We Made a Movie Part 1: Plots and Plans

My friend Glenn and I make movies. That is not news to anyone who knows us personally, nor probably to anyone to whom this blog entry would be of interest. You're either reading it because you like me or because you're curious about "Driven", but I appreciate you bearing with me as I go through some obvious stuff.

He's got my back. Sorry. He's on my back.

My friend Glenn and I make movies among other things. We also do improv together on a five person team, do improv as a two-person team and try to make festivals and other things happen in our hometown. The problem with trying to do all those other things is that it can sometimes interfere with the "making movies" thing. While we've stayed busy in the years since he made his feature "Earthrise" (one of the most despised movies on Amazon Prime. Sup haters! Thanks for paying my light bill!) making short films, organizing improv festivals, doing the horror fest, making our comedy series and doing our web show we hadn't really tackled another feature. For various reasons. Some of our proposed projects would be too expensive for various reasons. Some of them needed locations that we don't have access to. Some of them just weren't feasible as something that we could sell. But for whatever reason in the past year and change we decided it was time to pull the trigger. Make something with an absolutely micro-budget. No-budget, maybe. Found footage movies, two-person movies, one location movies... The skeletons of those ideas are still floating around and I hope we'll circle back to some of them, but one day Glenn floated the idea of a movie that takes place entirely in a car. It would be  easy, we thought. And cheap. But that was the extent that we agreed on.

Of the many misconceptions about Glenn and me and our relationship, one of them is that we are perfectly synced up and agree upon things to move forward smoothly as a single unit. That's inaccurate. He saw it as a character-driven (ha) suspenseful drama whereas I thought it would make for a great comedy-horror. We both pitched ideas to our film festival son Coley who skillfully evaded telling us which sounded more promising, so we finally agreed on a race/competition. We'd both write 5-10 pages of a script and read them together and pick one to move forward with.
I won.

When we write a script something that we do is get together and do a dream cast. Anyone from Oscar-winners to stars of local theatre productions are fair game. I don't remember which of us mentioned Richard Speight Jr., but even in the lists that included celebrities who probably wouldn't even take a meeting with us, his was the name that kept bobbing to the surface. We could almost see him in certain scenes. We didn't really think it would happen, but eventually decided that we'd be doing ourselves a disservice if we didn't at least reach out. We'd met him at a film festival years ago. Glenn was a big fan of Supernatural, I'd seen him in other things and thought he was good, so we sent him the script and crossed our fingers.

To one of our surprise (Glenn tends to have a lot more confidence in my work than I do), he was interested, so began the agent/manager tango. We enlisted the help of regional entertainment lawyer/awesome guy and got our I's dotted and T's crossed and then we had a name actor signed on to the project. And a little over a month to plan it.