#10 - More Failure: Where Hope Goes to Die
So wait, I'm going to direct something? Well, you know that can't go off without a hitch.
To continue down the path set upon a couple weeks back reveling in failure, I suppose it makes sense to jump to the next venture into trying to shoot something I’d had a hand in writing.
There are lots of places where I may have to fill in some gaps, but I’ll preface this with a bit of history.
I have a handful of friends who are similarly creative but who also don’t have the luxury of making their living through these endeavors. This is oddly something that I’ve seen being discussed on social media since I started writing this post a couple weeks ago, as some study or survey showed that the percentage of artists from working-class origins is at an all-time low, meaning that “our art” is being produced by people who are profoundly disconnected from the experiential pool in which most of us play, or more precisely toil.
Anyway, these friends and I invariably dance around with collaborating on projects (nearly all of which I still believe have legs and some of which are probably even more relevant now than when we started working on them), brainstorming, hypothesizing, outlining, and even writing for weeks or months or even years.
But usually the project ends up stagnating or fizzling out because life has a knack of getting in the way, and while it felt good to work with your friend on the abstract notion of a creative project, the lack of financial or emotional capital at our avail to ensure the time and energy to fully commit to the project inevitably puts the pillow over the face of it.
Ages ago, my good friend and repeated collaborator, Stewart Parker came to me with the idea for a horror/thriller feature that I still think is brilliant, and we fleshed out the concept of what the script would be, working up a rough outline and getting together periodically either in LA or San Diego (where he was matriculating at the time, though our friendship dates back to the mid-Aughts in Austin) with the idea that we’d work more on the concept but which inevitably ended up being spent hanging out because LA and San Diego are both cities prime for distracting yourself with food and drink.
So for what was literally years, we never really got past the outline phase on the feature, but after Stewart finished his grad school and wove his way back to Austin, the notion came about* that maybe we should think about shooting it as a proof-of-concept short that could still at least conceivably work to submit on the festival circuit in an effort to try to get word out and potentially secure funding for a feature.
*I think this was Stewart’s idea, but I’m honestly not sure.
So Stewart and I started working on the short script, and we started getting input from Stewart’s old friend, Austin “Al” Landon—a DIY filmmaker in his own right—who was on board as our director of photography. We collectively whittled the larger concept down to its most important parts to get to the themes we wanted to explore while still doing all the service to the central characters we felt was necessary. We got the core concept down to about 20 pages with the idea that we’d shoot what was necessary over the course of three or four days at two primary locations and then be brutal in the edit, slashing anything that wasn’t vital to try to keep the run-time as manageable as possible for a short.
We spent at least six months honing the script, doing rehearsals over Zoom, dialing it in, rewriting and revising the script over and over and over, making sure we wouldn’t be wasting any time on anything that we didn’t deem vital to shooting to make sure we had everything we needed to show, with the idea that even more could get slashed in the edit.
With the script in a good place, locations locked in thanks to Al’s extended family, actors lined up, and friends lined up for crew who were a mix of people with plenty of on-set experience gracious enough to help out and people who were willing and we thought would have an aptitude for doing this or that, we were feeling like it was good to move forward with shooting. Stewart would be producing because he was also in the primary cast, Al would be shooting, I’d be directing, and we’d plotted out the loose shooting schedule to maximize efficiency with an accompanying shot list that I’d worked up to make sure everything was good to go. The three of us had discussed at length how we’d shoot the scenes. We were as prepared as you can be for a self-funded shoot like this.
So we set the shooting date for of weekends* after SXSW where the city would have settled back down. I was working on the last season of Goliath at the time, but in a capacity well below my skillset**, so I was easily replaceable. I put in my notice, offering that if their replacement for me didn’t work out, I’d be available again in three weeks should they want me back instead.
*Another drawback to having to try to shoot these self-funded things is that there’s no fucking money for anyone to be making so they still have to WORK. This meant consecutive weekends rather than a much more optimal shoot conducted in four consecutive days.
**Let’s just say I had a conflicted relationship to working on that show. I’d interviewed for a position the season prior for which I was more than qualified that would have paid me far less than it should have. I had some knowledge of the inner workings of the show, as I knew people who’d worked on it in previous seasons.
One of those people happened to be someone who I’d actually had to call and inform that they wouldn’t be coming back to the production phase of a show after filling in for me for a week in prep while I was at a destination wedding in Canada. The reason for his not being brought back had been that he’d been—for the sake of being diplomatic, let’s just say… awkward with talent in the greenroom at another show that I was working with the same production team in the same time period. So rather than what most shows would have done (which was just not calling the dude and just moving forward without him, as it was just a PA job), I called him and let him know why he wasn’t coming back.
In the months that followed, HE got on Goliath while my résumé with credits higher up the food chain but largely on unscripted shows doesn’t get me in the door, despite another friend’s efforts. He proceeded to have to repeatedly be told to leave the writers alone whenever they’d venture out of their wing and was almost fired. A year or so later, yet another friend is working on the show, and he gets me in the door for either an Office PA or Assistant to the Line Producer/2nd Unit Director position. I was production coordinating smaller unscripted shows for a couple years at this point and had scripted PA experience on a handful of film shoots, and they wanted someone for the second position who could sort of act as a de facto production coordinator for 2nd Unit shoots (while presumably not paying that person a rate commensurate to the job they were actually being asked to do), which I could have done ably and had an according CV to back that up.
So in the interview, which I’m nailing because I’m CERTAIN I can do this job, they ask me what I want to do in the industry. I tell them I want to write because that is what I want to do.
The interview ends fine, but I later find out that they’re not going to bring me on because I want to be a writer and the guy I’d done a solid for and told that you can’t really be an impediment to talent only to have him not internalize the lesson was the reason why.
So when a different production team from production supervisor down was on the next season, I got a chance to be in the office, though it was well after the writers had completed their work. I’m grateful for that work, but still a little irked I didn’t get on the season before, and I’m not going to put off working toward a much larger goal to stay on a show that did not want me a year earlier.
A week after putting in my notice—if you know when SXSW is, you might know what’s coming—production for Goliath shut down.
So did the rest of the industry.
And the rest of the country.
And most of the Western World.
Initially, we were like fuck it, let’s just shoot this thing. The odds that any of us will have COVID-19 at this juncture is still astronomically low. I can basically load up with hand-sanitizer and try not to touch anything as I drive across the inhospitable desert between LA and Austin, and we can just shoot it.
As lockdown and the world became scarier and scarier over the next few days, we decided to cancel the shoot.
As the pandemic dragged on, the locations both fell through, and one of the actors grew more and more unreliable. We used the latter as an excuse to address how dude-heavy the script was and rewrote it to have one of the three buds at the center of the story be female. We did more rehearsals online, and as Adam and I had begun podcasting shortly after the initial shoot was scrapped, we toyed with doing a scripted podcast version of the short.
But eventually the pandemic killed the shoot. It sucked the momentum out.
I often hope that we can get that train back on the tracks, but it feels like everyone else moved on.