I'll Probably Eat Lunch in This Town Again: A Tale of My Falling Out with the Movie Business (Part 4)

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Part 2
Part 3

So X's three week vacation was over and I was excited to start on some sort of regular daily routine. I won't go into regular detail on everything I did during the day for fear of stretching out this series of posts into infinity but what a normal day looked like was thus: come in, get my lap top set up, check e mail, create a daily list of things to get done with X, make phone calls until around 10:00 am (by which time it is closing time for most foreign territories that fit into that time zone) and then go about other daily tasks such as creating e-blasts (a mass e mail sent to all the distributors in a certain territory to announce either the availability of a title or an upcoming screening at a local film festival), going over deals, and other such things. It wasn't an exciting routine although there always seemed to be something to do and even though we went from 9:00 am till 6:30 pm (which, at $400 a week was less than minimum wage), the day usually went quick.

There are three main tasks that I had was specifically involved with during this time that I was involved in and that I will break down separately: 1) prepping for TIFF 2) penetrating the TV market and 3) prepping a delivery to Australia.

TIFF, although one of the world's biggest film festivals, isn't a major film market for the small guys. One of the nice things about TIFF is that it continues to maintain it's image as the public's film festival which is more about appreciating movies than making deals. That's not to say that deals aren't made there, because they are but it's not as formal as say Cannes or Berlin and it's usually only the big players who carry any weight at TIFF (since it's mostly the big movies that get played there). If you think about AFM or Cannes, sales companies will go there, set up a booth, display their promotional material and hand out screeners to interested buyers (which is what my phone calls were following up on). You won't see this going on at TIFF (it happens but mostly in hotel rooms and lobbys) and TIFF mainly attracts the likes of the Entertainment Ones or The Weinstein Companys; the big guys with money to throw around. Cannes however, because it is mostly all about business will attract all kinds of small and independent companies, like ours, trying to sell all kinds of films.

Therefore, TIFF wasn't as high on our radar as the other major markets were (Cannes, AFM and Berlin, plus Mipcom, which is a TV festival held in Cannes in October). That didn't mean there still wasn't prepping to do as X would be around, going to parties, meeting people, getting tips on what is looking good and seeing if there is anything worth acquiring (X's plan, for the record, was to have three new titles to reveal at Cannes. If his website is correct, he has, since, September, acquired just 1 new title). The problem with this company is that what X basically acquired was the leftovers that no one else wanted. Any company worth their salt already has their claim to the best stuff well in advance of the festivals (although I did spend a brief stint on the phone trying to find out the availability of Fubar 2).

However, one of my jobs was to download a list of all the films that were playing and check them on IMDBpro to see if they were available and if not who had gotten the sales rights and/or what countries did they already have distribution with. The reason for this was twofold. On one hand, it gave X a good idea of what films were available, in which case he would investigate whether or not they were worth checking out as well as, if we saw that one company was distributing such a film and we had one just like it, that, in sales, is what we call an angle.

The other TIFF assignment was to download the patron list to see who was attending, mark off who looked like someone we should talk to and e mail them to try and set up a meetings as well as RSVP to parties and other administrative duties.

TV was where X wanted to be. It was his belief that theatre and video were dying breeds and therefore ondemand and PayTV was where the future was and he wanted a piece of that pie (as well, I think he knew that the majority of the titles we backed were not worth the time to put into theaters and would only appeal to niche audiences on video). Therefore, having not much experience with TV, he left it up to me to dig deep into the TV market, find out who's who and what's what and try to get these movies in front of the people who could get them broadcast. We started with the States with two titles that were available there, although, to be fair, I can't imagine any big channel in the U.S. ever playing either of them. One being sci-fi movie, I targeted sci-fi channels as well as family channels for the other one as it was my opinion that it would play best as a harmless vanilla comedy that wouldn't offend anyone.

But this wasn't good enough for X. He wanted the HBO's, the Turners, the Star TVs, the big, global broadcasters. I had no faith in this exercise but it got me through the day. I called up HBO, many times trying to get through to someone in charge of acquisitions however, anyone who has ever called HBO without a direct name and/or number, knows it's next to impossible to get passed the switchboard. However, I did manage to track down the names and numbers of the acquisitions people for Turner, The Hallmark Movie Channel, as well as some little family channel and AMC. I also managed to set up phone interviews with AMC and Starz (the former of which didn't want the movie but wanted to tell us what they would like to see if we ever came across it and the latter had already seen the movie several years ago and passed on it then but wanted to have the same kind of conversation). It was progress.

