Writing

I finally started writing this script again after nearly three weeks off for research and getting the rest of my life out of the way (I also took an additional week off because it was scary to start again).

So far, I think my sports movie has at least one good joke in it. That's a good enough day's work for me.

Sport Movie References

So I'm writing a sports movie, and one of the fun things about it is that I've gotten to run down all these great movie references while trying to figure out this movie. It's so gratifying to be putting my favorite things about movies in the world of my movie. It's like I get to experience my favorite movies for real.

Like there's a scene where a character has to start everybody on their training by giving a rousing speech, and I got to think a lot about the rousing speech Sean Connery gives in The Man Who Would Be King - the one that begins "We're going to teach you soldiering. The world's noblest profession. When we're done with you, you'll be able to slaughter your enemies like civilized men." I've always wanted to start a speech by saying "I'm going to teach you how to be PAs - the world's noblest profession."

Or I decided that I was going to spend my first act introducing a bunch of characters because I needed a bunch of characters on my sports team. So I've watched the first 30 minutes of favored ribbles movie Ocean's 11 like four times (and taken notes.) I have come up with like a dozen new reasons this movie is genius (example: each character gets an appropriate individual version of the theme music in their introductory scene.)

Another interesting phenomenon: because I am trying to write pretty close to formula for the first draft of this film, thinking about bad sports movies has been just if not more useful than thinking about good sports movies. Enough so that I can no longer figure out which category Cool Runnings falls in to.

Ooh! And because it's a woman's team, I get to name everyone after my ex-girlfriends.

Monkey Monkey

I am waiting until midnight to update the First Sundays website. There's some technical reason why I need to do this, but I don't think I understand it well enough to explain it.

I am going to be asleep soon-ish, much earlier than my usual. It's funny, but with all the time I kill in a normal day, I wouldn't say I spend all that much time waiting for things, outside of a subway platform at least. Not working may be part of this - there is just not enough going on that I could legitimately wait for anything.

Waiting is a funny thing. It reminds me of a habit I've developed in my notebooks, the written precursor to this blog and the preferred depository of my thought when I am offline or they are too trivial to be presented publically.

When I can't quite remember what it was I was thinking that I wanted to write down, I have take to writing the word "monkey," then either looking at the word on the page or writing "monkey" again until my last thought comes to me.

I remember when I learned the word "liminal," meaning in transition or on a threshold. It was in high school, the most liminal place someone could ever be.

I guess I don't really mind waiting. I remember when I was putting together a movie with Nadine back in December, there was a time when I had no more producing work to do until Nadine and the cinematographer put together a shot list.

It was the strangest moment, because I knew I'd been productive and I'd accomplished something and I could generally could feel good about thing, but I had to wait a couple of days before I'd be able to advance at all. It was not the same as feeling stuck, feeling that I couldn't move myself forward.

In short, it was a vacation from my own expectations, and it was wonderful. I wrote first drafts of at least two short films over those two days. It was like the perfect example of the conspiracy of circumstance that I tend to think I need in order to be productive for myself.

It's 12:05, and I'm starting to think free association is a good idea for a new feature. Jeez, I must be pretty tired.

Lifestyle Hack

A hack is a way to use a system or set of rules to achieve a result the original creator of that system or set of rules did not intend.

Let's say, for example, you use the macro function in Microsoft Word not to automatically format text, but to change every fiftieth and fifty-first word of all the Word documents on a hard drive to "peanut brittle." This is a hack. It doesn't have to be bad thing - running a diesel engine on used vegetable oil is also a hack.

Which brings me to the idea of the lifestyle hack.


Let's say hypothetically that I want to change my life. Now, I live the way I do for a reason - it may not be a very good reason, and I may not even be aware of it, but I've made choices to do things a certain way to fill some function that would be unfilled otherwise. If there wasn't a reason, I wouldn't be doing things this way.

I can think of two ways to change the way I live. The first is to change how I am. I could make a close examination of why I do different things and try to alter the way I think in order to change how I live.

Well, that's all well and good, but in practice it's rather a slow boat. Changing how I view the world takes concentration, clear thinking, prolonged desensitization to my brain's hangups and knee-jerk responses, and time. Lots and lots of time.

The second option is a lifestyle hack. Rather than changing the rules, why not figure out a way to use them to achieve the desired result? Instead of changing the way I think, why not change the way I frame a problem in order to change the way I behave?


