Blog

The last setback I faced when I attended my first film festival was probably the biggest, and ultimately something that was out of my control.

When I had first bought the pass to attend the concert, the latest writer’s strike had just gotten underway. While the Writer’s Guild of America was on strike, writers couldn’t discuss their current projects, and they most certainly couldn’t make deals with anyone in the business.

The main goal of attending these film festivals was that it would be a great chance to network with people in the industry. Only now that the strike was in effect, I was barred from doing so, because if the WGA ever found out that I had crossed the picket line to negotiate a deal, effectively working behind the back of the guild for my own gain, I would be blacklisted in the industry and no studio would ever work with me again, as the WGA would refuse to work with any of them if they worked with me.

The strike began before the festival started, so I held out some hope that the issues would be resolved before the start of the festival. I also felt that even if it was ongoing, it would be good to dip my toes into the festival scene, to get a sense of how they operated and what to expect, so that when the strike was over, I’d be comfortable enough with the format and what to do and who to talk with to network effectively.

It was just a bummer I couldn’t strive for these goals my first time out.

The quest to pick up my pass to actually attend the film festival didn’t clue me in to the main challenge that would bog me the rest of the day. As it would turn out, the movie pass wasn’t the only thing I would have to drive for.

It’s not uncommon for a film festival to have movies playing in multiple locations. In all three of the festivals that I had attended, there were multiple locations that were screening the movies. But the different theaters that were booked to play movies were often in relatively the same spot. For instance, when I went to the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) later that fall, while there were about 4 or 5 movie theaters that were playing the films submitted that year, they were confined to the same general area, the theater district.

This disbursement makes sense because this way one theater wasn’t forgoing all the new releases the play the film festival. Or looking at it from the reverse side, no one theater gets a monopoly on playing the film festival, as well as the promotion and fanfare that comes with it. Actors, directors, producers do attend these events, so spreading this about allows multiple theaters to benefit from the buzz of the festivals, while also not losing out on business if new releases are really strong during the weekend the festival is going on.

This festival…took it to an extreme.

THE extreme.

There were four different locations that were playing movies for the festival. Only one of them was a movie theater.

I’m not completely positive why all of these films weren’t shown at the actual movie theater. With four locations, they would have only needed four screens, and this theater did seem like it would be able to accommodate that for a weekend. Or, short of that, having a couple of screens booked, and maybe only other location, that could perhaps have multiple rooms that could play movies would have been good too. But maybe the theater was only willing to allow the festival to book one screen.

Either way, what they came up with was the worst possible solution.

Four locations – only one of them an actual theater – ALL of them a roughly twenty minute drive – AT LEAST – from each other.

I didn’t even notice how bad this was at first because the first movie I saw was at one of the closest locations to my hotel room, and a MUCH shorter drive in comparison to the trek I made in the morning just to get the pass.

But as the day went on, and I realized I needed to factor in an additional half hour in between each screening just to allow myself time to get to the next location – because of the movies that interested me, none were in the same place for consecutive showings – this added up to a lot of mileage and a really long day. I ended up skipping a movie in the middle of the day because there was no way I’d be able to make it for the start of the showing, and to be honest, I could already see I just didn’t have it in me to make the drive to jump right into another feature.

Also keep in mind that every time I parked, because this was in an area I was unfamiliar with, I definitely was locking my car, which as you might recall from previous post did work, but would trigger the car’s alarm every time I unlocked the doors. This ended up becoming such a long day, and I was absolutely ready for sleep by the time I crawled into bed.

The trials and tribulations I experienced attending my first film festival started right away when I needed to get my pass to attend the screenings. Some of this challenge was due to my own circumstances, as I didn’t have a working printer at the time and couldn’t print out a digital ticket, so I was left with picking up a physical pass that would allow me to watch the different films. I believe the option I went to – which was overly optimistic when I was planning out the excursion – was an all weekend pass, to avoid having to continually pay each time I wanted to see a movie, might not have allowed a digital pass anyway.

