Pay to play

I was looking at a Canadian website. A fellow had made a number of movies and YouTube videos. Uses local child actors. The movies looked pretty good from the previews. He mentioned that he wanted to shoot a movie on 35mm, but to do so, he would have to charge parents about $2,000 per child actor who wanted to appear in it, and he argued that this would be reasonable compared with what parents spend for their kids to play hockey, and he's probably right.

I watched the movie Lord of the Flies and listened to the directors commentary. The director said he got letters from parents after the movie was done. After spending the summer filming the movie, their sons came home and were doing much better in school and were now leaders among their classmates. And these were the kids who played very minor roles in the movie, who were in the background.

On the other hand, it's possible that what this Canadian director was doing could be considered illegal some places.

I read something by a guy who was in a discussion group, something related to script writing. Another fellow at this thing had a script and he stunned the others by saying that he also had financing to produce it and he had a distribution deal. The author of the article talked to him afterward. It turned out that when he said he had financing, he meant that he was going to charge each actor a few thousand dollars to appear in the movie. And his "distribution deal" was to require each actor to buy a couple of cartons of videotapes and find some way to sell them.

The writer of the article noted that it was illegal in California to charge actors to appear in a movie. Acting is a profession, and charging them to work is considered bribery.

I don't know if that would apply to the Canadian guy's work. I doubt it would.

There's Rick Schmidt, author of Feature Filmmaking at Used Car Prices. He had made a few movies for under $6,000 when he wrote the book. Since then, he's become much more prolific, making a movie or two, or three a year. This is because he now holds filmmaking workshops. People pay $3,500 each to attend and make a feature together.

Schmidt's book, by the way, noted that actors are often willing to pay their own expenses to appear in a movie, but he advised against taking them up on this. He called for you to pay them $100 a day to cover their costs, and he pays actors more than that for the movies he now makes through the workshops.

I don't think Mike Kuchar paid his actors, but he said in the commentary to Sins of the Fleshapoids that he would let the actors do stuff they wanted to do in the movie. Give them a chance to do their thing. Like, there was an actress in Sins of the Fleshapoids who would make underground movies with her husband. They would go to the financial district in the early morning, when the streets were deserted, and they would make films of him tearing her dress off. So she wanted a scene where the Fleshapoid tears her dress off. Okay.

Robert Rodriguez said that he didn't let any of the actors in El Mariachi stay on the set for more than three hours a day. That way he didn't have to buy them lunch.

And then there was Night of the Living Dead. I heard that as they started talking about making the movie, the plan was to have everyone to pitch in both money and expertise.

I don't know what my point is here.

I also read a book on movie financing. The author said he was thankful that he paid for his first few movies with his own money because they were terrible and he wouldn't want to have squandered money someone else invested.

If you make actors pay to be in a movie and the movie turns out terrible, you would not only have humiliated them and hindered their careers, but you'd have taken their money, too. Made them pay for the privilege.

No, you got to pay people.