The Cast of A Short History of Decay (so far)

Johnny Galecki  - Nathan Fisher

Robert Forster - Bob Fisher

Jacki Weaver - Sandy Fisher

Kelli Garner - Erika

America Ferrera - Shelly

There, I’ve done it.  I’m finally able to reveal most of the cast.  I haven’t done so up until now out of anxiety —and honestly, even now, I’m still holding my breath.  But as we head towards pre-production and a start date in June, it seems like time to name names, even though a few roles are still uncast.

Casting this film has been––and continues to be–– a thrill.  I have met with extraordinary actors, so many of whom have responded in powerful ways to my script.  Johnny Galecki is a brilliant actor and a real advocate for this film. As soon as he was cast he became a driving factor, pushing it forward. After she read the script, America Ferrera became a staunch champion for her character, sending me back to the script to define and enhance the role.

I feel very lucky to have Robert Forster and Jacki Weaver playing Bob and Sandy Fisher. Both are Academy Award nominees, Forster for Jackie Brown, and Weaver for Animal Kingdom.

I’ve brought on board a fantastic D.P.,  Nancy Schreiber, exactly the one I had hoped for.  And as we head into pre-production, opening offices in Sarasota, Florida in just a couple of weeks, every single day this film becomes more and more of a reality.

I'm still meeting with actors about a few remaining roles. There are still potential scheduling conflicts and other variables that I'm confident will result in sleepless nights. It will not go smoothly, which is to say, it will be business as usual.

For those of you on Facebook, I've set up a Fan Page for the film where I'll be linking to items as they develop.

I appreciate all your support so far. Stay tuned for further casting announcements and developments.

I took a moment yesterday, amongst the barrage of phone calls and emails, to consider how far my film project has come.  It was born out of frustration and intense creative desire and a need to change the whole way I thought of my work and my career.  I’ve done it my way, on my own, after a lot of years of thinking (or being told) that I couldn’t, or shouldn’t.  That I was thinking too big, or coming up with ideas that were too out there; that no one was making grown-up movies.  Or that no one would take a chance on a first-time director.  Well, of all the many mind-blowing things that have happened over these past few months, maybe the most amazing is this sense of what is possible.  Goethe once wrote this: “Whatever you dream you can do, or believe you can do, begin it.  Boldness has grace, magic and power in it.”

Tomorrow I’m heading back to LA with my producing partner for a few jam-packed days of meetings with actors, our casting director, agents, a cinematographer, and investors.  Several of the key roles in  “A Short History of Decay” have been cast with some staggeringly wonderful, remarkable, gifted and well-known actors.  I’m not being coy here – I’m just not comfortable naming names yet.  Call me superstitious.  But suffice it to say that I am beyond gratified with the response to the script, and with the support I’ve received from people in the industry.  I’ve come to see that casting a movie like this is like putting together a giant puzzle.  Or, as my wife has recently described it, like building a skyscraper from the top down.  We have most of the pieces in place, and still a few more key ones to go.

After my LA trip I’m meeting my producer/first assistant director Buffalo Mike Hausman in Florida where we’ll cover a lot of ground – from Jacksonville to Sarasota – location scouting and meeting with crews.  ASHOD has a start date.  Mind-blowing but true.  We’re set to begin shooting this thing in early June.

A year ago, when I sat down as if writing for my life, and wrote “A Short History of Decay” in six intensely creative weeks, I could not have allowed myself to dream that the project would be at this point.  I’d had too many projects go up in flames, had written too many jobs-for-hire that I had to pretend to be passionate about (“Remember, you’re passionate about this project,” my manager once said to me before I went into a pitch meeting ).  “A Short History of Decay” was a story close to my heart, and I didn’t dare believe, didn’t dare really do anything other than put one foot in front of the other and revise, show it to friends, get notes, revise some more, show it to more friends until finally it was ready to let it out into the world.

