Stuff I Like This Week

Welcome to a new feature here at 3C, Stuff I Like This Week.

Death Proof. QT breaks every rule and still makes us care about his characters. And oh, 'Ship's Mast' is the craziest game ever.


Anthony Zerbe's eyebrows (I was reminded of these while wondering how random hairs in mine somehow grow several inches overnight).


Ari Hest's Green Room Sessions.


The Fabulous Baker Boys, as viewed at 2 am with my daughter sleeping on my chest.

The idea of Starbucks selling a $1 cup of coffee. The coffee may taste like oil and spent matchheads, but the idea is great.

My Wife Is A Lost Widow

After a childhood raised in a home with borderline paranoids ("Bad grades? I knew that teacher didn't like you."), I sometimes feel like a recovering conspiracy theorist, especially when discussing with my wife any sour relations I've had with others. She'll lower her brow a hair while I ramble about whatever perceived slight I've been subjected to until I clue in.

However, I still can't help but wonder if my wife engineered the WGA strike to curtail the amount of time I obsess over Lost.

I've had last season's finale stored on the DVR for eight months. Eight months to a DVR is like 75 years to you and me. It's an eternity, especially when we've run into storage issues since the airdate. I just couldn't bring myself to cut it before the new season began, and now that the fourth season is shortened to eight episodes from 16 because of the strike, I'm feeling like I'm going to start scratching at myself and seeing bugs on the wall like Ray Milland once the season nears a close. I'm counting down the days to Lost's return on Thursday night, maybe even more so than the Super Bowl where my beloved Giants will take on Brady and the Boot.

Last week I Netflixed the Season 3 bonus materials disc. Aside from being at once jealous of and intimidated by the creative core of the production, I now also know that if I were airdropped into Hawaii with no chance of returning home, I might just be okay if I can get a daily dose of shaved ice.

Give My Regards To Mesrop Mashtots Avenue

I learned some valuable lessons yesterday.

Number One: Don't call out for a lawyer on a blog. They don't call back.

I also learned that for all my reticence about getting into the industry in the past, I relatively quickly can psych myself into bluffing my way into being a film producer.

Late last week, an acquaintance (let's call him George) asked a contact of mine if he knew anyone that had any horror scripts. Seems George's LA partner was meeting with a group of potential investors (from Armenia, of all places) and wanted to shop some horror projects to them. My contact called me and I forwarded my script "Brother's Keeper" over to him to have George read. Since George is an experienced music video director and his partner is reportedly a producer, my contact and I both assumed George intended to shop the script with himself or his partner producing.

Nope. Turns out they just wanted to shop a full production package to the Armenians. George at some point, in fact, asked my contact for a top sheet for my script, and my contact shrugged and asked what that was. Then my contact asked me for a top sheet. I asked what that was. Then I realized they were looking for a coverage sheet, and afterward George asked my contact for a budget breakdown.

This was spiraling northward of silly now, as far as I was concerned. Why would this guy think a writer would prepare these things when every serious screenwriting resource says not to, just like scene numbers and cast lists. That's for a production manager to do, not a writer. Plus, this wasn't even a script I intended to shop. I had some years ago considered sending an earlier draft off to an established Canadian producer at a friend's suggestion (the producer was shooting a film set in a hospital, "Brother's Keeper" is also set in a hospital), but the script was in bad shape then after a massive revision, so I declined (regrets...I've had a few...).

Meanwhile, at this stage I'd had no contact with George or any of his partners, no e-mail, no phone call, nothing. I was getting anxious because I'd sent the script off to them and had no paper trail to show for it. Finally, Sunday afternoon, as I was away from the computer finishing up any household tasks before the NFC Championship Game began, George e-mailed me. He didn't mention having read the script, but sent me a draft of a finder's agreement, naming them as the finder and me as the producer.

Producer? ME? I read this over and over after celebrating the Giants victory and burping my daughter. How can I be a producer, I'm sitting in a rental apartment with spit-up Similac on my sweatshirt.

The baby wouldn't sleep right away (she's a Giants fan and was wound up after the game), so I was awake an hour or so thinking about this agreement. This was bad communication, there's no way these guys could have thought I'd written up a proposal to make this movie. Had they simply called me directly, I'd have told them that.

But wait a minute, I began to think.

Why not? Why the hell can't I produce this myself?

The next morning was spent discussing the agreement with an attorney friend of mine. She's who I call before signing anything, so even though she's not an entertainment lawyer, I wanted to her to vet the agreement. The paper was solid (turns out it's a Litwak template), but the amount of the fee was bothering both of us.

They wanted ten percent of the money the investors would pay.

"Can you do this?" my friend the attorney asked. "Can you produce a movie?" She sounded like she was asking if I could scale the Chrysler Building barehanded.

"Why the hell not?" I replied. The truth was and is that alone, I could not. But, I have a friend who is currently directing his second feature. If he wouldn't or couldn't work on it with me, he could surely connect me with folks who could.

"But can you do it, is this something you would want to do?"

Note to self: It might be time to start introducing myself to new friends as a filmmaker. Having to explain to people that know me that I am more than just a fun guy to talk to at parties and the guy to ask about buying a new computer is a pain in the ass.

