A New Read from the Focal Press Library

Ghostbuster's II is playing in the next room and although I'm a little distracted I'd hate to close the door.  That franchise was an example of a lot of things done right and I know they were done right because the experience of relating to those heroes has stayed with me my entire life.

I do believe that marketing and distribution is less about the angle and more about making the heart of your film align with the heart of your chosen audience.  And some would argue that what I just said is no different but I would counter that point and say some people just don't honor story for the sake of the sale.

Integrity is a personal choice and I bring it up in response to the concept of selling one's soul in order to make a profit - another condition on an already large heap of challenges tying into how crazy you gotta be to try to live with yourself - and just live - doing this work.

This is my gut response to the opening of the book below.  Stacey Parks is going right to the forefront of the major market shifts that have reduced power in the opening contract for the filmmaker.  According to the introduction we're simply in a decade that has evolved from the movie and DVD boom in the 80s and 90s.  Distributors only want to pay royalties, no longer advances.  Presales are handled by luck of the right cast pick.  But that takes money to start with.  Getting money that doesn't come from presales takes a track record and you don't get that without actually pulling off a gamble here and there.  Even if you get presales, you're aiming for that to take care of getting you in the black.  You might have to pay for theatrical release as a marketing expense and you have to HOPE for US Distribution if you intend on seeing a profit.

But credibility, which is the cornerstone that can make all this happen according to Stacey and others, can apparently be built in different ways.  And in the digital age it makes sense to switch focus from impressing the industry to impressing a non-industry audience: your fans.

I've started admitting to people that yes I wanna be a storyteller and yes I want to help but I'm maybe only 70% altruistic.  There was a not-so-hidden benefit to writing as it was allowing me to connect with the people I'd been trying to build relationships with throughout my final seasons of college.  Stopping this work, even if it was to accommodate production and academia may have been shooting myself in the foot.

This post has been paid for by going to bed at a decent time last night (3:18 am), completely on edge of some very near productions I'm also directing. Personal discipline is constantly evolving but I felt compelled to share:

From the Insider's Guide to Indie Film Distribution, there have been confirmations to just about every angle of research I've done so far.  The need for audience outreach, campaigning as soon as preproduction begins and targeting milestones for an audience following in order to ensure successful screening.  Certain action lists regarding the pursuit of funding have been clarified, but also in confirmation of previous research, regarding the careful outreach to casting directors or agents/managers directly off a cast wish-list that is pre-approved by the distributors you hope to negotiate with.  It also helps if you have 5-10% of your budget for development funds which helps the casting/acting folks take you more seriously.  Getting that money, before you have the rich in tow, could just be a matter of having built that community base and getting kickstarter help, or holding screenings, or growing out your network and working for other projects.  BUT, you still gotta take a big risk at the very beginning, likely with a bunch of your own skin in the game because no one knows who they're dealing with till you've put yourself out there.

Everything here is both logical and inevitable once you start becoming familiar with the players and the incentives and it's only a complicated run - I imagine - the first dozen times.  After which you're a player.

Something I hadn't realized before was that this new title, Producer of Marketing and Distribution or PMD, existed and at the time the 2nd edition was written in 2012, the PMD was pending accreditation with the PGA.

Why aren't we learning this role and it's skillset at the same time we're learning physical production at school?

Let's get what we came for,
C.M. Sanchez III

Update on Lapse of Posting

Back into the swing of things at BC Film,

The days are getting pretty stuffed and going quickly.  Along with everything else had to setup another blog for the community at school.  Unfortunately brain space is limited so if you read up and find any previous posts interesting and want to catch up, feel free to contact me at housesanchez.cinema@gmail.com.

Posts should resume during spring break, if not summer recess for sure.  I'll try to squeeze in the time but frankly while so many deadlines uphold, this sort of stuff has to wait.  It's production season also so the crap is really hittin the fan.

