Nicholas Thurkettle

Wherein a Low Budget Filmmaker Had Better Look Beyond the Obvious Numbers

If you are fortunate enough to have any kind of festival run with a film you have made, there are two questions you can bet money on receiving at a Q&A before your run is over. 1) “What did you shoot on?” and 2) “What was your budget?”

The answer to the first question is readily at-hand. But I have found the second to be frustratingly non-simple; and I’ve learned something by exploring what vexes me about it.

Is your “budget” solely the amount of money which came out of yours and your investors’ pockets in order to make what appears on the screen? Do you include marketing expenses like creating a website and printing posters and postcards? What about buying snacks for a cast and crew screening party? What about festival submission fees? Festival travel costs? If you are planning this properly, you certainly need to plan ahead for those, but are they part of your “filmmaking” budget? Or is marketing and distribution – at least for the purposes of answering that audience member’s question – a separate number?

This is not a problem unique to filmmakers at my level. It infects even the highest levels of Hollywood studios, where we are accustomed to articles describing the nine-figure production budgets of blockbuster films while yada-yada-ing the worldwide marketing and distribution costs, which are often in the same ballpark as the price of making the movie, effectively doubling its “cost”. Simple inertia keeps the journalistic focus on what it costs to “make” the movie, even though, for filmmakers trying to build a career for themselves in this new unmoored independent landscape, unpacking and defining the costs of marketing and releasing their films is becoming essential for survival.

Interesting (to me) side note – the unit cost of a “blockbuster” has demonstrated remarkable stability in recent years. In 2009, we had a Pirates of the Caribbean sequel, a Harry Potter sequel, a Terminator sequel, and Avatar sitting at the high end of expense – all with reported production budgets ranging from $200-250 million apiece. A decade later, not even factoring in inflation, that’s still what you can tend to expect from a non-Avengers Marvel superhero movie or a Star Wars episode (other than Solo, which ran way over from having to essentially re-start production.) Hollywood is demonstrating remarkable efficiency at creating more and more bedazzling VFX spectacles at a predictable cost.

But let’s come back down from nine figures to where I live – three and four figures. It often sent an impressed buzz going through a film festival audience when I shared that I spent a total of $783 making The Dinner Scene. And that does match the amount I had outlayed by the time we had a finished, screenable film – I tracked every purchase and payment in a spreadsheet.

It didn’t, though, include what I described above – dozens of festival submissions, travel to festivals in many different states, posters, even the little things like driving to the post office and shipping a Blu Ray disc or thumb drive somewhere. By the time all that is factored in, over the course of two years I have probably shelled out $4-5,000 because of my “$783” film.

And there’s something even more important that number doesn’t reflect, but we’ll get to that in a bit.

So there’s a way of looking at the number which shows it to be fudged, but I think fudged in a way that is relatively traditional among filmmakers. In a way, it’s kind of a mutually-agreeable fib between filmmaker and audience – we make the dream seem more achievable, and our achievement more ingenious, the smaller a number we report. I take a greater sense of responsibility from that, though, to volunteer the bigger numbers if I am talking with anyone who has a serious intent to start down this road. They deserve to know.

In the last couple of years I have been able to demonstrate a success at getting things done for a very small price, even among the community of people making short films for festivals. Shorts I made for $700-800 would get programmed alongside works with budgets of $20,000, $30,000, or more. Because of that, I was blessed to have people close to me willing to begin investing in larger productions.

When asked the budget of “R&R”, I usually answer “$3,000”, and that’s relatively accurate by the above standard. But there’s no miracle hiding behind my thrifty ways – a lot of it comes from the volunteer energy of my collaborators, and daring to bypass costs that traditionally mitigate risk at higher budget levels. I haven’t registered an LLC for a short film. I’ve deferred pay when working with SAG-AFTRA performers. I’ve finagled free gear, skipped getting production insurance…I could have easily bankrupted myself from stupidity had one accident happened.

I put myself through the exercise of calculating what “R&R” would have cost had we made the same movie the more “professional” way – paying everyone a commensurate rate for their skilled labor, getting traditional insurance, true rental fees for all the gear we used, hotel rooms for cast and crew instead of us all squeezing onto couches and yoga mats to sleep at the cabin where we were filming.

Once I crunched all that, I realized that the same movie which I describe as costing $3,000 could have cost $15-20,000 without altering anything an audience sees.

How do you categorize those phantom dollars separating the two figures? How do you factor them into your understanding of what it costs to make a movie?

My anxiety about the success of “R&R” out there on the festival circuit is admittedly amplified by the fact that people close to me put their own money on the line to bring it to life. While considering this gap in “budget” numbers, though, a realization crystallized which I think I already sensed, subliminally, but which I became determined to hold on to as it now expressed itself:

Every person who works on a movie for less than a professional rate IS an investor in that movie.

