Other Sites

The problem with making a movie is that it's difficult to make a movie. I'm not talking about the technical aspect of it, I'm talking about the people aspect. I have the equipment, as we've discussed in earlier entries of this column. I have the scripts. I'm a writer, after all...I have plenty of scripts. Most of them aren't worth filming, but did that stop the producers of The Lady in the Water?

I used to have a cast. When I was attending college in early 90s, I had a comedy troupe. I had no shortage of people who would've been thrilled to waste their study time filming a movie about a car that magically produces the object of the driver's desire under the seat. I had a good group of friends in New York City in the mid-90s who did help me film shorts about cheese and cracker revolutions. The trouble with friends in New York, though, is that we all eventually move away from New York.

I'm now married. I have two kids under the age of three. The nearest friend I have who'd be willing to spend time on a movie project (and who'd be any good at it) lives about 175 miles away. Not very convenient for a multiple day shoot.

So, what's a man to do when he's not able to effectively write in a column he co-created? Change the rules. If I can't cast a movie, I'll get someone else to cast it. And if I can't make a movie, I'll make a play. Problem solved. Do what I can do, control what I can control, and let someone else worry about actually dealing with, you know, people.

And so, my first entries in myMovie won't be so much about the process of making a movie, but about how you can use your Macintosh to market your movie. To support it. To give you something to do while your cast members are memorizing their lines and pretending to get along with one another.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Spoon Millionaires. The play for a newer, meaner millennium. One ton of comedic muscle with a one-track mind. Spoon Millionaires. Just like Snakes on A Plane. Without the snakes.

Or the plane.

Spoon Millionaires is an updated version of a play I wrote back in college for my comedy troupe. Over a couple months this past winter, my comedy troupe co-founder, Jim Jividen, and I e-mailed the play back and forth from Ohio to Florida to get and suggest ideas and jokes.

Tip #1: For all you co-authors out there...make sure you work with compatible software. I used Final Draft on the Mac to write the script, but Jim didn't have it on his PC. Final Draft (and Mac OS X, of course) allow you to save/print to PDF, which is how I sent it to Jim. He'd open the PDF in Word, I guess, make his changes and send them back, which I would then open in Nisus Writer and copy/paste into Final Draft. Obviously, this was a mess, especially considering Final Draft's inability to cleanly paste text from a different application. Should we do this again, Jim will be buying a version of Final Draft. The Mac and PC versions are friendly with one another, you can leave notes for the other authors and track revisions, and it contains the ability for us to go online and make changes to the document in real time. Very handy, and Final Draft is a much better option for screen writing than are any word processors out there. For more information, read the Applelinks review.

This spring, we submitted the play to Lima Playfair in Lima, Ohio? Why Lima? The reasons are many, and they're all equal in their unimportance. Suffice it to say the play was accepted, and production began.

Kind of. It took them forever to get the cast. (Apparently I'm not the only one with this problem...where are all you actors going to these days? I thought reality shows were putting you out of work. Do my show, bee-yotch! Certainly, it's better than another Pepcid AC commercial, right?) During that downtime, Jim and I focused on marketing. What else was there to do? Step one, of course, was a website. And that's where I'll end this entry. It probably won't be helpful to most of you, anyway, as I'm a web developer by trade and have access to the tools and skills many playwrights won't, I'd assume. I used a combination of Photoshop and Dreamweaver to create www.spoonmillionaires.com. We registered with domain name with Network Solutions, set up hosting Applelinks, of course, and got to steppin'.

When Jim suggested he should do a production blog (because, as we say on the site, who better to do a production blog than the guy living a thousand miles away from the theater), I knew it was time to turn to iWeb's blogging feature. Apple makes it easy, after all, right? Well, that's a little bit yes and a little bit no. I'll cover that within the next few days. In the meantime, do your homework and head on over to see what we'll be talking about. Yes, I'm here to learn you, but I'm also not above shameless promotion.

Back to myMovie.