Film nerd wise, there are a few cuts that I don't like--but no one shoots the perfect amount of coverage. As I had Tucker next to me while viewing I could hit pause and get some explanation behind some of their editorial choices. But, in the grand scheme of things, the film is fine. You've heard this from me before, you've heard it from everyone before: The film is funny. The film is entertaining. It may be great.

Imagine that. An internet celebrity writes a screenplay with his best friend based on his only book. This screenplay generates all kinds of interest, but they select a small, but exciting studio with one cult classic under their belt to finance it. This same creative team hires a director with no comedic background, who is mostly well known for small dramatic indies. They cast experienced, but relatively little known actors. During an 8 week shoot filled with drama behind the scenes, we finish on time and on budget.

And that's what I find interesting: Somehow, despite all the struggles in Shreveport in what only seems to me were a few weeks ago, we have a film. It all worked. The 15 hour days, the arguments, the tension, the personality clashes, none of it matters. The blood, sweat and tears have given us something tangible.

And I'm only on the periphery of all this. God knows Nils and Tucker have been fighting this fight harder and longer than I have. But since I've boarded this freight train, I can tell you there is a feeling of relief that's hard to describe. For better or worse, we've committed our story to film. It exists. Whether or not the audiences flock to the theaters now is somewhat out of our hands. That's not to say that we don't have a comprehensive marketing strategy; we do. But to a certain extent everyone is rolling the dice. Tucker has talked about putting all his chips on the table. What an accurate description of the struggle of getting an independent film made. For me, I rolled the dice many months ago sitting a coffee shop with a guy whose stories I read in high school:

"Do you want to move to Louisiana for three months?"

In the end I've come to believe there are two sorts of people in the world: those who take the plunge and those who don't. Those who want the 9-5, those who don't. Those who are afraid to fail and those who are willing to risk being knocked down again, again and again. I haven't accomplished too much with my life thus far, but this much I know:

Regardless of whether or not IHTSBIH is a massive hit or a complete bomb, I'm glad I took Tucker up on his offer. I took a risk, and I am better off for it.

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Believe me, NO ONE wants this movie to be out more than me. But sadly, we still have more work to do. Just to keep you guys up to date, here is a basic list of the rest of the things we have to do to have a completed movie that we can put into movie theaters:

-Screen the movie for the MPAA and get a rating
-Do all the sound editing
-Do all the foley sound
-Do the actual ADR recordings that we spotted already
-Transfer the film to DI
-Do the DI color timing
-Finish all the VFX
-Record and mix the score
-Do all the sound dubbing
-Cut a 30 second and a 2 minute trailer

All of this should give us a finished and complete movie by sometime around March 1st, give or take. And this all leads into the big thing every independent movie has to do: Find a distributor.

To do this, most indie movies go to festivals like Sundance or Toronto or Cannes, because that is generally where the distributors are (and they are the ones who buy the movie). They also do this because festivals are very good for generating buzz for indie movies that don't have much commercial appeal. The benefits of this for a movie like, say, Hustle & Flow are obvious: If they impress everyone at Sundance, not only can they sell the film but they can get a lot of people to talk about their movie prior to release.

The only festival that would have made sense for us to go to is Sundance because it is at the end of January, but we decided a few months ago to not even apply. Why? Well, we have two things that very few indies have:

1. Huge commercial appeal and a very popular underlying property it is based on, and,

2. No ticking clock to pay back investors.

Generally speaking, if you don't need to go to a festival to sell the movie and get attention, you don't go. Based on the buzz surrounding the script and my book, we already have commitments from pretty much every major distributor to come to the distributor screening we are doing in LA as soon as we wrap picture (beginning of March prob), and god knows this movie will be able to get all sorts of press and marketing traction once we have a release date, so why risk any of the numerous things that can go wrong at a film festival? Plus, Darko has another movie at Sundance this year (World's Greatest Dad with Robin Williams) and McKittrick is on the phone about 12 hours a day dealing with all the bullshit that comes with being in a festival. I think he would die from stress if he had two movies there. We decided to pass.

This wasn't really part of our decision process because we decided to skip Sundance in September, but another major benefit has emerged over the past few months: The buzz around town is that at least one independent distributor, and maybe one major, are going out of business in the early part of 2009. The credit crunch has hit the film industry in a way that many people are underestimating, and the years of free-flowing equity from Wall Street have built up many houses of cards that will soon come tumbling down. It is going to be a blood bath in Hollywood for at least the first quarter of 2009, and sitting that out will reveal many distribution options that don't exist now, and create many opportunities for us that didn't exist before. After all--something has to go on the screens, and we have an awesome movie that is finished. It will be a sellers market very soon, and the most valuable property will be a broad commercial comedy with a massive best-selling book and fanbase to pin the marketing on.