I figured this would be easy enough – just go to the location that was hosting the film festival. This should have been my first sign that things were going to be a bit challenging.

For this particular film festival, there wasn’t a central location. Movies in the festival were being played in multiple locations, which is not uncommon for these events.

However, the film passes weren’t being distributed at the locations playing the movies. They were being held at local businesses that had agreed to participate in holding them until the purchasers of the passes arrived to collect them.

As I said, this should have been a warning.

What’s more, these local businesses were not on the strip of road in between some of the locations that were screening the films (more on that in next week’s post). They were scattered all around the town, and even neighboring towns, which required hopping on some of the highways for a few minutes. It was about a fifteen minute just to get to the coffee shop that seemed to be the closest to the hotel I was staying at.

This should have also been a warning of things to come.

When I arrived at the shop, which was serving customers when I first entered, there wasn’t any signage confirming that the movie passes were being held in the location. And when I talked with the cashier, and sheepishly went through the “I bought a pass to a film festival and was told I could pick it up here,” they of course didn’t know what I was talking about, and had to talk to the manager.

The manager knew about the tickets, but still, this wasn’t a great start. This was my first experience with a film festival, and this was the first thing I did that day.

They did have passes for people to pick up, and although I had some concern because passes were just dropped off at this location, and there was no way to verify who was picking up passes from which location, so there was the possibility someone could just buy one pass, then go to each location, pick up one of the passes, get scratched off each list, but have multiple passes which could create a situation where all the passes would’ve been picked up before people showing up a day into the festival like me would be able to get theirs, ultimately having me walk away empty handed, I was content that I had gotten mine and would be able to attend the films I wanted to.

As I mentioned last week, my car alarm went off every time I unlocked it and opened the door, so after doing this and drawing some stares from the street I parked on, I got in my car and made the return fifteen to twenty minute drive back to my hotel to settle on which films I was going to watch that day.

This action was going to lead to the bigger challenges I faced the rest of the day.

I attended my first ever film festival in Long Beach Island, New Jersey when I bought tickets for the Lighthouse International Film Festival. I didn’t know what exactly to expect, so this smaller festival was a good one to dip my toes into for that reason.

It gave me a good sense of what to expect for film festivals going forward, and because the other two I ended up going to that year were much bigger, it was nice to get a feel for them on a smaller scale.

I learned it was wise to arrive about twenty to thirty minutes before they would start seating you. Yes, this did mean standing for that amount of time, but it also meant getting in sooner and seats – in general, but also better seats – were more readily available. This also avoiding the bad etiquette or arriving late or even from being barred entry because the film had already started.

I learned that the director was often there for the screening of the films and typically would both introduce it and participate in a Q & A after the film was done. I got my first taste of scheduling out my day to watch movies. It was a full weekend, but after work, running a mile as part of my conditioning for marathon training, and then the drive to southern New Jersey, I arrived late Friday night, and with my hotel room only being booked until noon on Sunday, when the earliest movies would be only halfway done, and driving a car that I couldn’t lock the doors without the alarms going off every time I unlocked them and open the door for the first time, I decided to focus on just the Saturday showings.

As of this post, this is still the most number of movies I’ve seen in a theater in one day, not just for film festivals, but even just going to the movies in general.

But even though it was small in comparative size to the later competitions that I would attend, but that did not mean it was without its challenges. In fact, I’d say that I had more challenges in this film festival than the other two combined.

I’ll ignore the inability to lock the car doors without the alarms going off as that was an issue I had beyond the film festival, and one that persisted until the car died. I will however include the start of the trip itself, which was driving into the heart of the thick smoke that was going through New York at the time. The smoke had actually made it all the way upstate to where I lived, to the point where I had to keep my windows closed and didn’t like going outside for more than a few minutes. Because of this festival’s location, I had to drive towards it, and the thickness and smell just got worse the closer I got to the location, which I could’ve avoided altogether if I didn’t go.

The thing is, I don’t even think this would make it onto the podium of challenges that lay ahead for me that weekend.

I’ll start to go into them, next time.