Well, I’m just back from a heady, borderline-surreal few days in Hollywood, with a lot to report.  I flew out with my producing partner for a series of meetings with investors and actors, and honestly, it couldn’t have gone better.  I don’t want to jinx the project by naming names, but for now I’ll just say that we have attached a fantastic actor who also happens to star in a wildly popular television show, to play one of the lead roles, and we have tremendous interest from other wonderful actors to play the other roles. (I'm not teasing here.  I'll report the details at the appropriate time.)  The big agencies are behind us.  Agents are passing the script along to their clients, who are reading it quickly.  I met extraordinary people who have offered help of all kinds.  Doors just keep swinging open.  If you know me, you know that I cannot be described as an optimist, but I will say this: we are well on our way to securing the backing that will allow us to start shooting this summer.  

Many things will happen between now and then.  There’s a long way to go before I’ll be able to utter the words “...and...ACTION”. But we have momentum, and I am beginning to believe that it will happen.  When it does, I can tell you that it will be a story of a whole lot of years of perseverance, rejection, discouragement, and a loss of a sense of what was most important to me.  It’s amazing what can happen when you remember what it means to be true to yourself.

Tonight I leave for Los Angeles with my producing partner for two solid days of meetings about A Short History of Decay.

As I pack for this trip, it’s with a completely different feeling than previous business trips out West.  In the past, I would have spent weeks (if not months) preparing pitches in the hopes that producers or studios would pay me to develop them. I would seek their approval and await their judgment. Sometimes their judgment was instantaneous. In one case, I spent literally months working on a pitch and it was clear from the moment I walked into the room that they had taken the meeting as a courtesy, that the producer I was with had no juice with the network, and that they weren’t interested in the least bit in the subject matter.  All that time, down the drain.  That wasn’t a fun flight home.  I can tell you the various corners in New York City where I have been standing when my agent called me to deliver the good — or more often, the bad — news.  Sometimes an answer would never come; I have scripts and projects out there with producers and studios who, years later, haven’t passed on them.  (Silence is sometimes the Hollywood “no”.)

The waiting.  The waiting will kill you. Do you know those lists that tally up  how many hours of your life you will likely have spent brushing your teeth, or shaving, or driving your kid to school?  I would rather not know how many hours of my life I have spent waiting.  In all the years I spent as a foreign correspondent, it went like this: write a story, file a story, see it in print the next day.  One of my best stories — for which I won several awards — was actually dictated from memory over the phone from Somalia to my editor, because my computer had crashed.  Which is all to say that I am not really built for the act of waiting.  Nor am I built for the painful act of abandoning projects that I have worked hard on and loved, because I couldn’t get an executive or a producer to share my vision.

With ASHOD, that has all changed. No, I don’t have stars in my eyes.  I’m not naive.  Nothing about this process is easy.  But as I meet with some amazing actors this week at the big agencies –– some of whom have already expressed interest in being in my film –– I am aware that it is entirely by following my own heart and my own vision that my small, personal film has made it to this point.  I still need partners, of course. I can’t make the film alone.  I still need lots and lots of help so I can forge ahead and realize my vision for this project. The difference is that it’s in my hands.  Step by step, it is happening.   And it feels exciting and exhilarating––and like the way it always should have been.

For the past last two months everything has moved steadily in the direction I’d hoped it would — which is why you haven't heard from me in a while.  This is what’s happened:

First, Mike Hausman finished my budget. The initial draft of the budget totaled about $4 million. That was too high. Mike and I both felt that in order to  secure investors’ backing of a film with a first-time director, we’d have to get it down below $3 million. And since we’re planning on shooting in Florida, it means that we “only” need to raise about $2 million in private equity. That’s because Florida offers a tax credit of between 20 and 30 percent, depending on a series of variables.

In order to work the budget down, we had to reduce the number of shooting days. Don’t ask me exactly how that was done, but Mike went back to the drawing board and produced a budget for $2.8 million based on 25 shooting days. That puts a lot of pressure on the production, but with Mike working as 1st assistant director, we’re confident that’s doable.

But now, the hard part. Where to get the $2 million?  On one level, the answer is simple, you ask for it. Several people have suggested the crowdsourcing model, but this is simply too much money to raise in that manner. And although this script bears all the classic hallmarks of an indie picture, I want to make a film that will be a commercial success, or at least make earn more money than it cost to produce. I wanted to be able to go to people and offer this as an investment. Crowdsourcing even a portion of the budget seemed to me a signal that this was not a viable commercial venture.

