Making an Indie Film -- Love 10 to 1

TSA: Your Way or Runaway

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 02:31:00 +0000

Packing your bags and traveling these days is stressful enough as it is. Make sure you follow these tips by Justin Klosky and Organize & Create Discipline to ensure your O.C.D. Experience is seamless and stress free. Don't let the TSA or ill prepared travelers ruin your mood and slow you down.

Quick Update

noreply@blogger.com (Love 10 to 1) — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 13:53:00 +0000

Long time no blog! We are currently working on some sound issues. Once that's done we should be able to upload a trailer and will keep you posted on screenings.

We received an honorable mention at the Los Angeles Reel Film Festival for Best Narrative Feature. We are all very proud of our work on this film and are looking forward to getting it out to the public.

Meanwhile, the three of us have been working on our next projects. I'm shooting The Big Deal in mid November. Laura & Christine are writing their next features.

xoxo,

Lucy

Justin Klosky from OK! Magazine to AOL via #constantcontact

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 17:03:00 +0000

Justin Klosky from OK! Magazine to AOL via #constantcontact
Organize & Create Discipline's October Newsletter

(OCD) with Justin Klosky- TipTime for Bulk Buying Organization

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 16:28:00 +0000

Getting organized for back to school

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 17:27:00 +0000

Getting organized for back to school

Now that the bathroom's clean, it's time to get organized

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 17:09:00 +0000

Now that the bathroom's clean, it's time to get organized

Justin Klosky's O.C.D. Experience TipTime- Organizing Supplies

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 19:59:00 +0000

Summer is fast approaching -- using Spring cleaning to get organized

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 17:51:00 +0000

Summer is fast approaching -- using Spring cleaning to get organized

O.C.D. Experience TipTime- Organizing your Trash

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 20:03:00 +0000

I Will Read This EVERYDAY...I Don't Know For How Long, But For A While I Imagine...

noreply@blogger.com (Laura) — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 01:25:00 +0000

As we begin to wrap up "Love 10 to 1", and embark on our new projects...because that's right folks, all three of us are going at it again already, making our next films (!)...separately this time, but forever together in spirit - and in person I'm sure. Who else is going to cook breakfast for each other's films?

Check out my website at http://www.thesmokingrobots.com/news.htm for more details on my latest venture...

And then if you feel like it...

Below is an excerpt from a film making book called "My First Movie" by Stephen Lowenstein. The Coen Brothers are definitely on my top 5 list of influences (as they are everyone's, right?). I hope it's okay with Mr. L that I put this in our blog. Maybe he'll generate some sales from it.

Hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

Laura

Joel and Ethan Coen:

Blood Simple

Were you always passionate about movies? Did you see lots of movies when you were kids?

JC: We always went to a lot of movies. But when we were kids it was watching movies on TV. I guess our earliest film education came from a guy called Mel Jazz who had a movie programme on during the days. He was an eclectic programmer. So we were exposed to a lot of strange things—through the eclectic programming genius of Mel Jazz. Ethan once kidded that he had just about the whole of the Joe Levine catalogue because he'd have 812 one day, you know, Fellini, The Nights of Cabiria or something. And the next day he'd have Sons of Hercules. So it was a mixture of European art films and badly dubbed Italian muscle movies, essentially. I mean it was very strong in that area. He also liked a lot of the golden age of late fifties, early sixties studio comedy product. Doris Day, Rock Hudson movies. I'll Take Sweden, you know. Bob Hope stuff.

EC: Later, bad Bob Hope.

JC: A little later on there was a film society at the University of Minnesota that showed the kind of stuff that you wouldn't normally be exposed to: Godard, and the Marx brothers—who were both kind of hip at the time.

EC: I guess that doesn't exist any more. But for a period people would show black and white 16 mm prints on some crappy projector in a basement in the university building somewhere. I guess video ended that.

When you saw movies did you think, 'I want to do that'? I mean, you started making films when you were kids, didn't you?

EC: Yeah. Super-8 things. But it didn't rise to the level of serious ambition. It was another way of goofing off. I don't know when it got sort of serious for me. Certainly later than Joel, since he went to film school and I didn't. For me it was more an opportunity that presented itself through Joel's work than any long-harboured ambition I'd had.

JC: But these things are sometimes just pursuing what might be a casual interest in the path of least resistance. Even the decision to go to film school. Something that strikes you at that moment as being a bit more interesting than something else. It's not as if you really know what you're going to do with it. Or if you're going to do anything with it.

EC: Yeah. There are other people you read about like Scorsese for whom it seemed like a religion from an early age. It certainly wasn't that with either of us.

Could you have imagined going off in a completely different direction?

EC: I never seriously thought about any career so I couldn't honestly say. But, yeah, I suppose it could have happened.

Can you say a little about your experience of NYU film school?

JC: I think film schools are quite different now from when I went. First of all, a lot of people on the undergraduate programme weren't really that interested in movies. A lot of kids who had to go to college thought, this might be fun. I'll go to film school. You know, taking the path of least resistance. And it started that way for me. But it ended up being a fairly interesting place to be. If you took advantage of the school's resources, which were extremely limited but were at least something, you could go out and make little movies and sort of screw around with it without essentially having to pay for it beyond the tuition. I also met people there who we ended up working with later.

