What They Don't Teach You at Film School: 161 Strategies For Making Your Own Movies No Matter What
Camille Landau
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: 0786884770
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Two filmmakers who've beaten the system give the real dope on what it takes to get your movie made.
Do you have to go to film school to get your movies made? No, say two young entrepreneurs who survived the grind. Here they offer 140 strategies for making movies no matter what. Amateurs as well as seasoned veterans can pick up this entertaining and incredibly useful guide in any place--at any point of crisis--and find tactics that work. Whether it's raising money or cutting your budget; dealing with angry landlords or angry cops; or jump-starting the production or stalling it while you finish the script, these strategies are delivered with funny, illustrative anecdotes from the authors' experiences and from veteran filmmakers eager to share their stories. Irreverent, invaluable, and a lot cheaper than a year's tuition, this friendly guide is the smartest investment any future filmmaker could make.
Strategies from the book include: Love your friends for criticizing your work--especially at the script stage; Shyness won't get you the donuts; Duct tape miracles; Don't fall in love with cast or crew (but if you do...).
why professional script readers, and their bosses, are too traumatized to like anything. Script coverage ends up in a file that is kept for a very long time, in case your script ever comes back to the production company, even in a revised form. The coverage proves that the time investment to read your material was already spent, and protects them from ever having to read it again. Send the same company another script and they'll read their coverage on your last one first. Worse than points on
production funds from bankers like Lewis "Lew" Horwitz of the Lewis Horwitz Organization in Beverly Hills. Lew enabled the boom in independent filmmaking by pioneering the practice of lending production money against a film's reasonable expectation of additional foreign and domestic distribution contracts. Lending, in other words, to fill the gap between monies currently promised by existing contracts and the film's (larger) production budget. Lew stays in business by managing his risk. He works
compelled to break up into a psychotic war over whose side they take, the intrigues of which have nothing to do with which shot is next. We're not saying you shouldn't hire people who like each other. Just don't hire people who will work only if they can bring along their friend and protective shogun. Two is enough to talk behind anyone's back. Enough to share a maddening joke they won't let anyone in on. It's enough to keep a secret, and enough to start a mutiny. On one particularly ill-fated
truly help is that they can't see the point of it all. When you're in the midst of the Donuts, Red V i n e s , . . . 181 storm that is your set, you can see nothing but things you need to do. To someone who's not familiar with the work, and the linear sequences it needs to go through in order to get accomplished, the whole thing seems like the eye of the storm. Like nothing's really happening. Or whatever's happening is happening ridiculously slowly. Most didn't come to give so much as they
worry about than what they can do without any training or fundamental commitment to getting their hands dirty. Finally you come up with something: make some more coffee. They do this very seriously, as if Patton's army depended on them. Three minutes later, they're done. Is there anything else they can do? You make the mistake of handing them off to the A . D . to find something. This won't do. It's the equivalent of assigning them to the junior secretary pool when they've come to lounge in the