This is the third part of my series of posts telling the story of how this film came to be. If you missed it, you may want to begin over at Part 1.

Making Contact

So we rolled on back into Indiana with our cats and our stuff and set about reconstructing our life. It took a little time, but by November 2010 I was ready to start pre-production on the movie.

If you’ve been following along and know anything at all about making movies you’ll no doubt have realized that the lynchpin of beginning pre-production on my single-location movie was securing that single location. I hadn’t bothered doing anything about this yet because I didn’t think phone calls from the West Coast were the way to go; I was much more likely to get permission to shoot in Westminster Hall by talking face-to-face with the people in charge at Grace College.

I made some phone calls and determined that the person on whom I should begin working my magic was Paul Derenzo, Director of Special Events. He’s the one in charge of scheduling the use of Westminster Hall, and he has his office just off the lobby of the hall. As I mentioned, I wanted to talk to Paul in person rather than over the phone, and I’m the sort of person who will avoid picking up the phone even to schedule a meeting if I think I can just drop in on someone randomly and conduct the meeting on the spot. “Ambushing” is, I think, the technical term for this behavior.

I tried on several mornings to just saunter into Westminster and catch Paul—or Tina Keaffaber, his assistant—at their offices, but no luck. Their schedule was obviously incompatible with my impromptu-meeting idea, so I decided I would have to make that phone call I so didn’t want to make.

Picking up one of Paul’s business cards from the front desk, I dialed his number on the spot. No answer—unsurprising, since I was standing right there and could see that he wasn’t in. I left a message, including the reason for my call. Then I went home and waited.

And waited.

And waited.

Things move at a slower pace in semi-rural Indiana than they do in LA, so I wasn’t surprised or alarmed when my call was not returned the next day, or even the one after that. In fact, I let a week go by before I thought I could call back without seeming pushy. I made the call, left another message, and waited again.

Then the holidays happened. After a certain point somewhere in December, you know you’re not going to be hearing back from anyone, so I let my brain run off to deal with other things for a few weeks while I shopped, decorated, reconnected with family, and ate too much food. Unsurprisingly, nothing happened to recall my brain from its holiday, so I continued to enjoy my own.

Come January, I made another call, which also received no response. By now I was getting very mildly panicky. Pre-production takes time, and I didn’t want to start any of the bigger tasks in that process until I was sure I had my location.

Fortunately for me, Westminster Hall isn’t the only building for which Paul Derenzo schedules the events. Way across campus from the Hall is Grace College’s new Orthopedic Capital Center, which holds their basketball court. The court converts into a large-ish (for Warsaw) convention space, and in late January 2011 it hosted the first ever Warsaw Premier Bridal Expo.

I happened to be acquainted with one of the exhibitors, so I attended this event.

As the Expo was winding down I saw Paul Derenzo darting about with an underling, accomplishing some post-event chores. I seized my moment to talk to him, and very quickly explained what I was trying to do. Anticlimactically, he told me he’d have to talk to some of the Grace higher-ups and call me back.

And he did.

The Pitch

Apparently Paul is the sort of person who is really difficult to make contact with but very responsive once contact is established. He called me back in fairly short order and asked me to come down to his office to chat about the movie.

I showed up a few minutes early to the meeting, and Paul was running late, as I was informed by Tina Keaffaber. While I was waiting I told Tina what I was up to, and she got very excited. She had previously worked at a different event center that put on stage productions, and she had a filmmaker friend based in Los Angeles. Tina is obviously the sort of person who gets a big kick out of complex productions and watching disparate elements come together for a single event, which is probably why they put her in charge of scheduling all the wedding events for Westminster. We chatted for some time about the movie before Paul arrived and invited me into his office.

Unlike Tina, Paul was a stranger to moviemaking, so most of our conversation revolved around explaining how a film crew works and the needs of production. For example, it might seem obvious to someone who’s used to working on sets, but regular folks are often unaware that a crew includes more than just someone with a camcorder.

