Development, which encompasses conception, writing, budgeting, and even casting, is the most nebulous area in moviemaking, and the one least likely to lend itself to a “how to” manual. It’s also the most essential. Whole wings of major studios are devoted to acquiring and developing new properties. Those toiling at the job range from lowly readers who pore over unsolicited screenplays and galleys of forthcoming books, to vice presidents whose sole function it is to sit in meetings and pose annoying questions. In the independent cinema, development is less bureaucratized, more piecemeal, and far more impressionistic. There’s another significant difference: The rights to a novel or life story or popular song that can be bought with a studio’s pin money can be a budget-breaker on your one-hundred-thousand-dollar chamber drama.
At this level, clearly, development and budgeting go hand in hand. When trying to decide if I’m going to make a film, I don’t just think about what it’s going to say but who it’s going to say it to, and then I try to budget accordingly. That said, this isn’t a book about shooting gutbucket horror pictures for the direct-to-video market. The marketplace does not have to dictate your aesthetics—that way lies trauma, or, at least, Troma. I once participated in a development panel, organized by the Independent Feature Project, with a guy who complained that first-time independent filmmakers were making too many uncommercial films. “They should be making movies that are more commercial!” he declared. Well, duh. “If any of us knew what was commercial,” I interjected, “we wouldn’t be on this stupid panel at the IFP, we’d be in our houses in Bermuda.”
Commercial is buy low, sell high. What’s commercial in an independent movie? Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust, a slow-moving, turn-of-the-century poetic drama about descendants of slaves on a remote island struggling to maintain their West African heritage racked up two million dollars with no advertising budget whatsoever. Who could have predicted that? All it had on paper was a young writer-director with a burning desire to tell a story that had never been told before. On the other hand, I knew a couple of guys who put years into what they thought would be a crowd-pleasing horror picture called The Refrigerator. It turned out to be entertaining—the fridge was the portal of hell—but the film went pretty much nowhere.
THE SEED
A lot of people ask me where I find scripts. At this point, most find me. Agents, directors, and writers know the kind of movies I do, and send things my way that they think fit my agenda. Of course, I try not to have an agenda. After Poison and Swoon, I was dubbed “the Queen of Queer Cinema,” an appellation I loathe. Then I was attacked by a lesbian writer for only making movies with gay men—this after I’d produced just two features! When I took on the lesbian love story Go Fish, some people suggested it was a strategy to prove that my tastes extended beyond boy movies. You never can win. I’d never make a film solely because it’s edgy or provocative or features a gay subject, and I’d never refuse to make a film solely because it doesn’t. But there is one common denominator. I tend to work with writer-directors who consider themselves auteurs. Every one has been totally obsessed with what he or she is trying to say, and has taken enormous pleasure in that obsession. I wouldn’t work with someone who thought it was just a job, or was in it solely to grab the brass ring. Making movies is one of the greatest (pre)occupations in the world. It can be murderously difficult, but when everything comes together—when those words on the page take on a cinematic life—it’s alchemy. On the other hand, few things depress me as much as a set on which no one gives a damn about the film. Imagine lavishing so much time, grief, and money on a project that means nothing to you but a paycheck.
I can’t be more emphatic: Throw your resources behind a script with which you’re proud to be associated—and associated for a long time. Then make sure that the director is someone you could tolerate being stuck with on a desert island for a year, because that’s what it’s going to feel like. Then ask yourself: Is it possible to do this movie for the money I can raise? How much can I raise? Ten thousand? Fifty? A quarter of a million?
If your budget is really, really low (the largest number above is really, really low), look around and see what you have access to—what you can bring to the picture that won’t cost you anything—and then write a screenplay with those elements. Your grandmother might own a beautiful beach house or a cabin in the woods. Tony Chan’s parents had a Chinese restaurant, which meant that late at night he could use it for nothing. Shooting when the place was closed, he made Combination Platter. Your script should emerge organically, from your heart, but conviction and convenience can go together. Tony Chan really wanted to make a movie about the experience of the people he saw every day in that restaurant.