I will give an example, but please bear with me as this starts to become a bit personal. Those bored by such matters can read this sweet little post in which people go "Gwaar!"

I've always had trouble looking for work because I hate asking people for help and I have a lot of trouble doing anything just for myself.

I've never had trouble doing work, especially in a structured environment like a film set or an office, but I've always had trouble asking people to give me a job.

Well, I should revise that - I've never had trouble doing work for other people. If a friend or a feature needs me to, say, paint an entire apartment, I'll pick up a roller and have the first coat up by the end of the day - but throw some plastic over the couch and stop living in white apartment purgatory? It always strikes me as too much work for too little benefit, especially when I could be spending my time watching Flight of the Conchords.


My latest idea is to think about looking for work not as something that's going to benefit me, but as something that will benefit my friends in the film business.

Right now, I can think of maybe five friends who are both capable of writing a really good feature film script and fool enough to think that I'd be able to produce it. In fact, I probably am capable of producing a feature, but at the moment I'm missing some crucial skills that I'll only really get once I work as an office PA for a couple of months.

My lifestyle hack, then, is to get myself to look for work not as a way to help myself but as a way to make sure I'll someday be able to help my under-resourced and misguided friends.

I come up with these ideas all the time, but they hardly ever end up working the way I want (remember no daytime t.v.? If you do, something is wrong with you.) I am in the mood to let you know.

ribble's Bad Habits

I've been producing films for First Sundays for only about six months (although I've put more work in some than others), but I've been screening films for over a year.

Screening other peoples' movies is fascinating. I have seen some great stuff that in some cases less than ten people before me have ever seen.

Even the bad movies that we would never show can have their moments. I watch almost everything, no matter how terrible, all the way through to the end for exactly that reason.

I remember one particular film about a man who may or may not be possessed by the spirit of a dead, 70-year-old Jewish woman that was awful, awful. Too long, no one acts rationally, not funny.

In the scene, the maybe possessed man, now institutionalized, is talking to the camera about getting a letter from his fiance, who is now marrying his best friend, and he finally realizes that he's thrown his life away.

For the last five seconds of the movie, the protagonist stops speaking in the 70-year-old Jewish woman voice he's been using for the duration and starts talking in the voice of a normal 30-ish man.

It's an incredible cinema moment. Truly amazing. I watched it over and over. And because no one would ever show such an awful 20 minutes of awful for ten seconds of genius, it is possible that I am the only one outside of the production that will ever see it.


Mostly, though, screening movies means I've watched a lot of bad shorts. It's pretty instructive. There's nothing like watching the same mistakes over and over to warn you off them forever.

I developed a shpeil for people directing audience films [under "CONTEST"] for the first time.

For the audience films, we ask writers and directors to keep their shorts to five minutes or less (about five pages of script).

When we screen films, the bar gets steadily higher for longer movies. Think about it - the longer the film, the more of our limited screen time we need to commit to it. We've got an official cutoff at maybe 25, 30 minutes but it's very, very difficult for a film that length to be funny enough for us to show it. No film is too short.

If you are making a short comedy film, please do everyone a favor and keep it short. Cut, cut, cut - that's my #1 AAA [Star] Most Important Suggestion.

The films I watch can usually tell the same story in a quarter the time because audiences pick up on stuff pretty quick. I have seen so many movies that would take over the world if they cut everything that wasn't funny.


When I give my shpiel to first time directors of audience films, I tell them to only write what they think they can do themselves. In my movie, I wrote in a white truck and a good-looking Southerner because I knew I could get those things. Before he writes, Victor has everyone in the cast and crew write out a list of locations where they know he can shoot for free.

It's not a requirement, but I tell writer / directors to make sure their films take place in more than one location. Audiences start to feel trapped or claustraphobic if they have to stay in one location too long. Usually wherever you're shooting can double as two locations anyway, like one apartment playing two different apartments if, say, two people are talking on the phone.

Plus, there's usually more than one place in a particular area where you can shoot in a single day. Location managers think about this shit all the time.

On a similar note, first-time directors are always afraid to move the camera. Move the camera. If you don't, you will bore your audience to death. Moving the camera makes your movie so much more interesting, it's like night and day.


I would also suggest that filmmakers bring in a DP, even if it's just your best friend who may or may not know how to use your camera. The director is constantly making decisions on a film set. It's best to be able to hand the camera to someone else so that you don't have to worry about keeping the actor's forehead in the frame in addition to, say, how good their acting is.

