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An Independent View of the Movie Business
by Ed Proudfoot
(October 2000) |
On October 14, the Scriptwriters Network hosted a panel of independent film makers: Writer/director Steven Chin (SC), Vice President of HBO's Independent Productions Maud Nadler (MN), writer/director Lizzie Borden (LB) and co-founders of Five Sisters Productions, Ursula (UB), Maria (MB) and Gabrielle Burton (GB) and their screenwriter mother Gabrielle, Sr. (GBS) The panel answered questions posed by the Network's own Georgann Grunebach (GG).
GG: Steven, when did you decide to go into writing?
SC: I never imagined myself writing in the movie business, or even being in the movie business. I'm actually in the business by happenstance. I was working as a trial lawyer when I was hired by Miramax. We went on to make movies like KIDS and Scream. I pitched ideas to my bosses, but I wasn't interested in selling those ideas. As the company grew, we began working with very successful writers, but they didn't bring a lot of heart to the projects. I didn't get to write until I was out on my own, when I started working with Larry Clark. He had this four-hundred page prison manuscript that was completely unstructured, so we hired a young writer.
About a year later, the script just wasn't there, so we hired another writer, who spent his writing time shooting heroin. Here I am, the producer, who put my reputation out there and still had a problematic script without an ending. I really had no choice but to do it myself and there was a certain amount of skepticism on everybody's part. So I sat in a room for about ten days for twenty hours a day and hammered it out. We went on to make Another Day in Paradise with James Woods and Melanie Griffith.
GG: Now let's hear it from the studio's perspective. Maud...
MN: I'm not really studio. HBO started a new division to focus on independent films. I deal with first and second time directors. The scripts that I get are usually pretty incredible because they're written by people who've worked on them for a very long time. I worked in independent film before HBO and did that for many, many years. The level of work was fabulous but finding the money was torturous, so when HBO came along and they wanted to support the independent world, it sounded like a good deal to me.
GG: So the scripts have a stronger voice in the independent world?
MN: To me, yeah. What comes in for big-budget films is far inferior, but that's because they're trying to fill a mandate. Generally, the films that I've been involved in are small stories with big voices.
GG: Lizzie, talk to me about how you got into independent film.
LB: I wanted to be a painter. But when I went to a Jean Luc Godard retrospective, I thought, oh my God, you can put the visual and the verbal together and it doesn't have to be traditional. Then I saw BATTLE OF ALGIERS. I was in New York in the second wave of feminism and there were all these women that were unrepresented. So I did something that, having gone to film school, I never would have done. I decided to make a film about the future, about women taking over the media (Born in Flames) and I was going to people this film with real women. It took four years and $40,000. I'd film on weekends, maybe once a month, which led to all kinds of problems, but by the end of the day, I was writing it and shooting around the writing.
The Berlin Film Festival saw it on the editing machine and offered to show it. Anyway, during the shooting, I met several "working" women and finally realized they were working in a brothel. So I started making a movie about Working Girls and I found myself writing, even though I never considered myself a writer. You really have to know your act structures really well, because what destroys most films is a bad script. But sometimes you see the overly pervasive influence of Robert McKee. There has to be a balance between understanding structure and being open to the intuitive form. We're the anthropologists of people's lives. One more thing: If you're writers trying to get your work done, find the producers. Agents and managers are fine, but the producer can get the movie made.
GG: Talk to me about Five Sisters Productions.
UB: We have an interesting conglomerate. Jennifer's a writer, Gabrielle's a writer and our mother, Gabrielle, is also a writer, so we have a wealth of literary background. Maria and I started working as actors and we'd have conversations about trying to take a little more control over our careers. We produced a show called A My Name is Alice, which was a musical revue and it did very well. We started being approached by writers to produce their films. Maria found a script called Just Friends, which was our first feature. Maria directed it and we came together as a family to finish it. From there we went on to make Temps, which Gabrielle wrote in response to all the slacker movies. Now we're editing Manna From Heaven, which our mom wrote.
GG: How do you develop a project?
MB: It's very hard and it takes a long time.
GG: Thank you all for coming today!
