master Class in moviemaking…all in one book!

• Jonathan Demme: The value of cameos

• John Sayles: Writing to your resources

• Peter Bogdanovich: Long, continuous takes

• John Cassavetes: Re-Shoots

• Steven Soderbergh: Rehearsals

• George Romero: Casting

• Kevin Smith: Skipping film school

• Jon Favreau: Creating an emotional connection

• Richard Linklater: Poverty breeds creativity

• David Lynch: Kill your darlings

• Ron Howard: Pre-production planning

• John Carpenter: Going low-tech

• Robert Rodriguez: Sound thinking

And more!

Write Your Screenplay with the Help of Top Screenwriters!

It’s like taking a Master Class in screenwriting … all in one book!

Discover the pitfalls of writing to fit a budget from screenwriters who have successfully navigated these waters already. Learn from their mistakes and improve your script with their expert advice.

"I wish I'd read this book before I made Re-Animator."
Stuart Gordon, Director, Re-Animator, Castle Freak, From Beyond

John Gaspard has directed half a dozen low-budget features, as well as written for TV, movies, novels and the stage.

The book covers (among other topics):

• Academy-Award Winner Dan Futterman (“Capote”) on writing real stories

• Tom DiCillio (“Living In Oblivion”) on turning a short into a feature

• Kasi Lemmons (“Eve’s Bayou”) on writing for a different time period

• George Romero (“Martin”) on writing horror on a budget

• Rebecca Miller (“Personal Velocity”) on adapting short stories

• Stuart Gordon (“Re-Animator”) on adaptations

• Academy-Award Nominee Whit Stillman (“Metropolitan”) on cheap ways to make it look expensive

• Miranda July (“Me and You and Everyone We Know”) on making your writing spontaneous

• Alex Cox (“Repo Man”) on scaling the script to meet a budget

• Joan Micklin Silver (“Hester Street”) on writing history on a budget

• Bob Clark (“Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things”) on mixing humor and horror

• Amy Holden Jones (“Love Letters”) on writing romance on a budget

• Henry Jaglom (“Venice/Venice”) on mixing improvisation with scripting

• L.M. Kit Carson (“Paris, Texas”) on re-writing while shooting

• Academy-Award Winner Kenneth Lonergan (“You Can Count on Me”) on script editing

• Roger Nygard (“Suckers”) on mixing genres

This is the book for anyone who’s serious about writing a screenplay that can get produced! 

Hunter Lee Hughes on "Guys Reading Poems"

What was your filmmaking background before making "Guys Reading Poems"?

Outside of my experience acting, I'd say my crash course in filmmaking began when I served as the writer's assistant to Mardik Martin (co-writer, "Mean Streets" and "Raging Bull"). I didn't feel I could afford film school, but that job paid me $20/hour to learn from a master, whose simple, effective wisdom on the subject of screenwriting still guides me. The other mentor who shaped my early career was legendary acting coach Ivana Chubbuck. I trained in her master class for five years and slowly absorbed a method not only of developing characters as an actor, but of observing actors and communicating with them. Previous to "Guys Reading Poems," I wrote and produced the dark short film "Winner Takes All" and directed a 12-episode webseries called "Dumbass Filmmakers!" about a clueless installation artist making a difficult transition to directing films. It definitely felt like art imitating life. 

Where did the idea come from and what was the process for getting the script ready to shoot?

My maternal grandmother passed away in 2007 and I ended up with her poetry books. She was an avid reader of poetry and would read her poems aloud to keep her mind sharp. When I finally got around to reading the poetry books she collected, they became like little clues to who she was, as she'd interacted with the poems on the page, like underlining this sentence and circling a certain phrase or writing a note in the margin. So that got me interested in how individual poems could be revealing of the psychology of a film protagonist.
Getting the script ready to shoot....honestly the answer for me of how to get the script ready to shoot is the shot list, which is for me the bridge between what's written on the page and what you capture on set. You're forced in the shot list to start visualizing the mechanics of how you'll shoot rather than just seeing these compelling characters in an imaginary setting running free in your brain. I'm not a director that likes to leave things to chance on the set, so in this case, everything was shotlisted in advance and I always ask myself with every sentence I read in the final script, "How will the camera move to cover this? How will the people move within the frame? And why?" So for me, the shotlist is the way to do a final revision of the script because you realize little moments you need or don't need.

What was your casting process and did you change the script to match your final cast?

I consider "Guys Reading Poems" to be an ensemble of 15 actors. Of those 15, I already knew 12 of the actors and made offers to them without auditioning them. Two came through the audition process, Luke Judy, our seven-year old lead and also Blake Sheldon, who was the youngest of the seven poetry guys. I met Lydia Hearst through her manager Oren Segal and knew within seconds of meeting her that I'd make her an offer for the role of "The Actress." 
I originally was going to have the climactic scene between Patricia and Jerod silent, like so much of the rest of the movie. In the beginning, I was very rigid that the only "dialogue" should be the poems. But as we rehearsed, I started feeling that we needed to hear, in very simple words, the two of them resolve their relationship. And once I added dialogue to that scene, I realized that the entire section of the movie that takes place as Patricia leaves the prison and returns home needed to have dialogue. So I added dialogue here and there - to her interaction with the prison guard and also when she runs into the young man with the guitar. I realized that part of the movie that was taking place in the present needed that sort of ordinary, simple dialogue and that change was inspired by rehearsing with Patricia and Jerod.

What drove your decision to go with black & white ... and how did that decision make production easier and harder?

For me, the poetry lent itself to a 1950's boarding school kind of aesthetic and it wasn't a far leap from that to black-and-white. As a practical matter, black-and-white can hide a few things when you're dealing with a lower budget. I think it's easier to make a film look expensive with black-and-white. 

I'm not sure it made anything in production harder as much as it comes up in the conversation about distribution. Some distributors just are not interested in black-and-white films. 

What type of camera(s) did you use and what did you love (and hate) about it?

We shot on the Red Epic Monochrome and I think the image quality is really remarkable, the detail, the richness of the black tones. I think the camera inspired everyone on the camera crew, and especially our lighting team, because you know it's maybe once a year, if that, that they get to work on a black-and-white feature. It brought out the best in our team. I suppose that because our costume designer Shpetim Zero is so amazing and Lydia and Patricia are both so beautiful, every now and then I'd look at one of them in one those beautiful costumes and wish we could shoot it in color, which of course you can't with the monochrome chip, but that was a small price to pay for the satisfaction of working with such an amazing black-and-white camera.

Did the movie change much in the editing, and if so, why did you make the changes?

Certainly, the movie evolved in editing. In fact, we shot the poems first and it was our editor Patrick Kennelly who convinced me that I had to find a way to take the poems and incorporate them into a feature film. Including the poetry and the narrative, the entire shoot was 15 days, so we didn't have a limitless amount of options. We shot what was in the script and not a lot extra. But I think Patrick Kennelly (our editor) is just brilliant and I especially love the montage flashes in the Death chapter. You might think a super weird film like ours changes more drastically in the editing. But we were remarkably close to the script in terms of what was shot and the scenes remained in close to the same order as they were designed on the page.

Can you talk about your distribution plan for recouping costs?

We have an international sales agent, Patrick Holzen of Bodhi Tree Media Group and are repped domestically by Daniel Bort at Omni Media Arts. National Poetry Month in April is important to us. We're screening at the Rush Arts Gallery in New York City on April 4th. We have our monthly open mic event in Los Angeles on April 6th and then we open theatrically for a brief, one-week run at Arena Cinemalounge in Hollywood on April 28th. From there, we'll move to DVD, SVOD and VOD but the details of that are still up in the air. I can say this. We now see the feature film "Guys Reading Poems" as the most intense offering in the experience of a wider movement of "Guys Reading Poems." Our open mic nights draw 40-60 people each time and we sell t-shirts there. We've built a respectable following on Facebook where we highlight the videos of our audience reading their own poems with plans to expand the open mic night to other cities. So we've designed the experience of "Guys Reading Poems" as a positive feedback loop between providing open mic nights for our audiences and the actual film.

What was the smartest thing you did during production? The dumbest?

I committed. I have no regrets whatsoever about the kind of effort I made. The shoot took so much out of me - mentally, physically, emotionally - but I honestly did give it everything I had. And I'm not sure I can take credit for this, but I noticed that so many people in the cast and creative team were just as driven to figure this movie out and to go out and shoot it. As a director, you set the tone. So I think I set a good example in that way and that was smart.  I think the crew respects you more when they see how hard you're thinking and working and figuring it out. The dumbest mistakes probably all centered around time management with a child actor. When they are seven, you have so little time with them when they can actually work. And, in our case, Luke is basically the lead of the movie. So one time, I remember I wanted him on set early to rehearse with him and that was super dumb because it ended up being two wasted hours and then he got pulled from set later at a crucial time because that was his limit for the day. But you sort of just adjust and somehow get the movie done.

And, finally, what did you learn from making this feature that you will take to other projects?
I'm sure it's been said before, but I think a good analogy for directing movies is "the good parent." A good parent knows that their kids have own identity and sensibility and they will communicate that identity to you. So, more than anything, being a good parent involves being a good listener and observer and then fortifying your child towards the life they were meant to live. I believe a film is like a child and our job as directors is not to control the child or force it to be something it's not. Your job is to listen to the film and what it wants to be and then lend the film your strength when it needs its essential qualities nurtured or protected. I feel like I learned how that process feels through making "Guys Reading Poems" and will take the same experience to the next one.

 Dying to make a feature? Learn from the pros!

"We never put out an actual textbook for the Corman School of Filmmaking, but if we did, it would be Fast, Cheap and Under Control." 
Roger Corman, Producer

★★★★★

It’s like taking a Master Class in moviemaking…all in one book!

• Jonathan Demme: The value of cameos

• John Sayles: Writing to your resources

• Peter Bogdanovich: Long, continuous takes

• John Cassavetes: Re-Shoots

• Steven Soderbergh: Rehearsals

• George Romero: Casting

• Kevin Smith: Skipping film school

• Jon Favreau: Creating an emotional connection

• Richard Linklater: Poverty breeds creativity

• David Lynch: Kill your darlings

• Ron Howard: Pre-production planning

• John Carpenter: Going low-tech

• Robert Rodriguez: Sound thinking

And more!

Write Your Screenplay with the Help of Top Screenwriters!

It’s like taking a Master Class in screenwriting … all in one book!

Discover the pitfalls of writing to fit a budget from screenwriters who have successfully navigated these waters already. Learn from their mistakes and improve your script with their expert advice.

"I wish I'd read this book before I made Re-Animator."
Stuart Gordon, Director, Re-Animator, Castle Freak, From Beyond

John Gaspard has directed half a dozen low-budget features, as well as written for TV, movies, novels and the stage.

The book covers (among other topics):

• Academy-Award Winner Dan Futterman (“Capote”) on writing real stories

• Tom DiCillio (“Living In Oblivion”) on turning a short into a feature

• Kasi Lemmons (“Eve’s Bayou”) on writing for a different time period

• George Romero (“Martin”) on writing horror on a budget

• Rebecca Miller (“Personal Velocity”) on adapting short stories

• Stuart Gordon (“Re-Animator”) on adaptations

• Academy-Award Nominee Whit Stillman (“Metropolitan”) on cheap ways to make it look expensive

• Miranda July (“Me and You and Everyone We Know”) on making your writing spontaneous

• Alex Cox (“Repo Man”) on scaling the script to meet a budget

• Joan Micklin Silver (“Hester Street”) on writing history on a budget

• Bob Clark (“Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things”) on mixing humor and horror

• Amy Holden Jones (“Love Letters”) on writing romance on a budget

• Henry Jaglom (“Venice/Venice”) on mixing improvisation with scripting

• L.M. Kit Carson (“Paris, Texas”) on re-writing while shooting

• Academy-Award Winner Kenneth Lonergan (“You Can Count on Me”) on script editing

• Roger Nygard (“Suckers”) on mixing genres

This is the book for anyone who’s serious about writing a screenplay that can get produced! 