Let's get what we came for,
C.M. Sanchez III

The dream of the hale & hearty master: Scorsese on 'Wolf'

The dream of the hale & hearty master: Scorsese on 'Wolf'

For more information and a look at a pretty great interview, visit: Scorsese Explains His Cinematic Approach for 'The Wolf of Wall Street' in P.T. Anderson Interview

I think it was a pretty fantastic listen.  Scorsese says some things which of course I don't understand and can only guess at.  He talks about designing sequences and shooting in camera movement -which I imagine has to do with using the camera to translate areas of coverage within a scene rather than the typical master, coverage, coverage, insert setup.

He talked a lot about knowing when to let go of a shot or a scene.  He understood at which point the audience would understand and when it was necessary to push the film forward.  I suppose when he had to choose how to deliver information he worked from the essence outward until it became fluff and then chose not to do the fluff.

The interview explored his necessary versatility and flexible handling with the film to play to the actor's strengths and the production constraints.  Ultimately it seems he had a lot of fun.

As a storyteller, he explains that showing the moral compass would inevitably lead to a forgetful film.  Instinctively, I go straight to the point.  I've been marathon watching AMC's 'The Walking Dead' and all I can think about is solving their problems.  Not creating them which would have been my responsibility if I were writing the thing.  You have to learn to betray your desires to explain, and make things right, to harness truly compelling, disturbing, moving conflict.  You have to make things wrong.  Scorsese just knows this now.  And I hadn't heard that lesson before.

Before all the wild nonsense I'd discussed in just the previous post regarding the pain of uncertainty, I do get a sense of the joy it must be to problem solve compelling story for 1-3 months a clip.  My heart is there already.  It's waking up and trying to bring the best of something to light.  That's a good life.

Let's get what we came for,
C.M. Sanchez III

Can you enter your middle-age and enter the film industry at the same time?

Can you enter your middle-age and enter today's film industry at the same time?

For more information, visit So Money An oral history of Swingers

I haven't wanted to write recently.  I'm trying to write a script.  I'm trying to figure out event planning for my school.  I'm also thinking about production; both for class and a pet project I wanted to do for myself.

I'm tense.

A friend sent me this article on how 'Swingers' was put together.  As usual I'm inspired.  The way films become cult classics is anyone's guess but it appears it has to both capture an age and a feel, as if it's born from reminiscence, AND it has to come together through sheer obsession and ultimate constraint.  The creative leadership here was in their mid 20s.

Hitting 30 is a bleak experience in this economy.  There wasn't a parade or anything.  We couldn't afford to go out.  My mom, like many baby-boomer parents, is struggling to find work.  My parents split early so it's just been us.  I almost got out of the apartment when I was working in IT and sharing a place with my ex for like 6 years. Everything went to hell at some point.  My job went bankrupt, the IT field became a vault filled with ex-communicated VPs needing a middle income salary and my ex and I pretty much decided we hated each other.

Then there was film school.  As soon as the production classes started . . . wow what a reality check.
The argument goes: "don't waste your money there, spend it on filmmaking."  Well that presumes you have money to spend on filmmaking while making massive, sometimes dangerous mistakes.  Without money you have to contend with the idea that maybe filmmaking is reserved for the wealthy but you read books like "Rebel without a Crew" or just about any indie producing guide, and you see everyone's broke.  And then you look at the date and think maybe it's the decade.

From the 90's to the early 2000's, I think we were still taking notes from the "Raging Bull' era.  And the economy wasn't great but people had part time gigs.  There wasn't enough for us to save at home and the amount of money I would go through just putting together my first 16mm film was more than I had ever held at one time (I'm talking like $1,000 cause before I was a filmmaker I was an avid video gamer and book worm).  That's not a hobby.  I'm sorry.  But you have that first film and it's pretty much crap and you know you have to make another one but you can't just take an entry-level job that makes you work 30 hours a week at crap pay because what you get leftover after taxes and a drink or two, maybe a date to Tad's Steak, is just enough to get back to the job and certainly not enough energy to pour into a film.  If you take anything higher it's full time and I've known enough managers that piss on education to know it's not a solid argument that you need to shoot.

