The Storyboard Artist - I DRAW, YOU PAY!!!!
July 27, 2010
When one is working at a production office for a feature films are commercials, I don’t worry about getting paid.
Yes, there can be a snafu here and there, but you know that a bonded company has accountants set up and a payroll system. You will get paid with a week if you are on a film (studio film, indies can be dicey) or a few weeks on a commercial.
The two things that you enter on your own risk are music videos and when someone pays you out of their own pocket.
On a video (better to work with a large company that does commercials as well) the director often gets paid off the top of a job, particularly if they are an owner in the company. This has backfired on me many a time. I have waited a month to get paid on smaller companies as the check from the record company went to the director to get their bite and THEN the rest went to the crew.
If a director is paying out of their pocket, you might want to write out a simple contract, showing what each of you must bring to the table and what the penalties are for NOT doing this.
I recommended a friend to do boards for a director friend. The director gave my friend the assignment at the last minute. Then, he was told that as he was trying to get a studio gig, ten great boards would look better than thirty rushed boards.
The storyboard artist did the job (ten frames) and the director had the big meeting. What happened though, was that the director was pissed that he was charged a full day for ten frames, great or not.
What should have happened is this. The director messed up by NOT locking down the price as something he was cool with. The artist was charging for his TIME (days work) not how many frames he was doing. He was still working a full day in his yes.
The director also thought that he should get a discount as it was coming out of his pocket. Again, he needed to establish that early. If Steven Spielberg is paying me, I am charging my full rate. It is not the artist’s job to know what the director has in his/her bank account.
What has also happened is that the director said he would pay right away, but by now, almost a month has passed. If you work with a contract, you have it signed that you must be paid by a certain pre-described amount of time after completion of the job.
If a director won’t sign, then you take your chances.
Talk things out completely before you work with an individual or a company you don’t know. Get that contract, baby!
Tags: Hollywood, Movie, Actor, Director, Filmmaker
The Standby Painter - Invaders from Mars: Remembering the Good Times
July 27, 2010
Who can forget their first job? Certainly nobody who works in the film business can forget theirs. They will be able to relive it whenever the first film they worked on is shown again, thus embarking on a bright and nostalgic skip along memory lane or a repulsive stumble into …
Tags: , Director, Movie, Filmmaking, Film Blog
The Standby Painter - A Trick of the Light
July 19, 2010
Depending on your brand of physics, light may be the fastest thing in the universe. However, light is not a thing, exactly. Light is both a wave and a particle, but it is neither until it is observed. Light seems to be extremely important, both in the concrete, everyday world …
Tags: Film Industry, , Filmmaking, Filmmaker, Movie Bloggers
The Genre Director - FILMS, FESTIVALS, FOOD, TERRORISM COMEDIES…10 days of Euro Fun, if you exclude the exchange rate.
July 19, 2010
Paris in July.
Heaven on a stick. Actually I am referring to the main course of my first night’s dinner. I was so impressed I had to photograph it. Vegans, please avert your eyes.
Wherever I go, arresting images tend to trigger scene concepts. The hanging skewer of shashlick could be the sharp handy weapon the unarmed assassin plans to be served near his victim, and so on. I know, I’m a sick puppy…
Paris Cinema Festival staged a midnight to dawn Ozploitation section, programmed by Festival director Aude Hesbert, and I was brought in to do the introductions, kicking off with DEAD END DRIVE IN presented in the original Australian patois with French subtitles.
Trivia footnote: When we sold the film to New World Pictures, they wanted to dub Aussie accents and slang into ” American” as had been done to MAD MAX. ( I saw it once. Horrible.) I believe an “American” version of DEDI was prepared, then abandoned, when we resisted so vociferously. Does it sit forgotten in a vault gathering dust? I have a little masochistic curiosity. For those interested in contrasting advertising approaches, here first is a rarely seen Australian TV spot for the film’s 1986 release.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLPSHIfVyZw
Now, here is the New World Pictures trailer for the US release.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkR9Ny_FLYQ
The theater was 4 seats short of full, the audience was patient as I mangled their language, they totally got the movie and 80% stayed for the 4 am TURKEY SHOOT. The stamina of French cinephiles is legendary.
