Has Hollywood Really Changed?

Back a few months ago I had an ongoing dispute on the blog with someone who used the name/pseudonym "Jerry" who, after I described some actions I did on a series I worked on, said that I never got work after that because of my behavior and also, that "the industry has changed".

Now I don't know who Jerry was and he/she wouldn't tell me, so I just stopped posting his/her comments and he/she gradually faded away (I think). But I did get work after that, preferring TV Movies to series and accumulating credits on 17 of them over the course of 14 years, not a bad record at all. And the most recent one will be shown in a month or so. 

Which brings me to The Pat Hobby Stories.

I had heard about the book but never read it. Simply, it's a collection of short stories about a down and out screenwriter in Hollywood who survives by hustling any writing jobs he can get. It's a great collection of stories about writing and what you have to do to survive in a business that rips your heart out some of the time and then praises you for a little bit to give you encouragement, only to be ripped up again.

In other words, it's Hollywood as it's always been.

But the twist here is this; it was written between 1939 and 1940. And it's author was none other than F. Scott Fitzgerald, who, by this time in his life, was Pat Hobby, living from rewrite jobs to whatever he could muster. His successes were behind him, The Great Gatsby would be re-discovered in the 1960's and Fitzgerald died at 44 in the same year.

And while I read the book, a collection of 17 stories, I wasn't surprised to find out something else. 

It's the same today.

Nothing has really changed. We have computers, and Netflix and iPhones, but the business remains exactly the same. Exactly.  I can only assume that Jerry doesn't know Hollywood history, maybe because he/she is young and full of their self. And that's perfectly normal. I'm not knocking younger writers, hell, I was one once. 

There are a lot of movies about screenwriters, Bogart did one, William Holden did one, there are dozens of them out there, many you can still watch. And they all came before "The Player", the film most film students know of. And it was directed by Robert Altman who was 67 at the time.

There's also Day of the Locust, a brilliant film with Donald Sutherland and based on a novel by Nathanael West in 1939  . I read the book and again was surprised by the similarities in the business. Sure, the cars were different but the stories and the lives of the people in it are still here today.

And another great movie from the Coen Brothers Barton Fink, again a period piece about a screenwriter. And even Jeff Bridges was a screenwriter in Hearts of the West.

And there's one thing in common for all of them. The writer is always screwed. There's even a self-help book out called  "The Writer Got Screwed (but didn't have to). Honest, there is. I have a copy of it, written by Brook Wharton.

And before you think I'm starting to whine, I'm not, I rarely got shafted but that's mostly because I did have the protection of the Guilds.

And as far as not being hired again I offer this story; I wrote a script called Maiden Voyage, about the takeover of a cruise ship. It was made by by the British Company Granada. They paid me for the script but not the story. I had written the script as a spec, and they should have also paid for the story, as well as the screenplay itself.

They refused to pay.

WGA said they had 5 days to pay.

An exec told my agent this; "this might sour us for using Jim in the future". My agent said he'd pass that information along to me.

They paid up, very upset at me and my agent.

One year later, I met the same exec at a party and he shook my hand and said the movie turned out great and that it was because of my terrific script.

And we would work together again.

Was this the same guy who threatened to make sure I'd never work in this town again?

My agent said the saying is really "you'll never work in this town again... or at least until we need you."

Know this; Hollywood never really changes, it's about the dreammakers and those who finance the dreammakers. It's about breaking in, surviving, falling out and maybe, if you're really persistent and lucky, breaking in again.


Just ask Manoel de Oliveira, the Portuguese film director who continues working at the tender age of 102.

Presence and who has it... and who might have it.

It's been told that Marilyn Monroe could go unnoticed a party but put her in front of a camera and something happened. You couldn't take your eyes off her.

Presence is one of those things that you can't really define, either it's there or it's not Cary Grant had it both on and off the screen, when he walked into a room, everyone turned around.

Last night I watched an old western with Jimmy Stewart and Dean Martin and a load of character actors that filled the screen. Stewart and Martin had presence, but so did the supporting cast including George Kennedy and regulars like Dub Taylor, Andrew Prine, Will Geer and Denver Pyle. Did I mention Raquel Welch? Even she had my attention. Forget Reese Witherspoon, give me a real woman like Raquel.

