The Word on the Street

Bands selling less than 100K or 150K units are being dropped by independent labels because the labels just can't make any money from them. Plus, contracts are now "all in" -- meaning that the label gets a piece of touring as well as merchandise revenue. Otherwise the labels will just go broke.

It's a cruel cruel world out there.

Roger Corman Depresses You

Here's the man himself on the state of indy film:

I’ve been making films for over 50 years. We are at the lowest point ever for low-budget and medium-budget independent films. We are making a little bit of money on DVD. We are making a fair amount of money on cable sales, and still making some money out of foreign. But the profit margins are the lowest they’ve ever been. The only ray of hope I can see is the Internet. I think we’re beginning to see it. It’s not there yet. But we’re seeing a little bit of money coming in from the Internet, and I think that will grow. So we’re staying in there, taking our tiny profits now and hoping that we’re building out libraries that will hopefully pay off in the near future.

Thanks (or not) to Chance.

Oops. Little mistake

The Japanese version of "Alien Uprising" is called "Alien Revenge".

My last sales report was based on old sales. This is what we're up to so far in very recent sales:

Clonehunter -- Thailand (I can't wait to get a copy!)
Alien Uprising -- Malaysia/Brunei
Day 2 (!) -- Thailand and also Indonesia.

Whew, that means we gotta finish Day 2 right away don't it? ;-)

Tyrannosaurus Mouse Future

We had our second recording session yesterday at Trax East. I'd say it went even more swimmingly than the first. Probably because we were a little more used to recording with one another.

Odd thing on the guitar front: I'm playing my custom "Blattocaster" with Seymour Duncan pickups and the amps keep having some ugly breakup -- like "solid state" overload (in Ethan's words). So after sussing out everything I turned down my guitar. Fairly substantially too. It's weird to think that passive pickups could be that hot and cause that much trouble. I played with the Lil' Dawg Mutt and with Ethan's '65 Princeton Reverb. They both went through some Shep "1073" preamps and the Princeton had a Royer ribbon and the Mutt's 10" Weber had a Sennheiser 441.

Sally Rand's agent says she's "unavailable". I'll try to get her home number.

But that's not what the band's big discussion was about. It was all about how we're going to play live. I think that Tyrannosaurus Mouse is essentially a burlesque circus. Somewhere between the fan dance at the end of The Right Stuff and a 19th Century conjurer's show. Theatrical. Giant inflatable rabbits. You know what I'm talking about.

We're gonna need a lot of feathers, that's for sure.

Mostly we need a proscenium stage. I asked Ethan how much the Met was for a nightly rental. He said something about how included in the price is at least 130 Local 1 stage hands so I guess we're going to have to demur from that.

So we find a stage in New York with a proscenium that's somehow cheap. We figure out how we can quickly hang a tasteful backdrop and possibly a scrim for back lighting or front lighting someone upstage. The other trick is figuring how to light all of this in one day.

Lastly projections. We can certainly come up with suitable psychedelic images for projection but projectors haven't improved as much as I'd have liked in the last 10 years. Certainly not for the price. Because we'll want to splash the dancer(s) with light.

Ethan and Liz suggested The Triad in New York City as a venue. We'll have to check them out.

More Me

Brooklyn yo.

It's a virgin mimosa because I have to drive to Ikea.

Road Warrior

Now that I'm doing a scene-to-scene structural ripoff of The Road Warrior (which is, incidentally, impossible to do and I have no idea how I'm going to deal with the compound or how the "feral kid" is now an android and the dude in the helicopter is now a witch, but you get the idea) I've been watching the movie again. And that picture is spectacularly well filmed. I mean the cinematography and the camera work are simply excellent. Unbelievable.

But instead of the post-apocalyptic desert it's about this dude who's a super-enhanced human soldier. And he's been dumped off on the Earth after the alien apocalypse where there's just old war-machines running around the place. And he runs into a combat witch and eventually an android who, among some other people, are holding out in an industrial park in Jersey against the alien "bogies" which roam around trying to wipe out the last of humanity.

But this dude, in a cool suit of servo-powered armor, is looking for himself. When they built his new body they wiped his mind clean. At least that's the way things are so far. Or maybe he does already know who he was and he wants to get back...

How am I going to make these mechs work? And will the lead's servo-powered armor also be a rocket powered suit? Will he fly? How does that equate to Max's supercharged V8 interceptor? Will it be destroyed? Or should he have a bigger suit, one he steps into? What a pain in the tuchus that sounds like. And will you be able to see his face in the armor or will he be taking his helmet off all the damn time?

Will the feral kid and the blonde woman be the same character in "Earthwar"? And will it all take place in Brooklyn?

The feral kid is the cat Mel saves. Hmm... it's too bad Mel turned out to be such a douche.

The problem with modeling a screenplay on The Road Warrior is that the picture is almost too perfect. Sure, you can see some tropes of Star Wars in it, and there's the general craziness of Australian mondo cinema, and of course the chase scene in Bullit.

But our hero "John Keynes" (let's see how long that name will stick in the script) must certainly end up facing down a combat witch's crossbow, doesn't he?