It’s hard to determine at what point your budget becomes your aesthetic—when the physical limitations of what you can do shapes your mise-en-scène, the style of the performances, and the story you choose to tell. But the smart writer-directors are at least thinking about the budget when writing the script. The reason Swoon and Poison and Go Fish are important to see—besides the fact that they’re brilliant masterpieces—is that they’re good examples of how to make a low budget work in favor of a film instead of as an obstacle. In each case, the budget was built into the film’s conception.
On Swoon we were complimented for forcing an intimacy with the child murderers by using so many close-ups. Now, Tom Kalin, the writer-director, is one of the most visually rigorous people I’ve worked with, and those close-ups were largely an aesthetic decision. Largely. It’s also easier and cheaper to light small spaces than it is to light big ones. On Poison, Todd Haynes had a similarly resourceful strategy. He wanted to tell three stories, and the third had to be expensive looking—told in the lush style of a Douglas Sirk melodrama, such as Magnificent Obsession or Imitation of Life. That meant there wouldn’t be a lot of money left for the other two stories. So the first was conceived as a rough documentary, with mostly talking heads. The second was shot as a B horror picture, in black and white, with a lot of hand-held camera work. The contrast among the three stories was extremely effective. And you never got the feeling you were watching something dirt-cheap—although believe me, you were.
Go Fish came to me over the transom. (My office is one of the few that looks at a project that way.) The movie was half done: The director, Rose Troche, had run out of money. It was one of the rare occasions when I saw something and just knew there was an audience hungering for it. Here was a lesbian movie that was not about coming out—the coming out was over—but about life and romance and hanging out and having sex. The script was good, the actors appealing, and Rose had a certain visual panache. Part of the film’s charm was that—and I mean this with all due respect—the people who made it didn’t entirely know what they were doing. They also didn’t know they didn’t know, which is probably why they got as far as they did before they came to me. Although Rose had never made a movie before, she had terrific instincts, and she’d managed to make the picture’s very amateurishness part of its appeal. “Developing” that film in midstream meant weighing what we had and not imposing slicker criteria on what was best kept raggedy. On the other hand, the film needed to get finished and come off semicoherently. It was a balancing act. The result, I think, is that Go Fish is one of those movies whose flaws you gladly forgive because it’s so sweet-natured: “Ah, so it’s in black-and-white…so it’s a little out of focus…Who cares?”
Other projects reach me in the form of novels, memoirs, or—my favorite—true crime stories. More and more books read as though the author has been thinking about a film sale from the inception.
Some agents advise authors that if they want to sell their book to the movies they should have nothing to do with the project, because it will just lead to heartbreak. “You’re going to see your fabulous little book turned into Hollywood nonsense,” they say. “So take the money and run.” I understand that point of view when I see what’s happened to some books. I’m sure that Scott Spencer isn’t thrilled to be thought of as the guy who wrote Franco Zeffirelli’s Endless Love, and that John Updike doesn’t want to be known for penning the barf scenes in George Miller’s The Witches of Eastwick. On the other hand, you can often get an option on a book that’s a hot property because the author doesn’t want it to end up in the paws of Joe Mogul. He or she might want someone who will treat it with respect and not turn the characters into stick figures or slap on a bogus upbeat ending.
Other authors want a chance to write the screenplay or to have a strong say in the making of the film—who’s in it, who directs it. That can be good in terms of getting the rights and not so good if the author wants to exercise too much creative control in a medium in which he or she has little or no firsthand experience. Most authors, however glorious their prose styles, haven’t a clue about what constitutes film syntax. A lot of them are hungry to learn, though, because movies are the mother lode.
Whether you acquire a property can be a matter of luck and timing. That number one bestseller was likely optioned for six figures before it was even published, but there’s a universe beyond the current New York Times list.
