This is a transcript of SYS Podcast Episode 246: Producer Jeffrey Giles Talks About Writing For The Independent Film Market.
Ashley: Welcome to Episode #246 of the Selling Your Screenplay Podcast. I’m Ashley Scott Meyers, screenwriter and blogger of the www.sellingyourscreenplay.com. Today I’m interviewing producer Jeffrey Giles. Jeffrey is one of the producers who hired me to write an early draft of the film they’re finishing up right now called Snake Out Of Compton, which is a sort of spoof of Straight Out Of Compton. I know Jeffrey pretty well, so we were able to dig in pretty deeply into this film. We also talked generally about low budget independent filmmaking as well as what’s screenwriters should be doing to write these sorts of films. Stay tuned for that interview.
I just wanna give a quick shout out to Martin Gooch. Martin’s fourth film Black Flowers is having its world premiere at the Sitges Film Festival in Barcelona, Spain. The festival runs from October 4th through the 14th. If you remember the last interview I did with Martin promoting his film The Gate House, he mentioned he was getting ready to shoot this film I think it was in Montana. Martin has been on the podcast twice, in #Episode 17 and also on #Episode 204. He’s a real hustler and he’s out there getting his movies made. So if you live in Spain, think about checking out his latest film and supporting him. I will link to the film festival in the show notes.
If you find this episode viable please help me out by giving me a review in iTunes or leaving 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 mention in the podcast can be found on my blog in the show notes. I also publish a transcript with every episode incase you’d rather read the show or look at something later on. You can find all the podcast show notes at www.sellingyourscreenplay.com/podcast, and then just look for Episode Number #246. 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 log line and query letter and how to find agents, managers and producers who are looking for material. Really it’s everything you need to know to sell your screenplay. Just go to www.sellingyourscreenplay.com/guide.
A quick few words about what I’m working on, on The Pinch, the crime/thriller feature film which I’m finishing up. I’ve got some technical issues I’ve got to deal with before I can push it out to iTunes and Amazon. One of the processes that these aggregators do is they do what’s called a QC, a Quality Control Report. So there were a couple of issues. They found some drop frames in one part and then they also had one issue with one of the special effect shots. I haven’t actually dug into the report so I’ve got to get into that more. But I think these things are not completely uncommon. It’s probably like a rendering issue so I’ve probably got to just go back to my editor. Hopefully he’s not listening to this because I’m sure he was pretty happy when I picked up all the drives and he thought he was done.
So I’ll probably just have to go back up to his house and we’ll probably have to do a couple more exports on this and kind of see how it all comes together but hopefully we can get that worked out here in the next week or so. I’m still polishing up my mystery thriller script which I’m hoping to shoot early next year, so that’s moving along nicely. So those are the main things I am working on, now let’s get into the main segment. Today I am interviewing producer Jeffrey Giles, here is the interview.
Ashley: Welcome Jeffrey to the Selling Your Screenplay Podcast. I really appreciate you coming on the show with me today.
Jeff: Yeah, thanks for having me Ashley, I really appreciate it.
Ashley: So to start out, maybe you can tell us a little bit about your background. Where did you grow up and how did you get interested in the entertainment business?
Jeff: I grew up in a really small town in Washington State. If anybody’s ever seen the Twilight movies or read the Twilight books, they take place in a little town called Forks in Washington. It’s about 1500 people…now it’s probably around 3000…one stop away, that’s where I grew up- Forks, Washington Twilights. I went to school out in…just outside of Vancouver, British Columbia for two years and then I finished up in Montana, Montana State University, Bozeman, went to film program out there. I graduated in 2005 and came up to LA with the love of my life and right after that, that was summer of 2005, I started working for Nu Image in was it October of 2005, Nu Image Millennium Films.
There was a Borders Bookstore in Sherman Oaks at the time and when I first moved down we were looking at [inaudible 00:05:06] Sherman Oaks area and I went to Borders and looked up the Hollywood creative directory when that existed. It was a thing. I couldn’t afford to buy it [laughs] so I just sat there and looked at the different companies and what they were doing and…I mean, this is before IMDb was even a reliable source of contact information and stuff like this. So I looked at various companies and what they were doing, what they had coming up and made note of companies that were doing things that I liked. Nu Image listed Rambo in pre-production and I’m a huge Rambo fan, so I was like, “I’ve got to talk to this company.
I called them up right there on my little flip phone and talked to their office manager. I said I’ll do anything to get a job with you guys.” It just so happened that the primary executive over there was transitioning assistants at the time and so they needed kind of like a general assistant and that’s…I walked in that next day and I knew that I was gonna have a job like that day.
Ashley: Everything just [inaudible 00:06:32]?
Jeff: Yeah, they were so much….that place, it was like a dysfunctional family. As soon as you walked through the door you were like, “There’s a lot of work that can be done, so if I make myself dispensable here or show that I’m capable and I’m an outgoing person and I can handle multiple things and get along with multiple personalities I can figure it out. And so I did and they offered me a job within about a week of me just like showing up. I just started showing up and the assistants caught on. Like I said there was an assistant shuffle and the person that was going out to this desk didn’t wanna stay there for very long, so that job fell to me and in about six months after handling the phones I said, “This is garbage.”
All the real power and knowledge that I’m drawn to is happening in the international sales department and I saw that if they were in need of help that their productions getting into things like Rambo and at the time we were preselling Robert De Niro out in picture called Righteous Kill and a couple of other…like an A-list pictures for the independent space and they were just under water. In the international department they were selling twenty-something movies a year at that point. Twenty, almost 30 in pictures. There was just so much to be done. Cristian [inaudible 00:08:20] they were the primary executives and there were a couple other people [inaudible 00:08:27] Carlo De Los Santos. There was kind of a shuffle going on there.
There were some people leaving and with the amount of work required it was just like the same thing. I was like, “I’ll just make myself indispensable, I’ll learn everything I can and that’s when…it was at the very end of 2005 then beginning of 2006, that’s when I started going to the markets and understanding how international sales and how domestic sales really worked.
Ashley: So what drew you to that? You said that all the action was there and that’s where you wanted to go. Was it just the opportunities you saw that the department needed help, so you wanted to go over there or there was something just about international sales that interested you?
Jeff: Well, that was the engine of what they decided to make. I mean, of course like any other bigger production company…
Ashley: The engine in terms of the finances, like that’s where most of the money came from?
