Like many parents, I miss the days when certain brands could be relied on to give kids wholesome entertainment an adult could stomach too. I think those brands are largely gone. One can no longer trust any single media company to crank out wholesome, reasonably-high quality pictures so reliably that one doesn’t need to review them for objectionable content first. So, my wife and I reasoned, why not do it ourselves? In a digital age when great cameras can be had for a low price and the high cost of film can be bypassed, it really boils down to a good script. The rest—decent actors, a good editor, lighting rigs and an ace director of photography—can be had on a reasonable budget, union issues notwithstanding (more on that in a future article). Distribution, you ask? We’ve worked it out, we think. That too is a future jumping-off point.
So we decided on an apprenticeship. Learn this business by doing before cutting the check for a full-fledged studio (microstudio?) by latching on to someone else. I could have gone to film school, but I know from experience that school is not perhaps the most complete real-world education for an endeavor as complex as this. We weren’t sure exactly how to initiate said plan, so I went where anyone else would go to buy something you can’t find at the local Wal-Mart. I went to eBay.
Gorman Bechard has been a working novelist since the mid 1990s. He is also a working screenwriter, having optioned several scripts (sold the rights to those scripts for a limited period) to Hollywood studios over the years. He must think in both hemispheres, because he’s also a gifted photographer who somehow manages to stay married while getting great-looking women to take off their clothes for him in the studio. (Note to self: ask Gorman for strategy tips on hobby implementation.) Gorman did not like what happened to his scripts after they were launched into the insatiable foaming maw that is development hell in Hollywood, so he did what any insane screenwriter would do in his position. Gorman Bechard directed the movie himself instead of letting some cokehead former music video director hack his script for The Kiss into little tiny pieces. No, Gorman seized the reins himself and helmed “The Kiss” with a surprisingly sure hand, right up until the movie’s main investor decided to hack Gorman’s movie into little tiny pieces. The investor, you will be surprised to note, was married to one of the costars and had some strong opinions about screen time, lighting, and camera angles in any scene involving his wife.
So Gorman Bechard went back to the drawing board. He sold some novels and cooked up his next script, You Are Alone. You Are Alone is pretty much a one-room, two-person drama so excruciatingly honest about life that I never would have paid money to see it. It is the story of a fortyish family man who crosses that line too many of us fortyish family men have imagined crossing, and decides to hire an “escort” from her Web ad. The escort, he learns too late, is The Girl Next Door, played, and partially scripted, by the estimable Jessica Bohl. What happens next is so painfully close to what I am absolutely sure would happen should I lapse in a moment of similar weakness that I can only tell you… get it off Amazon. It rightfully won its share of festival awards and the striking verisimilitude of the dialog, attributed partly to its young star, guarantees that I cannot watch that movie without thinking way too hard about what I would do in the same position. As powerful a movie as You Are Alone is, I would have quickly skipped over the blurb in a festival review because I get enough real life in real life, thank you very much. I’m a comedy/guys shooting things/helicopter chase kind of guy.
Fortunately for me, Gorman had long been working on the movie now known as Friends With Benefits even as he and producer Frank Loftus shepherded You Are Alone to completion. I will no doubt annoy him by saying that Friends With Benefits is sort of a feature-length R-rated episode of the TV show Friends, but I mean that as the highest compliment. Friends was one of the finest shows in the history of television, and its best episodes rank right up there with the crispest movie comedies. Gorman’s movie, unlike the TV show, manages to keep the audience electrified for two hours. At least the script does, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Gorman had been writing Friends With Benefits on and off for years. He knew he had an eminently commercial property. He had sold scripts before. But he had also directed movies, so in 2006 he found himself at a crossroads. He knew he could sell it in Hollywood and make a shedload of money. He and Frank Loftus had also managed to scrape up the kind of financing needed to make a perfectly credible-looking full-length feature in You Are Alone. Gorman was now a proven director, but he didn’t have the kind of Hollywood clout needed to get full artist control over Friends With Benefits should he sell it to a studio. And he liked the Friends With Benefits script a lot. He decided to make the movie himself, but financing even a small indie film could buy you a house in Southern California. So he went where anyone else would go if they were trying to finance a movie without big-money connections. He went to eBay.
Wait a second... you need a script?
