A Screenwriter’s Survival Guide To Hollywood - Part Four

Photo Credit: Public Domain

In case you missed parts 1, 2 and 3:

https://steemit.com/writing/@thegridzom/a-screenwriter-s-survival-guide-to-hollywood-part-one
https://steemit.com/writing/@thegridzom/a-screenwriter-s-survival-guide-to-hollywood-part-two
https://steemit.com/screenwriting/@thegridzom/a-screenwriter-s-survival-guide-to-hollywood

The Journey of “The Seer”

We shot “The Seer” in 4 days over 3 weekends. All of the interiors were at the same location, so that really helped us out as far as mobilization and re-mobilization. We redressed the same room for 6 different scene locations.

Interesting things happened while we were on set. Even though, I had already thought of the project as an episodic, I thought it made sense to have it be a short film, so that it could serve several purposes. But while we were on set, I had a problem with the ending. The problem was that it ended the story. So, instead I decided to make the ending into a cliffhanger episode.

When the shoot was over, everyone felt like it should continue, so the decision was made to pitch the project to TV as a pilot presentation, and not to use it as only a promotional piece to raise money for a future, feature film.
We found a fantastic editor and he pulled together a trailer that knocked people’s socks off. Everyone wanted to help us, but at the same time had no idea what to do with this hybrid production which is often described as “Cagney and Lacey” meets “Medium” meets “The L-Word”.

Through the efforts of one of our actresses, Michelle Tomlinson, “The Seer” received some great online press on AfterEllen.com and also on a few horror sites. Michelle already had a nice horror following so even though our project was more sci-fi, we were able to get some nice write-ups and thousands of hits to our trailer.
With the fuel from all of this, we approached several production companies and came really close to having a deal on a few occasions, but nothing happened, and then the economy tanked.

Deborah and I then wrote the feature film, “The Rise Of The Seer”, which is a prequel to the TV pilot. We figured, we might as well be ready, just in case.

I then suddenly found myself with a lot of free time on my hands and besides writing several more feature films, directing two more short films (which I’ll tell you about later), I also learned everything I could about putting together a feature film business plan, PPM (Private Placement Memorandum) and got a letter of interest for distribution for “The Rise Of The Seer”. A friend put together my budget and schedule so now all we needed was money, so since that wasn’t something that seemed to be flowing very well during 2009, I put the project on the back burner and worked the festival circuit with the two other short films, I had directed during the summer of 2008.

Screenings and Festivals

When I originally began writing this book, it was the week of FRAMELINE 33 (June 2009), in San Francisco, where I had two of my short films screening over one weekend. So there has been plenty of prep-work to do including putting up pictures, etc. online on Facebook, Myspace, Youtube and sending out tweets on Twitter with links to various trailers and to any press we may have gotten, along with the screening dates and times.

It was a great experience having two short films both screen at the legendary, Castro Theatre. It gave me a real opportunity to make an impression and take full advantage of meeting some new people as a director.
Our “The 6 Month Rule” group consisted of Michelle Wolff along with supporting actors Deborah Stewart, Gina Scoles and Vincent De Paul all took the trip north from Los Angeles to be at our screening.

Since Deborah was the star of “When The Time’s Right”, my other film, she also got the benefit of being in front of two different audiences for the festival. It was great when people came up to her and told her how much they enjoyed the film and how well she did.

In this film, Deborah plays a woman, who buys a possessed, time-traveling, alarm clock at a garage sale and is able to see her future with her new girlfriend.

After we returned from FRAMELINE, I had to get ready for several more film festivals. The big one, here in Los Angeles is Outfest and we were very fortunate to get “The 6 Month Rule” screened on “All Girl Friday”. Our short was not part of the shorts’ program, but instead had the distinct honor of “opening” for one of the hottest feature films on the circuit, “And Then Came Lola” starring Ashley Sumner, Jill Bennett and Cathy DeBouno. My friend Vincent and I went to the opening night red carpet event, the week before and he chatted up his friend, Jason Stuart, who was waiting in line for the step and repeat with Jane Lynch (who I’ve been a fan of for several years already). This was right after the pilot of “Glee” aired, but wasn’t yet the hit show it is now.

Vincent introduced us and Jane congratulated me on my Outfest screening, and she was very kind. Within the next month or so Jane Lynch became one of the most popular faces on TV and in film. So, you never know who, what, when or where you’ll make a connection and where that person will be in their career, the next month.