Jeff: Correct, yeah. That was what validated where projects would land and how it needed to be built and what value it actually had. So they would acquire properties, IPs, whatever from anything like Conan The Barbarian, which was another one that they had on their [inaudible 00:09:38]. So it was like Conan the Barbarian, Rambo, I think they had even licensed Buck Rogers at the time and they were figuring out the licensing for it. They knew that these were properties they wanted. They were paying really relatively. They were paying prices for these options and Ref Sonja. But it was international…it was Danny and Christian in the sales department I would say, “Yeah, if we get Rambo, great, but you can’t go produce Rambo for $100 million.
It can only be produced for x amount and Stallone has to of course be in it and he has to direct it. Protocol x, y and z has to happen in order for us to be able to conclude this act of business which validates this type of budget. If that process had any sort of hitch in the project when it would still be a project, it wouldn’t be a picture. It wouldn’t get turned into a movie.
Ashley: What did you wanna do when you came out here, did you wanna be in producing distribution? Was that your main role?
Jeff: I didn’t really know. There’s a part of me that wanted to just like make my own pictures and that was the real generality of the goal was I wanna make my own movies. I think that’s what really drew me to the international side, was because understanding that this is how…anybody can choose any picture they wanna make, but you have to have a mechanism in place in order to actually produce that picture. Nu Images mechanism was international sales. So that’s what drew me to it, it was like if you could command dollars for your idea, if you could trade your idea or your package and get it validated by somebody who puts that end product, that widget basically into that movie in front of an audience and is able to transact and they say, “Yes, we like your idea because factor x, y, z is called Snake Out Of Compton, it’s got this star or whatever and we’re willing to pay you x.
That’s one of the best positions to start in because that distributor is essentially validating an audience. That’s what you want at the end of the day as a filmmaker, I think is an audience.
Ashley: What are some common mistakes when people come in here, producers, directors, writers come in here with projects, and you hear about their projects? What are some judt common mistakes that go against precisely what you’re talking about there?
Jeff: They don’t know who their audience is. They don’t have their goals clearly defined. They have big, broad doors like, “I want my movie to be seen by people. I want it to be seen by an audience.” Great, that’s a fine goal. Nothing wrong with that goal, but nothing’s stopping you from uploading your movie to YouTube, go monetize it there if you can. Just saying that, I can see the reaction on your face. It’s like, “Well, that’s not most people’s goals with a movie.” And it’s not. Most people that come in to meet with us, they made the movie for one reason and then they sit with us and their goals have suddenly shifted or the lack of a type of specificity to it. Now that they have this product, which is what their movie has essentially become. It’s a product and they have no idea what to do with it or their expectations for what their product is are so misaligned with what the product is that it’s…
Ashley: So let’s talk about a specific example. It seems to me most filmmakers and myself included, you start out, it’s all creative ideas, like I just think it’s cool or something about that idea sparks you and then you get done with the film, and then it’s all about how can I recoup the money. And so that’s the moment your goal is aligned in a different direction.
Jeff: Which is completely backwards to what I was saying in terms of how we and how companies like Nu Image engineer their movies is like…you don’t just go into production on Rambo because it’s a good idea. Of course it’s a good idea, but how should you go into production? Why should you spend that kind of money on that picture?
Ashley: Fifty million versus 100 million or 75 million versus [crosstalk].
Jeff: Yeah, or five, or $200,000 dollars. Whatever it is along the way this is like kind of one of my mantras is like budget has nothing to do with quality, but quality doesn’t mean your picture is gonna sell. There’s just no chain link of logic that says if I make my movie for this and don’t put anybody in it but it’s a calling card for my innate creative ability and it’s gonna be great and it’s gonna be called Paranormal Activity, there’s nothing that says because you made it, it now has a value that’s going to offset what you spent on the low budget side. Even on the higher budget side, unless you get distributors to validate that, unless you can engage an audience from the outset and be able to get that audience to transact.
Ashley: Alright, let’s talk about Automatic Entertainment. You run that with your partner Michael. Maybe you can talk about sort of what Automatic Entertainment is. I have had many conversations with distributors and sales agents and I’m still a little foggy about what exactly distributors versus the sales agents, even versus the producers reps. So if you can tell us, what does Automatic Entertainment? Maybe sort of define those different terms?
Jeff: Automatic Entertainment is…like if I was going to capsulate kind of our mission statement, Automatic Entertainment is a distribution solutions company. We’re somewhere between a management company for a creative or talent and a sales agency whose business is predicated upon offering something for the right to sell a picture, whether that’s a minimum guarantee or to be part of a financing structure on how the picture’s made or is cutting the kind of deal where they’re taking the cut rate for services actually to sell the picture and put it in front of distributors and be the first pair of hands that money really hits before it goes back to investors and equities. So we’re in this middle ground. If you’re the consummate agency it’s a volume business.
It doesn’t really matter what the project is or where it came from or who invested what in it, it’s, “Can I acquire it, can I sell it and can I get my piece out of it?” We don’t like that business which is why…
Ashley: Tell me a couple of companies that are in that space. I mean, I’ve heard a lot about Uncork’d Entertainment, when movies come through my way, I’ve heard of Gravitas, a bunch of [crosstalk].
Jeff: Yes, so those are distributors. Those are companies that actually sell to retailers outlet broadcasters who are like one degree of separation from the audience. So audience pays Red Box, Red Box pays Uncork’d and Uncork’d pays Gravitas. I don’t know if Gravitas has a Red Box deal. They might go through somebody. But yeah, those are distributors. Like in the larger conversation there’s not much of a difference between somebody…like really speaking, there’s not much of a difference between somebody like Uncork’d Keith Leopard and then Warner Brothers. They basically do the same thing. They put movies into theaters, they put movies into retail outlets and are usually a degree or two degrees of separation from their actual consumer. So a sales agency would sell to Uncork’d, would sell to Warner Brothers.
Ashley: I see, and I had a friend who had a movie with some distributor. I don’t remember the one who it was. They signed a deal with Lionsgate and then Lionsgate actually put it on Red Box. So he was seeing his movie on Red Box. And so you’re saying that then distributors would go cut deals with other distributors? If they don’t have a deal with Red Box they would go and just try to cut some sort of a…
Jeff: Back when physical media was a…like DVD Blu-ray was like the big home entertainment right. It still is for the most part but back when it was more relevant let’s say, you wanted to get your movie into Walmart. There were only about five or six preferred vendors that could actually get your widget onto a shelf. And so it was a big business of like collaborative work and working of this person using this person to fulfil these DVDs and get them over to Anderson Media who would fulfil Walmart. It was a lot of hands. There’s really a great amount of consolidation in that regard, SONY DCAB which was like the DVD manufacturing company that’s now under I believe Technicolor.