Most publishers have a person who deals specifically with movie rights. You can call and ask if the book has been optioned. You’ll probably be referred to the author’s agent or to someone at the agent’s office who handles subsidiary rights. Many times, if it’s not a recent work, that person will tell you yes, the book was bought by ABC a few years back to be turned into a Movie of the Week, but they let the option lapse. If the big money has already been paid and the book has been around for a while, the author might be more inclined to let you have the film rights for a pittance.
On the other hand, a studio could have bought the rights, bankrolled a script they ended up hating, and then put the project into turnaround—the lazy susan of the filmmaking world. If the studio still owns the project and you want those rights, you’ll have to reimburse the studio for what it paid initially, often along with its development costs. That’s prohibitive for many independent producers. Still, it’s worth going after anything you’re interested in, because you just never know. What you shouldn’t do is go ahead and adapt a story and assume you’ll get the rights. I know two different directors who optimistically made unlicensed short films of J. D. Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Banana Fish.” Outside of festivals and private screenings, neither work will ever be seen—at least until the copyright expires, in about half a century.
Some well-established independent producers have “overhead” deals with studios, which then have the right of first refusal on any project they handle. In effect, their development is subsidized: With their monthly stipend, they can run their offices and acquire the rights to a property without a lot of fuss. There’s no such thing as a free lunch, though. If all your money comes from one entity, you have to be careful that you can still protect your director’s choices.
ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT
Most of the movies I’ve produced have had extended periods of development. After I’d done Poison and was on the map, Tom Kalin, an acclaimed avant-garde filmmaker who had no experience with narrative, received a fifty-thousand-dollar grant (those were the days!) and approached me about making a film with two linked stories. The first would be a homoerotically obsessive take on the Leopold and Loeb murder; the second focused on a fatal explosion aboard a battleship—an event that Navy investigators initially blamed on a jealous homosexual. We couldn’t get enough information on the second story, which ultimately didn’t have the same resonance. So we went with Leopold and Loeb, the subject of other famous films but none as charged as Swoon.
Tom would fax me pages of the script in progress. “Am I crazy to start with this scene?” he’d ask. Or, “Do you get a sense of who these people are?” Like many writers, he says that when he works he feels blindfolded—fumbling along, bumping into walls. He’s extremely vulnerable, and he wants someone he can trust to look at the material and not say, “Yuck.” Or if they do, to say “Yuck” constructively. If you cultivate that kind of relationship with a writer, he or she won’t be embarrassed to show you something outlandish—something that might be atrocious but might also be genuinely inspired. Tom ended up coming into the office after ten o’clock many nights to use the computer. He’d sleep on the couch. That’s another thing a producer can do, if he or she is so inclined: provide food, shelter, and office equipment.
We knew we’d use up the fifty thousand dollars after about ten days of shooting, so we selected only certain scenes to film. Then Tom said, “We’ve done all the shots of people against white walls that we can get away with.” Production ground to a halt. It was actually good to stop at that point, because when we put together a cut of what we had it was a revelation. There were still vestiges of Tom’s original intention, which was to make an impressionistic work, almost a riff on Leopold and Loeb instead of a true narrative. But the story was also there, in tantalizing fragments, and the story parts worked best. The film was fighting itself. So Tom, who was gaining confidence in his ability to be a narrative filmmaker, wrote scenes that would fill in the gaps. He learned to jettison stuff that was only there because it was arty and atmospheric and to punch up the scenes that would move the story forward.
The process was even more touch-and-go with Mary Harron, an award-winning documentary and TV director. A friend of a friend, Mary came to me with an idea for a documentary about Valerie Solanas, the young woman who shot and nearly killed Andy Warhol in the late sixties. Tom Kalin and I shared Mary’s fascination with Solanas, the author of the book S.C.U.M. Manifesto, a play called Up Your Ass, and other works of man-hating vitriol. But we both felt she’d chosen the wrong form. Valerie’s dead, Andy’s dead: Where’s the documentary? All that most Warhol people remembered about Solanas was that she was weird. We thought there was a narrative in Mary’s material that was screaming to get out.
