Shoot Me: Independent Filmmaking from Creative Concept to Rousing Release

CHAPTER ONE

RS

WHERE IT BEGINS

One week early in February of the year 2001, I was lying in bed at my mother’s apartment, recovering from surgery to transplant cartilage in my knee. The procedure I’d undergone, known as osteochondral grafting, had entailed harvesting plugs of healthy cartilage and bone from a non-weight-bearing section of the joint and then inserting them into holes drilled in the damaged area. My case had required six plug grafts, meaning that between the harvesting and the transplanting, twelve holes had been drilled into my knee. And so both my judgment and concentration were considerably impaired by painkillers the night my longtime writing partner, Roy Frumkes, visited my bedside and informed me rather matter-of-factly that we would be shooting our script The Sweet Life that summer as an independent production.

At the time he told me this, it was a foregone conclusion within the industry that the Writers Guild (of which Roy and I are members) would go on strike when our union contract expired in July. In anticipation of this, the studios had shifted their focus away from developing projects to rushing as many films as they could into production before the strike stopped everything cold. Unless you were at the top of the screenwriting food chain, that short A-list of scribes the studios turn to again and again to doctor and rewrite other people’s scripts, you were hard put as a movie writer to get work just then. Being East Coast–based only compounded the problem for Roy and me. Why not be proactive, Roy reasoned, and shoot our own picture while the industry hashed out the strike issues?

Lying there that cold February night in a medicated haze, I agreed it made sense. But where would we find the money to shoot the film? The Sweet Life was a character-driven script, with no complicated action scenes or special effects, a classic low-budget piece of material. Yet, produced at the most minimal level, it would still cost close to a million dollars. Even drugged, I didn’t believe for a moment that we could raise that kind of money. Six figures, maybe, but never a mil.

Digital, Roy uttered.

What?

We’ll shoot on digital video. I’ve been looking into it, and I think we could shoot the picture on digital for a fraction of what it would cost to do on film. That kind of money I think I can raise. But what about you? Will you be physically able to direct a film by July?

It didn’t seem likely. A month of virtual inactivity prior to the surgery had reduced my right leg to a spindly appendage. I was already overweight and out of shape. Now I would be on my back for seven more weeks before I could even begin physical therapy.

Sure, I replied with an air of casual confidence. So what if in addition to my questionable physical condition I’d never directed a film before and had only the vaguest notion of what the job involved? The truth was I didn’t believe it would really happen; that we would find the money and that I’d be faced with having to come through on my promise. So I figured I could afford to be cavalier.

This was my first mistake in judgment in connection with The Sweet Life.

It would not be my last.

CHAPTER TWO

RF

JUST WHEN I THOUGHT I WAS OUT, I PULLED MYSELF BACK IN… !

Sixteen years ago, I get this call from an ex-student of mine at the School of Visual Arts in NYC. Rocco was the best screenwriting student I’d ever had. He was by no means great, but then again he’d only been a student. Twenty years old maybe. With a writing partner named Rico! Rocco and Rico. They’d better not have been writing anything but comedies with that alliterative moniker.

I was on the last few days of a grueling twelve-and-a-half-week shoot as screenwriter/producer of a low-budget feature called Street Trash. It was 1985, and Rocco had been out of my class for three years. The reason for his call: Rico had gone straight.

I’d better clarify that immediately; my partner is very sensitive about people misinterpreting our professional relationship as a sexual one. Rico had decided to abandon writing for marriage to the woman he’d been dating since high school, and for a safe job in a family-related business.

Rocco was in desperate need of a new writing partner. He asked me if I’d like to work on a screenplay with him. Rocco and Roy. Yipes.

I’d worked both with and without writing partners, and I liked it both ways (careful … !). However, not being the driven type (the quest for a creative chocolate dessert could lure me away from the typewriter without a moment’s hesitation), I found myself more motivated with a partner on hand. Also, it was a relief to have someone close by who could supply the script with those elements I was less skilled at— such as dialogue. When I wrote alone, if I needed an esoteric voice—a mercenary, a psychic, et cetera—I would invite a person in that field out to lunch and tape them for a few hours, feeding them the lines their character would be responding to. I would then have these character banks at hand, and could easily modify them as the script underwent changes.