What kind of films did you make there?

JC: It was just an extension of what we were doing with Super-8 cameras when we were little kids. Just kind of screwing around. It was all pretty crude. But even that stuff is kind of an interesting thing to have done. When you think about people who are making a first movie, it's a little bit different having had to look through the camera and frame a shot or imagine how it's going to get cut together, than it is if you're coming to it from a completely different discipline like a writer, who's never even made a Super-8 movie and is having to figure it out intellectually. So I think it does have some value even if what you're doing is a very crude exercise.

What happened once you got out of NYU?

JC: I started working as an assistant editor on low-budget splatter movies. Ethan and I were both living in New York at that point and we started writing together. We would get these writing jobs from producers who had these low-budget movies and sometimes wanted stuff written or rewritten. We got some writing jobs together that way at that point and that led to us writing something to do ourselves—which was Blood Simple.

How did the idea of writing Blood Simple come about?

JC: We wrote a little thing for Frank LaLoggia, one of the directors I was working for as an assistant editor; we wrote a screenplay with Sam Raimi. So we just sat down and thought what kind of movie could we make that was sort of producible on a really small budget like these horror movies, but that isn't necessarily a horror film.

EC: The inspiration was these movies that Joel had been working on which had been done mostly by young people like us who didn't have any credentials or credibility in the mainstream movie industry. But they'd gone out and raised money underground for their little exploitation movies, got the movies made and subsequently wandered into the place where Joel was working to have them cut. It was that evidence that it could be done that led us to try it ourselves: notably Sam's movie, The Evil Dead, because Sam was the most forthcoming in sharing all his experience with us.

You said you chose the particular kind of story because it was manageable at a certain budget. Was it also because you loved noir movies?

JC: On the one hand, we were both interested in and had read a lot of pulp fiction like Cain and Hammett—and Cain especially when you think about movies that involve murder triangles. On the other hand, as Ethan said, the sort of financial model for the film was also, to a certain extent, a creative influence on it. So it was kind of a mix of those two things.

EC: Also, there were a couple of notorious Texas domestic murder stories that had just happened in the early eighties. I'm sure that figured.

Did you write from beginning to end, or did you write particular scenes down as they came to you?

JC: We start at the beginning and work through to the end. On Blood Simple that was definitely the case. It was just a scene by scene accretion, wasn't it?

EC: Right. We don't outline and we don't really know where we're going. We might have some vague feeling that we're going to arrive at some point in the future but it's the vaguest sort of feeling till we actually write ourselves to that point.

But Blood Simple's plot is so intricate, so exquisitely crafted. Is it really just an organic process by which you arrive at such a complex structure?

JC: Yeah. Sometimes writing yourself into a corner means that there is no way out and you just have to bag the whole thing. But sometimes writing yourself into a corner means that you have to think of a way out of the corner. If you read the whole thing, you might think 'Oh this is very intricately plotted out.' But just because, by putting yourself into a box you figured a way out of the box, doesn't mean it was all premeditated. Blood Simple started something else that we've done pretty much on every subsequent movie, which was that we've always written parts for specific actors. And as we've made more and more movies and got to know more and more actors, they're frequently people we know personally from one place or another or that we've worked with in the past. In Blood Simple, we wrote the part that Emmet Walsh played for Emmet just because we knew his work. The other parts were written without knowing who would play them.

What's the starting point for a story like Blood Simple? Is it a situation, a kind of equation: a man wants his wife killed and gets killed himself? Or a character: a slippery private eye like the character played by M Emmet Walsh? Or is the dichotomy between plot and character a false one?

JC: It is, inasmuch as who does what to whom has to be consistent to some sort of idea of who the characters are, even if they're rather crude. But in this one the balance probably tips more towards the story than the characters. I guess this one was conceived more as a thriller. I remember that it was an early idea in Blood Simple that someone would fake the murder, and then do another murder that made more sense. That was there as an equation, as you say, at some point fairly early in the writing—earlier than the point that we got to that scene. Our initial thinking about it was probably more about plot than about the people in it. But maybe it's just something you just assume after the facts, since the characters in it now seem pretty crude.

What were you doing while you were writing Blood Simple to make a living? And how long did it take to write?

EC: I was working as a temporary clerical typist. It took a long time because it was an evening and weekend type proposition. Months.

What did you do once you had a screenplay? You were still not 'the Coen Brothers' as you are today.

JC: Cro-Magnon Coen brothers dragging our knuckles across the floor! (Laughs.) We followed the example of Sam Raimi. Sam had done this trailer, almost like a full-length version of The Evil Dead, but on Super-8. He raised sixty or ninety thousand dollars that way, essentially by taking it around to people's homes to find investors. He financed the movie using a common thing that people making exploitation movies had used, which was a limited partnership. This was a business model taken from Broadway shows where the general partners were the people who were producing or making the movie and the limited partners were just individual investors who were putting in a certain amount of money and buying equity in the product. So, Sam also told us how to set that up and we did that in conjunction with a lawyer here and then went out and shot a two-minute trailer in 35 mm.

Can you describe the trailer?