The story was a classic chase plot, but shot on great locations and with a cast like that, I didn't speed my TiVo at all. Which I do with a lot of movies now. But it wasn't the story that kept me interested. It was the actors.

You watched them.

They had presence, they looked like they had lived life, not growing up in the suburbs and hanging out at the mall.

I also watched the new Hawaii 5-0 finally, or at least 10 minutes of it. The lead actor is completely devoid of any presence at all, given that the original actor Jack Lord, just oozed presence. And he looked like a tough guy. The new version has Scott Caan, son of James Caan, who's left to offer some presence. He's not as good as his old man, but he tries his best and manages a bit of presence.

There's a lot of complaints about actors under 40, mostly that they don't seem to have much presence. One of the reasons is that the studio system has been gone for over 40 years. Studios carefully picked who would be a star, and it wasn't always because of talent. They would shoot tests of every kind until they found that actor who stood out on film.

Consider that today many actors have very little training and often none, given these reality shows. There are exceptions; Matt Damon has it, Ben Affleck doesn't. I don't get Ryan Gosling at all, and Edward Norton and a dozen others. They all look the same, "the little lesbians" as a feminist quoted a few years ago.

Now consider this; the studios are re-doing every movie older than 10 years ago in the hopes that lightning can strike again. The Fog came and went, so did Captain America and the Green Hornet, and I still didn't understand The Green Lantern with another actor, Ryan Reynolds who has the presence of a wall.

George Clooney has presence on screen and off, I saw him once briefly and you can't help but look at him. But he's 50. Johnny Depp is one of those inbetween guys,  but he still looks like a kid. And I still think Leonardo looks like he's dressed in his dad's clothes. 

So let's assume that there aren't any great actors anymore, just mediocre ones. The studios are redoing old movies so what is next?

What about putting an old face on a new body?

If you remember Brad Pitt in the movie Benjamin Button, you'd remember how he aged from baby to old man. It worked well.

So what if you could create Jimmy Stewart again, or Cary Grant or even Bogart. After all they were "stars" in the true description. What if you just added Bogart's face. Or Marilyn's?

Al Pacino starred in a movie called Simone, about a digitally created woman who rebels against her creator.

A week ago a friend of mine said that he knew an actor who was called to a studio for some tests. They were "tests" being made by two of the biggest directors in Hollywood. That's all he would say. Sort of. He couldn't say anymore except that it could change the business.

What if they created the old actors again with the amazing technology from Avatar, we could have movies again featuring a young Gene Hackman, Sean Connery, Kirk Douglas, Joan Crawford and of course... Marilyn. Maybe she gets to finish her last movie after all.  Imagine Sean Connery's young face on the next James Bond film.

Think it's crazy?

Those avatars looked pretty damn good. And that was almost 3 years ago. Imagine what they can do now. Or tomorrow?

Why do you think the Screen Actor's Guild wasn't happy with Avatar?

At least they can't create a software that can write screenplays.

Or can they?

Someone has already coming up with older actors long gone. 

Unemployment 

There's a lot of talk these days about unemployment, there's supposed to be an 11% unemployment rate in California and around 9% in the entire country. Experts also suggest that the conservative figures are more like 15% or higher. For a while Republicans held back from letting Unemployment Insurance benefits be released, mostly posturing and playing politics, but both parties do that so it doesn't really matter as it's the same game.

How does this affect the writers, and then actors and directors? Because after all they can't make a movie if they don't have a screenplay. It could be argued that even when they have a screenplay, it's  not that good anyways.

The WGA has supposedly 10,000 members, mostly in Los Angeles (WGA west) and New York (WGA east), and a few in the huge distance between the two cities. I say supposedly because it is increasingly difficult to get an accurate number.

You know how many of them are working?

Again, figures are hard to find and so there are basic estimates, the best one I've seen being that in any given quarter, there are around 1500 members working.

Fifteen hundred out of 10,000.

That gives us an unemployment rate of 85%.

This can be argued back and forth, but ultimately the truth is most WGA writers are out of work. It's one of the drawbacks when you have a few scripts you're trying to sell, or even get someone to look at them.

So what do we do when we're not being paid for working?

Some of us take other jobs; teaching writing classes at UCLA or other schools. UCLA advertises for writers in Written By, the guild magazine. You can buy it almost anywhere in LA. Others leave the business, their number filled up by new writers, some take any job they can find to pay the rent.

