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Chris Moore - "Stolen Summer" Budget
So Friday you got my thoughts on budgeting of movies in general. Here are more detailed facts, thoughts, and nightmares about the specific budget of "Stolen Summer." First of all, please go look in the Paper Trail archive for the Top 10 Budget Analysis written by Pat Peach. This memo was part of what we used to pick the winner. It clearly shows that Pat, the guy hired by Miramax to budget the films, thought that "Stolen Summer" cost $2.4 million. If you watched Episode 1 you also saw that Meryl and Jon were in the meeting and agreed on Pete's movie. So, for the record, my complaining and pushing on Miramax was that they knew, in the form of Jon and Meryl, that the movie cost at least $2 million and yet in this week's episode you hear and see them make us budget it for $1 million. Bullshit.
But this is how budgeting goes. Nothing is real until the money is in the bank. So what is wrong with Pete's script? Why $2 million? A number of things contributed to the problem. First and foremost, this script is a drama, which means a performance piece. This means a movie all about the performance of the actors. Do you like the characters and do you believe and care about them? The good side of this is that talking heads on film costs less. The bad news is Pete had many characters. Pete had great characters so it was going to take time to get the characters right. And Pete had kids at the center of the movie. So time to rehearse and shoot many takes to get a scene right is hard to come by on a low budget. Many characters means you need to cover many actors in all the scenes so it takes longer and we shoot more film. Both these things cost money. Finally, kids just take longer and they have much shorter hours to work as minors. They also have handlers, parents, teachers, and safety issues. So it is not just the kids themselves increasing cost but all the things that come with kids as actors. In Pete's movie, they are in almost every scene.
Next problem was Chicago. Pete wanted to shoot there. Pete wanted his film to look "authentic Chicago." So the art department had to find a place that looked Chicago and plan to fake other places as Chicago. Furthermore it was a period movie, 1976. This effects the art department and the look of the rooms, cars, and buildings. It affects wardrobe because everyone has to look like they are in the 70's. It also affects make-up because there needs to be different hairstyles. All additional costs. As if this was not enough budget inflation, 1976 and Chicago meant that product placement deals where we could have saved money were basically impossible because no one wants to showcase their products from the 70's. So no free props or wardrobe or art department or cars.
Pete also had some big scenes in the movie. Kids swimming in Lake Michigan, which comes up later in the show, a big fire, and two recognizable religious buildings: a catholic church and a synagogue. The big scenes and the big locations required extra bodies and extra time. Stunt and safety people needed to be around for the fire and lake. Many doubles of actors and actors' clothing has to be available so we do not lose anything. Training time is necessary for the actors and the camera people. Sometimes, not in this case, extra cameras are used to film big action scenes that use things like water or fire.
This is all the budget stuff directly linked to Pete's script. Then there is the normal budgeting process, film, time, locations, bodies, and equipment. Here Pete was a little aggressive because he and Biagi, the DP, got really psyched about some big camera shots. Moving cars, cranes and dollies. Biagi is a real shooter and the film looks great but his shooting and lighting time really cut into the acting time, so there was constant tension. There were also a bunch of locations, "Little Pete's" house, which had many rooms inside, "Danny's" house, the hospital, synagogue office, Catholic church kitchen, beach, train tracks, driving shots on streets, baseball field (with more kids by the way), firehouse, fire trucks, burning building. Funeral homes. Just too many places for a one million dollar movie.
Finally, Pete's script was a little long. But as you started to see this week, he fought (and rightly so at this stage) against any real cuts. However, by the time the movie comes out you will see how some scenes never made it in the actual movie. A long script means many pages must be shot each day. On average you want one to three pages a day. "Good Will Hunting" and "American Pie" went that way. But, with "Stolen Summer" we needed six to eight pages a day. Tough to do well.
So the fights you are seeing are real. They are mostly due to the appetite of the filmmakers (of which I was one) and the realities of the script. Jon Gordon and Michelle Sy really supported us on the film. But as I said Friday, you can always spend more money. Follow this budget drama as it unfolds.
I also want to talk about notes. We have a bunch of sets of notes on the site for you to check out and you should. Some notes are designed to cut the budget, but a lot are purely creative. Jeff's questioning of the "pray to Danny" scene at the end of the movie and my desire for a Danny shiva are creative notes, not budget. Shooting the lake scene in the pool is budget. Miramax wanted the lake but just thought it was not worth the money. So script notes reflect changes or cuts that are suggested by the studio or the producers for both budgetary and creative reasons.
I am going to end on a personal note, which is that I rode Pete hard at times this week -- particularly about not taking notes, and I was hard on his script. I did this to try and make Pete understand the frustrations to come. Will he really be able to shoot a scene he wrote the way he wants? When he is sitting in a theater with 400 strangers will he like that scene as much as he did alone in front of his computer in his underwear? These were awful experiences for me. I believe that making hard decisions before shooting and before editing really help a movie. Having sat in the audience of my own movies, having been on the set and watching the shooting of a scene and realizing it is boring to watch or not natural for the actors or just plain not needed, I wanted Pete to get some of that perspective. I am sure he has it now.
So please understand my motivations as we move on through the episodes.
As always thanks for reading . . .
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