Their whole home entertainment DVD division, and I think some of their digital home entertainment people are…maybe the whole department is now going over to one of those fulfilment center companies. Alliance, I believe it was called. There was a big distributor just a few years ago… Gosh, that used to be associated with Nu Image, First Look became a different company. I’ll think of the name in a second, but they bought out Anderson and so they were like one of the last names in DVD for this Alliance and [inaudible 00:21:30] and these other big warehouse performing companies. That’s riding the horse in the wrong direction and talking about that because that DVD company. When was the last time you bought a DVD?
Ashley: Well, I have kids. I have young kids so we do buy a lot of the kids DVDs. We got a whole shelf. All the Dismays you can….
Jeff: Yeah, we’re keeping it alive.
Ashley: So, let’s talk about Snake Out Of Compton for a minute. Maybe to start out you can just give us a quick pitch or logline. Kind of tell us what that movie is all about.
Jeff: Snake Out Of Compton is about a rap group who’s on the verge of signing their first recording publishing deal. Through a degree of separation on of the people associated with their rap group transforms a pet snake into this giant mutating monster and the rap group is the city’s last hope for saving them.
Ashley: Perfect. And I think this is a good project to talk about because it was one that I came in on wrote the original draft. And I’d just be curious to hear, what was it about this concept that you guys liked that you guys wanted to literally invest some of your hard dollars into? What was it that this concept had that was…
Jeff: We were pitching Sci-fi channel. We had met with one of the acquisitions executives at a market recently and so we were just pitching, “Here’s five concepts, do you like any of them? Here’s five titles, here’s five loglines, do you like any of them?” And we have been taking to CGI Company, the effects company that was capable of doing snake effects and they had conveyed to us that it was fairly easy to animate a snake and so it was kind of just this perfect storm of us dealing with that, us pitching and my business partner Mike just kind of out of the blue came up with the title Snake Out Of Compton. I was like, “Stop everything, we’re not even gonna pitch it, we’re just gonna do this idea.”
He was like, “Really?” I was like, “Yeah, of course.” It’s just a great title. You get everything you need to know about that movie from the title alone. And so when…just like Sharknado. It’s like when you hear it you get it and if you don’t get it then this movie is probably not for you. And so that was it, Mike came up with the thing and we had a degree of separation and that was it. We just knew it was a good idea and we had a production resource, a post-production resource and we knew at the end of the day we could sell it. We just knew it was a risk worth taking. It was a risk certainly, but it was one that…
Ashley: So let’s take it to that tempo that you kind of laid out at the beginning of our conversation. What you’re saying some of these filmmakers don’t necessarily understand how they’re gonna get to their audience. So who is the audience for a movie like Snake Out Of Compton?
Jeff: For how we operate especially in the movies that we produce, we’re not…our audiences is the global buyer base. So it’s distributors like Uncork’d, it’s One on One Films or Signature Entertainment or High Flyers in the UK. It’s Splendid or Tiberius Sunfilm in Germany. It’s FIP in France, it’s Trade Media. It’s distributors in any given territory, that’s our business. At the end of the day we like to pick ideas that we know inherently have a public audience as a title like Snake Out Of Compton aspires to capture. If you like Sharknado or Three Headed Shark Attack all these other kinds of Sci-fi pictures cheesy B movies, then hopefully a title like Snake Out Of Compton not only gets a laugh but it engages a buying response. That’s kind of our methodology but because we’re not a business that engages the consumer we base our business off of what can we get for the title as a sale to the UK or as a sale to Germany or as a sale to…
Ashley: As people who know distributors well were you able to go out and do some pre-sales for a film like this?
Jeff: Yes.
Ashley: You were able to? So you knew kind of going into it what your budget should be?
Jeff: Yeah, I mean, that’s how we show up our risk, is by understanding enough about the title’s salability in the same way that Rambo has an inherent salability to it. It’s not that we’re oblivious to how audiences transact in France or UK or Germany or North America on this titles. We do some research and we figure out how these titles typically perform. So it’s not just us saying as simple of a story as it is to say, “Oh, it was just a great idea.” We knew that international markets respond to creature features and we knew that creature features of this kind of having a title association in this way they perform this kind of level, therefore if you make it for x it can sell for y and hopefully when consumers transact on the title in their territory that’s it and there’s money on the table for the distributors to actually profit.
So we’re making profit from the distributors and I was hopefully signing deals with the distributors where once they male enough profit in their own territory the consumer dollar can flow through the distributor, that’s us.
Ashley: So do you guys go and hook up with the distributor…in a case like Snake Out Of Compton, do you hook up with the distributor or are you doing like sales? Like you just mentioned like…I guess you would be a distributor but are you doing like 100 different deals on Snake Out Of Compton or are you signing like one or two deals and then they’re going out and getting it…
Jeff: It just depends. Like on Snake Out Of Compton I honestly can’t remember how…
Ashley: But you just typically, you might kind of deal with the guy in Germany, “Okay, here’s Snake Out Of Compton, go to Spain, cut a deal with some distributor…
Jeff: Yeah, sort of.
Ashley: You don’t just go to one distributor that does international and one that does…
Jeff: I mean, you can. There’re companies and projects all the time that are lifted by a single company alone. You go to the AFM, you’ve done some Shark and Nazi idea and Universal says, “Yeah, we want this for our world.” So then you go and you conclude that deal. We’ve not done that like outright one single distributor sale. It’s been more advantageous for us to actually break it up and do the territories.
Ashley: Now, one thing you didn’t mention about Snake Out Of Hampton, I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on this. The big knock, like as a writer you hear from distributors is comedy doesn’t play well overseas. And as you’ve been describing Snake Out Of Compton, it’s a creature feature, it’s CGI, it’s Sharknado…Sharknado wasn’t really comedy. Is that a true reason you would agree with that comedy doesn’t play overseas and so you’re downplaying the comedy aspects of Snake Out Of Compton?
Jeff: Comedy is a huge worry in terms of what kind of the sub-categories are within comedy. Baywatch for I’ll say some purposes is a comedy with a rock and [inaudible 00:29:44].