What does this all mean for our distribution plans? The plan now is to screen the movie for distributors after it has an MPAA rating and is completely locked, which would mean the first week in March at the earliest. We'll get everyone in a theater at one time, show the movie, and then the negotiations start. By waiting until everything is done, we reduce the uncertainty for the distributor, and command the best deal. Plus, by presenting the movie as a complete package, it prevents them from making any changes and ruining it.

Once we do the distributor screening, it won't take more than a few days probably to pick the distributor and work out the deal, and then all the fun starts: We pick a release date, we start the heavy marketing plans, and we go 16 hours a day until it comes out.

Of course, this is just the tentative plan. A LOT can change over the next two months, and in fact, I expect a lot to change.

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It took us WEEKS in the editing room to find ways to fix the pacing problems (we even brought Jesse Bradford in for the final two days of editing and he gave us some great notes), but that was the thing I was most anxious about with the final cut: Did we solve the pacing problems?

Well, we haven't done a full screening of the final cut, but according to the relatively small group of people we've shown the movie to fresh since then, not only did we solve them, the pacing of the movie is now an asset. Nils and I both showed the movie to some fresh eyes, and not only did these people not say it was slow, they actually commented on how tight and fast-paced it was. Wow. If they only knew how hard it was for us to get it there.

I have watched the final cut three times now. Once by myself right after I got it to see if it was as good as I hoped, once with my girlfriend to show her the improvements over cut #2 and cut #3, and once again today with a couple other people to see their reaction, and I want to emphasize two points that I have been harping on in the blog:

1. I am even more confident in my belief that this thing is not only really fucking good, but has the potential to be a classic.

2. It is NOT perfect, and please do not mistake my enthusiasm for the movie as me thinking it is.

As proud as I am of this movie, it is far from perfect. There are many things, especially small things, I think could have been done better. Many of them are things that most people won't notice (continuity errors, line phrasing, blocking decisions, etc), but one is kinda big and is an issue with one of the two plot lines that was a script problem that Nils and I never really fixed. I think this thing will become a classic because so many people will love the characters and the dialogue and the story, but the fact that it has small things that could probably have been done better will give people who don't like it plenty of things to nitpick about.

Don't get me wrong--I think this movie is fucking awesome, and I think it has the potential to be regarded as one of the best comedies released over the past generation. And even though it's not perfect, lots of classic movies are far from perfect. When I think of a perfect movie, I think of something like The Godfather, or The Big Lebowski, or Unforgiven. A perfect movie is a movie where I cannot imagine it being done any better than it was, and very few movies are like that. This movie is definitely not in that league, at least not for me. Even as proud as I am of the finished product, I know that if Nils and I made this movie again today, we would do a lot of things differently and do a better job (at least with the details).

That's actually one of the most exciting things for me: Without any experience, through just hard work and (mostly) smart decisions, Nils and I made a truly awesome movie. Now that we have done this once and have this experience, we know where our weaknesses and strengths are and have an idea how to fix them. I can't wait to do this again, and see how good of a movie we can make when we actually know what the fuck we're doing.

But before we worry about that, there are two months of sound work to do, then picking a distributor, then marketing, then the release. The hardest part is done, we've broken out from the pack and there is a clear path to the goal line. But having 40 yards of clear green in front of you doesn't automatically mean you score; you have to actually run the distance.

Now that the editing is done and the holidays are about over, we will have more time to dedicate to this blog, so you can expect more posts from me and Greg and Nils. Plus Jesse Bradford is going to give his take on the movie, and in January I am screening the movie for my law school friends, so you'll get their takes on it too. And I'll be writing a lot of posts about the distribution process, the release process, and the marketing process. Lots more work to do means lots more for me to write about.

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Three days ago, I got this letter in the mail, and I laughed out loud. If you haven't been reading this blog long enough to get it, go read this post for background, then enjoy the letter:

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I've thought about this a lot, and depending on what facts I want to assume, I could make a very good argument for it making anything from 20 million all the way up to 200 million. But here is the one fact I cannot assume away:

Right now, it is beyond anyone's ability to accurately predict the gross because of the numerous variables that have yet to be decided. Who we pick to distribute, what weekend we open, what's going on with the economy--there are too many factors to even list and any number I would guess would be just that: A complete guess.

