Monday, March 14, 2011

The Loneliness of the long distance filmmaker

You've begun to see the amount of things I'm doing to make Ghostkeeper 2 a reality this year. There's one thing I didn't mention.

Most of what I'm doing, I'm doing by myself.

I've always been a one-man band of sorts, since I have good knowledge of almost every aspect of filmmaking, I am able to put together  reasonable package. In fact, I actually wrote 3 Private Offering Prospectus' which passed the necessary Securities Commission examination.  I simply got a stack of Private Offerings and cut and paste, in the process learning a hell of a lot as to why lawyers make things so complicated.

More words mean more money. You can say it in 2 pages like my distributor or 30 pages like a contract from Disney.

But for now, I'm on my own, putting together the proposal, doing a rewrite on my screenplay this week and working with a graphic artist on some artwork for the proposal. You can see my Travel Day proposal under Materials on the right side of the blog. I was helped a great deal by Shirley and her abilities with images.

So every day for me is a variety of emails, refining the proposal which I hope to have out by early next week, working over the budget again using Movie Magic Budgeting software and coming up with an Internet campaign to promote both the release of Ghostkeeper 1980 and production of Ghostkeeper 2.

I would love to have help, especially on the money side, and I do have two producers hunting around for money, but developing a movie is expensive and I simply can't afford to do it that way. So I learn and push forward.

And mostly, the others who will be working on the film, just wait.

I don't like waiting, so I guess that's why I take a lot of jobs on, and do the best I can. Someone will come along and tell me my budget is off, so I tell him to fix it. Simple.

But as Norman Jewison said about Cher after she thanked her hairdresser after winning the Oscar for Moonstruck... "I didn't do it ALL by myself."

I am working with the artist, and paying him his rate, and I have friends who look over my script, my proposal and a hundred other things.

But ultimately, nobody really cares if I do this movie or not. And that's the truth. It won't be any great loss if it doesn't get made. I know that every morning and at the end of every day. And there are some who really would like to see me fail.

But that's the movie business. There's passion and then there's passion, I always disliked that term, I prefer stubborness, that's what drives me. Someone told me "never give up on your computer when it's broken, have the computer give up on you." And I follow that advice on everything.

It didn't work quite well on Travel Day, the movie I tried to finance in 2009 and there were a lot of reasons. But I haven't forgotten it, in fact sent it to a producer last month in Canada who might consider it.

Probably none of you have ever seen Ghostkeeper and for that I posted a 13  minute trailer in the Materials section here, it'll take you to a YouTube version that I edited some time ago and is basically a 13 minute version of the movie.

Have a look. Tell me what you think.