Gary King on "How Do You Write a Joe Schermann Song"

What was your filmmaking background before setting out to make "How Do You Write a Joe Schermann Song"?
I'd done a few feature films but didn't have any experience taking on the scope of a movie musical, which involved progressing the story through music and song.  Even though I've loved musicals from a very young age, I wasn't well versed in the actual professional side, dealing with how to talk to dancers and musicians. So I surrounded myself with people who were way more knowledgeable in musical theater (Joe Schermann, Christina Rose, Mark DiConzo), as the life of an aspiring Broadway artist was the world I wanted to explore. 
However, my experience of producing several feature films helped me logistically complete the movie musical. I don't feel I could've made the film without years of knowledge of how to shoot a movie on a low budget with a skeleton crew. We made SCHERMANN SONG with just a crew of four people (including myself). 

Where did the idea come from and what was the writing process like?
The idea originated from my desire to explore the unrecognized artists struggling creatively and financially in New York City. However it evolved over several drafts and grew to more of an examination of artistic integrity and how relationships and friendships can really affect one's career and finding that balance.
It took about 8 months to get to the shooting draft. It's funny that the script says it's just "Rev 2" but the way I write is I make tons of passes at the script over and over again before updating the title page. I didn't have any of the songs or music beforehand, however I intentionally wrote in placeholder cues (and sometimes temporary song titles) of where I wanted the songs to happen.  That way, Joe Schermann, who did the music and lyrics, knew what was being explored thematically and who was supposed to be singing.

Can you talk about how you raised your budget and your financial plan for distribution and recouping your costs? 
We mainly financed the film via Kickstarter, raising close to $50k from over 400 generous supporters. I was lucky in that we signed a distribution deal with FilmBuff even before heading into the 2012 festival circuit. So the pressure to get a deal wasn't there as we toured the fests. It was so enjoyable to screen, network and win several awards (http://joeschermannsong.com/press/) already knowing we had a company behind us who wanted to release the film.
The wonderful surprise is due to our international film festival success, our film is being released digitally worldwide on March 26th.  People can visit www.WatchJSS.com to find out where they can see it. I couldn't be happier for everyone involved. This is exactly what we wanted, the chance for audience around the world to see our labor of love.

What camera(s) did you use and what did you love and hate about it?
We used the Canon 5D for 95% of the shooting, and the Canon 7D for some dance sequences and off-speed shots. I loved the ability to shoot anywhere I wanted in the city without a permit and not have anyone know we were making a film. Also, the camera just produces a gorgeous image, so much so that some people believe we had a much higher end camera for the film.
The main drawback was its tiny LCD screen. I had a Zacuto device that magnified the images about 2 times the size, however I still wasn't sure if focus was precise or not. And also this was the first film I shot myself and directed -- so juggling cinematographer and directing duties was a pretty arduous task. I tell people now it was probably one of the most stressful things I've done on the set, but now looking back it was one of the most rewarding.

You wore a lot of hats on this production -- Director, Producer, Writer, DP, Editor. What's the upside and the downside of doing that?
I'm actually pretty proud of the fact that I was able to do so much and not have people think that it was just me. At least that's the hope. It's nothing I really do by choice, this time around the DPs I wanted to shoot the film all had schedule conflicts. And I always tell people I produce out of necessity, not for the love. I hate producing films actually, but I guess I can get it done and that way I don't have to rely on someone else.  To me, that's the worst thing an indie/DIY filmmaker can do: hope that someone else will make the film for them. 
Having said that, it's my dream to not have to juggle so many positions. I do it a lot of time because mainly it's a budgetary thing (or lack of one). If I had my way, all I'd love to do is direct; occasionally write a screenplay every few years while directing other scripts in between. That's one of my ultimate goals.

What was the smartest thing you did during production? The dumbest?
The smartest thing....hire talented artists around me. Surrounding myself with a strong team.  
The dumbest thing...choosing a shooting location situated on the top floor of a walk-up building with no air-conditioning as our main characters' apartment. It was July and one of the hottest summers ever in New York. Pure misery.

And, finally, what did you learn from making the film that you have taken to other projects?
Actually, I really learned all about camera lenses. It sounds techy and boring, but I really dove in and fell in love with them. Moving forward it'll help me talk to cinematographers on another level that I haven't been able to articulate in the past.
Also, making SCHERMANN SONG was just a blast to do with people I loved. I don't think I'd ever want to make movies any other way.

Dying to make a feature? Learn from the pros!

"We never put out an actual textbook for the Corman School of Filmmaking, but if we did, it would be Fast, Cheap and Under Control." 
Roger Corman, Producer

★★★★★

It’s like taking a Master Class in moviemaking…all in one book!

• Jonathan Demme: The value of cameos

• John Sayles: Writing to your resources

• Peter Bogdanovich: Long, continuous takes

• John Cassavetes: Re-Shoots

• Steven Soderbergh: Rehearsals

• George Romero: Casting

• Kevin Smith: Skipping film school

• Jon Favreau: Creating an emotional connection

• Richard Linklater: Poverty breeds creativity

• David Lynch: Kill your darlings

• Ron Howard: Pre-production planning

• John Carpenter: Going low-tech

• Robert Rodriguez: Sound thinking

And more!

Write Your Screenplay with the Help of Top Screenwriters!

It’s like taking a Master Class in screenwriting … all in one book!

Discover the pitfalls of writing to fit a budget from screenwriters who have successfully navigated these waters already. Learn from their mistakes and improve your script with their expert advice.

"I wish I'd read this book before I made Re-Animator."
Stuart Gordon, Director, Re-Animator, Castle Freak, From Beyond

John Gaspard has directed half a dozen low-budget features, as well as written for TV, movies, novels and the stage.

The book covers (among other topics):

• Academy-Award Winner Dan Futterman (“Capote”) on writing real stories

• Tom DiCillio (“Living In Oblivion”) on turning a short into a feature

• Kasi Lemmons (“Eve’s Bayou”) on writing for a different time period

• George Romero (“Martin”) on writing horror on a budget

• Rebecca Miller (“Personal Velocity”) on adapting short stories

• Stuart Gordon (“Re-Animator”) on adaptations

• Academy-Award Nominee Whit Stillman (“Metropolitan”) on cheap ways to make it look expensive

• Miranda July (“Me and You and Everyone We Know”) on making your writing spontaneous

• Alex Cox (“Repo Man”) on scaling the script to meet a budget

• Joan Micklin Silver (“Hester Street”) on writing history on a budget

• Bob Clark (“Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things”) on mixing humor and horror

• Amy Holden Jones (“Love Letters”) on writing romance on a budget

• Henry Jaglom (“Venice/Venice”) on mixing improvisation with scripting

• L.M. Kit Carson (“Paris, Texas”) on re-writing while shooting

• Academy-Award Winner Kenneth Lonergan (“You Can Count on Me”) on script editing

• Roger Nygard (“Suckers”) on mixing genres

This is the book for anyone who’s serious about writing a screenplay that can get produced! 

Jeffrey Hatcher on "Columbo," "Mr. Holmes," "The Good Liar," and more!

John: Can you remember your very first mystery, a movie, book, TV show, play, a mystery that really captured your imagination?

Jeffrey: You know, I was thinking about this, and what came to mind was a Disney movie called Emile and the Detectives from 1964. So, I would have been six or seven years old. It's based on a series of German books by Eric Kastner about a young man named Emile and his group of friends who think of themselves as detectives. So, I remember that—I know that might've been the first film. And obviously it's not a play because, you know, little kids don't tend to go to stage thrillers or mysteries and, “Daddy, please take me to Sleuth.

But there was a show called Burke's Law that I really loved. Gene Barry played Captain Amos Burke of the Homicide Division in Los Angeles, and he was very rich. That was the bit. The bit was that Captain Burke drove around in a gorgeous Rolls Royce Silver Ghost, and he had a chauffeur. And every mystery was structured classically as a whodunit.

In fact, I think every title of every episode was “Who Killed Cock Robin?” “Who Killed Johnny Friendly?” that kind of thing.

And they would have a cast of well-known Hollywood actors, so they were all of equal status. Because I always think that's one of the easiest ways to guess the killer is if it's like: Unknown Guy, Unknown Guy, Derek Jacobi, Unknown Guy, Unknown Guy. It's always going to be Derek Jacobi.

John: Yeah, it's true. I remember that show. He was really cool.

Jim: Well, now I'm going to have to look that up.

Jeffrey: It had a great score, and he would gather all of the suspects, you know, at the end of the thing. I think my favorite was when he caught Paul Lynde as a murderer. And, of course, Paul Lynde, you know, kept it very low key when he was dragged off. He did his Alice Ghostly impersonation as he was taken away.

John: They did have very similar vocal patterns, those two.

Jeffrey: Yep. They're kind of the exact same person.

Jim: I never saw them together.

John: You might have on Bewitched.

Jim: You're probably right.

Jeffrey: Well, I might be wrong about this, either Alice Ghostly or Charlotte Ray went to school with Paul Lynde. And Charlotte Ray has that same sound too. You know, kind of warbly thing. Yes. I think they all went to Northwestern in the late 40s and early 50s. So maybe that was a way that they taught actors back then.

John: They learned it all from Marion Horne, who had the very same warble in her voice. So, as you got a little older, were there other mysteries that you were attracted to?

Jeffrey: Yeah. Luckily, my parents were very liberal about letting me see things that other people probably shouldn't have. I remember late in elementary school, fifth grade or so, I was reading Casino Royale. And one of the teachers said, “Well, you know, most kids, we wouldn't want to have read this, but it's okay if you do.”

And I thought, what's that? And I'm so not dangerous; other kids are, well they would be affected oddly by James Bond? But yeah, I, I love spy stuff. You know, The Man from Uncle and The Wild Wild West, all those kind of things. I love James Bond.

And very quickly I started reading the major mysteries. I think probably the first big book that I remember, the first novel, was The Hound of the Baskervilles. That's probably an entrance point for a lot of kids. So that's what comes in mind immediately.

Jim: I certainly revisit that on—if not yearly basis, at least every few years I will reread The Hound of the Baskervilles. Love that story. That's good. Do you have, Jeffrey, favorite mystery fiction writers?

Jeffrey: Oh, sure. But none of them are, you know, bizarre Japanese, Santa Domingo kind of writers that people always pull out of their back pockets to prove how cool they are. I mean, they're the usual suspects. Conan Doyle and Christie and Chandler and Hammett, you know, all of those. John Dickson Carr, all the locked room mysteries, that kind of thing.

I can't say that I go very far off in one direction or another to pick up somebody who's completely bizarre. But if you go all the way back, I love reading Wilkie Collins.

I've adapted at least one Wilkie Collins, and they read beautifully. You know, terrifically put together, and they've got a lot of blood and thunder to them. I think he called them sensation novels as opposed to mysteries, but they always have some mystery element.