Right? If their hours of expert labor are worth $500 and I compensate them with $100 worth of gas money and food, that $400 isn’t imaginary. By surrendering it, they have invested as much in my movie as an outsider writing me a $400 check did. Sure, I cut a few corners, but I didn’t get from $15-20,000 down to $3,000 with my own ingenuity and daring. It’s because of the people who provided labor, energy, artistry, and valuable equipment and supplies for less than their true value.

Is this a merely rhetorical consideration? A quibble over numbers that never took the form of real currency? I can’t stop you thinking that way. But how would it change the way you ran your set if you thought of every person around you as an investor? Would you treat them with greater respect and care? Would you feel a greater responsibility to plan and organize so that they knew how valued their time was? Would you work to keep them in the loop throughout the life of the project, knowing that they had “bought in” to every achievement it racks up out there in the world?

I send updates to every person who worked on my shorts. I include pictures and stories from festivals. If there’s a screening they might be able to get to, I send them everything they need to know in order to get there and/or invite their friends. Not everyone responds, but I’d rather show I care more than they need me to. Conversely, I’ve acted for cut rates in feature films where a year or more can pass after I wrap and leave the set without my hearing a sniff of news.

I have been remarkably fortunate in the talent and energy level of the people who have worked on multiple films with me; but I do believe you get more fortunate in such matters when you cultivate an attitude like this. I believe you get more fortunate when you consider in advance how to create the best experience available within your means. As we were driving down out of the mountains after wrapping “R&R”, I joked-but-not-really-a-joke that the 44 hours we had spent up there constituted just about the perfect span of time for the moviemaking sprint we had to undertake; and if we had stayed up there for one more day, we might not have been able to keep it positive no matter how much we liked each other. That was as much a gamble to me as the lack of insurance – asking how far one can ask people you’re not paying to push themselves. And I think, in that area, we came close to finding the limits of our “budget”.

To put it in the starkest terms – my credit card is not going to allow me to pretend that festival travel costs don’t count, and my credibility (not to mention my circle of friends) is not going to allow me to disregard a finite budget of donated labor. All those costs are floating out there, in the future of films already made or not even made yet. “R&R” was finished in January of 2018 but, just last night, I spent another $75 on it, making a new DCP plus backup for upcoming festival screenings. That’s not a dollar amount I can afford to casually light on fire.

No matter that it might take some of the magic out of the astoundingly teensy numbers we consider “the budget”, if I am going to advance my career I have to recognize and prepare for these costs now; just as I have to recognize and prepare for the “cost” of all the favors which will once again bless me as yet another tiny, tiny budgeted project of mine comes to life and gets out into the world.

I am entering into knuckled-down pre-production on a new short that we intend to shoot in March. The name of it is “Three Ninety Five”, and as some Californians might wonder, there is a connection to the 395 highway which runs through the Eastern Sierras.

This means that an increasing amount of my mental bandwidth is occupied by questions – ranging from practical (where is there a good concentration of vintage/thrift stores where we can go on a prop/costume shopping expedition?), to the far more abstract (why are we even calling it a film when there is no stage of the process where photochemical film will be involved?)

This project arose out of a ground rule of mine, and a practical reality I was up against. The ground rule is to make sure that there’s something important to do in each project that I’ve never done before, and which terrifies me. And the practical reality is that, with my education being in theater, I have in my filmmaking work heavily relied on the technical knowledge of my collaborators, to the extent of working with the same cinematographer on my last five projects. While it is one of my pillars of makin’ stuff wisdom that you should forge alliances with people who are good at the things you are bad at, I could not count on such an arrangement going on indefinitely, especially at my budget level. So “Three Ninety Five” is, from concept to production scenario on up, designed to force me to act as my own cinematographer for the first time, and do it for a project that is going to DEPEND on visual artistry to succeed.

This means immersing myself deeper than I ever have in questions of camera, lens choice, lighting, image resolution, coloring LUTs, and so much more. It means paying way, way more attention to what gear other filmmakers are using and what motivates their choices. I can’t say I’ll be an pro when this is done but from sheer, adrenalized cramming I am definitely going to learn a thing or eight.

As always, my choices are significantly restricted by my budget, which is larger than my first few shorts but nowhere near what we spent on R&R or Anya (both of which were expensive by my standards but absurdly cheap by most others’.) But it’s cheaper than ever to get not just big-screen quality, but more than you could possibly need. What do I mean by that, exactly?

There’s a lot of talk in the business now about 4K. There was a rush to adopt it as a universal standard but, at least from where I’m standing, I think a lot of people have successfully questioned the necessity of that. This terrific article from IndieWire breaks down the cameras, lens packages, and image resolutions of the features playing at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. I go into such an article presuming, with good reason, that the directors and cinematographers quoted know way, way, way more about this than I do. And, while the chief takeaway from the article is that the Arri Alexa Mini is cornering the indie feature market, another takeaway is that many of these filmmakers are opting not to even originate their footage in 4K.

