Passionate Hatley

Don't forget --

Adam's on Passions Monday, Oct. 31.

He plays a paramedic.

He's also been called back for two more episodes.

Apparently, there are quite a few people who need medical aid in Passionville.

Welcome to Tinsel Town!

It is time for all the minds to come together.

Glenn should be feeling a huge chunk of excitement about now. He is going to get to hear his words out loud, read by an AMAZING ensemble of actors. I am wearing my "Suicide Squad" shirt with pride everyday, and we are now officially locked with: SOUND, CRAFT SERVICE, LIGHTING, LINE PRODUCER, AD, GAFFER.

Director of Photography is soon to come ...I am going to want Neil (Director) to help me with that one. Location is cake....just have to pick between about 5 different ones.

The Suicide Squad Table Read

"Go West, young man."

Like the Beverly Hillbillies, I'm loadin' up the truck and bound for Beverly (Hills, that is -- swimming pools, movie stars).

This Friday, I'll be hopping a plane for the City of Angels -- The land of empty promises, broken dreams, heart aches, heart breaks, and for the lucky few ...

Well, you know.

Anyway, big week for Suicide Squad and for Starbox Pictures.

Our Web site will go live, official fund raising will kick off, and I'm finally going to meet the cast and director in person.

One of the interesting things about this project has been the bi-coastal approach. Adam's working the ground in L.A. He's assembled our cast and crew, scouted locations, and handled the tasks that require an actual physical presence; while I've been responsible for the less exciting tasks that could be handled from here (setting up the LLC, writing by-laws and articles of organization, working with our accountant, putting together logos, working on Web designs, opening our corporate account, setting up our cafe press store, etc.

All important tasks, no doubt.

But I am really looking forward to meeting the cast and director, and doing the table read, which will be the first step in making final revisions to the script.

We still have to trim about 20 minutes, punch up some of the dialogue and the action, and then I think we'll have pretty close to the final version.

I will be glad when all the business side of pre-pre-production is behind us, and we can focus on why we're really doing all this -- the story itself.

I'll also come back with pictures of the cast, and will be releasing details about the movie over time.

Stay tuned for interviews with our stars, photos, and hopefully more exciting news to print here as time goes on.

Big Things are Afoot

Starbox Pictures is less than a week away from the launch of our full court Internet press.

Being poor, independent filmmakers, we've had to rely on the good graces of friends to pull this thing off.

We Starbox folks are lucky to have a bevvy of damn talented friends, helping build our Web site, designing graphics, helping with our accounting, and contracts for our investors, cast, and crew. The number of people who've invested in "Suicide Squad" so far -- be it time, money, or talents -- is more than we ever dreamed of.

By the time we're done with this movie, I believe we will have exhausted every favor the universe will allow us. Of course, we hope the movie is a huge success and these same people are lining up to help us again. But in the interim, we're doling out points, credits, and thankyou's like they're currency. And in many cases, we're trading out our confederate dollars for cold hard cash.

In the coming weeks, we will add a ticker to the blog, showing how much money we've raised, and who to credit for the investments.

The GREAT news is that in addition to all those who've donated their time and talents to this project, we have commitments of over $25,000 already.

This thing is becoming more of a reality every day.

Sappy thanks to all of you!

Is the cart ahead of the horse if the horse is backing up?

Not high on our list of priorities right now, but something to keep in mind come March:

From So You Wanna ... Web site.

~~~
Once you have some type of finished product (even if it's just video) you'll need to start hitting the festival circuit. Film festivals are essentially singles bars: studios and distributors who are looking for content mingle with aspiring artists who have made films, and everyone wants to go home with someone.To enter a festival, you will need to get your hands on a list of many of the festivals held across the country, when their deadlines for entry are, and how to obtain an entry form. The best place for all this information is on the web at www.marklitwak.com/filmfes.htm. Some of the most famous independent festivals are:

• Sundance (Park City, Utah)
• Slamdance (Park City, Utah)
• IFFM - Independent Feature Film Market (New York, NY)
• SXSW - South by Southwest (Austin, Texas)

Festivals can cost as little as $10 or as much as $100 to enter, so you may have to be frugal. Typically, you send off a video copy of your film, plus the entry form and fee, and if you have been able to generate any publicity about your project, throw that in too. Convincing your local artsy newspaper to drop by the set one day will be a good way to get press coverage, and the people reviewing festival applications would rather read those than have to sit through another hour of home video footage. Sell yourself.

If you start getting into festivals, you will want to up the stock of your project by holding distributor screenings. Filmmakers typically hold one of these in LA and NYC. The idea is that you rent out a nice small theater or screening room, invite distributors and studios to send someone to attend your screening, and then have them appraise your project and bid against one another to purchase the rights from you. If you think you've never heard of a distributor, you're wrong. All the major movie studios -- Sony, Warner Brothers, MGM/UA, Disney, Fox, etc. -- do a lot of distribution. A good way to find one would be to see who distributed a movie that you really liked or thought was like yours. Check out http://www.imdb.com/ to find the credits on almost any movie ever made.

To find a place to screen your movie, just call a local art house theater and ask them if and when they have space free. You may have to rent it, but then again, they may be interested in hyping their Indie feel by giving it to you gratis. To find the addresses and phones of a bunch of theatres near you, you can use the yellow pages, or you can go to http://www.moviefone.com/ and type in your zip code and nearby zip codes.

Remember, the ultimate goals of a filmmaker are to have the project distributed to theatres around the country, and to be recognized as a talent and offered financing for future projects. Festivals and distributor screenings will be your prom and if all goes well, you'll be well on your way to living a cushy lifestyle amongst fabulous celebrities.

~~~

Perhaps, however, we should focus on getting this thing made first.

Suicide Squad, LLC

It's official. Suicide Squad is now a taxable entity recognized by the Internal Revenue Service of these United States, complete with limited liability protection and a federal tax number ... and as soon as Nancy calls me back from the bank, we'll have our own bank account.

It's not nearly as romantic as the writing part, but equally exciting.

Now let's start counting the money ...

One dollar, two dollars, three.

Three dollars and

ten

thirty five

forty five

70 cents.

We have three dollars and 70 cents to make our movie.

Let's do this thing.

Why Support Independent Films?

Top Ten Reasons to Support Independent Film Makers

10. Tired of seeing Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, or Tommy Lee Jones in every other movie made?

9. Looking for a break from the standard format:

• boy meets girl
• some shit blows up
• girl gets kidnapped by aliens / evil warlords / terrorists / ghosts / giant space monkeys
• boy rescues girl
• boy kisses girl and says something clever and catchy
• credits roll

8. The Hollywood movie machine churns out watered down, formulaic scripts compiled by teams of writers who pound every ounce of individuality out of every phrase uttered on screen.

7. "Flight of the Phoenix"

6. How many "Aliens vs. Predator vs. Jason vs. Freddy" movies have to be made before someone gets hurt?

5. Rocky V

4. Just found out I am actually seven degrees from Kevin Bacon. Hope to strengthen relationship by assembling cast of independent film actors.

3. How many times do The Fog, The Longest Yard, Pscyho, War of the Worlds, etc. have to be badly re-made before someone realizes some movies don't need to be re-done? And how many times will we absurdly shell out $10 a pop because "the first one was prettty good" and "Adam Sandler's usually pretty funny."

2. King's Ransom

1. There is an alternative to the tripe the studios attempt to force down your throats.

Fashion King

I mean ... come on.



I just ordered mine.

The Starbox Money Machine

As the Marketing arm of Starbox Pictures, I am excited to announce that Starbox and Suicide Squad merchandise will soon be available.

A sneak peek at our first t-shirt:


Coming Soon: Suicide Squad and Starbox t-shirts, hats, mugs, etc.

This should all coincide with the launch of our Starbox fundraising Web site ...

Stay tuned.

Suicide is Painless

A link to an article on Pitchfork today.

Interesting look at suicide and music, both of which play heavily in "Suicide Squad."

