This is a transcript of SYS 504 – Making A Horror Movie For The Asylum With Jim Towns .
Welcome to Episode 504 of the Selling Your Screenplay Podcast. I’m Ashley Scott Meyers, screenwriter and blogger with sellingyourscreenplay.com. Today I am interviewing indie filmmaker Jim Towns. Jim is a real indie filmmaker. He’s got dozens of credits as a writer, director and or producer. He just did a film called End Times which is a post-apocalyptic love story. We talk about his latest film as well as how he broke in and got some of his first credits in the business. So, stay tuned for that interview.
If you find this episode valuable, please help me out by giving me a review in iTunes or leave me a comment on YouTube or retweeting the podcast on Twitter or liking or sharing it on Facebook. These social media shares really do help spread word about the podcast, so they’re very much appreciated. Any websites or links that I mentioned the podcast can be found on my blog in the show notes. I also publish a transcript with every episode in case you’d rather read the show or look at something later on can find all the podcast show notes that www.sellingyourscreenplay.com/podcast and then just look for episode 504. If you want my free guide, How to Sell a Screenplay in five weeks, you can pick that up by going to www.sellingyourscreenplay.com/guide. It’s completely free. You just put in your email address and I’ll send you a new lesson once per week for five weeks, along with a bunch of bonus lessons. I teach the whole process of how to sell your screenplay in that guide. I’ll teach you how to write a professional logline and query letter, and how to find agents, managers and producers who are looking for material. Really is everything you need to know to sell your screenplay just go to www.sellingyourscreenplay.com/guide.
So, a quick few word about what I’ve been working on. Obviously, the film festival preparations are the main thing, I’m almost ready, we’ve got everything, pretty much put together. Just a few minor details to get set the next this last week before the festival. If you’re in LA definitely consider coming out, there’s a nice bar lounge at this theater. So, there should be some good networking opportunities. Nearly all the filmmakers for the films will be in attendance, at least at some point during the weekend, especially in the opening night screening on Friday, October 6th at 6pm. I’ve had the director from Plea and the writer director from That Last Girl, those are our two opening night films. I’ll be inviting all the filmmakers out to that to kick off the festival. And again, there’s a nice lounge. So hopefully everyone’s going to meet up there around five o’clock. And then we get to watch this opening night feature and opening night short film. Again, if you’re around, definitely consider checking it out. You’ll find all the details on the website, www.sixfigurefilmfestival.com. And if you do come out, please do stop by and say hello, obviously I’ll be there. It’s always nice to meet some of the folks who listen to the podcast and just see what you guys are up to. I’ve also been furiously reading screenplays and getting them out to the industry judges and then corresponding with the industry judges trying to get a feel for the top screenplays. We will be announcing our final winners in the screenplay contest on October 17th. So, definitely keep an eye out for that as well. Anyways, those are the main things that I have been doing the last couple of weeks. Now let’s get into the main segment today. I’m interviewing indie filmmaker Jim Townes. Here is the interview.
Ashley
Welcome, Jim to the Selling Your Screenplay Podcast. Really appreciate you coming on the show with me today.
Jim Towns
Hey, thanks very much, Ashley. I really appreciate it.
Ashley
So, to start out, maybe you can tell us a little bit about your background where you grew up, and how did you get interested in the entertainment business?
Jim Towns
Sure, man. I grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I went to the Savannah College of Art Design and Savannah, Georgia from 92 to 94. I was actually a painting and then illustration and then comic book illustration major. So, I actually majored in comic book, illustration, graphic design, sequential art. And I kind of worked in that for a little while. I moved to New York City, I did some work there, it didn’t quite work out for me. But what I started doing at that point was I was trying to collaborate with your comic book artist, you have to collaborate with comic book writer usually to create a new comic. And I wasn’t really getting a lot of good collaborations with writers at the time. So that’s when I kind of really started seriously writing professionally for the first time. Not a lot of my stuff got out too much. I did have a comic in the… when the matrix came out there was a website, I think was called enterthematrix.com. Maybe dot net, I’m not sure. And I had a little piece in that. So that’s kind of my first professionally produced piece of entertainment. In New York kind of kicked my butt. I moved back to Pittsburgh. I started painting and showing in galleries for a while and around that time. A guy named Mike McCoy grew up with we used to make monster movies and stuff his kids. He was a professional videographer and digital video. This is like 98-99 and digital video and nonlinear editing are really becoming a thing where you could really create a non-film-based movie and it was starting to look like a professional kind of piece. So that’s how I kind of got into that with him. He and I did a couple films. And I moved out to LA in 2005 after trying to move out to LA to Florida and being in a car that crashed. So, a year later, I finally did make it out to LA and sold my first film that we made in Pittsburgh. And then I started kind of writing and producing my own stuff there.