Ashley: Sharknado though is debatable because it’s just a cheesy movie and is kind of [inaudible 00:29:51] but I wouldn’t say it’s a comedy.
Jeff: Well, yeah. I mean, come on it’s a comedy. It’s like ridiculous.
[laugter]
Ashley: It’s ridiculous.
Jeff: But my point is like it’s tough. I don’t know enough about Sharknado’s sales numbers or anything like that. Even if I did I shouldn’t comment on what those are. But my point of bringing up Baywatch though is that Baywatch is inherently a comedy in the same way that Sharknado is inherently a comedy. And if you look at Baywatches Box Office which I was looking at yesterday, it does twice as much business in international as it does domestically. This is…and I might be wrong about those numbers but…there’s some sort of balance there to that picture. But to say that like international markets don’t respond to a certain genre I think is incredibly near sighted because if you have a great comedy that is probably distributable, people are gonna watch it.
There are genres that essentially make money like easier. As a distribution solutions manager, action is always an easy pitch, creature disaster titles are always an easy pitch but using another rock Dwayne Johnson picture, look at the performance of Sky Scraper. Arguably that’s the biggest disaster picture this year and we’ll see how the international comes in on that one. But it will probably be, you know, on a one to one plain field ratio, Sky Scraper will probably perform the same way that Baywatch did even though one’s beach comedy and one is blockbuster disaster. And even then Rock is a great example. Rampage, that’s another one that’s like…and of course these movies are huge in terms of scale and $125/$140 million advertised production budget, whatever.
But Rampage does significantly more than Baywatch and will probably do significantly more than how Sky Scrapers poised to do if it’s kind of falling in this Baywatch trend. And it’s a disaster picture too but because it has a giant monkey or alligator in it does that mean it’s not much better? Is it a better movie than these other pictures? Does a better movie actually make more money?
Ashley: Yeah. I’ve heard of Sky Scrapers. I haven’t seen it but I actually heard that it’s not that bad. It was actually pretty good [crosstalk].
Jeff: Right, yeah. As far as those Dwayne Johnson pictures are concerned, yeah I think it’s arguably one of the better reviewed out of that group, but good doesn’t equate to business. It just doesn’t unfortunately. Bad movies do great business all the time. Sharknado or Snake Out Of Compton or any of these big pictures that kind of like pop up a little bit, these are examples.
Ashley: So let’s dig into Alien Expedition. That’s another one. Maybe you can give us a quick logline on that one.
Jeff: I mean, essentially it’s not very different than Snake Out Of Compton. Alien Expedition which I think we’re gonna re-title Jurassic expedition was originally titled Jurassic Planet and then a North American distributor told us, “Hey, you should call this Alien Expedition,” and then we did. A group of people, a group of space explorers discover a habitable planet on a return voyage back to earth. The expedition team is deployed to the planet’s surface but they have to wait for 10,000 hours to determine habitability, economic resources, blah, blah, blah. They discover that it’s filled with these dinosaur like creatures and…
Ashley: So where did that idea come from?
Jeff: Where did that idea come from…we were in Hong Kong at the Hong Kong Filmart, which is like the Asian version of AFM. We had recently been selling our Jurassic City picture which was a Sci-fi TV kind of picture. We knew there was an international appetite for this, we knew we were two years off from this Jurassic World kingdom picture and we said, “Well, international distributors, i.e. Asian distributors they do like giant creature movies like Snake Out Of Compton, so we need a dinosaur creature concept and that was it. We marked up a poster, we put it in our booth and promoted it and said this is what we’re gonna do next. We have enough distributor interest and buying validation and we can’t wait for them to say, “Alright we’re gonna make a movie.”
Ashley: Did you have some experience? It sounds like you understood that the CGI snake was gonna be easy to do on the budget you had. Did you also do some experimentation with the CGI dinosaurs and know that that was gonna be possible?
Jeff: Yeah, we didn’t have that team set up like we did on Snake, but we’d seen enough. From selling Jurassic City we knew that there were 15, 20 easily accessible CGI companies that you could go to and then it was just a matter of like tailoring your script and your production to make sure that you’re not over-extending in terms of needing two thousand CGI dinosaur shots as opposed to having many. I think we ended up with like 100 picture, which is a lot considering…hopefully it makes for a really exciting picture.
Ashley: Yeah, exactly. So as I said, you and Michael got a co-writing credit on that. Maybe you can talk about that relationship. How does that work with Jacoby? Did you guys sit in a room and write together or were you guys writing scenes? Maybe just describe that.
Jeff: Yeah, we’re pretty much hands on especially if the idea is born with us it becomes a business endeavor for us. We kind of have to wear multiple hats under Automatic because we are a distribution solution. So we’re acting as sales agents, we’re acting as managers, we’re also acting as talent. So enough distributors say, “Hey guys, we’d really love for you to make a movie with aliens and dinosaurs and space ships.” We say, “We can do that. We have the ability, we can do that picture.” So when it comes to ideas that are inherently ours, we like to be a little more hands on in some ways on these projects. If the idea is something that really strikes our fancy or tickles a creative bone in us, yeah, we’ll crank up the scripts.
We know how to write scripts, we read scripts all the time and so we know arguably, even though some of our movies may not showcase like we have the best taste or talent, we know a good movie when we see it. We know what comprises a good story. If those elements aren’t in our pictures it’s usually because we’ve made a conscious choice to forego the most quality story for 800 BF shots. Because at the end of the day that’s what we know we’re selling with Alien Expedition. We’re selling a movie that hopefully is good. But good is always subjective. We’re selling a movie that has something remarkable to it and in this instance, in Alien Expedition instance, we wrote a script that was far reaching for what the budget was and was ambitious in terms of how many creature shots and a the types of creature shots we wanted to do.
So for example the Red Man came out recently and we were like, “Great, let’s do it.” You never really see a scene even in the Jurassic pictures, like the blockbuster Jurassic pictures where it’s like one of the characters is wrestling with a dinosaur like Leonardo DiCaprio wrestles with a bear. That would be a great scene, you never see that. We want in this expedition picture a guy with just a nice wrestling with a dinosaur. You have to take the logical stories like how to…that would be a great scene, that’s a trailer moment. Totally. So you have to take the logical writing steps in order to say, “How do we get from…here’s the mission to do wrestling with an alien [laughs]. And that was it. So we plotted along the way. That’s really how that script came out, was working with Jacoby and working with Mike and just kind of spit balling creatively over a couple of days.