Production isn't a pickup basketball game.  It isn't poker night.  It requires crew, lights, 10-18 hours, a script you care about, locations that will have you and, if your serious, a strategy to reach audiences.  We know the deal.  I didn't even mention a budget.  I just did.

So when I read how 'Swingers' came about I wonder if I would ever have had the guts.  At 30, I really believe poverty...I believe that no one should have to go through it.  Who can think about storytelling on the verge of eviction?  or while they're starving?  But I'm 30, and only as aware of the process and my identity within it to the extent that I am because the city and state and, to a great extent, the government, pay for me to be here.

Film school, for those who can't casually play 'director' because that money is desperately needed elsewhere, is a place where time, a community, and funding is provided to temporarily bring you across the gap of ignorance into some context of what it takes to be a professional in this industry.

One downside is that by the time you leave, if you've been on more than a handful of rough sets and you have half a stomach for it, you can't do anything else with your life.  You sense a tremendous waste even thinking about becoming a cop (no offense to cops).  Quitting seems ultimately wrong.

The other downside is the "educations" remains incredibly insufficient.  From the digital markets to digital cinema, changes in workflow and the demands of political capacity and gatekeeping, everything grand strategy related to the sustenance of the filmmaker and his crew is left out of the classroom.  It's next to pure memorization exercise save where the film students go out and shoot and that's very much on their wallet (thank you Obama for Direct Loans).

Time and again I think about what the most important assets were to these run-and-gun risk-takers.  It appears to me that it was always the people that stuck by them - from the 'Swingers' cast to the star of 'El Mariachi,' Carlos Gallardo and all the supportive people in between these films and the audience.

I look to fellow students who suffer years expending all that faith with each other on purely academic assignment and by the time they graduate, that energy that sustains them through suffering is next to spent.  Who knows how people continue?  I've only started developing my thesis approach and I'm exhausted.  My hair's thinned, I've lost weight, sleep-loss has slowed me down and the closer I get to graduation the more I need to go on...

I want this very much to be a rallying call but I didn't start a blog to give e-hugz and pass out lolz.  The truth is the business belongs to young men who haven't burned themselves out yet.  Cynics and skeptics tend to be balanced by their checkbooks, many of the mistakes made having gotten them somewhere.  I'm generalizing but this is how it appears to me.  The rest are scattered about in perpetual limbo wondering what's next.

I accidentally moved the mouse over and opened up Movie Magic Scheduling...maybe that's God telling me to shutup and get to work.  But humor me a while longer.

Factor out that we're under pain of death, filmmaking is a great exercise, a great expression of energy and heart and creativity and willfullness...  It's challenging in a way so few other things are.  The people that succeed don't always appear to earn their success because profit motivates a lot of quick successions.  I try to tell myself this to feel that the timing is exactly what it needs to be.  But without knowing the future, every new day finishing up this degree and putting my exiting films together involves a desperate struggle for bits of faith.

Some will read the oral history of 'Swingers' and be inspired.  I was.  But it was in such a way that I stood up wanting to do something, remembered I already was (writing, researching, practicing, studying), sat back down and remembered the reason I started taking things so seriously was because I hit 30 and I had to make a choice.  And for some insane reason I chose the movies...

I don't have a fortune but what has ever constituted one to me I gave to cinema.  Comforts, laziness, procrastination, a private imagination, money for games and dating and generally joy, and several chances at stability.  But without a film...

"Swingers' costed north of $200k ultimately.  That amount just seems impossible.  But.  We know in depth only what yesterday's success story looked like.  I wonder what today's looks like because after everything I've read, it appears more and more about not being found but being made.  So many tools are out there and looking back is nice but it isn't a complete story.  The industry has shifted and ultimately it's in all that uncertainty that I find the greatest hope for absolutely anyone and everyone willing go after what they want.  In the uncertainty there are definite questions and once you know what people want you can fight to give it to them.

I suppose the greatest feat of strength in pursuing a career as a filmmaker is in figuring yourself out.  Hitting 30 is very much about that.  I'm not half way to 31 and it's either gonna be a year worth celebrating or something else and just too depressing.