Ashley
Okay, so let’s talk about some of these. I’m just looking at your IMDB page, Prometheus triumphant, Stiff, these were some of your early films. So, was that Prometheus trumpet? That was when you did…
Jim Towns
That was the first one. Yeah, it was, it’s a black and white silent, Gothic expression style horror film. So, it has the intertitles and everything like that. And we, it was interesting, we did that one. And someone had right around that time came out with a Call of Cthulhu. That was like a silent movie type thing. So, there was a moment where that was kind of people were going back and doing like John spunk Meyer type stuff, and re embracing early film look and aesthetic and trying to get back to the source of it. And that’s kind of what we were trying to do too. So in a way, it was interesting. I was going to if me, a non-formally trained filmmaker, because my background is art again. If I was going to make the transition to making movies, why not go back and start at the beginning and work with the elemental ideas of how films were made, like train coming into a station by the Lumiere brothers, right? How does this means of expression visually work? And so, I kind of started at the beginning and taught myself all the way through kind of film history until…so it was a few years before I did my first talkie, actually.
Ashley
Okay. Was Stiff…?
Jim Town
That was deaf. Yeah.
Ashley
Okay. Yeah. And so just give us a sense of how did you move from one project to another? Was it you just constantly trying to raise money? Did you have a little bit of success with this? And like, was Stiff? Something that someone came to you and funded? Were you still self-funding these things or trying to raise money yourself? Just been through these?
Jim Towns
Yeah, yeah. Prometheus got picked up by Greg Hatanaka at cinnamon epoch, which was great, because I don’t think anyone else was going to distribute a black and white sound feature length film. But you know, he’s a big film guy. He can talk to you about Bollywood, he can talk to you about Eisenstein, he talked about anybody. So yeah, so he put that out. And then he gave us a very little amount of money to do Stiff as a follow up. And that kind of, you know, that Stiff falls into, I think, the sophomore slump, sort of category where I had a great idea for something I want to do about that. It’s just simple two-person story about a suicidal businessman, and a necrophiliac woman who works at the crisis hotline, suicide hotline thing, who kind of fall in love and meet up. So, there’s really only two characters in the whole movie. And I think it worked well is kind of a play type idea. In practice filming in our location in Pittsburgh, you know, it became what it became, we had very little money to do it with so we kind of do ours, but it was, again, it’s, I think it’s easy now to just think of filmmaking as you get your one big break. And that’s it and you’re in and not think of it as kind of a journeyman experience of learning as you go and making mistakes and learning from your mistakes and perfecting your craft. And I think that’s what more of the reality is, is that you have to put the time and effort in and risk the failures in order to get to where you want to be.
Ashley
Yeah, yeah, for sure. That’s sound advice. So, let’s dig into your latest film End Time starring Jamie Bernadette. We actually had Jamie Bernadette on the podcast in Episode 329. I guess she produces and acts in a lot of her films. She did a film called Dead by dawn. So that was 329. I’d recommend that to our listeners. But maybe to start out you can give us a quick pitch or a logline. What is End Times?
Jim Towns
Okay. End Times it’s a love story that takes place at the end of the world and it’s about an aging mercenary who’s done a lot of things he’s not happy, not proud of who … when a pandemic surrounds us forces LA to be blocked off into a quarantine zone with the living dead. He finds this sort of pampered young suburbanite girl who has no skills sets that are going to allow her to survive in this new world and he starts training on how to survive and the to form this kind of surrogate father daughter relationship.
Ashley
Gotcha. And where did this idea come from? What was sort of the genesis of this?