I've been a limo driver, a security guard, a newspaper subscription caller (I was the only one on that job that never sold a subscription. Not even one!). I've edited a travel guide of Las Vegas, did magazine articles for the Auto Club and even did medical reports for Workers Comp. I had to edit long testimonies and doctor's opinions. Actually it was sometimes a lot of fun.

Then there's writers who write spec scripts. This isn't something that all writers do, and it actually surprised me. I am extremely prolific at writing, I'm always writing something, a screenplay, an idea for one, an idea for a documentary, an idea for a pilot.

Since I have a background as a news cameraman, I make small documentaries which I shoot on digital and edit in Final Cut Pro, which took me 2 years to learn. But now I love that software and am currently editing a doc I shot with my deceased friend's son. It's about Highway 50 in Nevada, dubbed "the loneliest highway in America".

I love doing these docs because it's all in my hands, I don't argue with anyone about how it should be filmed or cut.

And I write specs somewhere in that collection of things I do to try to make a buck. But as I said, some writers don't do that. In fact some can't do it. I couldn't understand this at first but began to see what the problem was.

A lot of writers need to be hired in order to work. I know writers who couldn't write a spec if their life depended on it. And I don't think less of them anymore than they think less of me. There are a lot of us who do write specs that we hope someone will buy. I write at least 2 specs a year, full feature-length screenplays. Currently I have around 33 specs "on the shelf" as they say.

33 screenplays that are begging to be made.

So why haven't they been made yet? Simple enough.

I haven't found someone who likes one or more of them that wants to make them. They're not bad, they're just not what "they" are looking for. And I can't blame them. I always say they may not like my story, but they can't say my writing is bad.

The odds of getting someone to like your story is a combination of craft, timing and just plain old luck.

Take Christmas In Nowhere. I wrote it 4 years ago and it hung around ABC Family and Lifetime and Hallmark for that long. Oh, they all loved it, but they didn't want to make it. My old agent Frank used to say "I'd rather have you love Jim less and buy him more".

Guess what happened after 4 years?

They bought it. 

What did it take? What was the burning desire someone had to finally take the leap? Well, I asked the woman who pushed the project for Hallmark. Was it my great writing, or my track record, or my glowing personality?

No. It was none of them.

It was because the teen-age girl in my screenplay reminded her of her two daughters. 

That was all. Really. Okay, she did like the writing and they went with my draft of the screenplay with actors changing a line here and there. But it got made because the teen touched this producer's heart in a way only she could see.

And I look at it as pure luck. Sure the script was good enough to land on a stack of screenplays at Hallmark, but it was picked out of sheer luck.

And nobody can teach a writer that part.

How to survive when you're not working for money

I've dealt with some options that writers do when they aren't writing for $$, which is most of the time, at least for feature writers and TV movie writers. Episodic is a whole other story as you actually can get paid not only for a script but if you're lucky enough or know the head writer (aka showrunner) you can get a weekly paycheck by being a story editor, working at the studio with hours almost like a normal job.

But if you're not one of the fortunate ones, you wake up every Monday morning and dread having to open the computer to that famous "blank screen" that challenges you to do something.

This is where you separate the pros from the wannabes. At least most of the time.

Right now, I'm not really making money on any of my ideas so I'm in that category that when someone asks me what I'm doing, I use the classic unemployed writer answer;

"Oh, I'm developing a few things".

What does that mean? It means I'm not earning money.

I can check emails, do some internet shopping, clean the fridge or vacuum the living room. I even bought a carpet shampoo cleaner which is an excellent excuse to not turn the laptop on. 

But I have one trait that is essential to writers who are serious about their work. 

I am curious.

You've heard me say this before but I really believe that a writer should want to know about almost everything. I want to know how things work, why people argue in public, is Highway 50 in Nevada really the loneliest highway in America?  You see the photo at the top of the blog? It's Highway 50.

And the biggest problem with this is that I find something new at least once a day, sometimes more.

But 90% of the time I do start work promptly at 9am. I keep regular office hours 9/5 because it's a self discipline I have trained my brain to do; otherwise I'd sleep in, hang around in pj's and find an excuse to do something tomorrow. Sometimes I start at 8am, particularly with blogs.

Although I sometimes think this blog is just an excuse to not write something I can sell.