Then, on to the Czech Republic and the Karlovy Vary Festival, where a chauffeur driven Audi speeds you to screenings down narrow streets that resemble rows of wedding cakes.
A selection of Ozploitation classics, programmed by Karel Och, and accompanied by Mark Hartley’s NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD, were playing through the week.
Producer and old friend Richard Brennan (LONG WEEKEND) joined me for introductions and interviews.
On our second night, we were dinner guests of another old friend, legendary Australian critic and author David Stratton, who was on the Festival Jury. David has been a tireless supporter of the Australian film industry for 40 years. He ran the 1973 Sydney Film Festival where my first film THE STUNTMEN won Best Documentary. Richard Brennan produced over 26 movies, including exec-producing my DEATHCHEATERS. There was much discussion of the current state of Australian film. The quality and success of ANIMAL KINGDOM is certainly encouraging. Which reminds me, I ordered my first ever plate of roast goose, succulent with a guilty residue. No problem eating duck, Donald notwithstanding. Perhaps it’s Mother Goose that gives me a twinge…
I had to leave early to introduce THE MAN FROM HONG KONG, virtually unseen in the Czech Republic, now graced with Czech subtitles. So gratifying to watch 1000 young Czechs enjoying the action and getting the satire. ( The Australian DVD is the fullest version for those that don’t know the film)
Between Ozploitation duties, I had time to see a number of movies. Here’s four I particularly enjoyed:
I knew nothing about LA DOPPIA ORA ( The Double Hour) before the screening started and that’s the best way to see this Italian romantic paranormal thriller. Suffice to say, I had the rare experience of not knowing what was going to happen next from the first 10 minutes to the end. Yet at each new surprise, each Ah-Huh moment, I never felt cheated by the writer. It’s a fantastic script, directed with style and a very sure hand, that started a bidding war for English language remake rights after the star Ksenyia Rappoport won Best Actress at Venice earlier in the year. It’s a great date movie, but don’t let anyone tell you a thing before it starts. Here’s the unsubtitled Italian trailer, which manages to sell without spoiling the twists.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCHKpb4BTfI
SOUND OF NOISE is a delightful Swedish comedy about musical terrorists.
They adore rhythm, and abhor musical instruments. Their ideology is free form drumming using everyday objects.
Their agenda is to disrupt public areas, a bank, a hospital, etc. and stage brief anarchic concerts before the police arrive. They are pursued by a tone deaf detective, who hates music, to the disappointment of his family of musical prodigies. The climax, when the musical anarchists use the city’s electrical grid as their instrument is hilarious. ( But don’t try this at home!) If the concept sounds very esoteric, it’s not. SOUND OF NOISE is easy to grasp, charming, whimsical, and frequently laugh out loud funny.
I think it deserves to be Sweden’s contender for this year’s Best Foreign Language Oscar. Co-directors Ola Simonsson and Johannes Stjarne Nilsson have a comedic flair that transcends cultural borders, judging by the response of the Czech audience, and their movie could do well in the US with the right handling. At the Q & A, Simonsson and Nilsson revealed that their inspiration was a short film they had made 6 years earlier. So here it is. ” Music For One Apartment And Six Drummers”.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVPVbc8LgP4
Terrorism Comedy would be a pretty sparse sub-genre, you might think, but there was another example screening at the Festival after its highly successful run in British cinemas.
FOUR LIONS is probably the most confronting black comedy I have ever seen.
