Latest / Bulletproof Screenwriting™ Podcast / BPS 360: Making and Selling a Niche Indie Film with Rob Smat

Transcript

BPS 360: Making and Selling a Niche Indie Film with Rob Smat · Bulletproof Screenwriting™ Podcast

• 0:03
  You are listening to the IFH podcast Network. For more amazing filmmaking and screenwriting
• 0:08
  podcasts, just go to ifahpodcastnetwork dot com. Welcome to the Bulletproof Screenwriting Podcast,
• 0:14
  Episode number three sixty. You can't climb the ladder of success with your
• 0:19
  hands in your pockets. Arnold Schwarzenegger broadcasting from a dark, windowless room in
• 0:25
  Hollywood when we really should be working on that next draft. It's the Bulletproof
• 0:29
  Screenwriting Podcast, showing you the craft and business of screenwriting while teaching you how
• 0:34
  to make your screenplay bulletproof. And here's your host, Alex Ferrari. Welcome,
• 0:40
  Welcome to another episode of the Bulletproof Screenwriting Podcast. I am your humble
• 0:44
  host Alex Ferrari. Now, today's show is sponsored by Bulletproof Script Coverage.
• 0:50
  Now. Unlike other script coverage services, Bulletproof Script Coverage actually focuses on the
• 0:56
  kind of project you are and the goals of the project you are, so
• 1:00
  we actually break it down by three categories micro budget, indie film, market,
• 1:03
  and studio film. There's no reason to get coverage from a reader that's
• 1:07
  used to reading tempole movies when your movie is going to be done for one
• 1:11
  hundred thousand dollars and we wanted to focus on that. At Bulletproof script Coverage,
• 1:15
  our readers have worked with Marvel Studios, CIA, w NBC, HBO,
• 1:19
  Disney, Scott Free, Warner Brothers, The Blacklist, and many many
• 1:23
  more. So if you need your screenplay or TV script covered by professional readers,
• 1:30
  head on over to covermiscreenplay dot Com. Now, today on the show,
• 1:34
  we have filmmaker Rob smatt Now, Rob is a Indie Film Hustle tribe
• 1:40
  member and the podcast and everything I do with Indie Film Hustle really helped guide
• 1:45
  him through the process of making his first film called The Last Whistle. He
• 1:52
  started the process when he was twenty two years old, and it really is
• 1:56
  a great example of how to focus on a niche audience, how to create
• 2:00
  a product, and just we just go into a deep dive into his entire
• 2:05
  process, his distribution strategy, and how he's generating revenue from his film.
• 2:12
  So, without any further ado, please enjoy my conversation with Rob smatt I
• 2:17
  like to welcome the show, Rob smatt Man. How you doing, brother?
• 2:21
  I am super happy to be here. I'm so excited to talk about
• 2:23
  this movie and I mean, I'm a huge time, longtime fan and you
• 2:29
  know, just thrilled to be here. I appreciate that, man, I
• 2:31
  appreciate that you were telling me earlier off air that Indie Film Hustle had a
• 2:35
  little bit to do with helping you make the movie a little bit. I
• 2:38
  mean, it's got everything to do. It's got everything to do with this
• 2:40
  movie. I started listening to Any Film Hustle a year or two ago at
• 2:46
  least, if not longer, and every episode it's just like there's something else
• 2:50
  that I hadn't heard before. There's something else I didn't learn in the film
• 2:53
  school track, and just so specific to the kind of thing that I wanted
• 2:59
  to do. And this, I mean, just everything on this podcast was
• 3:01
  super, super helpful. So you know the stuff that I want to,
• 3:05
  you know, hopefully help everybody with today. I hope it's going to be
• 3:07
  very specific. This is going to be any Film Hustle. You know,
• 3:09
  veteran, you know, it's not just going to be how did you make
• 3:13
  your movie? It's like, let me tell you about the deal structure of
• 3:15
  X, Y and Z, so i'll, you know, we'll have fun.
• 3:17
  I appreciate that, brother, So all right, So first question,
• 3:21
  how did you get into the film business? Good question, I was,
• 3:24
  uh, you know, I've always been making movies. It's always been something
• 3:28
  that I've done. And uh, in high school I got to that point
• 3:30
  where it was like, all right, am I gonna go into science,
• 3:34
  go into physics, or I'm am I gonna chase the arts. And I
• 3:38
  said, well, let's see where I get into. Let's see how colleges
• 3:40
  sort out. And I got into the USC's film program as they call it,
• 3:45
  the Harvard of Film Schools. Harvard of Film Schools. It's not,
• 3:49
  but you know, it's fun to find. You know. You know I've
• 3:53
  been there, Yes, you have, you have, but you know,
• 3:57
  at that point, it was sort of that idea where it's like, oh,
• 4:00
  hey, if if they let me in, then I guess I'm on
• 4:03
  part at least, you know, I guess I'm close. And so at
• 4:06
  that point I just said, you know what, this is something that I
• 4:09
  love and I want to I want to take a shot at it. And
• 4:11
  so that was that was kind of how I, you know, started and
• 4:15
  after four years of film school and uh, you know, then spent a
• 4:18
  few months after and then start on this movie. Right after that and it's
• 4:20
  been about two years since then. What was the biggest thing you learned in
• 4:25
  film school? And was it worth it? That's two separate questions, two
• 4:30
  separate questions. What I learned it was it? Was it worth it?
• 4:33
  So I thought, I think the answer wasn't worth it? First, because
• 4:38
  I think the most interesting and worthwhile part of the film school wasn't so much
• 4:44
  you know, the classes or the facilities, the things that they kind of
• 4:47
  like to advertise. It was the most valuable part for me was I grew
• 4:53
  up in Texas. I I you know, spent eighteen years of my life
• 4:56
  in Texas, I you know, fifteen I you know, I started there.
• 4:58
  I grew up there, and especially, you know, ten years ago,
• 5:01
  Texas didn't really have a film industry besides Austin, and you know,
• 5:05
  I was up in Fort Worth and the Dallas Fort Worth area, so there
• 5:10
  wasn't a huge film education thing happening there. The internet, you know,
• 5:14
  I couldn't really stream YouTube in my house, so you know, it wasn't
• 5:16
  happening. And so to be able to go to LA and just do a
• 5:19
  total immersion into Hollywood and the whole shebang was was hugely beneficial. For me,
• 5:27
  and the school did a good job of sort of you know, conveying
• 5:30
  that and you know, not giving it to me all at once and you
• 5:32
  know, blowing my head up or whatever. So I think that was the
• 5:35
  biggest value to film school at least, was that. And then the friends
• 5:39
  I made there, the connections. You know that half the people on the
• 5:42
  Last Whistle are USC people and they're all, you know, early twenties.
• 5:47
  You know that they're not far out of school. They were the people I
• 5:49
  came up with. And I think I think the biggest thing that I learned
• 5:54
  at the school was it doesn't matter when it comes to movie making. It
• 5:59
  doesn't matter how how smart you are. It doesn't matter how good of a
• 6:00
  writer you are or what your stats are. It's all about how hard you
• 6:05
  try. And I think that that's something that indie film hustle is all about.
• 6:10
  But honestly, you can be in the Harvard of Film Schools and the
• 6:13
  valedictorian is no better than number one hundred and fifty out of one hundred and
• 6:17
  fifty. But it's all who tries is who actually you know, I've been
• 6:21
  happy to work with for sure. You mean, who hustles hustles, go
• 6:28
  back and just edit hustle into everything right exactly who usles? Now tell me
• 6:34
  about your film, The Last Whistle. Okay, so The Last Whistle is
• 6:39
  a sports drama. It's very much in the vein of Friday Night Lights.
• 6:44
  We are doing day and date release. It's you know, of course,
• 6:47
  it's about ninety minutes. It's you know, very a very simple movie,
• 6:51
  but really tried to make it exciting and really make it up the production value
• 6:58
  as much as I could. It's basically what happens to a coach after one
• 7:01
  of his players collapses during practice. And so it's a lot of the stuff
• 7:06
  that I feel like you hear about in the news from time to time,
• 7:09
  or a football player or a soccer player or a cross country runner collapses,
• 7:13
  I mean, and then they don't know why it happened. Everyone's kind of
• 7:16
  hurt, you know, shattered by this, and it's super tragic and so
• 7:20
  just you know, I played four years five years of football. I played
• 7:24
  on a championship team in Texas and going through that and seeing that happen at
• 7:28
  so many schools and so many different sports around the area, it was something
• 7:31
  that affected me. And so when it came to this first movie, I
• 7:33
  started to think, all right, you know, what's something that's scary.
• 7:38
  What's a good hook? And that was what jumped out of me. That's
• 7:41
  like this used to scare my pants off and still does, you know,
• 7:44
  So do what all the great filmmakers do and make a movie about it.
• 7:47
  Yeah, it is a pretty scary topic in general. And I've seen you
• 7:50
  know, I remember when I was in high school and I had to do
• 7:54
  with that. You know, they work you, and I was in Florida,
• 7:56
  so they worked you and the heat and everything. They think and they
• 8:00
  think that, you know, because they're eighteen. You know, they could
• 8:03
  just keep going and going and going. But they are human. Yeah.