Of particular relevance to our project:

Where the hell do we first hear about, or imagine, killing ourselves? I think that the lazy rhetoric of parents plants the seed: I remember asking for Nikes, or a certain type of bookbag that a classmate had, and being responded to with the question, "What if your classmate jumped off of a bridge and died, would you want that, too?" In my prior fantasies of jumping off of things, I always flew, but my parents insisted on passing some existential nugget of resistance and dread along to me. What an unjustified raising of the stakes! "Mom, can I have an Eastpak?" "Son, can you die?" (I am reminded of the brand names rattled off in the The New York Post by the surviving boyfriend of a girl who leapt to her death at NYU: "She was wearing my Merrill Lynch baseball cap, and the white Banana Republic jacket I'd bought her. She had been wearing Prada sneakers that matched mine.")

In this excellent piece, Mr. Bowers comments on some of the same issues that we addressed in our script.

There is a groundswell out there -- no not a suicide movement, which has never been something we encouraged, and is not the point of the film.

We, like Mr. Bowers, ask you to look at societal values, culture, and norms with eyes wide open. Don't take information as it is spoon fed to you by mass media and political spin machines.

I look forward to divulging more about our script in the coming months.

Stay tuned.

SHE's only ACTING!

Caught Shanola on "Related" last night.

She's good.

Will definitely bring some face recognition to this project.

Two questions -

1. When are they going to put her picture on the WB Web site?

2. Come on, Hatley -- When are you going to get that NBC contract so we can double down here.

Suicide Squad comes first

Yes, it is true...I did get the call today that "Passions" was bringing me back for two more episodes. This could in the long run increase my chances of getting a contract deal with NBC, but in this business there are no guarantees. However, if you produce your own stuff...there is. SUICIDE SQUAD and Starbox Pictures has my dedication and promise that this FEB 2006, we are lighting the set, rolling the camera, and moving into ACTION!

He's only ACTING!

Big shout out to Hatley for getting picked up for two more episodes of Passions.

Rock on, kid.

Be sure and tell them when you sign your contract that you need three weeks off in February to shoot your movie!!!

one way to really piss off a writer

So for those of you that want to produce a Feature and really want to piss off the writer, this is what you do. After he has already made it to the 3rd and final draft, bring up the fact that you want to add another main character. This will send him/her into an insane rage....

I just did this and I know that the insanity of adding another main character into an alredy established plot is crazy, but the writer is so damn talented...I knew that it could be done.

It has not really been done, but we are indeed in discussion about it...maybe if I can increase the budget by about 10 grand and get the writer an endless supply of Jack Daniels, followed by numerous back rubs given by the one and only Shirly McClaine ... he may be more than willing.

Hatley.

Peering behind the camera

Usually, when I work on projects, I don't pay much attention to what's going on behind the camera...but since I started working on my own feature.....a whole new world has opened up to me.

I am currently playing "Brad" in another independent project filiming now, and with my own feature looming on the horizon, I've started paying much more attention. I have always thought of a movie is a working machine that requires many working parts to work together for the whole thing to work (say that sentence 10 times really fast), but I was used to being just one part of that machine.

On the film that I am working on now, I have ventured out and learned a lot about everything that goes on, and let me tell you...those guys that manage to Produce, Direct, and Star in the film....DAMN!!!!

All I can say is, "Thank God for cocaine."

The Movie Business

There's a reason most people don't make their own movies -- it's hard.

But this is definitely the era of the independent film. And with digital technology, it's never been easier for individuals to make their own movies outside of major Hollywood studios.

Movies like "The Blair Witch Project," "Pi," "Clerks," and "Napoleon Dynamite" (just to name a few) show that even with a small budget, if you have a quality product, you can compete with studio motion pictures that have a budget 100 times the size of yours -- or more.

For Suicide Squad, we're trying to shoot the whole thing for $50,000, which will consist of private investment (mostly from friends and family), a few creative revenue-generating schemes, our own $$, and to the least extent possible - debt.