In the vein of making it easier on yourself, the rule of thumb in independent film is that the ideal number of people to have in a scene is two. Any more, and logistics, camera placement, booming and everything else becomes much more complicated.

For an incredible movie that rarely has more than two people in a scene, watch Brick. Or you can just read me gushing about it over and over again.

Of course, there's no end to the things you can learn about making movies. There aren't all that many masters. But making a movie isn't rocket science, and it is possible to make a good first movie. Start with this and let me know how it goes.

Three Movies in Three Weeks: Epilogue

Since we finished shooting "Proud Mary," I'd been having the strangest dreams.

I couldn't quite place them. I just remembered a lot of people, a lot of stuff going on, some sort of grand direction to things, and the unmistakable feeling of big things being organized.

This morning, I realized that I had been dreaming - literally dreaming - about making movies. Imagine that. Three weeks of implacable dreams about making movies. How undeniably significant.

In a single three-week period, I made a movie for a friend that was low-responsibility and a lot of fun, a a movie that I did entirely on my own that I couldn't have been able to make a year ago, and a long-term project that was a real test of my abilities but ultimitely gratifying.

Something for a friend, something of my own and a challenge - if I make nothing but one of those three movies for the rest of my life, I'll be happy.

In my last post, I kept having to keep myself from writing "I went out a boy, and came home a man."

There is something of the war-movie cliche to making movies - chaos, comradery, structure, pressure. I felt transformed by the end of "Mary." For maybe the first time, I had both a proven skill - making movies - and a sense of direction, a clear path to how I would use it.

Now, I'm unemployed, but it's the good kind of unemployed. I can see how I can get the skills I'm missing as a producer, I know what sort of projects I want to do and with who, and I have a lot of confidence in both being able to make movies, and being able to do them better than a lot of other people.

Now that I know I can do something, all that remains is to see what it is I do.

Three Movies in Three Weeks: Proud Mary Part Two

In Which Everything Starts to Go Wrong
About two weeks before we were going to shoot "Proud Mary," everything started to go wrong.

I'd just gotten pre-production in to a place I was comfortable with - we had the schedule settled and our cast together - and I had enough work left to do that I could just get it done before we started shooting if I worked solidly until the shoot.

Our first problem was that we were having a lot of trouble finding a full crew: it was midterm-time at NYU, and Easter Weekend, and, because I had been stuck in pre-pro, I had sort of fallen behind on the favor-trading (you work my set, I'll work yours) that is in many ways the life blood of independent film production. We were shuffling crew until literally the day before the shoot.

But the biggest problem was that, just as we'd gotten our cast finalized, one of our lead's moms got sick and he had to leave the country. I arranged some quick auditions, and we found a good replacement, but, just before his callback, his aunt got sick and he suddenly had to go take care of her on Long Island for the weekend.

So we replaced him with someone who'd had a so-so audition, but then he got two days of paid soap work and decided he wanted to spend Sunday with his family, so he dropped out.

After the second and third guy dropped out just before we were going to pick up the equipment, I decided that if anything was going to go seriously wrong with this production, it wouldn't be my fault.

This was a big moment for me - deciding that, after all the work I'd put in, and the number of factors I had working against me - the budget, working alone, the casting and crew problems, shooting in New Jersey, the complications of the schedule - I really had no choice but to forgive myself if things weren't perfectly button-up when it came time to make our movie.

At the last minute (we literally auditioned him during our equipment pickup, hours before our table read) I found an actor who could play our second male lead, a friend from college who was available during our shoot days. Crisis masterfully averted, thanks to y.t.

Okay! Logistics arranged, budget estimated, actors in place, crew committed, New Jersey Transit tickets purchased, catering menus settled and priced out, fucking brilliant table read accomplished. I called Nadine.

"Hey, Nadine," I said. "What are we doing tomorrow?"

"Making a movie?"

"That's right," I said. "We're making a movie."

Three Movies in Three Weeks: A Multitude of Sins Part 2

In which I make many phone calls, and a movie.

Once I'd decided to go with the script I had, I started making phone calls (producing consists almost entirely of phone calls). I wouldn't be using a crew, but I had some actresses in mind and I had to check their availability, and I had to make sure Codename Bronco was down to put his truck in my movie since that would have broken it.