Jim Towns
We did this a couple of years ago, this actually made pre pandemic and Pandemic stopped us for a little while and then finally now here we are. The idea was based on hilariously dot hilariously but I’d written a zombie film called Pandemic in 2006, or seven or something shortly after I’d come here, and I plan to film it back in Pittsburgh, and that film didn’t happen. Scripts and stories come out come from every different kind of place for me, the genesis of two films has never been the same for me. Jamie and I had worked together a little bit on some smaller stuff and we really wanted to do something together and she had some access to some funds to get us started and we were trying to patch an idea. And I kind of wanted to bring back this idea of doing this. This film that takes place in this love story. It takes place in the wasteland. Coincidentally really near me there. I live in San Pedro, south of LA, and there was a Navy housing community that had been abandoned for years and years and years. And they’re just about to tear it down. And I’d gotten in there and asked to film because all day it was just it was like, there’s an entire neighborhood of just houses that were condemned, falling apart. And it just looked amazing. Anywhere you turn, you could never see anything that looked like it’s right, the middle of LA, but you’d never know it. And, and they wouldn’t ask him they apparently everyone had tried to film their universal everybody. And they’d never let him but then it’s sold and the construction guy, I got in there with him. And he said, you know, okay, yeah, let’s do this. So, we actually filmed the first half of the film very quickly, because they were tearing all that stuff down. And we had to move quickly. Took a hiatus and then came back and did the second half of the movie. But we were driven by this impetus that we had this opportunity for this location, that was not going to be there very long in that no one ever, ever been able to fill them in. And we just had to, so I had to write this the first half of the script very, very quickly, so we could still we could film it and then work on the back half.
Ashley
So, one of the big things you hear like at a Blake Snyder saved the cat is given the same but different. And you know, this is well worn this post-apocalyptic sort of sub-genre throw subject is well worn, how do you give them? How do you put an original spin on something like this, that is just so well worn?
Jim Towns
I think you just go back to character. And I think you create interesting characters that you haven’t quite seen in full three dimensions before in a film of this genre. And you put them in that environment, and you follow their story. And you see how they would react to it. I think you rooted in a reality, where you create characters and people that an audience looks and goes, I know that person, I don’t exactly know who that type of person is. And this is how I would imagine they would be navigating through this kind of kind of dark, futuristic world. I think the key to everything is character. And if you can find interesting characters and put them into a familiar genre setting, you know, no matter how many tropes and everything everyone has seen already, I still think you can do something original.
Ashley
Gotcha. So, I’m curious just how you approach this in terms of the CGI and even the practical effects, it looks like you have a good number of practice effects and CGI effects, especially something low budget, do you have some experience with this and your other films? This is not something that I would recommend to a first-time filmmaker that doesn’t have this kind of experience. If you’re trying to make your independent film, I would say maybe curtail the CGI in this and the effects if you don’t have the experience. But maybe you can talk to that a little bit. What experience do you have? And then what suggestions do you have for screenwriters who are writing this kind of stuff? Is there any things that are counterintuitive things that are easy to do? CGI wise give a lot of bang for buck, but you can do cheaply? And then the other thing are there things that are expensive to do but seem may be easy writers like to use?
Jim Towns
Great questions. Okay, so well, first of all, as far as CGI goes, Yeah, I like to film, I kind of fall into the category of like, if you can film it for real film and for real. And if you can just augment it a bit digitally, then, then I’ll do better. Yeah, in my film, House of bad I think was the first time I used some serious CGI digital effects. And we use them for everything from bullet hits and gunfire to fixing continuity issues where we you know, there’s a scene where the house about is about three sisters who hold looks to steal a bag of heroin, a suitcase full of heroin, and holed up in their old ancestral home in the mountains, while he dies off. But while they’re there, they’re haunted by the ghost of their dead mother and father who start turning them all against each other. There’s a scene about halfway through the movie where they finally find a TV and they bring it out. Unfortunately, I’d already filmed a scene that takes place earlier, where the two characters talking the TVs in the background. So, it’s there before it should be. And that’s when what was one of my first experiences of how CGI was just save your butt. And they just went to our guy just went in there and put the TV out. And otherwise, you know, otherwise, we would have had a whole complicated issue with the same. So, it’s twofold, right? It can augment what you’re trying to do, and it can take away from the things you’ve already done and you don’t want to do. So, when it comes to State of desolation. It’s a violent film. There are zombies, obviously everything like that there’s a lot of machete action. There’s a lot of gunfire, our whole thing my whole approach was to I work with a great special price editing doc death, who does all my headshots and stuff and he’s also like armor or two. So, he keeps cell safe when we do have like firing guns and stuff. On stage distillation we were shooting up in Simi Valley and up in Laurel, Laurel Canyon, all sorts of places. And it was during a drought. We were having really dry weather in LA at the time. So, we weren’t doing any kind of blank firing or anything like that. Not least the fact that we were