Doing Battle in Hollywood

These last two weeks (sorry for missing a blog) I’ve been greenlit to direct a commercial for the Elevate Film Festival, invited to chair a new board created to benefit recipients of The Caucus Foundation Grants, got completely excited about a new actress my casting director introduced me to, lost an option on a book that I’d been in negotiations on for nearly a year, was asked to direct another short film and received a new draft of my feature with… more notes to be addressed.  Magically, all of this seems to be colliding the day I’m taking a holiday weekend.  Perfect.

Needless to say I have not had a second to breathe.  It’s now 5:56am and if I want to leave town today by 11am as planned I have to read the script and give useful notes, respond to ideas about the new short film and write this blog.  Eek!

Of all the great things happening now, the one I think worth detailing is the book option that just fell apart.  Honestly, it was pretty heartbreaking.  After a year of negotiations on an obscure book I absolutely love and of raising more and more money to accommodate the writer’s ever-increasing last-minute requests, we finally realized they had no intention of signing.  We “closed” many times but “signing” eluded us.  Ultimately we had to walk away.  Now we’ve got $20k sitting around burning a hole in our pockets and I wish more than anything that it were sending that writer’s kids to school so my partners and I could be putting the story on the screen.

It was a strange situation from the start.  We inherited the project from two other producers who decided the material was too indie for them.  The story is small and the tone is dark and the other producers knew they would never make their money back if they made it as big as they’re accustomed to and they didn’t have the taste for indie filmmaking.  So they introduced my producer to the writer’s representation and we started anew.  Only it wasn’t really starting anew because once a writer gets the idea that two people might be interested in their material they always think surely other people will be interested.

Our lawyer warned us he was having trouble early on – the other lawyer was asking for things that were completely off the wall and when she didn’t want to deal with our lawyer she would call one of us directly to try to divide an conquer - but we loved the material and just couldn’t believe they would negotiate with us as long as they did if they didn’t want to take our money.  In the end, they didn’t. 

We have no idea what they wanted.  Attention?  The experience of power felt by wasting other people’s time?  Who knows.  We know no one else was after the material – it’s not the easiest to adapt - and the writer has never been produced.  Maybe this is why.

For a while we thought the lawyer was misrepresenting her client but in the end they seemed to be on the same page.  We still suspect there was a bit of the lawyer posturing in front of her client and then getting herself in a corner she couldn’t back out of so let the deal die to save face.  But I really hope that’s not it – that’s just incredibly lame and grossly cavalier.  I don’t think we’ll ever know what really happened. 

But the upside is that after all of that struggle we (myself and three producers – one of whom I’ve never worked with before) know that we love working with one another.  Our communication was great, our styles were similar, our work ethics matched well.  And since it’s actually the people that make filmmaking difficult, not the work itself, this is a huge bonus.  We know we want to work together again and now we have some hard-raised money to spend - we’ve just got to find the right material.  So all in all, not a bad result.

On that note, I’ve got a script to read and am then off to Palm Springs for the weekend to nurse my battle wounds and will be eager to start the hunting process all over again when I return next week!