…or so it did last Thursday. I’m happy to see that I’m not the only one who crash-landed after last week’s IFW meeting marathons.
Craig and I met with 24 companies in three days. And, yes, it was just as uncomfortable pitching this idea as I thought it’d be. The level of uncomfort depended on the person we were speaking to. It could vary from a feeling like we were pitching a dirty joke to NPR to feeling as if we were over-explaining why one might think the
3 Stooges are funny to someone who is obviously not a fan. But, it had to be done – and that’s why we were there – and surprisingly (to me, at least), the meetings went incredibly well. After pulling off a quick polish to the script, we’re sending the script out this week to just about everyone we met with.
Our description (I really shouldn’t call it a “pitch”) got better as the days went on. We decided to ask some folks if we could just spare them the misery of listening to us babble on and just send the script – none of them declined that option. Both Craig and I felt that the script could sound like a one-note joke, which it certainly isn’t, and that the response we had already received was excitement about how fleshed out and full the script actually is…so why not let it speak for itself if we have that option?
A lot of new ideas were sparked from the meetings. I came up with a new scriptwriting software idea for Macintosh and
Craig Zobel and I continued to spend the week developing new ideas for our own self/alternative-distribution model – which will hopefully enable us to not only MAKE our films, but to get them SEEN as well.
Right now it is impossible to say what any of these meetings will lead to…we likely won’t know for at least another month, after we’ve followed up and re-met with everyone. Regardless, this week opened a lot of doors that we likely never would have thought of knocking on.
Other thoughts in summary:
Rooftop Films is wonderful – they pulled together some great screenings to wrap up the 2008 season, the week’s parties were packed with the “who’s-who”, the “who’s that?” and the “who farted?” of film festival parties,
Melvin VanPeebles made a quick speech at the awards lunch that made us all cheer (why wasn’t he on Wall Street helping those folks out?), more than one person asked us “are you actually going to make that film?” and, while meeting with an incredibly wonderful woman from
Gracie Films, Craig told her that we’d be willing to change the title of our film to
Turds of Endearment to help get on
James L. Brooks’ good side.
Let’s see if it works…
Thank you to IFP and Filmmaker Magazine for asking me to take part in this week's writing experiment.
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posted by Todd Rohal @ 9/22/2008 04:48:00 PM
Comments (1)
Butts are awesome. Seriously.
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posted by @ 9/23/2008 3:33 PM