EC: Well, it was rather abstract, as it had to be. We didn't have the actors: we didn't know who the actors would be, of course. Actually, what we also borrowed from Sam and the other models was that it was presented more as an action-exploitation type movie than it ended up being, and in fact than we knew it would be. It was pretty much of its time. In the early eighties there was a real vogue for these low-budget horror movies, some of which did really well commercially and made their investors lots of money. So we were passing ourselves off as one of those—which to a certain extent we were, of course; but to a certain extent we were not. And we just ignored the respects in which we were different.

JC: The trailer emphasized the action, the blood and guts in the movie. It was very short. We had a very effective soundtrack, which is very cheap to do. And we schlepped that around for about a year to people's homes and projected it in their living rooms and then got them to give us money to make the movie.

EC: The thing is when you're trying to attract someone who might invest, you have this legal prospectus which is really dry. It's worse than dry—it's a document that's basically warning them off the investment, presenting all the risks. You have to be able to show them something that's a little more intriguing than the legal document that they're eventually going to have to sign. Which was Sam's rationale for doing his little featurette.

JC: There were two or three people that we knew or who were connected to our family somehow. But beyond that, they were all people we'd never met before in our lives. If you call people up and you say, 'Can you give me ten minutes so I can present an opportunity to invest in a movie?', they're going to say, 'No, I don't need this', and hang up the phone. But it's slightly different if you call up and say, 'Can I come over and take ten minutes and show you a piece of film?' All of a sudden that intrigues them and gets your foot in the door. That's something Sam made us wise to which was invaluable in terms of being able to raise the kind of money we were trying to raise, which was essentially much more money than Sam had. He'd raised about ninety grand initially and we were trying to raise a threshold of five hundred and fifty and up to seven hundred and fifty.

How much did you raise?

EC: Seven hundred and fifty ultimately. We started actually working on the movie once we'd raised the five hundred and fifty.

This was all going on in New York?

JC: New York, Minneapolis and Texas.

Because you were going to shoot in Texas?

JC: Right. And because we knew some people. I think there ended up being about sixty-five investors in the movie, most of them in five- or ten-thousand-dollar increments. I think sixty to seventy per cent of them were from Minneapolis.

EC: The good thing about Minneapolis is those horrible phone calls you have to make to people you don't know—you've just got their names from whoever. They're too polite to hang up.

JC: That's absolutely true. In New York, they'd just go, 'Yeah, yeah', and hang up; because the dangerous thing with any salesman is to keep talking to them. (Laughs.)

EC: But people actually put up with us! We'd walk into their living room with our projector and before they'd even offered us to sit down we'd be like finding the outlet, sticking the cord in, setting the projector up and opening up the screen. (Laughs.) There was one investor we went to and we hit his car, parking. And we had this big debate out on the driveway whether we should tell him we hit his car before the sales pitch or after the sales pitch. We decided that we wouldn't tell him until we showed him the movie and made the sales pitch.

JC: Obviously he didn't end up investing in the movie!

What kind of people did end up investing in the movie?

JC: Not professional people, by and large. They weren't doctors and lawyers and dentists and that sort of thing. They were small business people, entrepreneurs who had started a small business themselves twenty years earlier with very little money and had made a lot of money doing it and related to the entrepreneurial aspect of it. They liked the show business thing but that was actually secondary. It was more that they related to the enterprise of just going out and trying to start a business that way. And that's where most of the money came from. These people owned little businesses. You know—I've got a business that supplies hair driers to beauty salons or I've got a scrap-metal yard or I've got fifteen bowling alleys or something like that. It's those kind of people.

EC: Fargo was based around our fascination with the Minneapolis business community.

JC: Right. It was raising money for Blood Simple that we met all these business guys who could wear the suits, get bundled up in the park and slog out in the snow and meet us in these, like, coffee shops. We came back to that whole thing in Fargo, the car salesman, the guy who owns the bowling alley, you know, whatever. That was very much part of it.

And your family helped you out?

EC: They put in fifteen. I don't know why. I don't know why anyone did at the end of the day.

Did the investors make their money back?

JC: Oh yeah. It took a while though.

EC: In fact it took so long that they might have done almost as well putting the same amount of money in the bank and collecting bank interest. But you know, they certainly did fine. And most of them were quite pleased because it is an interesting thing to follow if you're not in the movie business.

Did you try to raise money from any distribution companies?

JC: We went to certain people after we'd raised a certain amount of money hoping to bring in a partner who could basically end the agony of having to go out and find all that money—because it just took for ever. Each time they either wanted too much or it seemed they'd be interfering and controlling and at the end of the day it would be better to struggle on and control it all ourselves than it would be to relinquish any control to these groups. They all wanted to talk about the script. I'm sure they would have taken us to the cleaners. Not that that was such an issue at that point.

EC: It would have been complicated since we already had investors who'd signed up under terms which forbade us being taken to the cleaners.

How long did it take between finishing the script and raising the money?

JC: It must have been at least a year and half.

Did you ever think you weren't going to make it?

JC: Oh yeah. Until we had raised the threshold amount that we needed to start the production, neither of us thought that it was anything but a long shot, that we'd actually succeed in doing it. I think we thought there was a good chance it wouldn't work out.

Do you think first-time film-makers have to have a kind of crazy faith in what they're doing because if they looked rationally at the odds they'd never try?