I know what I’m good at and what I need help with. I needed a producing partner who could explain the investment, the risks, the potential rewards, and could also talk film. Someone who could speak with authority about the script, the process, and the business.
I met him at a dinner party that I almost skipped. (I also met my wife at a party I almost skipped.) My wife was out of town, and my son was insistent that we stay home and watch The Hangover again.  He pouted and complained for the entire 15-minute ride to the party.  As Woody Allen famously said, “Eighty percent of success is showing up.” That has indeed been my experience.

I’ve known from the beginning that in order to get this done, I’d have to talk to everyone I met and tell them what I’m up to.  (Which isn’t difficult because everyone eventually asks, “So what are you up to?”)  The hosts of the party introduced me to Alfred Sapse, who I’d known by reputation as an entertainment attorney. Alfred moved to Connecticut from Malibu looking for a lower key place to raise his kids. He’d been working for his old clients and quietly producing low budget films.

We hit it off immediately.  The next day I sent him a copy of A Short History of Decay.  Two days later we were partners. Last week we met in New York with Mike H, to move the process forward. And since Albert came aboard, things have been moving very quickly.

A corporation has been formed: Short History, LLC.

Our first investor is now aboard, a very smart investor whose presence we hope will convince others give us a serious look.

There’s more than that to tell, but I’ll do it in the next post, casting for talent.

Click HERE to see the first post in this series.

When I was on the set of Phil Spector a last month I got some great advice on directing my first film, A Short History of Decay,  from David Mamet. A week later, as I was heading to LA, it occurred to me that many of my friends in the business would also have some interesting things to say about taking that first daunting step into directing.

How does a neophyte walk into a situation crowded with experienced professionals and start running the show?  (Or, does one even attempt this?) How does someone who hasn't acted since stinking up a high school production of Othello talk to seasoned actors about their craft? So, camera in hand, I started asking them.  As Mamet had predicted, everyone was generous, supportive and helpful.

Techies P.S.: This was recorded with a Nikon D7000. Okay, some of these are a bit out of focus. When I realized that I couldn't really see through the camera's LED screen, I bought a Zacuto viewfinder which allowed me to actually see what I was shooting.  I recommend the product to anyone shooting with an HDSLR.

I’m writing this from Tutka Bay, Alaska, about a 30-minute boat ride from Homer, which is a four-hour drive from Anchorage, which is a five hour flight from Los Angeles, where I just spent a week visiting friends and having a good time. It was the first time in more than a decade that I’d arrived in LA with nothing to sell, no meetings to take, no mad dashes from lunch in Santa Monica to a 3:00 PM in Beverly Hills where––just for instance––after I arrive, I receive a text telling me that the meeting has to be rescheduled because Mr. XYZ has been held up at a lunch meeting and evidently didn’t feel the same compunction to dash across town that I did.

No. I spent a week in LA without that crappy feeling. And without the crappy feeling that I have after mangling a pitch. Or the even crappier feeling I have after nailing a pitch and realizing that it doesn’t really matter because the project was doomed long before I walked in the door; nothing left to do but get my parking validated and go back to the hotel in time for cocktail hour.

Without all of that, LA suddenly felt like a warm and welcoming city. My wife and I hung out with some old friends and made some new ones.  I had some long, leisurely lunches and relaxed dinners and didn’t spend a second fretting over traffic. When people asked my what I was up to I told them about A Short History of Decay and my plans for making the film.  I received nothing but incredibly warm encouragement and support. (Much more on that later). Nobody thought I was crazy.  In fact, it seemed like a lot of the people I was hanging out with were doing the same thing themselves.

I may be imagining this, but it seems that the frustration I’ve been feeling for the last few years in Hollywood is shared by most; working outside the system is becoming more the rule than the exception.  The people doing this range from screenwriters to actors to directors to producers to musicians.  It seems like we’re all in the same boat together, trying to forge new paths and do what’s truly meaningful to us, come what may.  After all, if it’s going to be this hard, we may as well be doing what matters, right?

David Mamet

We were on our way to grab a quick bite, waiting for the elevator in a Brooklyn courthouse. David Mamet looked at me and said: “The best thing about directing your first film is how supportive everyone on the set will be. Everyone will be rooting for you to succeed.” Then he added, “Let me know if there’s anything I can do.”

