50 Days

There are about 50 days left until we begin shooting Salvaging. That means about 50 more wake-ups with anticipation of this shoot on my mind. I can't wait to get to it but I know that there is prep still to be done. Besides getting the cast in place, my attention is aimed squarely at finding and locking down locations for the shoot.

In the script, a couple of characters push a broken-down car through city neighborhoods on their way to a junkyard. It should be pretty straightforward. First and foremost, I need a junkyard. After that, I need a few different neighborhood streets and then a few areas with some visual interest for transitional shots between scenes. I've been out and about on my own scouting for junkyards with the idea that once I find the junkyard, I'll choose the other locations by their proximity to it.

Like most things with this project, because there is little to no money involved, it's hard to really lock anything down almost two months out without the promise of pay. But because the junkyard is central to the story, we are probably going to have find money in the budget to pay for the location. That way we insure availability and have a contract that says we can be there when we need to be there.

Now if I can just find out where "there" is.

Joe

For Chicago area readers with location ideas: email me at salvagingmovie@gmail.com or leave a note in the comments section. I'd appreciate any help and thanks.

"We're gonna need a bigger boat"

35 years ago this week Universal Pictures released Jaws. It was the first summer blockbuster, the fastest film to reach $100 million and one of my top 3 favorite films (the other two change from time to time but I always reserve a spot for Jaws). Whenever I catch it on TNT or AMC while flipping channels, I am compelled to watch, even with all of the ham-handed commercial interruptions and even though I have it on DVD. The movie and the book that inspired it had a far-reaching effect on our culture and society. My mother, fresh from reading Jaws, frantically pulled us from the water while vacationing in Florida; the fins she saw actually belonged to dolphins.

There are the perceived negatives from Jaws. Because of its success, every summer we face an onslaught of lowest common denominator films designed to appeal to the broadest possible audience in order to rack up the most in box office returns. Then there is the villainization and slaughter of sharks from which the species is only recently beginning to recover. Jaws author and co-screenwriter Peter Benchley had such regret that in his post-Jaws career, he actually became an advocate for the preservation of sharks and marine environments. The Shark Research Institute even has a Peter Benchley Conservation Award because of his efforts to reverse the damage.

But I still love this movie, especially the second half. Brody, Quint and Hooper - three characters that would normally have nothing to do with each other are forced to work together against a common foe. The scene where the three, liquored up and feeling fine, finally let their respective guards down and compare their scars from past injuries is one of my favorites. Quint and Hooper have finally earned each other's respect. Brody, feeling like the odd man out of the scar discussion, tentatively and unnoticed by the other two, pulls up his shirt to reveal what is presumably an appendectomy scar. He quickly thinks the better of it and lowers the shirt again. The mood then makes a subtle shift when Quint tells the story of the U.S.S. Indianapolis and unveils the making of his character. It is a great scene in a great film and it has inspired my filmmaking efforts.

If you haven't seen Jaws in awhile, see it again.

Joe

Write What You Know

I wrote in the last post that the hardest part about making a movie is the prep. While that's true for the most part, there is also another equally difficult stage that comes before it - if you are also the writer of the project, well than that process can be just as hard and, at least in my experience, even harder.

The old adage is to write what you know. For me, that proved to be sage advice. I took an event from my early teen years and built it into the short screenplay that would become "Salvaging." Having lived some of the story made it a little easier to picture the scenes and characters and that helped quite a bit. But the first demand of writing is patience and that doesn't come easily to me. I want those words to be perfect the first time they hit the page and when they aren't, which is every time, I have a hard time rewriting. Here is where having the advantage of knowing the story from personal experience helped me get past some of the pitfalls of re-working the story and improving it.

But all the life experience in the world doesn't change the fact that the rewrite process can be rough and it is easy to get lost in it. Before I knew it, my attempts at improving the story soon disappeared and I had no idea what I meant by any of it. Those were the dark days, the days that made me wonder what the hell I thought I was doing writing this thing anyway. But I had to keep going. My biggest help through this rough period were my trusted readers. My lovely and talented wife Meghann and a few others took the time to read and re-read each draft* and give me their input on what was working and what wasn't. I just had to remember that I didn't have to use everything I was being told about my story and fit it in somewhere. The trick I had to learn here was to take in each reader's remarks and apply what I thought worked and ignore what I thought didn't. It was still going to my script after all.

Many drafts and much time spent playing free online Mahjong while hoping for a miracle breakthrough finally paid off and here we are today. Discipline is pretty important in writing as well and this blog is probably an attempt to force myself to write more often. More time at the keyboard is more time writing is becoming a better writer...that's the theory anyway.

Joe

* Each draft EXCEPT for the first draft that is. The first draft is likely terrible and bad feedback at this stage can kill a project. Don't do it, brother.

The Waiting Game

The hardest part about making a movie is the prep. All the unknowns, all the what-ifs, all the arbitrary deadlines, all the real deadlines...it's a lot like putting together a puzzle that's missing a lot of pieces. It can be a frustrating period.

So in the meantime, there's work. I would love for writing and directing to include a paycheck, but right now it doesn't. And because I have to take a little time off soon in order to concentrate on the movie, I have to work every day that I can. I work as a set electrician on movies, TV shows and commercials. I've been at it for a few years and while it isn't exactly what I want to do, it's a great place to observe the job that I really want. I went to film school but the truth is seeing a lot of movies and having a job on set is the best training there is next to doing the actual job. I've watched a lot of big name directors interact with some pretty high profile actors and hopefully I've picked up a thing or two. But the most important thing that I've learned is how a set works. Everybody on the set has their job and they're all important to the final outcome. A good crew is like a machine with multiple moving parts all working together.

And a good director should know what every one of those parts is doing.

Joe

The Journey is the Destination*

Hey Everybody,
However you got here, welcome and thanks for stopping by. My name is Joe and I'm a filmmaker living in Chicago. To make the not so long story that much shorter, towards the end of last year, I submitted my short script, Salvaging, to the 2010 Production Fund competition being sponsored by the Independent Feature Project/Chicago. The chosen script would receive approximately $100,000 worth of in-kind donations from various local vendors in order to take the script from page to screen. After jumping through a few hoops, I received the great news that Salvaging was chosen for the fund and I would get the chance to realize a long-held dream and make a movie.

I've directed and written a few things in the past but this is going to be on a whole new level and I plan on giving it everything I have. There's much to do in the coming months, from continued fundraising**, to location scouting, to casting and on and on. I decided to write this blog in order to document the process and, as the above title suggests, to realize that every step along the way is an important part of the journey and to enjoy it. I also thought that this process might be interesting to people out there who want to know what goes into making movies and so this blog is for you, too.

Thanks for reading and I hope you find the good, the bad and the ugly of making movies as fascinating and rewarding as I do.

Joe

* I've take the title from a book about artist and photojournalist Dan Eldon. You should check it out.
** While the fund supplies a lot, there is still much in the film's budget that remains uncovered. To help with that, I've started a fundraising page at http://www.indiegogo.com/project/view/3855. You should check that out, too.