Development Hell is the worst place to be. It seems, sometimes, you can only inch backward, rather than forward, and every day truly tests your love for what you are doing as the money needed to survive becomes more and more scarce. For myself, especially, having hitched my wagon, so long ago, to the never-ending zombie western project that eventually became “GallowWalker”, which the new producers seem to have found loopholes where they can continue working the project to a point where it is bankable (or at least keep Mr. Snipes out of jail) without having to pay members of the original crew.
Kudos! Well done!
Anyway, we try, desperately to do what we can do to get the whole cycle started all over again and make new films and hopefully a couple of bucks so we can survive until the next one. Yeah, many mornings I wake up and ask myself “why?” and then I break off from my work for the day or endless Grand Theft Auto deathmatches (gamertag “gallowwalker” naturally) and re-watch some classic like “Dog Day Afternoon” (as I did last night) and I remember why we all try so hard against unbeatable odds to try and commit images I celluloid (or bits to some hard drive).
“ef”, Joanne Reay’s project and hopefully her first directorial effort seems to be progressing well, despite daily headaches. Right now, with what seems to be the pefect version of the script complete, some star casting needs to be in place before investors will kick in the cash required to be able to focus beyond where mortgage and food money will come from, which is a difficult road in itself, with a project as offbeat as this one.
Andrew Goth has moved on from the tortures of “GallowWalker” and is currently trying to get his own script (his first since the Bafta-winning “Everybody Loves Sunshine”) “Daniel Mann” into production in Hollywood. It’s a terrific read and a video game fan’s dream. I know he can make a fantastic film out of it. I did some initial concept work on of awhile ago, which you can find here.
I myself cling to the foolish hope that if I draw enough pictures and scribble enough words, somehow a movie will result, and my current exercise in futility is called “Shivering Kings”. It comes from the urge to make an old-fashioned horror film, you know, one with characters and sitiations that the viewer gets wrapped up in rather than bland, two-dimensional stereotypes that spend their time reacting to cats jumping out of closets, or trying to wrap their mouths around a concept that’s so high they wouldn’t be able to reach of with the tallest ladder.
“Shivering Kings” developed from an original idea I was frittering away with about a pack of demon dogs that wreak havoc on a group of interesting characters, but I hit the wall and exhausted my options before I managed to make it interesting enough to invest in. Joanne Reay had a throw-away concept that she wasn’t particularily interested in developing which seemed to fit perfectly with what I had in mind, so she let me play with it. Its concept is a little high for my tastes, but even though the setting and situations have changed, I was able to retain the core ideas and several characters from my “dog script”.
At Joanne’s urging, I put together some concept art, even though the script is still in a very raw state. It turned out to be a great exercise, as I had a crapload if ideas as I was working on the drawings that I probably wouldn’t have had if I was working with words alone.
Anyway, you can find some of that artwork here. I’m going to try and plot the development (or who knows, maybe eventual death) of that project on this site, so, as always, stay tuned.
Where do we go from here? Who knows. Everybody says that something’s going to happen soon, but beyond deluding myself with constantly creating what I can, I can’t be sure. With the full and complete collspse of “GallowWalker” after we all virtually poured our souls into it, it’s hard to find a reason to go through all of that again. All I know is that we all want to make movies and need some reason to wake up in the morning, so we keep trying until we can’t try anymore.
Related posts:
- Shivering Kings
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Return of the One-Week Screenplay says:
[...] This is what happened to me yesterday. I have been working, for the last couple of weeks on character, notes and script structure (ideas for the lay person) for “Shivering Kings”, a low budget horror movie with big ideas I wanna make (see previous post). [...]
Jun 28, 2008, 12:38 pm