For me, moving toward directing my first film, this was welcome encouragement from a great director, a director whom I’ve long admired.  Whose book On Directing Film, I’ve devoured.

But the more interesting story is how I ended up chatting with David Mamet in the first place. And it’s a story that starts, as does the story of my making this film, with a decision to follow my own instincts against all advice and conventional wisdom about how to make a movie.

This part of the story begins with Milos Forman. Milos was among a small circle of trusted friends to whom I’d given early drafts of A Short History of Decay. I was looking for any notes he might have as well as any tips he might offer on directing.  Mostly, I was looking for the reaction of a veteran multiple Oscar-winning director to my casual remark that I was planning on directing my own script. “I only have one piece of advice,” Milos said in his deep Czech accent. “Don’t listen to anybody. You’ll know what to do.”

I’ve followed that advice ever since.

Milos loved the script enough to pass it along to Mike Hausman. Mike is an amazing producer who often doubles as first A.D. (assistant director).  He’s produced films such as Amadeus and Brokeback Mountain, to name only two.  He’s also produced most of David Mamet’s films.  The first A.D. runs the set. I need someone who can do that.

Mike Hausman and Milos Forman

I’ve previously written about my initial meeting with “Buffalo” Mike Hausman.  So you can read it here.

Mike is now producing  and acting as first A.D. on a film for HBO, the as yet untitled Phil Spector biopic which stars Al Pacino and Helen Mirren. Mamet wrote the film and is directing.  I told Mike that I’d like to spend some time on the set, to watch him work and see how he runs the show.  His answer was to invite me to be an extra.  I would play a journalist in the courtroom. “Great,” I told him. “Because I still consider myself  to be a journalist.”

“I know,” he said. “That’s what I’m afraid of. You’ll probably overact.”

So, continually reminding myself not to overact, I arrived at “holding” for extras, which was set up in church in Brooklyn Heights. I joined dozens of other extras— or background artists — most of whom seemed to know each other from previous TV and film jobs.  They would be spectators, security guards, jurors, journalists and other other bits of what some referred to as “moving wallpaper.”

The  scene recalled for me the feeling of being a journalist and landing in a new country for the first time. I watched, learned, and immersed myself in a fully realized subculture with its own language and customs. And since most of the work of being an extra background artist involves sitting around, I got to know a few people. It was a blast.

I spent three days staring at the back of Al Pacino’s head as he wore some crazy Phil Spector wigs. I watched Mike Hausman run the set, which all of the extras agreed was one of the most relaxed and friendly they’ve ever been on.  And I got to meet some of the amazing people who work for him, some of whom I will work with on my film.

Al Pacino as Phil Spector

And I got to sit for hours and watch an extraordinary and accomplished director create his vision.

(My star turn was when one of the cameramen asked me to slide a bit to my left. Then a bit more. I asked him if he was trying to get me into the shot. "No," he said. "I'm trying to get you out of the shot. You're ruining Al's closeup.)

And as I sat there day after day, I thought to myself, This is good. This is what comes from giving yourself permission to do what you want to do. From taking Milos Forman’s advice: “Don’t listen to anybody.”

Or I suppose I should add to that, don't listen to anyone who tells you what you can't do.

First, a brief update on A Short History of Decay.  I’m awaiting the budget and breakdown from my producer. It’s a hugely complicated process that results in a document that is very often longer than the screenplay itself.  During this time I’m talking with potential investors. I can’t talk any particulars until I have the document, so we wait. And I turn back to several television projects that are on my board.

I keep a bulletin board in my office with the titles of various projects I’m working on, or want to be working on; It’s easy to lose track. The board also reminds me of why I’m making a film on my own. Every project on it has a back story that includes a litany of reasons why it can’t be made.

If you want to make a living as a screenwriter or television writer there are certain things you must understand: You can’t sell a television show with a female ensemble cast. Baseball movies don’t make money. Period pieces are too expensive to produce. You can’t show a sick child in the opening act. You can’t set the drama outside the United States. You can’t have more than one foreign character in your movie or TV show. The lead has to be an American. A television show has to be a procedural; you must resolve at least one storyline in each episode. And by all means do not write a baseball movie with an all Cuban, female cast set in the 1930s.