We liked this kind of scene and we liked that kind of scene and we love these scenes from aliens and we love these scenes from Jurassic Park and how do we combine this kind of stuff to make something that is visually remarkable.
Ashley: Yeah, now I’m curious, the new Jurassic World came out this summer probably a couple of weeks ago or months ago. Were you guys trying to get it done, did you want a timed out release or it doesn’t matter if it comes out next year?
Jeff: It didn’t matter to us, with our distributors it’s however they wanna release it. As long as we make it available it’s really up to a distributor to pin point when they care to release. There’s a big business on that called drafting, which is kind of a British term for titles that…in the US we call them mark busters. So, transformers comes out and The Asylum makes Transmorphers. Sherlock Holmes comes out and another company makes a Sherlock Holmes…whatever. Cindy Collier Night of The Werewolf or whatever it is… Game of Werewolf.
Ashley: Like just the Jurassic Games. I just interviewed the guy who…
Jeff: Exactly, like Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom comes out you get Jurassic World or you get Jurassic Games. I think there’s four or five Jurassic pictures in the market right now available to purchase right now. You got Alien Expedition which we’re gonna retitle. We also have a picture called Jurassic Galaxy that’s ready right now. Again, it’s like…it’s up to buyers when they wanna release. You don’t necessarily need Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom to…you don’t need to rely on that. Most distributors don’t need to rely on that picture to release whatever it is that they’re releasing, even if it is construed as a draft title.
Ashley: Yeah. Okay, so let’s talk about Robin Hood The Rebellion. Same thing, maybe you can give us a quick pitch or a logline on that.
Jeff: Robin Hood must rescue Maid Marian from the Sheriff of Nottingham. That’s it.
Ashley: Classic Robin Hood story.
Jeff: Yeah, when we were initially talking to the production company and the producers in the UK we said we want die hard meets The Raid in a castle with bows and arrows. That was it. That was it. That was the only thing we said and then they went off and…
Ashley: But not even Robin Hood was even a part of that.
Jeff: No, no, no. We said Robin Hood. Because drafting is a bigger business in the UK, we said this is a good opportunity for the UK to draft the title and make something homegrown that works for the UK market. Based on the name value alone of Robin Hood being a public domain name, there should be enough international remaining global value to make that project make sense if it’s produced financially responsible fiscally.
Ashley: I interviewed a guy, he did The Curse of Sleeping Beauty and I’m just curious, is that sort of IP that exists for something like Robin Hood or Sleeping Beauty. That does have a lot of value with this because those are drafts… was there a Robin Hood movie that came out that you’re drafting on or it’s just Robin Hood in general as everybody knows?
Jeff: This is because of the ubiquitous, yeah we know in nature the name. Just because it’s called Robin Hood and there’s a Lionsgate movie coming out doesn’t mean that it tends to be a draft. I wouldn’t want anybody watching or listening to this to say, “Oh, I have to do something that has drafting ability to it.” I think the larger thing to take away from Robin Hood or the Jurassic titles or an alien expedition or whatever, even what The Asylum does in terms of their mark busters is that…essentially I can try and validate this as a consumer but essentially we’re willing to be drawn more towards properties that we have a pre-awareness of. That’ why the studios create what they create. Is because if they can take some of the guess work out of the consumers equation of like, “What am I actually getting into?”
It’s called The Avengers versus whatever…A Quiet Place which has no pre-awareness to it, it’s just like, okay, A Quiet Place is a horror picture that can be marketed in the same vein as this [inaudible 00:45:50] A24 horror pictures, got some familiar faces to it, great. But in order for A Quiet Place to really do its business they’re gonna have to market the heck out of that picture. They’re gonna have to spend a lot of publicity and advertising knowledge in order to tell people, “Hey, this is a movie you need to pay attention to and go watch it.” Whereas if your title is Robin Hood or Little Women or Mission Impossible, anything along the scale of pre-awareness, Zorro, whatever. You’ve already won 50% of the convincing battle because hopefully the title for the audience you’re intending your movie to be seen by, hopefully that audience will have that pre-awareness factor.
They’ll say, “Oh yeah, I totally wanna watch Zorro. I’m interested in Swashbucklers. I’m interested in martial arts combat. Zorro speaks to me, I loved that as a kid, I can’t wait till it comes out…whatever. So if you take that guess work out of the equation then you’ve already stacked chips in your favor way beyond what the vast majority of filmmakers are doing in the independent space which is saying…We went to script fest a couple of weeks ago and listening to all these original pitches and like every drama, every action story, nearly everything that came across our radar was this very intimate personal story that didn’t have very much broad audience appeal. It was so specific it was so…what’s the right word…
It didn’t have broad appeal. So as soon as you call your movie Three Musketeers you’ve suddenly entered a space of…
Ashley: Some people are fans, some people are into those.
Jeff: Yeah, it’s like general broad appeal. Even if you’re my mother and you have no interest in Swashbucklers. She at least still knows, “Okay, I know what The Three Musketeers are. I either want to get that for my children to watch or I want to, it’s a classic. And again, it’s about taking the guess work out of the equation. So there’s nothing wrong with producing A Quiet Place, but how do you get Quiet Place to actually stand out amongst a film spectrum of vendors- Stars Wars and Jurassic.
Ashley: Yeah, so you just mentioned Script Fest. That was one of my next questions was in general, how do you find writers? I know there’s writers that would have loved to get some produced credits even on low budget movies. So how do you typically find writers? Are relationships started with…I just I guess coincidentally wrote a script that you guys were involved in and then when I started emailing you out the pulley you kind of just recognized me.
Jeff: Yeah, we don’t typically go to places like Script Fest or InkTip. We don’t go to those things and hunt for ideas. Mostly because we’ve found that they’re just…there’s a real lack of understanding about what the market wants. The mistakes that we talked about earlier. It’s like these pictures or these scripts, these ideas don’t have an intended audience in mind in the broader word of audience in terms of what we need for something to be worth our while to get involved with and do our business. Not that they shouldn’t be made, it’s just that we’ve never found those to provide us real tangible value. It’s good to go to them every once in a while because you never know. It’s like fishing. You never know when you might find a…and it’s good to expand your network.