I’d had two writing partners simultaneously just prior to Rocco’s call, and his call was serendipitous, to say the least, because both of them had died that year, leaving me in a vulnerable state not only of grief, but of compounded hypochondria.

Though I have no strong spiritual beliefs, I entertained the thought that one or both of my ex-cowriters had guided my future partner to me. I agreed to meet and kick the concept around. Roc lives in New Jersey, and the Street Trash production was shooting a scene at a liquor store the following day in his neck of the woods. Gary Cooper (not the Gary Cooper, but a good Gary Cooper nonetheless, who is currently editing The Sweet Life) was playing the liquor store owner, and the special-effects makeup crew was going to melt him all over the sidewalk in front of the store. (Curious about Street Trash, are you? Well, let me employ a little narrative drive here by not filling in too much about that film just yet. Over the course of this book you’ll learn all, as you would in any well-constructed screenplay, where each scene supplies some vital new information, yet leaves a few questions unanswered, with the intent of drawing the viewer inexorably forward.)

Gary was miserable. Glop (a.k.a. methylcellulose with food coloring mixed in) was being spewed up through his clothing by hidden tubes, and out through his hair. It was dripping down his face, oozing from his pant legs; as I recall, he even had to keep some in his mouth and drool it out on cue. He was supposed to look transformed with pain; but he just looked mortified. Poor Gary was sorry he’d ever signed on for this thankless role. (He’d relive that experience at my hands fifteen years later, on The Sweet Life, and not in the editing room … but that, too, we shall catch up with in another chapter … )

It wasn’t fun seeing Gary tortured, so I was happy when Rocco arrived and we adjourned to a nearby bar for a drink. The script idea we discussed was an Othello tale transposed to the modern boxing milieu, called Killer Instinct. We wrote it, but it was never produced. It was never even optioned. Neither are 75 percent of all the scripts written in this country, and of the 25 percent or so that are optioned, 75 percent are never made into a movie. Yet, Roc and I began a friendly, productive, and adventurous writing partnership that day, and after a decade we even made some money at it.

A writing partnership should be firmed and fixed in legalese. That way the partners will stand less of a chance of being at each other’s throats a few months down the pike. Boilerplate agreements will include several cogent what if’s and who’s. What if one of you dies? Who gets the rights and the revenue of the deceased, and will any heirs have creative or business say? Who does the negotiating on sales deals? What if there are attendant costs? Who pays them? What if one of the parties goes on to do a book about the filming of the screenplay? Who gets what in that case?

Intriguing, yes? Let’s up the ante. What if there are three parties involved? On occasion, Roc and I have written about the lives of real people, relying so heavily on interviews with said third parties that it became a three-way collaboration agreement. Then the above-listed questions become complicated by the subject’s ownership of his or her own life, and a new question arises: What if he or she wants to do something else with it while we’re working on it? Another question is, how long can we own it?

Following are excerpts from such an agreement, reprinted with the permission of Bill Chepil. Bill starred in Street Trash. Beyond that, he is a retired New York City police officer with an incredible story to tell. Apparently, the literary agents didn’t think so, because three sample chapters of Muscle, a book which we hoped later to turn into a screenplay, didn’t meet with overwhelming enthusiasm. The collaboration agreement, however, was a good one, and here it is, in part (with certain names deleted), for you to cannibalize for your own purposes:

COLLABORATION AGREEMENT

AGREEMENT dated as of, by and among ROY FRUMKES (Frumkes), (address), ROCCO SIMONELLI (Simonelli), (address), and BILL CHEPIL (Chepil), (address).

1. Purpose of Collaboration.

1.1 The parties hereto are collaborating in the writing of a book (the Book) and screenplay (the Screenplay) based upon autobiographical, anecdotal and other nonfiction materials (the Materials) furnished by Chepil pertaining to Chepil’s experiences as a New York City police officer.