What you should do is figure out what was successful ten minutes ago, tweak it a bit and hit the streets with your script before the buzz dies about the thing you just ripped off.

I exaggerate, but not much.  This is a symptom of the climate of fear that has always gripped the entertainment industry but which has of late reached apocalyptic proportions.  Agents don’t want to go out with offbeat material, and junior executives don’t want to pass it along to the higher-ups.  If you’re working on something and you hear that someone else has beaten you to the punch with something very similar, write faster and wish them well. If their project crashes and burns, yours will never see the light of day.

A number of years ago my wife and I developed a medical procedural set in the world of fertility clinics.  We were partnered with big TV star fresh off of a mega-hit series who had a development deal with Warner Brothers.  All good. Except... we’re all buoyed about by the same zeitgeist.  If you’ve got an idea, and it feels good or commercial (or both!) then you can pretty much assume that half a dozen other writers were struck with the same epiphany in the shower this morning and are busy drafting emails to their agents.

That was the case with our fertility drama.  We learned, while sitting in a conference room at CBS, that there was another project that they were also considering that had been brought to them a few weeks earlier by a team of emmy-winning writers.  They went with the other project.

Several months later we turned on the TV and watched the show with something approaching paralyzing trepidation. It was -- pun alert! -- as different from the show we’d conceived of as possible. And it was godawful.  Just terrible.  And it didn’t last much beyond the pilot, from which I derived some smug satisfaction until I realized that it meant that nobody was even going to look at a show in the fertility “arena” for at least a decade. And that was the end of that.

Nobody wants to hear that a show or a film didn’t do well because it wasn’t well done.  That’s too hard to quantify, so everything is reduced to a formula based on facile and false equivalencies. There’s little room for aesthetic judgement in the economy of fear.

A television pilot I recently wrote about doctors in a war zone (American doctors) was quickly conflated with a chirpy feel-good medical drama set in a tropical paradise from people who made Grey’s Anatomy. The only thing the shows had in common was doctors and Third World. I’ve actually spent years living in refugee camps in war zones. I was creating real characters and drama based on that experience. There was no confusing it with escapist entertainment -- not that there’s anything wrong with that.

People who liked my pilot were waiting to see how the other one did. It didn’t do well.
The lesson that producers took from that was you can’t take doctors out of the country.

But then there’s Slum Dog Millionaire. And there’s Mad Men and Six Feet Under and other films and shows that broke lots of rules, maintained their integrity and  did phenomenally well.  And when you hear what it took to get these things made and distributed you can only gasp in admiration of the persistence and singularity of vision that it took to fight through the resistance.  Ultimately it’s powered by respect for the audience and by the belief that what’s good is good whether your hero is an all-American masked avenger or a Mexican sharecropper.  It’s hard to keep believing that when you’re constantly fed that list of things you can’t do.  Until finally you just decide to do it anyway, which is why I am where I am, starting to raise money to make my own film.

I’m writing this post from Cambridge Massachusetts.  I spent a chunk of my youth here, my adolescent and teen years (I most definitely did NOT go to Harvard or MIT.). I loved the flavor of the place, the sense of freedom, the sight of people reading and writing in cafés, with books and papers piled around them. I always imagined that they were grinding away at dissertations about their recent discoveries in some highly specific aspect of genetics or insights into obscure 18th century poets. Later I moved to New York City, and was equally taken with the sight of people writing, at first in notebooks and later on notebooks. I imagined they were all writing novels, deeply felt tomes of startling emotional resonance.

Then, when I got into the business, I started spending a lot of time in LA. I would walk into a Leaf & Bean or a cafe in Venice and see people working away at screenplays. And I felt none of the admiration that I experienced in Cambridge or New York.  My thought was something closer to: Those poor, deluded saps. Of course, I was a screenwriter myself, but I was pretty sure I wasn’t one of those saps. I felt that I was close, very close, on the verge. They were slaving away over too many lattes, and I had just come from a “big meeting" at DreamWorks.

I pulled out my MacBook Pro, booted up Screenwriter, and pitied them.

Is there anything less rewarding than being an unproduced screenwriter? The PhD candidates’ dissertations will be read by their peers and advisers. They may not in fact be groundbreaking, but they will be fully realized. They will find their intended audience and will exist as the academic works they are.

