I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell

We already have our director, casting director, line producer, production lawyer and producers set, and are now in the process of adding other department heads, namely the Director of Photography, the Production Designer, and the Editor.
This email was sent from one of the people we approached to occupy one of those positions on the movie. He is an A-List person in his field, and though I am sad we can’t get him, I was pretty happy to see what he said to the director about the script.
To me, this is the sort of praise I really relish–this is a guy who doesn’t know me or care about me, who hasn’t read my book, writing about me to someone else. And not only that, he has read thousands of scripts and worked on some of the biggest movies of the past twenty years. More often then not, the below-the-line people can tell you if a movie will be a success with way more accuracy than the people paid to do it.

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: [A-List below-the-line department head]
To: [The Director]
Date: Mon, Mar 31, 2008 at 10:36 AM
Subject: Hey Man
I know your producer called Deb on Friday and was gracious enough to give me until Monday, but Friday night one of the jobs that had talked to me last month about their project pulled the trigger and I’m afraid I’ll have to do it. It’s a project with [Huge A-List actor] and [big director] who I’ve worked with before. Let me assure you this decision has nothing to do with money or any of that nonsense, I would have done it for what ever you had to work with you again, it’s really just timing.
I can’t tell you how torn I was because not only was I really looking forward to not only working with you again, but I think your movie is really funny and quite frankly gonna make a shit load of money. I got the same feeling when I read “Wedding Crashers” which I had to turn down as it was happening during [another movie he did].

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I knew this was going to happen at some point, but with a twist:
A version of the script has leaked. You may end up seeing it somewhere. I’ve seen it, and here’s what you need to know:
It’s not remotely close to the script we are using. The leaked script is Version 7. It was finished sometime in May of 2007. We are now on Version 12. That was finished in December/January of 2008. The changes from then to now aren’t little. Version 9 was almost an entire plot and structure rewrite. We did take a few individual scenes from Version 7, but that’s it. Version 7 is quite literally not the movie at all, not even half of the movie.
If you see it and want to read it, it’s up to you, but know that it is almost nothing like what we will end up shooting (it has major plot and story issues, which is why we did a complete rewrite). But at the same time, there are also spoilers in there–it’s not completely different from the final script. If you read it, you’ll go into the movie and know a few of the scenes and situations. I know I prefer to go in fresh, but some people don’t care.
I love that of all things, the old script leaked. And why now, as opposed to earlier? I haven’t sent that version of the script out to anyone in months and months and months. This is so comically awesome on so many different levels. I can’t wait until people start accusing me of posting it to drum up interest, just like how I conspired with Katy Johnson to create a lawsuit against me in order to get press.
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In my last post, I talked extensively about the difference between an indie film and a studio film, and why I chose to go indie. I said that the reason I went indie was because I wanted full creative control and I kept talking about “my vision” and “my art” and I meant those terms. Of course this raises a big question:
“If you want to control the artistic vision, then why do you have other producers and a director? Why not do it all yourself?”

This is the first thing I had to learn about the movie making process: It is a collaborative art. The days of a movie being the exclusively singular vision of one person are, with a few rare exceptions, gone. Even small indie films can have over a dozen creatives working on them and putting their stamp on them. At some level, you have to give up some control to get the movie done right.
This was hard for me to swallow at first. I am so used to doing everything myself, to exercising complete and exclusive control over all aspects of my art that initially, I didn’t want to collaborate. I actually looked into the feasibility of doing it myself; writing, directing, producing, acting–everything. I thought that by doing that, I could be sure that the creative vision would remain pure and it would be mine.
I gave up that idea really fucking fast, right after I started writing the script in 2005. I will write many other posts specifically dedicated to the script itself, but in short, I fucking failed. My first few efforts at a script were complete dogshit. Laughably bad. The characters were the same as my stories, the jokes were the same, but…it just wasn’t right. It sucked as a movie.
I went to TheProducer and asked for help. She walked me through some changes and whatnot, but I still could not get past the seminal issue: Screenwriting has its own logic and its own form, and you have to abide by it. It’s nothing like writing a short story, and I could not get the form down on my own.
That was when I went to Nils Parker. I told him that I was having problems fitting my stories into screenplay format, and since he is the best writer I knew, I asked him for help. He agreed, and we became collaborators. It took us several years to learn how to write a screenplay, and it took us time to learn how to work together, but we did both and it has turned out to be a great experience–Nils was not only able to fill the gaps in my abilities, he brought a ton of creative talent to the table, and combined, we created something greater than the sum of our parts. It’s a cool synergy. Now, I wouldn’t dream of doing a script without him heavily involved.
That lesson–that collaboration can not only be done well, but can create something amazing as a result–was what ultimately dispelled me of the notion that I was going to be some Alfred Hitchcock-type auteur and do everything myself. Not only did I probably not have the ability to do that, but I was leaving so much on the table. The fact is, I am not the only one with good ideas. I am not the only talented one. I am not the only one who can create something based around the “Tucker Max” universe. Just because I am the one who created the vision, does not mean that others can’t add value to it.
This led to the second thing I had to learn: If I am going to collaborate, how do I do it while still maintaining the vision I laid out? We all know the maxim about too many cooks in the kitchen; how do I avoid that? Here are the things I’ve learned so far in attaching people to a project:

