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Blog: Living the Indie Film Dream |
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Written by David Greenberg
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Sunday, 11 February 2007 |
 I should not be blogging. I should be working on a screenplay that is due at the end of the month but is not even 1/3 complete. I should be working on another screenplay that was supposed to be finished months ago. Of course, I just turned in a screenplay on Sunday and have not heard anything about it from the producer. I am living the indie film dream.
I have to take my blessings where I can. The last year has been the best (Only? Last?) year of my professional career. I have been getting hired to write screenplays. One of the first projects that I was hired to write just wrapped production in NYC. Whether or not my name winds up appearing with the words 'Written By' is, however, up in the air because, after writing three drafts of a screenplay for the producers, they hired someone else to re-write my stuff. Par for the course, I know but still'.
So, I am getting a lot of screenwriting work but the big news is that I will be shooting my own feature in the spring. Much more on this ---- the good, the bad and the ugly --- as this blog continues. I am meeting with my co-director, my producer and our casting agent next week and have started to scope out SAG actors.
So, what does it mean to be living the indie film dream? The answers to this question and others will be the basis of most of the content here for the foreseeable future. More importantly, why am I, a guy in Philly, contributing to a Boston website? Well, my 9 year old daughter is a die-hard Red Sox fan as a result of having lived in Maine for two years. Does that count? I still have the house in Maine, hope to move back one day and, well, Maine was once a part of Massachusetts and Maine is where my film career began, back in 1988, working on back to back features, one a low budget indie and the other a big budget studio film. The experience of working for three months on a $1,000,000 film, having a day off and starting three month of work on a $20,000,000 film was a study in contrasts that changed my life, shaped my vision and, in many ways, turned me into who I am today. Go ahead; you can try to look me up on the IMDb. There is only one credit there: the indie film for which I did not get paid for (in fact I think I lost money on it) but got my name in the credits not the studio film that I made (relative) buckets of money on but got no credit.
I am living the indie film dream, a dream that really began right after college and has recurred with frightening tenacity and consistency for the past almost twenty years. Just months after graduation, Spike Lee's 'She's Gotta Have It' was released. A guy from out of nowhere made a film for something like $187,000 and got it released? Mind-blowing. Something was going on here and I wanted to be a part of it. A couple of years later Steven Soderbergh, another guy from out of nowhere, released 'sex, lies and videotape', made for about 1,000,000 and created something of a fuss at a little ski resort in Park City, Utah. The fuss and the buzz from Utah erupt with staggering predictability every year now but fewer and fewer of us are paying as much attention.
I became a student of the neo-indie film. There have always been independent filmmakers. Thomas Edison used to employ armed gangs to roam New York shutting down productions that weren't providing him with kickbacks or, residuals, dues or something because he held the patent to the cameras, projectors and he had an exclusive deal with Eastman for film stock. I had seen films by John Sayles and The Coen Brothers before Lee, Soderbergh and others starting getting people's attention. I devoured every article, every case study that detailed the path from 'out of nowhere' to indie film success. I read books about individual films. Lee's 'Spike Lee's Gotta Have It' and 'Uplift The Race: The Making of School Daze' in addition to Soderbergh's account of making 'sex, lies'' and later Rodriguez' 'Rebel Without A Crew' are indispensable. I had to find out how these guys did it and then find some kind of excuse for not doing it myself. Lee had already won a student Oscar. Soderbergh had been a Grammy nominee. Rodriguez sold his own blood or something like that. From Robert Townsend to Kevin Smith, Jim Jarmusch to Richard Linklater, these guys had something I wanted, something I needed to do and after 20 years of sort of trying, it wasn't happening for me. Until now. Nothing I read prepared me for the path that my career has taken, what has happened to me to me get to the place where I am now and hope to be going soon. My film is going to be made in a few months. I am living the indie dream, for better or worse, and that, for the most part is what this blog is going to be about. More next time.
Finally, can it be true? Are The Police really getting back together? Now, that's a dream.
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