And he was, you know, a close friend of Charles Dickens and Dickens said that there were some things that Collins taught him about construction. In those days, they would write their novels in installments for magazines. So, you know, the desire or the need, frankly, to create a cliffhanger at the end of every episode or every chapter seems to have been born then from a capitalist instinct.

John: Jeff, I know you studied acting. What inspired the move into playwriting?

Jeffrey: I don't think I was a very good actor. I was the kind of actor who always played older, middle aged or older characters in college and high school, like Judge Brack in Hedda Gabler, those kind of people. My dream back in those days was to play Dr. Dysart in Equus and Andrew Wyke in Sleuth. So, I mean, that was my target.

And then I moved to New York, and I auditioned for things and casting directors would say, “Well, you know, we actually do have 50 year old actors in New York and we don't need to put white gunk in their hair or anything like that. So, why don't you play your own age, 22 or 23?” And I was not very good at playing 22 or 23.

But I'd always done some writing, and a friend of mine, Graham Slayton, who was out at the Playwrights Center here, and we'd gone to college together. He encouraged me to write a play, you know, write one act, and then write a full length. So, I always say this, I think most people go into the theater to be an actor, you know, probably 98%, and then bit by bit, we, you know, we peel off. We either leave the profession completely or we become directors, designers, writers, what have you. So, I don't think it’s unnatural what I did. It’s very rare to be like a Tom Stoppard who never wanted to act. It's a lot more normal to find the Harold Pinter who, you know, acted a lot in regional theaters in England before he wrote The Caretaker.

Jim: Fascinating. Can we talk about Columbo?

Jeffrey: Oh, yes, please.

Jim: This is where I am so tickled pink for this conversation, because I was a huge and am a huge Peter Falk Columbo fan. I went back and watched the episode Ashes To Ashes, with Patrick McGowan that you created. Tell us how that came about.

Jeffrey: I too was a huge fan of Columbo in the 70s. I remember for most of its run, it was on Sunday nights. It was part of that murder mystery wheel with things like Hec Ramsey and McCloud, right? But Columbo was the best of those, obviously. Everything, from the structure—the inverted mystery—to thw guest star of the week. Sometimes it was somebody very big and exciting, like Donald Pleasence or Ruth Gordon, but often it was slightly TV stars on the skids.

John: Jack Cassidy,

Jim: I was just going to say Jack Cassidy.

Jeffrey: But at any rate, yeah, I loved it. I loved it. I remembered in high school, a friend and I doing a parody of Columbo where he played Columbo and I played the murderer of the week. And so many years later, when they rebooted the show in the nineties, my father died and I spent a lot of time at the funeral home with the funeral director. And having nothing to say to the funeral director one day, I said, “Have you got the good stories?”

And he told me all these great stories about, you know, bodies that weren't really in the casket and what you can't cremate, et cetera. So, I suddenly had this idea of a Hollywood funeral director to the stars. And, via my agent, I knew Dan Luria, the actor. He's a close friend or was a close friend of Peter's. And so, he was able to take this one-page idea and show it to Peter.

And then, one day, I get a phone call and it's, “Uh, hello Jeff, this is Peter Falk calling. I want to talk to you about your idea.” And they flew me out there. It was great fun, because Falk really ran the show. He was the executive producer at that point. He always kind of ran the show. I think he only wrote one episode, the one with Faye Dunaway, but he liked the idea.

I spent a lot of time with him, I'd go to his house where he would do his drawings back in the studio and all that. But what he said he liked about it was he liked a new setting, they always liked a murderer and a setting that was special, with clues that are connected to, say, the murderer's profession. So, the Donald Pleasant one about the wine connoisseur and all the clues are about wine. Or the Dick Van Dyke one, where he's a photographer and most of the clues are about photography. So, he really liked that. And he said, “You gotta have that first clue and you gotta have the pop at the end.”

So, and we worked on the treatment and then I wrote the screenplay. And then he asked McGoohan if he would do it, and McGoohan said, “Well, if I can direct it too.”

And, you know, I've adored McGoohan from, you know, Secret Agent and The Prisoner. I mean, I'd say The Prisoner is like one of my favorite television shows ever. So, the idea that the two of them were going to work together on that script was just, you know, it was incredible.

John: Were you able to be there during production at all?

Jeffrey: No, I went out there about four times to write, because it took like a year or so. It was a kind of laborious process with ABC and all that, but I didn't go out during the shooting.

Occasionally, this was, you know, the days of faxes, I'd get a phone call: “Can you redo something here?” And then I'd fax it out. So, I never met McGoohan. I would only fax with him.

But they built this whole Hollywood crematorium thing on the set. And Falk was saying at one point, “I'm getting pushback from Universal that we've got to do all this stuff. We've got to build everything.” And I was saying, “Well, you know, 60 percent of the script takes place there. If you're going to try to find a funeral home like it, you're going to have all that hassle.” And eventually they made the point that, yeah, to build this is going to cost less than searching around Hollywood for the right crematorium,

And it had a great cast, you know, it had Richard Libertini and Sally Kellerman, and Rue McClanahan was our murder victim.

Jim: I'll tell you every scene that Peter Falk and Mr. McGoohan had together. They looked to me as an actor, like they were having a blast being on together.

Jeffrey: They really loved each other. They first met when McGoohan did that episode, By Dawn's Early Light, where he played the head of the military school. It's a terrific episode. It was a great performance.

And although their acting styles are completely different, You know, Falk much more, you know, fifties, methody, shambolic. And McGoohan very, you know, his voice cracking, you know, and very affected and brittle. But they really loved each other and they liked to throw each other curveballs.

There are things in the, in the show that are ad libs that they throw. There's one bit, I think it's hilarious. It's when Columbo tells the murderer that basically knows he did it, but he doesn't have a way to nail him. And, McGoohan is saying, “So then I suppose you have no case, do you?” And Falk says, “Ah, no, sir, I don't.” And he walks right off camera, you know, like down a hallway. And McGoohan stares off and says, “Have you gone?” And none of that was scripted. Peter just walks off set. And if you watch the episode, they had to dub in McGoohan saying, “Have you gone,” because the crew was laughing at the fact that Peter just strolled away. So McGoohan adlibs that and then they had to cover it later to make sure the sound wasn't screwed up.

Jim: Fantastic.

John: Kudos to you for that script, because every piece is there. Every clue is there. Everything pays off. It's just it is so tight, and it has that pop at the end that he wanted. It's really an excellent, excellent mystery.

Jim: And a terrific closing line. Terrific closing line.

Jeffrey: Yeah, that I did right. That was not an ad lib.

Jim: It's a fantastic moment. And he, Peter Falk, looks just almost right at the camera and delivers that line as if it's, Hey, check this line out. It was great. Enjoyed every minute of it. Can we, um, can I ask some questions about Sherlock Holmes now?

Jeffrey: Oh, yes.

Jim: So, I enjoyed immensely Holmes and Watson that I saw a couple summers ago at Park Square. I was completely riveted and had no, absolutely no idea how it was going to pay off or who was who or what. And when it became clear, it was so much fun for me as an audience member. So I know that you have done a number of Holmes adaptations.

There's Larry Millet, a St. Paul writer here and I know you adapted him, but as far as I can tell this one, pillar to post was all you. This wasn't an adaptation. You created this out of whole cloth. Am I right on that?

Jeffrey: Yes. The, the idea came from doing the Larry Millet one, actually, because Steve Hendrickson was playing Holmes. And on opening night—the day of opening night—he had an aortic aneurysm, which they had to repair. And so, he wasn't able to do the show. And Peter Moore, the director, he went in and played Holmes for a couple of performances. And then I played Holmes for like three performances until Steve could get back.

But in the interim, we've sat around saying, “All right, who can we get to play the role for like a week?” And we thought about all of the usual suspects, by which I mean, tall, ascetic looking actors. And everybody was booked, everybody was busy. Nobody could do it. So that's why Peter did it, and then I did it.

But it struck me in thinking about casting Holmes, that there are a bunch of actors that you would say, you are a Holmes type. You are Sherlock Holmes. And it suddenly struck me, okay, back in the day, if Holmes were real, if he died—if he'd gone over to the falls of Reichenbach—people probably showed up and say, “Well, I'm Sherlock Holmes.”

So, I thought, well, let's take that idea of casting Holmes to its logical conclusion: That a couple of people would come forward and say, “I'm Sherlock Holmes,” and then we'd wrap it together into another mystery. And we're sitting around—Bob Davis was playing Watson. And I said, “So, maybe, they're all in a hospital and Watson has to come to figure out which is which. And Bob said, “Oh, of course, Watson's gonna know which one is Holmes.”

And that's what immediately gave me the idea for the twist at the end, why Watson wouldn't know which one was Holmes. So, I'm very grateful whenever an idea comes quickly like that, but it depends on Steve getting sick usually.

Jim: Well, I thoroughly enjoyed it. If it's ever staged again anywhere, I will go. There was so much lovely about that show, just in terms of it being a mystery. And I'm a huge Sherlock Holmes fan. I don't want to give too much away in case people are seeing this at some point, but when it starts to be revealed—when Pierce's character starts talking about the reviews that he got in, in the West End—I I almost wet myself with laughter. It was so perfectly delivered and well written. I had just a great time at the theater that night.

Jeffrey: It's one of those things where, well, you know how it is. You get an idea for something, and you pray to God that nobody else has done it. And I couldn't think of anybody having done this bit. I mean, some people have joked and said, it's kind of To Tell the Truth, isn't it? Because you have three people who come on and say, “I'm Sherlock Holmes.” “I'm Sherlock Holmes.” “I'm Sherlock Holmes.” Now surely somebody has done this before, but Nobody had.

Jim: Well, it's wonderful.

John: It's all in the timing. So, what is the, what's the hardest part about adapting Holmes to this stage?

Jeffrey: Well, I suppose from a purist point of view‑by which I mean people like the Baker Street Irregulars and other organizations like that, the Norwegian Explorers here in Minnesota‑is can you fit your own‑they always call them pastiches, even if they're not comic‑can you fit your own Holmes pastiche into the canon?

People spend a lot of time working out exactly where Holmes and Watson were on any given day between 1878 and 1930. So, one of the nice things about Holmes and Watson was, okay, so we're going to make it take place during the three-year interregnum when Holmes is pretending to be dead. And it works if you fit Holmes and Watson in between The Final Problem and The Adventure of the Empty House, it works. And that's hard to do.

I would say, I mean, I really love Larry Millett's book and all that, but I'm sure it doesn't fit, so to speak. But that's up to you to care. If you're not a purist, you can fiddle around any old way you like. But I think it's kind of great to, to, to have the, the BSI types, the Baker Street Irregular types say, “Yes, this clicked into place.”

Jim: So that's the most difficult thing. What's the easiest part?

Jeffrey: Well, I think it's frankly the language, the dialogue. Somebody pointed out that Holmes is the most dramatically depicted character in history. More than Robin Hood, more than Jesus Christ. There are more actor versions of Holmes than any other fictional character.

We’ve been surrounded by Holmes speak. Either if we've read the books or seen the movies or seen any of the plays for over 140 years. Right. So, in a way, if you're like me, you kind of absorb that language by osmosis.