1. Let them know exactly what the vision is, and make sure they share it: There is nothing worse than bringing someone on for a job that doesn’t share your vision for the project. For instance, how awful would it be if the director saw Tucker as a woman-hating misogynist, instead of as a lovable narcissist? That would be antithetical to how the movie should be done. When we were interviewing directors, we always asked them to outline why they liked the script, what they thought of the characters, and how they saw certain things. I wanted to make sure their vision of this project lined up with mine, especially on the key issues. You don’t want robots, or people who parrot back what you want to hear, but you do want them to agree with you on the major issues.

2. Let them know exactly what value they need to add to that vision: For example, when picking the director, we were very clear about his role–it was to take our ideas and our script and translate it into a movie. I didn’t want his interpretation of my world, I wanted him to make my interpretation into a movie. From the start, be very clear about what role you want the person to fill and what their job is, and if you already found someone who shares our vision, you’ll be fine.

3. Get out of the way and let them do their job: Once you find someone who shares your vision and tell them what you want them to do, get the fuck out of their way. Either you do the job or you hire someone to do it, and if you hire someone, let them earn their money. Micromanaging is for the insecure.

4. When you disagree–and you will disagree–the issue must be resolved on the merits: There is no question that I run this movie. But when we are discussing creative issues, things like changing a line of dialogue or picking an actor to play a role or anything like that, the discussion is always about the issues, and never about who is in charge. I can’t tell you how many arguments Nils and I have had over the last two years about this movie and the script. Three hundred at least. But every time, the argument is always confined to the issue at hand, and it’s always resolved on the merits of the issue, never by authority. Never once have I said, “We are doing it my way because I said so.” If I can’t win the argument on merit alone, then I am wrong and I have to concede the point, regardless of the fact that I am “in charge.” A decision doesn’t become right because the person in charge made it, and there is no quicker way to destroy morale and ruin the movie than to pull rank on creative decisions.
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I am doing this film as an indie film, instead of a studio film. To people who don’t work in movies, the difference between an independent movie and a studio movie isn’t always clear. I want to clear that up, because in this case, it is the crucial distinction that is going to make so many elements of my movie different from other movies.

What is an indie film?

When most people hear “indie film” they think about some obscure, weird, art house flick that no one but film students and hipsters care about. And most indie films are like that. As a general rule, those sorts of films have to be done indie because they have no commercial appeal and thus no major studio wants to deal with them, because they only care about profit, not art.

My movie is not going to be like that. This is a broad comedy built on a popular existing property with huge commercial potential (the exact type of script that studios shit themselves over). And we are going to have a wide release, on thousands of screens, with a big advertising campaign, mainstream reviews and everything else a normal movie gets. So even though this is an indie film, it will look and feel to the audience just like every other studio movie you see in theaters, but it will still be an indie.

What is the difference then? Basically, money and ownership. With a studio film, the studio buys the rights to the concept or buys the script, so they own all the underlying intellectual property. Then they do everything that you have to do to make a movie go: pick the director, actors, marketing campaign, arrange the financing, distribute it, etc. Most of the movies you see in theaters are studio movies: Godfather, Gladiator, No Country For Old Men, all studio films. Even though the director or writer or actor may be given a lot of weight in the decision making process, ultimately the executives at the corporation makes the decisions. The artist doesn’t control his art; he is a slave to the decisions of the suits. On an indie film, that is not the case. I make all the decisions and I have to do all of the work that the studio would otherwise do.

Why did you do an indie film?

I have dealt with Hollywood twice already; in 2003 I sold my show to 20th Century Fox, and in 2006 when I sold my show to Comedy Central, and both times I had major problems with the creative process. Basically what happens is that the executives at the studio/network give you notes on your script. A “note” is a “suggestion” about how to change it.

