Films Not Made: Today we have two guests. The first one ⁓ needs no introduction. Ted Hope, renowned film producer, ⁓ also of his ⁓ most famous and growing substack, Hope for Film, and ⁓ former executive at Amazon. Our other guest is Chris Monger. Chris is probably best known for directing the Hugh Grant film. the Englishman who went up a hill and came down a mountain, which was based on a novel and premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. ⁓ He also wrote the amazing Temple Grandin film that was on HBO that I loved and many other things. I'm blushing now. We're here today to talk about a project that was never made that the two of you worked on together called The Amateur Photographer. Yeah, Chris, what would be like though the one sentence pitch for the film now? I don't think there is one sentence. I can probably do it in three. OK, we'll take three. This is based on the true story of my experience going to work in a timber mill in South Wales where the men had two terms for photographs. There were photographics and snaps. Back then a snap was something you had processed at the local chemist or you sent back to Kodak. A photographic was something you processed at home and they were usually nude pictures. That's a good tease. I love that. I think I'd do it a little differently. Okay, Ted, how would you do Please, Ted, please. I'm hopeless What's Ted? I need to hear Ted's. Upon getting thrown out of art school, long haired hippie freak Billy is forced to work at the local mill. And through his experiences there, stumbles in to the true transformative power of art, taking nudie photos of the local for their own personal enjoyment. That's much better, much better. Very pro-style. Pro-style. Chris, when you ⁓ first had the idea to write the script or started putting pen to paper or whatever, or... typing away on your typewriter. Where were you in your life and career? Like, was this before the Hugh Grant film? Where were you? This was 95, 96, immediately after The Englishman Who Went Up A Hill with Hugh Grant. That was a movie which I had done under UK contracts. So I'd made literally nothing to write and direct it. It was pathetic how much I got. But luckily, my British Literary agent I had a screenwriting agent and a literary agent called me up. She's fantastic She's the epitome of the British literary agent, you know, Glass of Scotch cigarette darling Darling, do you think do you think you could novelize the English? I think I could sell that and I went yeah sure and said do you want to write it to get a go? I said well do it. said okay And while I'm in prep and shooting these contracts were arriving which are blithely signing I sold the novel to the USA, to Canada, Germany, France, England, Australia, China, Japan. mean, it's Poland. mean, I just look at how much they were paying me and go, fantastic, sign it. Great, right? Now, I'm in the editing room and we're going to go to Cannes. Christmas is coming up. We're behind a lot of pressure. go once, two times I went out, thank God. I went to a Christmas party and there was my agent. Darling, how's the book going? I went, oh shit, yeah, I should do that sometimes. And she said, you haven't read the contracts, have you? And I went, no, why? She said, it's not like screenwriting. There's an absolute deadline. They charge you. They take money back every day afterwards because a book has to come out with a film. I was like, well, this is December the 20th. I said, when's the deadline? She said January the first. So I wrote 7,000 words a day for 10 days. can literally say I wrote that book but did not read it. And I'm in the editing room trying to kind of, you know, you're trying to carve out frames. know, just tighten this thing, tighten it, tighten it. And I'm doing the exact opposite at night where I have to stretch the story longer and longer. There's so many adjectives and adverbs, it's embarrassing, So, but what I just- definitely going to find a copy of that. Actually, I quite enjoyed it. I read it recently. I quite enjoyed it. But what was interesting was that in having to fill it out, I was creating backstories for all these people and subplots up the Yazoo. And I thought, Geez, I'd like some of this in the film and I really should do it the other way around next time. And I had this idea for the amateur photographer stroke pornographer and I'll explain that in a minute. I thought, you know what, I'm going to write the novel first, which I did. And I'd forgotten that I had it. found it in the this week. it's 350 pages. For those of us just listening, Chris held up a tome that had AP on the spine of it. Yeah, we had two titles for it. The one was The Amateur Photographer. Back in the 50s and 60s, there was a photography magazine called The Amateur Photographer. And it was kind of what people bought if they want to get a nudie magazine but weren't buying Playboy. Because there always some nudes in it, right? Yeah. So was kind of like a joke magazine. You see a man buying amateur for talk, ⁓ yes, I'm very keen. I've just bought a new Leica, yeah right. So it was a kind of pun on that. But also, we call it the amateur pornographer because that's what I kind of becomes. And it was after you came back from Cannes or were you on a high and you're like, this is the next project or? I very much thought it was going to be the next project. I think I'd mentioned it to Ted and Ted had kind of gone, yeah. That sounds fun. do that. We'll set it up right away. Yeah, exactly. Your invitation to come on the show has made me remember the different projects Chris and I have collaborated on, you know, and the fact that he stayed with me despite my lack of success to get the maid is quite I got paid a couple of times. I did succeed in getting Chris paid a couple of times. I feel such deep affinity that very different projects that that we worked on together. And even the ones, you know, like the psychedelic Western and thing that I didn't get involved with have just stayed with me always when someone says to me like, what are one of those projects? go, God, this guy, Chris has this fantastic psychedelic Western that I've always wanted to do. That is like, you know, a little bit of a Groundhog's Day type scenario. So I just felt an affinity, but ⁓ piece by piece, you know, Chris got started in an early stage of true indie coming out of the UK, a