Lessons Learned

One advantage of writing some of these low-budget films is that you learn your lessons the hard way.

Blockbuster online has some reviews posted, and here's an example:

Awful This movie was stated to be a family kids movie. This had my 6 yr old girl crying all night. Not a movie for kids if they love animals. The quality is horrible.

Who'da thought that killing the dog 20 minutes into the movie might have some undesirable side effects?!

Some reviewers actually do like the emotionality of it -- but clearly several were not expecting the DVD with the cute, happy dog on the cover to turn into a FESTIVAL OF DEATH.

And, it really is something of a festival of death. We start in a cemetery, dog dies around 20 minutes in, then ghost dog and ghost dad *both* leave hero kid at end of movie.

My subsequent kids/family films are a tad less morbid.

Cop Dog Inception Trailer

Hafta say this is rather cool:

Cop Dog download now available at Amazon

Cop Dog is finally available in the United States -- via Amazon's Video on Demand. You can rent it or purchase it via the above links (and the above links are the only way I'll earn 'residuals'!)

Billy Unger Wins and Cop Dog Pandemic

Billy Unger ended up winning Best Performance in a DVD Film at the Young Artists Awards!

He's also in like a dozen movies coming out over the next year or two.

The lead actress, Cassi Thomson, has also landed a recurring role in HBO's Big Love, playing Chloë Sevigny's secret daughter.

Finally, COP DOG has spread via cable and satellite to more portions of the world:

-- on DVD in Australia

-- on the Superchannel across Canada

-- and on HBO in Mexico and pretty much every other country south of Texas.

-- but still not the part of North America between Canada and Mexico... I blame Lou Dobbs.

Low Budget Awards Season

The Oscars are over -- so now it's time for the movies that cost less than the dresses worn at the Oscars!

Billy Unger is nominated for best performance in a DVD film at the 30th Annual Young Artists Awards. Go Billy!

You'll need to scroll down to the bottom to see the list of nominees -- but he's doing well in a category where two of the other films are by Disney and Universal.


Also, my horror screenplays RED SKIES and THE SOUND are both finalists in the 2009 Paranoia Horror Film Festival script contest. After seeing their website I figured that my goriest screenplays might have a better shot.

Given that the IFFF where COP DOG showed was Feb 26-March 1, the Paranoia Film Festival is March 13-15, and the Young Artists Awards are on March 29th, and we just had 10 inches of snow dumped on us and wind chill is sub-zero -- you can imagine that this is a month I particularly wish I was in L.A.

COP DOG at 2009 International Family Film Festival

COP DOG now has an official page at the 2009 International Film Festival.

It's showing at 12:30 PM on Sunday, March 1. I won't be making it, but I think much of the cast will be there.

Too Lazy To Type Degrees of Separation

You'll probably need to click on the image to read anything but that's the IMDBPro main page above.

Typing being the awful chore that it is has forced me to invent a game: how few mouse clicks can I use to get from whatever the current main page is to the actor, director, writer, or movie I'm looking for?

No typing into search boxes allowed.

For example, using the sample page how do I get to, let's say, Kuma -- the canine lead in Cop Dog?

We start with the #2 video rental from the left column, Death Race (1 click), from there to lead actor Jason Statham (2), then on to Crank 2: High Voltage (3) -- then to Lil Chev Chelios, Billy Unger (4 -- Billy Unger is the Rosetta Stone of Cop Dog!), then Cop Dog (5) and finally Kuma (6 clicks).

If music videos got IMDb pages it'd actually be slightly faster since Taylor Lautner (middle starmeter at #5 famous in part from Twilight, 1 click) is in the music video Caught Up In You (2):



by Cassi Thomson (3), co-star in Cop Dog (4) then Kuma (5 clicks).

On a side note, apparently tween girls all over the world hate, hate, HATE, Cassi for stealing Mr Lautner from them.

COP DOG Trailer

COP DOG now has it's own webpage and trailer -- and poster.

Unfortunately, the player they're using can't be embedded and I also can't download the video to put it on YouTube -- but you can go to its webpage to view it.

I also had a few problems with the high-bandwidth version -- the pop-up window only showed part of the viewer for some reason.

At any rate -- it's a nice, peppy trailer -- and includes my favorite scene to write, the gum CSI scene...

First Sorta Review

Cop Dog received it's first sort-of review:

What a suprise!
Watched Cop Dog with my family and when it was over (after lots of 'happy tears' as my daughter said) the kids raved that they wanted to watch it again - right now! They've since watched it twice more. The cast is great, the dog is fantastic! Funny, touching movie for both adults and the kiddies.
Liam S. 12:08am Sun 7 Sep

I'm hoping that Liam doesn't happen to be related to anyone involved in the movie. Given our budget there's a decent chance we couldn't afford anyone international.

Anyway, you are warned -- monitor your glucose levels before watching.

Cop Dog premiere --

-- if you're in the U.K.