And the novels being written in New York? Most will never be finished, let alone published, but they too will exist as the “novel in a drawer” or “noble failure” or some form that bestows a measure of respect upon the author.

But screenplays?  Poor saps.

Many years ago, when I was a journalist working on my second book, I went to LA to do some research.  I stayed with a friend in Santa Monica, and when we were out in social situations, he introduced me like this: “This is my friend Michael from New York. He’s a real writer.”  I liked it then. I cringe when I think about it now, because it’s made me wonder, am I still a real writer?

The unproduced screenplay is nothing. It won’t be read, because nobody reads screenplays for entertainment. It is unfulfilled.  It is meaningless, and its author is a quixotic dreamer. Can’t get no respect.

No respect because the industry does not value the effort. It values only the success and the laurels it bestows upon itself.  Example:  A writer wins an Oscar for a script that everyone in the biz knows he didn’t really write. He’s gotten credit because he wrote a barely serviceable first draft of a high-concept idea that was rewritten by a half a dozen other writers. Still, the guy with the award is going to be a star for a while, have projects thrown at him and even some films produced.

It’s hard for a self-respecting screenwriter to stomach. And I’ve come to dread the words “I love this script” from a studio exec. I know what’s coming next. “But...”

You get just enough encouragement to keep going. Keep plugging away at a new script.  It’s called intermittent reinforcement. The animal (usually a rat) is conditioned with just enough reinforcement to keep doing the same thing over and over again. But soon that reinforcement is removed and the animal continues the same behavior with very little reward at all. It can eventually make for a crazy rat.

So, I quit--at least for now.  A Short History of Decay is my attempt to get off the wheel, to stop holding on to little bits of praise and encouragement. To stop chasing the market, and believing that the occasional paycheck is enough while my soul gets slowly eroded.  Like the folks writing their dissertations and novels, I’m taking control of my work and trying to make something singular and real, out of my own idiosyncratic, particular vision.  Every day now, I take a few steps towards actually making this film.  And for now, that’s good enough for me.

Go to the first post in this series.

Many years ago, I was writing a script for one of the major studios. In advance of a phone conference, I sent a draft of the script to the junior producer. He was my point man on the project, my supposed ally in the campaign to get the script green-lighted by his bosses and the studio. He got back to me with a number of very specific suggestions, with which I disagreed. I protested a bit, but it became clear that these were changes I needed to make if he was going to be enthusiastic as he put the script on his boss’s desk.  I made the changes.

Later, in a conference call with the producers and the studio exec, the higher-ups in the room pointed to a number of things they thought needed to go from the screenplay. They were talking about the very changes that this assistant producer had insisted I make. He was in the room with the others, and I waited on my end of the phone for him to take some responsibility, or disagree.  But he just piled on, adding his voice to the chorus of negativity. I could have said something at that point, but I didn’t.

Today he has the top job at an important place in the industry. I'm sure that the details of our first encounter and hundreds like it have dissolved into the far depths of his memory. I'd like to think that he recalls our time working together fondly.

Tom Benedek's thoughts on screenwriting

I’d like to say that there are positive lessons a beginning screenwriter could learn from this story, changes in behavior or strategy that would ensure that this kind of thing doesn’t happen. But there are no lessons. There are no lessons because this is simply the way it is. Within the system there are many masters that need to be served, many disparate voices that can bombard you with bits of contradictory advice and requests and then end the meeting looking for assurance that “we’re all on the same page.”

The writer gets off the phone and is left alone in a room with the impossible task of sorting it all out, the need to please various people with differing agendas. So, like a lab rat,  I learned to respond by producing not the best scripts I could, but the ones most likely to make producers and executives happy.

On a number of occasions I’ve handed a script over to an author whose book I adapted or to someone who’s portrayed in the script with this caveat: This is not the script I think should be shot. This is the script that I think will get the executives’ attention, or make the investors happy.  I’ve added some scenes that shouldn’t be in there, that we can’t afford to shoot, or that simply can’t be shot.  In other words, this is an extension of the pitch, not a real script. It's a waste of time and effort and, even more than that,  it’s soul crushing for the writer.