The ad he finally listed was short and to the point. For $9000 you could buy a 2% share of the profits in an independent movie. It was a romantic comedy with a proven writer/director. We decided if the movie looked good we'd go for a bigger chunk, like 20%. For reasons I don’t quite understand it has since become much harder to place such ads on eBay, something about potential problems with securities law. Until 2006, though, there were in fact a goodly number of such listings. Often they went something like this: “I have an idea for a VERY commercial movie! This can make millions! I can’t tell you anything more about it until you invest but IT IS A GUARANTEED HIT!” That’s not a direct quote but I assure you many such listings were that delusional, and I plowed through every one of them, looking for a diamond in the rough. On rare occasion a moderately sane listing would appear, but often I would hear nothing further from the seller when I attempted to make contact. The few times it went much further than that and I saw a script… well, let’s just say they weren’t quite up to the standards I hoped for. Often the very process of communicating with the seller was difficult, thereby ensuring I would never invest in their venture regardless of the quality of the script, because if you’re going to give people enough money to buy a Porsche 911, you expect them to be honest and businesslike at a minimum.
Gorman’s ad was, if anything, understated. He was clearly not trying to hype the potential investor. I contacted him and asked for a script. He sent it with a message I found dismaying, something about how it wasn’t quite polished the way he’d like but that he thought I’d like it. Translation (I thought at the time): it will be yet another steaming dungheap and this time not even a completed, polished dungheap!
I read it as a courtesy, and because hope springs eternal.
I was floored. Not polished? Not polished? It had 42 layers of lacquer, 25 coats of paint, and was buffed to a mirrorlike shine, the likes of which normally appear only in clean rooms at Intel. Polished? Stick a fork in that bad boy. It’s done!
Which is what I said when I called him the first time. That, and a thousand questions aimed not only at learning how he conducted business (how can I trust you? What if I want to look at the books? How will I know how much we make if it gets sold to a distributor? Why do you think yourself qualified to direct this thing? If it’s so good, why not sell it in Tinseltown?) but at how he answered tough questions. Business is all about relationships. If you’re going to plunk enough hard-earned cash down for a director you’ve never heard of to film his own script, you better feel good with him during the honeymoon period, because when it starts to get tight and the movie’s behind it schedule and over budget, you’ll need some reserves from the honeymoon period to keep away from each other’s throats.
Gorman has a great voice, the kind of voice that could get him a radio gig, and his answers were so polished, so knowledgeable, so utterly lacking in defensiveness that I flipped a bit and started to mistrust him because he was such a smooth talker! Sometimes you just can’t win with me. But hey, if I was going to recommend to my wife that we drop $90,000 on an unknown quantity, I was going to dig deep. I couldn’t throw him, though. I started to think he might be the real thing. I had my wife read the script. She approved. Gorman sent me a screener DVD of You Are Alone. I watched it, enthralled, and vowed never to watch it again because it was just too damn effective for its own good. Kind of the same feeling I got from Schindler’s List. A stunning achievement, but real life is painful enough.
Where have all the good scribes gone?
What happened to movie screenwriting, anyway? From about the 30s to the late 70s movies had to start from great scripts. Acting, by the way, was generally not nearly at the caliber it is today. I think today’s actors are on the average phenomenally better than they were 20 years ago and before. Directing seems to be pretty good too, and of course the technical side of movies (lighting, cinematography, special effecs, and so on) is at its peak. But what happened to all the good writers?
They moved to television, Gorman said in one of our marathon conversations. “Writers are king in television”, he said casually. Doh! The Sopranos. Entourage. Friends. ER. Firefly. The Simpsons. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I could list a dozen more without taking a break. It was a bit of a relief, actually, because I was curious whether screenwriting was such a terrible profession that it was no longer attracting people, or if we’re just dumber these days, or what. It was good to know that the the best writers had found shelter somewhere.
I had decided that even if Friends With Benefits was not brilliantly directed, it would still make a splash on the indie soon because, like Clerks or Kissing Jessica Stein it would make its money back on the strength of the script alone. As part of my due diligence I ordered a DVD on Amazon. I thought it might help me determine if, given a somewhat lighter script, Gorman could deliver a correspondingly light feel as a director.
Let me explain something here. I’m a very, very fat bald businessman. I dress in clothes designed for plumbers (no, really—I order most of what I wear from Duluth Trading). I make good money, but to meet me is to know my wife didn’t marry me for my looks. (Or my money, to be honest. I was in debt when we got married. Things are very, very different now.) It is also important to know that I’m madly in love with my wife. However. If Eliza Dushku were to go blind one day, and maybe stinking drunk too, and if she somehow found her way to my front door, I would invite her in and do my damndest to break my wedding vows. Even if it were my wife who answered the door. Anyway, during negotations with Gorman Bechard, I quipped that I’d pay for the whole damn movie if he could get her in it. His response: “Well, she was in one of my movies. Didn’t you know that?”