4 genre shorts, no-budget, shared universe, character driven, two in April, one in October, my thesis next summer and I'm out!

Let's get what we came for,
C.M. Sanchez III

Snap! JOBS Act Trending. Welcome Passion First!

Snap!  JOBS Act Trending.  Welcome Passion First!

For more information, visit: Online Film Financing Startup Passion First Funding Portal Announced at Sundance

My professor, just a few hours ago, was kind enough to offer me a seat for the 'Film Interchange on Saturday January 25th' event tomorrow.  I didn't know who Richard Guay was.  Then I did.  Then I saw the topic and thought 'oh, how nice,' but I couldn't attend because it's my mother's birthday.

And that's life.  Gotta keep a balance and remember all we do is to support the peace in our home and the opportunity to validate the time we have with our loved ones.  

Then I read the article at the head of this post.  It had been waiting for me for a few days on one of my numerous open tabs.  And oddly enough, Richard Guay is the founder of PASSION FIRST.  Well, shit...

I'll bother him via his blog at some point.

Why am I excited?  
One because I have an indirect connection to him and two because he is open to taking questions personally.  Lastly, he's on the forefront of utilizing what the JOBS act has to offer.  I wrote about this a while back when SLATED did a post on the potential investor strategies that will be adjusted now that investors can get involved for a return via public mechanism.  Crowd-funding is likely gonna shift in some big and unforeseen ways.  Ted Hope is a long time advocate of qualifying investors and staged funding also.  

I don't particularly understand it all yet.  I've been putting the pieces together.  But I think it's all about building infrastructure and standardized business practice within Indie Cinema to reduce risk by rewarding preparation, education on both producing and financing ends.  I think it's very cool to see the forces in motion.

I also think this process is going to redeem film schools while simultaneously causing a restructuring on what production programs offer.  The language is changing; right now!  It can easily leave aspiring filmmakers in the dust just as new technologies are quickly making education in celluloid obsolete.  It all ties together but not when it's unraveling.  

The standard definitions are evolving and it's good in that it's all to promote greater efficiency in the near future hopefully.  But curriculum and general outreach needs to remain contemporary, flexible and a consistent priority.  We need more outreach - especially in public institutions like CUNY where there's a wealth of talent without the proper type of current industry perspective to make an impact.

I've got my work cut out for me... Any mentors our there??

Let's get what we came for,
C.M. Sanchez III

P.S. One last note on the implications of productions being valued like stocks:  Business standards are great.  Incentives for organization and validation are wonderful.  But let's not forget that where serious art lies tends to remain the obsessive ego, the unrestrained soul, the passion of those that are absolutely murdered by bureaucracy.  GE CEO Jack Welch advised to beware too much paperwork and support autonomous leadership - to coach policy but not strangle with red-tape.  I hope that whatever new avenues of opportunity arrive, they don't completely obstruct the leg-room needed for emerging artists to be properly appraised.  I've heard about those foreign pre-sale value systems and all art-commerce concerns remain a slippery-slope.

Spiritual Strategies #1

Note: this isn't me.  This is paraphrasing all the people that've been screaming at me to readjust certain aspects of my general approach when tempted to be defensive.

Tools for the upstart:  If a person in a higher administrative position overseeing your agenda pulls you in for questioning (see: naysaying), respond "yes" for things you agree with and "good point" for things you don't agree with.  Practice neutral-face for 2 hours every day.  Then go as far as you can before they realize what's happening.  You won't learn what you have to any other way.  But if you reveal your cause, you give them everything they need to shaft you.

Clarification: everyone has an ultimate goal.  In cinema, one ultimate goal is to create the film.  Another is to make an honest film.  Another is to make art.  One can also entertain or educate.  Another is to just complete the damn thing.  Another is to sell the film.  Another is to make sure as many audiences see the film as possible.  Another is make sure you collect as much from those exhibitions as possible.  Another is to profit.  Another is to share that profit with loved ones.  Another is to pursue a life free from hardship other than what you choose to undertake in service of your fellow man.  <that last goal comes with a qualifier we know as the golden rule cause if you're not careful, karma will make the best of you and there's not much value in a life where you have to look over your shoulder for vengeful people.  Further, it binds the pursuits of all other tiers of effort and wraps it up in a nice bow.  Let me reiterate: the golden rule is the only thing capable of balancing the interests of all of the above.  It's the hardest work but absolutely wonderful once everyone is on the same page.  I won't say what should happen to the people that aren't with it, but know they can do a lot of damage if their ultimate goal doesn't allow for anyone else's.

