Introducing Scylla and Charybdis at a party
When you're between a rock and a hard place, you go under.
Making a film is all about the catch-22; you can’t get financing for your project unless you can get some name talent attached. You can’t get name talent attached unless you have money. No production company will hire someone without feature credits, but you can’t make a feature unless someone hires you (or you’re lucky enough to be independently wealthy). And you can’t hire a producer without showing the project has some value beyond a paycheck, but without the money for that paycheck, no producer will sign on even if a project shows lots of promise.
The catch-22 is related to the horns of the dilemma, or the classic case of being between a rock and a hard place. No matter which direction you turn, there be monsters and hardships and seemingly no way to extract yourself from the situation except to just go through it.
If I have felt one thing in this process, it’s that—the helpless feeling of going through the strait, hoping not to get dashed against the rocks or get your head eaten off. Damn Scylla.
Revisions are back in the mix!
After taking a couple months off to focus on business development, I’m back to the woodshed with the script. A few months ago, Cameron and I had a call where he asked me to make some changes to the front half of the script to simplify some of the set pieces and give the protagonist a bit of a stronger, active role in the plot.
Cameron’s notes were spot-on, of course, but I needed a bit of space from the script, and I had the business plan and investor deck I was working on, which was taking all my focus. So unlike the Cranberries, I had to let it linger.
Thankfully, the revisions have been easier than I thought they would be, and they’ve brought new elements to the story, making it more compelling and engaging. This has certainly re-energized me, and it’s also given me the impetus to finish because, the next step is….
Hiring a p.g.a. producer to run a full budget breakdown, stripboarding, assumptions sheet, etc.
It turns out, I actually know a producer in the p.g.a. (actually, two, now, but that’s a different story). I’ve known this producer for well over twelve years, but we only recently reconnected after a long absence.
Goes to show you, those connections you have with random people may someday come back.
At any rate, on our reconnection call he asked what I was working on, and I pitched him a brief version of the story of Lucid. I told him I was needing a budget breakdown with stripboards, assumptions sheet, the works—and it turns out he offers it as a service, and he offered to give me a friend discount on top of his already reasonable pricing.
What will all this mean for us? Breaking the budget down by scene (stripboarding) will help us better understand the financial requirements and give us a truer sense of costs, and to make informed decisions regarding the project's direction as far as casting and budgeting out our shooting days.
This insane market
Despite these positive developments, it’s not all sunshine and roses. The current market and economic conditions have made raising private equity even more challenging. Belts are tightening, and big money isn't taking risks on extremely risky bets.
Our main investor contact and consultant has told us VCs in general are growing much more risk-averse, and accredited money, even if it’s not adept in the film industry, is hyperaware of the dangers of putting their liquidity into a deeply shaky and uncertain market already fraught with peril from larger economic variables (Fed juggling inflation and bank failures, among many other fears and concerns).
What I’ve found is that producing this little indie movie is a little like querying. There's a lot of silence, and if you're outside the "network" of Hollywood producers and makers, you have to show your value for them to open their doors. It’s not enough to pitch them with a fancy deck or fully-thought out business plan.
In some ways, filmmakers, now more than ever, have to think beyond simply “making the film.” They need to be anticipating the marketing scheme, the platform(s) they want to build, and build the film as a business that is diversified to survive financial downturns, market upheavals, shifts in technological expectations (AI, anyone?), and the ever-changing winds of audience desires and consumption habits.
It’s complicated. You have to think bigger. You have to think like a studio. If you aren’t, you’re as likely to get eaten as you are to “make it.” In my conversations with producers, this is the consistent conversation.
To that end, I’m hopeful this film won’t just be a film; it's needs to be a launchpad. We need to be strategic in our approach to production and marketing, and so we are exploring producing models that could benefit not just Lucid but many other indie filmmaking efforts.
The Undoing released
I’m proud to say The Undoing was released on Tuesday and we’ve garnered over 1,000 views on YouTube and a pretty enthusiastic response from everyone who has watched it so far.
If you haven’t seen it yet, I’d be honored if you’d watch it (it’s only 5 minutes!) and let me know what you think in the comments.
Worth a _
📺 I suggested to my wife that we rewatch Season 1 of Ted Lasso. We’re in this weird space where most of what we have been watching recently is all serious, heavy material. Ted Lasso seemed like the perfect antidote and gives us something easily digestible during the week when we just want to unwind a bit.
What’s fun is, we’re watching it while also watching Season 3, and it’s really interesting to see what the writers have called back to in Season 1: Trent Crimm’s relationship with Roy and his warming to Ted Lasso, Roy and Keely’s mutual attraction and the inversion of relationships and “likability” (Ted and Nathan being the big flip from Season 1 to Season 3).
There’s so much to like about this show, and while I think Season 2 wasn’t nearly as uniformly excellent as Season 1, and Season 3 is shaping up more like Season 2 than I was hoping, it’s still an all-around wonderful show that dares to give us a protagonist who wins us over and does so in completely unexpected and charming ways, and he pulls everyone in his orbit into that same feeling of wholesomeness.
Ted Lasso is important to so many people because the show offers a unique and refreshing portrayal of humanity, kindness, and goodness. It reveals insights into the human psyche and combats cynicism and nihilism—which I personally think we sorely need and needed in the past three years. Jason Sudeikis’ portrayal of Ted Lasso presents a foil to toxic masculinity and promotes vulnerability and kindness as the path to greatness. The writers encourage us to believe in miracles and the potential for goodness within all of us.
We need that more than ever, and watching it again has reaffirmed that belief.
That’s all for this week, thanks so much as always for your support, it means the world. For now…
pax
Fresco by Allessandro Allori. “Odysseus’s boat passing between the six-headed monster Scylla and the whirlpool Charybdis. Scylla has plucked Five of Odysseus’s men from the boat.” Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