There are way more reasons for that than I know, but I can tell you already that the choice undoubtedly saves money and speeds up workflow (speed shortens the road between *spending* money and, hopefully, making money.) 4K footage is chunky stuff and, if you can’t afford to work at a professional editing bay, it might choke off your home computer. And to what end? Several of my shorts were originated in 4K; but we’ve rarely, if ever to my knowledge, screened at that full resolution at any festival. The best screening of R&R we’ve had to date was a 2K ProRes file, and it looked scrumptious when projected. The majority of the festival screenings I’ve participated in projected the 1080p file I keep in my cloud storage; and it’s doubtful the system they were projecting on could have handled more.

I don’t say this to dismiss higher-end quality. I went to The Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood to watch Lawrence of Arabia (probably still my favorite film of all time) projected in a new 70mm print and I BATHED in that business. I was one of the few people who went to see Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk projected in the format director Ang Lee nicknamed “The Whole Shebang” – 120 frames-per-second, 4K footage in 3D. His The Life of Pi remains one of the most bewitching uses of 3D since Avatar made it hip. And Billy Lynn in that format was a staggering, visceral experience, but that’s a double-edged sword because it raises the question we rarely ask but which underpins everything – what we go to the movies to experience?

This recent article from Popular Mechanics pinged my radar, describing the history of the mostly-forgotten 1980’s sci-fi feature Brainstorm, directed by the pioneering, legendary, not-enough-superlatives Douglas Trumbull. The film concerned characters entering what we would now call Virtual Reality; and to depict the switch, Trumbull experimented with using different film stocks and frame rates. After intensive research and study into the effect of visual stimulus on human brains and nervous systems, he created a process he called Showscan, consisting of 70mm film captured at 60fps, compared with the cinematic standard of 35mm film at 24fps.

“I’ve ridden on roller coasters in real life, and I rode the roller coaster in Showscan,” he (screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin) says. “The memory locked in by the viewing of Showscan was stronger than the memory of actually going on a roller coaster. It registers in a very deep, impactful way.”

This parallels my experience watching Billy Lynn – during a flashback to a fatal military encounter, someone getting shot didn’t feel like a spectacular Hollywood effect, it felt like I had witnessed a murder. It was less glossy, less artful, but registered deep in my brain somewhere outside the usual space that movies land in. That makes for a powerful tool, which means there’s an equally-powerful responsibility to ask – sure, we CAN do this, but why spring that on people who just want to sit in the dark and be taken away by a story for awhile?

How perfect is too perfect? And is imperfection necessary or just something we’re used to? As a measurement of the depths of my nerdhood, I’ve been tracking the progress of Project 4K77 – one of multiple fan efforts to create a projectable, UHD version of the “unaltered” original Star Wars based on a hodgepodge of sources; effectively undoing everything Lucasfilm has done in the creation of various Special Editions over the years. As a ride-or-die Han-shot-first-er, I respect the effort.

We now have a generation come of age for whom digital media and digital filmmaking tools have simply always been in the toolbox. And it’s fascinating to watch as, in going back into film history to do this project justice, the Project 4K77 team has had to re-learn and explain for their followers just how “messy” the entire analog filmmaking process was for the first century-ish of the art form.

They have catalogued the four different film stocks used to shoot the original film, researched the ad hoc solutions the Star Wars crew came up with day after day shooting in a hostile desert, tracked how the multiple generations of optical printing for effects would have altered the color and grain level from shot to shot. What we would now consider a distracting inconsistency was so unavoidable that no one at the time would think to demand better.

And – what was sort of an obvious fact then which was beneath consideration but which shows just how different filmmaking has become – they have outlined for observers how, due to the photochemical bath used to produce prints, there would be minute differences between every single film print of Star Wars ever made.

All of this taken together means that there is no end of the rainbow in the search for the “real” Star Wars. At some point, you just have to stop and agree that it’s as real as life allows. And that, just like how your Machu Picchu experience may vary depending on what month or time of day you visit Machu Picchu, there are some variables you will simply never be able to wrangle in making the experience of an artistic work universally repeatable and universally consistent from person to person.

As much as people may have roasted Lucas for claiming that the Special Edition represented things he always wanted to do but couldn’t with 1977 technology; for certain things, he was right. A microbudget indie film has better tools available now than he ever did for consistent coloring and grain, and anyone of professional seriousness uses them. It’s just become automatic.

And while we’re talking about grain, the current version of Project 4K77 has been split into two parts, one with as “clean” an image as could be produced using the latest in DNR (Digital Noise Reduction) tools, the other without said tools. And that’s because for some people, a movie without grain looks “wrong”, and Star Wars without grain looks especially wrong. But younger viewers raised on a diet of “cleaner” imagery don’t see a problem at all.