Having said that, here's what I have on my big whiteboard, not in any particular sequence; 

Likely Scenario is a 3-page proposal I made for a "procedural TV series", meaning something in the line of the CSI's and Law&Order. I had a lunch with a friend of mine who's a development exec at a production company and she said their company was looking for something in that line.  I wrote the 3 pages in 4 days, reworking it until I felt it was smooth. It's kind of like CSI but is about spies. I'll send that out in a day or two. 

Casualties of Love - which I've told you three blogs ago, is something I hope to make before the end of the year. To this end I have created a short description of the 5 characters which my actor friend will post on nowcasting.com, a website for actors looking for jobs.

From this we hope to find 5 actors who are really good and willing to do a reading of the script for gas money, coffee and lunch. I will also video it on DV to study later. I want to hear how the screenplay reads and sounds, make notes for changes and see how the actors are and how they interact with each other.

Since this is a 5-hander in a single location, it's relatively easy to stage, most likely sitting around a table.  I hope to do this before the end of October. 

Emperor of Mars - You know this project also, I'm starting to contact funding people for funding in summer 2011. This means phone calls and emails to anyone I think who can fund it or who knows someone who can fund it. Or might fund it. 


Annie's Calendars - My recently deceased mom left me a huge stack of calendars, the kind you get for free at drug stores or supermarkets. She would fill in each little box with a few words like "saw doctor" or "Jim called from Montana".

The calendars go back to 1971.

Annie dropped out in Grade 8 to work the farm, she didn't know about diaries; instead she used calendars. These are her diaries. And I am going to go through all of them to see if there's a book there. Response from my friends has been great, even from some of my former employers. But I will wait and see. 

Lewis and Clark today - I am totally obsessed with Lewis & Clark, who were the first Americans to travel across what would be the U.S. in 1803. And naturally it started with a movie I saw as a kid; The Far Horizon with Charlton Heston and Fred MacMurray.

I want to film a documentary that follows their route up the Missouri today and try to define how it and America has changed in the last 217 years. I was too late for their 200th anniversary but this will have to do.

Makichuk Lake - Yes, there actually is a Makichuk lake way up north in Manitoba, 15 miles north of a tiny Indian settlement called Brochet. Turns out one of my 2nd uncles died on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day in 1944 and Canada names lakes after it's fallen soldiers. Most of these lakes, if not all, are in the far north, inaccessible to vehicles. You gotta fly in a float plane or ice roads. Seriously.

What I want to do it fly there and explore it, put up a "No Trespassing Sign" (joking!), and get a small container of water. Then I want to fly to France where he's buried and pour it on his grave. I don't quite know what it all means but documentaries are always vague at the beginning. I will interview his closer relatives and maybe it's about them, or me or all of us. 

Potential Director interest - I recently met a very nice director who has some interest in my scripts, we had a long discussion about what we've done and what we want to do and she is reading several of my screenplays with the intention of possibly setting them up somewhere. Unlike some people I've met in the last year, she strikes me as genuine and confident, traits I admire.

The projects I describe above are ones that some interest has been shown by legitimate entities as well as dream projects like Annie's Calendars and Lewis/Clark which I would fund myself. It helps I have connections and they go back to 1990 and without them I would be sitting around watching Jerry Springer or Judge Judy.

In addition I have a handful of producers who are desperate to find a project that someone would finance who show some of my 34 scripts to a list of potential money that includes everyone from A-List to F-List. And  you never know who will come up with money.

All of this isn't about bragging; I am dead serious about developing new ideas every day, as you saw with the Christmas script in the last blog, half of selling a script is craft, the other half is luck. I, like other writers, am looking for a new job every day.

A Curious Diversion

So what was so interesting?

There has been a small but faithful following that has been growing around the first feature I ever did, Ghostkeeper, which I wrote and directed and produced through my Badland company way back in 1980.

As most who read this blog know, the movie sort of came and went. But in the late 90's, it became a minor cult film in Germany and England, there were even good reviews!!

Last month I got a call from Jonathan Culp in Toronto who had acquired a 16mm print and asked if I wanted to introduce the screening and do a Q & A afterwards. Ironically Toronto isn't my favorite city but I figured it would be fun. I had my first film job that lasted for about 4 months. I was working as a news cameraman. As I mentioned I never really liked it. Toronto - T.O. Too many English tribes who think they own it. Well, they do own it.

