Shirley and I have now been "in development" as they say on Travel Day since June of 2009 so it's been a little over six months since we put out our proposal for financing. We began with a bang, one investor came forward and said that if I could find half the financing he would probably be able to come forward with the second half.
Well, that second half seems to have disappeared as we are very close to the first half, coming from a small investor and the tax credits and equity from a Manitoba producer. I will be going to Manitoba next week to see Dane and discuss the completion of his end, which includes an LOI which is simply put, a letter of intent that he will commit to his side with the inclusion of a Canadian bank's LOI to loan money on the tax credit amount.
While six months seems like a long time, in the world of independent financing, it's barely a start. I had a meeting years ago with Dustin Hoffman's production company and his development exec told me Hoffman had a project to film in Ireland that he had been trying to fund for at least 10 years.
10 years. Dustin Hoffman who is a major star and legend.
And he can't get the money for his movie.
There's a movie out now called Up in The Air with George Clooney. It took writer/director Jason Reitman six years to get it made. And he has a famous dad, Ivan Reitman who did Ghostbusters among other films.
There are hundreds of stories like this; some projects linger for years before they are "discovered" by someone who will finance them. My own screenplay Emperor of Mars which I wrote in 1989 was optioned to be made at least 6 times as far as I can remember and as of last Wednesday, is still in the running to get made in summer of 2010 with me directing.
If the producers find the money. It's their third shot at it, having failed to get the money in 2008 and 2009.
Why does it take so long?
First of all let's define indie movies. In short, it's a movie that is made without studio financing. No Warner Bros, No Paramount or Universal, etc. There's only a guy looking for money from distributors or financiers or shopping mall owners or dentists, thus "independent" shortened to "indie". And why does it take so long? There are a hundred reasons, maybe more but mostly it has to do with the film being a "difficult sell".
What does that mean?
It means it doesn't have huge special effects, or superheroes or Will Smith. Smith is arguably the biggest consistent box office star in the world. His movies never lose money. Never. I like his movies too. But even he can't be in every movie made although many studio executives look at any script and say "is there a part for Will Smith in this?"
Now the irony here is that the obvious answer is no. But studio executives these days somehow believe Will can be in every movie. And it's also a great excuse to say no to a project and save their job. If Will can't make it, then it won't make money and they won't have to explain to their bosses why their last $100 million movie flopped.
For Example:
- Eddie Murphy's "IMAGINE THAT" cost $55 million and made $16 million.
- Adam Sandler's "FUNNY PEOPLE" cost $75 million and made $52 million.
- Land of the Lost cost over $100 million and made $48 million
Add in $20-40 million for prints and ads and the loss is even greater.
Another ironic factor that occurs in many indie films that take so long to get made is that they end up being very good movies that make a lot of money and win awards, even the big gold statue itself. How many times have you heard some actor or director winning an award and saying how many years it too to get made. Let me answer; very often.
Juno was turned down by studios and had financing problems until finally getting financed over a period of a few years and went on to make $100 million dollars, all on a budget of around $6 million and filmed in Canada.
Little Miss Sunshine was looking for money for 5 years before they found it. And of course, every studio turned it down.
And for what reasons? Well, no special effects or big stars or a remake. Studios today are terrified, and I repeat TERRIFIED of movies like the ones I just mentioned. And it's because they are character-driven stories and one can argue that since studio execs have no character, it's easy to see why they won't finance it.
When one or two men ran studios, guys like Warner and Fox and Cohen and the others, it was easier to get a good movie made. They went by their gut rather than research. Look at 1939 and tell me how many of these movies would never get made today:
They include Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, Stagecoach, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Of Mice and Men, The Women, Beau Geste, Dark Victory, Hunchback of Notre Dame, Drums Along the Mohawk, Goodbye Mr. Chips, Ninotchka, Love Affair and Young Mr. Lincoln.
All released in 1939. And there were at least 200 more movies made in the same year!
Can you name that many great movies in 2009? Classic movies.
I can't.
Studios now are competing like hell for viewers and they are afraid to take chances on anything that doesn't lower itself to the lowest common denominator. More people buy Big Macs than gourmet burgers. That's why the studios are always on the look for a "franchise" which means a movie that can have sequels. X-Men, Batman, Spiderman, Pirates of the Carribbean. You notice something there?
BIG. Big means big money.
Unless you make an indie film for $15,000 (yes 15 thousand dollars) called Paranormal Activity and has made to date over $100 million. And Paramount bought it 2 years ago and KEPT IT ON THE SHELF because they wanted to make a big Hollywood remake first. But finally someone noticed that college students liked it and finally when they made it, it made a fortune.
Why would anyone want to tackle this system and try to make a movie. All I can say is that there's nothing else I can do and nothing else I want to do, hell, even someone beat me to the moon.
It all comes out to screenwriter William Goldman's famous saying about the entire movie industry.
