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.
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.
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