Learn Smaller to Get Bigger

There is an old adage, “Good small-boat sailors almost always make good big-boat sailors, but very rarely do people who start out sailing big boats turn into good small-boat sailors.” The same is true of filmmaking. If you have been given huge budgets and resources from the beginning of a film career, it is much harder to learn the skill, discipline, and fiscal creativity that are needed to make a small film.

There are so many things to beware of when budgeting and scheduling an independent low-budget film. Some of the higher-ticket items that can undermine a low-budget film—and the solutions—are listed below.

Unions and Guilds

For a low-budget independent film, reducing the number of unions and guilds is critical in order to save costs on: increased salaries; pension, health, and welfare contributions; increased payroll taxes; increased minimums due to raising the level of the budget; prohibition from multitasking (unless you are qualified in each specific union category); restrictions of hours; overtime; forced-call payments; and residuals. All of the aforementioned items do not enhance the production value of anything an audience will see onscreen; they just cost vast amounts of money and have a dramatic, negative impact on your potential profit, or at least return of investment to your financier. This is not a popular sentiment with the guilds and unions, but union crews, rates, and restrictions are really appropriate only on large, studio-level films and television shows. This is the stark, harsh reality in today’s global economic crunch, as we illustrated earlier when contrasting union and non-union budgets for a small film.

“Non-union” generally means non-IATSE and non-Teamster. It is also vastly more cost effective if the production is non-WGA and the director and his or her staff are non-DGA. Bear in mind that residuals are applicable with SAG, DGA, WGA, and sometimes IA, and that the producer (i.e. you), or the person or company who is signatory to the collective bargaining agreements, is responsible for paying them, unless you have sold the film and the buyer has executed a buyer’s assumption agreement that has been countersigned by all of the guilds and unions. And remember, even if the rates paid to a union director, writer, or crew member were identical to non-union rates, they would still cost you the additional union pension, health, and welfare contributions, which are significant.

As discussed earlier, if you want a name actor to appear in your film, it is essential to be signatory to SAG, since almost all name actors are members of that guild. Fortunately, several low-budget SAG contracts are now available for smaller independent films, and each has its merits. However, each has potential pitfalls, too.

If your picture has to be union, producing it under the lowest possible budgetary tier or union contract level is the way to go. The unions have different rates for different levels of production, and the lower the tier of your contract, the lower the global savings will be across the board, thus lowering your overall production budget.

Texas is a right-to-work state that supports people who work both union and non-union. However, when I was shooting an independent film there a few years ago, a non-union crew member called the major craft union in an effort to get the film converted to a union contract, thinking he would make more money. The union sent representatives to Dallas, and they met surreptitiously with the dissenting crew member. In situations like this, when unions are trying to “organize” a production, they tend to work in the shadows. They attempt to infiltrate the film crew without the producers’ knowledge, looking to gain the support of crew member after crew member, until they reach a quorum of signatures from 50 percent of the crew in order to force a vote to convert to a union contract, which they did on this particular film.

I subsequently received a threatening call from a union “organizer” who insulted me personally, was completely ignorant of the financing of the picture, and said he would shut the picture down if I did not meet with him and his two colleagues, who had all flown in from out of state, and agree to their terms. Two major lending banks and a completion bond company were the actual financiers and guarantors of the film, which had a finite budget and schedule based on the total existing collateral, so there truly was no extra money beyond the existing budget, and it was the banks and bond company who were the real victims of this extortion. I was simply a producer for hire and a figurehead on their behalf.

I hired a labor attorney on behalf of the production company and we met with the three union executives. The lead organizer insulted me again, irrespective of the tens of thousands of union jobs that I had created over the years, and they collectively threatened to shut the picture down if I did not agree to convert it retroactively to a union contract. I informed them that they weren’t blackmailing me, since I was only a producer for hire, but two major financial institutions. They didn’t seem to care.

Since the film was ten days from completion of principal photography and the lead actor had a limited window of availability, I couldn’t, at that juncture, afford to shut the production down and hire a new crew, which I would have done if it had been my film alone. So I negotiated a deal. Knowing the union’s true agenda, I simply agreed to make a flat contribution to their pension plan.

