Thursday, September 29, 2011

A Missive From Sisyphus


I guess it's time for an update on "Europe After Dark."

This is the 10-episode travel-lifestyle TV series about European nightlife that we shot in Europe last summer. Sounds great, right? Shot last summer. Done and done. We contacted the Fox Station Group and showed them a few sample episodes, and they were quite enthusiastic about it. Chris King, who heads ad sales for the company, told me they would be willing to move other programming around to accommodate our show.

The problem is this: we have to sell the advertising ourselves. To do this, we signed with a media buying firm with a lot of experience selling advertising time in the paid programming arena. They tried, but to date have gotten no firm commitments to sponsor the show.

The reason? "Europe After Dark" is an untried entity. It has no track record, no ratings - nothing that could be used to sell its worth as a vehicle for delivering a particular advertiser's message. A solution would be to do a test run in a single market, and that's what my associate Van Sher is doing now.

We'll keep on trudging....

Saturday, September 24, 2011

Vince & James


Well, I have to confess that last night was a bit of a let-down.

It had nothing to do with the crowd's reaction to Tolltaker. It was more because the festival people were showing the wrong version of it. Instead of the Blu Ray with the gorgeous sound track and sound mix that I had paid good money for, that I had rushed to get to them a few days earlier, I was sitting in my seat, watching unfold before me the rough cut I had sent in months earlier, with the understanding that I would replace it with the final cut before the screening. Which I did.

It was really too painful to watch. I got up and hurried out of the theater, found the house manager and had some words that I guess could be characterized as tense. He offered to stop the movie, put in the right version, and fast-forward to the spot where the movie was at now.

I declined. That didn't make any sense to me. The movie was half over already. Whatever meager spell it might have cast over the audience would be completely broken if the film were interrupted like that. So I wound up sitting out in the lobby for the rest of the Tolltaker and the movie after that. Kind of a pouty, spoiled-brat thing to do I know, but I was pissed.

So, all in all, not a pleasant evening. But the day did have an upside. On the way to the festival (sitting in traffic that was moving slower than your average lava flow, it should be mentioned), I received a phone call from my friend Vince, who had just watched the Tolltaker.

I've known Vince Jolivette since about 1998, when we were both working as bartenders at the Bel Air Bay Club, which tells everyone that it's in Malibu, but is actually in Pacific Palisades, California. It was a private club for the rich, sitting on one of the few privately owned strips of beach in the state.

All in all, it was a pretty cushy gig, especially if you were working the day shift. Mostly I would just sit and read a book, or gaze out the open window at the Santa Monica Bay.

Vince was that Hollywood stereotype, an aspiring actor who made his living in the food industry. He was from Ohio, and seemed to have brought his entire college graduating class out to California with him. He was always hanging out with friends whom he knew either from college, or from his hometown just outside Cincinnati.

Vince was studying his craft, as every serious artist must do, and was doing so at a studio called Playhouse West in North Hollywood. The day he started, he ran into someone new, who (I believe) was also just starting at the studio. His name was James Franco. The two became fast friends.

Over the years, Vince and James did acting exercises together, worked on scenes, acted in plays. This continued as James began to land ever bigger and more impressive acting gigs. Freaks and Geeks, James Dean (for which he won a Golden Globe), Spiderman.

Vince and James formed a production company together, Rabbit Bandini Productions, which Vince would largely run as James flew off to wherever he was filming a movie. They began producing movies, first shorts, then a few feature-length films, all of which Vince produced.

A couple years after I moved back to the East Coast, James began taking classes at, it seemed, every university in the known world. There was NYU, Columbia and - I believe - Brooklyn College. James had gotten an apartment in Manhattan, which he shared with Vince and a pretty, charming female assistant (whose name, unfortunately, escapes me right now).

Vince, my best friend Jesper (who also knew Vince from the Bel Air Bay Club) and I would hang out in the city, and on, occasion, we would return to the apartment in Chelsea that Vince shared with James. It was a pretty cool apartment. James had eschewed a high-rise penthouse in favor of three floors in a turn-of-the-century (and I mean 20th Century) walk-up.

A really cool feature of the apartment was a roof-top deck, which provided stunning views of both midtown and downtown. I remember on at least one occasion relaxing up there with Vince and the nameless-but-pretty assistant, having beers and basically just hanging out.

James wasn't there, but my friendship with Vince has, from time to time, brought me in contact with him. The first time was back in Los Angeles, where Vince and James did a little scene in a friend's garage and I filmed it. Even then, James was the budding director. He had very specific shots in mind. This wasn't going to be a case of plop the camera on a tripod and get what you can.

Then there was a time I went to his apartment in North Hollywood. This was in an impressive office-retail-apartment complex that really stuck out from all the east Valley blandness that surrounded it. I don't remember much furniture, but it seemed that every horizontal surface was covered with empty, plastic bottles of spring water. Apparently he drank it when he painted (pictures, that is), which I hadn't known previously that he did.

