Show Me Your Indies

IndieFlix, an On-Demand DVD site where you can buy a standard edition of "The Bet" without specials features for $5.95, has a special site called "Show Me Your Indies." As part of that, they are highlighting filmmakers with films for sale with a "What the heck are IndieFlix filmmakers up to?" blog. Mine is up now. They asked 10 questions. My responses are at the link (opens a new window).

Forward on draft 11

With Kurt's notes - which Chris Smith just went through and agreed he and I are on the same page - I am moving ahead to draft 11. No major changes, just a bit of fleshing out the characters with some revised action and dialogue. Possibly going to re-incorporate some stuff dropped from previous versions and tighten up artifacts from those previous versions.

Also, I've been breaking down the script to get a bead on what we'd be looking at budget-wise. It's an odd beast. It could easily be made for $100,000, but would feel like a no budget film. I think at about $1 million it would be substantially awesome, on par with a film that costs five times as much, simply because of clever filmmaking tricks. That extra money would feed into the actors, obviously, but also one of the most overlooked elements in low budget films: production design.

Still, at this point, even $1,000 is beyond our means. So, I'll keep working on the business plan.

Sometimes technology is better than people

Hello the man in the planet, We at BLOODY-DISGUSTING.COM would like to wish you a happy bloody birthday!

'nuff said.

First feedback on "Detox"

Kurt Rauf gave feedback on the latest draft of Detox. Kurt was the DP on "The Bet" and many other films, including My Name Is Bruce with his buddy Bruce Campbell. Kurt's leaving to go to Michigan next week to catch the tour of MNIB. But he managed to get through the latest draft and make notes.

It'd be pretty much impossible to go into any kind of detail regarding the notes and have it make sense without having first read the script. So I won't - at least not yet. What I will say is Kurt said we went from a mediocre script (draft 4) to a pretty damn good one. He agreed it was a drama that has horrific elements and thriller trappings, but it's not a horror film, nor a thriller. He had absolutely no problems with the story/plot; his comments were mainly on dialogue (we were a bit wordy), artifacts of plot devices removed from previous drafts and some suggestions to punch up the characters a bit.

Still waiting for other responses, but so far, not too drastic of changes.

Oh, and today is the notification date for The Movie Deal. They haven't posted the winners yet, but, based on previous experience, I'd say we'd have known by now if we won.

First feedback

Kurt Rauf gave feedback on the latest draft of Detox. Kurt was the DP on "The Bet" and many other films, including My Name Is Bruce with his buddy Bruce Campbell. Kurt's leaving to go to Michigan next week to catch the tour of MNIB. But he managed to get through the latest draft and make notes.

It'd be pretty much impossible to go into any kind of detail regarding the notes and have it make sense without having first read the script. So I won't - at least not yet. What I will say is Kurt said we went from a mediocre script (draft 4) to a pretty damn good one. He agreed it was a drama that has horrific elements and thriller trappings, but it's not a horror film, nor a thriller. He had absolutely no problems with the story/plot; his comments were mainly on dialogue (we were a bit wordy), artifacts of plot devices removed from previous drafts and some suggestions to punch up the characters a bit.

Still waiting for other responses, but so far, not too drastic of changes.

Oh, and today is the notification date for The Movie Deal. They haven't posted the winners yet, but, based on previous experience, I'd say we'd have known by now if we won.

Horror

I just blogged about the first script pitch for Detox over at the Detox blog HERE. And at the end I mentioned wanting to write a horror script that couldn't construed as anything BUT horror. You'd think that'd be easy. And, I guess, it would. But maybe my brain is just not wired that way. I set out for Detox to be classifiably horror as a reaction to "The Bet" not being perceived as horror. Now, I am looking to write something else that's horror since Detox isn't perceived that way.

Anyhoo. I think the problem I keep running into is that, for the most part, horror films are stupid. They're good, but there's usually not much to them storywise. And if there is, they start to move into other genres. Slasher films are undeniably horror and their scripts are usually pretty lame. Group of unsuspecting people trapped somewhere isolated and picked off one-by-one. Sure, a film like Wolf Creek follows that, but front loads with a lot of character development and was unapologetically brutal. A Nightmare on Elm Street mixed things up by adding fantasy elements. The Thing added sc-fi elements. Maybe I just don't know what horror is.

Actually, I do. I recently was going nuts trying to come up with a short film idea. I had ideas with horrific elements, but they didn't feel like horror. According to Wikipedia, "Horror films are movies that strive to elicit fear, horror and terror responses from viewers." Seems pretty simple. And by that definition, "The Bet" is a horror film. It may not have worked for everyone and may have been very light in the fear arena, favoring other darker emotions, but it did "strive to elicit fear."

I think what I'm expecting out of myself is something more traditionally horror. Something with blood and monsters and screaming. The new idea I've got cooking is definitely looking good in the blood department. It might not be the best way to write a script, but going in I'm determined to get a lot of blood, a lot of sex, a lot of nudity, a lot of screaming, a lot of death. I'm sure it will somehow, in the process, skew off into a more heady direction - and that's fine. I'll just make sure to keep the blood flowing on the screen.

First pitch.

On Friday, I came across a post from the Director of Development of a production company asking for scripts to be pitched. I sent him an email asking if they were buying the script outright or if they were willing to allow me to develop it for them as the director. They said they were open to all options. So, I figured it wouldn't to give it a shot.

The problem was I had never pitched a script before. And everything I could find about techniques on pitching spent a lot of time covering how to look, how to present yourself and how to interact with the person to whom your pitching. Obviously I wasn't actually meeting them, so all that advice wasn't doing me any good.

I looked through the company's site, saw the kinds of films they had been making. Then looked those films up on IMDb. They had requested low-budget horror/sci-fi/fantasy scripts. What they had done were very low budget horror films. And not something that was straddling genres the way Detox does. There was no doubt these were horror films.

I had already decided they were going to pass on the script, so I didn't feel any kind of pressure writing something up and sending it to them. I decided to approach it more as a proposal in a business plan than an actual script pitch. I didn't want to go through the entire thing, scene-by-scene, and waste their time, when I was pretty sure this wasn't their cup of tea. Instead, I wrote out an introduction, a logline, the theme, a synopsis and then a list of selling points, such as the character of Miss Northrup being an ideal cameo option for a well-known star. The selling points also explained why we would be a good choice to create the film ourselves.

I sent it off last night. This morning I got their response.

Thanks for the very detailed pitch (really like your style of pitching), but we're going to pass on reading the script. Feel free to pitch me any other completed scripts you have.

Like I said, I didn't expect them to go with it, so it's not a letdown. And the comment about liking the style of pitching could be B.S., but it might not.

The whole thing, though, has really reinforced the need to write a straight-up horror script. No questions horror. Not a psychological thriller. Not an enigmatic drama. A horror film. I've got one in mind. All it takes is to get it on the page. Maybe that is what will eventually allow Detox to get made.

Obama. FTW!

Thank you.
Let's hope change really does come.
Cos we need it.

And thank you, especially, to Shannon. She made me want to vote. And if she made ME vote, she made others (and I know she did). And, considering the number of new voters, there were a lot of Shannons out there.

I just hope America's vote for change is real.
Cos we need it.