After today, I understand why almost everyone who makes movies, does it the normal way--through a studio.
So we had our first all-hands meeting today to go over the finished budget. Three hours, nonstop, to go over 48 double-sided single-spaced line items of costs, one by one. Unions perks, SAG travel rules, 35 mm ratios, the difference between a set designer and an art director, IATSE rules, hotel taxes, electricity costs for a warehouse in July in Louisiana, local hires, distance hires, tax rebates on taxes, DGA post-production specifications, animal wranglers, stunt coordinators, ISDN lines, per diems, HD dailies....I could go on for, well, three hours.
Fuck me running. I constantly came back to two thoughts during the meeting:
1. I just want to make a movie, I don't care about [insert bullshit here].
2. If this tiny film is so complicated, how the fuck did they make all the Lord of the Rings movies??
If I thought that a studio could do this film without fucking up the creative part, I may have seriously considered just throwing up my hands and saying, "Fuck it, let's call Fox Atomic. Let them worry about how many Teamsters we need to hire locally." But I don't, and I didn't. I knew this was a serious undertaking, but man--making a movie is no fucking joke. Hundreds of people, millions of dollars, thousands of moving parts. It's like going to war (except we have an exit strategy).
The meeting would have gone longer than three hours, but we had to cut it off at 1pm, then book it from Culver City to Larchmont to make a 2pm casting session. I get to the casting office, and the casting director says to me, "I am printing out what you wrote about me, and having it read at my funeral. My friends don't even say things that nice about me."
Not only was I shocked that someone in Hollywood was reading my blog, I wasn't sure how to respond. I didn't write that with the intent of complimenting him or not--I was just analyzing the situation and writing about it. I'm still not sure how to respond. I mean, I'm glad he liked it, but it really never occurred to me how someone else would respond to what I wrote about them. Which is just representative of my narcissism. Welcome to Tucker Max.
Then he told me that there has already been fallout from this blog. Apparently the actor we read on Thursday for the Tucker part (the one who did really well) found this blog and showed his agent. His agent called the CD and bitched and moaned about the casting director's assessment of his clients performance (which is an agent's job), and the actor actually registered and posted his response on the comments thread (he's specialist4).
We had a pretty funny incident happen at casting today, but the CD told me I wasn't allowed to write about it, because, in his words, "Everyone is reading your blog now and I don't want to have to deal with an hour of phone calls from agents."
I WON'T STAND FOR THIS CENSORSHIP!!!
Actually I will. At least until the movie is cast.
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