true no budget approach. There's a fine tradition out of the UK that America has never figured out how to do well, which I call like the community uprising genre, where the community comes together to change the things that are wrong through a series of small little leads to great transformation. America, for whatever reason, bought into the myth of the individual hero, which actually nothing gets done that way. Well, the UK makes many more movies about labor movements than we do. Yeah, that's true. know, partially because I think, you know, for the last 30 or 40 years, you know, the powers that be have been trying to kill off labor movements in America. best they can. So trying pretty well in the UK too. So you wrote a novel, right? You're back from Cannes. This is going to be your sophomore American effort, right? You had made films before, but it was going to be the follow-up. And you know Ted and you write this novel and you adapted to a script right after. At what point did you send it to Ted? Was he the first person you sent it to? Like who is the first... The great thing about amateur, AP as I call it, photographer, is it is based on a conglomeration of true things. I went to art school in London. I'm from South Wales, from a small place in South Wales. I went to an art school in London. I would come back to Wales every summer to get a job to make some money. Only job I could get was in the local mill. Almost the first day I was there, these guys were like... you do the photographics in that art school of yours? And I was like, yeah, I didn't know what photographics meant. I was like, yeah, sure. Like, oh, two things fascinated me. One, that I drew naked women. The idea that their tax dollars, remember British colleges were free at that time, the idea that their tax dollars went for me to watch, know, draw naked women. That was mind blowing to them. Oh, did you get a born out? It's like, no. And then they were like, you do photographics? went, yeah. Oh, bloody hell, you do photographics. It turned out that, as I said, a snap was a photograph you got processed by the pharmacy usually those days, or you sent them back to Kodak. But a photographic is something you process yourself. And they'd had a guy who'd been doing the photographics, and he'd lost his hand in a saw accident. This mill, by the way, had back then. had no safety stuff at all. I nearly lost a hand on my first day because I saw what looked like a heat haze above a table and I was about to put my hand into it when a guy grabbed me and hit the off button and this saw then came to a stop. It was a blade that big with these huge, when it was moving it was invisible. And I was about to put my hand into it. jeez. That scene's not only in the script. When I reread it for the podcast, it gave me chills. It gave me chills, because I remember where its origins were. Yeah. So they asked me, would I take over the photographics? I take pictures of their wives? It was all for private consumption. It was all they wanted, their own pictures. ⁓ Some of them would not show them around. Others were like, you if you got really close, they'd go, look, there's Doris. know, wow, wow, thanks. It's great. It's a lot of woman, Doris, yeah. I mean, it's great inspiration for setting and, you know, for a screenplay. And so basically the novel was set in Wales, And the first draft, too, of the script. And we got into prep at one point with... What? Yeah. It was one of those. So wait, so just for our audience, know, you go in to talk to Ted. What happens next, Ted? Like, how does it like where do you pitch it back in the day? Because remember, it's like the 90s. lot of maybe some of our listeners don't remember the 90s or were born in the 90s. Like, how do you like what do you do now? You're like, yeah, we're going to we're going to go. What happens next? I just thought it was such a sure thing. Yeah, exactly. Now I read a beautiful script that has all these values. I'm like, I love it. I have no idea how to get it made. This was the opposite, in that I loved it. And I was like, we're just going to be swatting them like flies. We're going to have the actors we want. We are going to have the funders we want. We're going to start really, really quick. And there's just like numerous reasons why I felt that, right? It's a funny heartfelt script, right? It's warm and cuddly, right? But it's not like safe by any means. It captures a period of time in transition with great specificity, but also recognition, right? You know, this is the moment, like it's predicated on the moment before Playboy hits the stands, but Playboy is able to hit the stands, you know, because the sexual revolution is happening. They're willing to talk about it now. Yeah, when is the script set? It's 69. ⁓ right. So right on the turn of the decade. Yeah. A big year. Because it was originally amateur pornographer and we were having trouble like... We'd send the script out and then I'd call somebody back when, you know, that's what we use phones for. I'd say, so have you read the script? And they're like, we haven't got it. And it was like, we started finding out that it was getting stopped in people's spams because we had such rudimentary filters. If it said pornographer in anywhere in the body of the email, at most of the corporate places, it wasn't coming through. Chris wasn't too precious, but also it had that double meaning that he mentioned. You know, earlier. Well, we got quite far in setting up the version in Britain and we got as far as casting and Matthew Reese, is this young unknown actor, came in to read. loved it. And we've become firm friends because of it. Matthew still talks about it. But there was there was supposedly money coming from the UK. Arts Council or the Welsh Arts Council. I can't remember. But it was this funny thing that BBC, these people would kind of get a few toes in and actually the very last minute you could just see that they couldn't report to their boards. Oh, by the way, when making, you know, they would all back out. The Welsh one collapsed and it was dead for a while. And then Ted came to me and said, look, I want you to go and pitch this to Colin Callender at HBO. Oh, yeah, of course. This was the time, you know, I had several projects. They had yet to make make real women have curves. Right. Right. And they were flirting with the idea of, you