On the East Coast, I met him one time at the premiere of his film Good Time Max at the TriBeCa Film Festival. He had to give a little speech at the beginning, introducing the movie, which he shuffled through rather bashfully. Afterwards, Jesper and I were part of an entourage that took over a restaurant uptown for the rest of the night.

Then there was the time, about a year or so ago, that James was directing a short film (a student film, I believe, for NYU) in Virginia, and asked Jesper and me to do him a favor. The production was renting about ten rooms at a hotel in the town of Suffolk for about a week and wanted to work a barter deal with the hotel whereby the production would get a steep discount if they produced a short, promotional video for the hotel. Knowing that Jesper and I do those kind of videos for a living, he called us.

After the shoot, we went back down about a week later to shoot some behind-the-scenes footage. The movie was a short called Herbert White and the lead role was played by the actor Michael Shannon, who was nominated for an Oscar for his performance in Revolutionary Road. An Oscar-nominated star. For a student film. You can do it if you're James Franco.

They had assembled a casual, relaxed crew that gelled well together. About half were classmates of James' from NYU, and the other half were local kids from the community college. By the time Jesper and I got there, they had gotten into the kind of groove any film crew (hopefully) gets into, where everyone is one big family, and it seems like they've known each other forever.

There were a couple memorable moments from the two days we spent with the production. One location was a derelict old shack of a house that some members of the crew believed was haunted. After the production wrapped at that location, James and Michael posed for a photograph, sitting on the porch in a pair of battered lawn chairs. Just before (or after - I'm not sure) the picture was taken, there was a loud crack of splintering wood and the porch beneath James gave way, tumbling him off the chair and onto his back in the dirt. He landed laughing.

Another moment was when the cast and crew were assembled at a farmhouse that was kind of serving as headquarters for the production. It was the last day of shooting, and everyone was having lunch. The atmosphere was relaxed, even festive. One of the Virginia kids was having a birthday, and James presented him with a cake and did a little mock interview, which I taped.

A little later, I was chatting with James, and he asked about the work we did at Reel Stuff. I told him some of our projects, including Living Tomorrow, a 15-episode original series for The Discovery Channel that we had shot in Europe a few years before. Vince was the host of the series.

"Wait! That was you?," James asked. "I wondered how Vince got that gig."

Anyway, enough of the reminiscing. Once again, Vince called me yesterday after he had watched the Tolltaker. He was very enthusiastic about it, and offered one or two suggestions for "taking it to the next level," so to speak. The main suggestion was to cut a version of it that was substantially shorter. This would make it more palatable to agents, who are often the key to getting movies made in Hollywood (and my overall goal is to get a Tolltaker feature made).

"No agent's going to want to sit through a 23-minute short film," Vince said. The ideal length is 12 to 15 minutes. So I'll cut a shorter version, which Vince said he would take, along with the feature-length Tolltaker screenplay, to James' agents at CAA. After that, who knows?

So, that's one iron in the fire. There are certainly no guarantees, so the wisest thing would be to press ahead with submitting Tolltaker to film festivals, racking up as many awards, views and "Likes" on Facebook as we can. So, to Tolltaker people everywhere, I repeat the prime directive:

Spread the Virus.

Friday, September 23, 2011

The Final Hours...


Well, The Tolltaker's first screening before an audience is tonight. Just a few hours away.

The only way I've ever experienced this movie was on my computer screen, with the audio being piped in through headphones. Tonight I'm going to see it projected on a screen (how big, I don't know) before an actual audience of actual people. I hope everyone's work shows well. I think people are going to like it, if they can forgive it for the flaws sprinkled here and there.

It's funny the set of expectations a person has when considering others' reaction to his work. You want everyone to love it. Anything short of that, of absolute perfection, means the whole thing's a failure.

And it's not just that you want them to love it. It has to be one of the best things they've ever seen, a real watershed moment for them. As the Creator of this Work, you'll be satisfied with nothing less than the audience dividing their lives into two parts: before and after they've seen your movie.

And if that doesn't happen? If all they do is clap politely? Or if it turns out that they like the movie, but like someone else's better? That's the reaction you have to steel yourself for.

I guess this feeling is something akin to what a gambler feels after he's tossed the dice or pulled the handle on the slot machine. A lot is riding on the outcome, and along with anxiety there's a certain rush. Every moment from now until the outcome is decided is significant.

In the end, I guess I'll have to content myself with the following sage advice: it's not about the destination, but the journey to get there. Whatever happens tonight, the experience of making this film has shaped, in some way, who I am. No audience reaction is going to change that.

Thursday, September 22, 2011

Radio Ga Ga


Life's too short not to let yourself bask in the glow of kind words, if only for a moment. You never know when you'll have the chance again.

Such was the case today during my radio interview with Bert Baron about The Tolltaker. The occasion was the movie's screening on Friday, September 23 at the New Jersey Film Festival. A filmmaker from the festival is interviewed once a week on Bert's show - today it was my turn.

