November 30, 2011
So here's the status of Cardboard Caskets: I'm pausing the project for a while. Not killing it, pausing it.
I'm not going to be crowdfunding (i.e., asking for money) at this time. Here's why.
October was a busy month. While the voting was going on (and THANK YOU! for your vote), I was pushing forward with many contacts behind the scenes. It was great because I eventually got to a strata of the industry that I have never been in before, and got a lot of valuable feedback from working professionals. Many conversations -- and I heard a lot of no-nonsense opinions. Stuff that I kind of already knew and had considered. But certain specific advice and warnings, in the run-up to undertaking that long battle known as "making a 90-minute film that doesn't suck" made me sit up and take note. And re-think my position.
I became convinced that my script is good but not great. I got some very useful notes that will result in a significantly better final script. No script is ever perfect, I know, but when you're asking people to work on a film for little or no money, I want to come to the table with a great script. Not a good script.
In the same ballpark, certain conversations helped me to see that my film -- even when rewritten -- has enough speaking parts, scene changes, props, etc. that it becomes a little problematic to do as a low- or no-budget. Yes, I could rewrite the script so that it's just the brothers Raymond and John sitting in aluminum lawn chairs at dusk in front of Dad's abandoned Airstream trailer, talking through everything that happened. But that's not the film that I want to make of this material. I want to show what happened. There's a certain complexity there, which means either a LOT of favors or some money. There's that old joke that you can have three things on the triangle: cheap, fast, or high quality ... but not all three.
Additionally, I began to realize that I'm not (yet) mobbed up enough in the film biz to call in sufficient professional favors to get everything done in a timely, quality way for the full vision of Cardboard Caskets. Again, I could do a lesser film right now -- but that's not what I want for this material.
Long story short: the deeper I went into the process (esp. in late October/November), the more I came to feel that there were a too few many wobbly elements to go forward with a funding appeal right now.
What's that quote from Yeats? "In dreams begin responsibilities," or some such. I feel responsible to potential funders of Cardboard Caskets. So work goes forward, but right now -- not in the form of crowdfunding.
So again -- thank you for voting! -- and stay tuned. Drop me a note if you want any more detail.
Ciao, Rob