know, making movies for the big screen. Yeah. First and foremost, and distributing them. But they hadn't done it. And I had had a project with another director that because we couldn't get it in the contract, this was all around the same time, that they would distribute it theatrically, but they still tell us they would. That was the intent. They just couldn't put it in writing. He walked away like a finance movie, never got made. It was all of that. But we had a good relationship with HBO. know, Colin, who ran it in those days, you know, was British. came out of art cinema himself, you know, and was bold, but was also under pressure to, you know, find the kind of films that could satisfy both sides of HBO. HBO had, you know, taxi cab confessions and, you know, real sex and different late night offerings, the Skinamax experience, but they also were prestige. They'd yet to come into. know, Sopranos and all of that. Yeah. This is like a perfect project then, right? got the pornography and a high, yeah, high concept. had, when I was just starting out, you know, back when I was a PA and trying to get movies produced, I was also a script reader and I was able to read for virtually everyone in town and kind of organize other people. like James Seamus and Scott McCauley and Ann Carey, into becoming this Reader's Brigade. And one of the people I read for was Colin Callender. He had a assistant at the time named Carey Putnam and an executive Brian Siberell. That was like the, to date it. So Carey was who I handed my coverage into ⁓ and talked to about the script, because she was in the process of becoming Carey. So I knew Colin pretty well and I knew his tastes, right? And what he liked. And sure enough, they responded right away to the script, but they had a note. A note. Wait a minute. Can the pigs fly? Well, it was kind of a pretty big note. was, can we say it in America? For me, all the kind of humor, all the relationships, one, it was based on real experience. It was set in this place I knew and the idea of moving it to America, which is what he asked for, I just couldn't see it. ⁓ And I went in to actually kind of try and talk him into doing it in Wales. And what he said was, look, I'll pay you to go and drive for a few weeks. Go and find a place that is the geopolitical equivalent of where you grew up in Wales. He said, I'm sure it exists and I'm sure it exists in the northeast and you'll find it and you'll feel at home. And I always thought this guy's an idiot, but if you pay for it. That's actually really smart, right? Yeah. You'll go and fall in love with some. Yeah. And you can't imagine that happening to this day. Yeah. Like right now, like people, they're so eager to find the reasons to pass. They're not telling you, let me spend some money to help you find the way that can make this Let me help you to green light. can't imagine that. And you know, I grew up on the New Hampshire border ⁓ on a river that was surrounded by mill towns. I can picture this place in my head. We only would buy our shoes and our boots. at the factory outlets, because it was a mill area, right? So you drive into Andover, Massachusetts to go to the Converse sneaker store, because know, Converse were so expensive in those days, we had to get the extra $3 off. And you drive up to Durham, North New Hampshire to get the Timberline boots. hip hop hadn't been invented yet. So like Timberline boots were a thing of people that lived in New Hampshire. where it snowed, or people who worked outside. They were not cool, really. They were not yet cool. But they had already filtered down into my family's awareness, not because they were cool, but because they were practical shoes. And the Timberline shoe outlet is like an amazing, the factory is amazing thing. It's built on an island in a river, and there's four exit ramps. And each of those ramps exit to two bars. Right, so at lunchtime, the bell rings, the bars open the doors. You can see in like 10 minutes, entire factory empty out and fill the four bars, eight bars, right? Fill the eight bars. And when the bell rings again- to work and they have to hit the emergency thing so they don't cut their hand off. Exactly, as they're drunk, right? Yeah. Well. Chris went and looked and started to find where we could actually tell this story. It was so similar to the area I'm from because everything was in transition. A lot of this industry was closing down. Union problems. ⁓ I think it was, right? When you went, it was in the midst of the factories shutting down. That era, yeah, that era is when the steel mills were closing. I made a film outside Pittsburgh and it was just depressing in that way, yeah, because the factories were closing down. I felt terrible because you see these factories close in time and go, oh my God, that's terrible. But oh, fuck, what a great location. We can use this as a location. So you have the script, you nearly have a green light. You go back to Colin and HBO and you're like, thank you for helping us towards this green light. And here's a new script. It's set in New Hampshire. We're ready to go. Yeah, what happened? How come we still don't have a movie? Ted will have a different take on it. My take on this was that the real problem all the way along is that it relies on a 19-year-old being the lead. And there are no glamorous parts. All the working men and women in it have to look real. You can't have a... some gorgeous star in the middle of it or some handsome guy. Were you a pain in the ass about the casting, Chris? You're like, I can't have No, it wasn't that. I mean, I think people recognized that. That was the only way it would work. You had to have a certain... You had to have that discovery, right? That fresh... Yeah, and a certain amount of verisimilitude about it or it would just be lame. It would suddenly become exploitative. If you believed these people... as real people and you could get away with murder. So did Colin have an idea of what cast would green light it? So you come back to script and then you need a better memory than me on this. You know, there were no demands that you have to get this because there was no one who who could quite justify it. You know, independent film was getting secure, like starting to be noticed at the Oscars. You know, it was working at the box office. But once pulp fiction came around, which I think is what, 97, 