In the organizers’ minds, they had wielded a big stick and organized a non-union movie. In actuality, I paid their pension plan contribution out of the film budget’s contingency, kept our schedule on track, and didn’t pay a penny more to any crew members than I would have paid them as a non-union crew. I finished the film on time with an unanticipated invasion of the contingency, for which I needed pre-approval from the bond company. The sole beneficiary was the union’s pension plan, not the crew or even the dissenting crew member who had called the union in the first place.

The organizers called their union bosses after we had agreed the deal, and they offered their congratulations for a job well done. In reality, the pittance that the union received—under $20,000—would barely have covered the organizers’ expenses for the weeks the three union organizers spent in Texas, including airfares, hotels, meals, and rental cars. The net contribution to the plan must have been minuscule, if anything at all. The crew hadn’t realized that any additional money would go straight into the coffers of the union’s pension plan, not to the workers themselves, and they weren’t happy after the fact.

After that experience, I never shot another film in Texas. So, all of those disgruntled crew members who thought they might get a bonus by converting the movie to a union contract not only didn’t receive another penny but stigmatized the Dallas/Fort Worth area for me and other producers to whom I spread the word. They ensured that all of us—who produce multiple films per year—wouldn’t shoot another motion picture in the area. Since then, I have chosen locations in other states and countries.

IATSE and Teamsters: Negotiate

Teamsters are the drivers, transportation coordinators, and captains who traditionally drive all trucks and any equipment that has wheels, such as motor homes, trailers, and honey wagons. (This last is a long trailer that has toilets for crew and multiple dressing rooms with private toilets for actors. It is traditionally pulled by an eighteen-wheel rig.) The wranglers who handle horses and other livestock, wagons, and carriages are also Teamsters.

For lower-budget, independent films, depending on the state or region in which you are shooting, Teamster locals may be willing to negotiate with independent producers. For instance, I’ve often bargained with the Teamsters to carry two or three drivers for the run of the show. Sometimes, depending on your budget, it is easier to negotiate with them than to try to avoid dealing with them. Generally, if your budget is under $1 million and you approach the Teamster locals and show them your budget and your rates, they will leave you alone. This type of preemptive approach eliminates animosity between the production company and the Teamsters local. We’ve all heard and read about the threats of strikes or disruption on set by disgruntled unions. This and the high cost of union labor are major reasons why so much film production and other industries have left the United States for other countries.

When negotiating with the Teamsters, try to negotiate an eight-hour—not a twelve-hour—minimum day, as well as discontinuous employment of drivers when you are at a specific location for an extended period of time and equipment is stationary. I once took over the production of a small Sony picture. The producer who preceded me hadn’t negotiated any concessions with the Teamsters. The company was at a particular location for two weeks without a company move, during which time every single driver sat, on the clock, every day, and collected a full paycheck, while the equipment never moved. Had the preceding producer negotiated properly, a number of drivers could have been “dropped” until the company moved again. Think ahead. Don’t be intimidated. If you don’t ask, you certainly won’t receive. Also ask for an eight-hour minimum day when negotiating with the IA. This means you can dismiss people after an eight-hour day if they are not needed, and not get stuck paying everyone a twelve-hour day irrespective of there being any work for them to do. Finally, when hiring union crew, don’t just interview the individual; ask other people for their opinions on whoever you are considering. You may learn that some film crew individuals are always disgruntled and have reputations for stirring up dissent on the set.

One camera assistant on the union film in Texas mentioned above was called Mike. He was a perpetually disgruntled troublemaker who would walk around the set and create problems among the rest of the crew, and not only in his own department. He encouraged others to join him in filing grievances against the company for such things as working in Roscoe smoke (a nontoxic, water-based smoke used by cinematographers), with his claim being that he was forced to operate in hazardous conditions. (Roscoe smoke creates a hazy, atmospheric, diffused look. You see it in haunted house scenes, on stage during rock concerts, even in churches, and it is used on almost every movie set.) The guild, in turn, demanded $46,000 in “damages” for just the camera local, which is only a faction of the crew members the union represents. In one phone call, I settled for $10,000, because it was cheaper than the legal fees if we had gone to arbitration; but it still felt like extortion, and took $10,000 from the studio’s pocket. Of the settlement amount, only $2600 went to the members directly; the rest was contributed to the union’s pension plan.

The lesson: do your due diligence on every person you hire.