some places without permits and whatnot. So, that means all the gunfire now has to be digital. What and then what I find with headshots, especially in any kind of gunshots is I just like squibs I do. Scripts can be dangerous, or there’s more explosive devices. My guy duck uses a lot of pressurized air. And with hoses, bladders, fake blood, all that stuff like that. So, what I like to do is just do a combination where anything like that tends to be a floor effect, where we will use that kind of that kind of system. And then I can augment it with digital and add an entry hole or whatever you have used. It keeps our actors really safe. It’s not noisy, it’s not dangerous, you know, does bring attention to you. And it’s reasonably portable. So, it’s great. When it comes to, you know, there’s a few cityscapes in the scene in the film, where we have some we pull out and you want to show the while you’re telling them a story, you want to pull out and show the vista of what’s happening, the devastation that’s happening. And those were just before we just shot the plates locked down. And my guy Damon, who’s great, he’s worked with Light storm entertainment he worked on Avatar came in, and came in with the effects and created these burning cities and created. And again, there’s still some removal stuff where we would shoot and no matter how careful where eventually there’d be a car that would drive by in the backgrounds, you have to cut that out and plug it up. As when it comes to the advice … here’s my main bit of advice. I’m not sure everyone is cognizant that there’s two types of animation, right? There’s 2D animation and 3D animation. 2D animation is, again, where there’s a TV in the background and you don’t want it and someone goes in there and cuts it out and takes away or it’s a character is like in house about the characters that ghost we created sort of our own TV, snow interference kind of effect a little bit like the ring this this kind of thing where they would they were just sort of shifting shimmer out of in and out just almost like the vertical hole was just a little knot right on him. Things like that are 2D effects. They’re pieces of you know, effects that are layered on top of the footage you’ve shot. They’re not hard to do, they’re not expensive to do. They’ve gotten cheaper and cheaper on my recent film Beasts Inside, we have a ton of those effects. And they were rarely used to do everything from taking a character’s eyes and turning them all black or anything like that. When you get into it, as far as writing, if you’re now if you’re starting to write like a monster that comes out of nowhere, you know, wherever and it’s attacking people are finding with it. Now you’re in the 3D effects and 3D effects are much more complicated and much more expensive. So, for the budding filmmaker, again, my advice would be right in the effects, writing the things that you’re not sure how you’re going to do them. And then consult with someone who does know how to do it, because those people are going to know a lot more about it than you and then follow their advice. And when it comes to shooting if you’re going to shoot your own stuff. Or if you’re going to produce your own film, have that person available. Consult with that person do storyboards and try and figure it out because shooting it the right way is going to save you all the hassle later. It’s going to save your budget later.
Ashley
Yeah, yeah, sound advice for sure. So, let’s talk about your writing process a little bit. I just like to get a sort of a feel for how people write. So, this is my first question. Where do you typically write? Do you have a home office? Do you have to go to Starbucks, you want that ambient noise? And when do you write Are you like, first thing in the morning? Are you like late at night or the middle of the day? Does your writing schedule look like?
Jim Towns
My writing schedule is pretty aggressive because I’ve written a couple books too. So, I do both publishing and screenwriting at this point. I’m kind of double stack. I’m fortunate to have a nice little house down here in San Pedro. So, I have a few options I have I do I write in the living room a lot I sit on the couch my work is because I’m also the director of my movies. So, I’m busy enough that I tend to I’ll be editing on one project and writing the next project. And one of the nice things about editing is once you edit a scene or something like that, and you want to export it or like that, that takes some time. So, I’ll work and I have a I have an office that I usually use to do my editing in which has a bigger computer, obviously, I’ll get some stuff work done there, export it, and now it’s five or six hours of that happening. So, meantime, I’m just going to go to the live room and sit down and do my other writing to my actual writing on my laptop. But I also we have a little thing in the backyard I like to sit in sometimes and just get outside because you can forget how negative the effects of just sitting in one room inside for hours, hours, hours and hours writing can have on you. It’s not even affecting the writing. It’s just affecting you. So, my advice would be to change it up for any other writers out there that are listening just you know, don’t get locked into like ‘I can only write this way with this many cups of coffee and in this place in this place like that.’ That’s fine if that’s like your happy thing, but challenge yourself and shift yourself out and go someplace else and do it. Yeah, I don’t tend to write much in public anymore. Ever since I was in LAX, trying to do rewrites on something, and I realized the guy sitting behind me was just staring at my screen reading everything I was writing, which was really invasive and strange. Dude, come on. Yeah, that’s just weird, right? Because last time I’m reading is under NDA at this point. So, like, that constitutes kind of a risk. It’s very strange. Nothing, I don’t recognize what it is. But still, yeah, and as far as time of day, it’s, every time a day, I do like to wake up and do you know, make some food and just do a little writing in the morning when the lights are nice and everything, that’s cool. But I enjoy doing it late at night, too. But if I’m on a deadline, that all goes out the window, it’s just from the time I wake up to the time I go to sleep, it’s just it’s just forcing it to happen.