Much scheduling later, I was ready to shoot. I had decided to start with the scenes of just Vaughn and his friend in his friend's apartment, which were relatively simple and would let Vaughn get comfortable with the process.

My first surprise on what was arguably my first day as a director was that being a director was, in many ways, a technical job. On a film set, the film "technical departments" refer to the camera, sound, grip and electric departments - the people responsible for handling the equipment used to make the movie. Then there's the creative departments - art direction, props, hair, makeup and waredrobe.

Aside from movie stars, directors have the most rareified position on a film set. They are ultimately in charge of everything, and it's their creative vision that ends up on screen, and blah blah blah.

Thing is, the main responsibility of a director is to know what shots he needs to get in order to tell a story. I'd argue that this is a technical requirement. At least, it operates by a system of rules that can be learned and require organized thinking.

I don't know, maybe this is a weak argument, or a pointless one. What I'm saying is that directing took a different type of thinking than the type I had expected. Like many of the other crew positions I've learned in the past, I felt like I could pick up the basics quickly, and I would be able to master the rest with enough time.

Once we started shooting, I immediately began to regret not bringing in a DP. I should have known from the directing I'd done in school, but I really needed to have someone else to explain things to.

As it was, I would change my mind half way through a shot as to what I was trying to get, and then I'd get confused as to what I had. I also didn't get to watch the actors' performances since I was so focused on the framing of the shot.

A lot of the time that I said I got something and let's move on or I didn't and do it again, I felt like I was guessing. A director needs to make firm decisions or people start to lose confidence in him - I've seen it on lots of sets, with first-time directors especially.

There were a few spots where I'd overlooked things that first day, and doing things so off the cuff really brought home the need to do my homework next time (story boards, location scouting, shot list, etc.).

That said, I think I represented myself pretty well during the shoot. My most desperate time was when our first location in the park was snowed out; I was working with four actors (two is ideal); we were in a restaurant that was poorly lit and that I'd never seen before; the people at the bar wouldn't shut up and I was genuinely worried we'd have to do it all again.

Even then, no one came up to me and said "you don't belong here, you can't do this, you're just faking it, you need to go home," which is what I was secretly afraid of.

Three Movies in Three Weeks: Mr. September

In which I have a brilliant time and generally make a fool of myself.

While I was in the midst of shooting "Sins" and doing pre-pro for "Mary," I had a three-day commitment to my good friend Nadine to do her film, "Mr. September." September was about a guy who loses his job and starts working out to try to keep his girlfriend.

I was grip and electric on this film, a job I've been getting more and more comfortable with, especially on smaller shoots. If production is becoming my self-educated film school major, grip + electric is becoming my minor (with directing, I am hoping for extra credit).

So I was comfortable, I was on my own turf, but, best of all, I wasn't responsible for anything. After the frenzy of "Mary" and "Sins," this was just about the most liberating thing that could've happened to me. I had a great time just going around, doing my stuff and not being responsible for anything.

Some of the fun stuff I got away with:

Room Tone Dance
For editing purposes, the sound department has to record about 30 seconds of silence ("room tone") in every location of the film. Ideally, you'd want everyone to be in the exact positions they were in when you were shooting the scene, because everything from which lights are on to where the bodies are in the scene affects the nature of the silence you record.

However, room tone is often overlooked until just after everything else is shot, and actors run away to deal with important business and whatever.

So, we were about to record room tone and I volunteered to sit in the actor's seat. Now, 30 seconds is a long time. I quickly realized that the camera was focused on me, and then I realized that no one would be allowed to stop me from doing whatever I wanted (or make any noise at all, for that matter.)

It was then that I invented room tone dance.

Room tone dance is a unique and highly modern dance designed to get the crew of the movie to laugh and ruin the take. I'd show you, but that video would cross the globe like a bullet that killed an Archduke. Maybe some day I won't care - I did post the link to that Milkshake movie, after all.

I managed maybe two or three really good goes at a room tone dance. Each and every one was well worth the three days of unpaid labor I needed to do to get them.

Similairly...

I Convince an Extra I'm Crazy
We had just lit a scene where the two main characters talk after an exercise class, and Nadine had a bunch of extras standing around with their bags pretending to talk.

I say pretending to talk, because, on a film set, everyone must remain absolutely silent except for the main characters in the scene. Their dialogue has to be recorded as cleanly as possible, and then whatever crowd noises or what have you are added during the editing process. Whenever you see, say, a bunch of people talking in a restaurant in the background of a scene, they're faking it.