But it isn’t a suggestion. It’s a command, and they can enforce it because they own the work once you do a deal with them, and you become their employee. And the notes are almost always fucking retarded, mainly because the executives are fucking retarded. They are just suits who have played the bureaucratic office politics game better than anyone else. Why this puts them in a position to make creative decisions has never made sense to me.

I originally wanted to do a TV show, but if I want to control my art, that’s not going to happen. The entertainment world is changing rapidly, but the sad fact is, for a standard TV show, you are still stuck with the entertainment company cartel as your primary means of distribution. The internet will break this monopoly someday, but not today.

But with movies, there is another way, a way that you can control the artistic vision: Independent film. It is much harder to do an independent film, and there is much much more risk for me. If I did a studio film, I could sell my script and the attached elements right now to a studio for probably a low seven figure sum, and get some decent backend participation. Plus, I wouldn’t have to worry about all the numerous things I have to worry about now. I could lay all the work and responsibility off on the people at the studio. But then I don’t get to make the calls. If I’m lucky, I’ll get input, and that’s it, and that’s not good enough for me.

This is a conscious and purposeful decision on my part. After going through this twice with Hollywood, I decided to never do it again. I intend to do this my own way, true to my original vision, working with artists I respect. I weighed the costs and benefits of both paths, and have decided to go this route because, most importantly, it means that I make all the decisions, I bear the responsibility, and I can make sure it’s done right. I have had every opportunity to sell both the film rights to my book, and sell the script that Nils and I wrote. I passed on all of them, because with all of them I had to give up creative control and give up the right to make the decisions.

If I fail on my merits I can live with that. But I cannot live with a failure that was hoisted on me by some asshole executive who doesn’t know art from his asshole. Win or lose, succeed or fail, I want it on my shoulders.

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Some things to read about Indy versus studio films:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_film
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_film_studio
http://cjrarchives.org/tools/owners/

