Recipe For Making A Movie

There is so much online video content and most everyone who posts something has the dream that their little production will go viral.  It's like buying a lottery ticket though it's not entirely by chance what works or doesn't work. Still it's not a science, like all other arts and entertainment there is a hard to define magical something that can make all the difference between compelling or boring.

The webcast is moving forward but because of prior commitments will probably not start production until August or September. The people involved are looking at the webcast the same as if it was a TV show or movie. They mostly come from a video game background and feel that the future demand for video games will for simpler games that can be played on smartphones and small portable screens.  The big multi level interactive games that create whole virtual worlds like Assassin's Creed, Call of Duty, Bio Shock;  have reached a saturation point . The market as matured. Unless a company is willing and able to invest 50-100 million dollars with 2-4 years of development time  on a new game title , then it's next to impossible to be competitive.

These games are comparable to Hollywood's blockbuster films. The blockbuster film is caught in the trap where any compromise on artist integrity is justified because of the huge monster budget and possibility for the total loss of investment. If a movie goes bust -what do you own? A few intangible creative rights? A pile of old film stock? -though film will soon disappear and it will only be the zeroes and ones that made up the images. Movies, as well as videogames, rarely leave behind any physical assets that can be sold after bankruptcy and often what gets left behind is usually a liability. Like in the case of one independent filmmaker where a full year after production, when the film was sold to a distributor and all the creditors paid, the local municipality threaten to sued him for the cleanup costs of his movie sets and location sites.  It was settled out of court but it was too late for the filmmaker to spread out the costs to the other investors.

The whole entertainment world is in flux. Broadcast TV is more and more on a junk food diet of low cost productions, the types of shows so cheap to make that even tiny audiences can keep them afloat. The big exception is sports because hardly nobody is willing to watch yesterday's game. Sports still generates premium ad rates.

Cable TV has weathered its first couple of years of decline and is nervously wondering what is their place in the future?  Online content further fragments mass audiences, services like Netflix undercuts cable prices and it seems the public wants something it hasn't yet identified. It's like in the 1950's when Westerns and Cowboy films were extremely popular. It was almost to the point where if felt like every other film shot on the dusty trail. The public got bored and critics predicted the end of a genre. Then comes The Wild Bunch, A Fist Full Of Dollars and Pat Garret And Billy The Kid; these films redefined the Western.

 

One Hollywood producer made the observation that a good movie starts with a good story -but every story plotline has already been discover and explored. The same stories get retold over and over with different sets and different actors.  The stories remain the same but the context that frames the story is always changing. What people want is a something that's little different but very familiar.... an unexpected twist in a classic tale.

Another Hollywood producer, that I and a dozen aspiring writers had a long and mostly liquid lunch with, shared his thoughts.  The Producer, a true D lister, felt that if you tell the story of any character long enough eventually you'll end up with an evil twin, a case of mistaken identity and a blow to the head that causes amnesia.

The rest of the conversation was just as disheartening. He had read samples of our writings. He made it clear that good writing was necessarily a bankable script and the tore apart one of them not because it was badly written but because it was pure box office poison -an adult drama with a projected budget of 10-30 million.

Another downer was to hear nobody in the business actually reads a script.  Maybe a production assistant might skim the first five pages and the pass it up to an intern.  If the intern likes the first half and last three pages then the script will get passed up the chain.  Our D List Producer was quite proud to say he hasn't read a whole screenplay in years, that most screenplays are dreadful and there's a never ending supply of them. That every studio gets thousands of them every years and that he even gets an average of 3-5 unsolicited movie scripts every day. 

We then shifted to talking about the movie Snakes On A Plane.  The Producer used it as an example of what a successful Hollywood movie is all about. The movie might be crap but it made money and people are still talking about it. Craftsmanship and quality should never get in the way of making a profit.

At that point I had to pitch my idea. I asked the Producer of what he thought about a sequel to Snakes On A Plane -it was going to be Snails On A Plane. Then I went into a manic improvised synopsis of passenger trapped on a long flight over the Pacific in airplane filled with poisonous snails. About halfway through the Producer looked at me with a jaundiced eye and in a tipsy slurred voice asked -"where the f--- are these snails coming from?"

 

"From the escargot compartment" I replied with cheerful enthusiasm.

After the peel of drunken laughter from the writers, the Producer  turn to one side and refused to talk to me any further.  As Kurt Vonnegut would say -"so it goes".

So a good movie starts with a bankable idea. I still haven't given up on the magic part. Magic is difficult to describe. One time I saw several short films from Romania. They were all produced during the Communist Era when Nicolea Ceausescu ruled the country. Private ownership of movie film and movie cameras was illegal. Making a movie could land you a life sentence in prison.  Despite the risks people made movies.

Often the movie was stolen, smuggled in or salvaged from the garbage. The quality of the film changed from shot to shot.  There was no film to waste so the whole movie was shot without retakes, it was all on a one to one shooting ratio with practically nothing edited out. As one friend said -It's like watch Ingmar Bergman on acid".  

Certainly not a potential money maker but they were compelling. Someday I would like to capture just a little bit of that magic.