Unlike a few other notable truly independent films, we are using working actors who are all either current members of SAG or SAG eligible, which means regardless of their good intentions, we have to pay them SAG minimum of $100/day.

When you add up actors' salaries, camera, lights, sound, craft services, insurance, prop rentals and other miscellaneous expenses, production is going to run over $2,000/day, so the faster we shoot this, the better.

I think "Napoleon Dynamite" was shot in like 22 days. We have the production benefit of shooting the whole movie in a single location (a barn, which we will rent for the period of production), so we're hoping to get primary shooting done in under two weeks. We still have to get the shot list from the director (more on him later) to figure out our shooting schedule.

While we're working on the pre-production creative process, we're also trying to get the business angles worked out -- accounting, developing LLC's for the production company and for the movie itself, contracts for the cast, director, investors, etc., and scouting locations -- all the while, trying to get the best deals on everything we can find.

But with each step, our dream is coming closer to becoming a reality.

I bought my plane ticket to LA last night. I'll be heading out there to meet the director and cast for the first time next month when we do a table read of the script.

More later,
Glenn

Slowly I turned, step by step ...

Telling your friends and family you're going to write a screenplay elicits a lot of "Awww, that's cute" responses.

Later, when you tell them that you've finished your screenplay and you've decided to make the movie yourself, the "that's cute" responses move to "OK, now you're just delusional."

How the hell are you going to make a movie?

The same way you run a marathon -- one step at a time.

Step 1 - The script
Step 2 - The Cast & Crew
Step 3 - The Money
Step 4 - Production
Step 5 - Post (Editing, etc.)
Step 6 - Promotion/Festivals
Step 7 - Distribution
Step 8 - Repeat

So, the script was the easy part. Check that one off the list.

The cast and crew - Also surprisingly easy. In his years in the business, Adam has developed a network of contacts, friends, aquaintances, and accomplices. Several of whom have signed on for this project.

In no particular order, our cast:

Jerry - Cliff Weissman
Sarah - Shanola Hampton (Currently a regular on WB's Related)
Thad - Adam Hatley (Last seen on Mr. Romance, Passions, and the pages of this blog)
Michael - Tom "TJ" Jones (Somehow turned coverage of the Miss Universe pageant into a five-month gig)
Wyatt - Brandon Gibson (The funniest man in Hollywood)
Cynthia - Shelley Winsor

So ... the first two steps are knocked out.