It depicts a group of home grown Brit Muslim extremists, even less skilled with explosives than The 3 Stooges. Incendiary satirist Chris Morris ( TV’s THE THICK OF IT) walks the razor’s edge with his feature debut, but he keeps it pitch perfect throughout, with an unexpected coda of political criticism that lifts the film to another level. I would have laughed even more if guffaws from the Czech audience, aided by Czech subtitles, did not make the Bradford/Pakistani accents of the gang even harder for me to decipher. An English subtitled version is being prepared for US release, I hope. I’ll let this magazine piece from a Brit TV program fill you in on the issues. Personally, I think it’s one of the most important political films of the decade.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnkTXfRaouU
Another pitch perfect comedy of a different genre is TUCKER AND DALE VS. EVIL.
I’ve done a few horror comedies, so I know how hard it is to achieve the right tone on the short schedules these things are given. So a tip of the hat to first time director Eli Craig for grounding the satire in well developed characters, ( Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine have great chemistry as the luckless rednecks) then going on to affectionately trash every Friday The Thirteenth/Serial Killer in the Woods cliche we have known and loved over the last quarter century. But not in predictable ways. This is a very clever piece of work.
Undoubtedly Eli Craig is headed for bigger opportunities. Good luck. Here’s the trailer.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=nx0GaB2EHUs
So back to Los Angeles just in time for the opening weekend of INCEPTION. Wow! Just shows you, it is possible for a high octane movie to feed the mind as well as the senses.
Tags: Film Industry, Movie Blog, , Director, Actor
The Casting Director - Make Film not Drama…
July 17, 2010
I think the hardest part about writing a blog about what I do, and maybe this is because of who I am, in the genetic sense, is that when I write down my daily thoughts or weekly events, at the time they sound important or worth telling and then after a few days pass by I look at what I am about to publish and I think, “Oi, not worth it,” or “Gosh, who is going to care?” For example, I was going to write about the agent who bold-faced lied to me about an actor reading the script and passing on the material and then I found out by emailing the actor directly that they had never read the script, I was going to write about that, but after writing most of that (3 full pages!), I re-read it and thought to myself, “I don’t care anymore, move on Matthew.” Or, I was going to write about the fact that I have had no work and all of a sudden several projects came in at one time and now I find myself in a position not to not accept the jobs, because I need the money and none of them are paying what I need them to pay in order to do them all properly, but I still took the gigs because, well, I needed the money. I could tell you that, in retrospect, it sucks to have to do that, because, I can’t focus on what the production needs, by not paying for an assistant or an assistant and an associate, my time is spent going through emails and scheduling auditions and working so virtually, that the phone calls I need to make to discuss the projects with a live person get thrown to the back of the line and the phone calls to return get pushed back to the back of another line and that the phone sheet becomes my enemy and still somehow I have to remember six different films’ characters and make lists and check availabilities on my own because these producers have no idea how intense the work load that they are asking me to do, is…I could write about that…
I could also write about the big drama over Casting Workshops and how over the past several months, my good friends who run these workshops have been freaking out about the LA City Attorneys letter sent to Casting Directors and workshop owners warning them that they may be in violation of the Krekorkian Talent Scam Prevention Act. I could write about that, but after attending several of the meetings and hearing all parties concerns, I got board from the lack of knowledge as to what people (i.e. people who don’t do what I do for a living) do and how we do it and also the lack of understanding that it actually is possible that someone like myself is good at something else besides casting a film and can actually teach a class legitimately and does care about imparting knowledge on to actors but is also entitled to make a living, I could go on and on and on about that, but it just gets a little whiny.