• 8:05
  Yeah, And there's there's there's all sorts of different aspects to it, and
• 8:09
  and you know, I won't put the cart before the horse here, but
• 8:13
  we we did one of our big marketing things that you know is totally self
• 8:16
  generated, was let's get in with the hard association. Let's let's work with
• 8:20
  some nonprofits that deal with the smart thing. And so we've really tried to
• 8:24
  sort of, you know, cross collaborate on those sides of things to you
• 8:28
  know, raise awareness about it and actually kind of add a social commentary to
• 8:33
  the to the film. Yeah. So what I what I find fascinating about
• 8:37
  your movie and the way you made it. We're going to talk a little,
• 8:39
  We're gonna get more into detail about it, is that you're you were
• 8:41
  thinking about this as an entrepreneur. You were thinking about this as a holistic
• 8:46
  project in many different avenues as opposed to just hey, I'm going to make
• 8:50
  some art. We're going to go do some stuff and we'll see if we
• 8:52
  can make some money at the end of it. You were actually you really
• 8:56
  thought about this, and you actually do a lot of the stuff that I
• 8:58
  talk about on the podcast, which is like, hey, connect with some
• 9:03
  people, like you know, organizations, get into a niche. You know,
• 9:07
  who are the audiences that you can reach out to. You know,
• 9:09
  who is a demographic for this film? You know this is obviously it can
• 9:13
  range into faith based, but people who like Friday night lights, who people
• 9:16
  like high school football movies, you know, and then just dramas and things
• 9:18
  like that. But you really have thought about this, and that's it's a
• 9:22
  great, great example. I'm telling you, brother, this is indie film
• 9:26
  Hustle. The movie, I mean, every piece of it. I mean,
• 9:30
  it was it's partly that it's a lot of it has to do too
• 9:33
  with Jason Brubaker, who you've interviewed I think three times at this point,
• 9:37
  who runs Distriber, And while we didn't end up going distribution through Distriber,
• 9:43
  Jason's a guy that I admire and I've met it a couple of different things
• 9:46
  that did AFM for the first time and saw him there, and you know,
• 9:50
  all the places that Jason pops up, I've made sure to go in
• 9:52
  and find him. And it's the calculator thing that he talks about. We'll
• 9:58
  be right back for a word from our sponsor, and now back to the
• 10:05
  show, where it's like, figure out how much you're gonna make per sale,
• 10:09
  figure out how many people need to buy the movie, and go find
• 10:13
  those people. You know, if you get fifty people to buy based on
• 10:18
  a news article, go, you know, get one hundred news articles wherever
• 10:20
  they are. You know, you have to. You got to make these
• 10:22
  numbers up because you're only going to get so much from the storefront, you
• 10:28
  know, and that sort of thing, and so you know, that's kind
• 10:31
  of what drove it. Alongside it was just you know, I got to
• 10:33
  I want to get people to the door. I want to get a lot
• 10:35
  of people to see this movie. And then I've seen a lot of you
• 10:39
  know, I think one of the most common film school movies, and it's
• 10:43
  not a bad thing, but I think one of the most common first features
• 10:46
  for a filmmaker. It starts off with three words coming of age. And
• 10:52
  whenever I hear those three words, I just think, all right, first
• 10:54
  feature. You know, that sounds like it to me. And so and
• 10:58
  again, there's nothing wrong with that, except for the fact that it's common
• 11:01
  that that that it happens a lot. And so, you know, I
• 11:05
  nothing with making a good or bad coming of age movie, But the marketplace
• 11:11
  for coming of age movies can only handle so many movies. And so I
• 11:15
  almost look at it as like I'm walking into a casino. I'm walking up
• 11:18
  to the roulette table, and you know, would I rather bet on a
• 11:22
  color or am I going to bet on a number? And you know,
• 11:24
  for anyone who knows roulette, a number is a one in thirty six chance,
• 11:28
  a color fifty to fifty. And so that's kind of the whole idea
• 11:31
  with this movie was how do I bet on the colors instead? Of the
• 11:33
  numbers. How do I increase our margin for success. Yeah, it's kind
• 11:37
  of like the Are you familiar with the blue ocean red ocean strategies? No,
• 11:43
  I'm not, all right. So the blue Ocean, red Ocean strategy
• 11:45
  is based on a book called Blue Ocean, Red Ocean, and it's basically
• 11:48
  when you when like so perfect example, independent film will go a horror movie.
• 11:54
  So let's say, well, this is really affordable. Everyone makes a
• 11:56
  horror movie, right, Well, that will we consider horror movie a red
• 12:01
  ocean. That means that there's blood in the water and there's a lot of
• 12:03
  competition. You want to go into a blue ocean where there's less competition or
• 12:09
  preferably nobody's there. So when you make a faith based or you know,
• 12:13
  you know, football movie at a high production value, the competition for that
• 12:18
  kind of movie is gonna be a lot less. Hence you can raise your
• 12:22
  rates, you can raise your money. You make another horror movie. There's
• 12:26
  a million of those out there. So then now if you're gonna do a
• 12:28
  horror movie, you gotta go Niche. So like Hatchet, I always loved
• 12:31
  Hatchet because Hatchet was like, oh, we're the American slasher movie, so
• 12:35
  like, and then there's sub genre like there's torture porn. It's vegan chef
• 12:39
  is what it is. It's the biggest. I've never had someone call me
• 12:45
  back out to that. I appreciate that. The second I heard that,
• 12:48
  I was like, why do you know? Why is there not a required
• 12:52
  reading for every kid in film school about the vegan chef, the vegan Chef
• 12:56
  movie. It's I have to make the vegan spoken about the biggest. I
• 13:00
  have to make the thing I mean. And I think part of it too
• 13:03
  is I mean again, I'm kind of jumping ahead here, but a lot
• 13:07
  of the last whistle was, oh, what's the word for it? Teleological
• 13:13
  teleology, I think is the word for it. And it's all about the
• 13:15
  study of ends. And so if you're a teleologist, you study the apocalypse,
• 13:20
  you study you know, the end of you study the end of the
• 13:22
  world. You study these things, and so on a smaller scale, the
• 13:26
  last whistle was totally reverse engineered. It was I want a movie that distributors
• 13:31
  will at least be interested in. You know, it doesn't have to go
• 13:35
  traditional distribution, but I want something that they would be interested in. Some
• 13:39
  of its marketable something like you said that that feels new, but it's got
• 13:43
  something old to it, you know, kind of Scott Dereckson's twenty five seventy
• 13:46
  five or fifty to fifty is what he what he calls it, and you
• 13:50
  know, and so it was really that idea of where do I want to
• 13:52
  be? Not so much you know, what do I have? It was
• 13:56
  a little bit of both what do where do I want to be and what
• 13:58
  do I have? A mind? Just and so that was the whole thing
• 14:01
  was. It was like, you know, uh, the teleology of you
• 14:05
  know, I want to end up with you know, something that really changes
• 14:09
  what people are expecting. Yeah, you built, You've built a movie.
• 14:13
  You you came at it like a blueprint, almost as opposed to just like
• 14:18
  hey, I'm just gonna get a whole bunch of wood, it's some nails
• 14:20
  and uh, and let's see what happens you actually constructed like, no,
• 14:24
  I'm not only going to figure out how to build this thing, but I'm
• 14:28
  going to have a buyer for this day before I get done with Well,
• 14:31
  well, i'll tell you what what what kicks me into that? And I'm
• 14:33
  sure you know everyone in the in the tribe. Wal know, an experience
• 14:37
  like this, it's it was a bad experience, and a bad experience is
• 14:41
  what showed me. Oh a blueprints a really good idea, and you know
• 14:43
  I can talk about it, you know, with with a light heart because
• 14:48
  it wasn't my project. It was just something I was helping out on,
• 14:52
  and and it was a project that we really you know, if there was
• 14:54
  a blueprint, I was the one trying to be like, hey, wait,
• 14:56
  here's we should we should blue what into that one? Not much,
• 15:01
  you know, not much, A lot, a lot of time and money
• 15:05
  was with whatever you think happened, is what happened. Mistakes, Mistakes were
• 15:09
  made, Mistakes were made. Yeah, I mean, it's just it was
• 15:11
  at the end of the day, it was it was a half built house
• 15:15
  and a lot of nails and boards that weren't ever going to fit in that
• 15:18
  house. And and you can't sell a half built house, no, not
• 15:22
  in this market. Right twenty years ago South Korea videotape backyard they could have
• 15:31
  maybe, but not in this market. All right, So how did you
• 15:33
  raise the money? The budget for this was about how much one hundred thousand,
• 15:37
  about one hundred thousand, right, So that's not that's not a mic.
• 15:39
  It is a micro budget in the grand scheme of things. But for
• 15:43
  a normal guy like you or I, pulling a hundred extra grand out of
• 15:46
  our pockets is a it's a bit much. So how did you raise the
• 15:48
  money? A lot of different places. I mean, just really had to
• 15:52
  start a lot of different places. So I think that's that that's such an
• 15:58
  important quest. It's such a crux of what people ask. And I think
• 16:03
  before I kind of go into it, I think sort of the mindset and
• 16:07
  the helpful part that you've already kind of hit on was we had the blueprint
• 16:11
  whenever we were going out for financing, and so we had this blueprint of
• 16:17
  all right, here's what the independent film landscape looks like. You know,
• 16:22
  here's where our film is a micro budget film, and then here's where we
• 16:26
  can lose money if we do it wrong. You know, we were very
• 16:30
  forthcoming with the investors saying here's what we're worried about, and here's how we're
• 16:34
  going to try to mitigate that. So I think the blueprint was was the
• 16:38
  biggest piece of that. The blueprint was, you know, one hundred thousand
• 16:42
  is not a little but it's not so much that we can you know,
• 16:48
  get get caught off balance, you know, over commit, you know,
• 16:52
  spend too much. I had researched a couple other films I've been following,
• 16:56
  like thunder Road is a film I've been following very closely, not in the
• 17:00
  sense that we're the same as them in any way. I mean, they
• 17:03
  really did a good job with the festival circuit and knew their audience and we
• 17:06
  have very different audiences. But I followed them, and I followed them in
• 17:10
  terms of, Okay, how much money had they been able to get with
• 17:12
  the resources they had, you know, how did their storefront deliver? And
• 17:15
  then I just started calling up other directors and I say, hey, how
• 17:18
  much money have you made? You know, I mean, and they you
• 17:22
  know, it never in a way where it was like, give me an
• 17:25
  exact number, but it was always how did iTunes go for you? How
• 17:30
  did Amazon go for you? Did it did you get a streaming deal?
• 17:33
  How much was that worth? And you know, of course listening to your
• 17:36
  guests on the show, and so it's very hard, it's very hard to
• 17:38
  get those numbers. The Creative Institute at Sundances trying to make that a little
• 17:42
  more transparent, and they're awesome in that way. I mean, I'm so
• 17:45
  excited to see all the stuff that they continue to put out. But I
• 17:49
  kind of was able to go into to investors with those numbers and say,
• 17:52
  hey, here's what the numbers look like, here are your odds of success.
• 17:56
  Here's how we're going to try to increase those. We went to production
• 17:59
  company, you know, we went to some some B level groups, and
• 18:03
  a lot of them said that, you know, it's you guys don't have
• 18:06
  any prior work. You know, you're you're all just out of film school.
• 18:10
  And even though it's USC, it's it's not enough for us to feel
• 18:12
  confident in and and that's just the way it goes. And we were expecting
• 18:17
  that, so we went We went to I think we're between eight different private
• 18:21
  investors, very spread out, you know, none of them feeling too like
• 18:26
  it's you know, no one, no one cashed in all of grandma's retirement
• 18:30
  savings or anything like that, which was which was good, and and we
• 18:33
  we each one of them had a different ask and one or two of them
• 18:37
  just were wanted to be a part of it. And the whole goal was
• 18:41
  what can I do for you. You know, this is this is a
• 18:44
  movie. You don't normally invest in movies, but you know, if this
• 18:48
  excites you, we want to work with you on it. And and that
• 18:52
  was that was kind of how we we built the financing. Now what you
• 18:56
  were talking earlier little bit about the budget levels, like you know, ten
• 18:57
  thousand line willing fifty thou another movie, hundred thousand movie. What is the
• 19:00
  difference in your eyes on the difference obviously besides financial, I think that they're
• 19:06
  and and and I'm sure you know this, but I think there's a huge
• 19:08
  difference in the one hundred thousand and under range that indie filmmakers don't realize.
