Somewhere in the 1990′s my husband John was studying film at Columbia College Chicago after departing a chemistry program at Oberlin. (“I was always protesting apartheid, I couldn’t concentrate,” he would tell me.)
Over the weekend as I was raking my way through what production contracts look like, and just generally trying to learn the legal and insurance ropes of independent filmmaking– John plunked a giant three ring binder on my lap salvaged from our waterlogged garage.
The cover listed him as executive producer of a feature length film being produced locally. I start raking through pages of production schedules, lease agreements for locations, actor resumes, point splits, bleeding scripts and vendor lists for Eastman Kodak film stock.
When I press my husband for details on his film career of yesteryear (he’s a big shot IT consultant now working for the government) he kind of scrunches up his nose and folds his arms. He doesn’t want to talk about it.
We muse sometimes about the vastly different production methods of 15 years ago, and he tells me I’m spoiled. (Since we’re being honest here, I had to actually admit in an interview I had never loaded a DV tape, or pulled anything from it. Everything I had used up to that point ran on a hard drive. And of course, last week when I was searching video archives and had to ask our director what a beta tape was.) We giggle about VHS and why public access used to be such an asset (it made high cost production goods available for everyone) and has now been replaced by any kid with a cell phone uploading shows to Youtube. I mean, this stuff is cheap. Do you know how cheap it is to make a movie?
I quote a prophetic Cameron Crowe on this one: “In the future, everybody is going to be a director. Somebody’s got to live a real life so we have something to make a movie about.”
(And cut me some slack, I’m conjuring Pre-Elizabethtown Cameron.)
So I ask John as I thumb the pages of the production binder, “do you have any advice for me?”
‘Yeah. Don’t go into film.”
That’s a picture of me finishing off this awesome newroom desk that I used for a show on public access television. I made it out of thin plywood, for roundness and portability. It was basically the ugliest thing on earth, second only to my hairdo.