With that conversation out of the way, we moved on to costs. This was the part that made me nervous. I had a strong feeling that Westminster Hall was way outside my price range (next to nothing), and this proved correct. The building usually rents for several hundred dollars a day, which I definitely couldn’t afford. Moreover, I was asking for something unprecedented; usually the college just rents out the main floor, which includes two banquent halls, the main lobby, the courtyard outside, and sometimes a few rooms that still function as a conventional hotel. I wanted access to all those spaces, plus the upper floors the college uses as dorm space, the kitchen, the office area, part of the basement, and the attic.

I had explained before, and repeated now, that the production was very small in scope and that we were trying to keep the budget under a few thousand dollars, most of which I was planning to spend on food and housing the actors (who would have to be brought in from Chicago). Then I did the thing I’ve always heard you should do in these situations, which is shut your mouth and wait.

And Paul said he’d have to think about it.

He said he call me, we shook hands, and I went home to wait for his call. It came a few days later, and while he didn’t give me any actual numbers, the response was generally favorable. He asked me for specific dates and an estimate of the number of people who would be in the building, which I supplied. Then it was time to wait again.

Unanimity

I found out later that sometime during this interval Tina Keaffaber went to bat for the movie and persuaded Paul to let us shoot at Westminster even though he was skeptical about the prospect. She told me part of her pitch was that using the building for production might become a trend and a future source of revenue. Whether potential revenue played a big part, or whether he just wanted to be able to cut me a break because I was an alumnus, Paul eventually told me that he was open to having us shoot at Westminster but would need me to meet with him and two other Grace College staff to allay some of their concerns.

Those two staff were Mike Yocum, head of the drama department, and Steve Grill, who runs The Reneker Museum of Winona History. The Reneker Museum has its space just off the main lobby of Westminster Hall, which explains Steve Grill’s involvement, and I could only assume that Mike Yocum would just have some general questions as someone familiar with stagecraft.

As it turned out, both had previously been involved with movie production and knew about the kind of physical toll it usually takes on a space. For those who haven’t spent significant time on a set, I can tell you that heavy gear, dirty cables, hot lights, hurried art departments, and careless grips conspire to do damage to just about any location. Since Grace College had spent over $4 million renovating the historic Westminster Hotel, they were naturally concerned about the liability of inviting that sort of chaos.

I wasn’t nearly as concerned, for two reasons. Firstly, my crew were all going to be relative novices to film production—people with some experience in their respective disciplines who had nonetheless infrequently or never used their skills to make movies. Not having become jaded about such things, they were therefore much less likely to treat the building with contempt. Secondly, since we were shooting with modern dSLRs, which require much less light than conventional film cameras, we would not be bringing in nearly the volume or magnitude of equipment that Mike Yocum and Steve Grill were picturing. Our gear would be much more manageable.

I communicated this to the group, which seemed to assuage some of their fears, but I ultimately had to offer to take out an insurance policy in order to truly make them feel comfortable. Having heard over and over by this point how much money Grace College had invested in the building, this only seemed prudent to protect myself as well as the Hall.

I had two other entities to persuade before we would finally be cleared to shoot: Student Affairs and The Physical Plant (what Grace College calls their maintenance department). Paul Derenzo is only responsible for scheduling the public areas of Westminster, but I wanted to disrupt the dorm space, basement and attic, so I had to ask permission from the people responsible for those areas. Fortunately, they were all pretty indifferent once they heard that the Special Events team was on board.

And that just left the question of cost. Paul had spent several weeks by this time trying to decide how much to charge us for a whole week’s (really nine days’) use of the building, and not long after I had finished convincing everyone that we wouldn’t burn the place down if we shot there, he arrived at a figure: $600. Considering the usual cost of renting Westminster Hall, this was quite low and reasonable. With the $660 quote I had already gotten from a Chicago-based insurance company, this made the location our biggest single cost, but not out of reach.

I wrote two checks, and now we were in pre-production.

This is the second part of my series of posts telling the story of how this film came to be. If you missed it, you may want to begin over at Part 1.

Practical Education

When we last left our intrepid hero (me), I was on my way to Los Angeles, having abandoned my plans to produce a movie in my college town of Winona Lake. You may remember me mentioning a stack of index cards with all my ideas for the script, possibly the world’s worst cliffhanger image.