What a day. First things first:
I am never fucking another USC girl again. I have hooked up with three since moving to LA, and they are all the same: Entitled, obnoxious, and most unforgivable, WILL NOT SHUT THE FUCK UP AND GO TO SLEEP.
I guess this is because they are all cokeheads. Not just normal cokeheads, this one is a cokehead and CAN’T HANDLE HER LIQUOR. This means that not only will she not go to bed, her constant chatter is slovenly drunk gibberish instead of coherent paranoid jibberish. Super. How about you just set my balls on fire while you’re at it? This is the type of shit that makes me want to have a girlfriend.
My dog Murph just looked at her, and then looked at me with a look as if to say, “Daddy, can’t you fuck something at least as well behaved as me?” My dog is judging this girl, she’s so annoying. Not even kidding. She’s finally asleep, so here we go:
The last two days have been stressful as shit. Being an indy producer is like fighting a forest fire–you are always undermanned, out-gunned, and struggling to not only do your job, but to not get killed.
I did not sleep Monday night. My speech at Northeastern was done at 830pm, I signed books etc until like 10pm, drank until 2am, fucked until like 4am, got a 6am flight, SAT NEXT TO A CRYING BABY ON THE FLIGHT AND NEARLY COMMITTED INFANTICIDE, landed in LAX at 11am, went to a casting session at 2pm, then had these issues waiting for me to deal with:
-One investor unhappy with the legalese of the term sheet,
-One investor unhappy with wire transferring money instead of FedExing a check,
-Literally five different, distinct issues with location selection,
-The 1st AD wanting to discuss the director,
-The new lawyer needing all kinds of things,
-The directors deal needs to get done, and
-The casting director’s deal is all dicked up and needed to get done yesterday.
This is from just Monday. Oh yeah, did I mention that I tore my ACL? This is becoming a bad Monty Python skit.
None of the individual issues is all that hard (except one, discussed below). It’s just a constant barrage of fires that need to be put out, and its not like this is a paint by numbers job. Every issue, every situation is not only different but has to properly fit into the larger scheme that we have devised and has to not conflict with any number of other things.
One of the issues was hard: Negotiating the casting directors deal. Holy shit. Let me tell you about negotiating deals in Hollywood. Its not even describable. I honestly don’t know how to make someone understand how fucking insane the negotiation process is in this business. It’s nonsensical, it’s inhumane, it’s counter-productive and it’s just flat out mean.
I am not sure how much detail I can put into this, but let me just say this: Negotiating deals in Hollywood is not like negotiating anywhere else. On the casting directors deal alone, there are at least 15 different distinct issues, each of which affects the others, and each of which has it’s own issues to be resolved that affect the resolution of the other issues. For instance on a standard casting director deal, you have to negotiate:
-The fee of the casting director
-The fee of the assistants
-The number of assistants
-The rent for usage of his office
-The cost of office supplies used during casting
-Who pays the union fees, and how much (all casting directors are in a union, usually a Teamsters union)
-The credit received
-The placement of the credits
-The flight arrangements (if casting outside of LA–we are)
-The travel arrangements (to and from airport, rental car)
-The hotel arrangements (ibid)
-The per diem (ibid)
-The cost of hiring local casting help (if casting on location for a non-LA shoot–we are)
-Backend participation
I think that covers everything, though I could be wrong. I don’t know.
Anyway, after much bullshit and posturing (I don’t have the energy to write about dealing with Hollywood agents, but I will at some point), I am pretty sure we have that deal done. The ridiculous part is that our casting director has been awesome and working basically on spec for like three weeks now, but the last mile of the deal got super sticky. Make no mistake about it: There is a reason that artists get screwed so much in Hollywood, It’s because the business of Hollywood is so complex, the artists don’t want to deal with it (and I very much include a casting director as an artist, it is a hard job), so they leave it to agents and lawyers and other suits who dick them over. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
UPDATE: It’s 5am. I just kicked the USC girl out of my house because she PISSED MY BED.
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We had our third casting session for the three male leads this past Tuesday. It was probably the best thus far, or at least that is what I am told. I can’t say for certain because it was my first. It was quite the learning experience for a number of reasons.
Auditions are short. Ten minutes, maybe. Each actor has two relatively short scenes to read. Most times they’ll do each one twice. Once cold, with their own personal interpretation, and once with The Director’s notes. Sometimes they’ll only do them once, either because they nailed it or they missed the mark enough to make a second shot not worth the time or effort. I was surprised at the number of guys who read both scenes twice, but that might explain why this was the best day thus far.
Timing and Tone Are Everything. Intellectually, I already knew this was true with all forms of performance art, but it is especially true with comedy. Not just how the words are written and constructed either, but how they are delivered. And more importantly, that the deliverer has a sense of timing and tone, as well. You put C+ actors with an A+ script and you end up with a B- movie. You put A+ actors with a C+ script and you end up with B+ movie. I came to understand all this at a core, visceral level after watching a handful of actors try to pull off the three male leads and then comparing the ones who had “IT” with the ones who didn’t. With the actors in the A range, the good stuff exploded off the page. With the actors in the C range, even the best stuff didn’t pop.
You never know how funny something is until you hear it performed. Tucker and I labored over this script for the better part of two years. We agonized over specific lines, specific words, arrangement. We went through draft after draft fine-tuning until we were comfortable “locking” the script. And still, The Director and the other producers assured us that we could not be 100% certain that any single line or exchange would be funny until we got into a room with actors and heard them spit back our lines at us. Goddamn if they didn’t have that one pegged. It’s probably been the most enlightening aspect of the creative process thus far.
The words on the page are not the same as the words coming out of the actors’ mouths. Oddly, it hasn’t been an issue of our lines not being funny. It’s been whether the dialogue is too much of a mouthful, or the scene is too congested. You can tell if that’s the case the first time you see it performed. A line won’t snap off the way it should because there is an extra word or line. A scene won’t crescendo the way we want because its progression is clogged by an extra joke or a redundant, irrelevant exchange. It’s crazy how apparent it is. It’s so obvious, we’re meeting with The Director tomorrow to go back through the entire script and strip that shit out. Who knows if we’ll get them all, but I guess that’s part of what casting is for.
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I gave a speech at Northeastern on Monday. Went great, fun crowd, had a good time. The students who run the speaker bureau at Northeastern told me something that made me very happy:
This semester, they brought four other speakers to campus. Spike Lee, Greg Behrendt, Frank Warren and me. I outdrew all of them…COMBINED.
Those three drew 350, 300 and 400, respectively. I sold out the auditorium they put me in, capacity 1050. And that was only Northeastern students–there were a couple hundred kids from other schools that they wouldn’t let in. I could have filled 1500 without breaking a sweat.
There is a huge market for this movie. If we do the film right, this thing is going to fucking explode.
[On a side note, kinda unrelated to this movie--they said I not only drew the most people of any speaker, but I was the nicest person to deal with. Apparently each of those guys were super prima donnas and assholes to the staff at Northeastern. That just makes no fucking sense to me. Why would you be a dick to people who support you? Stupid.]
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My friend, TheBunny, went to a casting session last week. These are her comments:
“I’m just the graphic designer, so I’m not going to add much value here, but I can tell you what the casting session was like. Which was: neato.
Its a weird process, because its more a feeling out thing. There’s no logic to it. You can’t make a list of traits and tones and then go find a perfect fit. Lucky for Drex and Tucker, I think they’ve hired the most amazing director. He was pulling all sorts of different emotions out of the actors as they read, and each read was totally different because of it.
There was one actor who read for Slingblade and just fucking nailed it from the get-go, which was fitting, because in between reads, he made a wry joke about being perfect for the role almost exactly the way Slingblade would. He had the right look and demeanor, and his face was subdued but expressive, the way Slingblade’s face is. I couldn’t tell you why he did well; not in a million years. There was just something about the way he held his mouth and the way his eyebrows moved in conjunction with this strong and stiff body language, I guess. It was strange. Tucker actually read the part of Tucker for him and they went back and forth. It was surreal because the guy actually did a good job, and it sounded–and more importantly, felt–like any number of times I saw Tucker and Slingblade play video games and rip on each other.
I was watching the casting director, and he spent almost no time looking at the actor. He was watching Tucker’s face and my face, because he knew we knew the guy in life, and he knew that when our faces lit up, the “feeling out” was going well, and the actor was right for the part. That CD is no joke, man. He knows his shit. I mean, how do you make decisive decisions that directly affect the success of huge, millions-of-dollars, pieces of art by gut instinct? No doubt, the movie will be superbly cast.”

