I’m in a quandary. I found a beautiful location for the film I’m shooting at the end of this month. It’s a farm built in the 1800’s and kept completely intact. No busy nearby roads, no streetlights, no modern renovations. It is, for all intents and purposes, perfect. It is also, however, part of a state park. “How is that a problem,” you may ask. Well, after all my chatter about starting a short film and seeing it through by the end of this month, I may be running into some time constraints. Or even worse…money constraints.

RESPONSIBILITY BLOWS
It does. It blows big. Because when you are responsible, you have to do things “by the book”. Which means “legally”. Which means “expensively”. As I said last week, you can go out and shoot a film for $150 if you so desire. I’m aiming to keep this film under $1000, and that was looking fairly possible up until yesterday when I discovered my dream location was under state supervision. What does that mean, exactly? INSURANCE. That’s right. That damning word. It’s a terrible word, isn’t it? It oozes off the tongue. It may be the least attractive word in the English language. Need proof? Try making out with somebody. In the middle of it, say something dirty like “I want you to cover me the way insurance does.” Watch the pheremones fly.

AWW, DO I GOTTA’?
No, I don’t gotta’. I can make this movie without permits and without insurance. But I’d have to say goodbye to my dream location. I’d have to scour central Ohio for an alternate location. What’s worse, I’m leaving October 25th for Ohio (I’m in LA right now) and we’ve got a start date of October 30th. That leaves four whole days to find a better spot, restructure my shooting schedule, and notify my actors. Not exactly ideal.

So let’s assume for a moment that I did do this movie “by the book”. Insurance for the last short film I did cost around $1300. Now for any of you math majors out there, to add that cost into my budget… puts me $300 in the hole. Without lifting a camera, without a frame of footage to show for it.

ALL INSURANCE AND NO PLAY MAKES SAM A DULL BOY
A little over a decade ago, my best friend Jeff Seibenick and I got lectured by the police for shooting a movie with fake guns. This was on my parents front lawn. I was barely 17. We were shooting “Whupsumass 4”, the sequel to our first action epic “Whupsumass 2” (we thought, and rightly so, that people were more drawn to sequels. Our third installment of the trilogy was “Whupsumass ’95”, naturally). Somebody in the neighborhood had apparently mistaken a group of teenagers with spray-painted water guns for an elite group of Russian Terrorists. An obvious mistake. (on a sidenote, I’d like to bring up a poll I had read three years ago in the Toledo Blade [“One of America’s Finest Newspapers”] listing people’s greatest concerns. Number 2 on the list was terrorism. I’d also like to point out that, should terrorists attack our country again, they would most assuredly begin in Toledo, Ohio. Mostly for giving the world the Mud Hens and Jamie Farr)

There’s something liberating about that memory with the cops. Here we were, a bunch of runt kids making movies on VHS (we even rented them out at the local video store). Perrysburg, Ohio was our movie studio. We made a movie about once a month for three years. It still stands as one of my greatest childhood memories. In fact, ever since we all went to college, went our separate ways, and reunited back here in LA, we’ve talked endlessly about restarting our little production company. And yet, nothing happens. Have we gotten too old? Has the move to LA taken the fun out of a renegade film crew? Whatever the reason or combination of reasons, it’s been enough to have stalled a handful of truly wonderful careers.

WHAT’S THE DIFF?
What’s kept us from making even a single movie with the old crew? What was so easy about making a movie ten years ago that’s been lost to us? In my mind it’s the burden of age. A decade of feeding our feeble minds with doubt, paranoia. We missed our chance. We lost our edge. We started intellectualizing film. Started wondering when we were going to leave our mark, and in what profound way? The result was a stalling of energies. Fortunately, the times are a changin’.

ANGER MAKES EVERYTHING BETTER
Living in LA and considering yourself a filmmaker is a bit of a joke. At least, that’s how everyone out here views it until you’ve done your first huge blockbuster. Then you’re a “genius” in the vein of Zach Braff. Quick question: how did Zach Braff become “the voice of our generation?” By making an uneven film that could’ve used a few months of rewrites? Come on. Remember when they’re on the edge of that cliff and they scream for no reason, and then they kiss for no reason? What the hell was that? You know it could have been better. Alas, I’m getting off track.

The point is this: Zach Braff did SOMETHING. Which is more than can be said for most filmmakers in LA. You see, it’s the doing. The line between filmmaker and film critic is very thin out here. In fact, I’d say the only difference is that a film critic is essentially a filmmaker without faith.

But I’m a little fed up, if you can’t tell. I’m terrified about making this short (as you may well be about yours), but I’d much rather have something to show for my years of intellectualizing. By December, I’ll have something. It may be a pile of crap. I could fail. Or I could be the new “voice of our generation” (with the right publicist). Either way, SOMETHING will be done, insurance or no insurance. Legally or not.

And afterall, it’s the doing that makes the difference.

-Sam Jaeger

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