As one last little note on this before moving on, I also did manage to get a screener sent to the Spiritual Cinema Circle which is a club that sends out monthly DVDs to members of movies that deal with Spiritual (not religious) subject matter and since our little movie involved God and the ghost of George Burns, I thought, why not? I never stuck around long enough to find out the outcome of any of these connections.

The most interesting thing I did during the remainder of August and the beginning of September was to hunt down all the materials for a delivery. The good news, was that the delivery was to Australia, an English speaking country (which eased the pressure a little) but the bad news is is that the delivery date was fast approaching and we didn't have all the materials. A delivery, in brief, is when you have sold a movie and you are sending the distributors all the materials it will take for them to format the film's release to their region. This includes, but is not limited to, the 5.1 sound, the M&E, a Dialogue Transcript, the Billing Block, the HD Master, the DVD Bonus features (if applicable), the Textless Backgrounds, etc.

Let me do a quick breakdown: 5.1 speaks for itself; M&E stands for "music and effects" which is exactly that, but without the inclusion of the dialogue (foreign countries need this for dubbing); a dialogue transcript is a print-out of all the dialogue and at what time it occurs in the film (which is needed for creating subtitles); the Billing Block is what you see on the bottom of posters where all the names of who did what are listed, HD Master I assume speaks for itself, as does DVD bonus features; Textless Background is the entire film without any text inserts. This is needed because, if a film starts with an image and over top reads: "Once upon a time in a galaxy far, far away..." that will need to be translated into the country's language and put back in into the finished film.

We had exactly none of this. The problem was that the filmmakers behind the film were young first-timers who didn't really know what they were doing and since their movie had more or less made them all the money it was going to, they didn't really seem to care anymore. They had said that they didn't have any of the materials and put us in touch with a nice and helpful man named Oliver at Roadside Attractions in LA who were looking after the North American DVD release. Oliver gave us one-time access to the master at Fotokem so that we could make a copy of it but said that all of the other materials he had sent back to the filmmakers on burned DVDs. Despite this, they still claimed that didn't have it and didn't know anything about it. It was a brutal back and forth that was about the equivalent of clubbing seals. After Oliver had kindly, despite his business, offered to burn us what he had (the 5.1 and bonus features), the filmmakers decided they did have that after all and sent it to us.

Fine, now what about the M&E (which, once again, wasn't as important due to it being sent to an English speaking country, but would still be needed in the future) and Dialogue Transcript? The filmmakers sent me on another wild goose chase to another company in New York who did not have a dialogue transcript but directed me to another man in another company who might, as he had created the Spanish subtitles for the DVD. He didn't exactly have a complete dialogue transcript but he sent us his notes anyway and they would do for now. At this point we also had 4 people who were telling me that no M&E had ever been created. Fine enough, we'd do it and charge the filmmakers.

This task was done. So was I...

To Be Continued...The Conclusion Awaits

I'll Probably East Lunch in This Town Again: A Tale of my Falling out with the Move Business (Part 3)

Read Part One

Read Part Two

Let me speak a bit about offers. In the world of independent film, especially piddly little ones like the ones we were dealing with, which really (with the exception of a Canadian zombie movie) would be a waste to put into theaters, the most desirable deal is cash up front. That's probably the most desirable deal in any event but with movies in which there is a good chance that they won't perform, everything other than cash up front is more or less a last resort.

Cash up front minimizes the risk of the sales company losing money and puts the entire onus on the distribution company. The other kind of deals (the only kind I was ever offered) are what I will call 50/50 deals (although they can break down into any percentage and usually have a third number thrown in there to cover expenses). In this situation the distribution company takes it's cut in order to cover the expenses of releasing the movie and then the profit would be split between the sales company and the distribution company, that way, essentially insulating there investment. In the event that the movie did no business they would only be out their expenses.