But most of the pictures that are a part of have come through our community. Existing community and then that community continues to expand each year whether it’s, “I was a writer on this or I was a cinematographer on that project or whatever.” So our doors are always open. Our phones are always on and we’re always checking email and we’re not hard to get a hold of. We’re a blue tick company. But…
Ashley: You’re not sitting around reading a bunch of spec scripts is the bottom line, to see if you can find a [crosstalk].
Jeff: No, I’ve read two this morning. Again came through degrees of separation. These weren’t necessarily like cold calls or somebody was like, “Hey, Jeffrey I’m really a big fan of what you guys do or whatever [laughs]. “What do you want?” “Hey, I got a really great idea, I wrote a screenplay, it’s 90 pages and it’s called Die Hard or whatever. Do you wanna read it?” We typically don’t do that. But in this instance it was, “Oh, I worked on this picture that you guys distributed two years ago, here’s my idea.” And we looked at it and it was like, “Okay, well, there may be something here. It’s horror, there’s genre boxes that [inaudible 00:51:45] okay, they’ve got a little bit of budget for it. “Great, send it over, let’s take a look.” It was a pass. Both of them were passes but that’s it. It’s usually a few degrees of separation.
But that doesn’t mean that somebody can’t pull Carlos and say “Hey, can I send you something?”
Ashley: So, let’s talk a bit just market trends. I’d be curious to just get your perspective, what has changed over the last year, five years or ten years?
Jeff: Everything [laughs].
Ashley: But maybe you can point out some specifics. There’re certain things like DVD market we know has been on a steady decline. But maybe there’s some…
Jeff: Well, the market trends is an obvious answer. How are people consuming media?
Ashley: It’s taken over the world.
Jeff: Netflix is doing their fair share of trying to entice subscribers. I just read a report this morning that they came about a million subscribers under their expectation this previous quarter. So Netflix and streaming, you know, streaming, subscription, Video On Demand which is where Netflix is, same as the Amazon Pro, Hulu and now YouTube. There’s definitely an upswing in our consumers interacting with that method of consumption. DVD on the downside, sure. I also saw this morning on the news that the two blockbuster stores in Alaska closed and there was only one left with an open door. So if that’s not an indicator of how people are interacting with that form of consumption.
Ashley: It seems to me unlike the word that I get from other independent filmmakers that places like Hulu and Netflix are becoming much much more difficult to get your films on there, and the numbers I hear even when a filmmaker gets on there are not really that impressive. It seems to me like for this independent genre film that I’ve written in and that you guys have produced, it seems like that’s kind of getting run down a little bit.
Jeff: I mean, there’re a lot of things that we can unpack from what you just said, one of which is it’s getting harder. Yes, it is getting harder. They’re becoming much more selective with what they acquire third party wise. In the past almost all of our pictures and probably Snake Out Of Compton will get onto Netflix or Amazon or Hulu because of how we’re getting that picture distributed, because of how we’ve engineered sales on that picture. But yeah, next year it will be even more difficult than it is now. So yeah, it’s not getting easier, which I think is a great thing. It keeps the bar high. It means you can’t just do the same thing that worked 10 years ago and expect it to work today.
I love that. It’s uncomfortable…yeah, I wish my life was easy and I could get everything sold to Amazon Prime for top dollar. But if you can’t sell it to Amazon Prime for a license fee, there’s nothing stopping you from beginning your own distribution studio, creating an Amazon vendor account and uploading your movie and having it on Prime and transacting on it. There’s nothing stopping anybody from doing that. And it’s great that Amazon provides that service. If your goal is, “I really wanna get into Amazon Prime and have my movie seen by a wide audience and have the ability to transact.” And for whoever that person is I’d say that for me is way better than doing ad-supported on YouTube. Go for it man, don’t let anything stop you!
I love that about Amazon. I love that about Netflix, is that the bar is every day it’s getting higher for what they will put on their services. There’s always ways that distributors can work with these companies to get things onto the platforms that you may not always access. You might be scrolling through looking at any given selection and be like, “How the hell did this picture get on here? Why didn’t my movie with this star get onto to Netflix but this movie which is similar and doesn’t have anywhere near the production or star value that my movie has, why did it get on Netflix but mine didn’t?” There’re many number of reasons and you’d probably have to ask the distributor for that picture that did get onto Netflix.
Ashley: Correct me if I’m wrong, Isn’t it mostly ultimately about the relationship that that distributor has with that company?
Jeff: It can be, but Netflix always…or Amazon or any of these places always has the ability to say no. Even if you have a Russell Crowe action picture and Snake Out Of Compton as a distributor and you say, “Hey Amazon, we want you to take the Russel Crowe action picture and Snake Out Of Compton. Of course they have the ability to be like, “We’ll just take the Russel Crowe one. We’re gonna have to pass on Snake Out Of Compton. They can do that. There’s no rules to it, it’s negotiation. This is business to business. This is how it’s done.
Ashley: The most important thing like salesmanship and that relationship, as someone who’s preparing to get their film out there into the world like everyone’s telling me, “Oh, the poster in this…” I go to places, everyone tells me…and this is the pitch. Some of these low end distributors that will take my film, they’re like, “We can pitch it to Red Box but it’s all about the poster with Red Box.
Jeff: Yeah, that’s true.
Ashley: But I don’t want Red Box and I can see some of these distributors are getting a lot of their movies on Red Box and the posters are not different. These are a bunch of crappy movies and the posters are…you know what I’m saying? These are not great movies but the low end distributors, some of those low end distributors are getting a lot more movies on Red Box than others and it’s not the quality of the posters and frankly it’s not the quality of the films. And so I have to believe that at the end it’s the relationship that that distributor has with the…
Jeff: Each retail outlet or each business from Netflix to Red Box to Walmart, they’ve got their methods of operations. I can’t comment on that because I don’t…we have sold to Netflix in the past but every deal is unique and every situation is unique. Every picture is unique. Every picture is its own company, its own piece of business. And so distributors, retailers, they get involved with things for a lot of different reasons. There’s not real hard set logic to it. The logic starts to kind of become a bit more organized or matrix supported once you cross over into the larger theatrical spectrum. Once you get into a minimum of 600…once you get in your first week of release, you know, 600 screens US release.
