Here is the next installment of Nate Winslow’s guest column, a 22 year-old attempting to produce a $1M indie film:

Welcome to a slightly delayed Week 3! I apologize for the skipped week, but casting experienced a minor frenzy of increased activity and my life disappeared temporarily. But I’m back, and this week I’m going to follow up last column’s discussion of my experience with the rewrite process with a post about how we went forward with a finished script.

The accessibility of the independent film industry is something that’s talked about loudly and repeatedly: from blogs to news outlets to magazines, you’ll hear people saying that today’s advances in technology are creating opportunities for just about anyone to buy a decent-quality camera and, with the tools readily available on their laptop, create their own feature film with a miniscule budget. That’s true, by and large. The flipside of the opportunities for independent films with tiny budgets being feasible is that there are literally thousands of things out there that you COULD spend your limited budget dollars on, and—in my recent experience—not that many that you can afford to. I’ll take a look at some of the steps that we took along the way and note all the mistakes that we made and hopefully highlight the pitfalls to avoid.

Our next step after having a finished script actually came before we had landed on our final draft. Since we had the intention of taking the script that our writer/director was writing and taking it all the way through to production, we set out to create an LLC production company for the film. We approached an entertainment lawyer about creating the LLC paperwork and filing it for us, had a meeting with her, and they agreed not only to do that, but to take us on retainer.

Retrospective commentary: Having our own lawyer on retainer felt great, I guess, but it was a mistake. Lawyers are incredibly expensive, and entertainment lawyers are needed when you get deeper into production (actor’s contracts, your contracts, any contracts…), but to sign our lawyer onto a retainer almost 10 months ago was not the smart move. What did we need from a lawyer at that stage of the process? Creating and filing our LLC papers. What we didn’t need was to pay thousands of dollars to have a lawyer on call to write…well. Nothing, really. Lesson learned.

After we had our LLC set up, our next step was looking for a line producer. We got a list of recommendations from some people that we’d worked with and/or met, and got in touch with all of them. Our movie is SAG Modified-low, and not all line producers work on that small of a project. We got in touch with a handful that did, met a few of them, and on the third try, found ours: she is, without reservations, absolutely incredible and overqualified in every category. And from working with her for the past 6 months, I cannot stress how important a great line producer is. We originally were approaching line producers to get our business plan and a preliminary budget and schedule: all things you’ll definitely need when you’re going forward and dealing with investors, agents, producers and just about anyone involved in the process. No line producer who works consistently in independent film is going to charge you an arm and a leg for all three of those things, and if someone is offering those services for $5,000, you’re paying too much.

Retrospective commentary: While our line producer has been nothing short of fantastic, there’s a lesson to be learned here as well. Much like our lawyer-retainer-issue, I think we pulled a similar “too much too soon” maneuver with the line producer. We needed the business plan and the budget: we did that right. What we didn’t need was to have our line producer come into the budgeting and scheduling side of things BEFORE we had our locked script. Since we had her writing up a schedule and budget based on an ever-changing script, we ended up with far too many drafts of both of those things. Our line producer, saint that she is, stopped charging us full price at a certain point and started to feel bad that she was drawing this much money out of us. And good thing too, or our expenditure might have been…crippling. So I cannot recommend a veteran line producer who’s familiar with the ins and outs of independent film in whatever area you’re in strongly enough, but don’t commission one to do your schedule and budget work until you’ve got a script that you’re happy with, and that you know won’t be changing drastically in the near future. Otherwise you’ll end up going back to them for draft after draft after draft, and that’s money you shouldn’t be wasting.

The next big step for us after our line producer was hiring our casting directors. This was absolutely necessary for us, but I want to stop and point out that this is not always the right move for every independent low-budget project, depending on the size of your budget. Casting directors can be expensive. I’m not talking about the 25-35k that someone like Avy Kaufman is going to draw, but nevertheless, if you’re making a movie for $45,000, you’re working with a whole different set of limitations than a million dollar film. For us, working with a million dollar budget and with the goal of landing three great leads with some somewhat-well-known names, there wasn’t a way for us to get to anyone without a casting director. In a lot of ways, when you hire a casting director, their fee is bringing you their skill and talent and experience, but more importantly, their contacts. Experienced casting directors bring with them established relationships with agents, agencies, actors and managers that are just as invaluable as a great eye for talent. When we were looking for casting directors, we were looking at their IMDB pages to see the types of movies they worked on and the budgets they generally worked on, as well as the actors that they were able to get. Because if you’re making a coming of age drama about three teenagers in Portland’s grunge rock scene and you could afford Avy Kaufman, is she really the right fit? She has great, tried and true access to some of the biggest movie stars in the world, and routinely casts massive movies. That’s her area of expertise, and it’s where all of her contacts and work experience centers. As great as she is, I’m not sure if she’d be the greatest fit for such a small story. Our casting directors had specialized in movies with teenage/early-20 leads, and mostly consisted of movies with budgets under 10 million dollars: they were a great fit on paper, and when we met with them they turned out to be even better in person.

Retrospective commentary: When you pay for a casting director, you’re paying for their ability to get you to the actors that you want. If you’re trying to make a movie and you have actors in mind that have agents at a decent-sized agency, you’re probably not going to get past that agent to their client with a script without a casting director. I think we made a great choice with our casting directors, and they’ve gone from strength to strength for us, including having a pretty in-depth understanding of the indie film process: they knew the budget constraints and the money problems, and were willing to adjust their pay-scale accordingly which was another huge plus.

So that was a quick journey through our money-spending process once we had a finished script in our hands (and even before then…) and were ready to move forward to the next stage of the filmmaking process. I hope the absence of a screenwriting-centric topic didn’t drive anyone away, which brings me to my next point: I have a column topic and outline prepared for next week, but I thought I’d turn this around and see if there were any particular areas of interest regarding screenwriting for this scale of a film or independent film production in general that anyone would like to see covered. Shout it out loud in the comments—anything that you guys are interested in hearing that I have the experience to elaborate on, I certainly will. See you guys next week.

For previous columns by Nate:

Column #1

Column #2

UPDATE: Correction. Nate is actually 22 years old.