Fresh Frozen

This oxymoronic headline grabbed my attention in Variety this morning:

DE NIRO, PACINO UNITE IN $60 MIL INDIE

If a sixty mil budget is indie, what do you call a film with a three thousand budget?
Maybe instead of Dangerous Writing, we could call it Movie From Another Planet.
A very impoverished planet.

When my paternal great-grandfather was a young boy, he walked behind a covered wagon from Minnesota to Oregon. He died debt-free but poor on the farm that they built when they arrived in Pendleton. My maternal grandfather dived for sponges in the Adriatic, set pins in a bowling alley and worked in coal mines in Pennsylvania all before he was eighteen. In 1978, he left a small house in NE Portland and thirty thousand dollars to his wife and children. He considered himself a wealthy man. Hell, my father currently works in a candy factory in Boise, Idaho and will never be able to retire for lack of a retirement plan. So I don't know if I can justly term our three thousand dollar budget, the free time to do it and the twenty-five thousand dollars worth of gear that I own as a blighted existence.

I ran into this production assistant recently cum producer at the camera rental house yesterday. I was doing my weekly internship, studying a Varicam. He asked if I was getting ready to do a little project. I said yes and asked him if he was getting ready to do a little project. He laughed and then said he was producing a music video for a local band. I could have hit him with a 'never heard of them' which would have prompted some predictable 'up and coming' blather. Instead I forgot the slight of the little comment and gave him my full interest and support. We exchanged numbers and I think I'll call him.

There's a lot of freedom in low expectations.

¡viva!
Signore Direttore