Ashley
So, and we can use this particular film as sort of an example. But how much time do you spend preparing to write, doing index cards, note book, you know, just writing down ideas versus how much time have you actually in Final Draft cranking out screenplay pages?
Jim Towns
It’s gotten to a point now where there’s no index cards, there’s no anything like that, there’ll be an I’ll do. I’ll back a bounce back and forth, I’ll break down sort of the beats of something in Word, very often I’ll do an outline, I’ll do a three-act structure. And I’ll try and figure it out. And I’ll have like a, I’ll have a worksheet, a digital worksheet that I’m working from that any kind of ideas that hit me while I’m doing something different in you know, at some other point in the script, I can jump in and do that before I lose them and forget them. When I go into actually final draft and I’m writing, I usually just write straight through scenes. I don’t always write in order, sometimes, very often, I’ll skip towards the end of the film, and just at least get that figured out. So, I know what I’m working towards. But at this point in my career, 20 some screenplays in, it’s not unusual for me to just sit down and really just start writing through and try and get at least a draft down and then go back in and start figuring out where my beats are and what needs to be shifted around and fixed.
Ashley
And how do you know when it’s time to start showing others? Do you do a couple of these drafts yourself? And then do you take it out to get notes? And who are these people that that you get notes from? I’m just curious about sort of what your development process looks like.
Jim Towns
That’s interesting. Yeah, notes are something I just don’t have in my zone at the moment, except for just like, the actual producer’s notes, you know, yeah, I don’t really get a chance to show stuff to peers or anything like that, it’s really just a matter of … normally, if I’m writing something, I have a pretty clear idea that it’s on its way to getting made. That’s just time management at this point. I mean, there’s things I writing that I’m just, I’ll skip to, and it’s just oh, it’s such a great idea. It’d be really fun to do. But for the most part, like I’m writing for somebody, or for something like the thing I’m working on right now, is a film that we’re going to shoot on location. And we went down there last week, and checked it out. And its pretty far distance away from, you know, everything. So, it was a matter of like really looking at like the location and what it affords and what options we have there and what assets we can employ. And then coming back and starting to revise what I had originally planned to do based on those considerations. So, I’m really writing for production at this point. And that’s, that’s kind of the best part. And the worst part to it being the director and producer as well, for most of my projects. It’s like I’m basically writing for myself, knowing that, that in six months or 12 months’ time, I’m going to be standing on a set, trying to film what I wrote and just going like, what was that guy thinking? Like I wrote a film I just shot called killer X shot in New Jersey and Pennsylvania in June. I had a chance to scout all the locations, I scouted some of them, and then came back and finished writing the script. And we went and shot. And the one location was the family’s house. And there’s an and I hadn’t gotten to see it. And for some reason, I wrote a ton of scenes to take place in the kitchen like all these conversations, right? Because it’s the kitchen right and everyone eats up and talks in the kitchen. And when I finally got to the location, the kitchen was so small. And it was just why did I write so I’m three scenes into we just started all those kitchen scenes. And one day I’m like Wonder write so many scenes in this kitchen, because you run out of ways to film it. Interestingly, there’s no repetitive way different. There’s just not that many places, but the cameras so that’s the upside and downside to being your own writer really when you’re a filmmaker.
Ashley
So, how do you approach screenplay structure? You mentioned the three-act structure. You know, there’s the Syd Field, Blake Snyder, they have these delineated templates. But what’s your approach to screenplay structure just sort of in general?
