The problems start when plucky morphs into desperation. “Please help me. Look how friendly I’m smiling, yet my eyes say I want to enslave you!”
Kim, Jane, and I recruited anyone we knew to help us bring The Guild to life. Literally anyone. Conversations like, “We need a baby. Who do we know who’s bred recently?” peppered our prep meetings. Guilt, blackmail, you name it, we muscled it.
“Hey, I drove my hairdresser to the airport that one time when her uncle died. I’ll call her up, she owes me!”
When we fell short on personnel, we put an ad on Craigslist for people looking for experience on film sets and said yes to anyone who didn’t seem like they were a parolee.
“Here’s a student from Santa Monica Community College who wants to do sound for us.”
“Does he have his own equipment?”
“He might be able to bring a boom mic held together by duct tape.”
“Invite him aboard!”
We ended up with a camera assistant who was a recent émigré from Hungary, and couldn’t spatially place the clapboard in the actual film frame. Her ONLY job.
“No, Veronique, lower. LOWER! The general area the camera is pointed would be good! Ugh, close enough. Action.”
The trouble is, when you’re asking people to work for free, you can’t be an exacting perfectionist.
“I know you’re doing this as a favor, late at night and on weekends, but I hate what you did. Can you revise it fifteen times until it’s perfect? Cool?”
I ended up having to use my own craft party skills to make our show logo for the opening credits after Kim’s neighbor’s cousin fell through in the graphic design department. Because she was busy “going into labor.” Psh.
Yes, I used MS Paint and a mouse. No, I was not drunk.
I’ll admit that some of the production problems we ran into were my fault. I am bossy and arrogant enough to think I have a “vision,” so we needed a much bigger crew than an average web video warranted. Many times during filming, I’d start to cry in frustration at myself. “Why didn’t I just write something that could be shot with one person and a phone camera?” Five minutes later, I’d run up to Kim. “Hey, let’s fully CGI animate the opening credits! We can do motion capture like Gollum! It’ll be great!”
In terms of free labor, you’d think that the actors would be the easiest to recruit. I mean, we were shooting in Los Angeles; that’s like asking in Vegas, “Where can I find a glass of alcohol as tall as my torso?”
And things looked promising initially. We posted an acting listing for “The Guild. Web Series. Zero Pay. (Seriously, there’s no pay for this thing.)” And got about 500 applications. For each part. We weren’t special, that’s just what happens when you put out a notice for actors in Los Angeles. Good thing I went through the process AFTER I’d been an actor for a while, or I’d have immediately moved back to Texas to play “I Will Always Love You” on the violin at church weddings for the rest of my life.
But as we started going through the applications, not to insult my own profession or anything, we realized that releasing a “free actor” posting is like sending out a virtual birdcall, “Whackadoodle! Whackadoodle!” into the Los Angeles jungle. Ninety-eight percent of applicants were “swipe left” immediately. For instance, when you post this character description:
TINKERBALLA: early 20s, Asian. A sweet, doll-like face belies her acrid tongue.
You KIND of assume the photos submitted will be, at a minimum:
A) Asian
B) Under 30
C) Female
But when you allow just ANYONE to submit themselves, which we did, we got some, shall we say, “out of the box” head shots. Like a fifty-year-old Hawaiian man standing butt naked on a surfboard. Or a “current” head shot for a woman clearly taken back in the 1970s, accompanied by halter dress and Vaseline filter. Or a cheerful blonde who, for some unknown reason, posed with a cooking ladle.
(Oops, that was actually one of the actors we hired for a part who was amazing. Love you, Robin!)
The process gave me a lot of empathy for those on the OTHER side of the camera. For so many years as an actor, I’d enter a casting room and assume the people inside were thinking, Wow, she’s ugly. This girl’s going to suck. She messed up a word on the page? AMATEUR! But as a producer, I sat there day after day, watching dozens of people read the words I wrote aloud, and all I could think about was . . . uh, me.
Oh God, she can’t pronounce the words. My script is unshootable, what was I thinking?!
That joke didn’t work. We probably should change this to a video game drama. I’m in tears myself right now, should be an easy fix.
She’s okay for the role. But why is her hair so much thicker than mine? I’m taking those biotin pills, do I maybe have cancer or something?