1.2 Subject to Paragraph 1.3 of this Agreement, the parties intend to negotiate and enter into one or more agreements for the publication and exploitation of the Book and rights allied, ancillary and subsidiary thereto (each such agreement is called a Publishing Agreement) and/or for the development, production and exploitation of the Screenplay and rights allied, ancillary and subsidiary thereto (each such agreement is referred to herein as a Production Agreement).

1.3 Frumkes shall have the sole right to negotiate Publishing Agreements and Production Agreements. Frumkes shall keep Simonelli and Chepil fully informed of the progress of all such negotiations. No Publishing Agreement or Production Agreement shall be valid unless and until approved and signed by all of the parties. [This was a vital clause, which, if you think about it, saves mucho potential infighting down the road. I’m the business negotiator, but they get veto rights on any deals I’ve put into place. Fair enough.]

2. Rights to Exploit Materials.

2.1 Chepil shall not use or exploit or authorize or permit the use or exploitation in any manner or medium of any materials used in the Book or Screenplay or in any work or production based upon or derived from the Book or Screenplay (Production) without the prior written consent of Frumkes and Simonelli. Notwithstanding the foregoing, nothing herein shall be deemed to limit Chepil’s right to use or authorize or permit the use other than in the Book or Screenplay of Chepil’s physical description, date and place of birth, years of employment by the New York Police Department and such other similar autobiographical facts, the use of which will not be likely to diminish the unique appeal of, or interfere with the market for, the Book, Screenplay or Production. [You can see the necessity for this. Word of the project gets out… other entrepreneurs decide to do something similar … Bill gets involved with them … a lot of our valuable time goes down the toilet. Not that Roc and I thought there was the remotest chance that Bill would do something like that, but it’s your lawyer’s job to hatch the worst-case scenario, and then prevent it from ever happening. The following clauses clarify the situation even further.]

2.2 If a first draft of either the Book or the Screenplay is completed, and if Chepil wishes at any time thereafter to write, collaborate on, or cause to be written a book, screenplay, story, treatment, format, teleplay, radio play, or stage play based upon or derived from elements of Materials contained in the Book or Screenplay, including, without limitation, a sequel or remake (New Work), then Chepil shall so notify Frumkes and Simonelli and will negotiate exclusively and in good faith with Frumkes and Simonelli for a period of thirty (30) days for Frumkes and Simonelli to write or to collaborate with Chepil in writing such New Work. If the parties are unable to negotiate such an agreement within such thirty (30)-day period, Chepil shall have the right to write, collaborate on, or cause to be written such New Work, subject to the following:

2.2.1 If Chepil proposes in good faith to enter into an agreement with a third party for such third party to collaborate with Chepil on or to write a New Work, Chepil will give notice to Frumkes and Simonelli of the financial terms and conditions of such offer.

2.2.2 Frumkes and Simonelli shall have a period of thirty (30) days following receipt of such notice within which to notify Chepil of their election to accept such offer upon the same financial terms and conditions set forth in such notice. Upon Frumkes’s and Simonelli’s notification to Chepil of such election, the parties shall immediately be deemed to have entered into an agreement upon such financial terms. If either Frumkes or Simonelli does not wish to accept such offer, the other alone shall have the same right to accept such offer as set forth above.

2.2.3 If Frumkes and Simonelli both fail to accept such offer as aforesaid, Chepil may enter into the proposed agreement with such third party upon the same financial terms specified in said notice. In the event Chepil does not enter into the proposed agreement of which Frumkes and Simonelli have been given notice and/or if Chepil proposes thereafter to write, collaborate on or cause to be written a New Work, the same procedure set forth above shall be followed in each case.

3. Name and Likeness.

Chepil hereby consents to the use of the materials and of Chepil’s name, likeness and biographical materials in the Book, Screenplay and Production, and in the advertising, promotion and publicizing of any of them.