I had sent a link to watch the movie a few days ahead of time, in case Bert wanted to take a look at Tolltaker in advance of the interview, which was scheduled for 2:30 this afternoon. I had been instructed to call in to the station a few minutes beforehand.

Bert actually called me unexpectedly this morning, right after he had watched the movie. It was around 10 or 11 a.m. and my phone rang. The number didn't look familiar, but I answered it, thinking it might be work-related. It was Bert.

As I look back on it, I'm not entirely sure what the call was for exactly, other than to offer his congratulations about the movie. He was very pleasant and cordial. We chatted for a few minutes, and then I said I would call into the show a few minutes before 2:30, as directed.

When I called into the show this afternoon, I was stunned by the words of praise he bestowed upon The Tolltaker. A few quotes, which I pulled later from the podcast:

"I thought it was unbelievable."

"I was just wowed by it. It was a real treat to see."

Bert said it "used music expertly." It's "just a great movie."

"I couldn't take my eyes off of it, it was that captivating to me. "

And there was this:

"Everybody who has a chance to come down and watch this movie is going to be absolutely blown away by it."

Some of the best praise was reserved for Cullen Clancey, who plays Bobby in the movie. Another quote:

"I'm gonna see this kid on a red carpet someday, giving an acceptance speech. I have no doubt."

Of course, an obsessive-compulsive, over-analytical sort might try seeing between the lines here. It could be that he was just offering encouragement to an aspiring feature filmmaker, and talk radio hosts tend to speak in superlatives. Was this just a pat on the head?

Who knows...I guess I'll just have to wait until The Tolltaker screens tomorrow night, and see what the audience's reaction to it will be. Then, instead of one person's opinion, I'll have a whole theater-full of them.

To hear the podcast of the interview with Bert, go here: http://www.wctcam.com/BertPodcasts.aspx.

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Gazing Into the Depths


Now that it’s finished, I look at “The Tolltaker” and ask myself: is it any good?


I think I’m the last person to be able to judge that. I’m much too close to it. I know every frame, and every flaw announces itself to me with the subtlety and finesse of a fog horn.


I hope it’s good. If “goodness” equals dedication and hard work – not to mention sacrifice, particularly of money – then “The Tolltaker” is superb. But of course, life isn’t fair that way. Nor should it be. I’m sure people put a lot of time and effort – not to mention expense – into Battlefield Earth. That doesn’t mean I have to like it.


If goodness equals sincerity, then I believe the Tolltaker wins points. This is a story I honestly wanted to see told. Why? As I’ve said before, the setting and circumstances remind me of growing up myself in the Philadelphia area in the 1970’s. For that reason I tried to pack it with as many “cultural markers” as I could.


But beyond that, I really felt for the character of Bobby. I sympathize with a confused and anxious boy, an outsider, wounded by life at an early age, and endowed with sad wisdom as a result.


There are so many books I read when I was a kid that were about some youthful hero stumbling into a fantastic – or terrifying – alternate world. I guess Alice in Wonderland was the first of this type written. The first of the modern era, anyway. Heroes have been venturing into the netherworld for various reasons since the very dawn of story telling.


Am I over-thinking it? Am I making connections and deriving levels of meaning that others just don’t see? I know how easy it is for an artist to go into obsessive detail about his own work, in the mistaken belief that others share his enthusiasm with this new creation. I’ve got to stay on the look-out for that tendency in myself.


I think I must have watched Tolltaker at least 500 times so far. Even so, I’m still making discoveries in it. Levels of meaning that could be inferred. I ask myself: did I put that there? Did I know I put that there? Did I know the reason?


Not consciously. But then story-telling isn’t entirely a conscious process. The wellsprings of inspiration are in the unconscious, which is why sometimes a story will pop up fully-formed into a writer’s mind. According to Jim Sneddon, that’s how the Tolltaker novel came to him. The unconscious has already been working on it, putting it together below the notice of the conscious mind, and by the time the writer goes looking for the story – sitting down to actually write it – the unconscious mind hands it over, practically ready for the type-setter.


And what are these “wellsprings of inspiration,” really? It feels like it’s almost coming from somewhere outside my mind. That, I understand, is a common phenomenon, and psychologists have talked and written about it often. You should read William James’ book Varieties of Religious Experience for an eye-opening description of inspiration – both divine and otherwise – from a psychological perspective. It’s one of the definitive works on the subject.


Carl Jung has proven tremendously helpful in shedding some light on this question. I remember reading his books on archetypes and the collective unconscious (which, of course, is the title of his most famous book), and gobbling each one up greedily. The insights were like little bits of light, little bits of fresh air, and I eagerly followed from one to the next. The result, I believe, has given me an understanding of stories that’s both universal and personal.


Of course, to palliate anyone who’s rolling his/her eyes right now, I have to say that I absolutely don’t consider myself a master story-teller. The Tolltaker doesn’t provide evidence of that, and, besides, it was based on a book written by someone else.