98, everything started shifting to the big star. And we were caught up in that and people, and I think that one of the main truths of the film business is people don't care about looking smart. Right. They don't need to be smart. Right. They care about not looking stupid. Right. Yeah. So when a popular wisdom takes place, you can get Bruce Willis, Uma Thurman, John Travolta to be in your whatever it was, eight million dollar movie, right. You're not going to make a five million dollar movie with a long haired 19 year old kid that nobody knows. It wasn't that people had demands. it wasn't fitting the common status quo model. people were worried about looking stupid. That was it. The good machine model, which was really fully driven by David Lindy, who ran our international sales thing, could time and time again deliver the impossible, was essentially to get 120 % of our budget from international sales, pre-sales. ⁓ we were able to do that for this period of time in the 90s. And as we started moving to the 2000s, having a US distributor in place became a necessity to make the international side still work to do that. HBO entering this field was an unknown. It wasn't necessary an asset yet in that way. So it didn't goose us. to get us over the hump. Everyone wanted this movie to get made. Nobody set barriers in front of us. The barrier is the changing business model, right? The rapidly changing business model around that time. I really always felt like that moment I first read the script, even reading it again for this, I was like, ⁓ I can get this made. It's perfect. Before we came on. Of course, we got all your original materials, the script and photos and everything. we put it through our AI pipeline. And what we're going to show you now is a new pitch deck and then a trailer. And then we're going to have a conversation at the end with a film executive who joins us. He's going to drop in. She will. Yeah, we Meredith with us today. And now for our disclosures. Films Not Made uses AI to reimagine movies that were never produced. All development materials, pitch decks, trailers, and posters are AI generated. Any likenesses of people are speculative and synthetic. No real actors participated in their creation. This is cultural commentary not endorsed by any individual or studio referenced. Here we are. We've got the title page, the amateur photographer. produced by Ted Hobe, written and directed by Chris Monger. You know, again, we ask our AI ⁓ models to come up with a style and a look and create prompts for the images. This look to me looks like the kind of New Hampshire, ⁓ small mill town, Main Street. There's a... photo drug like a drugstore like you said where you would have gotten your photos developed. ⁓ It's very it's very moody and and wedded down. Yeah, there's a wet down. I love the wet down. I grew up. Okay, looks familiar. And an old pickup truck park. There's no one in the truck. Even though the lights are it's very desolate but you can see a factory in the background also. Yeah, it's very evocative. And then we ask it for copy as well. So the logline here is a draft dodging, teen photographers secret erotic photo business collides with a crusading cop, forcing him to expose the small towns darkest hypocrisy. And the kind of, ⁓ you know, elevator pitch, Billy Great, a broke 19 year old New York photography student dodging the draft. slinks back to Milltown, New Hampshire and accidentally becomes the town's secret private erotic photographer until a hypocritical cop and a bungled drug scheme turns his tender side hustle into a high stakes act of exposure. We have a tagline. Think American Graffiti meets Boogie Nights. Ted, give me a Ted, why didn't you come up with that? Yeah, we need a hot take on American Graffiti meets Boogie Nights. Yeah. You know, I think it's pretty right on, you know, there's ⁓ a nostalgic love in Chris's script, you know, by all means that like American Graffiti and American Graffiti and Boogie Nights are some of the only examples we have of American community uprising movies. ⁓ we Which is going right on with what Chris has. I think you see Why, when I read it, I was like, this is gonna happen right away. We're going to make this happen. The AI, you small towns, darkest hypocrisy might be a little over the top. The film has, you know, it's a joyful film. I was gonna say that the small town cop who is, you know, out to get everyone is actually based on where I grew up. We used to have a cop who everybody knew. And if you got in trouble, you just come and tell your parents, right? And then we suddenly got a new cop. We started giving things like traffic tickets, which would never happen, and closed the bar. The bars are supposed to close at 11, but the tradition was you just went in the back door after 11. And this guy started arresting people, and the village drove him out. He'd come out of his house every morning at his His car. It was uprising. Yeah, he'd have flat tires on his car all the time. And everywhere he walked, people would go, plot, plot, plot. mean, it was... I love that. Yeah. We asked you to make a style for us, suggested style for the film. And so what we have here is, well, I don't know, it's kind of a genre I've never heard of. It's acid rock small town naturalism. I mean, talk about subgenres. It's a microgenre, but it's just for the style. It reminds me of like the early days of Netflix where they would be like four sentences long genres. Star and so and so. This is a collision, a collision of two vibes. Jittery kinetic late sixties New York City prologue. High contrast neon pops collage energy followed by grounded New Hampshire mill town realism, which I guess is. You know, exemplified by sodium streetlights, fluorescence, wood smoke shadows, 35 millimeter grain. ⁓ Intimate scenes are shot like domestic anthropology. It's not like documentary. Funny, awkward, tender. So the final act of exposure lands as catharsis, not sleaze. I like that. I like that. Yeah. Yeah. When Chris was talking about it, like, and when I... Like I always thought this was also a movie that we would be able to do all sorts of interesting extensions with. And it was happening during this time of kind of a new wave of British photography too, where I'm gonna forget the artist names, where people were doing photographs of their families and parents and they were winning