Okay, so all the extras were placed in the scene, but one girl didn't have anyone to pretend to talk to. Nadine asked me to stand just outside of frame to pretend to talk to her.

So I could be seen by only the crew and this one girl, I was just out of frame so I wasn't being picked up by the camera and no one was allowed to talk. I decided this would be a good time to teach my captive extra how to bake a cake.

We did two long takes. During that time, and using only my natural enthusiasm and the medium of mime, I showed my extra how to shop for ingredients, how to mix them, how to spice and pour the mixture, how to place the cake in the pre-heated oven, about how long to leave the cake and, once the cake was done, how to throw it in to the air and shoot it with a shotgun.

I am not sure how much of my recipe got across.

Three Movies in Three Weeks: A Multitude of Sins Part 1

In which I decide to make a movie.

While pre-production for "Proud Mary" was getting under way, I was taking on some new responsibilities at First Sundays, the monthly short comedy film festival that I'd been screening movies for since about a year back.

One of my new responsibilities was to produce a film each month for the next month's festival.

First Sundays shows about an hour and a half of short comedy on the first sunday of each month. At the end of each month's show, brave members of the audience tick a box at the bottom of their ballots to enter their names in a drawing. The winning audience member gets to star in a film for the next month. The audience then suggests a title.

I had starred in an audience film in November, "Smooth Milkshake," (which, look at that, is now online), and I'd produced maybe three projects, only one of which made people angry at me, and then there was some stuff I'd done at school, and I hadn't really found anyone else to do it and I'd just finished reading Rebel Without a Crew.

Long story short, I decided to direct the March for April audience film myself.

The title I got was "A Multitude of Sins," and my actor was a tall, gorgeous North Carolina import and male housekeeper named Vaughn. We talked at the afterparty about the various sins we'd committed, and I came up with an idea.

Now, before I went in to the show to find out my title and actor, I knew I wanted to do a few things. I knew I wanted someone to get hit by a truck because I had gotten hit by a truck outside my apartment and that's the kind of experience that sticks with you. And I knew I wanted a lot of movement and action and a lot of plot crammed in to my six minutes, almost a breakneck pace.

And then I didn't want to have to ask anyone else for help.

My script was about a Texan who falls in love with his cousin and follows her to New York City, but then it turns out she's a lesbian and he ends up with the girl reporter who's better for him because they're not related.

About midway through writing the script, I figured out that the real love triangle was between the Texan, his cousin and his truck.

I also worked in a lot of ideas from my conversations with Vaughn - living in a closet, moving to New York City from the south and falling in love with the place, etc.

Now, at this point in my career, I considered myself an expert on thinking on a budget. The key, as any good independent film director will tell you, are using the resources you already have available to you. For example, before Victor writes a movie, he has everyone on the cast and crew write out the locations they can get access to. Very smart.

I thought Codename Bronco had a truck I could use, so I felt comfortable using that in the script. I had a Southerner, and he made himself available any time he wasn't working, so I could drag him all over the city. I had my beautiful actresses who I thought would be down for this sort of thing. I set everything during the day because I didn't have any lights and I wasn't sure if we would be able to see anything if I shot at night.

Then I had myself - I hadn't exactly directed before, but I'd been successful at organizing these things, and I felt confident that if I kept my crew as small and mobile as possible (i.e., it was just me), I could handle the logistics of the shoot.

What I didn't have was a lot of time. I wrote the script within four days of meeting Vaughn, but I agonized it for about a week after that because it seemed like such a dumb idea, just because of that problem.

I mean, the script was fine - a little weird, a little funny, very strong story arc - but I had lots of locations and people getting knocked down by killer trucks and lots of odd little moments that, all together, made things pretty complicated. So I sent it to Jay.

Jay asked me if I was crazy. He said it was way too complicated. He admitted that I might be able to do it if I had a truck and all the locations in the script, but, yeah, he still thought I was crazy.

I looked at my script again. My instincts were the same as Jay's. I thought about starting over - the current script was too ambitious for an audience film, with the crazy running all over the city and the story arcs and everything, but I decided that this was just my writing style, and I didn't want to just scrap the whole script.

I looked at my script again. There wasn't any particular part of the script I didn't think was beyond my abilities to do on my own. It was just the confluence of all these little moving parts that could prove to be too much, like how ninjas can kill you with 1,000 paper cuts.