Nobody knows anything.
Okay, here's where I sink low and resort to a dog picture. Looking for money is not always exciting. Most of my time now is spent sitting at my desk in my little home office, surfing the web, looking for potential investors, emailing people I've emailed several times, telling them I have someone who's ready to match my funds, if I can find them.
Then I stare at nothing and wonder why I'm even trying. It's sometimes boring as hell as I wait for people to get back to me and mostly say no. So I decided to give you a history lesson on independent movies. Or "indies" as they're called in the industry.
The definition of indies is somewhat vague, but mainly it means movies made outside of the bigtime movie industry. This means that Paramount, Warners, and all the others are not involved in indie movies. In fact, the money they pay for catering lunch is probably more than most indie movies cost. Indies are the labors of love for most people, the stories that a general audience wouldn't really care to see as they don't have car crashes, super heroes or incredible effects.
But once in a while, an indie sneaks through and experiences huge success. The rules for indies are quite clear, but they have been getting muddy in the last few years. Take movies like Blair Witch Project, made for well under $25,000, but made well over $100,000, 000. Yes, one hundred million dollars. Or take Juno, a hybrid indie, which caught on and made money and an Academy award for the screenwriter.
But these are anomolies, or "non-recurring phenomenons" as the studios like to call them. In other words, they don't really know why those movies succeeded and don't know how to copy them.
Independent movies started back in the late 195o's when John Cassavettes, a solid actor, wasn't able to get into a prestigious acting school and decided to start his own acting school. And the first thing he did is get all his actors together and with money he begged, borrowed from others, went out and made a movie that cost almost nothing.
What happened after that changed the way movies were made forever. Cassavettes did something different, he took his camera out on the streets. The movie, called SHADOWS, is about a young interracial couple in 1950's Manhattan, shot on 16mm film and mostly improvised. The film surprisingly got good reviews, Leonard Maltin said it was "a watershed in the birth of American Cinema". Remember this was the time of big studio movies like Ben Hur and My Fair Lady.
Shadows didn't play to big audiences but it played to enough audiences that it begat a lot of imitators. All of a sudden, small personal movies about subjects a writer or director was passionate about, were being made. One of my favorite movies is Cassavette's HUSBANDS, with him, Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara, as three buddies who, after a friend dies in his 40's, decide to go out on a bender. Cassavettes would star in big Hollywood movies like ROSEMARY'S BABY and DIRTY DOZEN and then use much of his money to make more personal films.
Independent movies. Indies.
And this continues to today, whenever you see a little movie, low budget, personal story, it's the product of Cassavette's work. Recent indies include WENDY AND LUCY, ONCE, AWAY FROM HER, LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE, PIECES OF APRIL, FROZEN RIVER (the last two had Academy nominees in them). Chances are most of you haven't seen these movies as they mostly play in bigger cities like New York, LA, Chicago and Toronto. But they are all released on DVD. And cable networks like Sundance and Independent Film Channel show many of them and even more obscure ones.
What remains unchanged since Shadows, is the financing of these movies. They are often funded by family money, credit cards, friends and sometimes studios. The common denominator is that they usually don't cost a lot, and that they are the kind of stories that play arthouses, not usually commercial and not usually profitable unless they are made for little money. Like TRAVEL DAY.
One interesting aspect of indie movies is that Hollywood has finally discovered them. Smelling money, the big boys opened their own "boutique Indie department" and started buying up every one they could. This lasted a few years until they realized that most indie movies don't make millions and millions of dollars and they closed down their "boutique" operations and stayed with IRONMAN, TRANSFORMERS and Adam Sandler comedies.
Also, a lot of Hollywood stars began to notice the amount of Academy nominees that came out of indie movies, and pretty soon each star wanted her or his own indie film. After all TRANSFORMERS didn't get Academy nominations, but FROZEN RIVER did.
So they created a "hybrid indie" in that a small personal movie was made with a "humble Hollywood star" who normally got millions of dollars for a movie but whose heart was really in movies that cost less than their Ferrari. Since these weren't really true indie movies, and with bigger budgets, they were generally scorned by the starving filmmakers who did real independent films. LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE was a hybrid as it cost around $8 million (ten times Travel Day's budget) and had Greg Kinear and Alan Arkin, both Hollywood stars.
And what changed the indie business again was something nobody saw coming.
Digital cameras.
Now it became possible to make complete films for barely anything. Your neighbor is probably making one now. Digital cameras and editing systems, all of which could cost under a thousand dollars brought movie making to everybody on this planet. Take my friend Randy, who did 2 movies for $10,000. That alone would be the cost of lunch on a Hollywood film.
However, having the equipment to make a movie isn't necessarily good. Not everyone has a great story to tell. The saying in Hollywood is this:
The good news is that everyone can make a movie, the bad news is that everyone can make a movie.
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