Week 7: Somebody Has to Bet

It is Saturday afternoon and I leave for Austin Tuesday morning, which has introduced a useful amount of panic into the system. Not actual panic. I am not wandering around the apartment clutching a passport and screaming. Most of the logistics are handled. There is a hotel reservation, there are flights, there are clothes, there is an increasingly ridiculous calendar that tells me when to run, when to lift, when to eat, when to pack, when to talk to people and, presumably, when I am allowed to urinate. The anxiety is more fundamental than that. I have spent the last seven weeks getting ready to do things. Now I have to go do them.

That sounds obvious, but there is a real difference between preparing yourself for an opportunity and eventually having to stand in the room where the opportunity might actually occur. Preparation is comfortable because you can always do more of it. You can rewrite the script again, research another company, find another producer, improve the website, make another list, talk to another consultant, ask another person how they would approach the thing you are trying to approach. At some point the pile of advice becomes high enough that you can no longer see over it.

I think I reached that point this week.

I am topped up on resources. I do not need another person to explain to me that movies require budgets. I know. I have met the people who make the budgets. I have talked to payroll companies, lawyers, film offices, chambers of commerce, economic-development people, filmmakers who have made movies in Missouri and people whose entire professional existence consists of knowing why your production is going to cost more than you think it will. All of that has been useful. Some of it has been extremely useful. But I have reached the point where another helpful person offering to help me prepare to someday possibly do something is not necessarily helping.

What I need now are people willing to stake something. Not necessarily money, although I would certainly accept money and promise to treat it with the respect normally reserved for transplant organs. A stake can be a reputation, an introduction, producing responsibility, representation, somebody calling another person and saying, “You should read this guy.” It can be somebody deciding they would rather get involved early than wait until everything has already been made safe for them.

That is what I have been thinking about heading into Austin. I do not need another person selling me a shovel. I need somebody willing to dig.

This realization caused me to cancel a couple of conversations this week. There was nothing wrong with the people involved. They seemed perfectly capable of doing what they do. The problem was that I finally understood I was about to get on more calls with people whose services I am not actually in a position to engage right now. Six weeks ago I probably would have taken the calls anyway because a meeting felt like progress. Now I would rather give everybody their time back. That feels like progress too.

The Battles of Birdtown has been responsible for most of this education, and most of my anxiety. There were a couple of conversations this week that shook me a little. Nothing catastrophic happened. Nobody pulled me aside and explained that I am an idiot and movies have been outlawed. It was subtler than that. Enough smart people have now looked at the project from different angles that I have started confronting the gap between loving a movie and financing one.

Those are two completely separate problems.

I know what Birdtown is. I know why I wrote it, why I want to direct it, the Missouri towns and people and family dynamics underneath it, and what I think the movie can be. I have considerably less certainty about who is going to write the checks. There is a strain of advice in independent film that basically amounts to: why aren’t you making horror? Horror travels. Horror has a clear audience. Horror can be made cheaply. Horror has buyers. Horror is apparently the broccoli of independent filmmaking, except everybody actually wants you to eat it.

I like horror. I have written horror. I am not opposed to making horror. What irritates me is the idea that the answer to every difficult financing question is to make a completely different movie. Maybe that is naïve. It probably is, at least a little. The whole point of this exercise, though, was not to become so practical that I eventually optimized myself into somebody else’s career.

So I have had some doubts. Maybe Birdtown is too difficult for where I am right now. Maybe the budget lands in a place where the math gets ugly. Maybe I am asking people to take a chance on a writer-director without the kind of directing résumé that makes taking that chance comfortable. Maybe I get to the end of development and discover the version I want to make cannot be financed on terms I can live with.

Those are all possible. They are also questions I can only answer by continuing. What I do not want to do is answer them in advance because uncertainty makes me nervous. That would be the old move.

This entire Revamp started because I had become very skilled at living defensively. You avoid the thing that might embarrass you, wait until you are ready, improve the work privately, and tell yourself you will make the move once some additional condition has been satisfied. There is always another condition.

While I have been worrying about whether Birdtown can actually become a movie, something else has happened that I probably would have had trouble imagining seven weeks ago: the scripts are getting finished. Not “finished” in the way screenwriters use the word when they mean they changed the title page and will rewrite Act Two next Thursday. Actually finished enough that I am putting locks on them, making the reader copies easy to find, putting the work on the website and organizing everything so Marcel and I can quickly answer the question, “Do you have anything like this?”

That question used to terrify me because the answer was technically yes but operationally no. Yes, I have something like that. Where is the PDF? Which version? Did I ever fix page 83? Is that one actually locked? Why does the file say FINAL_FINAL_USE_THIS_ONE_2?

Now the sellable work is becoming an actual catalog instead of an archaeological site. Pibble got there. Illyria got there. Atheistmas got there. Other projects have been pushed hard toward the same line. The website is increasingly functioning the way I wanted it to function, with the work presented like work instead of a collection of titles that require me to explain what everything is.

