This is a repost of a story I wrote for a new friend, over at www.startopolis.com:


Real to Reel...


Craters and Debris Trails

When we arrived in Los Angeles at the end of 2002, my girlfriend and I had about seven hundred dollars between us.  My big plan, such as it was, was to put almost a decade of stage production experience to work in the movie industry, while I developed some ideas I had for interactive multimedia.  (Secretly, I wanted to make movies - but the projects I was developing seemed more selfless and more attainable.)  On the other hand, my girlfriend's goal was to find geology work.  She's heard California was the promised land, earthquakes and all.

Because she was far too outdoorsy to tolerate the city, and because I was too indoorsy to be anywhere else, we wound up responding to one of those Westside Rentals ads about living on a boat.  The perfect compromise!  We put a deposit down before leaving the East Coast.  Wouldn't you know, that boat never existed to begin with!  In an odd pique of insanity, the man who defrauded us helped us find a place to stay until we could find lodgings in Koreatown.  Perhaps he was more loony than downright malicious, or perhaps it was drugs.  Only in California...

All this is prelude to my first job in Los Angeles.  An old friend from college was dating someone who was working at a small independent film company in Beverly Hills.  When I wound up working in a call center for a telemarketing producer of DVD shlock, I was grateful.  When I began to suspect that the investors I was bringing into these films weren't going to make any money, I was hesitant to explore the issue further - living on the property of our ersatz landlord's friend was making both me and my girlfriend hungry for income.  When I eventually closed a 60k deal and was due my commission, I was fired.

You see, I'd signed papers that voided any incoming commissions due to me, should my employment come to an end.

Oops.  Probably, I could have sued.  At the time, I was feeling pretty disempowered.

For me, the Christmas holiday was spent trying to get hold of prospective employers, eating once every two days, sitting on the vacant floor of a Koreatown apartment with next month's rent looming overhead.

Somewhere in Hollywood

While I forget the exact wording, I recall seeing a job advertisement in Variety for professional, hungry, entrepreneurially minded people.  To me, it seemed dangerously similar to the position I'd just left, but I figured I'd work for a few weeks, shore up some money, and find something better.  When I found out that I'd be working in the financing of independent films, I cemented my opinions and my exit strategy.

All that was before I met my friend, Keith Kjarval.  While Keith and I have a great many differences, we do have a choice few things in common.  Of all the people I've ever met, Keith is the only person who can consistently match my energy.  Beyond that, he carries a sense of purpose and a conviction that can't be denied.  By the end of my interview, we'd already started to become friends.  On the other hand, when I showed up for work the next Monday and saw the projects I was being exposed to, the gates of my own imagination opened wide.  For the first time, I dared to see myself making movies.

While I can't go into the details of this company or how it worked, I can certainly talk about what happened to me there.

First and foremost, I came to understand how movies are structured financially, and how investors CAN make money in them.  Every day since then, I've read the trades and followed the market trends.  Exit strategies like distribution deals came over my desk, and whenever I didn't understand something, the resources were there to wrap my head around it.  Very quickly, the analytical side of my mind began breaking down all this information, retaining it, contrasting it...   By and by, my coworkers came to rely on me for analysis.  I became the go-to guy for hard breakdowns.

At the same time, those interactive projects I mentioned moved into a modest playtesting phase.  One of my beta testers, a screenwriter, pitched me on optioning the material...  and something inside me popped.  Armed with a copy of Syd Field, I blasted through a rough draft of my own screenplay, and it was the most fun, hard work I'd done since high school.  Since then, I've written scripts ten in total, and I've finished five scripts on spec.  Of the rest, I plan to direct three (my theater background shines through), one was sold, and one is still unfinished.

At about that time, my girlfriend left Los Angeles for Cambridge University and grad school.  While I might have gone with her, something far more vital to me was taking shape in Los Angeles:

Unification

When it came time for my co-workers to go into business for themselves, they asked me to come with them.  In 2005, Unified Pictures was born.  Our first year was one of the most incredible times of my life, from the production of our first film, The Perfect Sleep (in theaters March 13 - www.theperfectsleep.com), to our work on David Lynch's Inland Empire.  Again, I was financing independent films, but this time I was building my own future, as well as the future of my projects and my company.

When Unified decided to delve into the horror genre with a film called XII, they needed a script with the visciousness, the depth, and the basic human truth to anchor the movie.  This was my first real opportunity to move my creative initiative ahead.  As part of my negotiation with the producers, I accepted some equity in the project (which I had taken the time to understand, financially) and bartered for the resources to shoot my first short film, Farther.  Right now, Farther is in post - and I can tell you, the very best day of my life to date was our day of production in the Mojave Desert.  At the same time, my financing activities put me in a position where I was able to secure equity in another Unified Picture, Bob Funk - which hits theaters Feb 27!  Check out www.bobfunkthemovie.com.

Currently, my finance work is focused on the upcoming animated musical Noah's Ark.

8 Sided Films

With Bob Funk going into theaters this month, and with XII in the process of securing distribution, all this equity enables me to seed my own film fund and begin pulling together a microbudget production.  Finally, I'm shooting one of my scripts - a movie called Sam Bailey.  I've given myself the knowledge, the production resources, and the exit strategies to make my movie successful.  After years of assembling financial resources for other producers, you find me putting my own movie together, under the production banner of 8 Sided Films. 

For more information on my own projects, check out www.8sidedfilms.com.  For the scoop on Unified Pictures, please visit www.unifiedpictures.com.

Punchline

If there is one lesson to be gleaned from this story, such as it is, it's the fact that nobody actually "makes it" in the film industry.  Each day's work is as hard as the last, but hopefully it gets a good deal more fun as time goes on.  Even during the times when famous actors are bombarded with offers for parts, they find themselves consumed with the work of creating the opportunities they actually want.  In any industry or field of study, things become easy when people become complacent. 

As an entrepreneur, I'll never "make it."  For me, the best life is one where I've taken every opportunity to break boundaries within myself, in the people around me, in my business and in the world.  That's what drives me to write, direct, and to share my stories.