“Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.” – Oscar Wilde
The story of new filmmaker Jacob Medjuck and his first self-produced feature, Summerhood, was featured in the January/February 2009 issue of Creative Screenwriting magazine. Mr. Medjuck’s story is both inspiring and cautionary.
After a 30 day shoot for a movie funded by 44 private investors, Mr. Medjuck claims the first cut of Summerhood was as long as “all three Godfather films put together.” Obvious exaggeration aside, his shooting script was a lengthy 130 pages, not a single word of which was offered for the investors’ approval.
The auteur laments of his herculean task in post-production of rewriting the movie, something he advises others to do at the appropriate time of pre-production. The story and ending changed in post along with the dismissing of two central characters which he had to digitally remove from several scenes.
My post-production for Horror House lasted much longer than I anticipated or wanted to tolerate. The major setbacks were due to technology, the troubleshooting for which I have little to no patience. I can’t imagine going through what Mr. Medjuck went through in digitally removing characters and changing the entire movie in post. Horror House, for all its imperfections, is at least a coherent story with no irrelevant scenes. Of course there are scenes I’d change a bit if I could – a result of my obsessive self-loathing perfectionism – but outside of one tiny scene I dropped in editing, the finished movie is the movie we shot. Preparation saved us from extraneous production which saved us money.
Horror House worked on the whole because we took the time to write and rewrite the screenplay a number of times. But… it should have been rewritten again. Nothing too significant, but the differences between a good movie and a great movie are rarely major.
The best place to start addressing those minor tweaks and adjustments is in the screenwriting phase where a delete key can be the needed messiah for your movie. Why mediocre screenplays are continually made into bad movies is beyond me.
Just to be clear, I am not claiming Horror House would have been a great movie with one or more rewrites of the screenplay. It could have been better than it is, but greatness was pretty much out of our reach. We simply lacked the budget, equipment, and resources to achieve the level for which I ultimately aspire. Then again, I hate excuses…
2 comments:
Great post and very wise. I admire that you're one to learn from "mistakes". It bothers me when filmmakers don't understand why things went wrong or why things don't work out because they think they're the next big thing. To become the next big thing you better become humble and start looking at what you can do to improve your own game. I think you're on to it...keep it up! And wouldn't it be nice to have a big budget...someday:)
Absolutely right, Brooke. Lack of self-awareness and self-criticism is certain doom on this path!
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