As you can probably understand, such a deal is not desirable being it is essentially the equivalent of throwing the movie into the wind and seeing how it will land. If it does well, then great we've made good money and if not all our effort in not only selling the movie but preparing the delivery has gone down the tubes. Unless there is a lot of hot buzz around the movie or you have a big star to sell it's name on, this is risky business. Cash up front ensures that we get paid for our work and whether or not the movie does any business is someone else's problem. That's the best place to be in the movie business: put the risks on someone else, take the money, and run. X always used to say that the movie business was the "F**k Business." You have to f**k them before they f**k you.

The problem that I was running into while X was away on vacation was that the majority of the companies that I followed up with had indicated that they were going to pass because they were currently trying to focus on bigger titles. No company after all wants to focus forever on the cheap stuff no one wants to see, unless of course they are a niche company that focuses on either a certain genre (horror for example) or just gets by releasing the cheap stuff. X did talk about one day moving into bigger stuff and I truly hope that he does because it's certainly hard to get by peddling the stuff that you only got because no other sales company wanted to touch it.

Before I go on let's have a word on the actual definition of independent film. A lot of time the terms independent and Hollywood film get thrown around without the users actually knowing what distinguishes the two. The simple misconception is that if we see it in a multiplex it must be a Hollywood film and if we see it in an independent theatre it must be an independent movie. Not so much the case. An independent film is a film that is produced outside of a Hollywood studio. One of the summer of 2010's big hits The Expendables was an independent film.

I'll do my best to explain while keeping things as simple as possible (because nothing is ever simple or straight forward in the movie business). Big studios have different divisions one of which is Production in which there is a President of Production and maybe a VP and so on and then it hires on producers and gives them production deals. Ultimately it is for a producer to go out, find material, bring it into the studio and oversee it's development from buying the rights to the book (or whatever) hiring the screenwriter, getting rewrites, hiring the director, etc. Joel Silver is a Hollywood producer as is Jerry Bruckheimer, Steven Spielberg and Brian Grazer. Art Linson used to have a production deal with Fox but I'm not sure of his status now. Julia Phillips and Don Simpson used to be hired studio guns as well during their lifetime.

An independent film is produced by a company that has no ties to one of the big studios. The production company, often owned or co-owned by the filmmakers themselves, makes the movie and then tries to sell it to distributors  (sometimes if you're good you can have all the foreign rights sold before the film is even completed. Atom Egoyan's Chloe had made it's entire budget back before even opening in North America). This is why you often get so many logos and so many credits at the beginnings of movies these days (one for the production company, the sales company, the distributor, etc). In the olden days, when everyone was under contract, the studios did everything from hire their writers, their actors, their directors and release the movies into their theaters. Today, with the increasing cost of getting a film made, it's safer business to include more people into the pot. Mirimax (back before Disney took them off the independent market) used to produce their own product until they realized that it made better business sense to simply acquire already completed films.

Kevin Smith's View Askew is a good example of an independent production company. Smith writes and directs and co-produces with Scott Mosier under the View Askew name (although, and maybe I'm wrong on this, they change the company name on every film for insurance purposes so that, if anything happened on one film, they don't bankrupt the whole company). After the film is finished they (or a sales agent, I don't know how it works for them) sells the film to a distribution company (in this case we'll continue with Mirimax who made Smith a household name) who will get the movie into theaters, advertise it, etc.

That's why festivals (except for maybe Toronto which, despite being one of the world's biggest film festivals, stills holds onto it's image as a public festival and not a major North American market) are so important: it is a place where filmmakers try to get their product acquired and where sales companies go to get their product distributed (be it to theater, video, TV, airlines, etc). Before I leave this topic, I don't want to have made things too simplistic. There are many independent distribution companies that have production departments and so on and so forth. Again, nothing is as simple as black and white.

There's also one more option for a sales company which is to shop the film to an agent (a very last resort), who will try to sell it to their specific client base. It's essentially adding another middle man into the mix and is only to be considered after there has been no interest generated in a title from our own efforts. The advantage to this is that they assuredly know their own territory's market better than we do and their connections may be able to reach farther than our means had allowed us to on our own.

So, while X was away, I got a nibble on a zombie movie, but it was a 50/50 deal (I think this one was around 35/35/30 or something), but mostly people weren't interested in our poor little movies that could. I don't blame them. The movies, on a whole, weren't very good. That's not to say there isn't an audience for them, there probably is, and we weren't there to like the movies, we were there to sell them.