I’ll skip pretty lightly over the two years my wife and I spent in LA. Here are the two things you need to know:

1. The number of feature movie scripts I’d written increased to nine. Looking back over the progress I made as a writer during those two years, it turned out to be a very good thing that I didn’t write Murder! A Love Story in 2008. When I finally did write it (more on that later), it was much better than it would have been two years earlier.
2. All the money I made in LA came from working in production, mostly as a Production Assistant, although I also worked quite a few gigs for an Art Director and three or four as an editor. The vast majority of my jobs were for non-union companies, where they let the PAs join in the work of any department that happens to need help at the moment, so I picked up experience in nearly every aspect of production.

As Sally neared her last few quarters of fashion school, we started to talk about the transition back to Indiana. We had always intended to return home once she was done with her education, and the plan hadn’t changed.

Since we would be moving back in the fall of 2010, the summer of 2011 seemed like a great time to shoot a movie. If you remember, I needed production to happen in the summer because at any other time, the building I wanted to use would be full of college students. Also, warm weather is easier to shoot in, and summer is a time when you’re more likely to persuade people to take a week off to act in and crew your production.

But before you can do any of those things, you need a script.

Picking a Genre

Remember that stack of index cards? In November of 2009, almost a year in advance of our return to Winona Lake, I dug them out of their box.

Now, just because I’d been writing other things and working on other shows this whole time doesn’t mean I hadn’t spent any time thinking about this script. I’d been bouncing ideas around in my head for two years, trying to find the right way into the story. All I really had as my starting point was a location and a character. The story itself could be pretty flexible, as long as it all took place in a hotel and the main character was a high school girl who loved photography. I wanted it to be a mystery because the thriller genre is a good one for independent films, being easier to market overseas than comedies, which don’t translate well into foreign languages.

Unfortunately, one of the things I had learned in the last two years was that I very definitely write comedies, and pretty dialogue-heavy comedies at that.

In fact, the thing I write best is romantic comedy in which the humor is largely based on wordplay between intelligent characters with lots of spare time to stand around and impress each other with their wit. You can begin rolling your eyes whenever you like.

The more I thought about this, though, the more it made sense. Thrillers are pretty low on dialogue and heavy on action, but this actually makes them longer to shoot. Dialogue is the way to go if you want to shoot 12 pages a day, because once you get the scene lit you can let the actors crank through the lines over and over, just moving the camera every few takes to get a different angle. In this way you can shoot several pages in the space of just a couple hours.

Also, doing a light-hearted, dialogue- and character-driven mystery played not only to my strengths as a writer but to my tastes and references as a film lover. I grew up watching lots of ’30s and ’40s movies, and I still love movies like His Girl Friday and The Big Sleep, which rely heavily on dialogue to push the story forward.

All these words just foreshorten a process that took place in my brain over the course of several months. By the time I actually sat down to start writing the script, I’d already decided: I was writing a romantic-comedy/murder-mystery hybrid, heavy on the rom-com.

Writing

I’ll spare you several paragraphs of writing about writing and note just a few things that will be totally boring and irrelevant to non-writers. Feel free to skip to the next heading if you’re not interested.

Thing One: During the course of writing this movie, I switched from being the kind of screenwriter who uses lots of neatly-marked-up index cards to being the kind who scrawls illegibly in notebooks. I’d always had cheap spirals lying around and used them to do mind-mapping and general note-taking about my ideas, but while I was writing Murder! I also churned out pages and pages of plot points, dialogue scraps, character ideas and structure maps. I write multiple directions on each page to separate the various types of notes from each other. I also write upside-down on alternating pages to keep the spiral binding on the right side (I’m left-handed). You can see an example here, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Thing Two: I use a character worksheet to create personalities, histories and specific traits for the major characters in my scripts. This is the kind of thing that I shunned when I was a beginning screenwriter, thinking that such mechanics were artificial and unnecessary. Of course, the real reason I wanted to believe that was laziness. Who wants to actually do all this thinking and work before actually getting to the fun part: writing the script? Me, if I want my stories to be good, that’s who. If you’re reading this and you’re a writer who doesn’t use such a thing, think about it again.