While “The 6 Month Rule” was screening at Outfest, “When The Time’s Right” was screening at Philadelphia Q-Fest during the same week. And throughout the summer, there was festival after festival. “The 6 Month Rule” and “When The Time’s Right” paired up again in North Carolina during August 2009. The North Carolina Gay and Lesbian Film Festival has been very supportive of me since day one. I’ve had a short in their festival every year from 2006-2009.

As the festival season began to wind down, I got bored. I finished up a couple of scripts; did some rewrites; and then decided to explore some new territory, a webseries, to keep our “Seer” project alive while raising the money to produce the feature film.

The Rise Of The Seer” - Webseries a/k/a The Seer Rises Again

During August 2009 was when I decided to take “The Seer” project off the backburner and start stirring the pot again. We still hadn’t raised a dime for the feature, so I wrote 35 pages of what we’re now calling, “InSight”. I broke the 35 pages down into 7 webisodes, and on the timeline of “The Seer”; the webseries is a prequel to “The Rise Of The Seer” feature film.

I went back in time because I wanted to show the early years of the lead character, Guin Marcus when she was still on the LAPD. By doing the webseries, I put myself in the position of having something new out on the web, every week for 7 weeks.

Just because we were doing a webseries, didn’t mean that we didn’t have to go through the same process, we do with a short film. The only thing different this time, was that since I was allowed to go non-union, I didn’t have to deal with SAG. It was very freeing to not have someone else’s timer running.

After we had our cast, it was time to find LAPD uniforms for 3 female cops. Being that we had a zero budget, we knew it would be a real challenge since we knew we’d be shooting the series over the course of two months and we would need the uniforms worn in almost every episode.

When we shot “The Seer”, I recall spending around $400 per week to rent two uniforms. This included alterations, gun belts, badges, etc., and I knew this would be completely out of the question.
Deborah and I decided we’d get her a pair of “Dickies” in dark navy blue and fake it. I’d already started shopping on Ebay for patches and gun belts and slowly accumulated enough stuff to put the uniforms together, once we had the actual uniforms.

One day, Deborah suggested, out of the blue for me to go to a used wardrobe store in Burbank just to see if they would have anything. Although I had been there before and hadn’t seen any uniforms, I went anyway.

It was unbelievable. You know that feeling you have when you know you’ve struck gold? I had it. There were racks and racks of used and some new uniforms of all types. At this point, I could’ve just gotten the actresses anything that matched, but they had exactly what I was looking for. They had LAPD style shirts in several sizes, but only two pairs of pants (both pairs brand new), and get this: IN THE EXACT SIZES TO FIT MY ACTRESSES. Huh? I bought almost all of the shirts, since I anticipated needing some background cops, and the two pairs of pants, which were fine since I was only going to have two of the cops on screen at one time. The best part was that the uniforms cost me less than $25 a set and I own them.

But the weirdest part of this story is that when I returned to that same store a month later, there was not one uniform in sight. No, I didn’t buy everything they had. Don’t be silly. They were all gone. I don’t know if they had only put them out for Halloween beginning in August, but whatever the reason, it was perfect timing for us.

The shoot went very well. We got everything done within our two-month schedule and wrapped out with a total expense out-of-pocket expense of $750. Of course, I did the editing myself and we didn’t pay any of our cast and crew except for food, copies and credit, but everyone was happy to be there and we made something happen during a really bad economic time when not a whole lot of independent projects were being shot out here.

And on that note, it really seems that since then, there are more and more webseries popping up everyday. It’s a great way to feed your following. I shamelessly plug the webseries on all of my social media sites, but my reach is only so long, so I depend on my actors and friends to also send out links.

Just as I was beginning to put the trailer together for “InSight”, I received an email from Curve Magazine, that a couple of my projects were going to be mentioned in their December 2009 issue. This was great news because we had been sending them pieces of info and DVD’s of our projects over the last year.

I was definitely worth the wait, because when I got the tearsheet, I was shocked to see the beautiful full color photos and one-page article on me and my projects, “The 6 Month Rule” and “The Seer” with the title of the article reading, “Pray We See These Again”. The reason for that title was because the projects were mostly only screened on the festival circuit, and the writer of the article wanted to make a point that my two shorts were not the typical short films because of their mixed genres within the niche’. This article was a great boost. It was our first national press that was not online, but in a real magazine on newsstands.

This article put me into an interesting position, though. I had promised to release the webseries starting at the end of November, but since the writer put our web address for “The Seer” in the article, I made the big decision of releasing the full 20-minute pilot on Youtube. This way, I could milk the article and prime my audience for the release of the webseries, which I pushed into January 2010. I figured I’d lose my audience over the holidays anyway, so why waste it.

Copyright 2018 Linda Andersson/The Grid Zom, LLC