Part 1: Why Coming Home Matters
They say that if you actually knew what it took to make a movie, you would never do it.
Filmmaking is not for the faint of heart. Many of my incredibly talented team members work day jobs, reaching for security and also ready to leave it in a heartbeat when the right industry job comes up.
Why do we keep doing it? Well, it’s a calling. A need, the solution to the artistic self doubt. To rope others into our madness, join us on a swashbuckling adventure with no definitive path, to risk money and embarrassment and looking foolish, we artists must crave a level of panic that most mortals generally shun.
Right?
Well, I sure do.
Who Are YOU to make a film?
Born and raised in Portland, I always believed I was meant to leave and “make it in a big city.” I intended to move to New York after attending Vassar, but the West Coast called me back, along with the belief that Film and Television were the medium of the masses, to whom I hoped to shout. I landed in Los Angeles, soaking in her sunshine, big dreams, and possibilities.
I started my career as an actress with no intention of directing. When I arrived in Los Angeles. I loved hearing “no”, “we’re going another direction,” “great callback, but not this time” SO MUCH that I signed up for a life in it. And for twenty years, I made health insurance and bustled through. But I never broke. I never got to choose which projects I got to participate in, and even though every day on set was a dream, there weren’t enough and I wasn’t in charge: in truth, I sold you cookies with a bright and enthusiastic commercial worthy smile, but did very little shouting about things that mattered to me. They were good cookies, though.
Around this time, I was somehow roped into directing a short script my friend had written, titled “How To Get on Deadline.” It was a hilarious piece about a (crazy) actress who believed that her career would be made when she was published in Deadline, and miraculously the piece WAS posted to Deadline’s website. Someone pointed out that through my day job, coaching actors for their auditions, I had gotten very good at getting performances out of creatives. That I loved leading a group and that I had clear vision. In all honesty, without others pointing out that I had an unusual set of skills that meant that directing was almost certainly my actual calling, I wouldn’t be here today. Lesson learned: know your strengths, but keep around the people who elevate and support your sense of self.
So ten years later I finally directed my own feature film.
Building a Dream (Team), Locally
During the pandemic, I fled Los Angeles, returning to Portland, OR, the city that made me who I am. The move terrified me – it was right for my small children and for my family, and a part of my heart yearned for trees instead of desert, but I felt like I was leaving my dreams behind.
In a fit, I wrote a script about my own fear, a modern take on my childhood favorite genre, the musical, AND a modern take on the feminist classic “A Dollhouse”. It flew out of me with passion: a musician leaves her career, returning to suburbia to focus on raising her child – but her dreams don’t give up on her. I imagined a story not far from my own about the struggle between creativity and daily life, intending to play the lead myself.
It should be noted that this was NOT my first script, but my fourth or fifth depending on whether you count the lost feminist rant that was also a stoner comedy. Over years coaching, I had learned script structure intimately, studying some of the best pieces of writing that came through Los Angeles in the early 2000s and 2010s (and also some of the worst). I was honored to see pieces I read reach the screen, imagining how I might have done them differently. This exposure, and practice, were key to my “fever dream” script having cohesion and structure. And it should be noted, entire scenes are on the cutting room floor nevertheless.
The script was bold enough and creative enough to be something new and untried – a deeply grounded story laced with flights of fantasy in the form of music videos.
Now I just needed to figure out how to get it made…
