HOW FAR YOU WILL GO TO FOLLOW YOUR DREAM?

A good number of people contact me every week from allover the World, telling me they wrote a script worth an Oscar, that they locked themselves in their room for a certain period of time, just writing and watching films, and now they want me to produce it.

Guys, this is not how it works. If you really want to know how it works, below I report the story of my friend Geoff Talbot: a talented Writer, Director and Producer who like most people in this business is fighting Destiny to find his way.

I left London for Hollywood in March thinking I had the world at my feet. With two very different screenplays in development and an offer of full finance (US $20 Million on The Emancipation of Putz) things were looking positive. I had a couple of meetings lined up with very big Hollywood Producers and although things were tight financially… surely the dam was about to break…

But the dam didn’t break and so the desert (my bank account) is still very dry. But I wouldn’t change it for the world. As artists we can learn so much from our hungry & thirsty times. These are crucial periods that provide us with a deep wellspring of experience, from which we can draw water for the rest of our lives. So what happened? What didn’t happen more like it?

I had to tell some financiers that I didn’t want their 20 million dollars; it was easier than you might think because despite all their promises (aka small untruths) I didn’t believe they actually had the money. So I flew back to Europe, to Cannes, to the sunny Rivera where the French girls were just as pretty as they had been the year before; only this time they were not quite so friendly.

During my hungry & thirsty times I had dreamed up a new way of filmmaking that used the internet and social media sites like facebook & twitter. I had created this model around the second feature film I have in development, a bohemian love story called Lucky & Rich. Technology is changing so rapidly, and the internet enables the filmmaker/artist to converse directly with their audience like never before. It stands to reason that the way we use to make films… will not be the way we make them in the future. So I went back to LA, to the land of broken dreams.

I wish I could say that it all went swimmingly, but it never rains in California.

One of the things I’ve learnt in the last five months and I mean this in an encouraging way… when it comes to a new idea, or a film, or new technology… NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING. If your script, if your song, if your idea is truly great, if it is different in any way… nearly everybody will turn it down. They will reject it because their reference points are the films they have already seen or ideas that have already worked etc. New is different and different is scary. But keep going. Colonel Sanders was an unemployed pensioner who spent two years taking his revolutionary chicken recipe (KFC) around restaurants in the United States. He got turned down 1019 times before someone finally said yes… and the rest is history.

Since I left London in March I have slept in over thirty different locations and I have run out of money 25 times… soon to be 26. Some days I wouldn’t know exactly where I would be sleeping that night, and for a couple of days all I had to eat was stale pizza and flat coke.

Never again will I look down on someone who lives on the street. You try it and see if you can do it better than them.

I'M NOT BAD, I'M JUST DRAWN THAT WAY

I lately met a Hollywood Producer whose neighbor is Keanu Reeves, and he told me he's one of the nicest persons he knows: hard to say he's actually one of the biggest Holywood stars.

So I told him an impression I had: I said that I met a number of film people now, and they have all been nice to me.

This world is not as dirty as it's said. I think this is because they all know how difficult is to make films, and are in general open minded and willing to exchange ideas, or tell their story, or looking for future collaborations.

And most of all, they all know there's not all that money people usually think: it's true we talk about projects worth millions, but when you start taking off the salaries for the Actors and the technicians, all the expenses, the cut for distributors and advertising and the money you have to give back to your investors, what it usually remains is very little.

He agreed with me and confirmed my opinion: the real nasty people in this business are the ones who don't really belong to it: Agents, Lawyers, and most of all Investors.
Most of the investors think they will put in your film project 100 and will take a million, and because they finance a (small) part of your project they own it. They ask to change the script, to cast some of their friends or fiancé or want to use your film to wash the money they earned illegally.

You have to face difficult situations: from a side, you want to make a film that costs an enormous amount of money and can't do alone. From the other side, accepting their offer could mean destroying your film project and yourself.