JC: That's definitely true. All the things we didn't know are what enabled us to do it and be successful. If we knew what we know now or even what we knew when we finished the process we probably wouldn't have attempted to do it or at least attempted it that way. The odds of succeeding at it are very slim and the process is very difficult. That's why it's kind of hard to recommend it to people.

EC: Right. There is something a little unhealthy about the monomaniacal frame of mind you have to put yourself in. Right after we got it done we kidded that the reason we got it done was because we got ourselves so deeply in debt that the only way to pay back the money was to make the movie.

JC: We ended up getting dangerously in debt just to live and to keep the operation going. There was absolutely no way we could have made good on that money without actually making the movie and have the movie make money and pay off. So it's all a little crazy. It's all something that's a lot easier for people who were in our position than it is for people who are a little bit older or have financial responsibilities. We didn't have kids. We were just kids. We didn't have any commitments so we could gamble that way. People who are making a lot of money doing commercials or videos or that sort of thing, a year or a year and a half into the process that we went through, they're factoring in all the income they've lost, thinking 'Jesus!' We weren't doing that.

EC: It's an irony that even back then some of our peers were actually making serious money at serious movie industry jobs. They wouldn't have done what we did because they did have something to lose. They would have to relinquish something in order to embark on something like that.

Once you'd raised the money, how did you begin to prepare for the filming?

JC: The first thing we did was hire Mark Silverman who we'd gone to school with and I'd been to NYU with.

EC: Mark actually did have a little experience. He'd done a couple of really low-budget horror movies.

What was his role?

JC: He was the line-producer. And he was really the one who put the movie together from a nuts and bolts point of view, who really helped us organize it at a professional level.

How long was your shooting schedule?

EC: It was October to November. Eight weeks, I guess.

That sounds quite long for an independent movie. How did you manage that?

JC: We didn't pay anybody anything. Well, we paid them the minimum. That's the one thing I always say when people ask about this type of thing: it makes more sense to find people who don't necessarily have the experience doing what you want to do, but who you think are ready to do it and shoot for longer, than it does trying to find some four thousand dollars a week DP who you think is going to save you time and allow you to shoot for a week less. It doesn't work like that. That was something Mark helped us achieve and appreciate. That was the philosophy that he brought into the movie and it was really helpful for us. The other thing we did, which I think in retrospect was really smart, was we gave ourselves a very long pre-production, too. Because we were dealing with very limited resources we gave ourselves a really exhaustive pre-production and that ended up paying off.

EC: Yeah, we storyboarded extensively, pretty much everything.

Did you work on that together?

JC: On Blood Simple we did it together and then we worked with some storyboard artists down in Texas.

How did you end up working with Barry Sonnenfeld?

EC: We met him through a mutual friend. He was in fact the person who introduced us to Mark Silverman.

What had he done at this time?

EC: Odd things here and there. You know, 16 mm industrial type things. But he hadn't shot a feature before. In fact I think he hadn't shot anything on 35 mm before.

JC: There was almost nobody on Blood Simple, ourselves included obviously, who had ever done a feature film before. Certainly not in the jobs that we had hired them to do.

How did you work with Barry in terms of the look of the film? I thought some of the scenes looked almost colour-coded. Blue when Marty is sitting out on the back step looking at the incinerator or when the private eye is breaking into John's house; red for Marty's bar and back office.

JC: Some of these things were conscious. But you may be reading more calculation into it than actually happened. As most of these things are, it was half by calculation and design and half just because that's what there is. There was a conscious effort to make it crisp. Use hard sources and make it cold.

EC: The thing you mention, looking at it again, I actually think we went too far. We wouldn't have gone quite that far if we were doing it now. But that probably came from talking to Barry about single light sources. There's a blue bug zapper in that scene. There's a lot of neon in the bar.

How did you go about finding your key locations?

JC: Some of the actual locations in the movie were places that we were aware of when we were writing the movie. Beyond that, I think we did it just the way we normally do it. We hired a location manager who started looking for places and showed us different options when we went down there. I don't think it was any different in that respect from the other things we've done subsequently.

EC: It's funny you ask about that. Looking for locations is always weird. It's always surprising how specific you can get in your descriptions of what you want and how you realize when you get shown things, how much you've left out: what you really need. Everything superficially matches what you're asking for but it's all basically kind of wrong. It's funny. That never changes.

JC: So at the end of the day, you have to find these places yourself or go out with whoever's looking.

EC: We would frequently choose things out of ignorance. The house that we shot in, for instance, was so ridiculously small that when the AD came down —

JC:—she told us we were crazy, that we'd never be able to get the crew in, the lights and blah blah blah. It ended up actually working out okay but she was right.

EC: We really made life difficult for ourselves out of ignorance.

I understand you had to vacate the bar at the weekend?

EC: That's right. It was empty during the week, then the swingers came in at the weekend. They said, we got to keep it going at the weekend. So we had to get out of there.

Let's talk about the casting. What made you think of M Emmet Walsh for the part of the private eye? Did you know of him already?