Like a good producer, I started breaking down the script. I divided it in to four different categories of things I could shoot together. It didn't look impossible when I did it that way. At some point, I decided to go ahead with the script I had.

Three Movies in Three Weeks: Proud Mary Part One

In which things happen really slowly for awhile.

I got back from New Orleans in early January determined to get more work, a new apartment and a cat before the end of the year.

I am still in the same apartment.

The cat is fine.

As for work, I decided to become an independent producer of no-budget films. Partly this was because it was the path of least resistance. To be self-employed, I didn't have to ask anyone for help, I didn't have to go to any interviews, I just had to find some projects.

Partly, it was because of Marlon Brando.

Brando revolutionized his medium, but he lost his focus. I saw an interview with a biographer of Brando's where he said "you just want to tell him, 'you're good at making movies. That brings people joy. Why not do that?'"

After I did Ballots Over Broadway, I figured I was good at making short, no-budget movies, so I'd better go ahead and do that.

Not long after that, Nadine, director of Ballots, came to me with a project. It was a great script by an NYU Junior named Nick Koenig about a girl who's shit-head boyfriend convinces her to do an amateur porn with an overweight local.

I saw immediately that Mary was going to be a challenge. We were shooting in Jersey, which is always a struggle because I have to get everybody out there and we'd all have to sleep over; it was longer than any script I'd done before; and Nick had created some interesting challenges for himself and his actors with the script. It was really going to have to be done well to be done at all.

But, man, what a script. I decided it was going to be worth the challenge. It was exactly the kind of project I was looking for, and I took it.

We scouted locations in Jersey. We did a lot of casting. I tried to figure out how we were going to put this thing together.

For awhile, things happened really slowly. It was my fault, really - when I'm my own boss, it's great because there's no one telling me what to do, but it's awful for the same reason.

I struggled with trying to keep myself motivated, keep myself moving. A couple of times I thought about quitting, but never too seriously. By the time I had said "yes," I had a lot at stake in "Proud Mary." I had to see how far I could go. I was in it for keeps.

At some point, I added up my calendar and realized I was going to be doing three movies in the next three weeks. I'd made just enough progress on pre-production for Mary that I'd be ready if I worked really, really hard. It was time to get organizized.

Three Movies in Three Weeks: Introduction

In which I reveal why I've neglected this blog a bit this past month.

Exactly one month ago, I realized I was going to have to make three movies in the next three weeks: "Mr. September," a short film I was gripping for my friend, Nadine; "A Multitude of Sins," a First Sundays audience film I was writing and directing myself; and "Proud Mary," a short student film that I was producing which was a bit more ambitious than anything I'd ever done before.

Making this many movies in this short a time is, for lack of a better phrase, stupid. Movies are tiring. Film crews work long hours (12-hour days are the norm) and it can be trying, stressful work. And it wasn't like I was just crewing these movies - "Sins" I did completely on my own, and "Mary" I was producing, so I was ultimately in charge of everything for both those films. These were ambitious projects on their own - together, they would have broken a lesser man.

I want to write about each of my three movies, but for now, I just want to say that I did it. I survived. I did a good job - everyone was happy and well fed, I did my job, we got the footage, we made our deadlines, and I couldn't have expected any more out of myself. That alone is cause for celebration. I celebrated by sleeping for a week. Then I cleaned my apartment. I haven't been happier.

Making all these movies in such a short time, along with all the time I've spent as an independent, no-budget film producer (since about mid-January) has taught me a lot about where my skills are, what I'm capable of, what I've learned from a year in the business, and, more importantly, what I don't know, what my options are, where I go from here.

Trying to go back and write about my experience from the beginning is going to be a little tricky, like starting a story with the epilogue. I'm not expecting too much out of myself, but I hope to at least tell you about where I've been and what I've been up to. It's been a hell of a ride.

ribble's Bio

The bio I wrote for this month's First Sundays program.

Richard (First Sundays Producer) was exiled from the New York suburbs, grew up in Texas, fled the country for an odd and obscure school in Wales, then went to college in the frozen American North. He moved to Brooklyn after school and became a journalist, then a finance guy, then a producer, then a lackey, and then a producer again. He aspires to some combination of making movies and having steady, respectable work, and he cannot watch a movie without trying to guess the budget.