4. Copyright.

The copyright in the Book and Screenplay shall be secured and held jointly by the parties.

5. Sharing of Proceeds and Losses.

5.1 Unless otherwise stated in this Agreement, all assets, claims, income, rights, profits, fees, receipts, and returns of whatever kind (collectively, Benefits) derived by the parties hereto from the exploitation of the Book and Screenplay and, subject to Paragraph 5.2 hereof, any costs, expenses or losses, shall be divided by the parties as follows:

5.1.1 All royalties paid to the parties pursuant to a Publishing Agreement after the recoupment of any advances paid pursuant to such Agreement (except such royalties paid with respect to a disposition of the right to produce an audiovisual work based upon or derived from the Book, which shall be divided pursuant to Paragraph 5.1.2 hereof) shall be payable one-half (1/2) to Chepil, one-quarter (1/4) to Frumkes and one-quarter (1/4) to Simonelli.

5.1.2 All other Benefits derived by the parties from the exploitation of the Book and Screenplay, including, without limitation, any advances paid pursuant to a Publishing Agreement, shall be payable one-third (1/3) to Chepil, one-third (1/3) to Frumkes and one-third (1/3) to Simonelli.

6. Credit.

6.1 In all Publishing Agreements or otherwise in connection with the exploitation of the Book, the parties shall use their best efforts to obtain provisions providing that the parties shall receive appropriate credit as co-authors of the Book.

6.2 In all Production Agreements or otherwise in connection with Productions based upon materials written by the parties, the parties shall use their best efforts to obtain provisions providing that the parties shall receive credit in substantially the following form (or such other form as the parties may mutually agree): Written by Bill Chepil, Roy Frumkes and Rocco Simonelli.

6.3 All credits to be given to the parties shall be of equal size, prominence and style of type and in no event shall one name appear without the others.

7. Term.

The Term of this Agreement shall commence on the date set forth above and continue in perpetuity. In the event of the death of any of the parties hereto during the Term, the surviving party or parties shall have the right to act generally with regard to all artistic matters relating to the Book and Screenplay, as though he or they were the sole author or authors thereof, except that the provisions of Paragraph 6 hereof shall survive the death of a party hereto. The personal representative(s) of a deceased party shall receive his or her decedent’s share of the Benefits, as provided in Paragraph 5.1. [In the case of a subsequent collaboration with a former Liberian student of ours named Hawa Stovall, who returned to her country and became a kind of national hero during a bloody civil war, the Agreement had a time limit. We were unable to get the project off the ground within the time allotted, and Hawa allowed us to extend it for another several years for free. Keep in mind that time limits come creeping up on you faster than you would have imagined.]

The portions reproduced here were written in accordance with New York State law. Different states may call for modifications in language and even in the content of the agreement. Be sure to have an entertainment lawyer in whichever state you reside look the agreement over, even if you use this as a template and create the agreement yourself.

So Roc and I became joined at the hip … aesthetically and businesswise. All my previous scripts suddenly became coauthored by him as part of the deal, whether he worked on them or not, and vice versa. It was an odd experience to get my mind around. I’d written The Substitute, for instance, before our partnership began. He read it and proclaimed: This will not only make a great Hollywood film, it’s a franchise! However, he added, the ending’s gotta go. The protagonist has to live in the end, go on to another school. And it’s gotta be trimmed by thirty or forty pages; Hollywood won’t do a samurai epic …

Oh, yeah …? I responded sourly, Why don’t you just fix it yourself and don’t show it to me. He did, and the script that went out to the coast had my ending, followed by a blank page save for one tiny word in the middle—or—followed by his ending. Later we heard that studio people were tearing my ending out of the script before passing it along to their superiors. The screenplay sold, became a franchise, and bought us a modicum of independence, so how miffed could I be that the project existed before we signed the agreement.

And it works the other way, as well. The Sweet Life is really Rocco’s script, though it bears both our names. It’s about his life, he did it in between our paying gigs, and I served as editorial advisor on it rather than actually contributing to the text. It all balances out. But the agreement makes it painless.