Part of the job was in trying to come up with unique sales angels and so some of those three weeks at home were spent making notes on certain companies in certain territories and coming up with angels. If we wanted to sell Y title in the U.K. I would search for TV, Video and Theatrical companies in that territory and make notes on what kind of titles they dealt with or any like titles they had recently acquired: Hey, I see you just picked up Paper Heart with Michael Cera, I bet you'd like Youth in Revolt with him too, want to have a look at a screener? We had a zombie movie that, once we had exhausted the possibilities on the horror market, started selling it in the gay market as two of the characters were homosexual and started making even more sales that way. One of the producers for one of the films had come up with the idea to announce that the sequel had been greenlit. Hey, if you like this one, get the rights to the sequel before it's even out. Between you and me, the sequel very well could have been greenlit, but there is currently no intention of it ever being made. Two sales for the price of one. The F**k business.

At the end of those three weeks I was feeling pretty good and ready to get back into the meat an potatoes of things once X returned. I had made some minor mistakes along the way but I was still in the learning process and each of those mistakes was a learning experience. It was time to really get into the swing of the sales thing and also time to prepare for TIFF. I couldn't wait.

To Be Continued...

I'll Probably East Lunch in This Town Again: A Tale of my Falling out with the Move Business (Part 2)

Check out Part 1 here.

Back then I used to strategically place my phone on the shelf beside my bed at night for it to charge in the event that some anxious HR person would call to discuss my experience with me early in the morning. Of course I would never answer it when it rung. I''m a night person. I do my best work at night and am at my clearest and most open-minded then too. Therefore, having no work or school to go to I got into the habit of staying up until 4 or 5 am and sleeping until 1 or 2 in the afternoon. It just worked for me. It probably wasn't the best idea. I should have been up and prepped for my job hunt every morning at 9:00am sharp but that just never worked for me.

The reason I never answered the phone then is because 1) if it was important they would leave a message and 2) I had once jumped out of bed to answer my cell phone about 6 months prior. I give my number out to very few people and get very few calls so I always used to figure that, if my phone was ringing it must be something important. It was some lady to call about some volunteer job that I had applied for but never really wanted. I was still half asleep and must have sounded to her to be either stoned, hung over or retarded (maybe a combination of all three). I struggled to complete coherent sentences to answer her routine questions and it must have sucked for her because I can't imagine it took her too long into our conversation for her to decide that I wasn't getting this job.

Anyway, whenever the phone rang I would wake up, listen to see if a message was left and then go back to sleep. None of my friends or the barrage of wrong numbers I got ever since changing to a Toronto phone number left messages so I knew that if a message was left it was either a job opportunity or a death in the family. Either way it could wait a couple more hours.

The number one proponent against my sleeping in was my girlfriend who still went to school and juggled a part time job every other day on top of that. So when my phone rang that Thursday morning at 9:00am and a message was left, she poked and prodded me until I rolled over and checked it. It was X saying he had some good news for me. I called him back. He told me of how both he and the girl he had hired came to a mutual agreement that she just wasn't the one for the job and now it was all mine. He didn't really ask me if I still wanted it. For all he knew I could be harbouring deep resentment against his going for a girl just because he thought it would give his company a new dimension. Served him right. But really, when movie people need something, they don't ask for it and deep down he must have known he was offering me something I really wanted.

He went into a typically long-winded explanation about what had happened and repeated about how the business isn't for everyone and other variations of the same material I had heard repeatedly to death already. He told me to grab a shower and some breakfast and meet him at the Starbucks. This seemed strange as I told him at both of our prior meetings that I had a car but I figured he knew what he was doing so I agreed to meet him there at 11:00am. I grabbed a shower and went to McDonald's for breakfast (now that I was a working man I could afford such little indulgences) and headed for Starbucks.

I had asked X if I needed to bring anything. He said only my laptop. Curious, but I made nothing of it, realizing now that these are maybe oversights that need to be made from a naive and over zealous small town boy going off to his first big city job, in the movie business no less.

