Project Greenlight

I was inspired to watch old episodes of Project Greenlight after reading the attacks on their last movie, The Leisure Class and its director, Jason Mann. I watched all I could for free on YouTube. If I want to watch it on the Roku I'd have to pay and I'm not doing that.

Although I did pay to see a movie by Mike Carroll. I just read his book on zero-budget filmmaking, so I wanted to see one of his movies. Books seem like a pretty good way to publicize your work. I always thought of it as merchandising----you make a movie with no money and then you write a book about it and that's where you make the money. I thought paying to see that movie might have been a break-through for me and I'd start paying to see lots of movies.

I once watched a long interview with James Garner on YouTube. He talked about The Rockford Files. He said he wanted everyone to direct an episode, so some of the actors on the show as well as Stephen Cannell directed for the first time. Today, an hour-long TV episode costs about $3 million, so they were apparently directing a three million dollar film and it was for a TV series so I assume the consequences would be rather serious if they screwed it up. Garner insisting that everyone direct when they knew nothing about directing gave the impression that directing must not be that hard.

But here they were on Project Greenlight filming a three million dollar movie and really lousing it up in this case.

I'm reminded of the words of Ivan Reitman, what he told his son, whatever his name is. Somebody Reitman. I've written this before on here. His son was about to direct a movie and Ivan told him not to try to make a scene funnier or more dramatic. It's almost impossible to do. Just follow the script---you picked it for a reason. But on the show, they had a script that wasn't ready.

There was a Todd Solondz movie, Life During Wartime, which consisted mostly of scenes of two people talking. Now and then a third person would walk in or there'd be a larger group conversation. That would probably have been a better approach to these Project Greenlight movies. Actors moving around and doing things is more trouble than it's worth, and they love dialog.