Turner prizes. And I was like, we're gonna get such a great photographer or Chris to. to shoot all these stills and we're gonna be able to sell the stills. You know, that they're going to be artworks in museums themselves. Just like, you know, our characters work in the movie, you know. But it captures That's a great idea, even for now. Yeah. And I also always felt like it was a movie for me, because it was so close to where I grew up. You could smell the film. You could smell the wood shop. Smell the mill, you know. You can smell the weed. Yeah. I hope so. It drives me nuts in movies when you don't know what people's jobs are or they kind of, their job is referred to once and you see this fantastic place where they live. I've always wanted to make films where you see where people work. you see how they live. Yeah. And there are towns like, you know, that it was ending, I think, in the nineties, but like everyone I grew up with's parents worked at General Electric. Like everyone, 90 % of the people worked for a single employer in the town. The next step is we ask it to cast the film also. And so now we're gonna go through the kind of principal cast. It provides three choices. We ask it to provide three good options. We start up here with Billy Great, a talented and cocky photography student dodging the draft. The first choice who's in the photo here is Dominic Sessa from The Holdovers, ⁓ described as volatile and soulful. And we have a shot of him in a makeshift. It's a very tiny, dark room because he has to crouch down with tongs and a roll of 35 millimeter. I like the size of the door. It's like a garden shed, I think. maybe maybe I picked up on the shed factory. Yeah, yeah, that's true. 100%. Other choices. Other ideas, yeah. Yeah, read them up. Yeah, we have Cooper Hoffman, Phil Hoffman's kid, who is in Licorice Pizza. He's, guess, described as unguarded. He was fantastic in Long Walk this year, He's well beyond being someone's kid. Yeah, exactly. And Gabriel LeBel from the Fableman's. I don't really know him so well. Who's name? Nimble. For the role of Penny, which is the Photoshop girl with a sharp guard up, Daisy Edgar Jones. I know, I picked Twisters as the... That makes no sense, but she's also known for normal people. I wonder if AI picked up, like scraping the internet, if it picked up that she's dating a photographer. Pretty well known photographer, art photographer. I mean, choices are Sydney Sweeney and Jessie Buckley. Yeah, Sydney Sweeney of American Eagle fame. And White Lotus. Bowl commercial fame now. There's a shot of her in the, I guess it would have been the photo counter at the drugstore. ⁓ not sure they would have had that many cameras, I don't know. I want to point out that Jessie Buckley is ⁓ unavailable because She's in another episode of ours. She's acting, she's the lead in another unmade project directed by Heidi Ewing. So she's busy on another unmade project of ours. I love how AI is as guilty as Hollywood. Let's not forget these characters at 19. So generally speaking, I think, you know, the men, it's almost kind of reverse, it seems here. The men I think exceed the age limit by about seven or eight years on the average. The women I think are exceeding closer to 15 on And again, this is the problem of getting the movie made. a 39 year old. Key to making this work, was the same problem we had when we did Ice Storm. We had to cast someone who felt like an innocent, Tobey Maguire at that time. And it was very hard to find actors who felt innocent, right? And this is true of Billy. Billy has to be innocent. Like despite all of his goings-on, it's the first time he's ever seen a woman naked before. know, like that's what's these kids, these actors don't feel like that. They've seen plenty of naked women. Yeah, you've got to really feel that he's sort of horrified when he's suddenly in the presence of mature women. Yeah, he thinks of himself as mature, but he's suddenly reduced to a boy. Yeah. Here's the foil, which is Officer Dowd. Crustading small town cop with a license. And a bully's appetite. Yeah, Chris, you named it right away. Josh Brolin. If Dune part two, I'm sure he'll he's chomping at the bit to play. Commanding. He looks pretty supporting role. He's got a ⁓ clipboard. He's standing in front of a bar with a closed sign on it now. Like he just shut it down. Clipboards always scare me. You come at me with a clipboard. I'm going to cower. Yeah. Well, I just want you to sign my petition, Ted. Yeah. But again, like so funny, like, you know, ⁓ This I think they only scaled up by about 30 years. AI is recognizing the challenge of movie making, finding the age appropriate character. Yeah, characters. can get you financed. Broken system, perhaps? The character of Mike, the Milltown ringleader with a good heart and bad ideas. We've got ⁓ Holt Mc... McAlany, ⁓ star of The Iron Claw. The Iron Claw, I didn't see that. It's about wrestlers? A dad of grownup kids. A dad, exactly. We see him, there's a shot of him at the mill, lunch pail in hand. He's got kind of like a, I've got a great idea for you expression on his face while he's smoking a cigarette. I like the fact he's got a cigarette. Yeah, absolutely. I'm the job. The Mike's partner in crime, we might recognize is Gene. ⁓ His fast talking, hustling, always pitching the next brilliant scheme. ⁓ First choice, Jeremy Allen White, also known for Iron Claw. You know, when I think of Jeremy Allen White, I think of Iron Claw and I think of underwear ⁓ and I think of, well, The bear and Bruce Springsteen. In that order. We have a female role. Alice is ⁓ anxious, lovingly, socially alert. She's desperate to keep the family normal, quotes. ⁓ Amy Adams from Night Bitch, who AI says is unfiltered. ⁓ Amy Adams is in the photo. I guess she's washing some dishes in a sort of old kitchen. She's concerned looking out the window. We also have Carrie Coon or Laura Linney, all, you know. That's like Billy's sister, not his mom. Young mom. And then we have Billy's father, Howard, a proud working man who equates order with love. And we see our first choice is Paul Giamatti, also from The Holdovers, described as thorny. I mean, think there, yeah, AI's latched on to the Holdovers and Iron Claw as films to find cast. And Nightpitch because the third choice here is Scoot McNary ⁓ in Nightpitch and also ⁓ somewhat of a perennial choice for ⁓ whatever reason in our own ⁓ AI casting cinematic universe for these. ⁓ Yeah, Scoot Lois comes up. comes up on the casting list. I love AI's description though of him as being grounded. ⁓ Exactly. I'm that actor that's a little off, that's a little nuts. That grounded guy. That grounded guy. Yeah, get me a grounded guy for God's sake. The casting in this is like a Venn diagram between ⁓ Night Bitch and ⁓ the Iron Claw. ⁓ that you guys are right in the middle there somehow. I'll tell you what, did do really, really well though. It's like all these are my favorite actors. Like it put all my favorite actors into the book. I love them all. I wouldn't say they're necessarily appropriate for the movie, but it definitely got my flavor. Okay, and Anne, exact thing. Blanchett is definitely gonna play this role. And sentimental and fair, Cate Blanchett. Cate Blanchett, who wants to be known for Marty Supreme. not say tar or Carol. Yeah, pleasure. It known for Marty. She's got, you know, scenes in the film. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Or Julianne or or or Laura Linney again. Yeah. This is also where where AI is acting just like a studio exact. We have someone that has about a minute and a half of screen time. Yeah. And the movie has no essential arc. And you know, we're gonna do it, but you just have to get one of these three great actresses. yeah, exactly. And then you're greenlit. So you can just put her on the poster. I don't think she's described anything like that in the script. Exhaling? My teacher was actually the sister of the editor of the Times of London. ⁓ my God. William Rees-Mogg, she was Anne Rees-Mogg and she was like the black sheep of the family. And she was astonishingly, she was tall. astonishingly austere lesbian who was like at time when she wanted to let everybody know she was a lesbian but at the same time was kind of like so upset about it and she was like just kind of like nervous all the time it was delightful. She only dressed in black and white and all her purses were transparent. Well, Cate Blanchett here is in great character. She's pointing at some, I don't know, contact sheets or... Yeah, well, it's a crit for class. Just a bit of DK plush in two scenes. Let's do it. Here's a couple of ⁓ just storyboard frames. The high concept tag in there is the graduate meets zodiac, which is, I don't know, not quite ⁓ American graffiti meets boogie nights, but, you know, we asked it for stuff and it gave it to us. And we've got a couple of like there about six frames in here. see Paul Giamatti looking very constipated at the breakfast table with fluorescent lights, fluorescent lights, Billy in the midst of an anti-war demonstration. This must be in the, beginning in New York, ⁓ sets him on his course. Also with Kate Blanchett ⁓ at art school, I imagine. We see Mike and Billy at the mill. Probably Mike's pitching him his idea there. We see Officer Doud eyeballing negatives. And there's Amy Adams looking concerned. Where did Zodiac come from? I don't know. don't know. Where is it? The color palette. It clearly likes the Zodiac color palette. Yeah. the graduate is, you know, grainy, saturated look or something. And Billy out on the street taking anti-wool protests. No, no. He's too lazy for that. I don't remember your color palette for all this, but somehow, like, I remember this being much more poppier, you know, than... Melancholy. Absolutely. Well, we we asked for its idea for for the best. Yes. For the most sellable. Here's some poster mockups. We have kind of the streamer one on the left. Netflix. ⁓ good work, Ted. You sold it to Netflix. Yeah. Right. It's a bracing dark, darkly funny American Awakening, says the New York Times. We have the middle one, which is more of like a festival prestige kind of that one went to camp. Yeah, back to can your back to can there. Yeah. It's got Billy on the hood of a car and behind him, his parents and even further behind in the shop window. We see Penny. Oh, they're framing in a frame. And then the last one is, I don't know, more like a in the Sundance poster. Yes. Scrappy, rough edged. It's a funny. Who would see that? Like, look, there's not even a person in the poster. It's like some muddy fixer bath. It looks like a crime scene. Definitely. like Zodiac. There's the Zodiac part. I think as the producer, AI, I'm going to fire you as a marketing consultant. Yeah. These don't sell the comedy. This is a funny movie. Yeah. I want the classic. a version of Antonioni's blow up poster meeting something that cues me in, know, meeting Tom Jones, right? I to feel that. Tom Jones, 100%. That's great. See, I always thought the model was the poster for the graduate. Yeah, something very sexy and a guy who's afraid of what he's seeing. OK. Yeah. Well, now the trailer. Yeah, have a trailer. No, Avi doesn't show me the trailer beforehand because I laugh harder if I have it. I wasn't running toward my future. I was running away from it. You come home looking like that. People talk. Let them! we got a way you can make real money. Quiet money. It started as pictures. You didn't get that from me. You doesn't excuse damage. So rainy. town's got rules. This is genius. and it stopped being about money. If he finds out... He'll ruin you. So, you're a photographer now? ⁓ You I the directed mic. Because someone explained to me talent doesn't excuse damage. Is that not in the script? I had that on a t-shirt. That's been my life motto. I see a merch opportunity for you guys. The weird thing that AI missed is that one of the big plot points is that he's hands down to his waist. And he stands out. mean, he's here like here and like everybody else. I mean, do you think it captures the tone? Because, you know, Ted has a good point in that it's funny. And Chris, you're so ⁓ funny in this lighthearted way. You know, I know some of your work and I feel like it's this version's a little more serious, maybe melodramatic. Yes. I mean, all the humor comes out of. real situations. There isn't there isn't a mood to it at all. it way too dark? You know, the look is all wrong. Yeah. It should be very light and frothy. Yeah. I love seeing it, though, I have to say. Yeah. Because it kind of actually like one of those things like I only imagine that we made it, you know, for like Harvey. and he gave us a trailer so different from our movie. This is exactly right. ⁓ my god. I was making a film for Miramax and someone I was talking to an executive and they were like, you know, we have your dailies and we are actually have another editor secretly cutting our cut of the film. I was like, yeah, I was like a young producer. was like, no. Well, now AI is secretly cutting your trailers. Just before Englishman got released, Harvey did a final test screening of Secretly. And it came in a few points lower than he imagined. And I got a call from one of the kids at Miramax, you of the... Your film's gone up to the fifth floor, which is where they... And I called Harvey. I couldn't get hold of Harvey. ⁓ So I called Hugh Grant, I called the producer, I called everybody who I thought could exercise some pressure on Harvey. And failing to get a hold of anyone, I left a message with Harvey's assistant saying, every cut you put in the movie, I'll put a cut in you. Oh no! Have you heard the phrase, you'll never work again this time again? Next morning, I was here in LA. I got a call at six o'clock in the morning when I knew it was going to be... I picked up the phone, was Harvey screaming, I'm gonna cut your nuts off and stick them up your ass. And I hung up and made myself a cup of coffee and I called back and said to his assistant, will you tell Harvey when he's ready to have a conversation? I'm ready to have one. And got on the phone and he said, you never threatened my assistants. And I said, I didn't threaten your assistants, I threatened you. And he went, oh, okay. I'm sending you a car, come on over. So old school. can't. That's so amazing. Wow. Good for you. OK, well, now that you've seen the trailer, we we are really prepped and ready. You know, the casting and we are going to invite an executive in to chat with those for a few minutes. ⁓ Hopefully this goes better than that conversation with with Harvey. But but but. But there is often some communications issues. just be patient. Yeah. Hey, everyone. It's Danny. Meredith's finishing up another call, but she asked me to kick us off so we don't burn your window. Quick heads up. We've only got 10 minutes today, and it's not even an industry thing. She has to step out to deal with a truly glamorous situation involving a plumber and a home renovation. So tight window, hard stop. But she's very keyed up about the amateur photographer. She'll jump straight into character slash tone slash packaging the second she joins. So feel free to start anywhere you want. She'll be on in a moment. Hey. Good to see you, Meredith. Hey Amy, hey Abhi, hi Ted, hi Chris. Good to see you all. Give me one second, I'm pulling up the pages and the deck. Let's just get your kind of hot take on the script, know, first impressions. All right, quick take on the script for the amateur photographer. Yeah, the tone lands. Billy's underground photo hustle feels real. And the small town hypocrisy is sharp, not preachy. The thing is, The escalation between Billy and Officer Dowd sometimes gets too procedural, which risks losing the darkly funny edge. What if you dial up the moments where Billy's choices are driven by desire and rebellion? Does that push the story closer to a true coming of age versus crime procedural? Great idea, Meredith. We love that. Okay. Not sure I'm tracking. Are we still talking the amateur photographer or did you mean something else? Which scene or character should I jump to? Well, what do you think of Billy? I mean, in his his arc, is it working for today's market? You know, they had a really hard time getting it greenlit. There was kind of like a casting and a market issue. thinking about it today and the kind of films that that you cut, like to greenlight, you know, how how is Billy's character for today? Yeah. So Billy absolutely works for today's market. He's a cocky, broke art student dodging the draft, and the script puts him right up against authority, officer doubt, and small-town hypocrisy. That outsider energy feels modern, think the Holdovers or Licorice Pizza type leads. The challenge is his arc sometimes leans reactive. He's often responding to trouble, not actively pushing forward. For Greenlight, I'd want him to take bigger risks, drive the moral showdown, and maybe lean more into authorship than just curiosity. Do you see Billy as a driver or a survivor? What kind of actor would spark the most with Penny endowed for a streamer audience? I'll let Ted take that one. We are thinking it's a theatrical film, not a streaming film. Yeah, for a theatrical film, Billy's arc has to feel bigger, more cinematic, more urgent. The audience needs to see him take real risks, make choices that change his world. not just react to it. What's the one moment where Billy truly steps out of his comfort zone, visually and emotionally? Could you push that scene so it's the heartbeat of the film? Yes, absolutely. We could do that. I'm wondering, Meredith, what do you see as a good budget and what do you think it would go to at the box office as a result? I'd expect budget low single digits, maybe creeping toward mid, if you get a name. The box office depends on who's playing Billy and how festival friendly it feels. If you can get buzz, it could be a sleeper hit, but it'll need a strong lead and a sharp campaign. Who are you thinking for Billy? Casting Zulwing...ding wise. We think Dominic that you suggested is a really good idea and that Holdovers is a very good comp. Yeah, Dominic's got that mix of vulnerability and trouble that pops on screen. He'd anchor the film and draw in a younger crowd using the holdovers as a comp. You'd want to lean into the generational conflict and the humor and market it as a character driven, slightly subversive comedy. Are you considering pairing Dominic with a recognizable actor for Officer Dowd or Penny to drive pre-sales? Yes, we're looking for the people that would have the great foreign value to help with that. Do you have any suggestions of other folks that you haven't mentioned? Because we are really open. We're very good collaborators, as you know from our other work with you, Meredith. Yeah, that's great to hear. For Officer Dowd, someone like Mark Rylance brings instant credibility and international pull. Plus, he can play with nuance and menace. For Penny, maybe Jessie Buckley. She's got indie cachet and foreign value, and she'd give the role bite. Would you want a slightly comic or a more