More and more of my compatriots from my odd and obscure Welsh school are finding their way here, so I figured I'd post it. "And then a producer again" is a snowclone from Minds, except that snowclones are supposed to be common, and that one's pretty obscure.

ribble's Progress #2: Work

This is the year I'm getting more work, a new apartment, and a cat. Here's how it's going so far:

NUMBER TWO (2)

WORK

So far, each time I write one of these, I am talking about a decision I did not know I'd already made. It seems that I have decided to produce no-budget short films full time with no hope of reward. I have made this seemingly senseless decision because:

1) I am desperate to commit to doing something with my time starting immediately because I consider the alternative, despite all reason, to be doing nothing at all, forever,

2) I know I can do this and do it well because I have done it and done it well,

3) At this point, I have more to learn by producing stuff I want to do than by working as a PA,

4) If I stick with it and don't do anything else, I can make a lot of films very quickly, and, like John Turturro putting wax in his ears in Barton Fink, I kind of have to ride that creative wave out before I lose it.

5) Sinbad says get paid in cash and be your own boss.


Last week I spent settling in from New Orleans and making space for an office. Monday felt like the first day of work at a new job.

So far, my work as a producer consists mostly of making phone calls. The biggest challenge, I can already tell, will be keeping organized. I'm keeping a phone log, but what I really want is a giant white board. Yes, a man can dream...

So far, I am a pretty good boss. I started a bit later in the day than I would have liked, but I gave myself a lot of time off to write.

I am realizing as I write this that it is difficult to explain that this is not a bullshit job. I enjoy it too much. I'm working from home. No one knows what a producer does anyway (Please do not ask me. There are books you can read. I am sick of explaining it. You will only make me whinier.)

I agree with this straw man of accusation in that I believe the only way to justify being self-employed is to produce either money or content. I hope for plenty of the second, but I'm not counting on any of the first.

ribble's Coffee

Coffee is my favorite beverage. It is the only widely available potable liquid with magical properties.

I first started drinking coffee with my mom, who drinks half-decaf, half-caffeinated coffee with sugar and lots of skim milk heated in a small pot on the stove, so that's how I took my coffee.

Then I went away to school in Wales, where the nearest grocery store was 20 minutes walk in the rain each way. Sugar and especially milk were often not available, so I got used to having my coffee black. Also, we had no coffee maker, so it was plunger coffee all the way.


When I went to college, I drank coffee at the local joint. I went through all the different brews and all the different drinks.

My favorite drink (to stay) was the cafe au lait, which at the Dirty Boy a little metal pot of strong, black coffee, and a little metal pot of warm milk. My favorite drink (to go) was the Jamaican Blue Mountain with a double shot of espresso - basically the strongest type of coffee that could be legally sold.

When I left school and got my own place, I bought a bed and then I bought a coffee pot. I got whole beans from one of the many spots around Park Slope and ground them myself. I had no consistent philosophy on milk and sugar, preferring them when faced with mediocre coffee but letting good coffee speak for itself.


Then I started working in media and drinking coffee with Speedrail. We drank either the really cheap coffee from the deli down the street or the really cheap coffee from the gas station at the corner. In either case, it was always large, light and sweet.

I lost that job and started working on film sets. Film means weird hours, stress and very little sleep. If it weren't for coffee, the film business would not exist. Because PAs never really got breaks and always had the least time for meals, I had time to pour in milk but no time to stir in sugar. (Although, on the one Bollywood film I worked, the craft service guys made a really strong instant with condensed milk and only served it at tea time. It was to die for.)

Now I'm a little bit between careers, and I haven't hit a new coffee philosophy. Will I be a writer, keeping the pot going all day and all night? A producer, forcing lackeys to buy me some very specific type of Starbucks? A film star, demanding only coffee made with organic beans and bottled water? Or maybe a film guerrilla, drinking deli coffee when I can get it?

I Made a Movie

By the time I read this, we will be done shooting Ballots Over Broadway, the first film I've produced in over a year.

This feels pretty good.


I've learned a lot about making movies since my last project, and I'm a better producer now than I was then. It's both surprisingly easy and surprisingly difficult to make a movie. Difficult because there's always so much that can go wrong; easy because there are so many people who will make a movie just to do it - for no money, just for the dream of it.