And the way Max loses the Interceptor always seemed to easy to me.  I understand why he has to lose it but it's a bit like Han Solo losing the Millennium Falcon if it had just self-destructed. And I have zero idea of what the Starship Troopers equivalent of that would be.

A few more sales

Solar Vengeance, Clonehunter, and Alien Uprising have sold to Thailand and to the Middle East. Not all of them to both markets but a mix of movies and markets. I'm guessing that we'll get a few $K net to our coffers once all is said and done with such and things and expenses on our end and paying our rep and such but I don't have the specifics.

What would be cool is if we finally pass the $50,000 mark on Alien Uprising and start paying people percentages out of that picture. I doubt that'll happen without a TV deal in North America but maybe after a half-dozen more small deals with the picture that's where we'll be? We'll see. Like I said, I don't have specific number yet.

Earthkiller Post-Mortem

1. As already established, I have to be nicer to the boom operator. I've started work on that. Early reports are that I'm doing much better.

2. We have to do something better with transportation. New Jersey Transit has raised their fares significantly. It now costs $22 to go round-trip from New York City to Metuchen. We were hoping to put people on the PATH and drive most days to Metuchen from Jersey City but that didn't work out. So our transportation budget went up by about a thousand dollars by putting everyone on the Train directly from Midtown to Metuchen.

3. As always, it doesn't matter how good the screenplay it, how great the actors are, or how well the movie is shot. All that anyone cares about is how good the CGI is. So that's what we're working on. CG. That being said, we worked with a great screenplay and actors and:

4. This was the best-looking picture we've ever shot. We had exceptional sets. Every single set was amazing and looked different which is certainly a first for us. One issue we had though was that although normally we're able to leave sets standing. But not this time. Because of the fact that the now-closed Broadway show Tale of Two Cities is, weirdly, storing their old sets right where we used to be able to work -- we had to take our sets down completely each weekend because we were working in the part of my dad's shop where people were actually... er... well working. That added about an hour of take-down at the end of each weekend but also added an hour (at least) to the beginning of each weekend to re-build stuff. Actually, maybe two hours.

It would be awesome if we had our own sound stage. In Jersey City. With all sprung Marley floors. Ooh. Nice floors.

I can dream, can't I? Yes, that's what the post-mortem is for.

5. It's nice to have a combat android whom you simply know could beat you up, and Robin Kurtz did a great job of that. We had a very strong cast and we were lucky to get Maduka Steady to actually play the part written for him this time. But really everyone was fantastic and we had a nice gamut from the whiny-comical to the deadly serious to the weirdly insane -- each character carefully delineated in such a way that they're all memorable and their interactions with one another was very clear and motivated.

Also: I can't believe I spelled "delineated" correctly without asking the spell-check.

A corridor set in mid-construction.

6. Joe Chapman and Libby Csulik went way above and beyond in the building of those sets. It was funny -- as the DP realizing I could turn around in any direction and shoot. I can almost NEVER do that. Even when shooting outside. Maybe especially when shooting outside. But lighting was very easy and kind of delightful to not have to keep saying "I can't shoot in that direction because there's no set there."

7. I should either drink more or take better drugs so I'm calmer on set. We need a blender for the fruitier cocktails. Maybe the first set should be a Tiki bar...

8. For the call sheets we did everything we could to keep every single day with the same call time. I think that helped lower confusion levels.

9. I'm sure our producer will have a list of things I should be doing better. As long as nobody is actively hitting me I'll be OK. Or using any sort of stick or club. I hate that.

Battle Mech

Don't think I won't do a scene-to-scene rewrite of The Road Warrior but have it about a dude in servo armor who meets up with a combat witch and an android trying to protect the last refuge of humanity from mechanized dinosaurs in the post-apocalyptic future.
See? You're thinking I won't do that. You are so ever so ever so wrong.

Over at Volpin Props they have a suit of mechanized armor. But this dude made some male and female armor which is excessively cool. Whoa. That's a LOT of work.

But the real trick is making a mech. That would be the equivalent of the 18-wheeler tanker truck of the movie. Can we build a two-legged one which is practical? Can we build a damaged one and then build a modeled one which is animated?

The Most Boring Blog Post Ever

Why do criminals wear Yankee caps? The bigger question is: why wouldn't they?

No really, you have no idea how little I care about the Mets/Yankees/Everybody else.

I think there's a more exciting blog post over there somewhere.

What I do care about is the $30 RAST chest of drawers from Ikea. Somehow out of the three places I live in (Jersey City, Metuchen, and Princeton) I don't have a single chest of drawers. You can imagine what that means for organizing my laundry. Yes. Dirty clothes in the hamper, clean clothes on the bed/chair/floor/wherever.

The girls' and boys' locker rooms in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series are hands-down the creepiest lit and scariest places in the whole series. All of a sudden you have rusty dripping faucets and under- lit lockers in and amongst the otherwise lit-like-it's-named Sunnydale High. Every time we go to the locker room it makes me laugh.

Sean McHenry is a guy who contacted me about my feature Hamlet.