Film grain was an inevitable outcome of the process at the time. Doing without it was, for decades, not even really an option. So we owe it to ourselves to ask: does that sense of “texture” actually positively contribute to the experience of watching the film? Or is it, at this point, a nostalgic trigger programmed by however many thousands of movies we have watched in our lives? I know that I “like” the 24fps experience of watching a movie over the 30fps that was the TV/Video standard for a long time; as a crowdsourced audience standard it was a definite improvement over the 18fps that often came from silent film. But did the progress actually peak there? Was further experimentation just too expensive and exhausting? Or were the results, like that Whole Shebang, so intense to the senses that it took the experience past positive? What do we go to movies for?

Going further down the rabbit hole – say you like the sound of this Project 4K77 file, and you download it. Well, how are you going to watch it? Are you going to strike a 35mm print from it and run it on a vintage projector? Or are you going to watch it on a UHD digital television? Or, hell, your phone? Again, we arrive at the conclusion that there is no singular, virgin-pure Star Wars. The work is aging in a way unique to its medium. But go through a museum and ask yourself how many brushstrokes on a painting are the artist’s, and how many are a restorer’s, and you’ll see this is not a unique problem.

Well, we’ve traveled far on this, haven’t we? It’s going to sound foolhardy, but despite all of these considerations, I’ve made the choice to shoot “Three Ninety Five” in 4K. Whether it’s artistically “necessary” or not, I’ve found a cost-effective camera package rental I can do it with, and knowing that it’s increasingly common at the Hollywood level, I’d like to at least test whether I can manage the workflow from within my present resources. Call it gaining a professional credential.

Will it ever result in any viewer having an aesthetically “better” experience with the film? Honestly, I doubt it – there are so many elements: story, acting, direction, editing, lighting, music, which, if they aren’t up to snuff, resolution isn’t going to mean tiddlywinks.

But I wouldn’t have known to look at it that way last month. I might have let myself walk 100% into membership with the cult of 4K. Last year I acted in a feature film that was shooting at *8*K; so I’m sure not the only one hearing that siren song. I’ll let you know if they ever finish post-production.

I had plenty to dwell on already when it comes to theme, to plotting, to the eternal dance of how much information to provide the audience, how much to withhold. I could spend six professional lifetimes immersing myself in this stuff and still wouldn’t know a “best” way to cinematically render any idea I have. It will always be a combination of resources, conditions, and whatever planning I can manage. But the unifying thoughts that can help us choose from within those restrictions can only come by asking a few big, airy questions once in awhile.

Now – on to that thrift store shopping.

Now that everyone who has wanted a reasonable chance to see Avengers: Infinity War and Ant-Man and the Wasp has had it, I can get SPOILER-y and talk about a strange coincidence I noticed. This is not an Easter Egg, unless you think there’s hidden meaning in using the same ineffective screenwriting trick in two consecutive movies.

Avengers: Infinity War is like a Russian Nesting Doll of MacGuffins. Thanos is on a quest for the six all-powerful MacGuffins that will power his MacGuffin Glove and give him the power to MacGuffin away half of all life in the universe. This is probably on the order of quintillions of lives at least, so since we care when one character dies, we should automatically care quintillions of times about this, right?

Well, not really, and we could have a whole separate conversation about how we in the audience abstract numbers and concepts too big to comprehend, and so don’t interact with them with the same sense of empathy – see J.J. Abrams nuking five planets’ full of randos in The Force Awakens to show off the power of Starkiller Base and not achieving anywhere near the emotional impact of the destruction of Alderaan, from which we had at least one, living representative on-camera to provide some emotional immediacy and connection.

What matters in Infinity War is that we have all these mega-powerful objects that Do Things, so we want the Good Guys to have them so the Bad Guys won’t do Bad Things with them. That’s all fine. But what it triggers is a remarkable progression of side quests whose common thread is that they require so much explaining.

Thanos: So what do I have to do to get the Orange MacGuffin?
Red Skull: Blah blah blah the power of the MacGuffin, the POWER blah blah blah.
Thanos: Please to be cutting to the chase.
Red Skull: Hurl your daughter off a cliff because reasons.
Thanos: Dig. *hurls daughter*

We get a lot of environments and character appearances in this movie that are a riot of visual design and Marvel lore deep pulls; but which ultimately take a lot of oxygen away from the emotional strength of the very simple dramatic actions they surround. The Soul Stone sequence is actually one of the best dilemmas in the movie because it complicates our perception of Thanos to see that he is actually capable of love; and this is the one moment where he at all reflects seriously on whether he wants to carry on with his cockamamie Malthusian Doom Preventative Genocide. Good drama right there.