I am sitting at my desk in Washington D.C. right now, preparing, finally, to relocate across the country to Los Angeles tomorrow in order to make this movie. I just finished composing a list on one of those long yellow legal pads of things I needed to remember to bring, and things I needed to remember to buy once I got there. As I reviewed the rather sizable two-column list, I started cataloging in my head the movie-related things I would need to do and think about between now and the time, god willing, this movie hits theaters. This new list dwarfed the others. I’m sitting here now, pondering for the first time, what it really means to be a producer.
“Producer” is one of those job titles, like “Assistant to/for ______ ” here in D.C., that rings with importance and magnitude directly proportional to how little normal people understand about it. They are titles cloaked in mystery, held by people who tend to DO less than they can but exercise more authority than they have. Remember Scooter Libby? He was an Assistant to ______. Remember Dustin Hoffman’s character in WAG THE DOG? He was a producer. A typical Hollywood, big studio producer.
I saw a matinée showing of WAG THE DOG in an empty theater on winter recess during my sophomore year at Berkeley, just days before the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke and Bill Clinton was inaugurated to his second term as President. I was (and continue to be) thoroughly entertained by the movie and, as an intellectually suspicious college student, I walked out of the theater with two questions. One, is presidential politics anything like that? And two, what does a producer actually do? By the time I got home, I’d decided the answers to those questions were “probably” and “not much.” While I understood that Hoffman’s character had lots of money and connections, the only decisions he made that produced anything creatively involved a calico kitten and a bunch of “ooh-aah” sounds. Sure, he corralled all these creative people and put them in a room together to, you know, CREATE STUFF, but how hard could that be? That couldn’t be all a producer does? I remember thinking to myself, “I could do that.”
Sitting here, mulling over my movie to-do list and remembering that day, I realize that the answers to my own rhetorical questions and bluster are “very,” “it isn’t,” and “we’ll see.” Especially since this is an independent film on which Tucker and I are the primary creative forces behind every bit of content other than the stuff that applies specifically to the direction of actors and the execution of their craft. Whether it’s the script or the content for the website or marketing ideas, Tucker and I are responsible for LITERALLY producing it. And of course, that’s in addition to being responsible for business decisions, and putting the technical pieces together, and getting the right people in a room together; all in the service of making the best movie possible. We are producers in the former sense (with a lower case “p”) and Producers in the WAG THE DOG sense (with an upper case “P”).
Because we do not have the luxury of deep studio pockets and massive studio infrastructure, you can be sure that Tucker and I will not be Producers as they are typically conceived of. For this film to be as successful as we hope, we MUST do everything we can. For it to live up to our expectations artistically, we must exercise, when necessary, as much authority as we have (which, if you ask Tucker, is Full). It’s at once both a daunting and exciting task. Can we pull it off? I guess…we’ll see.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to finish packing.
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I am out of town until Tuesday. I’m meeting with some investors and giving a speech in Boston (at Northeastern University) on Monday, and then I get back to LA the next day, just in time for the next casting session on Tuesday. Nils gets to LA on Tuesday also, which is going to be nice because he is coming to stay: He’s moving to LA for at least the duration of the movie, and may start posting here along with me.
I don’t anticipate posting much this weekend, but if the THR article drops, I will put up the posts I have written about who the director is and why we picked him; I will talk about the other producers on the movie a little, the casting director, and maybe some other stuff.