And today I refoamed my speakers. Getting the old glue off the speakers and the frame-thingy was the hardest part. But now it's all good. And we can have a party at my apartment again.

A Power Trio Rehearsal

But we didn't record anything. Even though we wrote a new song. Ha! Of course. And we didn't record it do I have to try to "sense memory" it if we're going to remember it for Sunday.

The Earthkiller Shuttle

An important element in Earthkiller is the shuttle which docks with the space station. And the always amazing Ian Hubert made one. Here are some stills. (Modeled in Blender.)

The wings swivel.

What is a Story?

Often people tell me "I've got a great idea for a story!" and I think "uh oh."

"It's about how everyone has personal jetpacks but sometimes they fail."

Voight Kamf causes heavy family dynamics.

or

"Cybernetic dolphins!"

or

"What if your house came alive?"

Those might be nice ideas, but they aren't stories. Alex Epstein, whom I've been following since he wrote his screenwriting book on the web back in the day, has a good post today on story.

A story is (a) a compelling character (b) who has an opportunity, problem or goal (c) who faces obstacles and/or an antagonist (d) who faces jeopardy (e) and can win stakes.

Making a Business Plan Part Sexo

So, we've already determined that it's theoretically possible to have a business which brings in $250,000 a year in revenue by making (egads!) 10 pictures a year.

But that's only $25,000 a picture. Is that really sustainable?

If you do a 12-day shoot with an average of 10 "men" on set each day (including cast and crew) it's going to cost no less than
$150/day in food
$220/day(!) in transportation (if they're taking NJ Transit from New York City Penn Station to Metuchen -- I will gripe about this in another post)

That's $370/day or $4400 for the duration of the shoot.

Now you might be able to save some money from that and, say, rent a van and drive rather than taking public transportation (don't get me started). But let's start with that $4400 number.

If you're going to pay salaries, which your accountant would appreciate if you did, you'd have to pay minimum wage which is $7.25/hour. And lets pretend each day is 10-hours (but you aren't doing more than 40 hours a week so no overtime is involved.)*

Now let's assume that the employer's side of taxes and SUI and the cost of a payroll service costs a total of 1.22 the wage you're paying. So the gross daily pay for someone is $72.50. Multiply that by 1.22 and you get the total cost to the employer for employing them: $88.45/day.

There are 120 man-days on the shoot so 120 times $88.45/day is $10, 614.

Production cost are $15,014 (and you haven't even made props, costumes, or built sets or found a location)
$10,614 in salary costs
$4,400 in "fixed" costs

That leaves only $10,000 to do all your pre-production, write the script, create all your art, props, and sets, and do all your post-production editing, mixing, visual effects, amortize the costs of your camera, lights, and sound gear and pay for repairs, AND pay yourself 1/10th of your yearly salary (whatever it is that you need to live where you are -- $20,000 to $40,000). And that's just to break even.

Hmm... it doesn't look like we'll be paying salaries any time soon, does it?

Also, I'm going to have to talk to my dad about why he wasn't born rich so I could have a drug problem. I mean a trust fund. Man, why did I say "drug problem"? I meant "trust fund"...

OK, so what if we chopped the size of the cast/crew in half and had only an average of 5 men on set per day? We could just divide the above number in half:
$5,307 in salary costs
$2.200 in "fixed" costs

So now we're at $7,507 in production costs before sets, art, costumes, equipment, and post-production. That's certainly more reasonable.

But you have to be making 10 of these dang movies a year. You're going to be run ragged.

So right, as Joe pointed out in a comment on the last business plan post, you're going to need to work with other directors. And... here's the thing with other directors. How many directors do you know who absolutely can't finish a short film? With this business model we simply can't take years and years to finish a feature. We can't do that. Nope. No way. The picture, with all its visual effects, a complete edit, and a mix, have to be done within three or four months from the beginning of principal photography. Finished. Out the door. Moved onto other things. Done. Finito.

This is how the producer feels.

Our producer once had a brief conversation with David Rimawi at the AFM a few years back. He was watching a fight scene in our movie Millennium Crisis and he said "How long does it take you to finish these movies?" Because he knew that at the time it was taking us a year. We're much faster now. But he knew that even with some decent action scenes you have to be done in three months or you're just losing money.

And doing a movie in three months is hard. Especially when everyone is working for free. Heck, we're not even getting much in the way of economy of scale by making a whole bunch of movies a year. Who is going to write 10 shootable pictures a year? Who (more importantly) will freakin' edit 10 pictures a year? To do the sound mix I estimate it'd take a total (dialog, music, and effects, mix, and changes) of... 4 days (maybe 3) for every ten minutes of picture. So let's say (being all libertine about our numbers) that the picture is 80 minutes long and takes 24 days of full-time work on the audio. Good grief, that's 240 days per year of working on the audio alone!

So we're going to need to increase the denominator side of the equation of costs/revenue.

But how? How how how?

Just look for part 7 in the ongoing exciting series of "How the heck am I going to make money making movies?"

______________

*I believe in California that isn't the case and going overtime after 8 hours starts the time-and-a-half clock, but New Jersey and New York base overtime after 40 hours weekly.