Then there’re some things that start to trigger. But there’s also like you get into a tier one festival, Sundance Toronto, Cannes, Berlin. If you’re that premier picture at one of these things or you get the major award, you can bypass all of the traditional methods of release 600 or the 3,000, 4,000 screen release and go straight to Amazon and they’ll promote the heck out of your picture because you won the Grand Jury price or whatever. But if you’re not performing at a big, theatrical level or if you’re not premiering at that tier one festival level, it’s an open market. That’s already a relationship. You’ve got a long relationship with Netflix or Amazon or Hulu, you’re one of the original suppliers, probably they’re gonna pick up the phone for you. But I would think that even then those people, like every day that’s getting harder. That’s getting harder as these companies depend less and less on their party acquisition and more and more as Netflix is on original productions, Amazon in terms of expanding their channels and their strategic partnerships, Hulu in terms of creating original content.
Ashley: Would you say it’s a trend? And this is kind of not related to that, but one thing I noticed with my movie and just going to talk with distributors, I would say all of them, maybe Gravitas is not in this, but I would say all of them are where they’re starting to produce their own original content. They’re distributing a bunch of movies but they’re doing a bunch of their movies on their own as well. Is that a trend you see?
Jeff: Yeah, we see it.
Ashley: You guys are doing that yourself?
Jeff: I mean, that is our business, from day one that was our business. That’s why I left Nu Image in 2010. It was to ultimately curve my own destiny as a filmmaker, make my own movies and employ the skills and the processes that I learned in Nu Image and do it on my own. Like I said, being like a consummate sales agency or distributor is not our business. That’s not who we are. Mike and I are producers who need distribution solutions on our own movies. We just know enough to be dangerous and know how to engineer pictures and we know how to create success as far as how we define success and then we get the picture. Is it a trend to see these distributors creating their own pictures or sales agents?
Yeah, over the last couple of years I think more sales agents than ever have been purporting a version of production. Distributors are getting in earlier on pictures in terms of [inaudible 01:03:13] or prior to the premier just so that they can…I don’t know what their motivations are, but to secure the product that they need.
Ashley: Well they know what can sell so it just seems like a logic, they have inside knowledge of what they think they can sell. It seems that that would be a logical place for guys like them to start putting money into productions because they have the best chance of selling it.
Jeff: Yeah, there’s been more uncertainty…there’re more outlets now than ever for a movie to transact. But there’s also been more…there’s never been more uncertainty with how the title will actually perform just because of how the consumer methods of consumption are changing. It’s hard to define, but yeah, I would think that distributors are more inclined to get in earlier.
Ashley: So, just some parting advice for writers, and let’s take it a step up, suppose a writer, they wanna be a professional screenwriter but they don’t wanna write B movies, what advice would you have for those folks?
Jeff: It’s as easy as it sounds, don’t write B movies [laughs]. Write a script called Zorro Episode 12. Go write the Obi-Wan Kenobi story. Don’t write about your drug rehabilitation trip to South Dakota or don’t write a script called Sharknado. Don’t write a script called Snake Out of Compton.
Ashley: If someone does want to become a writer and they don’t mind working in the B movies, maybe…
Jeff: Keep in mind B movies are like low budget movies…that’s defined by how the movie is actually produced, not necessarily by what the words are on the page. Because one could argue that you could take Sharknado’s script or Snake Out Of Compton’s script, throw $150 million at it, put Dwayne Johnson and fill it with Drake and all these other rappers that are…Cardi B or whatever and you can mix that kind of content on an A level. Is that a good financial endeavor, I don’t know, I’m not in that business. But it could happen. That’s why I said…even your drug rehabilitation in South Dakota, there’s an A list picture there. So it’s really about the method of producing. If the method of producing is at an A level is beyond the screenwriter’s control or who their network is then you need to take a step back and probably evaluate who is in that circle and how you want to get your script into that A list pictures zone.
That’s I think more defined…That’s more about your community than the actual words on the page…in my opinion.
Ashley: So, you read two spec scripts this morning. Maybe you can talk about again just in general terms, what are some things that you see writers doing really well and what are some things that you see writers doing not so well. Basic advice for screenwriters.
Jeff: Taking too long to get into the story. One of the scripts this morning was…it was like I was on page 10 and I was like, “This is where the story needs to start.” Like all these other stuff was just exposition, back story garbage. We could start with him on the journey and now you’re getting character information and back story through action as opposed to you’re at the funeral, then she’s with a social worker right now, she’s at the orphanage, now she’s run away from the orphanage. Well, just start the story with her running away from the orphanage and let those back story elements feed into the momentum of your flow. Out of the last couple of scripts that I’ve read I think that was pretty much my comment on almost all of them, was the first like 30 pages on these…and each of these scripts were somewhere around 100 to 115 pages.
But I was like the first 30 pages should probably be condensed to the first 15 to 20. If you’re thinking like in Save The Cat or [inaudible 01:08:46] kind of terms, they’re like B story was being really introduced around page 50 where it should be right around page 25. Dialogue is really hard to comment on because there’s a lot of performance that goes into dialogue. But a lot of the dialogue that I’ve been reading recently has been like just shameless exposition. I think the first three lines in one of the scripts that I read this morning was like, “I’m sorry for your loss, you must miss your parents.” “My parents are already dead [laughs].” I was like, “Thanks for just selling it out.” One of them was a horror thing and in the first line was the entire…there was two pages of action or whatever and the first line of dialogue was something to the effect of like, “Well, the cellphone connection’s pretty spotty out here.”
Just so on the nose! Alright, well, there’s ways that you can show that as opposed to…I don’t get any character information or subtext through…
Ashley: Yeah. So how can people keep up with you guys are doing? Blog, Twitter, Facebook, anything you’re comfortable sharing and I will round it all up and put it in the show notes as well.
Jeff: Yeah, we’re just automatic entertainment. We are www.automaticent.com, that’s our website. We’re not really involved with too much social media updating that kind of stuff just because again, it’s not our business. Our business it to support the filmmakers and their social media outreach and distributors.
Ashley: Okay, well definitely, I’ll get the website and I’ll put that and link to it. Jeffery, you’ve been generous with your time so I really appreciate you talking to me.
Jeff: Sure, I hope it was helpful.
Ashley: I think it will be. This is great insight for screenwriters, thank you.