I cannot predict what this movie will make--at least not right now--but I can tell you what I think about the movie:

Though this movie is extremely funny, it's more than that. Though the acting is amazingly good, it's more than that. Though the lighting and cinematography is beautiful, it's more than that.

I think we made something special.

Now, clearly I am the least objective person on earth to evaluate this project. Not only because it is about me and my life, but also because I know exactly where it went right and where it went wrong. I not only saw the sausage getting made, I was one of the ones making it. Artists don't write their own reviews for a reason, because they are simultaneously too easy and too hard on themselves.

When we finished the script, I knew that Nils and I had done a really good job. It was funny, original, and smart. Obviously a lot of people agreed with me, because we got it financed and into production in no time at all, with exactly the deal we wanted. Casting took a long time, but we ended up with great actors who were perfect for their roles. Early on in readings and rehearsals, I felt it in my bones that we had something; that impossible to quantify chemistry was there. During filming, I saw glimpses of magic and greatness.

Granted, after seeing the rough cut, a lot of my optimism was replaced with doubt. For a minute there, I thought we had missed the mark. But Nils and I got back at it, worked our asses off in the editing room and found the magic (it was there the whole time, we had shot it mostly right, but you just couldn't see it in the rough cut because it wasn't edited correctly). Now that we are done with all the hardest creative parts, I am feeling more confident about this than I ever did.

Granted, a big part of my optimism is just gut feeling. But, in addition to my intuition, there is evidence to support my conclusion. We've tested through the roof on the audience screenings so far (92% average in three screenings), and people whose opinions I trust have flipped shit over the movie. It's clear that at the very least, this is a good movie that will appeal to a lot of people.

Yet to me, it's not the overt evidence that confirms my gut feeling that this is special, it more the little things I am seeing. Some examples:

-Suki (the DP) took the movie to the colorist last week; he is the guy who makes sure all the colors are balanced correctly and look right in the final product. This guy has seen probably 10,000 movies in his life. He watches movies all day. It's literally his job. Well, he couldn't do his job on our movie. Why? He was laughing too hard. He was literally in such fits of laughter, he couldn't concentrate or focus, so he gave up trying to pay attention to his job and just watched it all the way through, as a fan.

-There was the 60 year old woman at the second LA screening, the crippled one with the cane who got in because she was the ride of someone else we invited. She could not be farther from our projected demographic...and she LOVED the movie. Raved about it.

-There is the constant, unending feedback like this--and this is written by a guy I only met last weekend:

"Before long it was 2200 and it was time for the screening. We can't tell you much about the movie other than this, it's hilarious. I was crying. It was legitimately funny and not like you'd expect it to be if you've followed or read what's on his website. I mean, yes, he has sex with a bunch of women, and yes, he's horrifically inappropriate in almost every frame, but it was, and I am going to go flog myself after saying this, a rather charming film, even in its absolute absurdity. Bottom line - 50 soldiers watched it and all 50 said it kicked ass. When the shit does that ever happen?"

-There is the fact that, after each of the three screenings we've had, dozens of people--most of whom don't know each other--have stood around afterward talking about the movie, quoting it back to each other and rehashing all their favorite parts. This has happened three times, with three very different groups, and each time it happened spontaneously. The first time I thought it was a fluke, but by the third time, I start to think it means something.

I know that the plural of anecdote is not data, but incidents like this speak to me. These things don't happen to normal movies, but they have happened to us so many times, I've stopped writing about them because it just sounds like boasting. Yet every day something like that happens. We are getting amazing reactions, not only from the expected sources, but often from places we never expected, and in ways that rarely if ever happen.

It's the combination of these numerous factors that is spawning my feeling that this movie has the potential to become something special. I can see it becoming the type of movie that is on everyone's DVD shelf, that is referenced thousands of times in hundreds of contexts, that becomes iconic. The way that Office Space and Swingers and Braveheart stand as reference points for all sorts of cultural discussions, I think this movie can do that.

Will this actually happen? And if it does, will this mean the movie does well at the box office?

Who knows. I don't. I hope I am right, but I could definitely end up being wrong. It would not be the first time. It's almost impossible to predict something like this beforehand. Only time will tell if my gut feeling turns out to be right, but as of now I truly believe we made not just a really good movie, but something special.

EDIT: As we figure many of these variables out, and we get closer to the release date, making a prediction about the gross will be much easier, and many blogs will start posting their predictions.

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