• 19:15
  And I see a lot of indie filmmakers who spend one hundred thousand dollars on
• 19:19
  a movie that should have cost ten. And that's a lot of indie filmmakers
• 19:25
  spend ten on a movie that really needed one hundred, and then in the
• 19:29
  end you've got fifty, and then in the middle you've got fifty. And
• 19:32
  those filmmakers can go both ways and both you know, budgets can go towards
• 19:36
  those filmmakers. And I think that you know, whatever your budget is,
• 19:42
  you should really know. I mean, where you're going to spend money,
• 19:47
  where you're not going to spend money. You know that that's that that can
• 19:49
  get pretty complicated. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor,
• 19:59
  and now back to the s. But I think that one of the biggest
• 20:04
  things that I see and I'm sure you've seen too, is at these lower
• 20:10
  budget levels, filmmakers feel like they have to do everything in one location.
• 20:14
  They feel like it has to be a bottle episode, it has to take
• 20:17
  place in one location. And I think I think that you can really shoot
• 20:22
  yourself on the foot when you do that. That was something I was really
• 20:25
  excited about with the last whistle, was we we have, you know,
• 20:29
  fifteen locations minimum in the film. I mean, this movie travels. You
• 20:33
  don't feel like you're in one place the whole time. And the fear always
• 20:37
  is, well, we've only got this amount of money, so we can't
• 20:41
  afford a company move, we can't afford the time it takes to go from
• 20:45
  one place to another. But I think I think you increase the production value
• 20:49
  of your movie so much if you can add some other locations in there.
• 20:52
  Yeah. And with that question, yeah, and I think ten thousand is
• 20:56
  the only budget level where you can say, say, you know what,
• 21:00
  let's keep it in one place, you know, or maybe if you're if
• 21:03
  you're in one hundred thousand and fifty thousand range, but it's an action movie
• 21:07
  and you're dealing with stunts or controlled you know, explosives or something like that.
• 21:11
  Like, okay, I can see needing to stay in one location for
• 21:14
  something like that, but the single location movie has been done so frequently that
• 21:18
  you can risk losing hundreds of thousands of dollars if you feel like that's the
• 21:23
  way you have to do it. And so that's that's sort of the thing
• 21:26
  that I've seen is, you know, if you're gonna spend six digits on
• 21:30
  a movie, try not you know, don't do it in one place unless
• 21:33
  you absolutely it's mandated by the script. I think is the way that I
• 21:37
  would put that. Yeah, I mean, and with my film, my
• 21:38
  last film, On the Corner of Your Desire, we did that for about
• 21:41
  three thousand, but it was it was done at the Sundance Film Festival.
• 21:45
  But the thing was that there was tremendous amount of production value in every five
• 21:48
  minutes we're moving or somewhere else. We're moving here. So it actually had
• 21:52
  probably like twenty locations when it was all said and done, So it added
• 21:56
  a tremendous amount of production value to do that film. That's how we use
• 22:00
  so we shot, you know, kind of the next question is, we
• 22:03
  know, how'd you do it? Howd you you know, keep the production
• 22:06
  value low? We shot at my high school. We you know, I
• 22:08
  called them up. I said, hey, listen, I know there's a
• 22:11
  week where the students aren't in class and it's not a holiday or anything like
• 22:15
  that. Can we do you mind if we shoot there as long as we've
• 22:17
  got our you know, location insurance, pay the security guards over time,
• 22:19
  that sort of thing. And they were super awesome. They were super awesome,
• 22:22
  inviting, and it it kind of played into okay, I know how
• 22:26
  many families are at this high school? Who would watch this movie? So
• 22:30
  here's another audience that we can use. And this this high school was awesome
• 22:33
  because it gave us everything from offices to the football field to the locker room
• 22:38
  and it kind of turned into this mini you know, uh, not sound
• 22:42
  stage, but it turned like a studio a lot in a way. And
• 22:45
  so we would have what, you know, a quote unquote company move,
• 22:48
  but we were moving from building A to building B. Sure, but you
• 22:52
  still feel like it's a whole new place as long as you you know,
• 22:55
  hide it with production design essentially. Yeah, that's the same thing happened with
• 22:59
  us. We were just constantly moving to different locations throughout the whole piece,
• 23:00
  and it was literally a block away or literally you know, next door,
• 23:04
  but it seems like boom, it's like this entire new world. And that's
• 23:08
  the key. I think I've done that with a bunch of my movies where
• 23:11
  I've been in one location, but I can probably get twenty looks, twenty
• 23:17
  scenes that are completely distinctive and makes it feel much larger than it is.
• 23:22
  But it really was just like let's just walk down the hall and it's like
• 23:23
  a completely new world. So yeah, that's that's great. And anytime you
• 23:26
  can get a location like a high school which you have complete control over,
• 23:33
  you can create a ton of production value because there is a ton of production
• 23:36
  value there all about you know, just just make the I think the hardest
• 23:41
  part is, you know, don't do it in la I think that's what
• 23:47
  challenging locations. They will, you know, they'll ask for your checkbook minute
• 23:53
  one when you're in LA. But if you're outside of LA and you've got
• 23:57
  a personal connection somehow, and and you you not only say you're not gonna
• 24:03
  damage anything, but you actually do it. You know. I think that
• 24:07
  that's another thing too. It's like you need to really you know, you
• 24:10
  need to know everyone on your crew, and you need to make sure that
• 24:11
  while yes, you as the director or producer or writer will respect the space,
• 24:17
  that your gaffer will respect the space and something with the c stand and
• 24:22
  you know, and and that was that was you know, I was the
• 24:23
  last one on set every day cleaning up you know, water bottles. And
• 24:29
  everyone was like, well, we're coming back first thing in the morning and
• 24:30
  they're not going to be here overnight, so who cares? And I was
• 24:33
  like I care, God forbid the person that you know, let us use
• 24:37
  this room. It comes comes to find all these water bottles everywhere, like
• 24:41
  I want them to. I want them to like us when we leave.
• 24:42
  So in other words, you weren't wearing your ascot and your monocle with a
• 24:45
  blowhorn as a director. Well, I put the monicle in my front pocket
• 24:51
  and then I clean up the water and then I put it, then you
• 24:52
  put it back out, and then the ascot's there all the time generally just
• 24:56
  because it's yeah, well, I mean you can clean sweat with it.
• 24:59
  It's it's the ascot is multiunction. It works very well with the Hawaiian shirt
• 25:04
  too. You know. We never I've never seen an ascot with the Hawaiian
• 25:10
  shirt that I have not seen. Now, how did you get your talent?
• 25:14
  Did you have? You have a fairly you know, great, great
• 25:17
  cast. Sure, So the hardest part with the talent I thought was going
• 25:23
  to be the money. I thought the hardest thing was going to be,
• 25:27
  you know, we've got this movie. We're attaching talent we had, you
• 25:32
  know, I thought the hardest thing to say it was going to be we're
• 25:34
  not done with the investment yet. You know, we're not done getting the
• 25:37
  money yet. We started casting with probably forty to fifty percent of our investment
• 25:44
  in the bank, and so I thought that was going to be the hurdle.
• 25:48
  But no one asks to see your bank account, No one demands,
• 25:53
  you know, you you put a cashier to check into them. For the
• 25:57
  most part, I mean, unless you're getting too high for for who you
• 26:00
  should be going after and what I really realized was the hardest thing was.
• 26:07
  You know, uh, as long as they like the script, which is
• 26:11
  huge as you know that if you have what you would call a bulletproof,
• 26:18
  bulletproof screenplay, you've been hustling on that screenplay, they will read it and
• 26:25
  they'll say, this is this is a great thing for me. I love
• 26:27
  this role, you know, and if they genuinely love the role, they
• 26:30
  will play ball with you. There are actors who will say, oh,
• 26:33
  I love the role, it's so well written. But you know they're not.
• 26:37
  They're just saying that. You know, you mean no in La,
• 26:41
  no, stop it, stop it telling you truth, Tampa, Tampa,
• 26:47
  anywhere, Texas, anywhere. Uh So, so you have to have that
• 26:52
  to start off with. If you don't have that, then you know,
• 26:56
  that's why you're not getting calls back, I think when it comes to attaching
• 26:59
  talent. But the second thing is they want to know your prior work,
• 27:03
  just like the production companies did. And again with this movie. You know
• 27:07
  I didn't you know, I didn't have a football movie that I had made
• 27:11
  before this. You know this was going to be the football movie. You
• 27:14
  know, I didn't have some award winning short film because you know to make
• 27:18
  a really good short film these days, it money helps, and I didn't
• 27:22
  want to go and spend ten to twenty k on something that I knew couldn't
• 27:26
  earn its money back. Now, there's nothing wrong with doing that, especially
• 27:30
  if you're aware of that going into it. But that's just not my style,
• 27:33
  you know. A. I don't think I'm good at shorts. Honestly,
• 27:37
  I think features are really where I'm comfortable. So the hard thing was
• 27:41
  not having prior work to show the talent, the agents, the managers,
• 27:47
  the gatekeepers. What we did have was a says a real I had gone
• 27:52
  to my brother's little brothers homecoming football game. I filmed some stuff in slow
• 27:56
  motion through some Friday night lights, sound tracks over it, and there was
• 28:02
  our you know, last sizzle reel, and that's awesome. It was enough.
• 28:07
  It was enough. It wasn't perfect. No one was like, oh,
• 28:10
  you guys know how to make movies, but it was I feel something.
• 28:15
  This makes me feel something, and so I'm interested. It was not
• 28:19
  shot beautifully, there was this production design was terrible, but they felt something.
• 28:23
  And that was just like a trailer what you have to do when you
• 28:26
  want to convert someone to your side. I was gonna ask you this the
• 28:32
  touch on the sizzle reel stuff though, that's something that a lot of filmmakers
• 28:34
  don't understand about a sizzle reels. It's like in creating a sizzle reel and
• 28:38
  and it's an inexpensive way to really give a feeling, a look, a
• 28:45
  vibe to your project. And it really makes people who are generally not very
• 28:48
  visual, especially financiers. They can't think visually. So if you show them
• 28:52
  something, even if it's a cut up, you use other movies and cut
• 28:57
  up a fake trailer for your movie. Yeah, with Brad Pitt. And
• 29:00
  I mean, you're not saying that Brad Pitt's going to be in it,
• 29:03
  but I've seen it done and I've cut it. It's kind of like a
• 29:06
  feel a vibe. I'm like, this is just a vibe we don't have,
• 29:07
  mister Pitt. Have you cutzle reels for coins many times? Man times?
