THERE’S AN INTERESTING ritual in the film industry called the “general meeting.” Not sure if other industries have this, or a version of it, but it fascinates us to this day. A general meeting usually comes about because one of the parties is a fan of (or trying to get something from) the other party. For instance, if we loved someone’s short film and wanted to meet them to discuss possibly working together, we would ask them for “a general.” Likewise, if a studio or producer was a fan of our work, they might ask us for the same. Sweet and harmless. But not really.

In our first year in Los Angeles, we took about a hundred general meetings. Possibly more. And a rhythm started to develop. We would drive across town to their offices. Wait for a bit. Then we’d all sit together and do some general ass-kissing and getting to know each other. And, at the end of the meeting, we would inevitably all say something to the effect of “We should definitely find something to do together.”

As you might imagine, very rarely did we actually find something to do together. In fact, I think it’s safe to say that not one of our general meetings has directly resulted in doing anything more than driving home and wondering if we wasted a couple of hours. Maybe wasted is a strong word, but we are filmmakers and we have to work extremely hard and long hours to get our stuff made, so at the very least we began to question whether we should be putting our time into something more fruitful.

And as we questioned this age-old ritual of the general meeting, something more disturbing occurred to us: People in this town (and possibly in this industry altogether) spend about ninety-nine percent of their time talking about the potential of making something. And a large chunk of that time is spent in a general meeting that will most likely never amount to anything. And no one seemed to be talking about this problem. Wasn’t this an obvious waste of time that was easily identifiable? From our perspective, yes. So we made a decision: Maybe we should cut down on the general meetings.

When we proposed this concept to our representatives, they were shocked. Won’t people be offended if we don’t take the general meetings they ask of us? Even if not, how would we make those long-term connections that would ultimately lead to success in the industry? The feeling we got, overall, was one of “This is just not done.” We were on speakerphone during this call with our reps, looking at each other in amazement. It was as if we were trying to extract ourselves from some sort of cult that might bludgeon us to death if we tried to leave the compound. So we did what we normally do in these situations. We took a walk.

MARK: I feel like they’re gonna be mad at us if we don’t take the generals.

JAY: Totally. But…I don’t know. My deep gut says this is wrong. That this whole process is just…

MARK: Bloated and inefficient and false?

JAY: Yeah. I mean, how many hours do you think we’ve spent, travel included, doing these meetings?

(A little math. It starts to dawn on us.)

JAY: Two hundred? Maybe more?

MARK: Yep. And how long does it take us to write a solid draft of a script?

(Quiet. A realization. Then, a sadder kind of quiet.)

Yep. It hit us like a heavy sack of diarrhea (sorry, gross, but it really got to us). In all the time we had spent ass-kissing and talking bullshit in those general meetings, we could have written another script and basically eradicated the need for those meetings.

After the initial shock and embarrassment, however, we became emboldened.

We walked back to Jay’s house, called our representatives, and led with our chins. We told them we had decided we wanted to make films, not talk about them. We even came up with a clever and overly dramatic moniker for our newly birthed philosophy: We wanted to “make movies, not meetings.” We laid it all out there and let them know, in no uncertain terms, that we would not be taking general meetings. We didn’t want to be difficult, but we had our own way of doing things and we needed to do what our gut told us was right. Much to our surprise, our representatives were very understanding and respectful on the phone. They were clear on our stance and validated everything we had to say. It was a small victory but an important one.

A few weeks later, our main representatives ended up leaving that agency to go to an even bigger one. We were not invited to come along with them.