Teacher, Teach Yourself

Two weeks back, I decided that I was (finally) going to teach myself the basic principles of film production, not just all the stuff which applies directly to writing a script (much of which I’ve worked out more via osmosis than anything else). So since then, I’ve been making my way through a bunch of books on the subject:

1. How To Shoot A Feature Film For Under $10,000 (And Not Go to Jail), by Bret Stern
2. What They Don’t Teach You A Film School, by Camille Landau and Tiare White
3. Making Real-Life Videos, by Matthew Williams
4. Splatter Flicks: How To Make Low-Budget Horror Films, by Sara Caldwell
5. Jumpstart Your Awesome Film Production Company, by Sara Caldwell
6. What A Producer Does, by Buck Houghton

All of them have turned out to be worthwhile reads, which is great. Stern’s a bit of an ass, but he did manage to teach me what the hell a gobo is, and made me think—albeit only briefly—about the fact that my latest project requires me to try and sell somebody a women-in-prison flick which does NOT (as yet) include any shower scenes, strip-search scenes, guard/prisoner rape scenes or lesbian sex scenes. Landau and White make one of the best arguments for writing every day I’ve ever seen, plus including a vaguely threatening exegesis about what separates a good film teacher from a bad one; as a result of reading it, I’m going to try my best to beef up my specific knowledge of TFS rules and regs (though frankly, I still think that what your "reasons" for fucking up in my class are shouldn’t count for much except sympathy, since they sure don’t out in the real world).

Williams’ book is adapted from courses in video production he’s taught to New York high school students, so it puts things in blessedly simple terminology. The two Caldwell books both contain a lot of interesting, necessary information, as well as hard evidence that what I’m teaching people about putting a production proposal together really is basic industry standard, as opposed to just being "some school thing" (as one of my students once asked me: "Are we gonna use this stuff again, or is it just some school thing?").

Finally, the Houghton book—though definitely old-school Hollywood in philosophy and intent, and probably dating back to sometime in the 1980s—shows you exactly how to break down a script, attach a shot-list, build call-sheets and plan out storyboards, too. Stern’s does as well, but he’s apparently too cheap to include visual examples. So I’m finally fore-armed in advance for when THAT particular can of worms comes up in class, too.

And yes, sometimes I get a bit depressed, thinking about all the work it’s going to take to make movies out of my scripts…nothing brings home quite as strongly the fact that this thing you’ve slaved over for upwards of a year, two years, five years really is only a necessary intermediate step as wading through somebody else’s production horror stories, a lot of which are often about problems inherent in the script that "somebody" should have seen and fixed at a draft level, before the equipment ever came out of its boxes. But there’s no point in censoring yourself at this stage. You have to have something down on paper before you can really start to cut and paste, at least effectively.

Meanwhile, 775 new words on "Words Written Backwards", so far. I know where I’m going, but it’s like pulling teeth. And I also have a deadline to meet, since Mom offered to take Cal tonight, which means we might actually get to see POTC: AWE, a month or so after it first came out…