dramatic vibe opposite Dominic? Comic. Absolutely comic, yes. Alright, sounds like you're leaning toward a playful tone with Penny. Maybe someone like Jodie Comer or Emma Mackie, who can do wit and chemistry without losing depth. Do you see Penny and Billy's dynamic as flirtatious or more oddball partners in crime? It's oddball partners in crime. They start off as adversaries and end up as friends. Yeah, that lands. The adversary to Ally's arc works well. especially if Penny brings comic energy and challenges Billy. Their scenes, like the one at the photo studio, could use more playful tension. What's the one moment where Penny risks something big for Billy? Should that happen earlier or later? She gives him a discount. She gives him that 10 % discount. Chris, that's a pretty big risk. Yeah, it's a big risk. That's a nice touch. Her giving Billy the discount shows she's willing to bend the rules. The thing is, for a theatrical audience, That moment needs to feel a bit bigger. Maybe she covers for him with doubt or helps him sneak into a forbidden event. Could you scale up Penny's risk so it's more than financial? Something that changes her standing in town? Well, he's rescuing all those refugees that he has hidden in the basement. She's pretty good at keeping quiet about that. You know, maybe she has to do a little bit more. I think the police officer, we could rewrite him as an ICE, like an ICE agent. Maybe? Should we update it politically? Yeah, could update it. Yeah. What do you think about that, Yeah. Updating officer Dowd to an ICE agent instantly amps up the stakes and brings real urgency, especially for a theatrical audience. That makes Billy's actions more dangerous and Penny's complicity much riskier. The win is... It gives the story sharper relevance and opens up new tension. Are you comfortable pushing the political angle to the forefront or do you want it woven in subtly through character choices? I'd always go for weaving it in through character choices. If Penny covers for Billy, it's about the risk to her job and relationships, not a big monologue. Do you want to see that shift in tone happen early or let it creep up as the story unfolds? I always go for creep up as the story unfolds. That's the right call. The tension builds as Doud's presence gets heavier and Penny's choices get riskier. The audience stays invested because they feel the stakes rising, not being told. Ted, Chris, I'm so sorry to cut in. Meredith just got pulled into the leak situation and had to drop for a hard stop. And I swear she tried to multitask until the last possible second. Something about the pool's heating system now. Anyway, thank you both for making the time and walking us through the amateur photographer. Super helpful. If you want a next step. Send the two, three pages you feel best capture that tonal pivot into the end game. We'll make sure Meredith reads them immediately and reacts with notes. Thanks again, really appreciate you. Welcome to the future. What are you talking about? I felt so much like the past. Exactly. I also failed to make a film about Dylan Thomas, the Welsh poet. I love that script. Thank you. had the wonderful privilege of my executive producer on that was Mick Jagger. Mick would come to meetings. And Mick was actually in a meeting where an executive said, does Dylan Thomas have to be a poet? and his wife have to drink so much? does he have to die at the end? And Mick just got up and went, well, this isn't the right place, it? ⁓ When we did Sense and Sensibility, I got a call from a junior agent who asked me if the novelist had been signed to any of it by the end. Amazing. Oh, OK. Well, it's a look back and a look forward. Well, impressive. Yeah. Very realistic. She's very slow at first, as you can tell, we've been working on that. Yeah. She gets, she sort of gains speed towards the end of the meeting and then she always has to go. She's quicker than many executives that I've Exactly. Exactly. During COVID, I hadn't driven around LA very much. And after months and months, I went over the hill into the, into the valley. So I turned to Barham and ⁓ suddenly was filled with this nausea. And I realized it was. the reminder of the fear of going to pitch. Yeah. I know exactly that road. Yeah. it's not, I like pitching. I think I'm not bad at it, but it's the questions. The questions afterwards, you just go, ⁓ what? What? What scene? Maybe that's the use case for our AI executives. It's just practicing pitching. Ted, were brilliant. I was just fusing as some of those questions were being asked. I like, what? So I guess the big question is... When can we start shooting? Yeah, you still make it right now, you know. Do you wish you made it? You know, do you have regret or how do you feel about this project now? Well, I just want to quick point out, that she wants us to keep it at the budget it was 25 years ago. Yeah, exactly. And refuse to give us any thought of what it might make at the box office. Yeah. That's that that seems realistic. ⁓ It's one of the ones that broke my heart. I've got maybe three scripts that I'm like, ⁓ shit. And when I read it, it still seems to work. I'm still Once the episode publishes, we're going to send a link to it and the script to Dominic's agent. Amazing. Great. Let's do it. It said in the contract we have to give you 10 % of our fee if we follow exactly a presentation card. It's true. Yes. Films not made presents. FNM Studios. Well, thank you for coming on the show. Thank you so much guys telling us about the project and ⁓ you know playing our little game and ⁓ And you know, look, it's great to hear these stories and I'm sure that like lots of people are gonna learn a lot and Yeah, I loved it. I love seeing you again Chris. It's lovely to see you and when you're in LA drop in please Please come up. I want meet the dog. Yeah Thank you very very much. Thank you You've been listening to Films Not Made, but if you want an even better experience, check us out on YouTube where you can see all the new materials, including the pitch deck and trailer. And subscribe to our sub stack for show notes, more about our guests and industry insights. And please follow us on Instagram and TikTok as Films Not Made. And of course, we have merch. Check that out and all things Films Not Made at FilmsNotMade.com. Thanks again for listening and watching. We'll see you next time.