JC: We hadn't met him. He was a Los Angeles guy. We knew him only from his work, notably from a movie he did called Straight Time in which he was really good. It's an interesting movie in which Dustin Hoffman is a parolee and M Emmet is his parole officer. M Emmet's character was sort of sleazy. Actually it was a more interesting character than what we came up with in Blood Simple inasmuch as it was more ambiguous. So, yeah, that was the notable thing that we'd seen him in. We had our casting director send him a script not in the expectation but in the hope that he'd be interested in it and he was. It was a pleasant surprise that he was interested in doing it.

Where did you actually meet him for the first time?

EC: In Texas. We met him only when we were ready to shoot. He was the one person we offered a part without an audition. All I remember is we didn't know what the hell to call him! I mean, what the hell do you call him when you meet him? 'M'?

Was he like the character he played?

JC: Emmet? No. He was a bit of a curmudgeon, certainly, but he didn't have the sleaze that his character in the movie has.

EC: His sort of curmudgeonliness is not a cloud on the set. As a matter of fact it's the opposite.

JC: Emmet's kind of crusty.

EC: He's kind of a coot.

JC: He's basically any noun or adjective that starts with a 'C'!

Did he ever give you a hard time?

EC: Yes, but in a half-kidding but only half-kidding kind of way. He never tried to intimidate or make us feel insecure because of our lack of experience although he had by far the most experience of anyone on the set.

What about the rest of the casting? How did that go?

EC: It was just the usual process of meeting actors. In our case, it was here in New York, for the four main parts excluding Emmet. Actually, we met Dan Hedaya, John Getz and Sam Mart fairly early on but hadn't met anyone we were happy with for Fran's part until we met Fran. We met Holly Hunter and liked her but that quickly became academic. She wasn't available because she was doing a play in New York.

Happy Ending to Hard Drive Saga

noreply@blogger.com (Christine) — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 23:48:00 +0000

I got all my footage recovered from the defective hard drive! Thank you Universe! And thank you Lori and Quent (tech guru/extraordinaire) for your generosity and kindness.

Throughout this whole process, there were so many shitty things that came up. Some stuff were human errors, like having our footage recorded at two different frame rates, which required a lengthy conversion process to make all the frame rates the same. Other stuff were things that we couldn't really control but just.. happened. Like a defective hard drive. But as Laura told me several weeks ago as I was about to pull all my hair out, it's just the film gods throwing obstacles your way to see how much you really want it. I am so grateful for everyone who crossed our paths on this journey to make this film and lent a helping hand or even just a few words of encouragement. The three of us were talking about the end credits several weeks back, and our collective list of people to thank is quite long.

Now, back to finishing up post production on the film!

Hard Drive Saga Continues

noreply@blogger.com (Christine) — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 06:43:00 +0000

Well, the 80-90% certainty that the Lacie tech had about replacing the power cord to fix my hard drive problem turned out to be 0% correct. I spent the past few days visiting a couple of data recovery places trying to get a quote to recover my media and project files. The really great news is that the data is recoverable, or so I'm told--for a big fee. But the other really great news is that a friend may be able to have her IT friend recover my data for the cost of a free meal. Deal. What else can I do at this point but try not to freak out so much and just ask the Universe for some mercy. Please.

So I have to admit, the real reason why I'm blogging right now is that I'm completely procrastinating on working on a new script. It's been a while since I've worked on a screenplay, and getting back to writing on a regular basis is difficult. My evening debate consists of: Gym? Nah, tomorrow. Trashy reality TV show? Hmm, definite possibility. Work on script? See response to gym above.

Anyone have tips on how to juggle a full-time day job and creative projects after work?

What's Taking This So Long?

noreply@blogger.com (Love 10 to 1) — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 06:54:00 +0000

At the end of the day, it all comes down to money. Anyone who's ever made a film consider yourself privileged and if it was someone else's money you spent on your film then consider your self privileged, blessed and lucky.

Team Good Karma was lucky to get money from "investors" (friends and family), about 85% of our financing came from our hard work, savings and 401ks. Yes, the best decision I made was to pull my share of the film out of my 401k because the economy tanked shortly after and that would have been the end of most of my 401k anyway, at least now I have a film to show for it.

It costs money to make a film and a lot of money to make a feature. We were naive in thinking that if we had enough money to shoot the film that the money for post would come. We got the money for post the same way we got it the first time, we worked for it. It was hard to pay for living expenses and finish the film but we sacrificed and made ends meet.

So now that we are really almost done, it turns out that we need more money. It's going to cost Christine a lot of $$$ to retrieve her footage from the damaged drive and that sucks. We are so close and this happens! I was really hoping for a Valentine's Day screening for our cast, crew, friends and family.

What's taking so long? MONEY

On a happy note, the trailer is coming soon.

xoxo,
Lucy

Are We Done Yet?

noreply@blogger.com (Christine) — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 17:11:00 +0000

2010. Yay! But wait, Mercury Retrograde is in effect right now. Just found my hard drive with the latest cut (and contains most of the media files) is not mounting (i.e., not working). Oh My God. Called the Lacie tech and she offered to send me a new power cord. Will it help? She's 80-90% sure it will. Crossing fingers. Send good vibes. Otherwise, I may just decide to crawl under a rock and not leave. Ever. Have been told that the G-Raid drives are the best. 1st advice of 2010: when using digital media, DO NOT cheap out on the hard drives. Get the best, most reliable drives you can. And if you get the drives with the larger storage space, it will save you a lot of trouble later on when working with your editor. Like 2T of storage space. Trust me on this one.