Jim Towns
I hang everything on that three axis just as a beginning template, and then I really tried to let it go I try to be a little more freeform. And maybe that’s some people’s criticism of my writing. But I know I know writers that hold so true to the hero’s journey where they literally looking at something like no one’s page 17, this has to be happening here. And that’s how I think you just get a lot of really reductive writing, when you hold yourself too tightly to the rules, because I think any for any of those rules that you read or see, you can find five examples of a screenwriter that went totally in the face of those things. And it was a success. I mean, whether it feels right or not, it’s an intuitive and organic thing. It’s like editing really, we know when it when the rhythm and tempo feels right. And we know when it doesn’t. And really, it’s just about stepping back, forgetting everything else and looking at what you’re writing and going to this feel right? Is this flow feel good.
Ashley
So okay, so once you had a script that you guys liked, and you’re so ready to take that next step, just take us through that process of going from script. It sounds like Jamie had some access to some funding, but just take us through that process of going from script to actually that first day of principal photography, how did you raise the money? How did you get it all cast? How did you get the locations?
Jim Towns
Yeah, that was a lot of Jamie. Jamie did a lot of the producing on that end as far as fundraising and as far as a casting, I’m also a producer on the film. So, I dealt with a lot of locations. I did a lot of props, special effects, wardrobe and things like that. So, my producing was really, but we were really a team because my precinct really focused on like the visual of things like what was going to end up on camera. And that dovetailed with me being the director, hers had a lot to do with like, the infrastructure that was built underneath our thing, and, you know, meals and transportation and all those things like that. Yeah, because we are a small team. So, we really like I mean, each of us, we’re doing a bunch of different jobs.
Ashley
And then ultimately, how did you get hooked up with the asylum? You got the film done? And then you took it to him they liked it. And then they come on…
Jim Towns
Jamie had previously done a film, she’d produced one film before coming to meet a person. And that was sort of her impetus to come to me, she’d done a film called The Sixth Friend and assignment put that out. So, when the time came for, you know, when we were finally done with, you know, hadn’t had a film to shop around, they were kind of one of her first calls. And, you know, it took a while it took a bit of back and forth. And there’s moments where we’re thinking maybe we look elsewhere or whatever, but asylum really did finally come through and made us a great offer. And we’re really happy that to come out with a company that is their brand name is so well known for all sorts of types of films instead. And at times, it’s definitely not a typical asylum movie. There are no flying sharks. It is pretty serious and dramatic. It’s an interesting mix. And maybe that’s something they’re trying to tap into. Hopefully, that’d be really great to work with them again.
Ashley
Gotcha. Gotcha. So, what’s next for you? What are you working on now?
Jim Towns
Yeah, like I said, I just, I did a film at the end of 2021 that’s coming out this year called The Possession of Ann, in cast is Sadie Katz but also produced by Sadie Katz. So, Vernon Wells is in it from the road warrior in command, no, great Australian actor, a buddy of mine. That’s done. Shot to move an action kind of comedy drama called Killer X again, earlier this year. And we’re currently editing that. And then I have a film that we’re about to start shooting in 2024 is the one that just went and scouted for a called Paradise Fallen. And it’s a darker action kind of drama. But it’s not much bigger scope film. It’s going to be really an interesting thing to tackle.
Ashley
Yeah, gotcha. Well, hopefully you can come back on the show and talk about when you’re finally done with. Is there anything you’ve seen recently, I like to wrap up the interviews, just by asking the guests if there’s anything you’ve seen recently, HBO, Netflix, so mostly screenwriting audience here is there anything you’ve been watching that you really think is great that you could recommend?
Jim Towns
I’ve been traveling a lot for work with back and forth between filming in Pennsylvania and then scouting down in the Caribbean for this next film and everything so and then working when I get home I’m working so I’m not having a heck of a lot of time and the stuff I’ve been watching his older stuff that it’s just comfort food stuff, like Superman, the movie and stuff like that, but I watched 65 on the plane down to the Caribbean last week that Adam Driver film came out with that with the dinosaurs and stuff. And it’s a big action movie and it’s not really a movie meant to be watched on your phone on an airplane. Obviously not the most ideal situation but it was, and I just thought it so wonderfully entertaining or what I really from a screenwriting standpoint, what I really love is, again, we’re talking, it’s a two person story. There are some flashbacks to his daughter and his wife, isn’t it the tiny snippet really we’re talking about to a feature length film that has two character speaking parts of it. And the one character barely speaks English to Koa girl barely speaks English. So, it’s really, you’re having a really big production and a lot of money on two performances. And only one character out of driver is dialogue. That simplicity really, I really liked. I think we’re in an era where we’re seeing a lot of movies that have a dozen characters or more care, main characters in them, or tertiary or secondary characters at least. And I think it’s easy to get lost in all that stuff. And to tell a really, here’s my one of my things, if you can tell a really simple story elegantly, and do it in a very visually arresting way that I think you’ve succeeded. And I think 65 was a great example of a film that wasn’t on my radar. I knew it had been supposed to command now for a couple of years, and then finally kind of got released. And I just hadn’t had a chance to go see it or anything like that. I’ve just gotten in to a position where I happened to and I just enjoyed the heck of it. And that’s dinosaurs or whatever.
