Squeezing Success from Bone-Dry Failure

I spent nearly a decade trying to get a film made. Thankfully, it didn't work.

In a speech given to a small music conservatory, Estonian composer Arvo Pärt once recalled a long-ago day he spent writing music at a nearby monastery. He sat on a bench, in the shade of trees and the church, to write a new score in the monastery’s shadow while praying for inspiration. But no notes came to him. The page remained dry.

When a child asked Pärt what he was working on, sensing, as children often do, that the adult was open to distraction, he replied, “I am trying to write music… but it is not turning out well.” The girl, only ten years old, said a few words that changed the arc of his work forever: “have you thanked God for this failure already?”

I suppose my own thanks are imminent, because Lordy have I failed. Last year, I set out to finance and direct my first feature film, a sci-fi romance titled When You Became Us. So much of an artist’s life is uncertain, and filmmakers are no exception. After the dual strike and the cancellation of the show I wrote on, and gutting of the writers’ labor market by AI, waiting for a good job to fall into my life seemed idiotic. I had an arsenal of skills, scripts, and collaborators I’d spent a decade developing. Time to quit waiting for Hollywood to give me a shot and start calling my own.

I sketched the first notes for When You Became Us in 2015. It was the script that got me into a TV writers’ room and formed the basis of my first short. I believed in it, and so did the people I loved. So I knocked on every door I’d encountered in my decade of professional filmmaking, and spent what little money I had on marketing materials. Wrote a 40 page financial prospectus, drafted pitch materials, made a budget, scouted locations, and called agents and actors. Re-wrote the script to shoot in Pittsburgh, PA after some encouraging calls from investors and non-profits. I told anyone who listened that this was it, this was the big bet on myself that my career had built towards for ten years. The self-help TikToks were right— you only succeed by manifesting your dreams, or something. The goal was to raise $1.8 million — not a small amount of money, but miniscule by modern film standards.

By the end of the year, I’d raised $50k.

I was rejected across town and across the pond (in the form of a particulaly brutal “no” by a European agent), and had exhausted even our “long-shot” tier of potential financiers. There was some hope, but life intervened at every juncture: the number of “coulda-beens” and “close-but-not-quites” might have worked if filmmaking was a game of horseshoes, but it wasn’t going cut it when making a movie. After the LA fires, the gutting of scientific research dollars, and several thousand saccharine “we’ll be in touches,” I sat down with my family and fiance and took and honest look at the feasibility of getting this film made, vs. the very real need to get a job. The answer was obvious; the movie was shelved. I picked up a copywriting job and went back to bartending.

As creatives are wont to do, I took this personally. For long stretches of the fall, I seriously believed the last decade of my life had been a delusional, self-sabotaging boondoggle (more specifically, I felt like I my life was a round of the N64 classic Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 where, having eaten shit on the first 2-3 tricks, I was now hopelessly behind and wishing I could hit the retry button). I know you can’t tie your personal worth into the worth of your work. Doesn’t mean I don’t do it, sometime.

Honestly, being able to turn down the volume of various parts of my life sounds pretty good, too.

The funny thing about delusion, however, is that it can get your out of the doldrums just as quickly as it can get you in. I’ll let others decide if that’s a healthy trade-of. But, after a few months of self-pity and fruitless handwringing, the wounds began to cauterize. Pity turned to anger, anger turned into action, action turned into options. A startling clarity emerged— the carved relief of my life made far sharper by the deep shadows of failure. In the last 8 months, I wrote two scripts. The first attached to a group of producers I know and trust, and is now off to the races in their capable hands. But the second…

The second script will become my next first feature film. It’s a B-movie take on the biblical tale of Abraham and Isaac, who face off with a motel in the desert that literally drinks blood. You know, classic low-budget horror stuff. Fueled by rage for the current state of the world, sadness for the young men falling prey to political forces who use and abuse them, and my own insecurities, I titled the film Gulf of America.

This time, the budget is under $500k, there are only four main actors, and everything takes place at one incredible movie set deep in the sands of central California. Cautiously (“fool me once,” and all) I went back to a few of the investors from my doomed first effort. I admited my mistakes, re-affirmed my commitment to a great film and belief I had the skills to do it, and explained how everything I’d learned from my first round knockout informed this new bout. Gulf of America was a chance to lower the stakes, move the goalposts a little closer, and get a movie made. And…

Welcome to the soon-to-be Moriah Motel

… two days ago, I secured a third of our budget!

So here we go again, delusion be damned— hitting “continue” and “retry” all at the same time. We’re making a movie, and we want you to come along for the ride. It may flame out before we leave the driveway again, but at least I’ll be able to see it coming. And, if you decide to tag along on this gonzo desert road trip, you can look forward to…

1. A live look at the making of a independent film, from financing to final cut

2. Strategies for writing a script that is actually low-budget;

3. Tips on crafting a budget that you can actually stick to;

4. A blueprint for building investors deck and financial prospectuses;

5. Practical, business-first advice for filmmakers that you should know ASAP;

6. Semi-manic mediations on the highs and lows of independent filmmaking as a career;

7. Behind-the-scenes photos, tips, tricks, and insights.

As this second effort continues on Substack, I’m going to spend a lot of time writing about how, and why, is the right project for me to tackle, and why When You Became Us was not. But I would not have gotten to Gulf of America without first surviving the grueling decade I spent on my ill-fated sci-fi flick. I failed, plain and simple.

Thank God for that.