OOOOO man… Recently some interesting things went down. First, I moved to LA to live THE DREAM. Before my roommate and myself made the trek Dean (my roommate) mentioned the idea of getting a small camera to record the open mics we would do while driving from Cleveland, OH to Los Angeles, CA. Dean, being excited about the idea, had mentioned this to another friend.
Dean and I had thrown around the idea of turning it these experiences doing open mics on a road trip into a screenplay. The screenplay idea came to be a more realistic when we discovered that the first major city we came across was Indianapolis and there were not any open mics that we could find in the area until the next evening. So we didn’t stay. The next city St. Louis had that one that night at 8 but we didn’t get in until 1030. We decided to get just make the journey in as little time as possible and revisit the idea as road trip style script.
When we got back I found out the friend Dean had mentioned this to wanted to try to make this into a feature length documentary. Awesome!!!!
At the first meeting we ran into some issues: 1) The idea was similar to I am Comic and HBO series Tourgasm, ours would be a month long trip doing open mics in random places. 2) Communications from both sides. The initial pitch wasn’t very good and through a couple slips of the tongue, we started a bit of a schism.
Meeting #2 started off poorly. One of our friends who wasn’t at the first meeting was told we thought the idea sucked. He voiced his opinion immediately, putting us on the defensive. Even if that did slip out of mouthes during the first meeting it was immediately retracted (we were concerned about the similarities between this and the the above-mentioned documentaries). Having received a treatment from them earlier that was dramatically closer to what we were hoping for had and excite from that quickly disappeared. Having mentioned the difference between the poor pitch and the treatment our friends exchanged some glances that we both perceived as bit shifty. The trust is now gone. In addition there was was a discrepancy over credits and financing (a possible executive producer wants a finished product to help distribute but is apparently not going to help us cover our bills while on this month long journey).
We have all decided to figure out a legitimate way to finance this before moving on with this project and attempting to do so would be a poorly calculated risk. Nothing is final until the cash is on the table.