Tom became my coproducer on what was ultimately I Shot Andy Warhol. Development meant seeing that Mary had what she needed to write the script—which was fairly easy, since she had a lot of experience researching documentaries and had a great assistant. She dug up Solanas’ college yearbook and discovered that Valerie had lied about her age. She found published accounts of the Warhol “Factory” days in newspapers and magazines. She extracted the (limited) recollections of Solanas from people who had been around the Factory. And she had S.C.U.M. Manifesto and Up Your Ass.
Our most important function at this stage was to remind her that, while she had to respect the facts, she also had to tell a story; that the story had to have characters; and that the characters’ lives had to move forward in a way that would keep the audience moving with them. We told her that as hard as it might be for a documentarian of integrity to make things up, she was going to have to rearrange events, change the order of scenes, and inflate or deflate the characters’ roles depending on the story she decided to tell.
That story emerged slowly. There was too much narration—the action wasn’t happening in the present tense. We had many sessions with Mary in which we went through the script page by page. What’s happening with the story here? This scene is confusing. This scene is repetitive. Why is this character coming in here? The climactic action is here but it needs to be here. In some ways, as Tom has pointed out, when you’re developing a script you’re like a psychiatrist reflecting the writer’s thoughts back to him or her: Well, what do you think? What do you want to say? You ask simple questions to try to keep them from straying off course. Then, Mary hooked up with a cowriter, Dan Minahan, and the script began to acquire a life of its own.
A lot of producers organize readings, in which actors come in and sit in a long row and declaim for an invited audience. On Warhol this was especially helpful. We learned what parts of the screenplay dragged; what was funny that we didn’t know was funny; and that an actor’s reading could cant the whole script in a new direction. I don’t like going to readings that aren’t connected to my own projects—I find them really dull. But I think it’s extremely useful for a writer to hear his or her words spoken out loud.
There was another variable. For a while, we were developing the script to secure funding from a now-defunct division of October Films called Autumn—which meant that we were mainly trying to satisfy the person in charge. This happens a lot: You end up tailoring your project to suit the tastes (or, in some cases, the dopey whims) of a financier or studio executive. When that person leaves the scene, or when you have to move on to another source, all bets are suddenly off, and you have to endure a new set of challenges from a new (and possibly dopier) element. No script will ever please everyone. Ultimately, the writer has to have the courage of his or her convictions.
Autumn eventually decided not to move forward, and we were lucky enough to land at American Playhouse.
After solving its structural problems, our main concern about Warhol became the fact that its protagonist was a paranoid schizophrenic—not your usual heroine material. Who could identify with such a person?
That begs the question: Who is the audience? In most mainstream films, you’re supposed to care intensely about one or two characters and hate everyone else. But when Valerie was being called a “cunt” by Ondine, Mary didn’t take sides. She adored them all—the freaks, the bitches, the crazies. That’s one of the reasons the film evoked the period so effectively. It put you in the middle of the madness—without handing you a compass—and your reaction to Valerie depended on whatever baggage you brought with you. Some people said she made their skin crawl; others loved her. And casting played a role in making her palatable. Lili Taylor had so much physical charm and grace that she could look adorable even in a filthy raincoat shooting Andy Warhol.
So who is the audience? People who can live with that tension, who can say, as Tom does, “So-called ‘heartwarming’ movies do not necessarily warm my heart.”