Which is why writing A Short History of Decay (Can I just call it ASHOD?) was so liberating. I thought only of the film that could be made from it. There were no voices of execs in my mind.  I was the only audience for the script; the standards I held it to were only my own.  And then I found a producing partner who loved the script and whose primary goal is to help me realize my vision of the film that can be made from it.
The producer I’m working with is perfectly ready to move ahead with the script I’ve got.  Like anyone who’s hands-on in the biz he’s considering the fact that the what’s on the page is a long way from what we’ll end up shooting, no matter how many changes I end up making. In his mind, we’re making a movie, not perfecting a document.

This puts me in a very different position than I’ve ever been in before. What I’ve been used to is producers and executives sending me back for endless rewrites on scripts that I think are pretty damn done.  They do this because they’re not really sure what it is they want, and because they can, despite the fact that it’s against WGA regulations.  All writers know that they’re asked to do free rewrites, yet those who complain about it are labeled troublemakers and will have a harder time finding work next time out.

I’m doing a rewrite anyway because I’m not entirely satisfied with all of my characters. I’m doing a rewrite so I can better define some of those characters for myself.  I need to be careful, as I’m the king of the kind of  painstaking, time-sucking script fiddling that rapidly reaches a point of diminishing return. As I alluded to in the previous post, I spent a month — almost as much time as it took me to write the entire script — making the small changes suggested to me by some readers. Like Penelope, taking apart the tapestry she spent the day weaving, I endlessly wrote, unwrote and rewrote scenes and dialogue until… until nothing. There’s no end to that, and I needed to once and for all get the thing off my desk before I grew to hate it.

So I’m determined to hand the script with production breakdowns over to the producer this week so he can get to work on a budget and pass it along to a casting director.  I have a rough idea of what the budget should be, and some very specific ideas about which actors I want to approach. Those two variables are of course inextricably linked. But this is material for many future posts.

See the first post in this series.

See the next post in this series.

Film Forum

Yesterday I went to Film Forum in New York City to see Meek's Cutoff, a film that was highly recommended by a friend. It's directed by Kelly Reichardt, who also directed Wendy and Lucy. The film, set on the Oregon Trail in 1845, is both highly realistic and dreamlike. It beautifully captures powerful emotions, reveals the inner lives of characters who aren't exactly articulate. (It seems that modern films that deal with subtle emotional stories tend to be populated by writers, psychiatrists or academics who traffic in self-reflection as a matter of course.) For my money, this film blows True Grit out of the water. If you're going to see only one film about the old West this year....

Anyway, that's not what I was blogging towards.  As an added bonus, Michelle Williams, who gives a beautifully subtle performance in the film, arrived to do a brief Q&A with the audience after the final credits. The folks who raised their hands all seemed to be "in the biz," or aspired to be in the biz. And the questions all flowed around the same theme: What do you know that can help me?

They were the kinds of questions that no one can answer: "What would you do if you were me?" Correct answer: "How the fuck should I know? I'm not you." There followed more questions about how the film got made that were really asking, "Tell me how I can do this." If I hadn't been sitting in the second row I would have walked out at that point

"You've made some great choices to get to where you are today vis a vis the indie film world. How did you make those choices?" To her credit, Michelle tried gamely to politely address the desperate anxieties of the questioners. But the questions kept coming, as if her success is the result of some secret she's learned, as if there's some elixir out there that turns ordinary folks into successful producers, actors or screenwriters. At one point, an audience member turned to a particularly persistent questioner and told her to shut up. She didn't. Finally Michelle Williams said this: "Be yourself. Lead an interesting life. Don't take anyone's advice." (I'm quoting from memory here, but it's close enough.) It was the perfect answer for an audience of questioners who were in fact trying to be someone else; trying to be Michelle Williams or Kelly Reichardt or anyone but themselves. And while there's no road to success, that's a surefire recipe for failure.

I joined the Peace Corps right out of college in 1977. There was never any question about that for me, and it seemed that the idea of the Peace Corps had always been with me. I think that the first actual volunteer I ever spoke with was Paul Tsongas, the late senator (and congressman at the time) from Massachusetts who I worked for on Capitol Hill.  Paul had been a volunteer in Ethiopia in the early days of the Peace Corps, and often (to me, at least) referred to his experiences there.

