Posted by C2FThom at ip68-104-144-35.ph.ph.cox.net on March 19, 2004 at 23:13:51:
Hey guys. A little off-topic I guess, but does anyone keep track these days? Anyhow, most of you probably don't know that I'm an aspiring filmmaker, but... well, I am. In fact I try to answer what questions I can from other hopefuls on the board, usually technical questions related to DV or financing. Anyhow, now it's my turn to hear some words of encouragement, or a slap in the face, whatever I need to hear. So I hope someone's up for it.
Since Fall of 2001, I've come to realize my desire in life is to be a storyteller, and it didn't take long to connect that with my passion for the movies. So since about that time, I've been working on screenplays, and last fall I decided I really wanted to take the plunge and become an honest-to-goodness filmmaker, writing, directing, and doing whatever else I needed to tell my stories.
Along the way, I picked up the enthusiasm of my best friend. I'm not sure if his desire to make movies came after mine or around the same time, on its own, but we decided to be collaborators: roughly, co-writers, co-directors, and so forth, individually fulfilling those roles more specifically as we came to it. We work together well and are pretty productive as a creative pair--script ideas and plots tend to fill out pretty quickly when we put our heads together. Also, I must give him credit for this much: he's put over $3000 on his credit cards to buy our camera and other equipment.
The problem is, when it's come to actual production, anything beyond the hypothetical or financial, I'm not seeing anything coming out of his end. While he's been in possession of the camera since Christmas and I've only had access to it on every other weekend or so, he hasn't seemed to learn much about it. He doesn't even know how to loosen the panhead of the tripod. The same can be said of lighting and sound design, and to lesser extent, editing. I mean, he's had all this equipment and just hasn't put any effort into it.
What's worse is, upon trying out what he (and I) know by shooting a short film a few weeks ago, he flipped out on our main actor, my little brother. It was a stressful night for many reasons, but instead of shaking off his frustrations like a director's gotta do--without really even trying to do so--he proceded to cuss out the actor. The actor who, despite having no interest and extremely little preparation for the role, took off a night of work and hauled his butt up to this cold little town in Northern AZ, as a favor to my friend and myself. And the reason my friend went off? My brother "broke" his belt, which he'd lent him for the scene. (The belt was later fixed in about ten seconds with a flathead screwdriver.)
I dunno, I'm not sure if I'm asking for advice or just blowing off steam. But right now my plans for filmmaking are in upheaval. Am I asking too much of my friend, to be more prepared and professional than I can expect him to be? Is he trying to take on too much responsibility, or certain responsibilities he's not qualified for? I don't know. All I know is, he had no right to treat my brother like that, and I'd hate to see him treat anyone else like that. I'd especially hate to estrange my family because I have to defend my overbearing partner.
The solutions I see are:
1) Pull up stakes. Distribute the gear according to what we've spent. (I've put some money into the editing system, so I think we'd have to trade around some mic equipment for his old camera to split the difference evenly.) After that, go our seperate ways.
2) Let it lie. Smooth things over and try to continue working with him. This is problematic as my brother doesn't want to work with him, and working with my brother is more important than continuing to work with my friend. Also, the rest of my family wants nothing to do with him, so that renders a couple of pet projects of mine (which would've involved my family) indefinitely red-lighted.
3) Split up workloads. I'll continue to collaborate with him on "his" projects, but for mine, he'll have to step back to a role strictly as "Producer". This might actually be really beneficial, as it allows me to learn the more technical duties on his projects, but meanwhile doesn't hinder me in any way from moving forward with mine. Only problem with this is, I think he'll find this really insulting that I want to redraw the lines of collaboration (though he should notice this is a consequence of his actions), so I don't know how to present that possibility to him without causing even more drama.
Ugh... I'm sorry to babble. This has just been weighing on me for a couple of weeks now, and I can't seem to make any progress one way or another--even on my own writing--before it's resolved. So, any opinions appreciated.