Ashley
Yeah, yeah. So that’s a great recommendation. Yeah, I haven’t seen it either. But yeah, that does sound like a good recommendation.
Jim Towns
It’s meaningful to I like that combination. That’s kind of the kind of thing I tried to do.
Ashley
How can people see End Times. What’s the release schedule going to be like with that?
Jim Towns
It is in theaters for another couple of days in select theaters. Here in LA and in Miami, and Cleveland and Minneapolis and a couple other places. Mostly, it’s on VOD. It’s on VOD almost everywhere you can do VOD, Vudu, iTunes, Amazon was a little late getting it up there. But I think they’re going to have it up there this week. And so for, I think, a couple of weeks, it’s going to be available just as on Pay Per View, basically. And then I think it’s going to move to one of the platforms and be available to watch.
Ashley
Gotcha, gotcha. What’s the best way for people to keep up with what you’re doing? Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, anything, you’re comfortable sharing a roundup for the show notes so people can follow along with your career.
Jim Towns
Yeah, I’m on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Just it’s Jim Towns. Just look around for me, and you’ll find me and stuff. And it’s a regularly updated amalgam of stuff in my life and in my career, but there’s a lot of there’s a lot of work updates to between my filmmaking in my publishing.
Ashley
Gotcha, gotcha. Perfect. Well, Jim, I really appreciate you coming on talking with me today. Good luck with this film and good luck while your future films as well.
Jim Towns
Thanks, Ashley. I really appreciate it.
Ashley
Thank you. Yeah, we’ll talk to you later. Bye.
SYSs from concept to completion, screenwriting course is now available, just go to www.sellingyourscreenplay.com/screenwritingcourse. It will take you through every part of writing a screenplay, coming up with a concept, outlining, writing the opening pages, the first act, second act, third act and then rewriting and then there’s even a module at the end on marketing your screenplay, once it’s polished and ready to be sent out. We’re offering this course in two different versions, the first version, you get the course, plus, you get three analyses from an SYS reader, you’ll get one analysis on your outline, and then you’ll get two analyses on your first draft of your screenplay. This is just our introductory price, you’re getting three full analyses, which is actually the same price as our three-pack analysis bundle. So, you’re essentially getting the course for free when you buy the three analyses that come with it. And to be clear, you’re getting our full analysis with this package. The other version doesn’t have the analysis, so you’ll have to find some friends or colleagues who will do the feedback portion of the course with you. I’m letting SYS select members do this version of the course for free. So, if you’re a member of SYS select you already have access to it. You also might consider that as an option. If you join SYS select you will get the course as part of that membership too. A big piece of this course is accountability. Once you start the course, you’ll get an email every Sunday with that week’s assignment. And if you don’t complete it, we’ll follow up with another reminder the next week, it’s easy to pause the course if you need to take some time off, but as long as you’re enrolled, you’ll continue to get reminders for each section until it’s completed. The objective of the course is to get you through it in six months so that you have a completed power screenplay ready to be sent out. So, if you have an idea for a screenplay, and you’re having a hard time getting it done, this course might be exactly what you need. If this sounds like something you’d like to learn more about, just go to www.sellingyourscreenplay.com/screenwritingcourse. It’s all one word, all lowercase. I will of course a link to the course in the show notes and I will put a link to the course on the homepage up in the right-hand sidebar.
On the next episode of the podcast, I’m going to be interviewing writer director John Garcia, who just did a big foot horror film called Summoning the spirit. He’s done a number of LGBTQ films including this horror film he’s an interest it’s an interesting discussion with him next week about how he’s been able to launch his career and now get his latest film produced so keep an eye out for that episode next week, that’s our show. Thank you for listening.