But I do believe I have an understanding of story-telling and story arcs that’s both intuitive and intellectual. Or at least I’m starting to. I can watch a movie, say it’s terrific, and understand – both on an intellectual and intuitive level – why I feel that way.


That’s a long way from saying that I’m capable myself of producing something that meets those lofty standards. But I’m learning, and each time out, I hope to do better. In my perfect future, I’ll look back at this, my first film (but hopefully not my last) and shake my head in embarrassment at how rough it is.


That’s something to shoot for, right?

Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Thou Shalt Spread the Virus


So, as of this morning "The Tolltaker" has been viewed 50 times on Vimeo.

Thursday, September 15 was the halcyon day, with a breath-taking total of 19 views. (And, at this point, that is breath-taking.) Alas, the number goes down on succeeding days: ten each on Friday and Monday, and four the remaining two days.

So, once again, here's the pathogen all the busy little vectors out there need to spread the disease:

http://www.vimeo.com/29022379

Of course, I'm encouraging people to email the link as far and wide as possible. My strategy has essentially two components: place well at film festivals and chalk up views and "Likes" of the film online. The ultimate goal: get a feature-length version of the Tolltaker made. The next intermediate step to get to that goal is to find a partner who has the resources to produce "The Tolltaker" and distribute it to both national and international markets.

When you're asking people to part with money, they're going to want to see numbers. The online views and Facebook "Likes" are going to provide those numbers. The trick is to get those numbers as high as possible. That's where promotion comes in.

These days, the most successful promotional campaigns are viral campaigns. The idea is not just to get the message out to people through some mass medium like television or magazines, but to get each person who sees that message to pass it on to his/her family, friends and associates. That way , the message spreads. Like a virus.

What are the chances of success with this route? Well, she's not trying to make a movie, but web star Marina Orlova, I'm told, makes well into five figures each month from her YouTube channel "Hot for Words." But the channel has racked up somewhere in the neighborhood of 420 million views so far. My paltry 50 hardly compares with that.

One thing I need to make clear is that I'm not asking anybody for money (and neither does Marina, by the way - her channel is ad supported). I have absolutely no intention to receive financial compensation of any kind from The Tolltaker. At least as a short film. As a feature film, that's a different story. But that story hasn't been written yet.

No, what I want is people to simply take 23 minutes out of their lives to watch the movie on Vimeo and "Like" it on Facebook. I understand that's a lot to ask these days. The vast majority of viral videos are no more than a minute long, and are passed between people as a goof. For them to commit to watching something that's the length of the average sitcom, they're going to have to be pretty engaged in whatever that video's about.

So, we have the same task that faces the marketing team on any feature film: hook people's interest, so they'll make the effort to go to a movie theater and sit through your movie, and pay for the privilege. So what do you do? Make the content - the story - leap out at the viewer in a way that's simply irresistible. Plant a question in the person's mind that just has to be answered. A compelling image can do the trick, given context by a clever tagline, the best being one that can be taken several different ways.

I like to think I've done that with my efforts so far to promote The Tolltaker. At the very least, those were the objectives I had mind when I sat down to make the Tolltaker postcard. Does it work? The only way to tell now is if the numbers on Vimeo and Facebook go up.

And, as a call-t0-action (which is that thing, that specific physical action, that most ads exhort you to do), I don't think it's much to ask of a person to click on a link to watch a short film, one that (hopefully) intrigues them anyway.

There are filmmakers out there who are trying to finance their films through subscriptions they solicit online. The hook is to tell the people who are giving them money that they're "producers" of the film. To date, I don't know of any mainstream (or even sub-mainstream) film that's been made this way. My instinct is to condemn this as unseamly, but I'm not ruling anything out yet. Who knows? You might see me out there on a street corner, hat in hand, with a sign that says "The Tolltaker wants your money."

Nothing's off the table.

Monday, September 19, 2011

I See, Said the Blind Man...


I just realized that this blog has no art on it. It's visually boring, monotonous. So I will rectify that by posting the occasional image as well, starting with this one, which is a little 4x6 postcard I intend to start leaving at Film Festivals (and other locations), beginning this weekend at the NJ Film Festival - that is if get the postcards delivered to me in time.

The postcard, you can see, has been cobbled together from stills from the movie, as well as the logo we've had almost since the beginning of production. I wanted to blend the layers seamlessly into each other but, my Photoshop skills being rudimentary (to put it charitably), I couldn't figure it out. So I wound up using the vines as a means to cover up the seams between the layers. Kind of works, though, doesn't it? Necessity indeed does breed invention.

Sunday, September 18, 2011

Horror Movies Supply Promising Vector for the Disease

So, good news: The Tolltaker has been accepted into the Big Apple Film Festival. It's screening as part of a midnight program of horror shorts a few days after Halloween. The specific date is Friday, November 4 at Tribeca Cinemas on Varick Street in Manhattan. And it is indeed a midnight screening. They start rolling at 12 and continue until 2 a.m.