So, for some reason, it's very easy for me to click into the way I think Holmes talks. That very cerebral, very fast, sometimes complicated syntax. That I find probably the easiest part. Working out the plots, you want them to be Holmesian. You don't want them to be plots from, you know, don't want the case to be solved in a way that Sam Spade would, or Philip Marlowe would. And that takes a little bit of work. But for whatever reason, it's the actor in you, it's saying, all right, if you have to ad lib or improv your way of Sherlock Holmes this afternoon, you know, you'd be able to do it, right? I mean, he really has permeated our culture, no matter who the actor is.

Jim: Speaking of great actors that have played Sherlock Holmes, you adapted a movie that Ian McKellen played, and I just watched it recently in preparation for this interview.

Having not seen it before, I was riveted by it. His performance is terrific and heartbreaking at the same time. Can we talk about that? How did you come to that project? And just give us everything.

Jeffrey: Well, it's based on a book called A Slight Trick of the Mind by Mitch Cullen, and it's about a very old Sherlock Holmes in Surrey, tending to his bees, as people in Holmesland know that he retired to do. And it involves a couple of cases, one in Japan and one about 20 years earlier in his life that he's trying to remember.

And it also has to do with his relationship with his housekeeper and the housekeeper's son. The book was given to me by Anne Carey, the producer, and I worked on it probably off and on for about five years.

A lot of time was spent talking about casting, because you had to have somebody play very old. I remember I went to meet with Ralph Fiennes once because we thought, well, Ralph Fiennes could play him at his own age,‑then probably his forties‑and with makeup in the nineties.

And Ralph said‑Ralph was in another film that I'd done‑and he said, “Oh, I don't wear all that makeup. That's just far too much.” And I said, “Well, you did in Harry Potter and The English Patient, you kind of looked like a melted candle.” And he said, “Yes, and I don't want to do that again.”

So, we always had a very short list of actors, probably like six actors in the whole world And McKellen was one of them and we waited for him to become available And yeah, he was terrific. I'll tell you one funny story: One day, he had a lot of prosthetics, not a lot, but enough. He wanted to build up his cheekbones and his nose a bit. He wanted a bit, he thought his own nose was a bit too potatoish. So, he wanted a more Roman nose. So, he was taking a nap one day between takes. And they brought him in, said, “Ian, it's time for you to do the, this scene,” and he'd been sleeping, I guess, on one side, and his fake cheek and his nose had moved up his face. But he hadn't looked in the mirror, and he didn't know. So he came on and said, “Very well, I'm all ready to go.” And it was like Quasimodo.

It's like 5:52 and they're supposed to stop shooting at six. And there was a mad panic of, Fix Ian's face! Get that cheekbone back where it’s supposed to be! Knock that nose into place! A six o'clock, we go into overtime!” But it was very funny that he hadn't noticed it. You kind of think you'd feel if your own nose or cheekbone had been crushed, but of course it was a makeup. So, he didn't feel anything.

Jim: This is just the, uh, the actor fan boy in me. I'm an enormous fan of his work straight across the board. Did you have much interaction with him and what kind of fella is he just in general?

Jeffrey: He's a hoot. Bill Condon, the director, said, “Ian is kind of methody. So, when you see him on set, he'll be very decorous, you know, he'll be kind of like Sherlock Holmes.” And it was true, he goes, “Oh, Jeffrey Hatcher, it's very good to meet you.” And he was kind of slow talking, all that. Ian was like 72 then, so he wasn't that old. But then when it was all over, they were doing all those--remember those ice Dumps, where people dump a tub of ice on you? You have these challenges? A the end of shooting, they had this challenge, and Ian comes out in short shorts, and a bunch of ballet dancers surrounds him. And he's like, “Alright, everyone, let's do the ice challenge.” And, he turned into this bright dancer. He's kind of a gay poster boy, you know, ever since he was one of the most famous coming out of the last 20 some years. So, you know, he was suddenly bright and splashy and, you know, all that old stuff dropped away.

He has all of his headgear at his house and his townhouse. He had a party for us at the end of shooting. And so, there's a Gandalf's weird hat and there's Magneto's helmet, you know, along with top hats and things like that. And they're all kind of lined up there. And then people in the crew would say, can I take a picture of you as Gandalf? “Well, why, of course,” and he does all that stuff. So no, he's wonderful.

Jim: You do a very good impression as well. That was great. Now, how did you come to the project, The Good Liar, which again, I watched in preparation for this and was mesmerized by the whole thing, especially the mystery part of it, the ending, it was brilliant.

How did you come to that project?

Jeffrey: Well, again, it was a book and Warner Brothers had the rights to it. And because Bill and I had worked on Mr. Holmes--Bill Condon--Bill was attached to direct. And so I went in to talk about how to adapt it.

This is kind of odd. It's again based in McKellen. In the meeting room at Warner Brothers, there was a life size version of Ian as Gandalf done in Legos. So, it was always, it'll be Ian McKellen and somebody in The Good Liar. Ian as the con man. And that one kind of moved very quickly, because something changed in Bill Condon's schedule. Then they asked Helen Mirren, and she said yes very quickly.

And it's a very interesting book, but it had to be condensed rather a lot. There's a lot of flashbacks and going back and forth in time. And we all decided that the main story had to be about this one con that had a weird connection to the past. So, a lot of that kind of adaptation work is deciding what not to include, so you can't really be completely faithful to a book that way. But I do take the point with certain books. When my son was young, he'd go to a Harry Potter movie, and he'd get all pissed off. Pissed off because he'd say Dobby the Elf did a lot more in the book.

But if it's a book that's not quite so well-known—The Good Liar isn't a terribly well-known book, nor was A Slight Trick of the Mind--you're able to have a lot more room to play.

Jim: It's a very twisty story. Now that you're talking about the book, I'll probably have to go get the book and read it just for comparison. But what I saw on the screen, how did you keep it--because it was very clear at the end--it hits you like a freight train when it all sort of unravels and you start seeing all of these things. How did you keep that so clear for an audience? Because I'll admit, I'm not a huge mystery guy, and I'm not the brightest human, and yet I was able to follow that story completely.

Jeffrey: Well, again, I think it's mostly about cutting things, I'm sure. And there are various versions of the script where there are a lot of other details. There's probably too much of one thing or another. And then of course, you know, you get in the editing room and you lose a couple of scenes too. These kinds of things are very tricky. I'm not sure that we were entirely successful in doing it, because you say, which is more important, surprise or suspense? Hitchcock used to have that line about, suspense is knowing there's a bomb under the table. And you watch the characters gather at the table. As opposed to simply having a bomb blow up and you didn't know about it.

So, we often went back and forth about Should we reveal that the Helen Mirren character knows that Ian's character is doing something bad? Or do we try to keep it a secret until the end? But do you risk the audience getting ahead of you? I don't mind if the audience is slightly ahead. You know, it's that feeling you get in the theater where there's a reveal and you hear a couple of people say, “Oh, I knew it and they guessed it may be a minute before. But you don't want to get to the point where the audience is, you know, 20 minutes or a half an hour ahead of you.

Jim: I certainly was not, I was not in any way. It unfolded perfectly for me in terms of it being a mystery and how it paid off. And Helen Mirren was brilliant. In fact, for a long time during it, I thought they were dueling con men, the way it was set up in the beginning where they were both entering their information and altering facts about themselves.

I thought, “Oh, well, they're both con men and, and now we're going to see who is the better con man in the end.” And so. when it paid off. In a way different sort of way, it was terrific for me. Absolutely.

Jeffrey: Well, and I thank you. But in a way, they were both con men.

Jim: Yes, yes. But she wasn't a professional con man.

Jeffrey: She wasn’t just out to steal the money from him. She was out for something else. She was out for vengeance.

Jim: Yes. Very good. Very, if you haven't seen it, The Good Liar folks, don't wait. I got it on Amazon prime and so can you.

Jeffrey: I watched them do a scene, I was over there for about five days during the shooting.

And watching the two of them work together was just unbelievable. The textures, the tones, the little lifts of the eyebrow, the shading on one word versus another. Just wonderful, wonderful stuff.

Jim: Yeah. I will say I am a huge Marvel Cinematic Universe fan along with my son. We came to those together and I'm a big fan of that sort of movie. So I was delighted by this, because it was such a taut story. And I was involved in every second of what was going on and couldn't quite tell who the good guys were and who the bad guys were and how is this going to work and who's working with who?

And it was great. And in my head, I was comparing my love for that sort of big blow it up with rayguns story to this very cerebral, internal. And I loved it, I guess is what I'm saying. And, I am, I think, as close to middle America as you're going to find in terms of a moviegoer. And I thought it was just dynamite.

Jeffrey: It was very successful during the pandemic--so many things were when people were streaming--but it was weirdly successful when it hit Amazon or Netflix or whatever it was. And, I think you don't have to be British to understand two elderly people trying to find a relationship. And then it turns out that they both have reasons to hate and kill each other. But nonetheless, there is still a relationship there. So, I pictured a lot of lonely people watching The Good Liar and saying, “Yeah, I'd hang out with Ian McKellen, even if he did steal all my money.”

John: Well, speaking of movies, I am occasionally handed notes here while we're live on the air from my wife. And she wants you to just say something about the adaptation you did of your play, Stage Beauty, and what that process was like and how, how that process went.

Jeffrey: That was terrific because, primarily Richard Eyre--the director who used to run the National Theater and all that--because he's a theater man and the play’s about theater. I love working with Bill Condon and I've loved working with Lassa Hallstrom and other people, but Richard was the first person to direct a film of any of my stuff. And he would call me up and say, “Well, we're thinking of offering it to Claire Danes.” or we're thinking…

And usually you just hear later, Oh, somebody else got this role. But the relationship was more like a theater director and a playwright. I was there on set for rehearsals and all that.

Which I haven't in the others. No, it was a wonderful experience, but I think primarily because the, the culture of theater saturated the process of making it and the process of rehearsing it and—again--his level of respect. It’s different in Hollywood, everybody's very polite, they know they can fire you and you know, they can fire you and they're going to have somebody else write the dialogue if you're not going to do it, or if you don't do it well enough.

In the theater, we just don't do that. It's a different world, a different culture, different kind of contracts too. But Richard really made that wonderful. And again, the cast that he put together: Billy Crudup and Claire and Rupert Everett and Edward Fox and Richard Griffiths.

I remember one day when I was about to fly home, I told Richard Griffiths what a fan Evan-- my son, Evan--was of him in the Harry Potter movie. And he made his wife drive an hour to come to Shepperton with a photograph of him as Mr. Dursley that he could autograph for my son.

John: Well, speaking of stage and adaptations, before we go into our lightning round here, you did two recent adaptations of existing thrillers--not necessarily mysteries, but thrillers--one of which Hitchcock made into a movie, which are Dial M for Murder and Wait Until Dark. And I'm just wondering what was that process for you? Why changes need to be made? And what kind of changes did you make?

Jeffrey: Well, in both cases, I think you could argue that no, changes don't need to be made. They're wildly successful plays by Frederick Knott, and they've been successful for, you know, alternately 70 or 60 years.

But in both cases, I got a call from a director or an artistic director saying, “We'd like to do it, but we'd like to change this or that.” And I'm a huge fan of Frederick Knott. He put things together beautifully. The intricacies of Dial M for Murder, you don't want to screw around with. And there are things in Wait Until Dark having to do just with the way he describes the set, you don't want to change anything or else the rather famous ending won't work.