It wasn’t easy making the decision to no longer pursue adapting Dig Down into a screenplay as my first screenwriting credit. I had been following this path of adapting my first two novellas into scripts for about two years at this point, and while I had placed as a finalist a few times in some screenwriting contests, after this Zoom call discussing my script, I understood that this was as far as I was going to be able to take these stories in their current state.

So that left me with an important question I had to find the answer to…

Where do I go from here?

At the time, I felt I had the makings of a new story, one that would actually be the length of an average novel. But while I liked the story I was outlining, I also knew that I would be under the same time constraints to write it as I had been experiencing last year. I also knew writing and self-publishing another book wouldn’t generate attention alone. Part of the appeal of writing screenplays, in addition to being quicker to write than novels, was that if they were optioned, the audiences they could reach were more likely to be bigger, and this in turn could finally draw attention to the books I had already published.

But where did that leave me? I felt trying to adapt I’m Not My Father was likely to lead me to the same destination, collecting some accolades, but hitting the same ceiling because judge’s would recognize it as an adaptation of a book.

I didn’t reach the conclusion right then and there, but the seed for what I would do next was ultimately planted in response to this question. The course of action was to come up with a new story. Not the book I was planning to write next. A story that I was specifically going to write as a screenplay. This would help me avoid the pitfalls I was experiencing from trying to adapt from a story I’d already written in a different medium.

For the first time in over 15 years, I’d be writing a story with the intent that it would be a screenplay. If I was going to make an adaptation in the future, it would be from a screenplay instead of to one.

But I’ll have more on that later.

Because the next thing I did in my screenwriting journey was attend film festivals.

After some time had passed after my second script consultation for my screenplay of Dig Down, I felt I had two options in front of me for what to do next. Despite all the critiques in this Zoom call, I felt the clear lion’s share of them were constructive and would enhance my screenplay, but that in doing so, I’d have to make more than just some superficial changes to the story.

I understood that this was a different medium, and as such, changes would need to be made if it was going to thrive in this adaptation. But a lot of changes that were suggested were going to have huge impacts on the story, changing key components that readers had said had really resonated with them. The major one that comes to mind was the suggestion of showing off Rob’s genius or his master plan of getting out of his predicaments. A note like that tells me the character wasn’t understood. And it was unlikely revisions would help that along, as there was also the note to shorted it by about 20 pages to 90 total.

But another option came to mind.

And it was actually in line with what the first judge from the Page Turner screenplay competition had said.

The similar advice both had said was to have people come to me with the offer to make the story a movie, rather than me pitching it to them.

Now, the way they posed it was different. The Page Turner judge was talking about it in the context of my books when I had said I was looking at getting a screenplay turned into a movie to drive sales for the book. I was essentially saying my driving goal for the script was to promote the book. He said that if I could get the book sales, I would have people coming to me make the move. He was essentially saying the book sales could promote the move.

The Santa Barbara judge was demonstrating ways in which the script could be pared down. They gave some good examples where the objective of the scene had been reached, but that it kept going, because that was how the scene/chapter had gone in the book. While they were insistent that this was the way to craft the screenplay – and at the time, and even more so with time to think on it, I can see they were right – they also said I could write it my way if the studio was coming to me for a script, or an actor, essentially anybody with some pull, because then it was my story that was in demand instead of being pitched.

This felt like the option for me. I could understand the need to make changes to the script I had worked on for Dig Down. The advice given in the second script consultation with the judge from Santa Barbara was excellent, and not in any of the books on screenwriting I had read, but making all of those changes I felt would lead to a story so vastly different from my vision for it. And if I’m being honest, too different.

Somebody could make an adaptation of Dig Down under these parameters, but I wouldn’t be the best one to make them. If I was going to be involved in the screenplay adaptation of Dig Down, it would need revisions like the Santa Barbara judge had suggested, but not to the scale he was recommending. It would need to be a scenario where the sales for the book were at a point where people were coming to me with the goal of adapting the story to the screen, and that would allow me to keep the story as closely aligned with my vision for it as possible.

I’ll explain where that left me, next time.