WRITES OF PASSAGE
The input I have on a script varies with each writer/director. Some want to show me everything and have their hands held, others want to be left alone. A producer has two functions in this period: one is to create a space in which the writer feels safe and comfortable writing; and the other is to mediate between said writer and whatever entity has provided development money. As I’ve mentioned, things got testy on Simply Halston when the studio, Fox Searchlight, perceived that there were competing projects and wanted to see material faster than the writer could generate it. I can’t force a script out of a writer: It’s either done or it isn’t. On the other hand, with Simply Halston I had to shift away from insulating the writer to giving him a pretty severe wake-up call. It wasn’t fair not to tell him that if he didn’t deliver, the whole thing could fall apart. It was a lot of pressure, and sometimes increasing the pressure backfires, but if he’d taken an extra six weeks it would have jeopardized his movie. (It was also fortunate that running Fox Searchlight was Lindsay Law, the former head of American Playhouse, who is unusually sympathetic to writers, and with whom the writer and I had an established relationship.)
Incidentally, a huge difference between low-budget and Hollywood-studio development is that in Hollywood, executives are very casual about throwing a writer off a script and bringing in someone else; often, by the time the picture is made, there are eight people vying for screenplay credit. I’ve had companies suggest that I replace writers on projects, but at this level the script and the writer—and the director—don’t usually exist independently of one another. You’re only making the film because the script is right and the director is ready, not because you’ve hired your stars, built your sets, and are locked into a start date.
It’s hard to imagine what Hollywood would have made of Todd Haynes’ first draft of Velvet Goldmine, which was 200 pages and went in a hundred different directions. It was clear that it needed a tremendous amount of restructuring, and I made comments about whatever caught my eye—the idea being not to overwhelm him with criticism, but to give him an impetus to move forward. It helps that Todd has a clear idea of what needs to be done. The process is like looking at various cuts of a film. You enter into a relationship with the director or the writer where you ask yourself: At what point can I be useful? And at what point should I save my eyes, so that later on I’ll have a fresh perspective? On Velvet Goldmine—which is being edited as I write this—I know I’ve forfeited that perspective, because I’ve been so close to the process. I’m going to have to count on the kindness of strangers now.
If the studios found Todd Haynes’ script brilliant but difficult, they found Todd Solondz’s script brilliant but impossible. After Welcome to the Dollhouse, an art-house smash, scores of executives wanted to be in business with him, but as soon as they arrived at the part of the script where the not-unsympathetic protagonist begins drugging and carrying off little boys, the dollar signs faded from their eyes.
When Todd was making Welcome to the Dollhouse, then called The Middle Child, he phoned our office a couple times for advice, because he was having a hellish time. Pam and I try to have an open-door policy, so that producers can call us if they’ve gotten in over their heads or if there’s some aspect of the filmmaking process that they don’t understand. When Dollhouse came out, I found myself envious, wishing I’d produced it. I phoned Todd and asked him to lunch, which turned out to be a lot of fun.
Todd Solondz takes “geek-chic” to the extreme. He’s also convinced that he’ll have a heart attack before he’s forty (no reason that I can see—both parents are still alive). But despite those quirks, he manages to instill confidence. Todd reminds me of stories I’ve heard about Truman Capote: that when he was writing In Cold Blood he would knock on the doors of suspicious Midwesterners and somehow they would let in this weird little guy and pour out their hearts. At our lunch, he told me he wasn’t really working on anything. But not too many months later, he called and said, “I have this script. Will you read it?” What he’d written was the sort of twisted erotic roundelay that almost never shows up on the screen. I called him back and said, “Yes! I want to jump into this!” Sometimes “development” is like falling off a log.
RIGHTS AND WRONGS
Before I talk about rights and permissions, I have to add the usual disclaimers: I’m not an attorney; this is no substitute for legal advice; hire a lawyer. This area gets very complicated, especially when you start thinking about filming someone’s life story, or basing your movie on anything with even a vague similarity to an actual person or event.