The funny thing is that getting scripts to reader lock has not made me feel finished. It has made me feel exposed. When something is still being rewritten, you have an excuse. Of course nobody has bought it. It isn’t ready. Of course nobody is talking about it. You haven’t sent it. Of course nobody is representing you. You are still getting the material into shape. Locking the scripts removes a lot of those comforting explanations.

The work exists now.

Go find out.

That is basically what Austin has become in my head. I am not going there expecting somebody to hand me a career between two panels at the Driskill. I am also trying very hard not to go there pretending I am simply attending a fun film festival and whatever happens happens. I know what I need. I need champions. I need producing responsibility around Birdtown, not another person who can invoice me for explaining production. I need meaningful introductions, development capital and representation that does something other than confirm I should probably have representation. I would like somebody hungry enough to look at the amount of work I have done and think there might be something worth building here before the answer is obvious to everybody else.

That is a much more vulnerable ask than “Would you read my screenplay?” A screenplay can be good or bad. Betting on the person is messier.

This week I have been trying to prepare myself for that distinction. The Austin outreach got narrower. The people I want to meet are increasingly the ones who could actually change the trajectory: producers who might take responsibility, managers who might see a slate rather than one script, people with access who are still close enough to the ground to care about finding somebody before everybody else has found him.

That does not mean I am going to Austin armed with a pitch and attack every person wearing a badge. Jesus Christ, no. Some people I just want to have coffee with. Some people I already know and would like to see because it would be nice to arrive in a city and have a few friendly faces there. Some conversations should be about movies without becoming negotiations about my future before the appetizers arrive.

I am trying to leave room for that too, which is another part of the Revamp I have not talked about enough. This thing can very easily become pathological. There is always another part of yourself to improve, another professional task, another workout, another email, another piece of clothing, another system to organize the systems.

My calendar is now color-coded by category because I wanted to be able to see what kind of day I was building. It has work, fitness, writing, outreach, film development, travel, errands and the ordinary maintenance of being a person. That has been useful partly because it exposes when I am lying to myself. If every block on the calendar is career-related, I have not built an ambitious life. I have built a job I never leave.

The boring Revamp stuff is still in there. Wake up, drink water, meditate, breathe, walk Charlie, lift, run, shower, take care of my teeth and skin, buy groceries, clean the apartment, read something that has nothing to do with whether anybody wants to buy one of my scripts. I am not perfect at any of it, and that is starting to matter less.

The change I can actually feel after seven weeks is not that I have become extraordinarily disciplined. It is that I recover faster when I am not. I miss something and it gets rescheduled. I get anxious and eventually do the thing anyway. A conversation goes badly and I complain about it for a while instead of turning it into a six-month theory about why my career is impossible. I hear advice I think is wrong and I no longer assume that disagreeing means I must secretly be afraid of the truth.

That one has been useful this week.

There is a difference between being coachable and allowing every confident person you meet to become the author of your life. I have spent enough time doing the second one. Austin feels like a test of that more than anything.

Can I walk into rooms with people who have more credits, more money, more access and more proof than I do without immediately assigning them authority over me? Can I listen without folding? Can I ask for something without apologizing for asking? Can I talk about having written a lot without turning it into either bragging or an apology? Can I say that Birdtown is not financed without feeling like that makes the entire project imaginary? Can I admit that Nobody Leaves has an option conversation happening while also being precise that nothing has been signed? Can I talk about filmmakers approaching me for writing work without converting a couple of promising conversations into the fake version of my career that exists only in bios?

Can I simply tell the truth about where I am and still act like somebody worth betting on?

That is probably the actual assignment.

A few days from now I will get on a plane. There is still packing to do, a final weather check, a final schedule audit and whatever last-minute bullshit inevitably appears when two adult men attempt to coordinate transportation to an airport. There are still scripts I would happily touch again if somebody took away my self-control. There is still Birdtown finance work. There will always be Birdtown finance work.

But the Revamp feels different from seven weeks ago. I started because I looked at myself in a bathroom mirror and had the fairly brutal realization that I had become passive in too many parts of my own life. The point was never to emerge six months later as some optimized creature with perfect abs, a color-coordinated wardrobe, a movie deal and a meditation streak.

I wanted to participate again.

That part is happening. I am stronger than I was at the beginning. The physical work has a place in my life. I take better care of myself. I read. I leave the apartment. I make the call. I send the script. I ask people to meet. I tell people what I am trying to do. I have stopped treating ambition like something I need to hide until I can produce supporting documentation.

There are now people in multiple cities thinking about work I wrote. There are movies that are finished enough to be judged. There is a film I am genuinely trying to build. There are people approaching me about writing. There are conversations happening that might become something and might become absolutely nothing.

Nothing has happened yet that allows me to relax.

Maybe that is why this week has felt so strange. There is more evidence than I have ever had that something could happen, and absolutely no guarantee that it will. Seven weeks ago that uncertainty would have been a reason to wait.

Tuesday I am getting on the plane anyway.

Somebody has to bet.

I should probably be the first one.