So on the day, I gathered three Toronto buddies, Jim, Dave and Steve as my "peeps" and we entered a low ceiling basement in a late 1800's brick warehouse that once was a coffin factory. Perfect.

I was greeted by the owner and Jonathan, who had called me, there were a handful of people (I expected maybe 5 in total) already there, in costumes presumably for Halloween. We were led to the "Green room" and offered beers or liquor and for a moment, we felt like those guys in the HBO show Entourage. Just a lot lower on the food chain.

I was called out to intro the movie and the house now was around 70 or so,  all of whom were probably not born when Ghostkeeper was made in 1980. The screening was great, laughs at the bad stuff, groans, some genuine scares in which my friends and I also participated in the comments.

When it was over, they had a raffle and I picked the grand prize, which was a collection of old movies and some t-shirts. I signed 3 autographs, and we talked with the kids for an hour or so and then hit the nearby bar until 2.am.

There was more on my agenda than just watching Ghostkeeper, I also saw friends I hadn't seen for up to 10 years and I met my ex-wife whom I hadn't seen in 26 years. She cooked a great dinner and we started too catch up to our present lives, which, after that long, barely got started. 

If you've seen Avatar, you might remember the line "I see you" near the end, it was most appropriate for our evening. And if you haven't, you should look it up.

As we boomers say "far out".


Damn us.

Sorry

Sorry for the long week and a half.  I had someone helping me to a flaw in the works.  I'm switching to a new laptop and of course driving me crazy. Then I had to re-do some flaws and cursing. I'm hoping to get everything again. And then had a hell of a time with a things like all my photos from the old laptop, an XP.

Yes, I was working on XP and, as far as I could think, I could still be happy. But, they say, you have to do it. Well, I'm still "doing it." Still using XP for things I can do and harder things to a great helper who knows it all, or at least maybe knows it all.

So here we go again. It'll probably be just like it was. 

Well, maybe a little touch...

My Mom



I've often been asked how I came about writing as a viable career and my easiest answer was always the movies. Since I can remember I loved the movies, I even remember the first movie I ever saw, Disney's documentary The Living Desert, and how a scene of a rattlesnake scared the hell out of me.

After all, it was on a screen 20 feet wide and 12 feet high. 

After that I was addicted to the movies and soon knew the names of actors and directors and writers. I knew that after the director's credit, the movie would start.

Since then I have written a pile of movies but I also worked as a newscameraman, soundman and almost every other job on a film, as well as directing 3 movies and scores of commercials.

But it always came back to the writing.

Just before my mother passed away last August she kept telling me to "keep the calendars". I knew she would write little notes on calendars, appointments, things like that. But it wasn't until after she passed away that I discovered the entire stash of calendars stuffed into a corner of her closet.

And they dated back to 1971.

On January 1976, she received a call from my brother Dave, in Hong Kong, on that same day she called me in Vancouver and added, on the same day that there was snow and cold. She would also note the hours she worked.

Annie worked mostly in cafes, the kind that you rarely see now, where a hot hamburger sandwich was more common than a flambe. She was the youngest of six and when her mother died, her father took another woman and sent Annie away, at the age of 15. She had barely an 8th grade education.

Her calendars started around 1971, but some may have been lost in the many moves we made.  Mostly they were like this:

On March 1973 she wrote "sick, one half day worked, $21.20."
On June 1973, "Dave got hurt in school, went to hospital".
May 1999, "found 15 morel mushrooms and went to breakfast to Roman Catholic church".
July 1975, "exchanged camera, bought better camera".
Dec 1979, "boys phoned, first snow storm and cold".
Nov 1981, "James came home".

I started reading the calendars a few weeks ago, having stashed them after her funeral and I began to see what she was protecting, even after she was gone.

They were her life, her diary. Very basic yet revealing the life of a family for almost 40 years. They were simple entries but yet very clear to me, even if the squares of the calendars were only large enough to write 3 or 4 words. So many of the entries bring back a memory to me, things I had forgotten.

And I realized that maybe, just maybe this was why I write. And oddly enough the same goes for my brother Dave, who also writes and works for a newspaper in Calgary as a writer and desk editor.

My mother was not formally educated, rather she was educated in hard work and sacrifice like most of her family and most people back in the 1950's. She didn't believe in credit cards nor in incurring debt, which would make her a rare commodity these days.