Because of the resemblance between the central figure of Velvet Goldmine, Brian Slade, and certain glam-rockers, the movie was a huge can of worms legally speaking. There are so many shades of gray with this type of project that every lawyer will give you a different take on whether you may go ahead without permissions or if you should make changes to ensure that a character is completely unrecognizable. Of course, I could produce a film tomorrow called The David Bowie Story or The Bryan Ferry Story and, since they’re public figures, that would be perfectly legal. (Think of all the TV movies that get churned out about celebrities in the news: Woody Allen and Mia Farrow, Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan, Amy Fisher and Joey Buttafuoco.) I wouldn’t, of course, be allowed to use any of Ferry’s or Bowie’s music unless I had permission and I paid for it.
In a way, it’s almost harder to do what we did in Velvet Goldmine, a fictionalized account in which the characters have something in common with real people but live their own lives. Brian Slade snorts cocaine in the movie: does that mean we have to prove that all those glam-rockers did, too? We ran into some of the same issues with I Shot Andy Warhol, which had a lot of characters based on people still alive. Fortunately, Bridgid Berlin couldn’t accuse us of slandering her when we showed her injecting speed into her thigh, because she did that for real on camera in Chelsea Girls.
So let’s say you want to make a movie about a woman who has been in the news and is therefore considered a public figure. You don’t have to buy the rights to her story, but if you’re able to, it might make your movie better. If you don’t, she probably won’t sit and talk to you, so all that you’ll know is what everyone else knows. You won’t have the intimate details—the relationship with her mother, say, or what her best friend thought of the whole scandal. For that kind of access, I think it’s worth spending the money.
On the other hand, you have to set boundaries. Tom Kalin and I worked hard to get the rights to the story of the relationship between a legendary rock singer and an artist who has since died. We paid the singer a big (for us) option fee for her recollections, memorabilia, and the rights to her music, and all she asked for was script approval—which she strongly implied would be no big deal, just a formality. She was an artist, too: How could she be obstructive?
Easy. It became increasingly clear that she hadn’t wanted the movie made in the first place, but had agreed to the project because she really needed the cash. Yes, it was dumb to give her veto power over the script, but there was no other way she would have accepted the deal. It was a crap shoot and we crapped out.
Stonewall, an account of the tumultuous Greenwich Village uprising that is said to have launched the gay liberation movement, was the ultimate life-story nightmare. We bought the rights to a book by Martin Duberman, whose research formed the basis of the script. But to maintain the integrity and authenticity of the film, we wanted to hear from as many people who were involved as possible. This created several problems. The first was that there’s a lot of dispute about who did what. There are three different organizations of Stonewall veterans, each claiming that it is the only one that represents the genuine participants and that the other two are bogus and run by people who pretend that they were there but weren’t. It was difficult to deal with all of the groups, so I tried to choose the one that was the least insane. Still, different people had wildly different accounts: “It was raining!” “It wasn’t raining!” “It was 200 people!” “It was 500 people!” “It was 1000 people!” “It was a glorified bar brawl!” “It was a riot!” “The Black Panthers came over!” And each queen who came in to talk with us would say about the person who was leaving: “Is she still dogging you on that story? She wasn’t even there!”
One thing you learn is that people who have been eyewitnesses to momentous historical events can be very proprietary about them. Stonewall was a revolution of the disenfranchised, and the memories of some of its participants are still the most important things in their lives. Add to this the fact that when a movie company comes around—even a low-budget, independent movie company—they smell money. We were naïve and spread our net too wide: We thought that the Stonewall veterans would be excited to talk to us, to contribute to the first depiction of the event on the screen. We thought wrong.
The morning of the Stonewall premiere at New York’s Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, a group of transvestites called and said that if they didn’t all get tickets, they would picket the opening. I said, “There’s no way I’ll give in to their tawdry demands!” So they went ahead and picketed. Guests who entered the theater were surrounded by drag queens chanting and holding up signs that said, “We’ve been exploited!” “Christine Vachon is exploiting us!”
To my enormous irritation, they came to the party afterwards.