Thing Three: After I had a first draft of this screenplay done I sent it off to a couple friends of mine for notes. Every writer should have note-givers in his or her life. Mine are David O’Donnell and Greg Francis. Also, my mother, who is by far my severest critic. They’ve suffered through quite a few of my scripts, and they always come up with something valuable to say about them, even when I secretly wish they wouldn’t because I want to be done with that particular project. And that’s the point of good note-givers: they push you to be better even when you’d be ready to let something be less than excellent.

Up Anchor

Anyway, the point is: I wrote the screenplay. It took a couple months (work was pretty sporadic at the time, so I had plenty of empty days) to knock out the first draft, and another few days to do rewrites once my trusted readers had given me their notes. I would ultimately do other small adjustments and polishes later, but two drafts got me to the point where I was sure that I had a movie on my hands and could start pre-production as soon as I returned to Indiana.

Which, a few months later, is what I did. Sally graduated cum laude from FIDM, and we packed up a truck to transport our now-larger quantity of personal possessions across the country. Then we saddled up with the cats (oh, yeah… we have two cats) and started the three-day drive to the Midwest.

Next Time: Securing the Location, and How Nothing is Ever as Easy as you Hope.

I’m deep into post-production now, and there’s not much to say about the progress of the movie, so instead I’m going to go back to the beginning and do a series of posts about how Murder! A Love Story came to be.

Some people would probably use lots of video to do this, and they would do interviews with their cast and crew, and it’d be flashy and bite-sized and easy to consume.

But that’s not how I operate. I like the words.

So this is not going to be a “Behind the Scenes” or “Making Of”; it’s going to be me telling you the story of this movie. With words. Some of these posts might get really long. There will be sections. With sub-heads. It probably won’t be for everyone, so if you’re not into this sort of thing, feel free to duck out now; I won’t judge.

Still here? Settle in.

Taking Charge of My Own Destiny

Back in 2008, I was getting tired of writing screenplays no one wanted to read. I had four under my belt, which I considered a pretty good number, but I wasn’t having any luck finding an agent or getting produced. Since I lived in Northern Indiana and knew literally no one in Los Angeles, this should not have been very surprising, and it wasn’t, really. I knew the odds were long when I got into this business, but that didn’t make it any easier to keep sending my work out into the cosmos unacknowledged.

At this point I reminded myself that I only got into this screenwriting business so I could have good scripts to direct. In other words, Self, now that you’ve gotten pretty good at the writing, maybe it’s time to turn your attention back to what you really want to do.

I couldn’t help but agree with myself. If you’re a would-be screenwriter who has any interest at all in directing, writing something to direct on your own is a great way to take control of your career. The only gatekeeper is yourself, and you want you to succeed.

Now, the thing to do when you want to make your scrappy little ultra-indie movie with no budget is to figure out what you can get for free and build your story around that. And I had a fantastic free location already in mind.

Pre-Pre-Production

I live in a town called Winona Lake, home to a small Christian college called Grace, my alma mater. The college owns an old hotel called Westminster, which they use as a women’s dormitory. Consequently, it stands empty for much of the summer, and I figured persuading them to let me shoot there for free would be pretty easy.

I called up the office of the Vice President of Operations and ran the idea by his assistant (hereafter known as Assistant). If I’d had then even the tiny amount of small-town-producing savvy I have now, I would have just asked for a meeting with the VP and pitched the idea to him in person, but I at the time that sounded too formal and, quite frankly, terrifying. Instead, I got a promise that Assistant would talk to her boss and get back to me; I then didn’t hear from her for two weeks. That was OK, though, because I had to script the movie first. I got out my trusty spiral-bound notebook and went to work.

Having decided to do a single-location movie set entirely in a hotel, I thought it would be cool to do a contained murder-mystery. The movie-biz way to say this is: “It’s Murder on the Orient Express in a hotel!” I also had a character I’d been saving for this story: a high-school girl who solves mysteries using photography as her primary investigative tool. Putting these two ideas together would allow me to combine two powerfully non-commercial elements: mystery stories and female leads. I couldn’t resist.