When I found it was part of a collection of horror films, I have to confess to feeling a little disheartened. Not because I have anything against horror films - they're one of my favorite genres (although the list of truly stellar horror films is woefully short). Instead, I was a little worried about being relegated to a genre ghetto, one that programmers at the "important" festivals shun like a beggar turned away from a rich man's door.

Still, that also gives me a new audience to pursue. The horror audience is huge and insatiable. No matter what the economic times are, horror movies always make money. The downside is that often this audience has the lowest possible expectations for the movies they choose to see. Rank exploitation is the method, and the formula usually involves college-age kids getting dispatched in ever-more-gruesome ways, after obligingly getting naked and copulating to satisfy the audience's other base lust. Anything that doesn't fit this mold tends to be dismissed as unsuitable.

The thing is, the audience for stories like The Tolltaker is potentially huge. It was crafted from influences which themselves have proven immensely popular. If it can be considered horror (which again would, I believe, create a problem with the audience's expectations), it's closest to the Dean Koontz/Stephen King style that weaves horror elements into character-based stories set - for the most part - in the recognizable, everyday world we're all familiar with.

Now, a lot of Stephen King film adaptations have been laughable abominations. Saying that their film is going to wind up like a Stephen King film would be good reason for most filmmakers to shudder in uncontrollable anxiety.

But even though we have to accommodate a Children of the Corn, we also get movies like The Green Mile, Stand By Me and The Shawshank Redemption. Those last two aren't even horror films at all. And in The Green Mile the "horror" element is closer to a quasi-religious mysticism.

The difference between these two classes of Stephen King films, between the beloved classics and piles of putrid excrement, centers, I believe, on the filmmakers' focus. When the horror elements alone in a Stephen King movie are highlighted, you get just another cheesey horror flick, where we the audience are supposed to be scared out of our wits by some form of supernatural hocus-pocus or another.

When the people these things are happening to are put front and center, then the movie has the potential to transcend genre and touch people with all sorts of divergent tastes. And that takes good, old-fashioned story-telling skills, the number-one skill being the understanding that just as every verb in a sentence has a subject, every story has a main character. Making that character live in his mind is the most important piece of preparation I believe a story-teller can undertake as he sets about his task.

To every rule, there is an exception: in the Stephen King movie The Shining the characters were less of a focus than the setting and circumstance: being locked through an entire winter in an empty, isolated hotel with at least one - and maybe several - malevolent spirits after you. But the filmmaker in this case was just as exceptional as the film - Stanley Kubrick, who was endowed with the gift of being able to see farther and more penetratingly than most other people. I believe that, like any legendary artist, he had insight into things that remain a mystery to the rest of us.

So that's what I'm aiming for: creating a world that's recognizable and engaging so that the more fantastic elements (which I love just as much as good story-telling) have the greatest impact, the greatest meaning.

In any case, a niche provides a toe-hold, and if a horror audience turns out to embrace The Tolltaker, then I'll use that as a way to build an audience into the more mainstream audience beyond.

As always, I need help spreading awareness, and the movie's Vimeo link, as far and wide as possible. I've used this line enough that I guess it's turned into a sort of catch phrase for this effort: spread the virus. There, I said it again. It feels good.

Friday, September 16, 2011

The Soundtrack of My Universe

Well, The Tolltaker has been online for about a day now, and already has 26 viewings. Not bad, and I mean it in the most heart-felt way imaginable when I say that I am grateful to each and every one of the people who took time out of their day to watch my movie.

The only other thing I ask of people is to spread the link around, re-post it in chat rooms that they frequent, send it to friends. Let people know about it and, importantly, "Like" it on its Facebook page.

Once again, here is the link to watch the film on Vimeo:

http://www.vimeo.com/29022379

I have a little "Tolltaker" playlist that I listen to on iTunes and, in fact, am listening to as I write this. It consists of the tracks from the movie, as well as others that I group into the Tolltaker "universe." Mostly, these are tracks I remember from the early to mid-70's - which means that they were what my parents would have been listening to at the time.

One artist on the playlist is Linda Ronstadt. There have often been times I have day-dreamed about a "Tolltaker" sequel (listen to me talking about a sequel before the full-length film itself is even made!) that features Bobby's mother as single and on the dating scene (meaning, I guess, that the thing with Nick didn't work out). I picture a montage where she goes out on dates with one C&W after another. What's a "C&W?" It's a term my mom invented when she was on the dating scene herself back in the 1970's. It's short for "creeps & weirdos," which is all my mom said she ever encountered on these dates.

Anyway, Bobby's mother in the movie (whose name happens to be, like my mom's, Judy - although that's a coincidence we have Jim Sneddon to thank for) would go through this compressed odyssey among the C&W's of the day, and the soundtrack for this would be Linda Ronstadt's song "Poor, Poor Pitiful Me." I remember that my mom liked that song a lot in its day.