It's been a time to reassess the Corps.  This article in The Nation (which mentions me) is very thoughtful.

The only person on the dais who expressed any uncertainty about the value of the Peace Corps was Mary Jo Bane, the Kennedy School academic dean and an early volunteer in Liberia. She commented that the Peace Corps probably helped President William Tubman maintain power longer than he would have otherwise (as Tubman grew increasingly dictatorial before his death in 1971, the efforts of volunteer teachers and rural advisers arguably helped him create an appearance of government concern for the poor), which she said "might or might not have been a good thing."

Back when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Kenya, I used to watch the local farmers cart their freshly picked coffee beans off to the local coffee co-op. There, they exchanged the beans, and six months of hard labor (or more likely, the labor of their wives) for...well, for very little.  Because most of them were in debt to the coffee co-op for school fees, fertilizers, hardware, and other necessities even before they brought the beans there.  And then, using a formula that was indecipherable to the farmers, the people who ran the co-op calculated a payment. Which the men promptly spent on beer.  But that's another story.

The story here is that the farmers had no choice where to sell their coffee. The so-called coffee co-op dictated the price and that was the end of it.  In other words, this was NOT fair trade. The farmers were in effect indentured servants to the co-ops, which were controlled by powerful politicians on the local and national level.

That's why I was so optimistic about the Fair Trade movement.  Like a good citizen of the world I only buy Fair Trade coffee. (Mostly from CoffeeFool)  Skeptic, that I am, however, I always suspected that much of my coffee probably wasn't really fair trade. The task of certifying what is fair trade and what isn't strikes me as impossible to monitor in the conditions where most of the world's coffee is grown.

And of course there are other complications, and this excellent article by Jill Richardson in Alternet, does a nice job of laying them out.

Despite the certification program and the often intimate relationship between growers in the Global South and roasters in the Global North, it's not easy to quantify how the Fair Trade price translates into improved quality of life. Coffee comes from countries on several continents, each with its own currency and economy. Thus, a living wage in Ethiopia may not be a living wage in Peru, or vice versa.

Ultimately she concludes:

For a consumer, the choice is clear: buying Fair Trade is the way to go. However, consumers should be aware of the nuances within the Fair Trade market in order to make the most ethical choice (and hopefully enjoy some delicious coffee, too). First of all, make sure the coffee you buy is actually Fair Trade-certified, as corporations looking to undercut the Fair Trade movement will sometimes market their coffee with various ethical-sounding certifications. (For example, Sara Lee, one of the world's four major coffee buyers, markets some of its coffee as UTZ certified -- a certification with relatively weak standards.)

I agree.  If nothing else, the Fair Trade movement makes plants the idea in the Western consciousness that much of what we enjoy from the comforts of our homes is the result back-breaking labor by people caught in intolerable poverty.  I have not doubt that the Fair Trade movement has improved thousands of lives across the globe. And, it's a pretty good marketing tool as well. Fair Trade requirements need to be strengthened and standardized.  And ultimately, much of the money spent on foreign "aid" programs would be better directed to enforcing that certification.

Tim Hartford, author of ‘Dear Undercover Economist’ contributed this to the Financial Times.

A club sandwich, a pair of trousers, a ticket to the movies – in a typical market transaction, I choose and pay for my own desires.

Sometimes, however, I might buy something for someone else, and here trouble begins. If I am buying something – a goat, an HIV prevention course, a bit of paved road – for a complete stranger in a far-off land, the risks that something will go awry are far higher. How am I to know what is needed, where to send it, even whether it has been stolen en route?

This may be why we have aid agencies. Aid agencies are popular symbols of national generosity – witness the Tory commitment to ring-fence the Department for International Development’s budget, even as they speak of inevitable spending cuts elsewhere – and in principle should make better-informed decisions because they are in a position to put expert decision-makers on the ground.
In practice, things are not quite so simple. Aid agencies are government bureaucracies, of course. They are funded by governments and governments are also their typical beneficiaries. Even sympathetic critics tend to agree that aid agencies often spread themselves thinly across countries and sectors. Civil servants in poor countries are constantly tied up in meetings with aid agencies, while the agencies themselves fail to focus on what they do well.

Read the rest of the article.