Credit: Illustration by Ryan Alexander-Tanner

Once upon a time, way back in the day, two of my best friends and I wrote a movie. It was funny (SORTA THO), but it was terrible (FULLY). We weren’t just bad at writing movies—we were so bad we didn’t even know what it meant to be bad at writing movies. We were a wounded bull SPURTING THICK, HOT, CRIMSON JETS OF ENTHUSIASM ALL OVER THE MATADOR THAT WAS OUR HUBRIS.

You know, we were so dumb we didn’t even know we were dumb, plus we had heard about the movie Clerks. With this script in hand, and some dude named Seth set to direct the project, we went to my father to gather funding. My father looked me right in the eyes and told me to go fuck myself with as much love as can be communicated with that sentiment. Guess what though, person reading this while your friend uses the bathroom at Boke Bowl or whatever—we made the movie anyway, even without funding. We found the money ourselves. And guess what else? The movie was terrible.

It would have been less embarrassing to follow my dad’s advice to the word, and actually figure out how to fuck myself. We spent our own money, it wasn’t a lot of money, and we certainly didn’t make it back. I learned a lot making the movie, including, like, hey… maybe I shouldn’t be asking people for money to make a movie when I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. You’re goshdamn right this is going to be about Kickstarter.

I know crowdfunding isn’t all bad. I think it’s mostly good. Some of this shit though, you people have to fucking stop.

MOVING: You want to move to LA/NY/Sioux Falls to be an actor/comedian/rollerblader? Great! But look, if you don’t have a little bit of money put away to make that move yourself, think about this: Maybe you aren’t good enough at the thing you want to be doing to start shaking people down for money to do it. Those jobs tend to have a way of telling you that you’re doing well enough to move.

VACATIONS: Are you fucking serious? Sometimes this one will hide itself in the form of “Hey! Help me get to a comedy festival, or Burning Man, or the murky old bog I was born in…” but it’s a fucking vacation all the same. No. Stop asking people to help you go on vacation. You visit the fucking Oregon coast like the rest of us until you make that northern California coast money.

BOOKS: Write your fucking book! You know, at night. You don’t really need a big budget to write your book. You probably have everything you already need: a computer, your wonderful mind, and friends who tell you that you’re more interesting than you actually are. I kid.

It’d be dope if there was, like, a crowdfunding site you could use where you show up and do a task and they give you money and you can use that money to fund your dream and get good enough where you don’t have to keep showing up to that crowdfunding site. Oh they have that? Leave your dad alone, he has his own dreams.

12 replies on “Everything as Fuck”

  1. I wrote a screenplay once, back in the early ’90s, “Horror ‘Hood” by name, co-written with Reggie Bannister of the Phantasm films, this was in my L.A. days, used to drive home on the freeway at 4 AM, dodging drunk drivers, after writing at Reg’s all night, straight outta Long Beach, it was about a former medic/Vietnam vet who was a medical examiner in Washington D.C. (this was before medical examiners starred in every second crime show) and there was a monster but he wasn’t completely evil and of course a government plot and we forced a copy of the script into pre-Oscar-winning Quentin Tarantino’s hand (I knew him a little bit) and Quentin had to carry it around all night at these horror convention after-parties and we got onto the Warner Brother lot and tried to brazen our way into the script department to drop off a copy but they were having none of it but we managed to send it through WB interoffice mail to Steven Seagal and we got a letter some weeks later from one of his people letting us down easy probably because they thought we maybe knew someone and so why not be nice and luckily the person who got us on the lot didn’t get fired and we pitched it to a few people but it wasn’t all that great probably and not long enough and not structured the way they say scripts should be and I was gonna write a novelization but I didn’t get past page 60 but maybe I’ll finish it when I’m retired but set it in Hawaii instead of D.C. and by the way there’s another Phantasm movie coming out soon have you heard and Reg is in it, can’t wait. But I never thought of asking your dad for money. I’ll give him a call.

  3. Ian, you should have come up with the line, “…THE MATADOR THAT WAS OUR HUBRIS,” two weeks ago, so everybody could have used it in all the whiny stories about the dive bar that recently closed down.

  4. Here is my Kickstarter about something where I know the fuck what I’m doing. In the face of kickstarter fatigue, and the joke that things like ‘potato salad’ make of it, kickstarter still has a place. For my project, no one will be making any money. This will only get the thing done, if that. For me crowd funding is great for passion projects where you are not going to be making a profit. So, insert blatant self promotion!
    https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1077190235/the-new-portland-bridge-map

  5. There was a famous director who once during an interview, devalued the screenwriter. His main man packed one hundred pages of blank typing paper into a manila envelope and sent it to his director along with a note which said: “Here, direct THIS!”

    Write your script. It costs you nothing but time. Make the movie yourself; on your cell phone if necessary. The education is invaluable.

  9. Portland Mercury, will you consider moderating your comments just little? Does publishing these trolls’ hate-speech really improve traffic that much? Your readers don’t actually want to plow through this garbage hell-scape btw.

  10. Just about anyone can shoot video and edit it now days yet no one is making good movies. Clerks was shot on film, which requires real discipline, real money and real skills (yes analog film is still the gold standard). And there is a lot more to cinematography than point and shoot, even if you’re shooting video. It’s a lot like someone with a Casio keyboard synthesizer calling them self a musician, when they can’t play any real instruments. No good movies, just a lot of dumb folks making crap.

  12. Some dude the other day got $17,000 to buy himself pinball machines and then stream videos of him playing them.

    After my initial rage wore off from this news, I started wondering, “wait, who am I ticked off at again: this dude, or the people who donated?” Basically, the fact that his campaign succeeded sorta nullifies my rage. If he failed I’d be like, “oh the audacity!” But since he succeeded, I’m just like, “man, I wish I had $17,000 to buy pinball machines.”

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