So we are basically cast with the five main leads (one may or may not change, depending on some factors), and are right in the middle of negotiating the deals, but before we finish the deals and announce the cast, I thought I'd explain to all of you why we decided not to get big name actors for the movie.
[And BTW, I'm not going to write about this in detail but if I told you some of the stories about deal negotiations with the actor representatives, you wouldn't believe it. You literally wouldn't fucking believe how ridiculous it is. Boiler Room, Entourage, Swimming With Sharks--they have nothing on real life Hollywood deal making. The fucking bullshit that the agents and managers and lawyers try to pull...it's breathtaking. I have trouble comprehending their audacity, their preposterous bravado, and their obnoxiousness and brazen lies.
I am writing this piece on my blog instead of making calls and getting the deals done because...well, aside from Aaron and Sean being much better at standard Hollywood deal making than I am...let's just say that the production team has decided that I should not really talk to anymore agents or lawyers or managers. Why? I think the tipping point was when I threatened to beat the shit out of a certain obnoxious agent who thought he could call me a liar. It's like these assholes think there are no consequences to what they say. I can't write anymore about this now because I'll just start thinking it again and get pissed. I will say that it was one of the funniest phone calls I ever got in my life when Aaron said, "I told them that you were serious about kicking his ass, and that it might be best to not call you anymore."]
The five leads we are focusing on are all experienced actors, all have a lot of film and TV credits to their names, IMDB pages, Wikipedia pages, and most of them even have fan pages. They aren't just some schmoes we found at the Piggly Wiggly; all five are really good actors and experienced pros.
That being said, none are movie stars. None of them, were they to come out spilling out of Villa would merit even the briefest of mention on TMZ. In fact, I just searched PerezHilton.com, and NONE of the five had ever even been on Perez. Not one, not even once.
One of the supposed inviolate rules of Hollywood is that if you want a movie to do well, especially an indie, you need to have at least one A-List movie star in it. A name that brings people to the theater, that makes people want to see the movie and can "open it" strong. This is the prevailing logic in Hollywood, how most movies are made, and this is what almost every financier told us we "had" to do.
Yeah...I'm not big on conventional wisdom. I looked around at the movies I've seen over the past decade, and there are just as many that succeed with a certain movie star that succeeded without one. It seemed to me that the idea of a star driven cinema was a relic of past era, one that was not necessarily still meaningful, and by no means a necessity. And of course, the empirical evidence supports my view on this issue.
But the thing is, this movie does have a star: Me. My book has sold 350k+ copies, my website has gotten tens of millions of unique visits over the past five years, and I have built up a huge fan base over the past six years. I am not saying I can open a movie on par with Will Smith or Adam Sandler, but my name is going to have a lot more pull than most actors, directors or writers. Fuck man, I could shit in a bag and draw more people than saw David Mamet's last piece of crap.
But my name alone will not make this movie a hit. It will barely even open it. For this thing to do well, it has to actually be good. And guess what? It's fucking amazing. Exactly because of this is another reason we didn't want big name actors in this movie: The material is good enough that it doesn't require a star, in fact, a star would detract from the script and make the movie worse off.
I talked about this already in regards to Justin Timberlake potentially playing me, but it goes deeper than that. When you have a movie that is truly new and fresh, with characters that have never been done in cinema before, the worst thing you can do is put in a well known actor, someone who has already established their on screen persona. For example, say we had cast Ryan Reynolds as me. The FIRST thing 90% of the audience would do is say, "Hey, the guy form Van Wilder is in law school now." No one would be able to separate the new character from the baggage the actor brought from his previous famous roles.
Think about American Pie, if it had a star in almost any of the leads, it wouldn't be the same movie. Same with Blair Witch Project. This is no different. New, fresh material requires new, fresh faces, actors that don't have any character baggage in the eyes of the public, actors that can come in and imprint their own specific look and feel to the role without any previous connotations or associations.
The fact is, there are A TON of fantastic actors out there, men and women who are potential stars just waiting for the right role to come along and introduce them to the movie going public. You never see or hear of many of them because Hollywood retardedly puts the SAME people in movies over and over again. How many times do we have to see Keanu Reeves before we all just admit that can't act for shit? How many times do the same actors have to play the same roles before people just get fed up with all the repetitive bullshit? Well, I can't change the world, but I do get to pick who goes in my movie, and I picked five people who the world doesn't know as stars yet.
But after this movie, they will.
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