Blessings and Frustrations

noreply@blogger.com (Christine) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 07:30:00 +0000

The past few days have been particular windy in L.A. When the weather begins to turn cold and I start hearing about Halloween parties, I remember that it was two years ago when we first started shooting the film around this time. Two years that consisted of re-shoots, more production, and post production. Hellooooooo. A lot can happen in two years: a new President (of historical significance), the financial melt-down, the rise and fall of Jon and Kate. And we inched closer to finishing this baby.

I've been having a helluva time trying to find the right (gratis) music to use for my piece. And just when I've completely fallen in love with a song for a scene, I find out that it's gonna cost me. No one said falling in love was gonna be cheap. So then I try to break up with the song because I can't afford to love it. But because I'm truly an optimist in the body of a cynic, I think I may be able to convince the music publisher to grant me a gratis festival license. No such luck. Heartache.

But about three weeks ago, after listening to hundreds/thousands of songs on myspace, I found a couple of songs that I just loved by a couple of indie musicians. I went to their website and found a contact for the music licensing. I emailed the music licensing woman and she emailed me back right away. The next day, we chatted about my film, the project, music, and marketing. She agreed to to help me find other music for the film. After months and months of looking for music with no success, I finally found a kind soul willing to help me out. If I could bottle the feeling of total gratitude and joy at that moment, I'd be a very rich person. I guess that's just how indie filmmaking works. If you look long and hard enough, you will find that one (or more, if you're lucky) person who will help you. But at every step of the way, there will be obstacles. One after the other. Until you meet that one kind soul who just offers you the break.

My 16 candles for John Hughes, R.I.P Friend

noreply@blogger.com (Love 10 to 1) — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Three films that inspired Love Song
1. Some Kind of Wonderful (written by John Hughes)
2. Singles (written & directed by Cameron Crow)
3. Love Actually (written & directed by Richard Curtis)

Of the three films, Some Kind of Wonderful had the bigger influence on Love Song;
The love triangle, the girl musician, the clueless best friend and of course the happy ending.

John Hughes has had an even bigger impact on my life than I thought. His passing has affected me deeply. How could the death of a person I did not personally know leave me feeling so empty? And then it hit me, I did know him or rather he knew me and he knew me well. David Edelstein on his blog, The Projectionist said it best, “John Hughes, captured for a generation of kids (largely white, middle- and upper- middle class) how it felt to be marginalized, misjudged, alienated from parents, and alone in a crowd of so-called peers”. That was me and most of my generation growing up.

It bothers me that almost every article I’ve read describes his audience as largely white, middle- and upper- middle class. My girlfriends and I dreamed of Jake Ryan and Ferris Bueller driving across the George Washington Bridge and taking us on the dream date of a life time. We did not let socioeconomics get in the way of our celluloid fantasies.

That’s not to say that some of my friends have not chastised or questioned my love for this man’s films over the years. “There are no brown people in his movies” or “the characters are affluent” or “they live in Chicago” and my favorite “how can you relate to any of it”. My answer was, “I like his work, his movies make me feel good”. Sometimes that’s all it takes.

Watching his films as an adult, I realize what drew me to his work, what makes stop channel surfing if I stumble onto one of his gems; in the end, the outcast gets his/her happy ending and I love that. Those are my favorite kinds of movies, commercial or independent, the story of the outcast/outsider/underdog has always appealed to me especially if the outcast/outsider/underdog gets a happy ending.

My least favorite of his films is Pretty in Pink (he wrote and produced). Why? Because she ends up with Blaine when she should have ended up with Ducky. The 16 year old in me was rooting for Blaine but that’s my point, the movie sends a bad message. However, I think this one has my favorite soundtrack, music from Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark, The Psychedelic Furs, New Order, Echo & the Bunnymen, The Smiths, it’s heaven.

Mr. Hughes’ films rarely got the respect he deserved. Perhaps posthumously his critics will come to understand and appreciate his work and what it meant to people like me.

We are almost done with the film - Coming to a festival near you in 2010.

xoxo,

Lucy

Hey there, gorgeous, yes you, you sexy color corrected scene, you...

noreply@blogger.com (Laura) — Wed, 27 May 2009 21:44:00 +0000

Yesterday my friend showed me the first two scenes of Diving Lessons that she "took her pass at" with "less orange".

Dude.

It looks awesome. One shot almost looks three dimensional.

This makes me rethink my "fix it in post" negativity. I've begun to wonder, is it possible that the orange was planned all along, fully knowing that it would be toned down in color correction, thus creating what now exists AFTER color correction? Is it because of the hard orange that our actors are now able to have dramatic contours and not read as simply flat? Or am I just a lucky jerk with a good colorist?

It's something I want to do some detective work on. I know when I worked in the theater, the lighting designer would put up one colored light here, and a different colored light there, and when the two mixed it was "good for skin tone". Is it the same in film? I guess that all depends on the look you're going for - realism or stylized. As a director, I can say things like "this character's an icy person" or "this scene should feel like a fruity cocktail" and a lighting designer or a dp or a gaffer gets to interpret that on so many different levels. If got to know more about lighting, I'd be able to either shut up or speak up about what's going on before we shoot. Now all I'm capable of saying is, "it looks a little dark over there", but not know what's going to really come out on the other end (meaning AFTER color correction). Folks, that's suddenly not enough for me anymore.

