Just came back from the SAG Indie meeting. What a headache. I'm amazed whenever someone makes a film and gets it to a festival. With all the paperwork that you have to fill out just to make a film with a SAG actor, it seems almost better to just go non-union. I'm all for paying actors, but it seems like there's almost an incentive not to cast with SAG actors because of all the paperwork and costs involved. I can understand the requirements for protecting actors if you're making a big budget movie, but what about the little indie filmmakers? I mean, if there's a SAG equivalent for actors in Shakespeare's day, maybe Romeo & Juliet would never have been made. Just some random thoughts.

Christine

This is our first blog about the making of a micro-budget film (ie, mini-DV), Love 10 to 1. We started working on the script over a year ago, and now we're still revising the script. Ugh. Part of the problem is that there are three different stories, each written by a different writer, so the challenge has been to make the stories interrelated and consistent in tone. We've had a number of other bumps along the way, such as losing our one "name" actress and raising, oh, no money from investors. Merely flesh wounds I say.

With the devastation that's occured in New Orleans and other Gulf cities, and the stupid political finger pointing that's occuring now, it's somewhat difficult to blog about our little indie film about people looking for love and sex in Los Angeles. So please allow me to digress for a moment (with the disclaimer that this is my own opinion and does not reflect the opinion of my fellow writers/directors) to ask this: what does it mean when President Bush said " "I am satisfied with the response" to the hurricane. "But I'm not satisfied with the results." Huh? As an aside, Michael Brown, the head of FEMA who has been highly criticized for his failure to stem the disaster in NOLA, was fired from his previous job for "alleged supervision failures". And we're talking about his previous job as a commissioner for the International Arabian Horse Association. Can you imagine what kind of incompetent you have to be to be fired from the International Arabian Horse Association??? It's not like the position holds life and death implications (unless you happen to be a horse, I suppose), such as being the head of FEMA.

The next blog, I promise, will be about the film...

Christine