But in both cases, the women are probably not the most well drawn characters that he ever came up with. And Wait Until Dark, oddly, they're in a Greenwich Village apartment, but it always feels like they're really in Westchester or in Terre Haute, Indiana. It doesn't feel like you're in Greenwich Village in the 60s, especially not in the movie version with Audrey Hepburn.

So, the director, Matt Shackman, said, why don't we throw it back into the 40s and see if we can have fun with that. And so it played out: The whole war and noir setting allowed me to play around with who the main character was. And I know this is a cliche to say, well, you know, can we find more agency for female characters in old plays or old films? But in a sense, it's true, because if you're going to ask an actress to play blind for two hours a night for a couple of months, it can't just be, I'm a blind victim. And I got lucky and killed the guy. You’ve got a somewhat better dialogue and maybe some other twists and turns. nSo that's what we did with Wait Until Dark.

And then at The Old Globe, Barry Edelstein said, “well, you did Wait Until Dark. What about Dial? And I said, “Well, I don't think we can update it, because nothing will work. You know, the phones, the keys. And he said, “No, I'll keep it, keep it in the fifties. But what else could you What else could you do with the lover?”

And he suggested--so I credit Barry on this--why don't you turn the lover played by Robert Cummings in the movie into a woman and make it a lesbian relationship? And that really opened all sorts of doors. It made the relationship scarier, something that you really want to keep a secret, 1953. And I was luckily able to find a couple of other plot twists that didn't interfere with any of Knott's original plot.

So, in both cases, I think it's like you go into a watch. And the watch works great, but you want the watch to have a different appearance and a different feel when you put it on and tick a little differently.

John: We've kept you for a way long time. So, let's do this as a speed round. And I know that these questions are the sorts that will change from day to day for some people, but I thought each of us could talk about our favorite mysteries in four different mediums. So, Jeff, your favorite mystery novel”

Jeffrey: And Then There Were None. That's an easy one for me.

John: That is. Jim, do you have one?

Jim: Yeah, yeah, I don't read a lot of mysteries. I really enjoyed a Stephen King book called Mr. Mercedes, which was a cat and mouse game, and I enjoyed that quite a bit. That's only top of mind because I finished it recently.

John: That counts.

Jim: Does it?

John: Yeah. That'll count.

Jim: You're going to find that I am so middle America in my answers.

John: That's okay. Mine is--I'm going to cheat a little bit and do a short story--which the original Don't Look Now that Daphne du Murier wrote, because as a mystery, it ties itself up. Like I said earlier, I like stuff that ties up right at the end. And it literally is in the last two or three sentences of that short story where everything falls into place. Jeff, your favorite mystery play? I can be one of yours if you want.

Jeffrey: It’s a battle between Sleuth or Dial M for Murder. Maybe Sleuth because I always wanted to be in it, but it's probably Dial M. But it's also followed up very quickly by Death Trap, which is a great comedy-mystery-thriller. It's kind of a post-modern, Meta play, but it's a play about the play you're watching.

John: Excellent choices. My choice is Sleuth. You did have a chance to be in Sleuth because when I directed it, you're the first person I asked. But your schedule wouldn't let you do it. But you would have been a fantastic Andrew Wyke. I'm sorry our timing didn't work on that.

Jeffrey: And you got a terrific Andrew in Julian Bailey, but if you wanted to do it again, I'm available.

John: Jim, you hear that?

Jim: I did hear that. Yes, I did hear that.

John: Jim, do you have a favorite mystery play?

Jim: You know, it's gonna sound like I'm sucking up, but I don't see a lot of mystery plays. There was a version of Gaslight that I saw with Jim Stoll as the lead. And he was terrific.

But I so thoroughly enjoyed Holmes and Watson and would love the opportunity to see that a second time. I saw it so late in the run and it was so sold out that there was no coming back at that point to see it again. But I would love to see it a second time and think to myself, well, now that you know what you know, is it all there? Because my belief is it is all there. 

John: Yeah. Okay. Jeff, your favorite TV mystery?

Jeffrey: Oh, Columbo. That's easy. Columbo.

John: I'm gonna go with Poker Face, just because the pace on Poker Face is so much faster than Columbo, even though it's clearly based on Columbo. Jim, a favorite TV mystery?

Jim: The Rockford Files, hands down.

John: Fair enough. Fair enough. All right. Last question all around. Jeff, your favorite mystery movie?

Jeffrey: Laura.

Jim: Ah, good one.

John: I'm going to go with The Last of Sheila. If you haven't seen The Last of Sheila, it's a terrific mystery directed by Herbert Ross, written by Stephen Sondheim and Anthony Perkins. Fun little Stephen Sondheim trivia. The character of Andrew Wyke and his house were based on Stephen Sondheim.

Jeffrey: Sondheim’s townhouse has been for sale recently. I don't know if somebody bought it, but for a cool seven point something million, you're going to get it.

John: All right. Let's maybe pool our money. Jim, your favorite mystery movie.

Jim: I'm walking into the lion's den here with this one. Jeffrey, I hope this is okay, but I really enjoyed the Robert Downey Jr. Sherlock Holmes movies. And I revisit the second one in that series on a fairly regular basis, The Game of Shadows. I thought I enjoyed that a lot. Your thoughts on those movies quickly?

Jeffrey: My only feeling about those is that I felt they were trying a little too hard not to do some of the traditional stuff. I got it, you know, like no deer stalker, that kind of thing. But I thought it was just trying a tad too hard to be You know, everybody's very good at Kung Fu, that kind of thing.

Jim: Yes. And it's Sherlock Holmes as a superhero, which, uh, appeals to me.

Jeffrey: I know the producer of those, and I know Guy Ritchie a little bit. And, I know they're still trying to get out a third one.

Jim: Well, I hope they do. I really hope they do. Cause I enjoyed that version of Sherlock Holmes quite a bit. I thought it was funny and all of the clues were there and it paid off in the end as a mystery, but fun all along the road.

Jeffrey: And the main thing they got right was the Holmes and Watson relationship, which, you know, as anybody will tell you, you can get a lot of things wrong, but get that right and you're more than two thirds there.

Dying to make a feature? Learn from the pros!

"We never put out an actual textbook for the Corman School of Filmmaking, but if we did, it would be Fast, Cheap and Under Control." 
Roger Corman, Producer

★★★★★

It’s like taking a Master Class in moviemaking…all in one book!

• Jonathan Demme: The value of cameos

• John Sayles: Writing to your resources

• Peter Bogdanovich: Long, continuous takes

• John Cassavetes: Re-Shoots

• Steven Soderbergh: Rehearsals

• George Romero: Casting

• Kevin Smith: Skipping film school

• Jon Favreau: Creating an emotional connection

• Richard Linklater: Poverty breeds creativity

• David Lynch: Kill your darlings

• Ron Howard: Pre-production planning

• John Carpenter: Going low-tech

• Robert Rodriguez: Sound thinking

And more!

Write Your Screenplay with the Help of Top Screenwriters!

It’s like taking a Master Class in screenwriting … all in one book!

Discover the pitfalls of writing to fit a budget from screenwriters who have successfully navigated these waters already. Learn from their mistakes and improve your script with their expert advice.

"I wish I'd read this book before I made Re-Animator."
Stuart Gordon, Director, Re-Animator, Castle Freak, From Beyond

John Gaspard has directed half a dozen low-budget features, as well as written for TV, movies, novels and the stage.

The book covers (among other topics):

• Academy-Award Winner Dan Futterman (“Capote”) on writing real stories

• Tom DiCillio (“Living In Oblivion”) on turning a short into a feature

• Kasi Lemmons (“Eve’s Bayou”) on writing for a different time period

• George Romero (“Martin”) on writing horror on a budget

• Rebecca Miller (“Personal Velocity”) on adapting short stories

• Stuart Gordon (“Re-Animator”) on adaptations

• Academy-Award Nominee Whit Stillman (“Metropolitan”) on cheap ways to make it look expensive

• Miranda July (“Me and You and Everyone We Know”) on making your writing spontaneous

• Alex Cox (“Repo Man”) on scaling the script to meet a budget

• Joan Micklin Silver (“Hester Street”) on writing history on a budget

• Bob Clark (“Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things”) on mixing humor and horror

• Amy Holden Jones (“Love Letters”) on writing romance on a budget

• Henry Jaglom (“Venice/Venice”) on mixing improvisation with scripting

• L.M. Kit Carson (“Paris, Texas”) on re-writing while shooting

• Academy-Award Winner Kenneth Lonergan (“You Can Count on Me”) on script editing

• Roger Nygard (“Suckers”) on mixing genres

This is the book for anyone who’s serious about writing a screenplay that can get produced! 

Fred Terling on "Croaker"

What was your filmmaking background before making "Croaker?"

TERLING: I've done several shorts, participated in the 48-hour film festival and worked on a couple of projects for friends, both editing and acting. I've Produced and hosted an online international independent film showcase, "Barnabus Bailey and the Greatest Show Unearthed." Think Vampira or Zacherly, but screening Indy's instead of the old public domain films. I've written forever.

Where did the idea come from and what was the writing process like ?  

TERLING: I wanted to do something that was personal. I went back to my hometown and visited all of the locations of my youth. There was something that happened with the emotions and the memories that sort of coalesced this story.  

In my mancave, there is a pretty substantial folklore and monster library that served as a reference to pick just the right creature that fit the very ethnic diversity of my hometown. I've been writing since fourth grade, I love it. Ernest Hemingway said, “The first draft of anything is shit." That quote is my guidepost. I look more at a script as something that is alive, gestated through the process of the film. Actors get into their roles and the more they become that character, they breathe life into the words and often go off script. As a Director, I know I am doing my job when this happens.

Can you talk about how you raised your budget and your financial plan for recouping your costs?  

TERLING: I have a background in political fundraising and one thing I learned early on from my mentors, NEVER put you eggs in one basket. It was a multi-tiered approach based on an analysis of potential donors, fence sitters and unknowns.  By targeting specific groups with specific offerings, I developed an investment package that I could present to very specific donors, the kinds of people who wouldn't jump at a larger number. The fence sitters always need a little coaxing, so a lower offering was made to that group. Advertisers and product placement, since we shot locally, was also effective.
One of the questions that came up early on in the process was, "I can't afford the investor amount, but would like to help out, where can I donate?' That's where crowd funding came in. We used Indiegogo and I was pleasantly surprised with how many people came through that channel.

What kind of camera did you use to shoot the movie -- and what did you love about it and hate about it?  

TERLING: Old reliable, Sony HDR FX1, a Nikon D3200 and Panasonic HVX 200. What I loved is the video quality, even at night and of course the ease of using filters as we have a TON of exterior—natural lighting shots. Didn't hate anything really. Audio is always a concern running three different cameras. Converting the MXF files on the HV is a pain, but not a big deal.

You wore a lot of hats on this project -- director, writer, producer, editor. What's the upside and the downside of working that way?  

TERLING: Great question. The upside is, when doing a personal story that I created from images and emotions, the creative process of directing, writing and editing keeps the story continuity intact. The story is kind of complex as we have a curse, a monster, very developed characters, humor, a love story and at the center of it all, a longing for connection between two brothers that was cut short by an incident twenty years prior. To put that in anyone else's hands and maintain the integrity of the film, I think is impossible.