• 29:12
  Back in the day, Back in the day, I used to cut
• 29:14
  cite wheels. It was VHS. But back in the day I would cut
• 29:18
  together you know, I remember doing scenes from seven and some you know,
• 29:22
  a bunch of you know, kind of serial killer dark ding fight club kind
• 29:26
  of vibes to put together for a project that had that kind of energy to
• 29:30
  it, and they wanted to just it's you know, thirty seconds, sixty
• 29:33
  seconds, ninety seconds tops. So that's one way of doing it. Then
• 29:37
  shooting something like what you did, which was kind of like a sizzle reel.
• 29:41
  You actually shot footage, but you put in copywritten music as as a
• 29:45
  demo is fine, almost as good as Brad Pitt. I mean, the
• 29:48
  fact that you put a music library and pull anything. We'll be right back
• 29:55
  after a word from our sponsor, and now back to the show. I
• 30:03
  mean, everyone loves the score to Conception. I mean that's on everything.
• 30:08
  Shashak Redemption as well. That Shashank Redemp Redemn soundtrack is on. You could
• 30:12
  literally insert shosha Ak Redemption's music on almost any movie and it will just just
• 30:18
  take it up to that next level. I've used it so many times on
• 30:23
  so many different reels and things. You're just like, damn man, that's
• 30:27
  just a good score. Yeah, And so I think all of this is
• 30:32
  circumvincing the obvious answer, which is you should get a casting director to do
• 30:36
  all this for you. You know, where's your casting director? And I
• 30:40
  have the budget going into this project. Yeah, I didn't realize how expensive
• 30:44
  A really good casting director brutal, and they earn every penny of it,
• 30:48
  I mean, because because they do amazing work and they can they can,
• 30:52
  they can they deal with the agents and the managers, they can get the
• 30:53
  talent to feel comfortable with you. So it was in the absence of that
• 30:56
  that we were and we did end up having a casting director was awesome and
• 31:00
  brought in Brad Leland at the end and brought in Dan Laden at the end,
• 31:04
  but they were they they worked more locally, and then they helped us
• 31:07
  go for our for our lead, which we still didn't have at that point.
• 31:11
  So so I'm talking more about when we started by attaching Jim O'Hare,
• 31:15
  who we all know is Jerry from Parks and Rec. And and I had
• 31:18
  been keeping up with Jim in his career since Parks and Rec because like him,
• 31:22
  like Aubrey Plaza, like a lot of the actors in the office too.
• 31:26
  You know, I'd watched those ensemble shows for so long and had really
• 31:30
  been able to figure out which members of the ensemble had this amazing, like
• 31:33
  star studded talent and I'm almost bummed that Aubrey Plausa is blown up in the
• 31:37
  way that she has, because I knew she was there. But luckily,
• 31:41
  you know, Jim wasn't you know, his schedule wasn't full like hers was.
• 31:44
  And so we started with Jim, and we we sort of packaged it
• 31:48
  like you would at an agency. We started with I started with my friends
• 31:51
  who I knew were kind of on the cusp of, you know, TV
• 31:53
  stardom. Then they talked to their friends. We brought in some of our
• 31:56
  executive producers, Eric and Saint or fantastic and they have hit that TV stardom
• 32:01
  and then movie start them and they're so they had friends that they were able
• 32:05
  to go to. And so it was those personal connections and then showing who
• 32:08
  we had cast already laid really nice groundwork when it came to casting folks without
• 32:15
  a casting director and without prior work. You know, it's funny just to
• 32:19
  go back and this. Do you know what Robert Rodriguez did for a mariachi
• 32:22
  nor So when he was when he was pimping out a mariachi around town,
• 32:28
  he had his short film BedHead on a VHS. Then he had cut a
• 32:30
  trailer for Mariachi. But what he did was he took the soundtrack of another
• 32:37
  trailer because of that, in those days, it didn't it wasn't They didn't
• 32:39
  do a lot of dialogue. It was just all music. And Roger even
• 32:45
  gives it five two thumbs up. That kind of stuff, action packed all
• 32:49
  the way, says, you know Peter Travers from Rolling Stone. You don't
• 32:52
  forget the zooms you have, like that zoom to the face, right.
• 32:54
  Yeah, So he just took that soundtrack and edited his movie off the soundtrack.
• 32:59
  So when some and saw it, they were like, well, this
• 33:00
  looks like a real movie. It was. It was pretty It was pretty
• 33:04
  genius. It's things that I used to do back in the day when I
• 33:07
  was doing my demo reels, but he took it to another place with his
• 33:09
  feature. But yeah, czel reels are very powerful. The funny the funny
• 33:13
  thing that you mentioned, uh double r uh. Robert Rodriguez did the Rebel
• 33:19
  Without a Crew competition on l Ray. Yes, yes, yes, yes,
• 33:22
  you had you had uh two, I've had I've had one Alejandro and
• 33:27
  then I've I've met with Josh. I was on his podcast and now I'm
• 33:30
  gonna have him on my podcast in the next few months. So I loved
• 33:34
  that show. I watched every episode. I had to the best one,
• 33:37
  the best one of all of those shows. It's it definitely because green Light
• 33:42
  is. It is just you know that green Light's got its own stuff.
• 33:45
  Hey man, I wasn't. I was in season two. Cool. I
• 33:47
  was in season two of Project green Light. Five seconds opening credits, very
• 33:52
  nice. So when it came to so anyway, uh Rebel without a crew,
• 33:57
  the TV show was you know, most people say there first feature was
• 34:00
  was genocized by the brook but you know, the rebel out of Crewe.
• 34:06
  The TV show was what made me go on right the last whistle. And
• 34:08
  so I initially wrote this as a seven thousand dollars feature. For seven grand,
• 34:13
  that must have been impossible. I would go and shoot during the home
• 34:16
  I would make the sizzle reel all the football that was in the movie,
• 34:20
  and then I would shoot the coach at his home, getting phone calls from
• 34:23
  people, getting visited by people. It'd be a different movie. It'd be
• 34:27
  a different movie. Yeah, it's it's it's it's similar, but it cuts
• 34:30
  out all the other characters. Essentially, it's it's total art house instead of
• 34:35
  you know, sports with like a twinge of art house, which is I
• 34:37
  think what Lots was trying to be. But anyway, that was the genesis
• 34:39
  of this project. And that's kind of what they told me, was how
• 34:42
  would you do this for seven thousand dollars? And I was like, you
• 34:44
  don't know me, like, just give me a shot, Just give me
• 34:45
  a shot. And they picked her, they did, and I thought Alejandra
• 34:50
  especially killed it on the show. It it was. I found it so
• 34:53
  funny how in this third or fourth episode he was telling the other filmmakers what
• 34:58
  gear to go grab from the car, you know, they had like the
• 35:00
  card or whatever. He's like, no, no, no, you don't
• 35:01
  need to see stand like like get get the light stand, get the light,
• 35:05
  you know. And and so I thought that was hilarious. Yeah,
• 35:07
  and his new movie coming out, Millennium Bugs, is coming out soon's I
• 35:12
  saw his trailer. Dude, looks awesome, dude, and he made it
• 35:15
  for like underground or A hundred, and it looks great, looks really really
• 35:17
  great. Anyway, that was the genesis of the Last Whistle, and they
• 35:22
  turned it down. And when they did, I said, let's go make
• 35:22
  it ourselves. Fantastic man. Now, you also reached out to distributors before
• 35:28
  shooting I did, Wow, amazing. That was another one of your episodes.
• 35:32
  I don't know which one was, but but I'm sure it was.
• 35:36
  I don't remember who that was, but uh, yeah, you know where
• 35:39
  I got that idea. Yeah, so you went out to a distributor.
• 35:42
  You talked to them and like, look, I'm making a football movie.
• 35:44
  What do you need in here? How did? How did that process go?
• 35:47
  Just just like casting, more difficult than than I expected it. It
• 35:52
  was kind of crazy how how few distributors would email me back, and who
• 35:58
  how few of them would actually replied to someone who's essentially a future customer,
• 36:02
  you know, someone who's going to go and do all the legwork for them,
• 36:06
  you know, I mean I was. I was kind of shocked that
• 36:08
  these very middle level distribution companies were not paying me the time of day to
• 36:15
  just pick up the phone for ten minutes. Yeah, shocking, shocking.
• 36:20
  So you're right, yeah, here I am with my lofty ideals for humanity
• 36:25
  and maybe you're you're in the rug business for that, my friend. I
• 36:29
  hate that, dig I guess, but you got a few to called you
• 36:34
  back eventually. Yeah, so so eventually josh Specter at Gravitas at the time,
• 36:39
  UH said, I'll give you ten minutes, you know, as long
• 36:43
  as you're not trying to sell me the movie. You know, I'd go
• 36:45
  through the usual channels for that. And I was like, no, no,
• 36:47
  no, it's not like we don't we don't need pre sales and know
• 36:50
  any of this stuff. Just you know, ten minutes is perfect. And
• 36:52
  Josh was nice enough to pick up the phone and tell me, you know
• 36:55
  what, just you're doing football. Make sure it's got a ton of football,
• 36:59
  especially in the first five minutes. Make sure that your key art and
• 37:02
  your on set photography is excellent. We need a lot of options when it
• 37:07
  comes to art. He said, you know, make sure that you've got
• 37:12
  very high production value, enough to where you can cut a really good trailer
• 37:15
  with and and he just talked about, you know, the make sure that
• 37:22
  if you have a lot of football, the football is forefront. If you
• 37:24
  end up getting a big actor, that they are front and center. But
• 37:29
  I think the main question I went into Joshua was I said, here's our
• 37:30
  budget, and we and we're not sure if we're going to get a big
• 37:35
  actor. Can we make it work. And he said, if it's football,
• 37:38
  you can make it work. If it's not, it won't you know,
• 37:42
  a drama that's made for one hundred K, I don't think we'll make
• 37:45
  its money back. And I'm paraphrasing that those aren't his you know, his
• 37:49
  opinions or beliefs or anything that has to do with where he is now,
• 37:52
  which is Vertical Entertainment. But that was that was the gist of kind of
• 37:58
  what he told me in his pub available knowledge. And eventually he phoned me
• 38:02
  back, emailed me back about five or six months later and said, hey,
• 38:06
  did you guys finish the movie? You know, I Vertical would love
• 38:08
  to take a look at it. And at that point that's where the ball
• 38:12
  started rolling and he ended up being our acquisitions. He acquired us. So
• 38:17
  isn't it funny? So you need to tell me so I just I got
• 38:20
  to lay this off for everybody listening. So you need to tell me that.