HOW TO PITCH ME
• Never NEVER give me the _____ meets _____ pitch. This may work in Hollywood, but I find it insulting. It also demeans your own film—it makes it seem as if it cannot stand on its own. And more often than not, it sounds ridiculous. Seven meets The Princess Bride. Pulp Fiction meets Go Fish. Please.
• AND NEVER compare your film to Mean Streets. If I get another pitch that invokes Mean Streets, I might have to stop accepting unsolicited scripts. Scorsese’s film is brilliant and one of the seminal indie success stories, but it might have done more harm than good—judging from all the half-finished “guys from the neighborhood” films with narratives that spiral toward the inevitably tragic conclusion that come my way. I don’t want to make movies that are like other movies. And I hope that the filmmakers I work with are not trying simply to rehash elements from financially successful films. Do that song and dance when you pitch to Paramount.
• Know something about the company you’re pitching to and tailor your pitch accordingly. Form letters are a bad idea. When I get a letter that begins “Dear Sir,” I usually don’t get to the second line. If I’m going to take the time to consider your script, I hope you have taken the time to learn something about my work. And by the way, sending your script to everyone in the Hollywood Creative Directory is a bad idea. One of the reasons I sometimes consider implementing a “no unsolicited scripts” policy (which my colleagues at Good Machine have adopted) is because we receive so many scripts from people who obviously have no idea what kind of movies we make—Rambo rip-offs, spy thrillers, horror films about giant squids. I have more important things to do than wade through that kind of junk. And yet…I keep on accepting all scripts (sometimes over my staff’s objections) because I know that the next one could be amazing…
• Be concise.
• Don’t gush. (Sometimes people come off more like stalkers than writers.)
• Don’t be too cocky. (i.e., “This film must—will—get made. The only question is whether you will be a part of it.”)
• Don’t name-drop unless you can back it up. If you say you’re friends with Ethan Hawke, he’d better at least have heard of you. Hey, it’s okay not to have industry connections. Sometimes it’s better. After all, if you’re such big buddies with all these powerful people, why aren’t they producing your script? Do they think it sucks?
• Don’t tell me who’s reading it—i.e., “Parker Posey’s people are reading it!” Anyone can read anything. But it does make a difference if someone is attached. These days actors often sign what are known as “letters of intent,” which are basically agreements to appear in the film if and when it gets financed.
• Don’t try to sell yourself as the next sensation—save it for Sundance. I like people who are on the level, selling their project and not their history.
• Do include a synopsis. I’m much more likely to read a script if it has an interesting treatment with it.
• Spell check. Seems obvious, right? You’d be serprized.
• Include a self-addressed, stamped envelope.
• If you send something special to get my attention, be clever. Money doesn’t impress me—anyone can order five hundred dollars worth of sushi from Nobu. (One of my production partners once received that with a submission.) I don’t want bribes. But an interesting photo or prop is likely to raise my interest and make my staff look more closely at the script. Just make sure that it relates to your project.
• Be patient! At any given moment, Killer Films has two movies in some stage of production or post and several projects in development. The five of us on staff sometimes feel as if we’re just treading water, and the scripts pile up around us. We try to read everything, but it takes TIME.
• Rejection is inevitable in this business. It’s not personal. Sometimes people regard me as a deus ex machina who can MAKE THINGS HAPPEN. If my company (or any of the indie production companies in New York—Good Machine, the Shooting Gallery, and so on) says no, don’t despair. There are many aspiring producers out there who might jump at the chance to make your script. That’s one of the reasons I encourage people who want to make moves actually to work in production. Get hands-on experience, meet other comers. I started out as a PA along with Todd Haynes and Ted Hope. When I first met Nick Gomez (Laws of Gravity, Illtown) he was a film editor. His producer, Larry Meistrich, was a Second Assistant Director for me. The sharp Second AD you’re working with could someday end up as your coproducer. Working on a set gives you experience and connections you’ll never get in film school.