Apparently Cop Dog, alias Marlowe, will be showing on Sky Movies Premiere over the next few days -- here's a link to listings of its current showing times (as of August 29).

On Saturday it's playing at 4 (GMT I suppose), then at various afternoonish times after that.

Marlowe

The IMDB page for Marlowe, my first produced film, is now up. Still missing a bunch of details (like me!) and we don't have cover art yet, but a few of the principal actors are listed.

Also, my scene in the film, a true gift to cinema, is apparently staying in, so before long I'll have a Bacon number of 3.

I'm in Marlowe with Billy Unger who was also in National Treasure: Book of Secrets with Ed Harris, who was in Apollo 13 with Kevin Bacon.

Microbudget Movies: Locations -- the Convenience Store

I thought I'd share some of my experiences writing for microbudget movies -- in this case Marlowe (working title?), where I got to visit the set last November. I believe it came in at 200k. I'm told they target this number because SAG and the DGA have special contract provisions for films made at that budget. Other breakpoints are 600k and 1.7M.

Needless to say, everything is a challenge to fit into that budget. Actors are actually the easier part, since you can get talented but as-yet-unknown people willing to work to add to their reel and build up their credits -- and they'll work HARD.

Locations are the monster! You can't have very many of them and they can't be expensive.

We had several important scenes set in a Quickee Mart. Since they couldn't afford a big chain store like 7-11 or, my personal favorite, Circle K, they worked with a privately owned store (which actually had Quikee as part of the title--how fortuitous). One thing about mom & pop convenience stores -- they make a lot of their money on liquor, pornography, and lottery tickets. The Lotto was fine and the mom & pop had kids, so not much porn out in plain view, but there was a lot of liquor, and this being a kid's movie all that had to be hidden.

Big movies can make money off product placement. Small movies could too -- if they had the time and connections available to clear all the legal hurdles. We of course didn't -- so we had a bunch of the crew inside the store turning all the candy bars and bags of chips upside down or backwards so that their trademarks wouldn't appear on camera. A distressing number of candy bars have their trademarks printed on the back too! At the last minute they got a product placement deal from the Little Debbie people, so we were able to hide a bunch of stuff behind Devil Squares and so on. Debbie has our undying gratitude.

Another issue was that all the refrigeration units had to be turned off whenever they were recording for sound. The microphones are very sensitive and would pick up the hum. Being a convenience store, many of the refrigerators were filled with ice cream -- so you'd unplug them and have to plug them back in right away when they finished shooting. And you'd have to turn off almost all the power since the entire store is wrapped in refrigeration units!

Since that experience I've been a lot more conscious of using locations that don't involve batteries of brand names staring at the camera (for example, I'm now a big fan of the rural road produce stand -- but not on a paved road, because you need special permission to block those off).

ADDENDUM -- also, our Quickee mart apparently was the number one seller of lottery tickets in California!

EXT. SINGLE LOCATION - NIGHT

When working on a micro-budget film all sorts of things that you probably wouldn't think about suddenly become issues.

For instance, the director is having fits looking at his lighting budget -- so we're only going to have one night exterior shot.

Minimizing the number of locations is the other magic component. And I think it really is magic. My 1-3 location screenplays have all done really well. Moreover, I look at theatrical releases and notice how even larger budget ones often have a single location (Saw, 1408, Vacancy, The Messengers).

One thing that has happened for me is that someone will look at one of my scripts, realize that they could make it for a very small budget (like 500k) or a larger budget, and then they pick it up. They figure they can always try to get it made at the higher end, and if that doesn't pan out they'll still have a filmable movie at the lower end. And this is how you get sort of "back into" these higher budgets -- your script now has the connections to get read at richer places and those places figure a couple million is a safe bet on this little feature, so it gets the bump up. Whereas your other scripts that could only be made at 2 million or more so they don't get that start.


One other bit to make the recent graduates applying for those tenure track jobs that also have 100 other recent grads applying for them feel better. The casting director says that they've already got 4000 submissions for our tiny movie!

Simpsons Movie Collateral Benefits

The hope I held out in my earlier post about The Simpsons Movie has come true -- our local CW affiliate is now running syndicated Simpsons episodes at 10 on weeknights. Not quite the 2 hours of Simpsons we used to get in New Jersey, but better than 30 minutes a week.


The director told me that November 3 will be the start date for shooting on our little G-rated D2DVD picture. I'll visit L.A. for a couple days while they're shooting, to meet the various people involved and see what's up.

This one looks pretty locked in, unlike the continuing death throes of The Sound. Marvista, the company financing the film, would like shooting to start immediately, but the director wants to spend a little extra time getting things set up right since extra planning really helps when you're working with a lower budget. Marvista's already talking to him about turning right around and doing a thriller -- so this might work out to be a busy year.

When we get closer or when I'm told it's okay, I'll try to share more info about what kind of story it is, maybe who some of the actors are (anyone remotely famous is in it as a sole result of the director having a lot of friends!), and so on.