So you spend most of your time looking for money, and when you find someone interested, in most of the cases you have to turn his offer down.

This made me think of Jessica Rabbit as a metaphore of the movie business, and her famous sentence as the catching phrase movie people should use to present themselves to the World:

"I'm not bad, I'm just drawn that way".

THE ADDAMS FAMILY CAFE

A few days ago I met Actress Elizabeth Cooper, who lately opened a very special coffee shop and for this decision had 4 pages on the local newspaper.

Although being in London, the coffee shop is based near Westcombe Park Station, in a place that seems to be another world, so hidden that most of the locals are unaware there is a park in there.

After half an hour of desperate search, a woman shows me the entrance, and says she lived there for 2 years before finding that park.

Then I find Elizabeth having a tea with a customer and his dog, in a calmness I never saw in London.

She shows me this amazing eco sustainable place: on the roof she has solar panels to get electricity independently and flowers to attract bees, and out of the walls she has iron framing where ivy is growing up: "Next spring the coffee shop will be all covered in green", she says.

Admiring the place and all her efforts to make it something unique, I ask her:

- Isn't it a graveyard you have in front of your coffee shop?

- Oh, yes! - she replies enthusiastically, and takes me to see it.

She introduces me to some of her friends (soldiers died in past wars), and shows me her secret place when she wants to stay alone or read: a small portion among the tombs, covered by the willows.

She asks me what I think about all this, and I ask her "What about your career in acting?".

She says she is planning to drop it for a year, let her coffee shop take off and then come back to the scenes.

She says she has been an actress for 10 years now, always rushing for castings and taking any jobs, just because of all the competition there is in this business: everyone fearing to be forgotten, losing opportunities and not being able to pay the rent.

She wants to build something to care about now, something that can make the difference.

And if a part of me is starting to agree with her, another one says:

- But Actors have a limited career, and especially for women it's hard to find a job when you get older. A year is a lot of time.

I stated the obvious, and she smiles at me.

With the manners one would use to calm down a child and open his eyes, she says:

- Films reflect real life, and as far as there will be old people in real life, there'll be always an acting job for old actors.

She is so beautiful...

EMBARRASSING MISUNDERSTANDINGS

One of the things that commonly happen when you're a foreigner in England are embarrassing misunderstandings, often based on sexual double meanings.

That usually happens to me with women.

I think this is because English is so different compared to Italian in the way you structure sentences, and because it's sometimes difficult for a foreigner to have a correct prononciation, so when Italian people in London gather they like to laught telling these anecdotes one another .

DISCLAIMER: This is something that just happened to me, and it contains some vulgarity I can't avoid. If you follow reading, some of you could feel offended.

There is a TV series I like called Hustle, produced by BBC , and I decided if the DVDs are not too expensive I'll buy them.

I get to the information point of the store and start cueing. The guy at the computer is visibly gay.

The man before me is the classic Londoner with a bad mood, smoker and big time beer drinker who you know will send you to f*** **f as soon as your glance will cross his.

This fellow asks the information guy for a certain DVD he doesn't know the title of. The guy tries some combinations with no results, the customer loses his temper and argues he's not finding that effing DVD on purpose, and going away, he calls him fag.

Which is strange in London, because here homosexuality is something people are used to and don't care about, so the guy feels angry and humiliated.

After a few seconds to recover, he smiles at me and pretends everything's fine.

Understanding his feelings, I try to be more gentle than what I'd usually be, and I ask him:
- Do you have the DVD, Asshole?

Between the instant I complete the sentence and the one a killing glance raises in his eyes I get aware of the missunderstanding, and very shyly I say to him:

- Ma-maybe I pronounced it a little bit bad...

P.S. for my Italian readers:

HUSTLE, pronounced ASSOL, is the name of the TV series.

ASSHOLE, pronounced ASSOL, with the A that slightly waves to an E, is offensive, and you should be careful in using it.