The downside, of course, is that one additional hat - Production. Handling all the administrative tasks can be simply overwhelming. Trying to summon energy to step on the set after spending the day talking to an investor, securing a location and talking to the attorney, it was a challenge at times shifting gears. With that being said, from the ashes spawned the phoenix. Somewhere Hitch smiled on me and I was blessed with the greatest AD, Jennifer Obed and best production staff, Marty Patterson, Lori Terling, Jimmy Star, Jordan Strope, Tara Patterson and Pam Bolger, that a first time feature filmmaker could possibly have. They are the best - PERIOD. They turned any downside into an express elevator going up.

What was the smartest thing you did during production? The dumbest?  

TERLING: Smartest thing - the team. No matter how personal a project is to you, it's essential to get everyone on board to more than just see the vision, but to make it their own. We have professionals on both sides of the camera, and they understand what it takes to get the shot. We worked so in concert together, a lot of the crew direction faded, and we sort of were on mind share. I am an incredibly patient person and I think that trickled down as all of the actors were very patient with each other.
The dumbest? Simple...time management - that and trusting my battery indicator! Between call time and shoot time, well, as an ex-Marine I'm sure one of my past commanders would have had me doing push-ups until I crashed! It was probably the greatest significant thing I learned on this film. Take how long you "think" something will take and triple it!

And, finally, what did you learn from making the film that you have taken to other projects?  

TERLING: Locations are fun to shoot in, but time is limited. Sets are more relaxed and there is no time pressure. We had a ton of location shoots in Croaker and for the next film we are definitely going to rent space long term and build our sets. The creativity level and energy goes WAY up with the actors when we have no rush to shoot and get out, there are facilities and electricity is close at hand.  

Dying to make a feature? Learn from the pros!

"We never put out an actual textbook for the Corman School of Filmmaking, but if we did, it would be Fast, Cheap and Under Control." 
Roger Corman, Producer

★★★★★

It’s like taking a Master Class in moviemaking…all in one book!

• Jonathan Demme: The value of cameos

• John Sayles: Writing to your resources

• Peter Bogdanovich: Long, continuous takes

• John Cassavetes: Re-Shoots

• Steven Soderbergh: Rehearsals

• George Romero: Casting

• Kevin Smith: Skipping film school

• Jon Favreau: Creating an emotional connection

• Richard Linklater: Poverty breeds creativity

• David Lynch: Kill your darlings

• Ron Howard: Pre-production planning

• John Carpenter: Going low-tech

• Robert Rodriguez: Sound thinking

And more!

Write Your Screenplay with the Help of Top Screenwriters!

It’s like taking a Master Class in screenwriting … all in one book!

Discover the pitfalls of writing to fit a budget from screenwriters who have successfully navigated these waters already. Learn from their mistakes and improve your script with their expert advice.

"I wish I'd read this book before I made Re-Animator."
Stuart Gordon, Director, Re-Animator, Castle Freak, From Beyond

John Gaspard has directed half a dozen low-budget features, as well as written for TV, movies, novels and the stage.

The book covers (among other topics):

• Academy-Award Winner Dan Futterman (“Capote”) on writing real stories

• Tom DiCillio (“Living In Oblivion”) on turning a short into a feature

• Kasi Lemmons (“Eve’s Bayou”) on writing for a different time period

• George Romero (“Martin”) on writing horror on a budget

• Rebecca Miller (“Personal Velocity”) on adapting short stories

• Stuart Gordon (“Re-Animator”) on adaptations

• Academy-Award Nominee Whit Stillman (“Metropolitan”) on cheap ways to make it look expensive

• Miranda July (“Me and You and Everyone We Know”) on making your writing spontaneous

• Alex Cox (“Repo Man”) on scaling the script to meet a budget

• Joan Micklin Silver (“Hester Street”) on writing history on a budget

• Bob Clark (“Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things”) on mixing humor and horror

• Amy Holden Jones (“Love Letters”) on writing romance on a budget

• Henry Jaglom (“Venice/Venice”) on mixing improvisation with scripting

• L.M. Kit Carson (“Paris, Texas”) on re-writing while shooting

• Academy-Award Winner Kenneth Lonergan (“You Can Count on Me”) on script editing

• Roger Nygard (“Suckers”) on mixing genres

This is the book for anyone who’s serious about writing a screenplay that can get produced! 

Donna McRae on "Johnny Ghost"

What was your filmmaking background before making "Johnny Ghost?"

DONNA McRAE: I trained as an actor for three years. After I graduated, I had a couple of good years, then the work was harder to come by. Naively I thought that I would ‘write something that I could be in,’ but found that I enjoyed writing just as much as acting.

I started working with two directors (I had worked on their short films) developing screenplays. One by one they moved interstate and overseas, so I was writing by myself again. I was accepted into a screenwriting residency and the mentors there encouraged me to direct my own work and finally I did – via film school.  I made quite a few shorts there and after, and then thought I was ready for a longer length film. 

Where did the idea come from and what was the writing process like?

DONNA McRAE: The idea came from experience, I suppose. Even though it is not autobiographical, I did live through the post punk years in Melbourne (Australia) as a young girl and was fascinated and intimidated by all the great music, people, and lifestyle. It was a very short time however, and quite a few casualties were claimed by that hedonistic lifestyle of drugs and rebellious behavior. 

I had started a screenplay a few years earlier about a woman who was in a punk band with her boyfriend – so years later I got to thinking about that character and wondered what she may be like 25 years on! That was the basis of Johnny Ghost. It came together very quickly after that.

Can you talk about how you raised your budget and your financial plan for recouping your costs?

DONNA McRAE: I was doing a Masters of Fine Art at Monash University and was really enjoying investigating storytelling through images. The thought of going further into postgraduate study also interested me and I knew that they offered scholarships for some PhD candidates. So, I thought to myself, why not try to get a scholarship and spend it on making a feature film!!! Crazy? Yes, but it worked.

The area of ghosts – cinematic and beyond – really interested me and I knew I wanted to make work in this area. So, I got a doctorate and a feature film out of the process. It was 4 years, but I really loved it and feel like I have only scratched the surface of all things ghostly.

My film cost $30,000 to make and I have probably spent an extra $10,000 on it if you count marketing and trips to film festivals. I don’t have much of a plan to recoup that money – it was a scholarship in the first place – but I now have distribution in North America, Canada and Mexico and working on local (Australian) distro too, so you never know, I may get something back!

What kind of camera did you use to shoot the movie -- and what did you love about it and hate about it?

DONNA McRAE: At the time, all I could afford was the Panasonic P2. The Red camera was out of reach and the Alexa was about to be launched. I had already shot a short on it and was pleased with the results, so had no problem with using it again. It was robust and portable enough to not need a huge crew supporting it. My DOP Laszlo Baranyai liked it and really pushed it for a good result. Obviously, if I had more money, I would have used something better, but I am very pleased with what we got.

What drove your decision to shoot in black and white ... and what are the pros and cons of that decision?

DONNA McRAE: One of the reasons I shot in black and white was the P2 – I thought it could handle the blacks quite well. Also, I wanted to give the film that nether worldly, classic ghost story feel – a nod to The Innocents and Rebecca – all those old ghosts films that play to the shadows.  I thought that going that way wouldn’t date the film as much as colour would. It was a bigger job for the Production Designer (visual artist Michael Vale) but much more satisfying. 

It has been interesting in the marketplace though. There have been some distributors that wouldn’t even look at it when they knew it was black and white – they said it would be too much of a hard sell. One even said to turn it back to color! I can’t imagine it in color now – but I wonder if I would do another one in black and white…maybe…maybe not.

You wore a lot of hats on this project -- director, writer, producer, editor. What's the upside and the downside of working that way?

DONNA McRAE: Even looking at all those hats in your question I feel tired!!!

The upside was that it was good to keep control on all those departments as it was such a small project. Also, because I had the university scholarship, I had to run things past my supervisors which made it easier. And I could do all those roles for free!

The downside was that the buck stopped with me, so I was responsible for everything. It was ok in pre production and post because I didn’t really have to liase with many people -- and post I just had to edit it myself (with the help of grading from my DOP and a sound mix from a post house).

But the production of the film was hard. It would have been nice to just concentrate on just one role, but I never could. I am an organized person, so everything was drilled beforehand, but even so I was always watching out for another department. 

You also didn’t mention catering which I did a number of times. I will know that I have ‘made it’ as a director when a catering truck pulls up on set!!!  

What was the smartest thing you did during production? The dumbest?

DONNA McRAE: The smartest thing I did on production was casting the best actor for the role. The main role of Millicent is played by Anni Finsterer who gives an amazing performance. I felt that I didn’t have to do much at all – just tweak for the camera – and she really carries the whole film. I didn’t have to worry about it one bit.

The dumbest thing I did was not checking whether the fake tattoo transfer actually did work.  Of course it didn’t!!!!  The production designer Michael Vale had designed it but someone else had taken care of the transfer. Luckily Michael was with us everyday, so everyday he had to draw it on Anni. Both troopers!

And, finally, what did you learn from making the film that you have taken to other projects?

DONNA McRAE: I have learnt so much from that project and others along the way.

Firstly, organization. Everything needs to be so organized, because then and only then can it allow time for experimentation – things that aren’t scripted.

Secondly, marketing. Knowing what kind of film you are making and who your audience is. Setting up social media before you shoot is vital in this climate.

Thirdly, making sure you have a good time and treat people well. I have always strived to do this and because of it I have a great team that work together all the time. Filmmaking can be so stressful that you need to have lots of laughs along the way.

Fourth – be in love with the project. You are stuck with it, and it deserves your time to really push it once it’s done.

Also, probably the most important one – collaborate! Your team can make it much better than you can imagine! 

One more – try not to do the catering….

Dying to make a feature? Learn from the pros!

"We never put out an actual textbook for the Corman School of Filmmaking, but if we did, it would be Fast, Cheap and Under Control." 
Roger Corman, Producer

★★★★★

It’s like taking a Master Class in moviemaking…all in one book!

• Jonathan Demme: The value of cameos

• John Sayles: Writing to your resources

• Peter Bogdanovich: Long, continuous takes

• John Cassavetes: Re-Shoots

• Steven Soderbergh: Rehearsals

• George Romero: Casting

• Kevin Smith: Skipping film school

• Jon Favreau: Creating an emotional connection

• Richard Linklater: Poverty breeds creativity

• David Lynch: Kill your darlings

• Ron Howard: Pre-production planning

• John Carpenter: Going low-tech

• Robert Rodriguez: Sound thinking

And more!

Write Your Screenplay with the Help of Top Screenwriters!

It’s like taking a Master Class in screenwriting … all in one book!

Discover the pitfalls of writing to fit a budget from screenwriters who have successfully navigated these waters already. Learn from their mistakes and improve your script with their expert advice.

"I wish I'd read this book before I made Re-Animator."
Stuart Gordon, Director, Re-Animator, Castle Freak, From Beyond

John Gaspard has directed half a dozen low-budget features, as well as written for TV, movies, novels and the stage.

The book covers (among other topics):

• Academy-Award Winner Dan Futterman (“Capote”) on writing real stories

• Tom DiCillio (“Living In Oblivion”) on turning a short into a feature

• Kasi Lemmons (“Eve’s Bayou”) on writing for a different time period

• George Romero (“Martin”) on writing horror on a budget

• Rebecca Miller (“Personal Velocity”) on adapting short stories

• Stuart Gordon (“Re-Animator”) on adaptations

• Academy-Award Nominee Whit Stillman (“Metropolitan”) on cheap ways to make it look expensive

• Miranda July (“Me and You and Everyone We Know”) on making your writing spontaneous

• Alex Cox (“Repo Man”) on scaling the script to meet a budget

• Joan Micklin Silver (“Hester Street”) on writing history on a budget

• Bob Clark (“Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things”) on mixing humor and horror

• Amy Holden Jones (“Love Letters”) on writing romance on a budget

• Henry Jaglom (“Venice/Venice”) on mixing improvisation with scripting

• L.M. Kit Carson (“Paris, Texas”) on re-writing while shooting

• Academy-Award Winner Kenneth Lonergan (“You Can Count on Me”) on script editing

• Roger Nygard (“Suckers”) on mixing genres

This is the book for anyone who’s serious about writing a screenplay that can get produced! 