And here is bad drama:

Eitri: Welcome to Planet MacGuffin. The only way to defeat Thanos is with the Legendary MacGuffin Sword.
Thor: Yes, we have come here to Planet MacGuffin for that thing.
Eitri: But we cannot make it until you re-start the MacGuffin Device.
Thor: Then I will do that, since otherwise we’re all just standing here talking loudly.
Eitri: But wait! The only way to re-start the MacGuffin Device is to stand in that beam of Pure MacGuffin Energy, which will definitely kill you.
Thor: It is weird that you would design a MacGuffin Device that way; but so be it. I will stand in the deadly MacGuffin beam, since it is the only way to get the MacGuffin Sword which only I can wield.
Eitri: But it makes no sense to die making a weapon only you can wield, since as I will repeat now for the benefit of viewers who weren’t listening before, it will for sure, 100% murder you absolutely. We are now instructing you, the audience, to believe you are about to watch Thor die and cry accordingly.
Thor: *doesn’t die*
Eitri: Womp womp. Here is your sword. Come back in the sequel, please!

Thor escapes what we were told was certain death using a bit of movie magic I like to call Squinty Power – where a character reaches beyond their limits and does the seeming impossible because everything is at stake and they squint and yell a lot and so for that reason it just works.

Squinty Power is a cheat, and pretty silly once you start watching for it; but I won’t deny it’s a cheat that can really work when fulfilling an emotional arc. Emotion rules in movies, plain and simple. You don’t need to stop for a Powerpoint presentation on the radiation resistance of Asgaardian flesh in order for an audience to believe in Thor’s survival. You can even accept his cheating of death as a form of Deus ex Machina if you believe he is completing a catharsis, or reaching an emotional epiphany about, say, the death of his world and family.

But Thor putting himself in lethal danger here doesn’t resonate with any of that. It is just a physical obstacle that has been placed in his path in the middle of the movie on his way to the revenge he imagines will actually exorcise all that stuff. For me, the whole sequence provided no emotional lift and so came off as faintly ludicrous.

So, okay, in having to choreograph the movie blockbuster equivalent of a Superheroes on Ice show where every one of 40+ characters needs to get their moment, the filmmakers got a little sloppy in one corner. We can forgive that. But what happens, only a few months later, in Ant-Man and the Wasp?

Janet van Dyne: Help me my husband, for I am trapped in the MacGuffin Zone – a realm totally unlike your world, where the laws of space and time do not apply.
Hank Pym: We will do whatever it takes to find you!
Janet van Dyne: But if you don’t find me before this giant ticking clock reaches zero, then you will definitely be doomed to not find me for 100 years.
Scott Lang: That is weirdly specific for a realm where the laws of space and time do not apply.
Janet van Dyne: DO NOT QUESTION THE WAYS OF THE MACGUFFIN ZONE.
Hank Pym: Oh noes! The giant ticking clock reached zero, and my brilliant wife swore to me that if I had not found her by this exact moment, she would be lost for 100 years. I HAS SO MUCH SAD!
Janet van Dyne: Hello I am your wife.
Hank Pym: Womp womp.

They, of course, overcame the weirdly-specific rules of the MacGuffin Zone Quantum Realm with The Power of Love, which is like the heart’s version of Squinty Power. As with Infinity War, this isn’t even the climax of the movie; it’s a stop on the way to a bunch of other stuff; which makes it kind of a waste of a miracle. And because the Ant-Man movies have such a nervous attitude about even dipping their toes into Hank Pym’s storied history of being a monstrous a-hole to his wife, you don’t even have that available as a chance for him to redeem himself, or experience emotional growth that’s specific to his character.

I see a common error here, which I’m calling Womp Womp Stakes; where a movie too hastily attempts to manufacture all-or-nothing, life-or-death scenarios that require a lot of set-up in dialogue because you haven’t set them up well enough to be intuitively grasped by an audience; which are then immediately reversed without an accompanying emotional boost that might get you over it as an audience. It’s like a rollercoaster coming to a full stop mid-ride to stare at a picture of a giant Shruggie.

The dangerous flaws in a Womp Womp Stakes scenario are a) dialogue is usually your weakest screenwriting tool for accomplishing anything, so it’s hard to make it your primary strategy for getting audience buy-in at a life-or-death intensity of emotion, and b) an audience only believes in miracles so many times. If you miss the bullseye they just feel like suckers for caring; and you have to work that much harder to re-earn credibility with them.

I’m more sensitive to this stuff having just survived the Dr. Who tenure of writer Steven Moffat, who demanded Feels from us and then mocked us for believing him so many times that Fake Killing Rory became a damn meme.

Beyond even poor Rory, in the Doctor Who episode Let’s Kill Hitler, The Doctor got poisoned and then, apropos of not a damn thing, the TARDIS announced that his regeneration powers as described over decades of canon were suddenly canceled by this special MacGuffin Poison and so we were supposed to believe that The Doctor was really going to Forever Die…even though we were right in the middle of a season-long story arc where we saw him Forever Die in the damn premiere! Moffat nested a Fake Death INSIDE a Fake Death!