Get me to a lighting for camera class, stat.

Foolishness and Arrogance

noreply@blogger.com (Christine) — Mon, 25 May 2009 00:04:00 +0000

It's been a number of months since I've blogged here. In large part, I've been extremely busy with a full-time legal gig (which ended last Friday) that was an emotional and intellectual drain (but thankfully allowed me to get out of the debt incurred from making this film).

Recently, a fellow filmmaker noted in his Facebook update that he's spent over 9 years in L.A. trying to make it in the film biz, and still doesn't know what it will take to "make it". His other FB update stated that he's considering panhandling to get this next meal (I don't think it's that bad, but you get the point). I mentioned this to another filmmaker friend and she laughed, agreeing that, sadly, it's true: you have no idea how long or what it will take to "make it". Yet we're doing it anyway. Either this is pure foolishness or arrogance that our talent will be distinguishable from the rest of the dreamers living on ramen. Or perhaps it's a mixture of both. Who knows why. Does it matter?

Anyway, I've been working with another editor to get another cut of my piece together. After not seeing my film for several months, I found myself excited again. It's like being reunited with a long lost friend, and realizing that you still like this friend--relieved that the original feelings of affinity are still there. After I saw my rough cut, I looked at Lucy's and Laura's cuts to see the entire 3 stories together. I don't know what the film festivals are looking for, but I hope they will like this film. I'm sure it was a mixture of both foolishness and arrogance that made us think we could pull something like this together. But in between those two extremes, we did pull something together. We'll just have to see how it plays out.

Earthquakes are to a girl's guitar - They're just another good vibration

noreply@blogger.com (Love 10 to 1) — Tue, 19 May 2009 14:17:00 +0000

On Sunday we went to the closing night of Lydia and an earthquake interrupted the 2nd act. It was my first earthquake experience and I was relieved to have my dearest friends with me. Mari, Barbara & Bonnie (my LA mothers), Christine, Laura, James (Mr. Laura) and Matt were there to support my sister as she ended her run on a play that’s been with her for over a year. We filmed Love Song between the Denver & Yale runs of Lydia.

I am starting pre-production on my next project. I will once again collaborate with my sister, Matt, Christine & Laura. I consider myself blessed that I get to work with my friends and my family.

Last night we celebrated Laura’s birthday. We got to meet Suzi’s boyfriend, he’s a musician and generously gave me two cds to use on the film. Mr. Suzi is a known rock star so I’m very excited to use his music. There’s a song I LOVE that I’ll be pitching to Christine.

I am now the Music Supervisor for Diving Lessons & Love 10 to 1. Christine’s piece is currently titled Love 10 to 1. For those of you who don’t know, yes, I’m getting divorced. I try not to go into my personal life here but my soon 2BX was in charge of music. I had a lot of fun picking music for Love Song & he brought in a lot of great songs. We’ve edited so much of the film that a lot of the music he picked ended up on the cutting room floor or more appropriate in the "deleted scenes" hard drive. There’s a great piece of irony in that sentence somewhere!

It will be interesting working on music for Christine’s film, she’s going to want Lilith Fair and I want to give her Judas Priest (kidding).

xoxo,
Lucy

Orange is for fruits - Navigating through Color Correction

noreply@blogger.com (Laura) — Sun, 17 May 2009 15:47:00 +0000

I thought I would talk a little bit about what's been going on with the Diving Lessons portion of the film. I'm now in a part of production that's probably the least familiar to me - coloring film. When I worked on the short Las Perdidas, I had a very specific idea of what I wanted the color to represent in film - very saturated colors, bright candy tones on the characters all to play against the stark earth tones of the desert. When I talk about the essence of Diving Lessons, the words "pure" and "raw" are what I most connect with. Now what color tone is that? The first thing that comes to my mind is white. Some people suggested that we shoot in black and white, but I just think that doesn't lend itself well to a contemporary romance. Plus since I want to emphasis the complexities of love. black and white is too, well, black and white.

I have a generous friend who has offered to color the piece for me, and so we've been slowly working our way through the film, trying to figure how what this color tone is supposed to be. This is where a good pre-pro conversation would have come in handy. I think this film is the last one I'll ever do without thorough discussions with all the departments. Every film I learn something new. Clear story, check. Good actors, check. Color correction, oops! What happened in production is some of the shots have an orange tone to them, and some have a blue tone. And my guess is that's a setting on a camera that created it. ("Don't worry you can fix it in post!") Personally I like the blue tone look better and when I told the colorist that and sent along some photographs to demonstrate, she said, "Oh you want it to look like the seventies." Oh. No. Isn't that interesting that each decade not only has certain iconic fashion styles, they also have iconic color correction style? Back to the drawing board of concise communication and clear concept.