Nicholas Meyer on Houdini, Sherlock Holmes, Star Trek and Time After Time

John Gaspard: Do you remember what it was that caused your dad to write that book (about the psychology behind Houdini)?

Nicholas Meyer: I know something about it. He was interested, the subjects that kind of absorbed his attention were the sons of passive or absent fathers. This was a topic which probably originated from his experiences with his own father, my grandfather, who was a very interesting man and a kind of a world beater, but who spent so much of his time doing what they said in The Wizard of Oz—being a philip, philip, philip, a good deed doer—that he didn't have enough time for fathering. He was not a bad man at all, quite a conscientious one. But the parenting was left to his wife and I think my father missed and was affected by not having an involved father. And I think that a colleague of my dad's said to him Houdini, that's the guy for you. And that's how he did it. I'm only sorry that he didn't live to see the two-night television series based on his book.

Jim Cunningham: I enjoyed it immensely as a Houdini fan. It was fascinating and fun and Adrian Brody is terrific, as is the woman who plays Bess. I thought I knew a lot about Houdini and there was a lot in there that I did not know. And I really enjoyed the opening to it, which suggests that it's all fact and all fiction, and it's our job to figure out which is which. How did you come to being involved with the TV mini-series about your dad's book?

Nicholas Meyer: I have been friends and worked for many years with a television producer named Jerry Abrams. I started working with Jerry in 1973 with the first teleplay that I wrote was for a television movie called Judge Dee in the Haunted Monastery. There was a—China apparently invented everything first, including detective stories—and a circuit court judge in the seventh century, Judge Dee Jen Jay, solved mysteries and people wrote detective stories about him and now there are movies about him.

But back in 1972, or something like that, and I had just come to Hollywood and was looking for work and didn't know anybody. And I met Jerry Abrams and I met a director named Jeremy Kagan and I'm happy to say both of these gentlemen are alive and still my friends. They gave me a shot to write this Judge Dee in the Haunted Monastery because I think ABC thought they were going to get a Kung Fu movie out of it, which it wasn't. But it was a television movie with an all Asian cast. The monastery in question was the old Camelot castle on the Warner Brothers lot and that's where I met Jerry. And Jerry and I've been friends ever since. Jerry’s son is JJ Abrams, who directs movies.

Anyway, Jerry said to me a couple of years ago, let's do Houdini and I said, Oh, funny, you should say that because my dad wrote a very interesting book about Houdini. I would be interested if it were based on his book. I would only be interested and that's how it got made.

John Gaspard: What was your process? Did you know it would be two nights going in? Did you know it's going to be that long? How did you get started and what other resources did you use, because I know there's stuff mentioned in the movie that I don't remember being in your dad's books. You must have had to dig a little bit.

Nicholas Meyer: There's a lot of books about Houdini, that I read many, many books, because my dad's book is distinguished—if one could call it that—by being the only book of all the books about Houdini that attempts some inner explanation of his psychological process. The why? Why would you do this? Why do you feel the need to do this? Other books will tell you what Houdini did, and some will tell you how he did it. But my dad's book, as I say, it kind of explores the why of it.

And so I read these other books to supplement the rest of the how and the why and I've amassed quite a large Houdini library. When I say large, probably compared to yours not so much, but I must have like 10 books about Houdini and flying aeroplanes and Houdini and Arthur Conan Doyle and spiritualism and so forth. So, yes, I read all those to supplement what I was trying to condense.

I don't remember whether at this point whether it was proposed as two nights or three nights or whatever. I also know that if it hadn't been for Adrian Brody agreeing to play Houdini, it never would have happened. They weren't going to do it without a star.

Jim Cunningham: He's great.

John Gaspard: I was telling Jim earlier, before you got on, that my wife was kind enough to sit down and watch it with me. She's always worried in things like this, that she’s going see how something's done. She doesn't want to know how magic is done at all. And when we got to the end, she said, “Houdini seems so nice. He's such a likeable guy.” And I think that's really more Adrian Brody.

Nicholas Meyer: Oh, yeah. The Adrian Brody. As I say, the movie would not have got made without Adrian. I'm not sure that he wasn't to a large degree cast against type. I think Houdini was a guy with ants in his pants, a kind of frenetic character. And I don't think when you read about him in any detail, that he was what you'd call nice. I think he was a person who had a lot of charm that he could switch on and off like a tap.  

And I think this is one of the things that my dad's book brings out, and we tried to bring it out in the movie: that Houdini's whose own father was a failure of flop and absent parent. So, I think Houdini spent a lot of his life looking for substitutes or alternative father figures. And I think the first one he probably stumbled on was the French magician Robert-Houdin, from whom he took his name. And I think Houdini's pattern, at least according to my dad's reading of it, was to find father figures and fall hard for them, only to ultimately become disenchanted and alienated and furious with them. Probably, because ultimately, they weren't his real father. But I think there was something like that going on.

John Gaspard: Yes, it's pretty clear that's what happened with Doyle as well.

Nicholas Meyer: Yes, but he had better reason than in some other cases to be disenchanted with Doyle because Doyle's Atlantic City séance with Lady Doyle, Houdini ultimately regarded as a real betrayal. Because he decided, probably correctly, that the contact with his mother via Lady Doyle doing spirit writing was fake.

And by the way, it's not that Mrs. Doyle or Lady Doyle might not have believed what she was doing. It just didn't track for two reasons: Houdini experienced this contact with his mother, and he was as obsessed with her as he was with the fact of an absent father. And he was so overcome when she spoke to him via the spirit writing that it was a couple of days before he realized that his mother didn't speak a word of English. And she had communicated via lady Doyle in English, she only spoke Yiddish. Doyle got around this difficulty by explaining that the medium in this case, Lady Doyle, worked as a kind of simultaneous translator.

And Houdini said, yeah, but—and this was the second item—it was his birthday. And she never mentioned it and she always sent him something on his birthday. And he then denounced Doyle and Lady Doyle, as quote, menaces to mankind.

John Gaspard: So, were you involved in a day-to-day way with production? And I'm wondering why you didn't direct it?

Nicholas Meyer: I was involved. The whole movie was shot in Budapest, everything and I was involved. I was not invited to direct. I have not directed really since the death of my wife in 1993. I had two small children to raise and by the time it was, like, possible for me to go back since they are now grown up and busy. I was sort of out of a game.

John Gaspard: Oh, that's too bad. You're a terrific director.

Nicholas Meyer: I'm not arguing with you.

John Gaspard: So, once you were scripting it, and you were using other sources, how concerned were you about this is fact, this is fiction?

Nicholas Meyer: That's a very good question and it doesn't just apply to Houdini. It applies largely to the whole issue of dramatizing the stories based on real events.

And by the way, you could make the case in a way that there's no such thing as fiction; that all fiction ultimately can be traced back to something real. I'll give you two examples off the top of my head: one, Moby Dick was based on a real Whale called Mocha Dick because of his color; and, as Heinrich Schliemann proved, when he discovered Troy, most legends, most myths have their origins somewhere in the mists of time, in some kind of reality. It turns out there was a place called Troy. So, he was not far off the mark.

It's a knotty question with a “k” how much we owe to fact and how much we get to mush around and dramatize? And the answer has to be inevitably elastic. The problem is that people are neither taught, nor do they read history anymore. We are not taught civics. We are not taught history.

Nobody knows anything and so by default, movies and television are where we get our history, and that history is not always truthful. It is dramatized for example, in that Academy Award winning movie, The Deer Hunter, we learn that the North Vietnamese made American prisoners of war in Vietnam, play Russian roulette. There is no evidence, no historical evidence that they ever did any such thing. And yet, if you're getting your history from the movies, that's what you see and someone said that seeing is believing. In any case, you have to sort of always be looking over your own shoulder when you are dramatizing history and realizing that, yes, you can tell a story with scope, dates and characters. But what's the point where you cross a line and start inventing things out of whole cloth?

I’ll give you another example: was Richard the Third really the monster that Shakespeare portrays? Now, remember, Shakespeare is writing for the granddaughter of the man who killed Richard the Third and usurped his throne and called himself king. You could make a very different case that that guy was a scumbag and that Richard was not, but you know, Shakespeare was in business. The Globe Theatre was a money-making operation and Henry the Seventh’s granddaughter was the Queen of England. So, there are a lot of variables here.

When you sit down to dramatize, I've worked for the History Channel and I can tell you the history channel will not make a movie where Americans look bad. The History Channel will not make a movie that questions any point in our own history. Our right to the moral high ground. It's a point of view and they have a demographic and Americans don't want to be shown any of their own flaws or asked to think about them.

Jim Cunningham; Well, who does? Can I ask questions about the espionage? Part of what I witnessed last night, although I had sort of a vague memory, that there is some espionage connection or perhaps connection? In the first episode that he was working for at least the American government and perhaps the English government as well. Is there evidence for that?

Nicholas Meyer: Circumstantial evidence.

Jim Cunningham: Yes, and I suppose that it could still be even at this late date protected in some way in terms of, I don't know them, not admitting, or maybe no real hard evidence exists anymore, right?

Nicholas Meyer: I'm more inclined to think that no real hard evidence exists. Although we all know that somebody said, truth is the daughter of time. But a lot of evidence has for a lot of things, not merely in this country, but also England has been redacted and eliminated and buried. You know, how many of your listeners know the story of Alan Turing?

Alan Turing may have shortened World War Two by as much as two years by inventing the computer that helped break the German Enigma code. Alan Turing signed the Official Secrets Act which meant that his wartime work could never be revealed. Alan Turing was gay. After the war was over, Alan Turing was arrested on a morals and decency charge and he could not tell the world who he was and so he was sentenced to some kind of chemical castration, I believe and he killed himself.

And all of this remained a secret for the next 55 years before the world's, you know, learned and suddenly there was a play called Breaking the Code and then there was the Enigma novel by Robert Harris and then there was the movie, which is very inaccurate, and very troublesome to me, The Imitation Game. Because in The Imitation Game, the first thing he does when he's arrested, is tell the cop who he is. With a crushing irony, as well as inaccuracy, is it there's no way he was allowed to tell. That was the price you pay when you sign the Official Secrets Act. So that movie kind of bugged me.

Whereas for example, Enigma, which I think is one of my favorite movies, doesn't bug me at all because it doesn't call him Alan Turing and therefore, he's not gay, and it's a different story entirely spun out of inspired by, but not pretending to be Alan Turing.

Jim Cunningham: Well, now I'm gonna have to watch that movie because I don't think I've seen it.

Nicholas Meyer: You never saw Enigma?

Jim Cunningham: I don't believe I saw Enigma.

Nicholas Meyer: It's the only movie produced by Mick Jagger and Lorne Michaels, written by Tom Stoppard. Kate Winslet, Dougray, Scott, Jeremy Northam. Anyway, it's a fantastic movie, but you have to watch it like five times in order to understand everything that's going on because Tom Stoppard is not going to make it easy.

