For Writers Ready to Make Their Own Movie

I'm interested in hearing from other writers who are ready to produce movies from their scripts. Or at least to hear OF them doing so. I am making four movies right now, all of them with distribution or display offers (this means hard cash, in the hand, if I just sign there), and find myself inexorably drawn to producing more of my own things as opposed to trying to write for a market.

I wrote the response below to another writer's thread of lament: "Is it worth it?" I suppose the reality of trying to come into any industry from the outside is different from any dreamer's fantasy, but Hollywood's flesh and bone are especially far removed from far away perceptions. The best approach is to let Hollywood come to you. Maybe that's the only approach for a writer who has something to say and who is more interested in the process than the profit.

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response to "Is it worth it?"

In May, all the major Hollywood studios bought a total of 18 "properties." That's scripts, books, articles, ideas.

In June, that number was 25. Six of these buys were scripts.

I live in Laurel Canyon, and consort with all sorts of Lalalanders. Every waiter (and busboy) and valet huffer in the county and the valley is writing a screenplay, hoping to be one of those 43 properties bought by Hollywood bought in May and June. One friend of mine shuttles back and forth from Manhattan, and makes his living rewriting scripts and treatments -- perhaps $150K a year, with the occasional $200K pleasant surprise in a single check. Let's say he makes aboout $200K a year. He's worried about the future; he had to pay back $300K for a movie just released on a limited run a few weeks ago because he wanted his name OFF the credits. For every $1 he makes from writing for Hollywood (movies or TV), 25% goes to his manager, 15% to his agent and up to 10% to his lawyer, leaving him with about 40 cents to the dollar, of which the IRS until recently was taking 25% up front. So a $300K check for a movie that greenlights leaves him with $100K. If this happens every three years, he's doing great. It doesn't quite happen like this, because the path bifurcates into two routes:

1) Something you wrote makes money for a studio, in which case you are paid much more; by a factor of three or four;

or

2) Something you wrote loses money for a studio, in which case your income is halved or quartered, immediately.

This friend of mine, who I've known for years, was nominated for an Academy Award within the past 10 years. The movie he wrote made scads of money for the studio. And he will tell you this: For the five years it took to write, pitch, sell, produce that script, he made less mney annually than a bus driver. One year before he was nominated, he was one of the guys walking around the street taking census for the U.S. population count, temp work, basically.

So the original post on this thread asks and answers what every screenwriter dreads: If you have to ask it can't be worth it.

From my own point of view, and from my own experience, there are two alternate routes: Making the actual movie yourself, and getting involved ith lawyers. I won't explain the first, but the second route is soul-sucking.

I "optioned" a screenplay in 1998 to a lawyer who was impressed with my track record. I.e., I had reviews which he could copy and put together with the script. The option was $17,000 for one year. The lawyer wanted to go to Cannes with scripts under his arm of all the writers he was representing. Why? So he could talk to other lawyers already tight with the stars and the producers and have some credibility. In this way, he might sneak himelf onto a production with other lawyers, and become a producer of independent movies on his way to becoming a player in Lalaland. He kept optioning the screenplay I wrote, and I found its value kept increasing -- to other lawyers.

One note to alternate route 1: Making your own movie. Since most people are writing Mission Improbable XXIV, the possibility of actually producing their own script is understandably difficult. To blow up one car costs at least three grand: the deadbeat car ($500), the paintjob ($800), and the crew and demolition expert and your time ($2000). A blown up and burning automobile is good for 20 to 25 seconds of a 90-minute movie. So every screenplay with a blown-up car presents a problem to the erstwhile self-helmer. And how many screenplays are loaded with gunshots and explosions and the other Hollywood hoo-hah which make the writer indistinct from the 3000 other Tarantino wanna-bes?

Lawyers will also fund the production of your movie. But not if there is a single explosion in the story. That narrrows the field considerably. Some lawyers can even spot the scripts depending on cliches. One lawyer told me he would never represent a script if one character says "Good morning" to another, because then he knows the writer is willing to waste everyone's time, including his own. I thought that was very good advice.

There is proof in what I'm saying (as well as encouragement for any writer) from three sources: the movie "Laws of Gravity" by Nick Gomez, shot for $32k with a fab script that is now seen as an American classic; the book "Man With a Camera" by Nestor Almendros, the cinematographer who shot both "Days of Heaven" and "Sophie's Choice" and who thinks writers make the best producers of movies, especially those written by themselves, as opposed to film school grads, who Almendros thinks are almost always useless; and the book "Rebel Without a Crew," by Robert Rodriguez, who made "El Mariachi" for less than $10K and proved that even a dyslexic, illiterate known-nothing can be hailed as a great writer in Hollywood, and he does this in his own words, superbly.

Is writing screenplays worth it? They are as valuable as haiku, no question. Is writing screenplays worth it in terms of making a living? They are as useful for this as buying Lotto tickets at the 7-11.

