FEED YOUR CREW.

I've been noodling around the idea of writing a filmmaking book for over a year now. In fact, I was almost finished with a draft of the manuscript when two things happened that dampened my enthusiasm for the project: First, I gave the pages to three friends of mine who all offered astute observations, pointed criticisms, and helpful suggestions. Most importantly, though, was that each of them asked a different form of the same question: "Who's your audience?". It is an absolutely stupendous question. And when I started to examine my answer (which was, "Me, two years ago") I realized that I hadn't quite stayed true to that audience throughout the writing process. I was kind of all over the place in terms of who I was speaking to, and oftentimes found myself either speaking over the head of or (worse) speaking down to that intended audience. I was trying to be too many things to too many people. Structurally, the manuscript was a mess. But it was first draft, incomplete, and I had all the time in the world to finesse it.

That's when the second thing happened.

I came across Josh Becker's, "THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO LOW BUDGET FEATURE FILMMAKING" . Becker is a independent filmmaker who I had known of for years and respected; I actually use some his essays and writings in the Scriptwriting course that I teach. The book was a blow to me because not only did he mine the same territory as I was mining, he did so with a very similar tone and approach -- the two things that I thought I had going for me over all of the other filmmaking books out there. I was sunk.

Then, recently, two other things happened. First was that I came across an e-mail that Heretic Films' Alex Afterman had sent to us in October of 2005 expressing interest in distributing MAGDALENA'S BRAIN. One of the sentiments that each Scott, Warren and Joel (my manuscript readers) shared was an interest in the book's use of stories, antecdotes and front line experiences from the production of MAGDALENA'S BRAIN. Now, a new structure has revealed itself to me, inspired by the e-mail from Alex. I think I again have something new and interesting in terms of tone amd approach.

The second thing?

I'm actually now reading the Becker book, something that I never quite got around to doing. I had read the intro before and flipped through the pages, but had yet to actually dive into the book's guts. And you know what? That same feeling came to me that prompted the initial push to write the book in the first place.

I can write a better book.

So I will.

This post's title. by the way, is my tentative title for the book. It's not carved in stone, but it's got something, don't you think?