I have similar sequences set to other hit songs of the period (pity the poor music supervisor who would have to clear these songs!). There's a scene in the screenplay where Bobby is playing a game of hand ball with his best friend in the school yard. The song playing on my internal soundtrack? "Me & Julio Down By the Schoolyard," by Paul Simon.

It's no secret that music is a powerful influence on the overall movie-going experience, but one thing that I remain fascinated by is how much influence music can exert. It works, in films like this one, as a powerful cue for the time period. It's indisputable that for many, if not most people, music really does serve as a soundtrack for their lives, and a particular song can have super powerful associations.

But there's also a piece of music's intrinsic qualities to consider. I've been told that I use music for emotional effect, and I suppose that's true. My own response to music is primarily intuitive: I'll know if I like it, and most likely will not be able to articulate why. Hopefully a viewer will see (and hear) things the same way.

I think, also, on a deeper level that music provides a useful model for structuring a movie. If you sit and think about the dynamics at play in a piece of music, how one section builds tension that's released and channeled into new directions by the following section, how it all adds up to a unified whole: it's possible to find corollaries to these things in a story and, particularly, a movie.

There are definitely plastic, formal affinities between movies and music. Both take place over time, and create rhythms through repetition or counterpoint. In one, the medium is images; the other, sound. Both have beats. And these rhythms can be layered, one supporting the other, for tremendous impact. Martin Scorsese in particular, I believe, has a a sense for the kinetic potential of music and images.

It is for this reason that a big point of contention between me and collaborators is the use of music. Others seem to think that the choice of music is almost an afterthought, and you can swap one piece out for another with no ill effect. Not true, not true.

Put that in your book of proverbs.

Thursday, September 15, 2011

The Short & Long Terms

So, it's complete. For now.

Of course I'm talking about The Tolltaker. What else do I ever talk about? Four years, and I have a 23-minute short film. Should the feature-length version ever get made, I would hope the timescales wouldn't be proportional.

I've uploaded a cut to Vimeo. You can watch it here:

http://www.vimeo.com/29022379

That does bring up an interesting point, however. What now? All along, I've been saying that I want the short film to be a trailer of sorts for the entire feature-length version. The goal up til now has been intermediary: get the short film done. Then that medium-term goal will support the long-term effort to get a Tolltaker feature made. Well, now that medium-term goal has been accomplished. How exactly do I proceed from here?

Well, obviously, there's applying to film festivals. I have submissions out to several now, and the Tolltaker is screening next week at the New Jersey Film Festival in New Brunswick. And there's building awareness - and an audience - for the film through Facebook and blogs like this one.

But as for the next step in the development of the Tolltaker movie itself? Well, it's been my experience that the projects that are most fully realized are the ones that tend to get approved or get backing. The easier you can make it for the person you're pitching to visualize the final product, the more likely that you'll get that person's backing. That was the whole rationale behind the short film.

It seems logical, then, that the next step in this "pre-visualizing" process is to complete a story board for the feature film. That would take many factors that are now abstract and turn them into concrete things that can be measured and planned for. A shot list can be derived. A budget and shooting schedule can be fashioned. Work on details can begin. All of this adds up to a coherent, rational plan for completing a job, one that only needs the fuel of financial backing to be realized.

There are a couple of intriguing software packages out there for storyboarding a film. You can create three-dimensional spaces for the action to take place in, you can choose from a myriad of stock props and characters, you can design and execute camera moves - create a complete animatic of the film. It should actually be a lot of fun.

In the meantime, my hope is to get the number of "Likes" on the Tolltaker Facebook page up as high as possible. Another medium-term goal.

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Cheating Death With The Tolltaker

It's an odd thing watching something you've worked on for so long come to fruition.

Such is the case with The Tolltaker, which I have been working on in one form or another since 2005. First there was the screenplay, which came about as a result of my long-time friend Steve Sneddon telling me that his half-brother Jimmy had written a novel that had been published.

Of course, there's published and there's published. It turns out that Jim Sneddon's book (Jim being his preferred name since about the time he was twelve) was published by a tiny, small-press publisher in Maine that had held a novel-writing competition, with the prize being publication of the winning entry.

Jim's novel The Tolltaker was the winner, and a 500-copy print run was executed. I don't think the publisher is in business anymore, and I don't know where the majority of those copies are; however, I do know you can get used copies on Amazon and similar websites.

Steve then told me that, when they were kids, he and Jimmy (as Steve insisted on calling him) used to climb inside a huge drain pipe in their Northeast Philadelphia neighborhood with candles and notebooks to write the type of fanciful little stories that 10-year-old boys would write.

The habit of writing gradually faded as Jim and Steve grew up, but the creative urge didn't. Steve picked up the guitar and likes to noodle on it to this day. Jim was close to 40 when he finally resolved to re-awaken his childhood dreams of becoming a writer. He sat down at a computer provided to him by Steve's mother (not the same woman as Jim's mother), and out came The Tolltaker.

