Thursday, June 14, 2012

NOVEMBER GIRL

I'm finally getting caught up on things.  Sad to say that I had to stop production of November Girl.  There were several reasons why I had to stop and it was a pretty tough decision.  For the most part it felt so good and there seemed to be genuine interest in the project.  I was waiting outside the studio one morning and one of the managers of Uptown Bill's stopped and asked about it.  He was so impressed he gave me his business card and told me to contact him when we were done and we'd try and set some event up with them.  That was great.  Unfortunately there were to many obstacles.
One was the problems with getting actors who would commit to the production.  I had a few of them who agreed to do it and seemed very excited about it but when it came to actually spending time they were just too busy and dropped out.  One guy I work with was going to do one scene for one day.  he only had a few lines and he thought it would be fun.  For reasons I'll never understand his wife got worried that there would be something in the film that got them in to trouble.  What?  She wanted to read the script and see what it was about so I gave them the script for the first episode.  That wasn't enough and she wanted to read the whole script.  I don't know what she thought was in there but I felt uncomfortable having to get script approval from someone I didn't know just so he could do a few lines.  His character didn't even have a name.  It was pretty ridiculous and he dropped out to make his wife happy.  There were all sorts of problems like that and after 5 weeks of work I still had almost no footage to show for it.  I finally had a heart to heart talk with one of the actresses and she admitted that, had she known it would be so complex, she wouldn't have agreed to do it in the first place.  She was polite about it but it was obvious she couldn't give it the dedication it needed.  My only choice was to suspend the project for now.
I haven't given up on it, I still believe this has the potential for being a very successful series, but I've put it on the shelf for a while.  Maybe in fall when there is a new group of actors at UI I'll start it up again.  I'll have to start from scratch, there is no way to use the footage we shot with a recast, and hopefully I'll find someone who lives in Iowa City who'll help out.  It would just be much easier to set up the locations if there was someone who lived in town and didn't have to make a big trip.
In the mean time I've entered the script in the Land Locked Film Festival in October.  I've also submitted it to Trigger Street labs which is a site set up by actor Kevin Spacey to help people promote their work.  I'm also looking to see if there are other possibilities.
Will, hopefully, have some good news in the future.
Not really sure what my next project will be.  Everyone at PATV has been very supportive and I want to do more there.  I've had a few ideas but nothing has really got me excited yet. 

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