But making a movie. Whew. That's a lot of work. And there is always that immediate danger; you do a good job with everything, but your script sucks! Happened to me four times, annd the last thing I thought the problem would be was the writing. Screenplays are notorious for showing their holes, their cliches, and their dunderheadedness when somebody tries to bring them to life in three dimensions.

But I still write them because I love the process, as most viewers of this thread will probably also admit.

Hey Brian -- You could make a great movie about wanting to make a movie with explosions and gun battles. Walk every one through each scene, and have them act like there's an explosion or a gun battle. Or go around to all the "producers" (actors or friends) with your screenplay in your hand and have them do a quick breakdown of the costs, with each session ending with them asking you: "How much have you raised so far?" You could make a movie like this in a week. And it would probably be very funny. I don't know why people don't do this. A movie is a movie, and at least you'll have one. Show it in Ohio, get a review, and you're off to the races. You can distribute it yourself by getting a barcode and dropping it off at the local vid stores; it can't possibly be that much worse than anything starring Mel Gibson. The only difference between you and Mel Gibson is a forty-million-dollar line of credit. And you're undoubtedly a much, much nice person than he is.

gromhard said:

Nick Gomez had 38,000$ to spend, Nestor Almendros never wrote a single movie, never made any American/Hollywood movies and died in 1992.

Robert Rodriguez sure did make el mariachi(1992) for about 10,000$(in MEXICO) which would equate to more than 100,000$(1992 and not now) if filmed in the US.
-Gromhard

Click to expand...

Une pelicula no es asunto de dinero. Es hecho en sangre y sudor. Es celebrado con lagrimas!

Nick Gomez and Spike Lee are the most famous credit card producers in the industry, but there are tons of them. I haven't heard of or come acrooss somebody who maxed out their credit to make a movie and then got nowhere. Some people weren't trying to become Scorsese; they just wanted work in the industry, and their initiation fee turned out to be their movie. According to Rodriguez' book and to my own research, El Mariachi today could have gone straight to DVD; the money spent by the studio was a re-cut of the film to convert to theatre-ready, and Rodriguez tells the story with a lot of criticism about how Hollywood simply wastes money. And El Mariachi was shot on the border crossing of Del Rio, Texas so that instiutions like jailhouses could be included; he could have made the same movie in Del Rio. The $7K was literally for the purchase of stock and its development; almost everything else he talked his way into, including the shot pellets. But look what happened for $7K! Overnight, he had access to millions in budget. He raised the money, or part of it, by being a lab rat for medical research for a month, and that's the biggest problem I hear from wannabes; I tell them to deliver pizza for three or four months or work construction, and they'll get their movie made, and they look at me like I'm crazy.

Almendros became a cinematographer working for Truffaut and Rohmer and Robert Benton from a start which included making two short pieces which cost him nothing but the several hundred dollars for his camera. He spent four years in France washing dishes and doing odd jobs as a twenty-something before he got his break; it was his first movie, nothing more than scenes at a beach, which pushed him on his way, and that movie cost zilch. Many cameramen and soundmen start their careers this way.

But those examples are already long-ago. Noi from Iceland, Japon from Mexico, The Celebration from Denmark (or, more recently, The Inheritance, or even more specific to low budget considerations, The Idiots), and odd movies like Tarnation or Dig also prove how cheaply movies can be made. Meeting People is Easy is brilliant and shot on video; distributed nationwide, it cost less than $10K in cash. The new SAG agreements allow name actors to be used in movies with low budgets with 100% deferred payment, so a lot of the small films released today with budgets of over $100,000 include deferred debts and do not reflect how much cash is actually laid out. If the pastor could put $10K on his credit card, he'd have a movie worth five times that amount; it's all up to the writing, then. I think the future will follow productions like Japon, made for nothing in Mexico, a beautiful movie almost beyond belief, and now with Madonna and Sean Penn and every other big name chasing the director, Carlos Reygadas.

The pastor can shoot a few scenes in a barn with four or five actors and make a short for several hundred dollars. I'll concede he needs to own or rent the equipment not just for the shooting but for the editing; this could be far less than $10K. If he found an editor willing to be a co-producer, and hired a camerman for a few days, he could make a 20-minute short for less than a thousand dollars, no problem. Is the dialogue era-perfect? Is the aura of the setting authentic? If he gets the feel of his piece, the pastor can field something that will make a lot of people take notice; everyone from the usual suspects in TV to oddballs like HDNet to distributors looking to expand their catalogues.