Reduce the Number of Locations

We’ve seen that company moves cost money, that multiple locations (unless strategically contiguous, as previously discussed) cost money, and that staying in one location for as long as possible allows a producer to negotiate a better rate than would be possible if the shooting schedule called for short periods in multiple locations. Remember that these considerations need to be factored into the screenplay as you develop it.

Reduce or Eliminate Distant Locations and Save Money

It costs money every time an actor or crew member works in a distant location (which SAG defines as any place that cannot be reached from the producer’s studio within twenty-four hours of travel by ordinary means) or outside the Studio Zone. Often called the Thirty Mile Zone—or TMZ—the Studio Zone differs in size from city to city and is defined as the territory within a set radius from an established central point. (A sample Studio Zone map can be found in Appendix O.) This central point also varies from city to city. In Los Angeles, for example, the central point is the intersection of Beverly and La Cienega boulevards. Actors, depending on their SAG contract, usually travel in the best airline class available or receive mileage payments if the location can be driven to. They also require hotel accommodation and per diem (cash for meals) for every day they are on location. Crew members require virtually the same expenses, although crew on low-budget films will certainly travel coach and stay at more reasonably priced hotels than most actors will. Meals—or money for meals—still need to be provided for everyone, and actors’ meals or per diem rates are prescribed by SAG. A star actor will receive much more lavish per diem, hotel, transportation, and perks. Travel and living expenses are determined by a simple calculation of meals, hotel rates and taxes, air and transportation, and other related travel expenses for the number of people traveling multiplied by the number of days spent on location.

Reduce the Number of Speaking Roles

I spent a number of years as vice chairman, then chairman, of the Independent Producers Association (IPA), which shared common membership with the Independent Film and Television Alliance (IFTA). The IPA was responsible for collective bargaining on behalf of a number of independent companies. Time and time again, I tried to explain to several of the guilds that revenues for independent films were shrinking while the floors and fringe rates were continually increasing for all guild members. (Unfortunately, except for the DGA, my words fell on deaf ears.)

When meeting with the SAG and hearing its representatives argue that they were “serving their members” by increasing the daily and weekly rates, my response was to tell them that they were simply depriving several actors of work for every independent film produced. I explained that worldwide revenues were lower than ever for independent films, so every time the pension and welfare contributions and the daily and weekly rates for actors increased, independents would be forced to cut more speaking roles to compensate for the increased costs and fewer actors would be hired per film. It’s an unfortunate aspect of the independent business in these financially challenging times. Most actors just want to work, and I’m not sure that it serves the SAG’s membership as a whole to decrease the number of roles that are available to them.

Reduce Night Exteriors

As was discussed earlier, night exteriors are very expensive. They require big lights, electrical cables, manpower, scaffolding or Condor lifts, generators, fuel, and operators. So look for alternatives to external shooting at night as you develop your screenplay.

Reduce Company Moves

As was also discussed earlier, company moves cost significant time and money. Again, consolidate and limit the number of locations, thereby limiting the number of company moves during production.

Reduce Days or Weeks of Equipment Rental

As we have seen, equipment is usually rented on what is termed a “one-day week.” This means that the rental “day rate” is essentially the same for the entire week. One of the reasons for shooting a six-day week in a low-budget production is to capitalize on limiting week rentals. Picking up equipment on a Friday afternoon (theoretically for a Monday morning shoot) would allow you to use it on Friday night, as well as on Saturday and Sunday. On a fourteen-day schedule, your six-day week could go from Saturday to Thursday, with Friday as your off day, for two consecutive weeks, then you could shoot on Saturday and Sunday and return your equipment first thing Monday morning. Hence, you would be able to shoot for fourteen days for the price of two one-week rental fees. Under a standard Monday through Friday shooting schedule, you would incur three weeks’ rental fees on equipment for those same fourteen shooting days.

Similarly, with a location rental, if you are able to characterize the rental as a weekly—rather than a daily—and squeeze more shooting days into the calendar week, you will incur fewer costs.

Reduce the Number of Shooting Days

If your director is well prepared and conscientious, and your director of photography is flexible and fast, you should try to limit shooting days to those that are absolutely necessary. For every day of shooting, you pay your entire cast and crew, as well as locations, equipment, and all other daily production costs a prorated daily amount of money. Also, during development and preparation of your film, determine exactly which scenes and shots will be required editorially to tell your story. The biggest cost savings for your film are achieved when it is still on paper and you can cut or simplify extraneous scenes.