MB: I was lucky, because my first film was sponsored by Deluxe, Panavision and Kodak. I'd done student films in college and when I met the head of Deluxe, Bud Stone, he supported me; and through that, Kodak and Panavision came on board. Because the first film was less expensive than it would've been, we were able to make a return to our investors, which helped us raise money for the next one.
GB: We have some great actors for Manna From Heaven and they got involved because it's a great script with some great parts and we were pretty persistent. What works in this business is survival. If you keep doing your work, keep pushing along, I think you can do projects that you're really proud of.
UB: The hardest thing is getting the script read, but there are so few great roles for certain actors, if you can get the script read and it's good, chances are they will want to do it. You have to be passionate about it, because you're going to be working on the project for so long and you have to convince so many people that this is the best thing they can be involved in...it's essential, too, that you feel passionate about it.
GG: Tell me a little bit about your writing career.
GBS: I went to AFI and it was a wonderful experience. For me, the hardest thing, coming out of fiction, was to learn that movies aren't about words. Screenwriting is the most demanding discipline. It's the closest thing to poetry, as far as having to go to the essence of things and you can't wander down a lot of routes that I want to wander down very often. It's too compressed a medium; the words really have to count for something. That was the hardest lesson. I wrote a screenplay that won the Austin Film Festival writing contest and I am also in the last ten for the Nichols Fellowship. I'm on a great road, but it's very, very demanding.
GG: Maud, if somebody wants to break into the movies, what do you recommend?
MN: That you have a really good script and a really good story. All I care about is if the story has heart and has a voice and I want to see the movie. And it could be anything, as long as it has a point of view and a very strong voice.
SC: If I could rant for a second: When we (Miramax) suddenly had lots and lots of money and were shopping around for projects, we would see scripts that were so similar. Many times, experienced writers will write scenes that read beautifully and hit all the beats on the page, but they don't work on film. They follow McKee's story structure beats and Campbell's hero's journey and they're slick and follow the pattern and they just don't work. There are some rules and there is craft, but ultimately, if you want a career, forget the rules and write a good, original story.
GG: You have an opportunity to sell your first project or your first film. Do you work with outside attorneys? Are there things to keep in mind?
MB: It's important to have a good lawyer. Even if you have a lawyer, you have to take charge of your career and be an active part of contracts and negotiations.
GB: When you hire somebody to work for you, you need recommendations and references about them and the work they've done. Interview them.
UB: There's a lot of desperation and a lot of fear that goes into this business. Something that's very hard to remember is that they (agents, managers, lawyers) are working for you. We all have to take ourselves by the hand and ask, "Is this person really going to help me?" It's ultimately your life, so you have to be very clear about what you want and direct them toward that.
GG: Lizzie, did you retain ownership of your films?
LB: When you do little movies, they are yours and you retain a lot of control, which means you make money. When we audited Miramax, we found some more money. I don't think they were hiding anything, they were just growing so fast, they didn't know where anything was. If you can do a little movie and you can keep foreign, a lot of it can go into your pocket. A way of doing it is, based on the actors that are attached, a company does a projection: such and such actors are worth "x" amount overseas--and then a bank will finance the film based on that projection. That way, you don't necessarily have to have an American distributor, which in some ways is very freeing.
So many of my writer friends have written big movies and they've not gotten a dime from net points. But they're also paid a lot of money up front and don't expect to see anything. There are a lot of ways to finance an independent movie, so you have to figure out what you want to keep. Above two-and-a-half to three (million), it's very difficult to sell without name actors.
SC: If we could go back to the attorney thing for a second: Some writers get really paranoid that somebody's going to steal from them. Bottom line, if you have a great idea, and it's not completely f----d up in your script, why would I want to cheat you out of that? I want to have the benefit of an ongoing relationship with you, because you may come up with some other great ideas and also, I want to see if you can finish the script with a little guidance, so I don't have to spend $300,000 on a studio writer. People you probably need to be more careful of, rather than producers, are other writers. And the reality is, the vast majority of producers out there are looking for something great. They've got eight scripts in development and none of them are working and people are hungry. At the end of the day, great scripts get bought.
Ed Proudfoot is a screenwriter and playwright and is a partner in the writing team of Proudfoot & Proudfoot.
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