I arrived at Starbucks early and went on my laptop. I blogged and Facebooked about my new found employment and waited patiently for X to show up. He arrived and we loaded into his old beater, which took us hurriedly to his house where his office resided. No one said this was going to be pretty. The house was a modest affair in a nice neighbourhood. It was roomy enough for him, his wife and his son, with a nice back yard (a luxury if there ever was one in Toronto). There was no air conditioning in it. I hoped it was more a matter of them being a naturly family as opposed to a film sales guy who couldn't afford such a simple luxury. The house had recently had work done to it and been painted and it was strangely empty. X explained to me that he and his wife had recently decided that they had too much stuff just lying around and therefore were in the process of getting rid of it all. Why bother having books when there are plenty at the library. Ditto for DVD's when Blockbuster stored so many of them for you.

He gave me the tour and showed me to his office. The office was a medium sized room off to the side of the house and beside the bathroom who's door didn't entirely close; something that kept me paranoid the entire time I worked there. The office had two desks. Well one desk and one large sheet of wood that was help up by two wooden signs that looked like they were swiped from a construction site. I don't bring this up in mockery, it was a large and sturdy surface that was just as good if not better than any desk could have been. My desk, in the other corner of the room, was covered in skateboard stickers and was completely bare. I set up my laptop on it, fired it up and sat down on the most uncomfortable wooden chair I had ever sat on. I wondered if his one-room-in-the-back-of-his-house company had a policy on ergonomics (to be fair he later gave me his chair to use which was better and on wheels but still hard and unpleasant on those hot sweaty days where only a single electric fan atop a high shelf gave us any relief).

X was in a hurry. He explained that he had worked night and day by himself for over a year building the company up and now he needed some relief so that he could focus more on taking business to the next level. What he had learned from the girl, whose name I did know but now eludes me, was that he is not an easy man to work with and that he sometimes takes for granted that he has been in this business for a long time and has a wealth of knowledge that not everyone else has. In hindsight he may have been prepping me for every time he displayed a condescending attitude towards my not knowing something off the top of my head, but at that time it was all just talk. I lasted in the business for almost 3 months. I now wonder what had gone down in this 3 days to have made that poor girl jump ship.

The reason for the rush was because X was going on a three week vacation to Vancouver the following week and had wasted 3 days already driving down a dead-end road. I had a lot to learn and not a lot of time to learn it in. The first task was to set up my e mail address. We used Outlook in order to manipulate a Google account into looking like a company e mail. The rule of thumb is that if someone from a company sends you an e mail from a Hotmail or Yahoo of Gmail account, they probably don't mean serious business. There was no reason for anyone to know that we were just 2 guys working out of a house with no air-conditioning because we approached everything as a serious business so we may as well look like one.

This process took hours to do with me Googling for tip sheets on how to get everything properly configured while X went about his regular tasks. That was fine. There was business to be done and I certainly didn't need anyone to hold my hand. Getting everything set up took most of the day. In between he showed me some things that he was working on but really, day one was all prep. We ended the day at around 7:00 pm and he drove me back to the Starbucks thinking I would be getting on the subway. I reminded him once again that I had a car. He wondered why I didn't tell him. I figured he had known since I had told him two or three times before and figured that he had a plan. We parted for the day.

Friday morning I drove right to his house for a 9:00am start time. We had a lot to do and it all needed to be done before he left for his vacation. It was more training. I arrived to a list on my desk and a long-winded lecture on how every day he starts by making a list of what needs to get down and stroking them off one at a time in order to best prioritize the day and to measure one's progress so that we would know where we start each day when we make a new list. Made sense. The day lasted again until 7:00pm (I was getting worried about these late days, but figured it was simply because we were trying to cram so much into so little). During the day he showed me how to send via courier, how to prepare screener packages, how to send "e-blasts" (mass e mails to companies about upcoming festival screenings or to advertise the availability of titles in certain regions) and so on. In between both days, during lunch of his deck in the back yard he lectured me again and again about maintaining a positive attitude and thinking like a winner and every other self help advice he had ever picked up.I smile and nodded. I was the young know-nothing and he was the wise old professional who had all the knowledge in the world to give. If it was the part he wanted to play, so be it, who was I to get him off his high horse and all this stuff, in spite of it all, made sense and seemed to have worked well for him.

At the end of the day X was feeling as though we were making good progress and I guess we had gotten to where he had wanted us to be. He gave me a box of screeners, some cash and promotional materials for if I needed them when he was away. We had also went through his sales list, pinpointed what companies he had given screeners to and during what market and checked off which ones I should get in touch with to follow-up over the next three weeks while he was away. I was to work half days. It was a good learning experience.