I could write about my interns, all of who are in their early twenties. All, still in college, and all of whom are completely useless with computers, printers and the Internet. All of which makes me CRAZY! I don’t understand this, I don’t understand that a generation that has grown up with digital music, cell phones, the world wide web, virtual shopping, virtual worlds, that this generation can literally not plug in a computer to a printer or figure out how to download a printer’s driver onto their laptop, how, dear God up in the sky, how do they function on a daily basis? I could write about that, but then I just feel old and as I am not even 39 yet (a few more days, presents accepted), I could write about that, but I will swallow it and chalk it up to remembering that when I was 22 I was probably as much of an idiot as I think that they are and I probably was…
I could write about the office rent and phone bills and needing to put that damn poster up that has been leaning against my office wall, framed and all, since I moved into the office (2 years ago). I could write about needing to dust and vacuum the office and clean out the files, which I leave to Monika, because she loves to do it, I could remind myself that somewhere on my desk which looks like KATRINA hit it, I could remind myself to find that article on that rapper that everyone is talking about and how I tried to get him in a film two years ago but my producer thought he didn’t mean anything. I could write about the gazillions of times I have tried to get the obviously hot, hot actor to be to be the lead of a film and pay him peanuts because he would be happy to be in a film and then by the time the film was ready to be released, by that time, the producers would be kissing me, licking my body in joy and love because all of a sudden their 1.5 million dollar film had the new hot star of the moment, I could write about how this happens to me on a daily basis and still, somehow, I keep my cool when I hear back, “Matt, they just don’t mean anything…” I could write about that…
But I don’t want to write about any of this stuff. I want to tell you that I have been really lucky over the last few weeks and working my butt off to make it all work and that despite the state of the independent film world, I have faith that money will come back to it and that the business will find a way to continue to produce and distribute films and that the business will continue, because in truth, we need to find a way to keep things moving in a positive direction or else a lot of us in this industry will be doing something else. And since I have no other discernable skill set, I really need to keep my gig going.
So go out there and go to your local independent movie theater. Support independent film. Rent them on Netflix and demand them at Blockbuster! Support an industry that has a lot of talent, support us, because the less support we have, the fewer choices you will have in quality entertainment, quality writing, and quality acting. Support your local theater, school’s arts programs, volunteer, be a good person and remember, if you are in this business: IT IS NOT EVERYTHING, IT IS JUST PART OF WHO YOU ARE. Don’t freak out because you can’t book a client, don’t lie to me (or anybody) if you can’t deliver on something promised, just work towards making things happen. That is the only way we can continue to have an industry that thrives.
And with that rant, I will say, have a great rest of the summer. I will try to post something soon, but I have too much on my plate and too many places to visit (Aspen and the Grand Tetons here I come!). Be good…Act well: Cast thoughtfully! Actors still say “no,” it’s ok; you will get your film cast…
Tags: Oscars, Filmmaking, Film Industry, Film, Film Blog
The Manager - Summer Time and the Living Is Easy or What to Do in the Entertainment Industry When the Phone Stops Ringing
July 7, 2010
The Fourth of July usually means barbeques, beer and fireworks. For Hollywood it also usually means the slow down of the feature film business. Phones stop ringing, specs stop going out, and people start going on vacation.
Does that mean that you have to spend the next two months twiddling your thumbs? No! It means you have two solid months where you can spend your time and energy on things that you could never do while the phone rings every two seconds.
My two favorite activities that I like to do in these summer months are:
* Diversify
* Be creative
By diversify what I mean is I like to spend these summer months looking into arenas that I haven’t explored before and want to have better knowledge about.
For example, when my business partner and I started Tom Sawyer Entertainment, we spent the summer months learning everything about the TV business since we came from the feature world. Now we do almost 1/2 of our business in the TV world and several of our clients are staffed on TV shows.
A couple years ago we spent the summer learning all about the book world. Now we have sold seven books so far and are working on two more book deals.
There is always some segment of the entertainment business of which you could grow your knowledge, and the summer is the perfect time to do that.
By being creative what I mean is having the time to go through all those articles, ideas and scraps of stories that I have kept in a folder while I wait for some peace and quiet to sort through these.
My business partner and I will take an afternoon and read through everything in this folder and see what we want to develop for the next year.
Or being creative means finally having the time to work on my website, blogs, etc. For anything that takes creativity and the time to do it right — the summer is the perfect time for it!
Tags: Movie Theatre, Filmmaker, Movie, Film, Film Industry