• 38:22
  You call up a distributor and go, hey, I just want ten
• 38:24
  minutes of your time I'm thinking about making We're going to go make this movie.
• 38:28
  I'd love to hear your thoughts on what we need to make this movie
• 38:30
  sellable and marketable for you, and with your wealth of experiencing years of experience,
• 38:37
  and then he stated he was impressed enough with you that he called you
• 38:43
  back or emailed you back five or six months later and said, hey,
• 38:45
  whatever happened to that football movie? I'm over at this new place, and
• 38:50
  why don't you come over here? And then that turns into your distribution deal.
• 38:53
  Yeah, pretty much, shocking, shocking, shock. It's amazing what
• 38:59
  happens when you actually just do this kind of stuff, like it's it's one
• 39:02
  thing to look. I preach about this stuff every day all the time,
• 39:06
  but it's just very few people want to do the legwork. And because if
• 39:09
  not, this is what would have happened, you would have a major movie
• 39:12
  and what you would have then tried to make you move, and then you
• 39:14
  would have started calling everybody, and then you would have gotten all sorts of
• 39:15
  horrible deals if anyone would have called you back and you were just like you
• 39:21
  would be rolling the dice. You would be betting on the number, not
• 39:22
  on the color. Basically, you're trying to stack the odds against for you
• 39:27
  as much as you can against the house. And I think there's an interesting
• 39:30
  thing that comes to film festivals. I think this is a good point with
• 39:32
  you. That was my next question. The So my thesis going into this
• 39:37
  movie. You know, I did have some thess going into this movie.
• 39:40
  I said, I think, you know, I think this will work.
• 39:44
  I think this will work. I think this will work. Here's the evidence,
• 39:45
  and then let's test it out. Let's do the scientific you know,
• 39:49
  uh, the scientific process with it. We'll be right back after a word
• 39:53
  from our sponsor, and now back to the show. And so my thesis
• 40:01
  going into this was film festivals have way too much bearing on on the sellability
• 40:12
  of a film. People put way too much weight on a festival because of
• 40:15
  because of the nineties, because of the nineties, because of the nineties.
• 40:19
  That's when they did they actually did have power. You know, Sundan,
• 40:22
  you won Sundance. You got you got that check from Harvey. Yeah,
• 40:25
  I know he's not a cool name to say right now, but you got
• 40:28
  that name. You got my Aramax to show up and you don't want I
• 40:30
  would I would catch that check if you if you get a check from Harvey,
• 40:34
  now, I would make sure that doesn't bounce because exactly, but back
• 40:37
  then, I mean, there was a probably around a six or seven year
• 40:40
  period. That that's that festivals were powerful, you know, and some still
• 40:45
  are of course. I mean, you went Toronto, you win, can
• 40:49
  you when you know, maybe Tribeca or you went south By. That does
• 40:52
  bring in certain amounts, but that's such a small, small amount of wis
• 40:55
  And so my thing was, Okay, we're a Texas film, should we
• 41:00
  right? So we waited to go for south By, right, and and
• 41:04
  in the end we didn't apply to south By, we didn't apply to sun
• 41:07
  Dance. I wanted to keep it grassroots. I wanted to go where I
• 41:09
  knew the numbers were, where I knew that we had the fifty to fifty
• 41:13
  odds instead of the one and thirty six. And so we debuted at the
• 41:15
  Lone Star Film Festival in Fort Worth where we filmed it, and we had
• 41:20
  a huge opening night crowd, lots of local press. And what we did
• 41:24
  there was we started our audience. I mean, you know, we started
• 41:27
  building our audience there. And we got to do that in November instead of
• 41:30
  March, whereas if we had if we had gotten into south By and done
• 41:35
  March, we would have had to wait until football season twenty twenty one to
• 41:38
  get the movie out there, because you can release this movie and you know,
• 41:43
  the winter times, it's got to be football season, sure, And
• 41:45
  and so that was that was again that teleological thinking about the end, you
• 41:50
  know, really trying to land the plane one hundred miles away instead of you
• 41:52
  know, just slam it down in the runway essentially. And so that was
• 41:57
  my thesis going into it. Now. I think an interesting thing that I
• 42:00
  will be the first to admit is what I was wrong about was the same
• 42:02
  thesis that I had about a name for a movie. You know, my
• 42:07
  thesis when it comes to names is a name does not guarantee you a good
• 42:12
  movie in any way. And on top of that, a name does not
• 42:15
  guarantee you money, as we saw with not Manchester by the Sea, but
• 42:21
  was It by the Sea? The brad Pitt Jolie, Yeah, of course,
• 42:24
  the one that Angelina I think she wrote and directed that one. Yeah,
• 42:28
  yeah, she did. Yeah, And the movie did not do well.
• 42:30
  I mean it had Brad Pitt, it had the the brad Pitt and
• 42:32
  Angelina Julie and Jelia Julia and and so I think, you know, seeing
• 42:36
  movies like that, it's like names. But what I realized is that names
• 42:42
  and festivals are very similar in the way that it That is how distributors know
• 42:46
  best how to sell a film. And so if you come to a distributor
• 42:51
  with, hey, we don't have a name or festival laurels, but we've
• 42:53
  got these other marketable things, well, they might agree with you that those
• 42:58
  things are marketable. It doesn't fit their system of here's where we put you
• 43:02
  know, here's where we insert the name into our trailer, here's where we
• 43:06
  put the name on our poster. You know, they have to put a
• 43:08
  lot more legwork into Okay, how do we put these marketable aspects into our
• 43:13
  framework of how we distribute films? And so I think that was my That
• 43:16
  was the one difficulty when it came to festivals was people were surprised when they
• 43:22
  watched the movie. And I can't tell you how many times I've heard this.
• 43:24
  I'm going to hear it one hundred times again. But people go,
• 43:28
  oh, that was a lot better than I thought it would be. And
• 43:30
  and you know, whether they're giving it a six out of ten or an
• 43:34
  eight out of ten or a nine out of ten, they came into it
• 43:37
  expecting three or three or four out of ten. Because it didn't have a
• 43:40
  laurel on it, and and I kind of have to be like, oh
• 43:44
  no, no, we didn't. We didn't want to forefront the laurels because
• 43:46
  that's not our audience. And that boggled people's minds. They were like,
• 43:50
  what do you mean you didn't do film? What do you mean you didn't
• 43:52
  do the festival circuit? You know, YadA, YadA, YadA. And
• 43:54
  it's just a it's just a new way of thinking, and it's a much
• 43:57
  more difficult one to pull off. But you know better than anybody, No,
• 44:02
  not necessary, agreed, and festivals aren't necessary, and they're nice,
• 44:06
  and if you've never done the experience, it's a great experience. You meet
• 44:08
  a lot of cool people, you meet a lot of filmmakers. You know,
• 44:10
  you might get a little press, you might get an a ord or
• 44:13
  to your ego, might get stroked, you might get a red carpet,
• 44:15
  some pictures, but that's essentially it. Even if you get into one of
• 44:19
  these big ones, it's no guarantee. I know many filmmakers who want sundance
• 44:22
  and did nothing for their careers. You know, it all depends on the
• 44:25
  kind of project. When I saw, like Jim Cummings and Vanishing Angle and
• 44:31
  thunder Rouge My Saw thunder Road, you know, get grand Jury at south
• 44:35
  By and and Play at Sundance and all these things, and then not take
• 44:39
  the deal with A twenty four or with any of these you know, distributors
• 44:44
  that came calling and decided to self distribute. That's when I was kind of
• 44:47
  like, wait a second. If if you know, grand Jury at south
• 44:52
  By and huge grassroots in the audience doesn't get you the deal you want,
• 44:57
  you know, I then there's no that they're gonna come calling for a for
• 45:00
  a football faith film, you know, like that that's just not in the
• 45:04
  radar whatsoever. Right. But it's also like there's a there's a lot of
• 45:08
  people who drink drank this kool aid. A lot of filmmakers drink this kool
• 45:12
  aid of this kind of myth of and expectations of what winning a festival does
• 45:19
  or how things should be. And I do believe in correct me if I'm
• 45:23
  wrong, But I do believe that a lot of these preconceived notions are myths
• 45:28
  of a long gone air, which are those nineties indie movies that you know
• 45:34
  that's kind of the beginning of the independent film movement. Really, the independent
• 45:37
  film movie that we know today kind of started in the nineties, you know,
• 45:40
  started with them if you want to go way back, Hollywood Shuffle nineteen
• 45:45
  eighty seven, Robert Townsend and then You Go and then you and then Sex
• 45:47
  Salize and videotape with Steven Soderberg, and then that launched sun Dance and so
• 45:52
  on and so forth. And people still think that that's the way things are
• 45:54
  made. It is not. It is not that world anymore, and that
• 45:58
  the world has changed so dramatically. And I'd love to have you on the
• 46:01
  show for this specific reason too, that you are a different model and a
• 46:06
  new model of what's happening. And you know what, this model might not
• 46:07
  work in a year or two and we might have to switch again. You
• 46:10
  know, it could be another thing. So but people got to get that
• 46:15
  out of their head. Man, We're not living in nineteen ninety anymore.
• 46:17
  I'm going to inflate your ego here though, Oh no, please, dangerous
• 46:21
  thing to do. That back alley in Hollywood might have an Explosionllywood Week the
• 46:30
  That's what I That's where I really like about any film Hustle and the other
• 46:34
  podcasts that are in this space. Is it's it's it is to the day
• 46:39
  current when it comes to what does our industry look like? How is the
• 46:44
  best way to succeed today versus what works five years ago? Because I mean
• 46:47
  it maybe in terms of the styles of movies five years ago can maybe be
• 46:52
  similar to now, But in the styles of distribution, it's just changing so
• 46:57
  fast that if you're not staying like you know, if you're not listening to
• 47:00
  any film Hustle every week, you you you have lost track of what is
• 47:04
  happening in distribution and Indie Film Hustle and Creative Institute and all these other sources.
• 47:08
  I mean, it's so that that's what because like you know, books
• 47:10
  take time, and you know, books used to teach you how to distribute
• 47:14
  a movie because the information stayed the same for longer than twelve months. And
• 47:19
  that was the same way with our camera gear too. We shot on the
• 47:22
  Canon C three hundred mark two. We had the option to shoot red.