Rethink Expensive Sequences

Cost is always a factor and concern in independent filmmaking. If your writer has dreamed up an intricate and expensive car chase, smashing into other vehicles and careering in and out of traffic, this is clearly a logistical challenge for any film. On a low-budget film, it would be a prohibitively costly venture to purchase, rent, repair, and/or demolish multiple vehicles; hire drivers to transport vehicles, as well as stunt drivers to execute the precision driving and crashes safely; and pay a large premium on your insurance policy for potential personal injury and property damage. A car chase also requires the local police to close off and keep the public away from the streets where the filming takes place, paramedics to stand by in case of injury, firemen in case of fire, and multiple stunt drivers and photo doubles for actors in order to pull off the sequence professionally.

The same intensity, excitement, and emotional impact might be achieved by transposing a car chase to a foot chase through alleyways, fire escapes, and a multi-tiered warehouse with interesting shapes and design, and actors who, for the most part, can do their own running and perhaps other non-life-threatening stunts without the need for stuntmen or photo doubles. If you remember the terrific foot chase that director Joe Carnahan staged in the film Narc, then you get the idea. Again, it is much easier to reenvision and creatively construct exciting sequences when your movie is still in the script stage. You should attempt to reenvision and creatively construct exciting sequences and maintain the integrity of the picture and its dramatic beats, while reducing extraneous production costs.

Reduce Vehicles, Drivers, Fuels, and Transportation

The case study/cost comparison in Chapter 9 perfectly illustrates the potential increase in manpower and cost of adding drivers and vehicles under a union scenario. Obviously the fuel costs to run all of the added vehicles, equipment, and generators can be significant. Fuel certainly became more significant for everyone, including me, in the summer of 2008, when the price of gas rose to over four dollars per gallon and I was shooting a film that required a twenty-nine-mile drive to the location every day.

Lay Low and Publicize Later

When producing a low-budget independent film, particularly if it’s non-union, keep your mouth shut about it and put a lid on your cast, crew, and staff until it has wrapped. If you announce your film in the press and publicize it before you shoot, the chances are it will come to the attention of the unions. Similarly, the local unions are more likely to hear about a movie if crew members and actors are on the street talking about it before shooting begins. Once the unions catch wind of your production, they will call and request a meeting. They will ask to see your budget and try to convert the film to a union contract. If you ignore them, they are likely to show up at your office or on your set, and they have various means to make your life miserable and force you to sign a union contract, or make you jump through hoops to prove that it’s not worth their while for such a small film.

There’s an old cliché that there’s no such thing as bad press. I believe, to the contrary, that there’s no such thing as good press for a low-budget film in pre-production. As far as I’m concerned, in our tabloid society, the press is the enemy. I’ve seen even the most well-intentioned press releases backfire. For instance, agents or managers might not want to see their actors mentioned or listed in the press or film-market advertisement for a low-budget film. (Conversely, actors may be upset if they are inadvertently omitted from a press article.)

Problems always arise when a film’s budget is mentioned in the press, irrespective of whether the quoted figure is accurate. If the cited budget is low, public perception of your film will suffer. If it is high, the film is immediately on the radar of the unions, and no matter what you tell them, they won’t believe you. As described above, it is always best to avoid union attention in a low-budget film.

Publicity may also alert the permit office to a location you might be trying to shoot guerrilla style, without a permit, or create other types of scrutiny that could otherwise be avoided. Many low-budget films do pull permits for filming where required, but my recommendation is to choose a company or corporation name that does not have the word “Production(s)” in it. This is because permit offices are notorious for alerting unions to film projects and production companies that have just pulled permits for filming. For example, if the company name you are contemplating is “Jack Bell Productions,” I would suggest throwing interested parties off the scent by calling it “Jack’s Garden Company,” “Bell Supply Company,” or “Jack Bell’s Maintenance Corporation” instead. I started doing this years ago because an individual in the Los Angeles permit office regularly alerted the unions every time a permit application was filed in the name of a production company. Again, my motto is “Film first, publicize later.” Finish shooting your film, then sound the trumpets. Issue a press release, place an ad in a trade publication, or whatever floats your boat. But get your movie in the can first. Doing the opposite can cost you a lot of money.

