Success from failure

How many years ago was this? Over thirty years. I was at work. I was talking to a guy there who told me he was a film major in college. I asked him what kind of work he wanted to do. He said, "I'm going to go to Hollywood and direct movies."

I was stunned at his confidence. I tried to talk to him about low budget regional film and got a blank stare. Later, I asked if he was working on anything and he said that the university here wasn't production-oriented.

If he had focused more on the directing than on Hollywood he might have had more to show for it. On the other hand, that was in the years before digital video and he might have just squandered tens of thousands of dollars making a movie with no commercial value.

That was before the big film school boom. The economy was somewhat better and there were fields you could go into and make money. Not like now. I read a few years ago that bartending and waiting tables were the only areas with real job growth. You may as well go to film school. You won't be missing out on the economic boom.

Last time I checked, the guy was a news photographer in a town up the highway from here.

Now, if he made a movie there, he'd be the only one. It would be the town's only chance to see itself portrayed in cinema, although moving pictures aren't the novelty they once were.

I always thought, make a movie using as many high school kids as possible. In a small town, I would imagine that the kids would have an average of five family members--parents and grandparents--who would be obliged to see their movie. Of course, if you didn't pay anyone to be in your movie, you'd have to at least give the kids free tickets to let their families see it, and I think you'd have to give them a few DVD's.

Just try to bring in as much money as a high school play without it costing nearly as much.

We have a picture somewhere of my older brother at age five wearing a cowboy suit and sitting on a small horse. It was a photo taken in a different era----an era when strangers could walk into a neighborhood with a cowboy suit and a horse and take pictures of kids without their parents' knowledge or consent then get the parents to pay five dollars for a copy of the picture.

Making a movie using that business model, it would just be a really, really specialized niche audience. Just people who live in a particular town and are related to one of the people in the movie.

Someone in Portland, Oregon, got the same idea I had years ago. They filmed a zero budget movie about a video store employee. After he's fired, he goes from video store to video store applying for jobs. Every video store where they filmed a scene would HAVE to stock the movie!

Now, more recently, I read about a guy in England. He was in a big city. He hired local hooligans to appear in an extreme low budget action film. He sold the DVD's in local stores. They sold for five pounds each, cheap enough that people could buy them on impulse. And he made pretty good money, I think they said twenty or thirty thousand pounds.

In a small town, just film scenes anywhere that DVD's might reasonably be sold. Although you could glut the market pretty quickly.

Okay, I just googled the town where that guy lives. 53,000 people----it's a lot bigger than I thought.

It's like an old commercial they used to have for Alcoholics Anonymous. It noted the irony that people who drink out of loneliness have vast opportunities for friendship in AA.

For that guy I knew, living in a small city could be his best hope for success as a director.