I started by going through the list and sending e mails to everyone who had been given a screener at Cannes, Berlin, AFM or any other lesser market. It was clear that X hadn't really been doing his job (there had been screeners given out from almost a year ago that had never been followed-up on) and he openly admitted this while we were going through the list the first time around (no wonder he needed someone new). The e mail addresses were collected off of Cinando, a site that is given free on a yearly basis to anyone who attends the Cannes Film Festival and is a large and useful database of company and contact information. It was my best friend for the entire time I worked there. X would check in periodically via phone to see how I was getting along and to have my tend to any miscellaneous business that may arise. You'd never know what kind of mood he would be in. Sometimes he was pleased and sometimes not. Sometimes I had done good work and sometimes I had made made mistakes, which, of course, would be given far more focus on than the good work (one day he was moody because I had gone out for lunch and when he called I did not have a pen on me to write down what he had to say). What can one expect from someone who has spent two days in the business and has a boss who can only be reached periodically. No matter, mistakes are to be learned from and frustration was to pass. After the first week we devised a list of companies that would be good to phone up and do follow-through with.

The phone calls were daunting. Because all of them were foreign, you had to divide your schedule up into knowing who to call at what time of the day. I knew I wanted to start with a territory where they would be guaranteed to speak English so I started with Australia (I was dreading those calls to Japan and the other Asian countries). My first call was a learning experience. It was SBS in Australia, where I talked to a nice and professional man. My method was to just jump right in: this is my name, I'm calling from this company about this movie, have you seen it?, okay bye. From B, the man I spoke with, I learned to not jump right in, make introductory small talk and don't make them feel pressured by jumping right into business. Fair enough. B had not seen the movie but informed me that he hoped someone would have by their weekly meeting and so he would follow-up by the next week. Another movie business rule: no one phones you back unless you have something they really desperately want and it wasn't like we were dealing with the work of the next Spielberg or Scorsese here.

I marked this information down on the sales log, set a date a week from now to follow-up again and went about my business. I wasn't a very good salesman at this point, just accepting that most of the people I called hadn't seen the movie yet but would make sure to put it on the top of their pile and get back to me. Alright, thanks, have a nice day; but hey I was talking to people and getting some feedback (most of them passes). This wasn't so hard after all. I even managed to find someone who wanted to make an offer...

To be continued... 

I'll Probably Eat Lunch in This Town Again: A Tale of my Falling out with the Movie Business (Part 1)

My writing is always influenced by what I am reading at the time. When it's fiction I'm more introspective, more willing to play with words in order to convey emotions. When it's non-fiction I'm more technical, direct and to the point, especially if it's a film related book. It seems then no surprise that while reading Julia Phillips' tell-all Hollywood memoir You'll Never Eat Lunch in this Town Again that I would decide to write about the short summer that I spent within the movie business. In her book Phillips named names, which I won't do here. It probably wouldn't make any difference but you can never be too careful in this day and age.

As some of you know, sometime in July I wrote a post that declared I had finally snagged a job and it was at a film sales company in Toronto. I had had the job referred to me by K, a Toronto movie veteran and the man who I've been reading scripts for for over 2 years. It seemed like a dream opportunity. I got the call to interview some weeks after sending my resume. The man in charge (X hereon in) wanted to meet me the next day at a Starbucks on his side of town (Etobicko for the Toronto readers). The location seemed strange but I didn't think of it. After having spent almost 4 months of interspersed first interviews and rejection letters I was just happy that anyone wanted to talk to me. And it was a movie job!

I arrived at the Starbucks about 40 minutes early, 20 of which I spent collecting myself in my car in the parking lot, trying not to die with the air conditioning off. I'm like that. I'm paranoid about arriving to anything late and having to travel on the Don Valley Parkway doesn't serve that paranoia well. I know I can get downtown from my house in the afternoon in 20 minutes, I've done it many times. However this has never stopped me from departing 1/5 to 2 hours before the designated interview time. X obviously wasn't there yet so after leaving my car I took a seat inside by the door, making awkward eye contact with everyone who came through as if to silently ask if they were the one here to see me. At exactly 1:02 pm, 2 minutes after out scheduled meeting time, X pulled up in a beat up old standard BMW, well passed it's prime, bathed in a camouflage of rust. To me this guy was an insider. He could have come in rags and been pushing a shopping cart for all I cared. I was the dumbstruck kid staring into the window of the toy store, waiting for the invitation to come in and play. This guy had the golden ticket.