I'm told he sent it out to every publisher and agent he could think of, but with no success. He just had no ins with the publishing industry. And then along came the writing competition. After the book had been out for a couple months, Steve gave me a copy of it to read.

It reminded me of the kind of book I would have fallen in love with as a kid: the hero was a young boy facing a life-and-death situation, the kind that tests a person's character no matter what his age. The setting was the "real" world, but one in which incursions by the fantastic occurred, with profound effects on one's life. In that sense, it was like The Phantom Tollbooth, A Wrinkle in Time, The Chronicles of Narnia and countless other books that had fed my world view when I was a kid.

And of course, there's the familiarity of a story about a young boy being raised by a single mother named Judy in the Philadelphia area in the early 1970s. That goes without saying.

So, after coming to an agreement with Jim about how to split any potential financial gains, I set about adapting the book into a screenplay. The result wound up a semi-finalist in the Nicholl Fellowship screenwriting competition, which was a lofty-enough endorsement to win me the interest of one or two managers and producers in Los Angeles, one of whom recommended that I adapt the screenplay to a short film, and then take it on the festival circuit, which is a well-tried strategy for getting an independent film made.

And that's what happened. Unfortunately, James Sneddon didn't live to see it. He died unexpectedly about a year after I finished the screenplay, before the Nicholl Fellowship result came in. He left behind a wife and two young daughters.

So, it's probably disingenuous to say that the screenplay, the short film, and the feature (should it ever get made) are tributes to Jim. It's not like I'm not benefiting as well from any success the story might have. However, I do find it deeply gratifying that someone who, late in life, chose to follow his muse found some sort of recognition, even if he had to cheat death to do it, and I had something to do with making that happen.

Monday, September 12, 2011

Sound & Vision Part Two

Well, I got the Tolltaker sound mix from Rodney, as promised. It was a little rougher than I would have liked, and there were one or two essential fixes that had to be made. Fortunately, I caught a break on the New Jersey Film Festival deadline: no one's in the office until Wednesday, so Rodney had the weekend to work on it. I'll be going over to his studio a little later today to listen to the mix and give final notes.

On the non-Tolltaker front, we're delivering a batch of footage that we shot for the Annapolis tourist bureau about a week ago. Part of the shoot involved going to the first home game of the season for the Naval Academy's football team. After filming elaborate tailgater parties in the parking lot, we went on to the field in the stadium and filmed the equally elaborate rituals the Navy team and its supporters performed to take to the field.

The march of the midshipmen was an impressive sight. They came out 0nto the field, marching in formation through an opening at one end of the stadium: seemingly endless phalanxes of young men and women dressed all in white, filling the field before taking their seats in a large swath of stadium seating that had been reserved for them.

Europe After Dark, our spec TV series about European nightlife, continues to limp its way towards completion. While there have been some sales, the main quarry - broadcast on American television - remains elusive.

It's really a chicken-and-the-egg scenario: the Fox Station Group, the division of the Fox Network that owns and operates its affiliated TV stations, is enthusiastic about the show, and is willing to move other programming around on its schedule to accommodate it. However, it's up to us to find the advertisers.

Now, we have signed a deal with a media-buying company called Apex Media to secure that advertising. However, what we're being told is that advertisers are being very close-fisted with their dollars these days, and are mostly unwilling to take a gamble on an untried brand, which is what Europe After Dark is at this point. They want to see ratings data, hard numbers, which you can only get by putting the show on the air.

So, to get the show on the air, we need advertisers. To get advertisers, we need a show on the air. The chicken and the egg.

Friday, September 9, 2011

Sound & Vision Part One

I'm eagerly awaiting delivery of the sound mix by composer and audio whiz Rodney Whittenberg a little later today. He gave me a taste of what to expect a few days ago, which got me really psyched. It's amazing what a professional sound mix can do for a movie. It adds new depths, new dimensions to the experience. Really - it's what turned "The Tolltaker" into an actual movie for me.

Rodney's an interesting guy: he's got this really cool little studio tucked away like a hobbit's warren in a 200-year-old farm house in Plymouth Meeting, Pa. He has an Emmy, for a TV show he scored a few years ago. He keeps it in the bathroom, over the toilet. He says that's what they do in Hollywood. I lived there for 10 years and never personally saw that, but then I didn't generally move in social circles that included Emmy winners.

The plan is for Rodney to put the sound mix up on iDisk in an hour or two, from whence I will fetch it and lay it into the Tolltaker timeline in Final Cut Pro. God willing, everything will synch up, but hard knocks at the hands of Murphy's Law have taught me not to count on that. One way or another, I have to get an export over to Mike Brand at Lafayette Hills Studios by this evening so I can get deliver a Blu Ray to the New Jersey Film Festival on Monday.

The clock is ticking...