Some people dream of making a movie for their whole lives and never get a chance. I know that this skill, the ability to produce these small projects, it's not something just anyone can do. At the same time, I'm not sure what qualifies me to do it. Really all I did since I left college (with no practical skills) was to work on sets and pay attention. It's the same "high skill/no skill" feeling that I had as a PA.

So, once again, the job is done, and, once again, I'm feeling lost. I know what I can do, but I don't know what to do with what I can do.

The Get it Done School

I am of the Get it Done school of filmmaking. I see movies (the ones I work on, anyway) as a series of logistical problems to be overcome. That's why the first thing I did when I decided to produce next month's film for First Sundays - even before I decided to produce it, truth be told - was to get two other people to take over the aesthetic aspects of the film, the writing and directing.


These two guys are stars, and they're doing a great job, but, in a way, I don't care. As long as they're getting their jobs done, I'm happy. It lets me focus on getting the logistical challenges out of the way.

Every film needs a get it done guy or it just doesn't happen. I'm watching American Movie now, and it's a bit terrifying. I just need to keep reminding myself that I'm more organized than Mark Borchardt.

A PA Habit

Early on in my PA days I had a habit of thinking about the latest problem to come up (often other people's) and thinking about what I could have done before to prevent them. As it happens, there have been less and less problems that I feel like I could have prevented.

For one thing, I'm a better PA now than I was before, but that's just part of the explanation.

When I looked back, most of the ways I found to hypothetically prevent problems was to tell the people above me about potential problems before they developed.


Now, alerting people above me to potential problems is a tricky thing. Under the wrong circumstances or handled in the wrong way, it could be interpreted as telling someone above me (and when I'm a PA, everyone is above me) how to do their job.

Part of being a good PA is knowing what falls in someone else's area of responsibility from the beginning. The tricky part, for me anyway, is to tell someone once that there's a potential problem and then leave it to them to deal with it in their own way. After all, they may know something I don't know, like that there are other, more important things for both of us to be dealing with.

Taking ownership of problems is tricky, and I'm still mastering it.

The other reason I'm finding less problems I could have prevented is that I now understand that even if I had done everything right before, often a lot of other stuff would have had to happen in order for things to go right in the end.

Now I know why the people on set who are the most experienced seem the most relaxed. Mastering a job means putting challenges in perspective.

Unemployment

Unemployment is boring. It's a recipe for desperation.

In what has been my chosen profession, unemployment comes with the territory. Film people work from gig to gig, and unemployment is what happens inbetween.

The problem is I never know how long between gigs is going to last. One of the problems.

The other problem, the fat man sitting on the seesaw of unhappiness to which unemployment is the fulcrum, is that I hate looking for work. Hate it.


I work to escape the problems I have in the rest of my life, which means when I don't work, I have to face those problems again.

I've come up with a few ways to be semi employed, like writing and tutoring, but they're ultimately unsatisfying. It's hard to feel like these are real work after doing production, where the work is so real it effectively kills off the rest of my life.

That leaves me with ways to kill time, i.e. Mr. Ribbles on the couch with the remote, which, of course, just makes it worse.

There are only a few jobs I feel capable and qualified to do. At the same time, I know most of these jobs are or would be killing me. The crashes after the high of work are too much. Until I can learn how to be happy when I'm not working, I have to give up production.


This happens to a lot of people, and I hate that it's happening to me (by the way, ever see this? Nothing will make you feel dirtier.)

I'm not really quitting production, anyway, since that would just make me more unemployed. I'm just not going after jobs, especially long jobs like features - I'm just doing the ones I'm being asked to do. Here's what you might call the plan:

1) I've stopped watching t.v. during the day. I've been doing this for about a week.

2) I'm producing a very small, very managable short film that will show at First Sundays on January 7.

3) Today, I took my resume to a film equipment rental house in my neighborhood.

4) I've got that writing project I mentioned before.

5) Oh and then I'm blogging a lot. Maybe you could call this series "ribble's Quest For Non-Cinema-Related Happiness."

6) I'll keep working for my regular clients as a PA. They're aren't that many, and they tend to have short gigs.

7) If a big, interesting project comes along, or a friend is doing something and I want to be involved, I'll probably do it anyway, but I'll be choosy.

Not much of a mandate - in particular, I need to carefully consider the merits of a real day job. But, it's a start.

Here's What I Did Yesterday

Here's what I did yesterday: haul equipment and coffee back and forth across a building a quarter of a mile long.

Here's what I'm doing tonight: sleeping.