• 47:25
  It was the same price just about and and and I kind of in the
• 47:30
  DP Brian Tang and I went into it and I said, you know what,
• 47:34
  Brian, like, we're making a football movie. Our audience does not
• 47:37
  know the difference between red or cannon. They don't know the difference between anamorphics
• 47:42
  and and spherical. I want to shoot this on the camera that is going
• 47:45
  to run for the longest amount of time without charging. That's going to take
• 47:49
  up you know, a super low card space, and that isn't going to
• 47:52
  heat up if we take it outside in the Texas heat in May and and
• 47:57
  die on us. And that's not going to kill my mac Book Pro when
• 48:00
  I go and you know, do the first director's assembly and then hand it
• 48:04
  off to our editorkers on it. And and this is and as I say
• 48:06
  this, I realized you said this on an earlier episode of the podcast.
• 48:08
  You were talking about shooting on something that doesn't crash your computer. It warms
• 48:14
  my heart. It really does warm my heart man, right now, of
• 48:17
  course, because it's basically everything I've ever preached. I'm like, guys like,
• 48:22
  who cares? No one cares. Like I shot my movie on a
• 48:24
  black Magic pocket camera ten ADP, you know, and it looks fantastic projected.
• 48:30
  You know, It's like, god, jeezus, you mean, I
• 48:32
  don't know this. It's too much. I can't take this. I can't
• 48:37
  take it. It's too much, it's too much wrong, it's happening.
• 48:40
  I'm literally exploding because I'm like, it brings it warms the cockles of my
• 48:45
  heart since to hear to hear this from a filmmaker that I'm like, Oh
• 48:50
  good, someone's listening out there to me. And it's not all about ego
• 48:52
  and it's not all about I need to shoot this on a red or an
• 48:55
  Alexa. I'm like, no, man, my audience can't tell the difference.
• 49:00
  They both look really damn good. And what's gonna what's going to run
• 49:04
  the longest, what's not gonna crash my laptop when I'm working on it?
• 49:07
  What's gonna give me best bang for your buck? Man? It's not always
• 49:10
  like I told me. Was like, could I have shot Ego and Desire
• 49:14
  on on Alexa? Sure? Did I have access to them? Yeah?
• 49:16
  I could have probably gotten one if I wanted to, And I could have
• 49:19
  probably gotten away with shooting it all there if I if I truly wanted to.
• 49:22
  Is the Black Magic Pocket camera the best camera in the world? No?
• 49:25
  But does it work? And it doesn't do exactly what I needed to
• 49:28
  do for that specific project? Absolute freking Lily and that's that's something that I
• 49:32
  that I uh, you know, really, I've even got an image for
• 49:37
  it. And it's sort of the audience's threshold of quality. And it's don't
• 49:43
  think about what your cinophile friends know about film that they're they're going to see
• 49:46
  the lens flair. They're gonna see the piece of auction design that's messed up.
• 49:50
  I think about Mom and pop, think about Uncle Joe. What are
• 49:53
  what will they notice and not notice? And I'll tell you what they notice
• 49:58
  is bad directing. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor.
• 50:07
  And now back to the show. Bad writing, sound and bad sound and
• 50:13
  so and so I think that you know that the the hard thing to accept
• 50:17
  here is if if you as a filmmaker are focusing too much on red versus
• 50:23
  alexa. And this is something I see on that Facebook group movie set memes
• 50:28
  all the time. If you're focusing so much on red versus alexa, Uh,
• 50:31
  maybe it's because you don't know enough about what you should be focusing on
• 50:36
  to focus on that instead. And so again it's it's go take a class,
• 50:40
  get be be a better director, be a better writer. To it
• 50:44
  to the point where you don't feel like because I had this, I had
• 50:45
  this face, I mean so so strongly for such a long time. It
• 50:50
  was I don't know how to make this any better, So maybe I can
• 50:52
  make it look better. And the director, that's not what you're there to
• 50:55
  do. You were there to make what's on screen better. Your cinematographer will
• 50:59
  make it look amazing if you hire a right good a good one. Absolutely
• 51:02
  well I did, Brian. No, it looks great. It looks great.
• 51:07
  I have to say it looks great. Now, what was the distribution
• 51:09
  deal structure that you set up here, because I'm really curious to see what
• 51:13
  kind of deal you got, and you said you would be more than willing
• 51:15
  to share this with the tribe, so so yeah, I'll share all the
• 51:17
  publicly available you know info, just so I'm not, you know, stepping
• 51:21
  on the toes we're doing. We've done a day and date release, so
• 51:27
  we we blasted in ten theaters. That cost us some money up front,
• 51:32
  or the distribute at least put some money up front for that. And what
• 51:37
  it allowed us to do was to debut in the in theaters now folder to
• 51:40
  debut at a slightly higher premium price than elsewhere. It helps us with airlines
• 51:46
  and with later windowing and international sales and things like that, to show that,
• 51:51
  you know, the distributor had enough confidence in the film to invest early
• 51:54
  in it, and that that's kind of you know, it's kind of in
• 51:58
  a similar way where it's like, oh, didn't have a star, but
• 52:00
  they put it in theater, so so it must be worth something. You
• 52:02
  know, they money on it, so it must be or something. So
• 52:06
  the day and day release is kind of the way that the distribution was structured.
• 52:09
  We're working on a very standard distribution deal. There's there's a there's a
• 52:15
  distribution cut up front, and then there's, uh, there's a recoupment of
• 52:19
  expenses, and then there's uh, the our take after that the expenses have
• 52:23
  been capped. Yes, thank you, Yes, you're welcome. And that
• 52:30
  that actually came from a friend who had who had gone through a very uh
• 52:35
  sat very unfortunate distribution scenario. I'm sure you've never heard of that, never
• 52:39
  a shocking u and they and he kind of told me, he's like,
• 52:45
  you know, when it comes to deals sometimes and and usually the cap will
• 52:51
  be what they're going to spend, you know, and and so and and
• 52:55
  so I kind of went into it knowing that and and and you know,
• 52:59
  we're so way and I mean, I I do. I've been very pleased
• 53:01
  with how they've distributed, and I think they've done a great job. And
• 53:05
  so I'm I'm actually not in the school where I'm like, oh, they're
• 53:07
  totally going to screw us over, and I'm and I and I'm thrilled to
• 53:09
  be there. I'm thrilled that that we I think we found a good one.
• 53:13
  You know, I think we we we did. We definitely didn't find
• 53:15
  a bad one. And when I get all the numbers, I'll be sure
• 53:17
  to come back to or you know, go to the Creative Institute and share
• 53:21
  as much as the distributors comfortable with me sharing, because I think in a
• 53:24
  roll with so many bad distributors, it's worth, you know, really praising
• 53:29
  the good ones and praising the ones that do do good work because because you
• 53:34
  want them to be in high demand and and and I definitely want that for
• 53:37
  hours if that's the way that it that it turns out but awesome. And
• 53:39
  then and then also you've gotten a streaming service deal as well. You got
• 53:45
  one of the big streaming service deals, got got picked up by one of
• 53:49
  them as well. Yeah, and so I you know, I can't obviously
• 53:52
  can't talk much about who it is or what it was. It's one of
• 53:55
  the big boys. Boy what we what we noticed was or what I want.
• 54:01
  Another one of the blueprint aspects that I that I looked at with this
• 54:05
  movie is I was on an airplane, as many of us are from time
• 54:12
  to time, and I started to look at what was in their content library.
• 54:16
  And they had the Film Festival winners, they had the you know,
• 54:21
  the the big Hollywood movies. They had this and that, and then I
• 54:24
  go clink clink clink clink clink clink link, go all the way down to
• 54:28
  the bottom and they've got sports and there's one sports movie and it's the only
• 54:34
  category. It's it's the Blue Ocean. And it's like, oh my god,
• 54:37
  they have, you know, like, name a sports movie that came
• 54:39
  out this year, free solo. You know, it's kind of like that's
• 54:43
  pretty much it. I mean, I don't there's nothing. Yeah, that's
• 54:45
  all. It's on iTunes right now, you know, and well rip rip
• 54:49
  iTunes. But uh yeah and so and so I just I saw that Blue
• 54:52
  Ocean, and I said, and and so then I went to the streaming
• 54:57
  sites after that, and I started to look up, Okay, who's been
• 54:59
  selling to these streaming sites, who's buying what? And then the most important
• 55:02
  thing for me was is there a big, you know, sports property that's
• 55:07
  recently left or taken a better deal with a different streaming site. Because what
• 55:13
  they like to do is if they can't have James Bond, they'll put the
• 55:16
  Man from Uncle front and center. That way, if you if they have
• 55:21
  a customer that says I love spy movies, I want to go I want
• 55:23
  to go see James Bond, they can be like, no, no,
• 55:25
  no, wait, stay with us, watch a Man from Uncle, you
• 55:28
  know. And I'm not even sure if that's on a streaming site, but
• 55:30
  if I was running one, that that would be what I would put up
• 55:32
  to get to keep people to stay. So that's Netflix. That's what Netflix
• 55:37
  does. When you like search a specific like Marvel movie, they'll put all
• 55:40
  the other morverl movies that they might have access to, but it might not
• 55:43
  be the one that you're looking for, right, And so yeah, whether
• 55:45
  it's Netflix, whether it's Hulu, whether it's Crackle, whether it's any of
• 55:49
  them, it's it's they. They they yearned. It's sort of that that
• 55:53
  industry that used to exist of the mockbusters of you know, the ones where
• 55:58
  it was it was still still and oh wasn't I just saw I just saw
• 56:01
  now, like the Adventures of the Aladdin Mysteries or something like that. Like
• 56:07
  it literally just came out like a week ago, like, yeah, there's
• 56:10
  that company. I forgot what they do, but they just ough. It's
• 56:13
  all they do is just whatever the big Hollywood movie is, they'll pop it
• 56:15
  up. It used to be very easy because you go to Blockbuster and maybe
• 56:20
  Blockbuster didn't have the sleeve for Avengers, and they didn't have the sleeve for
• 56:23
  Avengers of Aladdin. You send Uncle Joe to Blockbuster, he brings home Advents
• 56:28
  of Aladdin and you don't watch it, but they've already made their money.