Budgeting Software

The industry standard for budgeting motion pictures is Entertainment Partners’ Movie Magic Budgeting 7 computer software (available at: www.entertainmentpartners.com/budgeting/), while the best book on motion picture budgeting is Ralph Singleton’s Film Budgeting: Or, How Much Will It Cost to Shoot Your Movie? (Lone Eagle Publishing, 1996). All aspiring independent producers and filmmakers should read Mr. Singleton’s book and acquire Entertainment Partners’ software. It is enormously valuable to gain a working knowledge of how to budget a motion picture based on the actual, real-world costs of actors, extras, stunt performers, directors, writers, crew, camera equipment, locations and permits, film and digital post-production, composers, editorial, special effects, and post-production sound, as well as payroll, administration, delivery, and fringes, all of which constitute a complete film budget. Becoming familiar with both union and non-union rates and fringes, and understanding how to use the budgeting software—which calculates costs based on the fringe formulas that the user inputs—are an eye-opener and will give you an insight into what the true total costs are of producing a movie.

Properly constructing a film budget based on a specific screenplay is a tremendous skill, built on vast, current knowledge of production that goes hand in hand with the schedule you create.

Creating a Schedule for the Picture

When scheduling a low-budget independent film, it is essential that the producer understand the exigencies of production and the impact that the schedule has on the budget and ultimate cost of a film. As was discussed earlier, costs can be cut by consolidating and/or cheating locations to eliminate company moves wherever possible, and by limiting night exteriors, which are time-consuming and expensive.

Low-budget Shooting Schedules

Our case study in Chapter 9 had a fourteen-day production schedule. As discussed, under the SAG Low Budget Theatrical and Modified Low Budget and Ultra Low Budget Theatrical Agreements, there is an allowance for shooting six-day weeks. When shooting with higher budgets and/or under standard union and SAG contracts, six-day weeks are not a viable or cost-effective option.

Once again, some of the advantages of shooting six-day weeks are: fewer total production weeks; reduced costs for equipment rental (as most equipment rental houses rent on a one-day week); and reduced lodging costs (by reducing the overall length of schedule and not paying lodging and per diem for two “off” days per week).

Scheduling is an art form based on knowledge, experience, and creative ideas, as well as an ongoing dialogue between the producer, director, director of photography, and first assistant director during pre-production about how to schedule the picture most effectively. Usually, many versions of a schedule will be discussed before agreement is reached. Further, often the days of availability of a critical location or limitations of a star actor’s schedule might undermine even the best production schedule, and compromises will have to be made. (A sample shooting schedule can be found in Appendix P.)

Stagger Actors’ Call Times

A call sheet is a two-sided sheet of usually legal-sized paper, which is issued on a daily basis by the production and AD (assistant director) staff. It lists the call time for the crew to report to location, availability of breakfast, when work commences, when the crew breaks for lunch, a projected wrap time, precise times of sunrise and sunset, and actors’ call times for makeup, hair, and set calls. Call sheets also list all crew and equipment, locations, special effects, special props, stunts or vehicles, and every key element in the day’s work, as well as an advance schedule for the following day. (A sample call sheet can be found in Appendix Q and a sample production report can be found in Appendix R.)

A good, cost-conscious producer must constantly keep in mind the actors’ contracts: whether they’re daily, weekly, or run of show. It is critical to try to avoid the impact of overtime, both in scheduling your low-budget feature and on a daily basis when creating your call sheets. SAG day player contracts stipulate eight hours before overtime. Weekly player contracts specify ten hours before overtime. And if you have overscale actors, their contracts usually call for twelve hours before overtime. Clearly you would like to create your call sheet each day so as to incur no overtime, or at least as little as possible. Each day, you must creatively strategize with your director and AD before finalizing the call sheet for the following day. You must figure out a logical order of shooting, when specific actors will be needed for specific scenes, in what order they should be shot, and which shots without actors can be held until the end of the day, in order to reduce the amount of set time for actors who may go into overtime. Daily, weekly, and overscale players may be called each day in a staggered order in order to reduce or, ideally, eliminate overtime payments.