It was The Kiss, also starring Terence Stamp. The same one that had been commandeered by the third star’s husband. That’s the DVD I ordered on Amazon. And you know what? It’s bright, breezy, and briskly edited. Not a movie I’d save for a kid-free night at home with my lovely wife should The Tinies all go to sleepovers (I’d save a Hugh Grant flick for that) but the movie was at least made by someone who knows how to make a movie. So imagine how well that someone could do if he had it his way? Which would of course mean letting him make the script he had written without telling him how to film it. I’m a CEO. I like telling people what to do. I’m pretty good at it. But I also like to delegate and work Ronald Reagan hours. But damn. Eliza Dushku. He said she was great to work with, which I actually didn't want to hear. I wanted to hear she was difficult, that she was all ego. Then I'd feel like I hadn't missed anything...
There was one more issue. At $90,000 we wanted some love. What I planned to angle for was an Executive Producer credit. I didn’t tell my wife this. For one thing, I might fail. For another, Executive Producer is in large part an inside joke in Hollywood. Unlike, say, gaffer, director of photography, or screenwriter, Executive Producer has no clearly defined role. It is an honorific handed out, for the most part, to the kind of rube who has enough money to help make the movie happen but who is too naïve to know just what a joke the Executive Producer title is. The kind of title, in other words, that would warm the cockles of my egomaniacal, ice-cold executive heart. And give my wife something to brag about on her favorite message boards. But how to approach Gorman? I’m a pretty good negotiator normally. On the one hand, we’re kicking in 20% of the budget, I reasoned. On the other hand, no one likes title-greedy investors making ridiculous demands before the picture even makes it off the ground. Even more important than the title was having a mentor who could someday step me through the making of my own movies, and I didn’t want to burn that bridge at all, much less this early in the game. How could I work it so he didn’t hate me, but so we got the cool title? I didn't want to seem too eager, but on the other hand, ninety thousand bucks. How could I keep a good relationship and grease my giant ego at the same time?
“Oh, by the way,” he said at one point. “With an investment this size we could make you executive producers.”
We cut the check, sent it to Gorman, and never looked back.
Can You Call it Film School if You're Executive Producer?
He’s been a more than capable producer/director up to this point. I have every reason to believe Friends With Benefits will be a success. Maybe even a Wedding Crashers-like success. I think it's at least as good, at least in its current script form. One has to assume realistically that the reverse far more likely to be true. That’s where film school comes in. Film school is a four-year commitment and costs, oh, $25,000/year at a school like USC. That doesn’t include the budget of your final project, a movie you make yourself, and for which you are expected to obtain financing. I had asked Gorman if I could sort of peer over his shoulder, figuratively speaking, as the movie was made. I’m sure he gritted his teeth when he agreed, but he seemed not to mind. I told him I’d like to learn the rudiments of filmmaking, and maybe he could help me on occasion if I got stuck running a camera or learning the editing software. He seemed fine with that. Like film school, but learning it in public. For real.
If Friends With Benefits tanks, I figure he’ll be chagrined enough to let me call him from time to time even after the movie is released, should I get stuck learning the editing software or trying to figure out the settings on my fancy new camera. If the movie’s a hit, we all make money and he never returns my calls, which is fine, because I’ll be phoning from the massage table at my personal trainer’s place, and he'll be getting rubbed down by someone in the executive suites at Sony. To me, the 90 grand is like getting film school at a bargain, and in much less time.
Why Not Pay AND Volunteer a Month of My Life?
At some point I outsmarted myself. I mean, Gorman’s good. He knows this filmmaking (and producing) stuff backwards and forwards. I went into a huddle with my wife, got approval, amazingly, and went to Gorman with a new offer. Let me tag along behind you and film the making of the film. A twofer—you get hard cold cash and a free behind-the-scenes documentarian, all for one low price! He went for it!
So here I am writing on the plane to JFK. I will hit the hotel for cast and crew tonight at about 11pm. Tomorrow the cast reads through the script in its latest form. Ditto for the next day. A few days off, and a week from tomorrow filming begins. I’ll be away from my family 5 times longer than I ever have before, I’m a complete novice with a pro-quality Canon XH A1 camera on board, and my biggest editing job was ever was last Sundays’ Easter home video (not horrible, if I do say so myself). Clearly an auspicious beginning. I plan to blog every day I shoot film, so that’s almost every day for the next four weeks.
With 14-hour shooting schedules, I suspect they won’t end up 3,000 words apiece, so don’t panic.
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