My attorney did some checking around and I Googled myself into oblivion (go ahead and Google 'finder's fee film', then have fun sorting through the Jeff Probst links). The results we were finding said finder's fees were usually between three and eight percent, depending on the track record of the finder. These guys were trying this for the first time, it seems like, but they must be used to hearing Ari Gold talk about getting ten percent from Vinny Chase, I guess, because they were dead set against changing their minds. I told George ten percent is an agent's commission on a script sale, not a finder's fee on what would be a lot more money. It was no use. They wouldn't consider lower than ten.

I was really disturbed by this when I read a quote from an entertainment lawyer online saying that for budgets over $10 million, finders fees were usually knocked down to 1 or 2 percent since most financial sources were unlikely to approve a higher finder's fee.

The investors, as quoted by George, were looking to spend $25 million.

It was ten percent or no agreement. Two point five million.

I wouldn't agree to it. I was desperate to talk to an entertainment lawyer, but these guys were saying the meeting was this afternoon, we need a signature now, can't sell your project without it...

And then they just kind of went away. Not with a bang or a whimper, but completely silently. There was no reply to my request that they reconsider the high finder's fee, not for my sake, but because it would hurt the budget immensely and because it wasn't the customary amount. I told them I could appreciate their hope to be compensated well, but I argued we had a better chance with the investors if it were five percent.

No reply.

Well, I thought, if they were meeting this afternoon, I guess they just shelved my project and tried to sell whatever else they had. C'est la guerre.

I e-mailed George this morning to ask where we were. I felt bad, like I should feel bad for killing a bum deal before it had a chance to explode in our faces. Plus, since my contact works with this guy all the time, I didn't want to hurt their relationship.

He replied this afternoon that he'd check to see if the investors were interested in just buying the script.

But I thought that meeting yesterday was the last chance to pitch them? And that the Armenians were flying out today? After the tick-tock drama of hocking each other over the agreement, this may still have a heartbeat.

Despite the bad communication, I might just try to get some coverage and a budget drawn up and let these guys or someone else try to shop it as a package rather than just a spec. Couldn't hurt.

But I'm not paying ten percent. The tiny producer in me is standing firm on five.

Unexpected Tangent: Anybody Know an Entertainment Lawyer?

I've got a question or two and I've been caught short on time.

I'm at tom.blogger _at_ mac.com.

On Juggling

I took a course in children's theater in college. We produced a play about a troupe of commedia dell'arte players traveling the countryside. As I was playing the leader of the troupe, my professor wanted me to lead their parade into town doing something flashy and he hit upon the idea of having me juggle while walking onstage. I thought about our performance schedule, 10 shows through the local school system in theaters, gymnasiums, outdoors, all of these venues unfamiliar and unpredictable. Could I manage to learn how to juggle and walk through strange environments at the same time? My professor challenged me to do it, saying if I could make the entrance perfectly each time, I'd get an A for the semester. I'm proud to report that I got that A, but it wasn't pretty. One kid threw a tennis ball at me. Once the semester was over, there went my professional juggling aspirations.

I've been married for just over five years to a smart, patient and generous woman. We have two children, a three year old boy and a newborn girl. A friend told me once that having one child feels like a married couple plus one, but having two children makes it feel like a family, and I'm beginning to see what he meant. I feel a bigger responsibility to the three of them than I ever had.

I'm employed as a computer support technician presently, having spent five years working in the retail field for a major computer company. I've been at my present job for eight months, and while I enjoy the work, I've got my eye out for the next step.

If you were to ask me, though, what I really want to do for a living, what would I be passionate about, what would be that job that I love so much that I'd never 'work' a day in my life, I'd tell you I'd like to be a screenwriter. It began in high school, a feeling like the extra care I gave to essays and assignments meant I was having a relationship with words, characters and story that I wanted to continue for life. I had a group of friends that was as much into movies as I was and we saw everything we could, sometimes three in a day, followed by a stop at the video store. I managed that video store a few years later, managed a few movie theaters and finally went to work in the event video field as a way to make money telling stories onscreen as best I could. All the while I kept writing and rewriting whenever I could, but it always felt like I wasn't giving it enough time.

A few years back, I decided to give writing a harder push, pushing myself at first to put together a stronger portfolio of spec samples with my first true attempts to crash the industry to follow. I began a blog, The One Year Push, at first intended to focus on my writing, but eventually veering off into the other areas of my life, my marriage and my daygig. As I'd visit the blog later, especially after having passed my (incredibly naive) one year goal of making a sale, I felt the need to broaden the focus, to allow myself to comment on the rest of my daily life without forcing a link back to screenwriting, even if the whole point of blogging was to force myself to write on a regular basis, to sharpen the tools.

When it came time to think of a new name, I thought back to that semester of learning how to juggle and walk at the same time. In that show, I was juggling plastic apples. If I'd dropped one of those (and I did, plenty of times), I would pick it up and the apple would be none the worse. Now I juggle these three distinct elements of my life: marriage, career, aspiration. Dropping any of them isn't an option, they would bruise. They've all got weight, substantial heft, yet they need to be handled just the right way, I can't just palm them and toss them in the air.

The image became clear, and my blog had its new name.