• 56:31
  And and so that used to be. That's where it started. And then
• 56:35
  of course now it's in full effect because you can design a poster looks exactly
• 56:38
  like I mean to be fair, and there's that meme. The Aladdin poster
• 56:42
  looks just like the Force Awakens poster. I mean, you know, the
• 56:45
  blue and the red and was I thought for like when the Avengers, like
• 56:49
  Thor Ragnarok came out. They just came out with a Thorn movie and it's
• 56:52
  just four Adventures or something like that. And it's because Thor. You can
• 56:54
  say Thor's Thor. It's yes, trademark on Thor. There's no trademark,
• 57:00
  Yeah, the trademark there. So so I I think that was I was
• 57:04
  looking for. I was trying to look for a blue ocean in a in
• 57:07
  a streaming site, so smart and and uh and and I think that I
• 57:10
  think that that was definitely the major one of the major reasons behind why the
• 57:15
  one that picked us did and and you know, uh, I'll take this
• 57:20
  time to say to please go find the Last Whistle on iTunes. Please go
• 57:22
  find us on uh you know, Amazon or Xbox or you know wherever you
• 57:28
  are right now, because because we really need the tribe, we desperately need
• 57:32
  to try, because we we got to get those numbers up. It's it's
• 57:35
  all about the algorithm. It's all about you know, getting word out about
• 57:37
  the movie and and that that helps us. So we you know, I
• 57:40
  I don't know when that the whole streaming thing is going to come to fruition,
• 57:44
  So please don't don't hold out for that. Please go check the movie
• 57:46
  out. Just rent it for you know, whether it's three bucks or five
• 57:51
  bucks or whatever it is, you know, rent it, I will,
• 57:52
  I will send you a dollar, two dollars whatever you need to feel better
• 57:55
  about your your purchase. But uh, but we but we really need the
• 57:59
  tribe to help us out right now. It's that's that's huge. Now,
• 58:01
  how did you get the word out on the film? Well? How are
• 58:04
  you getting the word out on the film? Sort of going back to that
• 58:08
  blueprint. The blueprint has a bunch of different things that allow sort of give
• 58:14
  us an in. So we started with Fort Worth where we filmed it.
• 58:19
  We were working with all of the people that helped us film there. We're
• 58:22
  sending them posters and trying to say, hey, you know, get people
• 58:25
  to like this. You know, it's it's very much a Facebook based campaign
• 58:30
  because our audience demographic is older, not you know chat but but they're not
• 58:37
  as young as Snapchat or Instagram, which is better for us because I think
• 58:42
  while Facebook pages has its drawback, it's made a very nice platform for the
• 58:47
  generation that we're trying to reach and because they are very active on it,
• 58:52
  and I know they're active because I Facebook is my favorite. You know,
• 58:58
  I'm an old sol at, you know I don't the new fangled things are
• 59:01
  not new fangled things. Yeah, the new fangled things. Listen to you,
• 59:08
  you're talking like you're my age are what are you? Twenty nine?
• 59:14
  All ry? God bless you, God bless you, sir, God bless
• 59:15
  you? And then boom the head explodes. Then the head explodes. Yeah,
• 59:19
  God, bless you. You think I'm twenty nine? My god,
• 59:22
  I could do something, you know what, I know? How old you?
• 59:24
  Oh my god? Can you imagine the damage I could do if I
• 59:28
  was in my twenties? Oh my god? With my mind said, oh
• 59:31
  my god, the damage The Mob would the movie for you? Yeah,
• 59:35
  it's exactly. The Mob would shoot a movie for me. Yeah. This
• 59:39
  cool man. Now. Another thing I wanted to ask you real quickly is
• 59:44
  the business model you're trying to build here. You're trying to build. This
• 59:46
  is not a one off. You're trying to do multiple films like this,
• 59:50
  and you're actually, through your production company, through what you're trying to do.
• 59:52
  You're trying to build a business model that you can replicate on film after
• 59:54
  film after film, So you could actually God, forsake, make a living.
• 1:00:00
  We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor. And now back
• 1:00:07
  to the show. In this business, you mean you're going to survive and
• 1:00:12
  thrive in this business, Please explain to people what are you trying to do?
• 1:00:16
  Yeah, I mean that's I. Oh, make a living. That's
• 1:00:20
  really interesting. That's very interesting. That's that's that's a great that's a great
• 1:00:22
  idea. That would isn't it great? Very admirable idea. Uh yeah,
• 1:00:28
  that that that that's the I mean, the whole goal with this movie is
• 1:00:32
  it's not about this movie. It's about the next one. Because while making
• 1:00:37
  that first movie is hard, once you do it, the hardest thing becomes
• 1:00:40
  the next one. And that's what I've heard from everyone that's that's gone and
• 1:00:43
  done their first feature. You know, I like I said, I I
• 1:00:45
  told you. I called up all the directors who had just done their first
• 1:00:47
  feature who you know, we're super helpful and and and I one of them
• 1:00:52
  was Morgan Dameron, who you recognize that name because it's Poe Damaron. It's
• 1:00:57
  last name from Star Wars. And she was assistant to JJ Abrams for number
• 1:01:00
  of years and and she left that Robot and when did her first feature,
• 1:01:04
  and she was hugely helpful to us and making last whistled because she she ca
• 1:01:07
  she she's stay on the phone with me for hour, hour and a half
• 1:01:10
  just giving me all the things. She was like, listen, you're gonna
• 1:01:13
  have to do a dialogue, connuity and spotting list and it's hell but but
• 1:01:16
  but it's gonna be worth it. And and she was very happy with Jason
• 1:01:20
  and Distriber and they went and Distriber and they self distributed, and and their
• 1:01:22
  movie is called Different Flowers, so they're they're awesome. That's one definitely worth
• 1:01:25
  checking out. And and she was one of those people who's very transparent with
• 1:01:30
  me and gave me a lot of info and and as we entered the call,
• 1:01:32
  this was this was about you know, a year, year and a
• 1:01:34
  half ago she was she was I was like, what's what's going on now?
• 1:01:37
  And she's like, well, the hardest thing is that second feature.
• 1:01:38
  And so that almost planned a seed for me back then where it's like,
• 1:01:42
  oh, that's that's crazy that you know, it's it's they did such a
• 1:01:45
  good job with this movie, and it's still so hard to get that second
• 1:01:47
  feature. And and I know that she will and I at this point,
• 1:01:52
  she's doing TV and commercials and she she's doing fine. I mean she she's
• 1:01:54
  doing great. But but that that's been my mindset this whole time is Okay,
• 1:02:00
  how how do you get that second feature? And so that's that's the
• 1:02:05
  whole idea is, let's let's figure out a business model where we're not overextending
• 1:02:08
  anybody, where we're not going to burn any bridges, where we're never going
• 1:02:13
  to lose everyone's money, and where we really give the opportunity to really blow
• 1:02:19
  up. And if it's not the last whistle that blows up, say the
• 1:02:21
  last whistle goes and does our medium range expectations, then you know, we're
• 1:02:27
  still kind of ahead of the pack there. We're still kind of like,
• 1:02:29
  oh wait a second. We can take this to someone that wants to make
• 1:02:32
  a five percent return on investment or wants to lose ten percent of an investment
• 1:02:37
  and be an executive producer on a movie and say, hey, here are
• 1:02:39
  the numbers, here's what we can and can't do. And so so this
• 1:02:45
  movie is almost there, so I can just have numbers, So I can
• 1:02:47
  just you know, take number concept superfer concept, Yeah, very much so,
• 1:02:52
  and so so you know, as we go into our next movie,
• 1:02:54
  I think I'm gonna I thume to go. I wasn't sure if I was
• 1:02:58
  going to do this. I don't know if it's where I'll be, you
• 1:03:01
  know, three months from now, but I think for the next film,
• 1:03:06
  I want to do what we did with Last Whistle in the faith realm.
• 1:03:10
  I think that Last Whistle is very much a football movie with a very heavy
• 1:03:15
  art house structure to it, even though you wouldn't really know that. You
• 1:03:21
  know, you wouldn't think about that going into it basically, but it's I
• 1:03:24
  really tried to bring some very classic filmmaking style into this movie, and I
• 1:03:31
  think it's totally all under the service. I don't think anyone really notices it.
• 1:03:36
  But I think that just like Kubrick did with two thousand and one Space
• 1:03:39
  Obyssey, where he brought sci fi from this sort of like B movie realm
• 1:03:44
  into oh, adults can watch science fiction, I think i'd like to and
• 1:03:50
  I think it's been done before a few times, but I think I'd like
• 1:03:52
  to bring that to the faith film perspective because it's a realm where I feel
• 1:03:55
  comfortable telling an investor, we've got a an audience here, a worldwide audience
• 1:04:01
  that is worth this amount of money every year. And if we carve out
• 1:04:05
  this niche, then I think we can spend this much on the movie,
• 1:04:08
  you know, and just totally reverse engineer it that way, and just work
• 1:04:12
  my way way up in terms of budget level sizes until you know, I've
• 1:04:16
  either had one do a great job, or I've worked my way up enough
• 1:04:19
  to where, you know, maybe I don't have to produce my own stuff
• 1:04:23
  anymore, and I can kind of, you know, go be a director
• 1:04:26
  somewhere, Go be a writer somewhere, and you know, produce whatever I
• 1:04:29
  want to. That's that's that's kind of the game plan. The dream,
• 1:04:31
  the dream, Dream, the Dream. Now you wrote a book as well.
• 1:04:38
  I did, uh. I you know, I knew I'd gotten so
• 1:04:41
  many questions that were so similar so many times while making the movie. Uh
• 1:04:46
  And and you know, one of the most common course, which is how
• 1:04:48
  did you raise the money? And that sort of thing. And I got
• 1:04:53
  to the point where I had, like forgot I started to say different answers
• 1:04:58
  every time, and then I would I would say, like the worst possible
• 1:05:01
  answer when I had definitely said the best possible answer in the past. And
• 1:05:05
  so at that point I was like, you know what, I'm just gonna
• 1:05:08
  write down all my answers. I want to have this in like a place
• 1:05:13
  where I can go like literally flip to it and figure out, oh,
• 1:05:16
  wait, what is my answer to this? What is the best answer I've
• 1:05:18
  ever answered for this? Because I didn't want to answer the bad answer anymore,
• 1:05:23
  And so I did a book. It is I got it right here,
• 1:05:25
  Rebel with a Crew. I call it Rebel with a Crew instead of
• 1:05:30
  Reuble without a Crew because the thesis of the book is that the Robert Rodriguez
• 1:05:36
  movie, the El Mariachi uh doesn't really exist anymore in a way that built
• 1:05:44
  a career his model. His model was very specific to him, very much
• 1:05:49
  so. And it's it's what you've talked about where it's like, yeah,
• 1:05:51
  they're the for every you know, Kevin Smith and for every Robert Rodriguez,
• 1:05:55
  there's you know, X number of people that did the same thing and you
• 1:05:58
  know didn't have that persons show up with their screening and YadA YadA, yadah.
• 1:06:04
  But but the thesis with Rebel with a Crew is that if you've got
• 1:06:10
  a group of people around you, a bunch of you know, if ten
• 1:06:15
  Rubber Rodriguez is get in a room that they can do that, they can
• 1:06:19
  achieve that, you know, whether it's ten, whether it's five, whether
• 1:06:23
  it's two. My thesis is is the idea that the quality of films has
• 1:06:28
  gotten so good that you need help if you want to compete at the at
• 1:06:31
  the minimal level. And whether that's you know, actors or a sound person
• 1:06:38
  or whatever it is, that's that's the idea of having that crew. And
• 1:06:42
  that was the whole idea with just upping the production value with Last Whistle.