She also had a box of letters that date back to 1937 and lists of money spent every day, 5 cents for ice-cream, 35 cents for lunch, new scarf $1.75.

Her last entry though, was written by me, as I sat with her in the hospital. She wasn't able to write at this point, her anemia making her so weak she could barely lift her hand. Yet she insisted that I write in the calendar that she had another transfusion. I told her she had the transfusion weeks ago, but she insisted that I write down "Another transfusion".

So I did. Twelve hours later she passed away.

I always thought it was my dad who had the talent in the family, for a garage mechanic, he played the violin incredibly well, winning contest after contest even into his late 70's. And both Dave and I inherited a little bit of his musical talents. 

But it wasn't until now that I realized that the writing part came from Annie, with a strong dose of Hollywood movies. So this is my plan;

I want to read all of her calendars and see if there could be a book in it, a diary of a woman but not your average diary. I have mentioned this to friends and many of them say their mothers wrote their version of a diary in calendars so maybe it just might be worth it.

Lesson learned; don't throw away your mother's calendars.

Why That Actor and not the other...

This is often the most mysterious aspect of casting; why do you pick one person over the other. My earliest experiences in casting were for commercials which I directed as well as writing a few also. This was mostly local commercials and a handful of nationals.

Once, I had the dream assignment for a commercial I was directing.  My assignment was to find a beautiful blonde woman for a newspaper commercial. I was ready for this and when I arrived at the casting, I learned there would be 35 blonde women around the 25 year old range. 

As it turned out, it wasn't fun, it was harder than anything I'd done till then. Why? Because I was really trying to find the right actress, the one with that extra bit of personality or, as we like to say; "presence".

Presence is what Marilyn Monroe had. I had read that if Marilyn was in a room, she wouldn't be noticed that much, but put her on the big screen and she shouted presence. Or "Star quality", as others might call it.

But after about the 23rd blonde actress, I honestly didn't have any idea of whom to cast. And when the 24th blonde actress entered, I actually couldn't speak. She sat down and I just stared at her.  Not because she was pretty, but because I had seen so many in the last 2  hours that I had overdosed on blonde.

Yeah, I know, sure Jim, it's tough job. My reaction was to laugh, not at her, but at the absurdity of what I was doing. The poor girl wasn't sure what to do, and I tried my best to explain that I wasn't laughing at her. I always do my best for actors and actresses to make them feel comfortable, wanted and needed. But after 23 of them, they all began to look the same.

And that's where the casting for Casualties of Love comes in. We had to cast 3 male leads, around 40 years old and a female lead around 21. We videotaped all 12 people that we had narrowed down from about 50. One great thing is the website I mentioned, "Now Casting" as it not only has head sheets but also video clips of some of the actors.

I decided to read the male actors with the same sides, a few pages of dialog. From this Chris and I could decide who the better actors were and thus, we could make the different parts work for whichever actor was best suited.

Now there are as many ways to cast as there are directors and casting directors. Since we are on a low budget, we were also the casting directors. The actors came in, they read for the parts and they left.

Usually Chris and I exchanged opinions right after an actor would leave and there would be 10 minutes before the next actor entered. But evaluating an actor's live performance and how they come across on video are sometimes two different things.

We had 4 girls for the 21-year old role and both Chris and I settled on one particular girl who had good reactions in her reading, very subtle rather than over-the-top. The men were different, each one had their method of acting, some memorized the pages, others never even looked at the script until they arrived.

Some were more forceful than others, some quiet, some flat. I always find it curious how 8 actors can say the same lines and yet be so different. I tend to go with honesty, by that I mean which performance sounds real and honest. Think Robert Duvall, who continues to be so subtle that sometimes you don't know he's acting.

But a few days later, after I cut the video into clips and shared it with several friends, all of whom were directors or writers or even actors. And a whole new list appeared. The 21-year old role seemed to work better by a girl who used motions, rather than the subtle one.

And the men came across as almost exactly as they did live, except for an exception or two. And after two weeks, and more comments from my film friends (male and female), I reconsidered some of the choices again.

As of now, I'm going to look at the casting dvd again, this time with the distance I had by going to Toronto for 10 days. Since the reading will take place in the next week or so we need to solidify our choices.

And even then, nobody knows exactly how these 5 actors will work with each other, which ones will shine and which will not. Or maybe they all will. Wouldn't that be nice.