Some folks are tied to you through circumstance but have an ultimate goal so far outside their involvement with you that all they can muster is energy to reduce the demands you place on them.  They might just want to get through the day.  That's fine, but history saw fit to give them say over you.  They resort to putting up conditions to protect themselves that, on occasion, thwart you.  Some of it's worthwhile, some of it's just emotional undercutting.

If a person thwarts you with conditions that, once met, can make your endeavor more resilient: then "yes"
If a person thwarts you with conditions that ultimately are just conveyors of doubt (sans wisdom, criteria, facts, or an ultimate goal worth achieving as an evolved alternative to the goal you started with (trade up if anything): then "good point."  It's polite at least.

Don't fight with them.  Someone once told me there are conceptual people and literal people.  The literal people who need to get in your way just suck ass.  They can't see beyond their own eyelashes and you represent a change to the habits they've come to live by.  They practically want to kill you by indirect abuse of your intent by tooling fear and doubt to coax you into willful submission.  Don't fight with them.  They put you in their own familiar territory and if you weren't stuck fighting them you'd be off winning somewhere.  Plus it makes you vulnerable to the ultimate attack: conversion.

You don't want to be a hypocrite and be caught reverse nay-saying, effectively letting them turn you into an asshole you thought you weren't.  Come to find out we're all guilty at some point or another, but that's no reason to kowtow to figures who overtly couldn't care less about your passion or success.  Also, these figures are almost always conservative and they hate progress or anything else they don't understand.  Being difficult won't make a difference.  Outdoing and outliving them will.

Let's get what we came for with "Yesses" and "Good Points" and brutal flanking maneuvers,
C.M. Sanchez III

Who's Money Do You Trust?

Who's Money Do You Trust?

For more information, visit: Thinking in Money

Point taken.  Having not received any real money yet to do much of anything, you all know I've done my share of dreaming.  At some point it did cross my mind that I might be too excited when the first prospect revealed itself.  And what would I do?  Who knows?

Before this blog post from Slated, I probably would have suffered from depression stemming from the realization that I wouldn't know where to begin.  I've recently finished Robert Rodriguez's book, "Rebel Without a Crew," which is a fun and informative read of what a trip to Hollywood was like in the early 90's.  He was effectively taken care of and his life changed almost overnight.

However this isn't the 90's and considering serious business from the standpoint of a novice seems like entering a shark tank with no armor on.  What a wonderful thing the internet is?  Simply put: interview your investors.  It's a major concern from the upper echelon who's doing what and associated with whom.  Your financiers reflect on you.  It's not that your investors have to be royalty.  But they should be credible.  They should be flexible and on the same page with you, preferably have some film experience or have advisers that are educated in film business, and most importantly there should be transparency about their history.  That said, and as written in this blog post, Hollywood has a penchant for eccentrics not always on the proper side of the law.  With tens of millions of dollars to throw around, the average emerging artist is dealing with a perspective that is as good as alien.

I fear there's no way to prepare for someone with that kind of power other than to meditate on the fact that all of that money comes with a shortened imagination.  It's constantly seeking a way to increase its wealth and it can't do so without investing in something as yet undiscovered or as yet exploited.  If that product is you than there is an inherent value you have as a creator with which you can contend.  And while the world may not have fully established that creative aspect as equal to gold, it certainly is respected for its ability to create gold.

Regardless, take time and do your homework.  Map the industry, learn the faces slowly but surely.  Don't agree to the first thing that sounds nice.  Protect what you have, who you are, and your ability to keep working first before anything.

Let's get what we came for,
C.M. Sanchez III