My first movie was a murder-mystery piece of junk called "Woobie's Geography Lesson," shot on 3/4" and SVHS, using an Ethiopian, Somalian and Eritrean cast. In all, 34 nationalities were on-screen, we spent two grand cash, and the movie was shown off by the American Film Institute as the first video production in a theatre. The movie is bootlegged and legendary in Ethiopia. My second and third movies are both listed on IMDB, both got great reviews and attracted a lot of friends. The second ("Uncle Paddy's Wake") cost $4700, and took in $14,000 in one week at the Biograph Theatre in Washington. More importantly, it opened doors with distributors, producers, lawyers, etc. It was shot in 9 days. The third movie ("Colon") was shot in two weeks, cost around $3K, brought in another $14K and shoved me in front of people like John Pierson, the finisher of Jim Jarmusch movies and countless other indies. Everyone faxed or called for several months, because the reviews were specific about how original and artistic the movie was. Nobody actually SAW the movie! My fourth movie starred (like the third) an eventual Oscar nominee (I'll usually drop names, but not his), which gave more credibility, and attracted me to other people; I mentored Tina Sugandh for a year, and she signed with Hollywood Records and is now the next "big thing" in Indian-American entertainment. For less than $10K I produced a musical with Peter Fox that got even more attention and offers, and that was followed by four years of a weekly TV show on Warner Cable in Manhattan called "Bad TV," each episode produced for nothing, zero, maybe once in every few months the purchase of food or a costume, and now the best of those shows could be distributed at the drop of a hat if I got off my butt. One of the Bad TV shows was about a stripper named Deborah Ash who had a masters in semantics from George Mason; I was the godfather (and cameraman, and "creative consultant") to her movie "Portrait of a Naked Lady Dancer," which I had the exquisite pleasure of stumbling over in Hollywood Video just a few months ago. And there are so many more stories like this, but suffice to say I spend my money on equipment and give opportunities to no-name or marginal actors, although the Oscar nominee was ready to fly to Mexico City on a moment's notice last summer to have fun and star in another ragged production of mine.

Any writer with a good story and enough discipline to work it into a small space can make a movie which will open and open and open the doors in Hollywood. Much faster than any screenplay, which suffers the terrible burden of peer pressure: literally, tens of thousands of screenplays hurtling into the production companies every year. The easiest job to get in Hollywood is the jackass who has to read this mind-numbing junk!

And any writer will have to admit, upon completing his movie, or at least part of it, that his story can probably be trimmed down and vastly improved simply by trying to bring it to life on screen. It is amazing how many confident (or even arrogant) writers are humbled by this process of wrestling their idea into precise story-telling.

And me, I will admit that the movies and video technology have ruined me as a writer. I've had agents squabble over me; I've been offered cash, bribes, advances . . . if I would just carve 480 pages down to 300 of either of two novels I wrote 15 years ago. But I can't do it. I spent a year dying of cancer in the midst of all the movie-making, so I can't waste any time. I live on a six-month plan, which has worked fine for almost 13 years. I'd rather make something short and beautiful than tackle my own or any other opus. And by short, I mean short: a week in Iceland chasing the Aurora Borealis or in the Cayes off Belize filming sharks and rays, no problem. I'll sign up for it. And even this, I will admit, is an excuse to avoid the actual head-splitting work of writing a novel. I'm not dying of anything, and I have no commitments ahead of me, but video and film offer such an immediate return on my concentration that I simply can't be bothered to write in longform anymore. That's the ruin. It's bad enough to sell out from "real" writing by cobbling together a few screenplays; but playing with those cameras will make it very unlikely you can ever return to the 15-hour days of writing which yields great literature. (And I'm not exaggerating the 15-hour days: three hours actually typing, 12 hours of cleaning bathrooms, thinking, cleaning kitchen and doing laundry, watching an inspiring movie, researching characters by going to bars or stadiums or street corners, etc., etc.)

I watched the movie "Downfall" the other night. It is about the last 10 days of Hitler's life. Just the last 10 days, trapped in his bunker. Shot in Saint Petersburg for less than $5-million. The movie is brilliant and the whole country of Germany is wringing its hands in new angst. But it's just the last 10 days. The pastor's movie could be about the last afternoon, or the last conversation, and that's the key to making movies for nothing: Reduction.

But if anyone said they were going to watch "Downfall," I'd advise them to first see "Schultz Gets the Blues" (sp?), which is the all time box office king in Germany. I resisted it for months. (A Danish proverb says in Hell the Swedes brew the beer, the Norwegians do the cooking, and the Germans provide the entertainment.") I was dumbstruck when I finally saw the movie; it's the best American road movie I've ever seen. Scorsese could not make this movie if his life depended on it. I think the budget was far less than $1-million. And it's a writer's movie. Simple, sweet, and always inward-looking despite its huge canvas.

Anybody can make a movie for less than one thousand dollars. Doesn't mean it will be any good. But it will be very hard to ignore.

In my experience, and it's just my experience, there are FAR fewer writers making movies for less than $10K than there are either indie filmmakers making movies or writers making a living from optioning screenplays. A lot of indie producers wouldn't be able to write a postcard to their grandparents, let alone something literary. A writer who carefully weds images and a chronology to his or her words and then tries to publish the result in a theatre or a film festival is many times of magnitude better off than anyone writing a screenplay hoping to sell it to Hollywood or anywhere else. But that is just my opinion. I am often wrong about things.