I’m happy to acknowledge that the writers of sci-fi, fantasy, and superhero stories are really damned challenged to keep coming up with MacGuffins that seem exciting and different but which once again channel our heroes into another climax of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s trademark “Epic PG-13 Punch-Fight Against the Digital Hordes”. But life-or-death consequences you need to stop the movie to explain will never be as powerful as consequences you instinctively feel just by absorbing what’s on-screen. In the opening shot of the original Star Wars, you don’t need rebel troops saying “I hope that Star Destroyer piloted by the Evil Empire doesn’t hit us Heroic Rebels with their MacGuffin beam!” Even though the ships, the technology, the whole Galaxy of that movie is completely alien to us, as an audience we instantly absorb Little Ship, Big Ship, and shooting, and we get that adds up to Little Ship is in Danger.

Since the MacGuffin Infinity Stones offer power over Life, Reality, Time, and everything else, we are primed for next year’s Avengers movie to walk back as many of the on-screen deaths in Infinity War as the studio feels like. The Infinity Gauntlet is a Magic Reset Button there for the taking. And I would bet cash money that the miraculous return of certain characters might well depend on negotiations over their multi-film contracts. This could be the most expensive exercise in Womp Womp Stakes in the history of Hollywood.

I hope that won’t be so. Marvel actually is pretty consistent about clean, comprehensible communication of simple stakes, and downright ingenious at visually getting over radical concepts like Tony Stark’s new nanotech Iron Man suit or Wakanda’s many, many, many, many, many, many forms of Vibranium tech.

But this is something every writer needs to watch for. If you see yourself getting boxed into a situation where you could be creating Womp Womp Stakes; stop for a minute, back up, and love your audience better than that.

Last week I was in Palm Springs, at the annual Palm Springs International ShortFest. This is, to my knowledge, the largest festival dedicated to short films in America. I was attending in my recently-added capacity as an Associate Programmer for the 2018 Newport Beach Film Festival, scouting projects and making connections with filmmakers. It was my first time attending a festival in an “industry” capacity, and it was immensely valuable to navigate the experience from this perspective; to see people with similar ambitions to mine through the eyes of someone whose mission it is to find great talent and great material.

Some of those muscles from my story executive days are still in there, and it had a few similarities to that unforgettable weekend I spent at a Writer’s Conference in Portland, getting pitched screenplays so relentlessly every moment I was out of my hotel room that I was literally scheduling people to pitch me during my elevator rides. This was not quite so aggressive, but that badge sure made me a target.

I often speak in terms of data, because part of my brain will always work like a massive, 3D monster of a spreadsheet; and I want to use that to move these filmmaking notions of mine forward. Palm Springs is uniquely valuable in that regard – they receive over 4,000 submissions in an average year, and program from 3-400 of them. That’s almost 10% accepted, which for a famous, Academy-qualifying festival, is actually relatively high. On top of that, every short submitted, even if rejected by the festival proper, is made available in what’s known as “The Marketplace” to Industry people like myself, and anyone who buys a festival pass with Marketplace privileges.

The Marketplace is essentially a room with dozens of Macs with headphones. You can dial up any film there that the Festival considered, as well as have access to a master spreadsheet with the filmmakers’ contact information. So even if you’re rejected by the Festival, a filmmaker with enough innate hustle could make the choice to come out anyway with some posters and postcards and any other gimmick they can devise, and try to get as many people as possible to see their movie. And more than a few people I met were here doing just that.

So because of the unusually high acceptance rate, and the guaranteed secondary opportunity to attract eyeballs, an entry to Palm Springs is one of the few genuinely no-lose scenarios for the price out there. And those incentives mean that, at Palm Springs, you have the opportunity to take a more informed sample of the current landscape of short filmmaking around the world than almost anywhere else you could go. I’ve never entered, out of sheer intimidation; now that I see the opportunity for what it is, and have spent several days scouting the competition in-depth, I’m resolving to enter The Dinner Scene for next year, because I think we have a puncher’s chance with it. Perhaps R&R too, if I finish it and it turns out to be a non-disaster.

I never actually went to the multiplex where festival screenings were happening. My festival experience was in that Marketplace, when I wasn’t grabbing snacks or refreshing my coffee at the Filmmaker’s Lounge next door. One set of filmmakers, to promote their film about maple sugar in Canada, had left some maple syrup by the Lounge coffee machine with an invitation to us to sweeten our coffee with it. I took them up on that – repeatedly.

It can feel a bit like punching a clock. I watched over 4 hours’ worth of shorts each day, when I wasn’t meeting with filmmakers, or stealing time away to work at my other part-time job, or check on the evolving sound mix for The Dinner Scene, or review casting submissions for R&R. There were parties every night, never starting until 10pm because of the heat.