Jeff: Good, yeah. Distribution solutions. The last thing I will say, and this is just kind of…I just talked to somebody about this recently too. I think the biggest thing that filmmakers leave out is the distribution plan. You spend all this time figuring out what your story is…filmmakers inevitably spend all this time figuring out what their story is or what they want, just what story they wanna tell, they’ll spend all this time figuring out who to cast or who’s gonna shoot the movie or what rans should they use or what camera body should they use, what editing system should they use, but they don’t give any consideration or they give very little consideration to one of arguable the most important aspects, which is, “How do I get my movie actually seen by an audience?”
If they do that and they think about that and they find that solution before they shoot a single frame it actually chips in their favor.
Ashley: Okay, let me push back on that one because I think it’s a great point. Like as a filmmaker, I can definitely say it’s easier said than done. As a filmmaker, if I did all these things that you’re saying I think I would never make a film. Like if I sat around and waited for all the plans to align, and there’s some of that. So, give me some specifics, like how can I for my next film, how can I line up the distribution? How can I go through those steps that you’re talking about?
Jeff: The best piece of advice I can give you is actually from this thing called [inaudible 01:12:48] to just screenwriters and people who aspire to just be screenwriters. The idea with a screenplay is…I think Stanley Kubrick said that it’s just like screenplays are not meant to be read, it’s not meant to be read, it’s meant to be actualized. That’s why it’s hard to find the screenplay for the [inaudible 01:13:13] it’s because you didn’t want anybody to read it. It was for the production to read so they could make a movie that you’re gonna watch. You don’t have to read the screenplay [laughs] come on. But I think it’s important for people to write things that are essentially producible. That’s the key. Write something…that’s why I say if you’re gonna write a story about drug rehabilitation in South Dakota, great, write that story, but then figure out how to make that like Hell or High Water…not the movie but the cochet. Figure how to get that script into production.
A lot of times people will talk to us and they’ll say, “I’ve got this great film.” And it’s like, “Cool, send it to me.” It’s just a script. It’s not a picture, it’s not a motion picture, it’s an idea. It’s words on the page. The most important thing is like how are you gonna get those words on a page into a piece of motion picture products? I’m starting to lose my trail of thought…
Ashley: No, just go on. I’m just trying to push down this idea because I totally get this idea that hey, as a filmmaker and someone who wants to protect my investors, let’s give it much of a distribution value as possible. But how do I go out and do that, It’s not that easy to do.
Jeff: It’s not that easy to do if your goals are nebulous. If your goals are very specifically defined in terms of like…
Ashley: Give me a specific goal.
Jeff: This is what I’m saying, like Hell or High Water…thank you for bringing me back on track. If you’re gonna make your script like Hell or High Water that’s a very defined goal because then it’s like what’s stopping you from making that on your iPhone with your friends? If you’re waiting for Warner Brothers to throw $40 million at your rehabilitation in South Dakota picture, great. There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s a great goal, go get it man? Just know that there’s a process that’s involved in that. That’s a lot of networking, that’s a lot of people going to buffer you for your idea and the financial nature of your idea. But who’s to say that Amy Adams doesn’t just fall in love with the material if you can get it into her hands and then Brad Pitt’s plan B says, “Hey, we’re gonna produce this in quarterback or we’re gonna put that through our studio deal with Panama or wherever is that, whatever.
Suddenly you’ve got an A list director on board and boom, now you’ve got an A list rehabilitation project that’s set up with the studio. That’s why you have to laser focus your goal. If your goal is not so clearly defined you’ve no ability to understand what your milestones for success are and therefore you could just end up spinning you wheels or saying, “Oh, but I wanted the planets to align as such.” But do you know how many planets there are that need alignment before you actually turn you script into a motion picture?
Ashley: I think that’s excellent and I agree with you. Most screenwriters are like, “I just wanna sell my script.” They don’t care whether it’s a $200,000 movie or $200 million movie and more defined goals.
Jeff: Yeah, one of the last times we spoke I think after you did a draft for us you were going to make a passion project movie. That was our conversation, I remember it was something to the extent of like, “Hell or High Water, distribution be damned I’m gonna make this movie.” This is what I wanna do. And that sort of passion is so inspiring to me. Someone called it full hearted, but there’s a fine line, right. From my perspective and knowing what I know and in operating as we operate, I always like to make sure that whatever creative endeavor I’m about to get into I know the distribution repercussions, I know where this project is positioned because I know how hard it would be to actually get Snake Out Of Compton to star Dwayne Johnson and be able to make a $25 million property.
That’s not my goal for that for that picture. I don’t wanna wait…that title, you should not marinate on it for five and a half years of eparchy. You should make it now [laughs]. That was our goal. But somebody else is making their version of Snake Out Of Compton or Sharknado or whatever kind of B concept, and there’s nothing wrong with trying to position it as an A picture. Just know that you have to have those milestones clearly set. David S. Goyer I think he did like a [inaudible 01:18:56] interview where he was first starting out as a screenwriter and it’s a great interview and your viewer and listeners should definitely check it out, where he talks about how he just relentlessly called an agent that had been I think newly promoted or something like this and had recently sold a script or had published a picture.
Goyer relentlessly called this agent and that was his goal. He wanted to get repped. He wanted an agent to work on his behalf, pitching his scripts. That was how he defined success at that point in his career was he needed a validator and the script that he got produced like right of the bat from that agency and resulting from his harassment was…was it a Van Damme picture? That was his first screenplay that got produced. Tremendous! But his goal was so clearly defined.
Ashley: Get an agent.
Jeff: Get an agent, yeah. Get repped and work with that agent to get me in rooms or to help me when I get in rooms so that when I convince people that this is a script they need to produce I’ve got my team. In the same way I noticed it’s like having an understanding of distribution is…before you shoot a single frame, where your picture fits in the market, in the ecosystem of pictures, where it fits in terms of the scale. Like I said, I don’t care if it $50 or $500,000 or $5 billion. The top tier companies always know what’s going on with distribution or where the picture fits. So if you have an intrinsic knowledge of why you should use a 15mm for this shot as opposed to 100mm for this shot, you should definitely apply the same kind of education fervor to how your picture is distributed and then ultimately how it’s consumed because that’s what it’s all about.
Ashley: Well, perfect Jeffrey, I really appreciate you. Thank you again man!
Jeff: Thanks man, really a pleasure Ashley.
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On the next episode of the podcast I’m gonna be interviewing writer, director, producer Josh Folan. He’s a real do-it-yourself filmmaker who’s there making things happen. It’s another great example of someone who’s just hustling like mad and having some real success to. Keep an eye out for that episode next week. That’s the show, thank you for listening.