Step Three is a big one. Stay tuned for our latest plots, plans, and schemes on the financing front. This is actually progressing much better than I had originally envisioned.

~~~
Yes, this list is over-simplified. Don't worry, the actual complexities, hurdles additional steps, sub-steps and mis-steps are coming.

Executive Producer II

Agreed! On my end, I have location after location. With the location comes price wars. Who is going to give me what I want for the best price.

When we first started this project, I had no idea where I was going to find a Barn in Los Angeles, that would appear to be in the midwest. Not only have I found one, but now I have to pick between about 10 barns. Who knew?

Once the location is set, it is time to establish lighting, sound, and the key part of any movie...a cinemaphotographer that knows what the hell they are doing, and that will work for art and food instead of cash.

What Glenn forgot to mention about our Executive Job is, we have also begun early advertisement for "Suicide Squad". So while swithing hats from Executive Produce, to Actor, to Rookie Sound Guy, Clueless Lighting Guy, Lost Location Scout, we now wear the Early Marketing Hat too.

I do love this business, and this side of the coin is new to me. Being just the actor in film and TV is cake. Everything is done for you. All the actor does is show up and do his work and become famous. Doing both, has opened my eyes to the nature of the beast and has only increased my love for the art even more.

Executive Producer

So, Adam and I are now executive producers.

It's definitely the best job title I've ever had, but rather than the fat paycheck I envisioned it would bring with it, the title is costing me a shit load of money right now.

Between plane tickets to LA, incorporation fees, accountant and legal fees, Web design fees (more on that later) and the other miscellaneous crap associated with the gig, the expenses are mounting, and we haven't even come close to getting actual production off the ground.

We tell people we are in "pre-production" mode, but I don't even know if we've gotten far enough to legally call it that. Is there such thing as pre-pre-production?

We have a script, a director, and a cast.

We also have $11k raised to get this off the ground.

That's a good start. But we have a long way to go.

Per the schedule, we're supposed to start seriously going after investors in November, but we can't do that until all our accounting crap is straightened out.

Also, we have to put together the contracts, business plan outlines, and some sort of slick marketing materials to highlight what we've got going on here.

But should my whining be interpreted as a negative spin, that's not how I feel about the project at all.

It's the most exciting thing I've ever done.

It feels great to take control of the project. I'm actually enjoying mixing the business with the art.

It's a whole new world for me -- blending elements of my professional life (as a finance stooge) with my lifelong dream.

It's gonna happen.

But it's not gonna be easy.

Nothing truly worthwhile ever is though.

What is Starbox?

Starbox Productions is a recently incorporated production company that has even more recently spawned Starbox Pictures -- our feature motion picture wing, which is in the first trimester of gestation of our first feature-length motion picture: "Suicide Squad."

As you can tell by that first sentence, we at Starbox pride ourselves on our extensive use of varied forms of punctuation.

Depending on how you look at it, I am either 4 months or 33 years late on starting this blog, which I (we) plan to use to chronicle the misadventures of a couple of first-time movie producers as we plod our way through the conoluted maze of writing, casting, financing, and ultimately assembling our baby.

Who am I?

I am a former journalist and current finance geek at a technology company, who's long had a hankering for the craft of spinning yarns and collecting rejection letters from the finest publishing houses in the continental United States.

Who are we?

We are the misguided, misunderstood, misplaced, and misanthropic force behind the Star box.

The other half of we is my cousin Adam Hatley, whose hankerin' for acting is as strong as mine for writing.

What the hell are we doing?

We're making a movie.

History of Starbox

Adam recently competed in the ubercheesey "Mr. Romance" surreality TV show on the Oxygen Network. Adam competed against a bevy of wannabe Fabios for the title of Mr. Romance. Adam was a staunch competitor, but ultimately lost to a gargantuan man, who will soon be appearing on the cover of romance novels.

While Adam didn't win the contest, he and co-contestant Tom "TJ" Jones were popular contestants on the show -- catching the producers' eyes with their devious plots and caustic wit.

While Mr. Romance was still airing, Adam, TJ, and I worked with the development team at Oxygen in an attempt to capitalize on the popularity the two had gained during their run on the show. While we never managed to get anything off the ground with Oxygen, this got us moving in a unified direction -- attempting to pool each of our resources to create some form of entertainment.

We started small by doing puppet shows at street fairs throughout Central Europe for most of the summer months. We crafted highly detailed puppets from bars of soap and bits of tin foil, and wrote elaborate operatic scripts for the puppets to act out. Several weeks in to our puppet theater run, a kindly street vendor from the Ukraine suggested that maybe we were thinking too small with the soap puppets.

"You boys should go to Hollywood," he suggested.

So we loaded up the truck, and ...

right.

Decided to retire the soap puppets and take on this whole independent film thing all the kids are talking about these days.

In the months following our falilng out with the fine gals at Oxygen, it has been suggested that the European soap puppet tour was nothing more than a figment of our hallucinogen-adled minds, and that we really spent the time lying on our backs in a crappy apartment in North Memphis, drinking Bud Light and playing balloon volleyball -- a game with much more elaborate rules than one might imagine (e.g. the balloon is in play if it bounces off the coffee table, but not in play if it bounces off the couch, UNLESS it hits both the couch and the recliner, but not the coffee table).

It has further been suggested that it was in one of these mid-afternoon drunken balloon volleyball matches that Adam might have said something like, "What if we wrote a movie completely set in one location? Like an abandoned barn or something. We could put a bunch of young, hip intellectuals in a barn in the middle of nowhere, and have them kill themselves."

And if that is how it might have happened, then those three sentences might have been the nucleus of "Suicide Squad."

But I'm only guessing at this point.

My God, it's full of stars.

Coming soon.