I've never been so indecisive as a director as I have been with the color for this film. It's actually embarrassing, if you want to know the truth. And perhaps that's because it shows to me how inexperienced I am with this part of the process. I do know what I hate about the color as it is now - there is too much orange in one of the actor's most important (and most used) shots in the pool scene when they're standing on the diving board. There's this big hot orange light hitting the actor's back and it makes me cringe because it looks so unnatural, and it's a totally different look than the other actor's shot. So I asked the colorist to take the orange out, and then it didn't have that raw, natural look I wanted. It was too desaturated (which I didn't like), because the walls of the pool have a brick colored tone to them, and that's got guess what? Orange tones. Now that I think about it, she could just spot color the actor and tone down that hot light, right? See? I'm totally clueless.

Do you think it means that we can't manipulate what's set in stone, aka "filmed", as much as I thought we could? If the one light is too harsh, then the one light is too harsh. Nothing you can do to help.

There's another section where we shot with two cameras and one camera's setting I assume was blue and the other's was orange, and so cutting back and forth you've got warm and cold tones. Not, not an artistic choice. Is that going to be able to be fixed? I could just use only the blue toned shots, but then that means I lose the excellent camera movement, and the best performance - not worth it.

At this point, we've decided to make a pass at the whole thing, and just "smooth it all out". I'm very curious to see what that means. My final direction? "Less orange." Maybe once I stop fixating on that we can move forward.

Almost Done

noreply@blogger.com (Love 10 to 1) — Wed, 13 May 2009 19:19:00 +0000

I'm going to edit w/Matt on Thursday. Hopefully this will be the last edit before picture lock.

Christine got a new editor and he's been posting clips to our box.net site. I can't wait to see it.

We are hoping to have the film done by the end of the summer.

Sometimes it feels like it's taken us forever to get here, I am grateful and amazed that we have gotten as far as we have. We made this film with little resources, miniscule financing, a lot of heart, blood, sweat & tears.

I'm looking forward to seeing this project through. I start pre-production on The Big Deal sometime in June.

xoxo,
Lucy

Onahoua Rodriguez stars as Ceci in Lydia at the Mark Taper Forum

noreply@blogger.com (Love 10 to 1) — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 14:37:00 +0000

http://www.centertheatregroup.org/tickets/productiondetail.aspx?id=7714

The show closes May 17th.

xoxo,
Lucy

Check out Art Hsu as Johnny Vang in Crank: High Voltage

noreply@blogger.com (Love 10 to 1) — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 13:51:00 +0000

Art has been amazing to work with, he's a terrific actor and a great guy. He cleans up well too, sorry ladies, this one's already spoken for.

xoxo,

Lucy

Time Flies

noreply@blogger.com (Love 10 to 1) — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 06:37:00 +0000

It’s been over two months since this page has seen any action. Sorry for our absence, we are still working on the film.
I’ve given Love Song to several people to critique/review. For the most part the feedback has been good and most people like it. The people who have been the most enthusiastic have been my non-filmmaker friends. I had a small screening (friends and family) in NY and I was very happy with the response.

The film got ripped apart pretty badly by two people and it deflated me to the point that I could not watch it for over a month.
I watched it a few days ago, trying to look at it from a different perspective to see what I could improve/do better etc. I learned so much making this film and looking back I would have done a lot of things differently. The first one probably would have been to delegate more but the reality is that there are a lot of people who say they’ll come and help, you assign them a job and then they back out at the last minute. That person who flaked left a void that needs to be filled and when there’s no one to take over you just need to step up and do it yourself.

I also had no money to pay for certain positions (production designer) so Matt and I decorated the house ourselves. At Brian’s suggestion and my pleading, Matt stepped in to edit. His priority is being a cinematographer so he works on Love Song when he’s between jobs.

As a director you need to be in charge of your set and I did the best I could with the resources I had. I am grateful to the cast and crew for going above and beyond. To have Ian & Jared (sound guys) help move furniture, Justin clapping the slate because we were short handed, Frederick downloading the footage along with all the other responsibilities he had as Matt’s right hand, Casey as the A.D/G&E/Dolly Grip/Transportation (I’m sure there’s stuff I’m leaving out) but you get the point, I wasn’t the only one doing more than one job. That’s not the norm, that’s not how I want to work but that’s what we had and that’s what we did.

All of that said, I still like the film, no, I LOVE the film. I am very proud of it and hopefully I will get the chance to do this again soon and I will bring what I learned in the first film to the second film.
The next step is for Matt to make minor edits. I am waiting on feedback from my mentor, I hope she likes it and if she doesn’t then maybe she can give me tips to make it better.

It is my goal to have the picture locked by June 1st.

I will keep you posted.

xoxo

Lucy

Snip, Snip, Cut, Cut

noreply@blogger.com (Love 10 to 1) — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 13:04:00 +0000

Back to Matthew's last night to edit some more. The majority of the living room scene with Shane, Dustin, Cali & Jim is gone. The majority of the limo scene is gone too, we left a quickie 15 seconds, maybe less. Added an additional 30 seconds scene to the photo shoot. We managed to trim down a good chunk, hoping to make the final time about 23 minutes.

We were done around midnight, I have to be at work at 7am. Somehow, I got up earlier than I needed. I think at this point my body is functioning on internal caffeine. I found a missing patch of hair in the back of my head. That tends to happen when I'm stressed out. Now I have to make an appointment with my dermatologist and she'll inject about 20 shots of cortizone which makes the hair grow back, she'll probably try to sell me some botox! Yeah, welcome to filmmaking with no $$.

Lucy