Thursday, September 8, 2011

What the Hell's a Preditor?

I'll tel you what a Preditor is. It's one of those "creative economy" jobs that have been created in recent years, thanks largely to the Internet, but also to the availability of cheap, professional video production equipment in the past 15 years or so.

The term comes from a combination of its two main functions: "producer" and "editor." By "producer," what is generally meant is that you run around with an ENG camera (Electronic News Gathering) shooting whatever anyone might care to look at. Then, when you get home to your computer (typically a Macintosh of some sort running Final Cut Pro as the editing software), you edit it all together. Thus: Producer-Editor. Preditor.

The main forum for this kind of work is the Internet, but you can also find yourself making corporate videos for distribution on DVD, content for TV networks' video-on-demand services, and being a shooter/editor for-hire for a cable network TV show.

With my business partner Jesper Olsson, I co-own Reel Stuff Entertainment, a Philadelphia-area (south Jersey, to be precise) production company that has completed something like 600 projects in the past five years, including an original series for The Discovery Channel, as well as content for the Travel Channel, AOL, Lakeshore Entertainment, AT&T and a long list of others.

This work has taken me to Europe four times in the past five years. One of those trips was for Intercontinental Hotels & Resorts, which had us produce travel videos for seven of their properties in Europe & North America. I would shoot the video at one property, edit it on the train to the next destination, then upload it to the client once I arrived.

Last summer, I was in Europe for about six weeks, shooting "Europe After Dark," a travel/destination TV series about nightlife in Europe. The host is Sean "Hollywood" Hamilton, the afternoon-drive DJ at New York City's dance radio powerhouse WKTU-FM. We don't have a network behind us - we shot it the preditor way, on a wing and a prayer during a road trip through Europe, financed privately by an investors' group based in Hatboro, PA.

The idea is to buy air time on TV stations ourselves, then sell the advertising. It's a model that's become increasingly common, although there's no guarantee that the TV station - or the network, if it's an affiliate - will accept the programming even if you show up with cash in hand. Fortunately, "Europe After Dark" received a rather enthusiastic response from the Fox Television Group, and they said they'll clear time on the schedule for it on their affiliates in about 20 top television markets around the country. The challenge now is to get the advertisers, and if we don't do that, this show is going nowhere. So you'll be hearing about that drama as it unfolds.

You'll also be hearing about The Tolltaker. This is a 25-minute short film I made that combines live action and animation to tell the story of a young boy in Northeast Philadelphia in 1973, whose father is MIA in Vietnam and who is being set upon by a fearsome underground demon called the Tolltaker that demands to be paid its "toll."

It's taken me four years, but the Tolltaker is finally finished (after a fashion), and is set to screen at its first film festival this month: the New Jersey Film Festival. I've submitted it to festivals all over the country, but I'm glad that this is the first one to accept it. It's good to start out playing to a hometown crowd.

I actually blogged for a while about making this film for a local newspaper, the Courier Post in Cherry Hill, N.J. Those blog entries are no doubt still around somewhere, and I will endeavor to find them and re-post them, so that these new blog posts will combine with the earlier ones to create a complete account of the Tolltaker's creation.

It's an ambitious project. Aside from employing about a dozen animators (who turned the downstairs of my home in Cherry Hill, N.J. into a mini animation studio), we also built a 60-foot-long Vietcong tunnel set in an old warehouse in Northeast Philadelphia. Our materials? Mostly old, wooden warehouse pallets.

As I write this, the final sound mix is being completed by the Emmy-Award winning composer and sound designer Rodney Whittenberg, working from a studio in the basement of his 200-year-old farm house in Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania. Tomorrow, I get an audio file from him, which I lay into the Tolltaker timeline on Final Cut Pro. I then export a Quicktime movie, take it to Mike Brand (who was also the director of photography for the film), and get a Blu Ray disk that I will hand deliver to Al Nigrin, director of the NJ Film Festival, on Monday. This is already an extended deadline, and I still am cutting it as close to the last possible moment that I can. More drama.

Other festivals I've submitted to include Sundance, the Hollywood Film Festival, the Big Apple Film Festival and some others I can't think of right now. I'm waiting to hear back from all of them, so you'll be waiting to hear back with me.

So, anyway - that's enough of a blog post for now, attention spans (including mine) being what they are. There are websites aplenty you can check out, including the one for Reel Stuff:

www.ReelStuff-Entertainment.com

Europe After Dark:

www.EuropeAfterDark.tv

The Tolltaker trailer:
http://www.vimeo.com/6323248

Europe After Dark YouTube Channel:

http://www.youtube.com/user/EuropeAfterDark

And the Reel Stuff YouTube Channel:

http://www.youtube.com/user/reelstuff44

And, finally, Facebook. For Europe After Dark:

http://www.facebook.com/EuropeAfterDark

And the Tolltaker:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Tolltaker/140213159398654

And finally, finally: you can follow my tweets at: @ReelStuffenter

See you next time.