John Gaspard: Just a quick side note here. I remember reading somewhere that Mick Jagger was a possible first choice for Time After Time.

Nicholas Meyer: Yeah, for Jack the Ripper.

John Gaspard: Okay, interesting. I prefer the choice you came up with.

Nicholas Meyer:  Well, when they—Warner Brothers—were trying to sort of figure out how to make this movie, quote, commercial (they were so surprised when it was a hit), they suggested Mick Jagger as Jack the Ripper. And he was in LA at the time touring and I really didn't understand the politics of not just filmmaking, but you know, sort of office politics generally. And my first reply was no, you know, you might believe him as the Ripper, but you'd never believe him—or I didn't think you would believe him—as a Harley Street surgeon. And they said, You mean you won't even meet him? And that's when I said, oh, okay, I get it. I have to agree to meet. So I met him and then I said, fellas, I still don't, you know, think this can work. And so we went on to David Warner.

Jim Cunningham: I think that was the first film I became aware of David Warner and of course, it colored my opinion of David Warner for everything I've seen him in since, including him as Bob Cratchit in a version of A Christmas Carol. I kept thinking to myself, don't turn your back on him. He's a killer. He's a stone-cold killer, because of Time After Time, which is still one of my favorite movies.

Nicholas Meyer: Oh, thank you so much.

John Gaspard: We promised not to geek out too much. But I have to tell you that the hotel room scene between him and McDowell, I still pull up once or twice a year to look at the writing and the acting in that scene. “You're literally the last person on Earth expected to see.” They're both so good in that scene.

Nicholas Meyer: They are that, they are.

John Gaspard: I think you mentioned in your memoir in passing that when you did The 7% Solution there was some back and forth with the Doyle estate. We—Jim and I—have a friend, Jeff Hatcher, who wrote the screenplay for Mr. Holmes, which is based on a book. Once the movie came out, it did run into some issues with the Doyle estate, because the writer had taken some characteristics of Holmes from the later books …

Nicholas Meyer: It's all bullshit. All that is bullshit. The Doyle estate, which was once the richest literary estate in the world, was run into the ground by his descendants and their in laws and they don't care anything about Sherlock Holmes. All they care about is money. And what they try to do is to stick up movie companies and book companies and say you've got to pay. And back when Holmes legitimately fell into copyright, which is when I wrote The 7% Solution, yes, I had to pay and I understood that. I mean, I didn't understand it when I wrote the book because I was a kid. But I understood it when it was explained to me.

What since happened is they continue, even though he's out of copyright, to try to pretend that he is or that one or two stories are etc. My friend, Les Clinger, who is a business manager but also happens to be a lawyer and a Holmes’ enthusiast, took the estate to court and won. He broke that bullshit stranglehold that they were trying to exercise on anybody who wanted to write or create or make a movie about Holmes.

Now, it's also true that big companies like Warner Brothers, or Paramount or something, if they make a Sherlock Holmes movie, and the Doyle estate comes sniffling to their door, find it cheaper to say, here's $10,000, Go away, than it is to bother to do what Les did, which was take them to court. It's just, it's blackmail, you've all seen the Godfather, you know, give me a little something to wet my beak is what this is all about. I have nothing good to say about them and what they did with Mr. Holmes, your friend's movie, was they waited until the movie was about to come out before they hit him.

John Gaspard: Jim, I should mention, you probably don't know this, that and this is the truth, the man we're talking to is the man for whom the thing at the beginning of a DVD that says the opinions expressed here are not those of this company. He's the reason that's on DVDs.

Jim Cunningham: Is that right?

Nicholas Meyer: Yes, I will explain because I'm very proud of it.

I've made a couple of contributions to civilization. One of them is the movie The Day After, it's my nuclear war movie. And the other is this little sign. And it happened when they were preparing the DVD release of Star Trek Two: the Wrath of Khan. I was interviewed and asked to explain my contributions to the making the movie, the script, the directing, etc. So, I told the story about how I came to write the script. And the DVD lady who subsequently became a very good friend of mine said, “Gee, the lawyers say we can't use any of what you told us.” And I said, “And why is that?” And she said, Paramount was worried about getting in trouble with the Writers Guild, because you are not credited as the author and you wrote this sort of under the table, the script. And I said, Well, why don't you just take me out of the whole DVD? Because if I can't tell the truth about it, I don't want to be in it.

And she said, “That's what I hoped you would say. Now, I've got some ammo.” So, she went back and she came back and she said, okay, here's the deal. And the deal now applies to every studio. “The opinions expressed in this interview, are not those of Paramount Pictures, its employees or affiliates.” 

What this does is it stops those interviews from being bullshit puff pieces and allows them to become oral histories. Now, different people may have different oral histories of the same thing. You put them all on the DVD, but suddenly, you've opened up a whole world to telling things that really happened or that the tellers think really happened, or are their opinions without the studio, worried that they're going to be sued, because of that little disclaimer. And they all have that now and that's my contribution.

Jim Cunningham: It's great. Now, I promised John before this interview that I would not talk Star Trekwith you, but since you've opened the door a little bit here. Now, that you say that you wrote Wrath of Khan under the table, can you just flesh that out for me? It might not ever be in the podcast, but I'm an incredible Star Trek fan. So, I'm interested in this story.

Nicholas Meyer: Well, very quickly, I knew nothing about Star Trek when I met Harve Bennett, the producer of what was going to be the second Star Trek movie. He showed me the first movie. He showed me some of the episodes and I got kind of a jones to make an outer space, a space opera. And I realized once I started to familiarize myself with Captain Kirk that he reminded me of Captain Hornblower, which were the books by CS Forester that I read when I was a kid, about a captain in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars, who had adventures and a girl in every port, which sounded good to me. I was 12. I think it was 13 or something and so I thought, “Oh, this is Hornblower and outer space. This is destroyers. This is submarines.”

So, I made a deal with Paramount and Harve Bennett to direct a Star Trek movie for them, which was going to be their second movie. And Harve said, draft five of the script is coming in. So, I went home and waited for draft five. And, you know, I looked up and it was three or four weeks later and wondered whatever happened, because I was starting to think about spaceships and stuff like that. And he said, “Oh, I can't send you the script. It's not good. I can't.” I said, “Well, what about draft four, draft three, whatever?” And he said, “You don't understand. All these different drafts are simply separate attempts to get another Star Trek movie. They're unrelated.”

And I said, “Well send them all to me. I want to read them.” And he said, “Really?” I said, “Yeah.”

And in those days, you didn't hit Send. A truck, drove up, a van, and it had a lot of scripts. And I'm a very slow reader and I started. I read all these scripts and then I said, “Why don't you and your producing partner, Robert Salem, come up to my house and let's have a chat about this because I have an idea.” And so they showed up, and I had my ubiquitous legal pad and I said, “Why don't we make a list of everything we like in these five scripts? It could be a major plot. It could be a subplot. It could be a sequence. It could be a scene. It could be a character, it could be a line of dialogue, I don't care. Let's just make the list and then I'll try to write a new screenplay that incorporates as many of these elements as we pick.” And they didn't look happy and I thought, I don't get a lot of ideas. This was my idea and I said, “What’s wrong? What's wrong with that?”

And they said, “Well, the problem is that if we don't have a screenplay within 12 days, Industrial Light and Magic, the special effects house for the movie, say they can't deliver the shots in time for the June opening.” And I said, “What June opening? “And I only directed one movie in my life, and these guys had booked the theatres for a movie that didn't exist. And I said, “Well, okay, I'll try to do this in 12 days, but we got to pick the stuff now.”

And they still weren't happy. And I said, “So, what is it? What's the problem?” And they said, “Well, you know, let's be honest, we couldn't even make your deal in 12 days.” And at this point, I was like, foaming at the mouth. I said, “Look, guys, forget the deal. Forget the money. Forget the credit. I'm not talking about directing. We've already got that signed, sealed and delivered. But if we don't do this, now, there's gonna be no movie, yes or no?”

And I was an idiot, because I at that point gave away you know, what turned out to be significant. So, I didn't invent Kirk meets his son. I didn't invent Khan. I didn't invent Savak. I didn't invent the Genesis Planet. I didn't invent any of those things. I just took them and played with them like a Rubik's Cube and poured my, essentially it's all my dialogue, Harve wrote a few lines, but I wrote most of it.

John Gaspard: Well, it certainly worked.

Jim Cunningham: Oh, boy. Yeah, absolutely. And I will not bring up The Undiscovered Country because I promised John I wouldn't. The 7% Solution is very interesting. You took one thing, and you extrapolated out from that an entire kind of reality about Holmes that had not been explored. And it's similar to kind of what your father did with Houdini. And did that ever occur to you that there was there's a similarity there somehow?

Nicholas Meyer: Well, I did 7% before he did Houdini.

Jim Cunningham: He owes you then.

Nicholas Meyer:  Oh, yeah. He does. It's interesting. I was not the first person to put together Holmes and Freud. In fact, Freud knew that he'd been compared to Holmes. Freud loved to read Sherlock Holmes stories. That was his bedtime reading and at some point, he even wrote in one of his case histories, “I follow the labyrinth of her mind, Sherlock Holmes-like until it led me to…” So he knew about this comparison.

And there was a doctor at Yale, a famous psychiatrist/drug expert, who wrote a paper that my father gave me to read about Holmes, Freud and the cocaine connection. Because Holmes is a cocaine user and for a time, so was Freud. And when my book came out and was the number one best-selling novel in the United States for 40 weeks, I got sued by this doctor at Yale for plagiarism. This is like the first successful thing I'd ever done in my life and this guy was saying I ripped him off. Because he was probably walking across campus and people were saying, “Hey, doc, hey, professor, that guy in the New York Times you ripped you off.”

So, I got sued. This is how you know you're hot is when you get sued. But it was devastating to me. It was devastating and it was expensive, because I had to defend myself. I had a lawyer and the lawyer said, “They have no case. We will ask for something called summary judgment.” And I said, “Does that mean we have to wait till July?” And he goes, no, no, no, it's not about that x couldn't resist summary judgment. Yeah, that happened in the summertime.

Summary judgment turns out to mean that the facts of the case are not in dispute. No one can dispute that I read his essay. I put it in my acknowledgments. I thanked him. I read it. The question is, what is the definition of plagiarism? It turns out, you cannot copyright an idea. You can only copyright the expression of an idea. The words. I hadn't used his words. I haven't used any of his. I didn't write an academic paper. I wrote a novel. I wrote a story. So, I won and then he appealed and I won again, end of story.

So, it didn't originate with me, nothing originates with me. Moby Dick was based on another whale. Emma Bovary was a real person, on and on and on.

If you read the history or a biography, you understand that in good faith, efforts have been made to lay out the facts. But when you read a historical novel, you understand that the facts have been mushed around and dramatized, that the author has assumed the dramatist’s privilege, his prerogative, to help things along.

There's an Italian phrase, se non è vero, è ben trovato. If it didn't happen that way, it should have.

I’ll give you another example: Queen Elizabeth the first and her cousin and rival Mary Queen of Scots, whom Elizabeth subsequently had beheaded, never met in real life. They'd never met. But of all the 4,622 movies, plays, operas, novellas, ballets, whatever that are, they always meet.

Because it ain't cool if they don't meet.

John Gaspard: It's a better story.

Nicholas Meyer: It's a better story.

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