I spent several hours over the next week making notes about the story, sitting across the room from my wife Sally while she taught herself patterndrafting in one of our empty bedrooms. I batted around different characters and plot points, and after a while I even got out the screenwriter’s favorite tool: index cards. I started writing down the different beats of the story on the cards, rearranging or discarding them as I changed the story.

By the time Assistant called me back, I had a glorious, disorganized mess of story ideas swimming around in my head. But that didn’t matter much, because something else had happened in the interim.

Leaving the Aquarium to Swim with the Big Sharks

Sally and I had talked off and on for some time about moving to Los Angeles so she could go to fashion school, a lifelong dream of hers. I wasn’t wild about the idea, as I had no interest in leaving our tiny little town where our families and all our friends lived. Sally, being the generous, supportive person that she is, decided that she could do without a formal education and teach herself how to design and make clothes.

We’d bought her a dress form and a number of supplies, and she was spending all her spare time wrestling with paper and scissors, trying to turn some of her sketches into real live garments. Unfortunately, just as I started to dive into pre-production, she realized she’d hit a wall.

We re-opened the question of moving to the West Coast, and this time we decided to do it.

She applied to The Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, and they accepted her for the Fall Term. My friend Greg, who at the time was Executive Producing for the production company that does all the Proactiv Skin Care Commercials, told me if we could make it out by August he would hire me as a production assistant on a three-day shoot he had scheduled.

I took a slightly sheepish phone call from Assistant which went something like: “Ohhh, thanks for looking into that. Yeah, um… I’m not doing it any more.” We found renters for our house so we wouldn’t have to sell it, packed up our most vital belongings and put the rest into storage, loaded up a trailer, said good-bye to all our friends and family, and headed for the horizon.

In one box, buried under empty spirals and printouts of some of my scripts, was the small stack of 3x5 cards with the beats of my murder mystery.

I wouldn’t touch them again for nearly two years.

And we got all our shots.

In a couple weeks I’ll be starting post-production, but for now I have a few other items of business to attend to—things I neglected for the last several weeks so I could focus on getting a film made.

I’ll try to be here, and on Facebook and Twitter, more frequently in the meantime. But for now I’m just here to say a big collective Thank You, in no particular order:

To all the people who supported me and the film with encouragement and word of mouth; to everyone who contributed financially; to the local restaurants and businesses who donated food, gear, supplies, props and costumes; to all the people temporarily widowed or orphaned by spouses and parents who for nine days only came home to crash into bed; to my amazing and inspiring crew, who worked 16- and 18-hour days for over a week and stayed on their A-game the whole time; to the stellar cast, who tried their hardest to make choosing the best takes as difficult as it could be; to Grace College and its staff—they bent over backward to accommodate our demanding schedule and needs….

Thank You.

Without you, there’d be no movie.

It’s 4 a.m. on the morning of Friday, July 22, which means that tomorrow is the first day of production.

Our Kickstarter project was unsuccessful, so we don’t have as extensive a budget as I was hoping. On the other hand, many of the people who pledged funds to the project just went ahead and sent me a check through the mail, which was almost more encouraging.

We also found some other ways to cut corners, so I think the movie is going to cost less than anticipated. Which is good, because… see above.

Let’s see: what else do you need to know at the last minute?

We have a cast. I never updated the cast page (until tonight), but we found some fantastic actors, and I rehearsed them over the past couple weekends, so that I’m feeling really confident about the level of performance we’ll see in the film.

I was planning on doing a behind-the-scenes podcast once every two weeks, starting with the one I posted a few months ago. The fact that the total is still at one should tell you how much I’ve had to do since then. Hopefully when we hit post-production I’ll be able to slow down a little and put up some more posts.

I’m amazed by my crew. They’ve put in tons of work and thought leading up to this week, trying their utmost to make this movie a success. I can’t wait to see them go into action tomorrow.

I can’t wait to see me go into action tomorrow. It probably never entirely comes off, but I’m hoping to at least push the Producer’s hat pretty far back on my head and start focusing on being a director.

Deep Breath.

And in.