X started the interview by introducing himself and immediately put me on the spot. Why should you get the job was one of his first questions. Coming fresh off a year of studying HR I can tell you now that this is not good interviewing technique and will, 9 times out of 10, yield skewed results. I'm not making excuses for myself, just saying. So I answered the question, not well as I was nervous and thrown but an answer regardless. I tried to keep my composure.

The interview lasted almost an hour and a half and was comprised of very little actual interviewing. I answered questions about myself and my history and progression to the current moment but X mostly explained the company, which was 2 years old and came after he had decided to give up producing. I'd give you a list of credits but I don't know which highlights would impress more: working with Lorenzo Lamas or Kelly Brook's bare boobs.

X also droned on about his own personal philosophy, his history in the film business, his move to Toronto from Montreal, his own personal life lessons, etc. He would later constantly tell me that he was an obsessive reader who always tried to have at least one self-help book going at a time and. Coincidentally, he spoke exactly like a man who always had at least one self-help book going at a time.

We parted company. I was ecstatic to be one step closer to the movie business. The pay was garbage ($400 a week, no commission), unpredictable hours (9 till whenever the work is done), and absolutely no job security. Ever really. That's entertainment. I ate it up.

He told me that he would create a short list of candidates by Friday (this was Tuesday or Wednesday) and would call them back for a second round. I got a call Friday to set up another Starbucks meeting the next day. Once again I put on my shirt and tie and headed, way too early, for Starbucks where there wasn't really any interview, just him talking, explaining the business, going through the whole song and dance again and relying anecdotes from projects passed in which he saved the movie at the last minute. This is one characteristic of everyone who has ever worked on a film set, especially producers. No matter who they were or what they did, they were always the one who came up with the idea that saved the movie at the last minute and if A tells you that once upon a time he worked with B, B will probably turn around and tell that that once upon a time A worked for him. Just smile and nod.

It seemed like a waste of time but one of the first things movie people will tell you is not to waste anyone's time and then will turn around and waste the time of just about anyone within earshot. He was on a schedule this time though, having a speaking engagement at the Mississauga International Film Festival. It didn't prevent the meeting from going on for a whole hour but I didn't care; I wanted it even more now and I was all the closer to getting it.

I was told that X would have a decision made by either Sunday or Monday. I waited all Sunday with baited breath, telling myself I would get it, but no call. I waited all Monday with baited breath, telling myself I would get it, and at 5:00 pm the phone rang. I didn't get it. I was crushed. My dream job had  just slipped away and I had another rejection notch on my belt. It had come down to me and another girl and he went with the girl because he had this notion that most film companies have a female presence. Maybe it's a fair assessment. Essentially he saw too much of himself in me and needed someone to be more personable and social on the phone with potential buyers. He assured me that he saw the potential in me and that I would have a career in film if I wanted one and would help me anyway he could and even suggested that maybe I should consider getting into acquisitions. The conversation lasted a minimum of half an hour. He bid me adieu and told me that he would call me if anything happened. I prayed it wouldn't work out with the evil harpy woman.

He had been extra picky with his selection because he had essentially run the entire company by himself for a year and now he was looking for someone who would come in, learn the trade and stick it out for the long run. The idea being that after a year, you would have learned the ropes and would be well on your way to, if not growing within the company, then moving on to a better one. If nothing else I wanted the job because I imagined it as the first step in my new career away from HR and into the picture business. Just like they taught us in school, I imaged myself going in, gung-ho, affecting change, selling every film to anyone I talked to, going to festivals, crashing parties, building an internal network; you know, making a name for myself and becoming a big deal in the movie business. I think we all have those dreams when starting a new job until slowly realizing, not in all, but most cases, that that is just what they are: dreams. And now mine were taken away as fast as they had been dangled in front of my face like a carrot. I still had scripts and was still doing some volunteer Production Assistant work for K from home, but as it goes: one step forward two steps back.

That was Monday. Thursday morning, the phone rang...

To Be Continued....