THE PROCESS will be an ongoing feature in iF that will chronicle the various aspects of filmmaking throughout the course of making a film and getting it sold. We will follow individual films, actors, and directors during the "process" and checking in with them infrequently to see if the fruits of their labors have paid off.
Our first look is at a "micro-budget" independent film TRUE RIGHTS which recently began production in Los Angeles under the direction of Meg Thayer.
After scripting numerous low budget films that barely kept any of her original thoughts or words intact, Meg Thayer decided to take matters into her own hands and make her own movie.
The thinking quite naturally was if she was going to have her material violated, she figured she should at least have first crack at violating it - thus TRUE RIGHTS was born.
THE PITCH: "TRUE RIGHTS is a black comedy about two bottom feeder producers who follow the police scanner all night long for stories that they can get graphic video footage of so they could sell it to the news or perhaps even buy the rights to," says Thayer. "Of course the problem is the stories they're going after are the lowest you can possibility get. At one point they hook themselves up with an old silent film star who decides to kill himself and what happens from there. It's a fairly scathing look at how voyeuristic we've become and our insatiable appetite for violence. It's created a sort of new form of media - to take things as far as it goes and it is unpleasant."
Originally armed with $7,000 and a video camera, Thayer changed her initial plan of shooting the film down and dirty after hooking up with the producer Kes Sullivan who was hoping to start up a series of "micro-budget" movies - films that were shot for $500,000 or less all in.
THE MICRO-BREW: "The idea behind doing 'micro-budget' movies in addition to bigger films our company is working on is to seek out interesting filmmakers that otherwise would not have a forum for their non-mainstream material and give them an opportunity to make a film and give them creative control," says Sullivan. "Obviously for that kind of money a filmmaker has to phone in a lot of favors to make feature film so we get to approve the budget and principal cast and few other details but the artist decisions regarding content choices have all been made by Meg."
For Thayer's part, she called in those ever-so important favors to give the film A-quality production value on a "C-level" budget.
CONNECTED: "From my stand point I needed to attach people who would bring value to the project," says Thayer who found a director of photography - Dave Garby - who was hooked up all over town and was able to keep film, rental and lab costs down. "I think that if you are trying to do something for no money, you just have to do everything yourself and seek people who will help you. You have to be very resourceful and it's almost like a recipe. Instead looking at a recipe and saying 'OK I'm going to go out and buy all these exotic ingredients,' you say 'these are the ingredients I can have - now how can I make this taste right.'"
Finding the right actor is also essential says Thayer especially when it comes to the selling the film. That's why she feels you have to be able to work a little casting mojo in finding people who are right on the cusp or have the potential to be on the cusp of breaking through so it adds more cache down the road. Claudia Christian for instance made her mark on the TV series BABYLON 5 and found TRUE RIGHTS interesting because she got to play a character completely opposite herself (she even wore padding in her pants to make her butt look bigger).
Playing the naïve lead in the film is Richard Lee Jackson who is an aspiring filmmaker that hooks up with these shady producer to help documentarize what they're doing. Recently appearing on ALLY MCBEAL as McBeal's teenage love interest early on this past season, Thayer feels Jackson is poised for breakout status and the reason he jumped on board TRUE RIGHTS was because of it's strong script and opportunity to show his range as an actor.
SHOP TALK: " There are a lot of projects that really get me excited about doing a character or acting," says Jackson. "ALLY MCBEAL was one of them and the same is true for TRUE RIGHTS. It's one of those characters that you are lucky if you get one of them in a year. I think a lot of times younger actors -- teenagers especially - take parts that are just kind of trivial or commercial and the movies themselves are just dumb or obsessed with sex or drugs or whatever. It's kind of stereotypical but this is a character who is trying to get a career going and who had a lot of real emotions. It was the real person in here that really interested me."
On this particular set day in mid-February, Thayer is huddled together in a Santa Monica, CA office complex shooting a scene of a pitch meeting gone awry between the two shady producers.
HOOD ORNAMENTS "These two character are pitching to a very sophisticated black executive and doing gangster talk to them," explains Thayer. "They want to do a gang movie and the executive thinks they are completely illiterate and suggests that they take a course in intermediate language."
While the lawyer offices here substitute perfectly for a "Hollywood producer's office," Thayer stresses she was also able to use this location for other parts of the script once it was dressed up a bit.
LOCATION: "We already shot a prison scene here which tells you how we're utilizing this location," admits Thayer. "The lunch room here totally looks institutional. Then we used the front lobby as a psychiatric ward waiting room and we used the parking lot here as a prison parking lot. We've pretty much used every nook and cranny of this building and also going to be using every nook and cranny of my own home."
Keeping a crew happy under such strenuous circumstances (namely getting very little base pay and/or deferring their salaries until if and when the movie is sold) is important says Thayer. Luckily her crew truly believed in the project and have had no problem going the extra mile for her and the film.
PAY STUBS: "We are paying our crew and trying to be democratic about," says Thayer. "If you pay somebody something just something it says to them 'you are worthwhile.' We do our best to feed people as well. I don't think anybody on this crew would tell you they were abused by any stretch of the imagination. We also try to keep our days light and low. We had this whole motto that we thought we invented and later I found out we didn't but we said 'let's take all our pain in pre-production while we're scheduling and anticipate what could go wrong' and because we did that we've had a pretty smooth shoot."
For independent producer Sullivan's part, her "micro-budget" plan is a very low-risk endeavor which means the movie has the chance to make back its money relatively quickly if they play their cards correctly. This experiment is funded through CBC (Children's Broadcasting Corp.) headed by chairman Christopher T. Dahl and whose film division is run by Jan Wireringa
SELL-THROUGH: "If you cast your movie correctly and choose your filmmakers wisely it's very easy to put together foreign and cable deals where we can recoup our money," says Sullivan, "We are not going to make scads of money and that's not the reason we are doing this. We are doing it because it gives us an opportunity to work with filmmakers at the ground level and hopefully these filmmakers throughout the years are going to do great things and we can continue a working relationship with them."
What has lessened the risk according to Sullivan is Sound Deluxe offering up their services in completing the film during post-production - essentially serving as producing partners on the film.
POSTAL: "They really decrease our risk and they really want to be a part of the film business so this is chance for them to explore that without investing a lot of money," says Sullivan.
While the concept of doing a "micro-budget" seems easy enough, the big question though is why aren't more independent filmmakers going this route?
THE BOTTOM LINE: "The problem of course is it's as much work to do this as it is to put together a $20 million dollar film plus there isn't a lot of money to be made at this level," says Sullivan. "I'm not making any money on this. I'm still doing bigger budget films to make a paycheck, but I'm doing this because I love it. We sort of have a three year plan. If we make nine of these micro budget films and pick our material and filmmakers right I think one of them will be a film of note. It's such a little amount of money for somebody who wants to enter the film business that I think it's very easy to do it right."
iF MAGAZINE will continue to follow TRUE RIGHTS in the coming months during the PROCESS of post-production, securing a distributor, screenings and festival prospects.