• 1:06:46
  You know, Last Whistle wouldn't have been possible if we didn't have amazing cinematography,
• 1:06:50
  amazing sound, amazing acting locations, my brothers helping me wrangle extras,
• 1:06:59
  a whole city of people coming out for one night to be a crowd at
• 1:07:01
  a football game, you know, killer scheduling, killer composition, and I'm
• 1:07:09
  forgetting ten fifteen other people there. But it's it's all about the book is
• 1:07:13
  all about that crew, and it's all about just going through every step of
• 1:07:15
  the process from writing to directing to casting to you know, all the state
• 1:07:20
  the pieces that that you that you normally would ask about and then I've got
• 1:07:26
  chapters on distribution and marketing too, but those aren't done yet because because I
• 1:07:30
  don't, I don't have the numbers yet. And so it's it's out on
• 1:07:32
  Amazon. It's called Rebel with the Crew, and check it out. It's
• 1:07:35
  it's like half a book right now. And so I'm selling it for like
• 1:07:39
  a half a book price because it is definitely not finished yet, but it's
• 1:07:44
  it's got enough information to at least, you know, do everything we've talked
• 1:07:46
  about about going to the distributor beforehand and budgeting and keeping your cross and all
• 1:07:53
  that. That's awesome. That's awesome, dude. Now I am going to
• 1:07:55
  ask you the questions to ask all of my guests, so you should you
• 1:07:59
  got someone this prepared for it. Maybe there's one, maybe a new one
• 1:08:01
  in there. There might be a new one in there. I don't know.
• 1:08:03
  We'll see, we'll see, we'll see. All right, what advice
• 1:08:06
  would you give a filmmaker wanted to break into the business today. I had
• 1:08:11
  to think about this. This is the hardest one for me to answer.
• 1:08:12
  I did have to think about this one long and hard, and I actually
• 1:08:15
  forgot that you that you asked about this one until recently, and then when
• 1:08:17
  I heard you ask it, I was like, oh wait, I don't
• 1:08:18
  know the answer to that one. I think my advice would be very bird's
• 1:08:24
  eye view. Hollywood cannot ignore someone who's making a profit. Yes, very
• 1:08:31
  true, very very true. So if you know not if you have an
• 1:08:36
  idea or something that can that can make money, you are one hundred getting
• 1:08:44
  into Hollywood. If you're making money, again and again and again even more
• 1:08:48
  so, yes, agents will line out the door to take ten percent of
• 1:08:51
  that money. You know. It's it's it's it is. You know,
• 1:08:56
  it's totally the most full proof way. Now you know, obviously the to
• 1:09:00
  do that is hard, and it might be you know, you might not
• 1:09:02
  have that answer yet. But but if you can find that answer, it's
• 1:09:05
  gonna it could save you a lot of failure time. Now, can you
• 1:09:11
  tell me the book that had the biggest impact in your life or career?
• 1:09:14
  Uh so, kind of the the brother to Red Ocean, Blue Ocean,
• 1:09:18
  Malcolm Bladwell's Outliers. Yeah, great book. I love that book. Great
• 1:09:23
  book, And I just I love the way that that book talks about success
• 1:09:30
  is failure, you know, which is which is very easy. You know
• 1:09:32
  that's a very common idea, but you don't, you know, you don't
• 1:09:35
  see it like he talks about it in very you know, concrete ways.
• 1:09:41
  He talks about really just you know, the people that walked backwards while everybody
• 1:09:46
  else was walking forwards, and just how to really you know, apply those
• 1:09:53
  those mantras that you hear on you know, inspirational quotes where it's like,
• 1:09:56
  don't do what everybody else does. Be right back after a word from our
• 1:10:00
  sponsor, and now back to the show. Whereas you know, I really
• 1:10:10
  like the way that you know, MG takes it, and he's like,
• 1:10:12
  no, no, here's where someone didn't do what everybody else did. And
• 1:10:15
  here's why it doesn't matter, you know, here's why it doesn't sound like
• 1:10:17
  it does on those inspirational things. So also David and Goliath, David and
• 1:10:23
  Glith is great, that's another great book. Now what lesson took you the
• 1:10:27
  longest to learn? Whether the film business or in life. Okay, so
• 1:10:30
  this one for me is that a larger number of people than I expected are
• 1:10:38
  not good at their jobs. And it's not because they lacked the skill.
• 1:10:44
  It's because they lacked the hustle and good answer and whether it's your job or
• 1:10:50
  whether it's you know, someone at the quote unquote Harvard of Film Schools that's,
• 1:10:54
  you know, just cruising their way through. I think I'm always surprised
• 1:10:59
  by one in any profession who is just there because they have to be.
• 1:11:05
  And I think that the lesson that took me the hardest, that took me
• 1:11:09
  the longest to learn there was just that that there are lots of there are
• 1:11:12
  lots of people that feel that way. And so, okay, good answer,
• 1:11:15
  like the tribe, the tribe is motivated. What is the biggest fear
• 1:11:19
  you had to overcome with making this film? There's the new one? Okay,
• 1:11:28
  all right, I'm gonna have to get yeah, I got to get
• 1:11:30
  a second. Uh total financial loss. Okay, it's good. It's a
• 1:11:41
  very reasonable fear, you know what, and and that you know, in
• 1:11:45
  the beginning, it took the form of, oh, we only shot half
• 1:11:48
  the footage and out of money, you know. Uh. Now it takes
• 1:11:54
  the form of all right, what are the numbers going to look like?
• 1:11:56
  Or you know, is the cap gonna work? You know, and you
• 1:12:00
  know that sort of thing. But my biggest fear of was having to go
• 1:12:03
  back to the investors and say we lost all the money. Because I want
• 1:12:10
  to go back and tell them that that we made their money back. Wan
• 1:12:12
  tell him that we made up made we made them all a penny. You
• 1:12:15
  know that that would be success. So he was a goose egg. Three
• 1:12:19
  of your favorite films of all time, sir, uh, Star Wars A
• 1:12:25
  New Hope, as as I you know, came up knowing it, and
• 1:12:28
  and A New Hope wasn't my favorite Star Wars, but it became that when
• 1:12:32
  I saw the the making of Star Wars documentary and I saw just what what
• 1:12:38
  a trial it was for Gary and for all those people, you know,
• 1:12:44
  going through that the desert and all that. So Star Wars became my favorite
• 1:12:46
  movie because it was just such a challenge for them too to make. So
• 1:12:50
  I guess number two would be Indian Jones, The Last Crusade. I see
• 1:12:56
  a theme crawling, go ahead, yes, And then the third one would
• 1:12:59
  be Back to the Future Part three. It was all all all all spiel
• 1:13:02
  work, touching. It was part three, you like the best? Yeah,
• 1:13:08
  And I got flat for that in film school. Really Part three interesting
• 1:13:12
  because I actually part of three is part of my second my first. I
• 1:13:15
  love number one I love number three, and then I love number two the
• 1:13:17
  last and number two is just congenitive tissue that you need to get to three
• 1:13:23
  and has its own fun parts about it. But three is actually really fun.
• 1:13:26
  I love I love three, So I think three. So I love
• 1:13:30
  Westerns. Yeah, I think. But as a kid, you know,
• 1:13:34
  growing up, and I was the oldest child, and so they tried to
• 1:13:39
  shelter me the most of you know, I got three little brothers, their
• 1:13:41
  maniacs. Shout out to them, big help on movie. But they're three
• 1:13:45
  little brothers, their maniacs. But I was the shelter one. I was
• 1:13:47
  the one where they were like, you know, we need to make sure
• 1:13:49
  he's not getting no violence, no drugs, no you know. And to
• 1:13:54
  be fair, I haven't given into the drugs, like I'm you know,
• 1:13:56
  I'm drug free right now. But but the you know, but then but
• 1:13:59
  then night is youngster, the night is young Go ahead, I have mom
• 1:14:03
  tune out right now. But the so I think that I've just got this
• 1:14:10
  part of me that just loves the Old West. And when it comes to
• 1:14:13
  showing, you know, an eight year old a Western, you can't do
• 1:14:15
  that. But Dad will always want to show an eight year old back to
• 1:14:19
  the Future. And I think that Future Part three was my first Western,
• 1:14:24
  and that's why it's my favorite, is because you know, this pastiche of
• 1:14:28
  years of spaghetti westerns was actually my first one. And by the time I
• 1:14:31
  saw Clint Eastwood film, you know, in my teens, I was like,
• 1:14:34
  oh, the iron on his chest, I got it. I see
• 1:14:39
  what this is. He's making our reference exactly what you guess, reverse engineered
• 1:14:45
  the Western for yourself. It's the name of the game. And now where
• 1:14:50
  can people find you and your work? Sure? Sure, I'm my handle
• 1:14:56
  for all my social media is mad Smatter. That was an name that somebody
• 1:15:00
  came up for me in high school. So but if you just google Rob
• 1:15:04
  Smatt, there's only one of me. I'm not smart. That's that's the
• 1:15:09
  tag. There it is now now you'll never forget that there's only one of
• 1:15:13
  me. And then The Last Whistle is available on all digital platforms, you
• 1:15:17
  know, whatever is easiest for you. Go check it out. Please give
• 1:15:20
  us a click, even if it's just a little rent A little rental means
• 1:15:25
  the world to us. And and uh and just yeah, check me out.
• 1:15:30
  I'm everywhere and hopefully all keep going after this. You are a unique
• 1:15:34
  snowflake, sir, as all of us are as a millennial, as a
• 1:15:41
  disenfranchised millennial, you are I know, Rob Man, It's been an absolute
• 1:15:47
  pleasure having you in your show. Man. Thank you for dropping some serious
• 1:15:50
  knowledge bombs on the Trap today. Man, thanks so much, you got
• 1:15:54
  it. Thank you Rob for coming on the show and paying it forward and
• 1:15:59
  share what you have learned on your filmmaking journey. I truly truly appreciate it.
• 1:16:02
  If you want links to his movie The Last Whistle, or want to
• 1:16:05
  get in contact with Rob, please head over to the show notes at Bulletproof
• 1:16:10
  Screenwriting dot tv. Forward slash three sixty. Thank you so much for listening,
• 1:16:14
  guys, as always, keep on writing no matter what. I'll talk
• 1:16:17
  to you soon. Thanks for listening to the Bulletproof Screenwriting podcast at Bulletproof Screenwriting
• 1:16:23
  dot tv.