And so our career went. The success of The Substitute brought us in contact with all the needy people out there at the studios. But need us though they did, and provide work though they did, they just had to put in their two cents to justify their worth, or keep their jobs, and our work mutated and diminished before our eyes. The checks were good, but not as good for the soul as the interference was bad for it.

This was particularly painful for Roc. All this time he kept a mantra going. Like a window wiper set on ten-second intervals, every so often it would crop up: that he wished he could see just one of our scripts reach the screen uncorrupted by studio vermin. He thought one way to do this was to direct, and I explored raising money for him to direct one of our short installments for a proposed anthology feature called New York Primeval. But money just wasn’t forthcoming for a short. It’s too obvious that under no circumstances could money invested in that kind of project yield profits: where could it play other than on a cable station such as the Independent Film Channel, or the Sundance channel, which aren’t big paying gigs. Certainly it could be entered into film festivals, but festival cash prizes aren’t substantial for shorts. It could be bunched with other shorts on a DVD, but then your share of the profits would be small. So, you can’t use profitability as a selling point to potential investors for something of this nature. To first-time filmmakers/ students I suggest offering a potential investor points not only in your short thesis/independent project, but in the first feature you produce, so that for the money they invest in the short, they go along for the ride and benefit down the road from your career. This scenario has worked for students. But it didn’t fit two guys who’d already been in the industry for decades.

So Roc languished in his loathing, and, according to him, the reason I didn’t was because at least I’d produced/directed a few films the way I’d written them, so I had that no matter what they did to my work now.

Then, as the new century rolled around, The Blair Witch Project seemed to validate the prediction of David Whitten, a brilliant distributor and former publicist who advised me that the coming millennium would see no-budget films made by young filmmakers on digital video, bypassing the studio system entirely and recouping their costs on Broadband. I became intrigued by a medium that had hitherto repulsed me.

The Sweet Life was our simplest screenplay, despite having thirty speaking parts and a number of locations. There were no big effects, no makeup meltdowns, nothing to give the insurance company the willies. It was essentially a character piece. We’d done a staged reading of it two years earlier and it had been optioned for eighteen months by a small company who planned to shoot it in 35mm. When their option ran out, they generously gave me their budget workup, and now, out of curiosity, I adapted it for digital video to see what the cost reduction might be. Same amount of shooting days. Lots of my little money-saving ideas inserted (which you’ll read about later). But mainly it reflected the ways in which digital video impacted production and postproduction expenses. The budget plummeted from over a million to $250,000.

I’d produced seven feature films over the last thirty years, and one of the reasons I stopped was because while it’s been relatively easy for me to raise money, it’s always proved nearly impossible to get it back. The distributors and exhibitors, who lay between me and the greenbacks, were determined to keep them from reaching me in myriad nefarious ways, and they were armed with accountants galore, while I was just one vulnerable filmmaker with limited funds to fight back. And since the money I raised came mainly from people I knew, rather than from nameless entities like banks and investment funds, this back-end problem weighed heavily on me. Screenwriting, equally lucrative in my career, did not come with the financial burden that being a producer entailed.

But digital video introduced a new wrinkle into the scenario. A million dollars might be hard to recoup given the obstacles mentioned, but a quarter-million wouldn’t be. And with new, evolving audience-access venues like Broadband, DVD, and digital theater projection, I might not have to deal with the distributors at all. The new century might just have rendered Hollywood an anachronism in the arc of independent production.

I wandered over one night to Rocco’s mother’s apartment, where my convalescing partner was being nursed back to health on chicken soup and maternal love, and told him he was going to get his chance.

CHAPTER THREE

RS

WHERE IT REALLY BEGINS: THE SCRIPT

One of the most frequently asked questions I receive as a screenwriting teacher is, Where do you get your ideas? The truth is I’m not much of an idea man. I rarely come up with a story purely on my own that I feel is rich enough with potential to sustain a feature-length screenplay. But if you pitch me an idea I respond