Right – the heat. This was brutal. Inhuman on a level of “why is any human even here?” I arrived at 9:45pm on Tuesday night, and it was 109 degrees out. Some nights, right before sunrise, it might dip a bit below 90. On at least two days temperatures topped 120. I start getting physically uncomfortable above about 77 degrees, so this was short-circuiting my body any time I left the confines of a heavily air-conditioned building. Thirty seconds of crossing the hotel parking lot would give my body those weird chill-spasms that are like a physiological red alert. One afternoon mixer was in a restaurant’s party room, one entire wall was exterior glass and the room was very crowded, so all I had time to do was chug a glass of Riesling and then retreat to stand under an AC vent in the men’s room before I legitimately fainted. Made me miss February in Colorado at the Durango Festival – 7,000+ feet up, brisk by day and with nighttime lows around freezing. Much more my climate.

In 5 days I watched over 80 short films. My festival program was marked up like a racing form. I saw an Estonian LGBT coming out story using animated foxes and horses, a sci-fi allegory about loneliness and STD’s done with deliberate 80’s video throwback visuals with a David Lynch-style emphasis on hypnotic dread over narrative, a thoroughly charming 12-minute Australian song-and-dance musical set in a library, an enthralling short documentary about a pair of ping-pong tables in a New York City park that have seemingly saved a few lost souls, and a deranged British short about a homeless schizophrenic on a mission to prove that his street brethren are being kidnapped and processed into artisanal coffee beans in his gentrifying neighborhood. Maybe 5 of the filmmakers whose work I saw feel ready to step into a feature, and one in particular I think is going to be directing Oscar bait within the next 10 years if this town has a lick of good sense.

Some of my favorite moments, though, happened when I got to chat with filmmakers after I watched their shorts, go over what I liked, where they’re going as filmmakers, hear stories of their struggles to get it made, and give them my thoughts on what might help them raise their game. One thing that happens at an event like this is that everyone in the room is bonded by the shared experience of having willed a film project into being. Even if their work was flawed or lazy, they still created something; and just doing that took far greater than average willpower and persistence. I just finished watching Season 1 of GLOW, and it captured something about how if a creative mission is going to be completed, there has to come a moment where someone activates that Closer instinct even when it seems impossible, insane, and pointless to carry on. It put the lady wrestlers and their determination on the level of the damn Magnificent Seven. Great show.

At this level, deciding to make a movie is like that. 99+ percent of the time, you’re going to lose all your money on a short. The acceptance rate at top festivals is brutal. Only a very few filmmakers will actually be able to stepping stone off a short into something better; and they’ll only manage to do that if they work even harder than they did making their short, which probably felt like the hardest thing ever. Why do it? Because whether the film is coming from a city in American or a village in Nepal, film itself is putting us into these places, into these conversations, and I’m still in love with that. Even on short #80 I was still excited when I clicked “Play” – ready for whatever the next storyteller had for me.

Can’t wait to put The Dinner Scene out there; I hope its journey is a good one.

As a screenwriter, William Goldman is famous for a string of classics including Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men, Marathon Man, and The Princess Bride. As a guru to budding screenwriters, he is famous for countless books and essays on the subject, but his most-quoted maxim in Hollywood is “Nobody Knows Anything”. This refers to the truth that you can never predict a hit or flop with 100% certainty; sometimes, you can structure your script properly, have dazzling stars and a big budget, and audiences will still boot you out the saloon door. Even he wasn’t immune.

William Goldman falls prey to his own maxim; and also lions

Screenwriters (myself included, I confess), have cited this in refutation of revision notes that we don’t want to execute. And I do think there is some wisdom in erring on the side of the storyteller’s impulse rather than trying to focus group your way into the largest audience possible. That is a very big, ongoing, vital conversation…and is not the subject of this blog post.

While I was at the Phoenix Film Festival, I spoke on a panel about screenwriting and a budding screenwriter asked me about the creative impulse behind “The Retriever”. I said, with total honesty, that my two organizing principles were 1) I wanted to show off my producing partner Barney Crow’s acting ability as a thank-you for everything he did to bring my first short film to life; and 2) I had no money. This is not the answer you usually get, but it was an honest one – I came up with an idea based on what I had.

I have taught many screenwriters by now, and if there’s a common mindset I would love to undo with a magic wand, it’s the idea that you are learning how to write Your Script. The One That Will Make You Rich. Why screenwriters ready to cite Goldman’s First Rule to studio executives can still cling to the idea that they just need to learn how to format their One Great Idea and they’ll definitely get those Harry Potter dollars is baffling, but human. Nobody Knows Anything cuts both ways.

You can’t control outcomes in this business, you can only control your own process. Which means that if you take this at all seriously, you have to think well beyond one script. Imagine if your plan to make it as a football player was to train really hard to run only one specific pass route, then hang around a stadium in the hopes that the Super Bowl will happen there, AND that a team will offer you a chance to catch the winning touchdown because they just happen to want to run that one play. You’d say that’s an absurd plan, because even if you get really good at running that route, your scenario depends on the occurrence of so many incredibly unlikely things that aren’t in your power to manifest. And screenwriting is like that. Don’t learn how to just write one script. Instead, make yourself a screenwriter, ready to apply your skills to diverse situations and staying in the game by constantly keeping your skills in practice.

The best way to make yourself useful (read: hire-able) as a screenwriter is to show that you can use the tools of storytelling to solve problems. The illustration I come back to constantly is in the legendary Raiders story conference transcripts that show George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Lawrence Kasdan beating out the original Indiana Jones movie. The key element that Kasdan, as the screenwriter, provides, is his sense for the progression of drama and cause-and-effect; and his desire for simplicity and efficiency. His screenwriting talents help create essential elements like the Staff Headpiece which motivates Indy to seek out Marion and, due to a clever reversal, subsequently puts the Nazis at the wrong dig site while Indy and his team discover the tomb.

Solving problems in your own work is one thing, and no doubt beneficial time and time again. Now that I am making my own short films, however, I’ve become a born-again advocate for practical training. Naturally, if you are excited about some big, studio-sized idea, write it down. But while you are waiting to receive the Standard Rich and Famous Contract a la The Muppet Movie, go ahead and write something to make right now.

Does this mean you have to become a director? Not necessarily – find someone who wants to do that if you prefer. When people talk about networking, introverted writers can have nightmares about lunches and parties with agents and executives. And if you’re lucky you will have to do some of that, someday. But if you’re just forging partnerships with other creative people in the course of bringing work to life, that is a form of networking too, and one that can be of immense benefit to the peer group you start to build. And it’s a lot more fun, in my experience.

But what thing should you make? What camera should you use? Should you use SAG actors or non-SAG? Should you submit to festivals or start a YouTube channel? How much should you spend?

I cannot answer these questions for you. But I can tell you how you should go about asking them; and that brings us back to Mr. Goldman, and this deeply funny and eminently-sensible scene from The Princess Bride:

“What are our assets?” Tattoo that question somewhere.

The first things you make are likely to resemble those heroes’ rescue plan – a tiny group of people with a little hope and not enough time. That’s good! K.I.S.S.: Keep it Simple, Shortfilmmaker! Start thinking about interesting locations you can access for free – get beyond Someone’s Apartment. The submission queues of film festivals are littered with Someone’s Apartment short films. Who are the actors you know? If you don’t know actors, do you know musicians? Stand-up comics? Who are the personalities you know that you could point a camera at? What could you, the well-rounded screenwriter, come up with for them to do?

Is someone you know junking a car? Would they let you wreck it instead? Does someone have a wheelchair they’re not using for a few hours? Congratulations – you’ve got the makings of a DIY camera dolly! Start looking around with this mentality and you might surprise yourself with what your assets really are.

It’s okay if the thing you make is not great. It’s okay if it’s terrible. Just make it. Make it, watch it, congratulate each other, then start asking – what would we need to make this better? Your experience will automatically make the next thing better, but maybe you also identified some key piece of equipment that would up the polish of your little filmmaking unit. “The Retriever” was shot without permits in a park outside of LA County because I couldn’t afford permits, but if I had it to do again I definitely would have found a few extra dollars to rent a shoulder rig for my cinematographer to make the camerawork a little steadier.

The great thing is, though, I gained assets just by getting out there and making things. More people became interested in helping out, lending resources, even investing a bit of much-needed cash. I’m still extremely limited in the scope of the stories I can tell but I’ve also grown my capability to make good work within those confines. I now have viable feature-length projects that could be made from the talent and resources I have access to; all they are missing is the budget. It gives one a lot of confidence to be able to show that to a potential investor.

I still have my “big” studio-style scripts that I put time into in case they ever come sniffing around; but I’m in such better shape for having chosen this self-starting outlet. And every time I start now, that’s the first question I ask.

“What are our assets?”

The more good work you can produce in response to situations like this, the more you develop your all-around muscles. A lot of paydays happen in Hollywood because somewhere, a producer suddenly has an urgent need to solve a problem. You want to be the one they think of. My gig last year writing the upcoming anime pilot Children of Ether didn’t happen because I had any experience writing English-language anime on an incredibly-short deadline. Who knows if there are even any names on that list? But a producer on the project knew and trusted me because I’d delivered for him in the past, and I solved their problem by coming in and executing the script on their deadline.

On “The Retriever”, I challenged myself to see if, as a writer, I could take a guy, a smart phone, and a shovel, and make that interesting and entertaining for five minutes; because that’s what I knew I could get my hands on and what my still-underdeveloped directing chops could handle. Now that it has concluded a festival run that succeeded wildly beyond my hopes, I can share it with you so you can see what a half-dozen friends and I were able to do in an unsecured public park in a half-day for a total budget of about $700.

Enjoy, then go figure out what your assets are and get to work!