Forest Gump is a Verb ( Part One )

“Dear Frederic,
Thank you for inquiring.
I would be delighted to hear more about your Project: Caesar's Flag.
a Story about Caesar, Cleopatra, and all the rest, based on a script you wrote.”

What was I thinking when I decided to be so nice, over a year ago?
Probably one of two things:
-I’m tired of being a cynical bastard, and, or:
-This project may turn out to be very timely income a few months from now…
Either way, I responded, we exchanged emails, etc.
I don’t particularly believe that if something walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and looks like a duck, it will eventually turn into a ’62 E-Type Jaguar, but sometimes, these crazed film projects, aloft on some insane personal Indy fortune, end up dumping money, like a Montgolfier Balloon throwing ballast overboard, as it tumbles toward a High Power Line.
Nice work if you happen to be standing there, as it plummets to the ground.

I’ll tell you about Frederic, then:

Frederic is Argentinean – Part German – who’s lived most of his life in New York.
Good lad. Well dressed, thirty five, balding.
A self described “director”, whose work nobody I know has ever seen, but somehow who has managed to summon a private investor willing to sink around $20 Million into a historical Epic, based on an unreadable script which vaguely wants to repeat some recent box office successes.
Private investors, in movie making, are a bit of a wild card; a double edged sword with no handle.
On the one hand, they allow for filmmakers to circumvent the whole movie-making-distribution system, and come up with cash instantly…’Sounds great.
On the other hand, of course, they fuel ignorance in film making, essentially by failing as a filtering system, to sift through garbage-writing and incompetent film craftsmanship, since they themselves have no experience in the field, and merely wish to “pay their way into the business”…
It amounts to a form of Hit and Run permission for the filmmaker, who gets to practice a sort of artistic Scorched Earth Summer Camp Voodoo, after which no good filmmaker will ever get a job in that town again…

After a couple of phone calls, I met Frederic, face to face in LA in the Spring of 2006.
We had a brunch in West Hollywood, facing the dark glass pyramid…It’s a good spot in LA for “power meetings” – but not for people on a budget.

He seemed fine. Not as crazed as he appeared on the phone.
There’s a fine line between “crazed” and “passionate”. Crazed, in a way, is when your self-programmed collision course is apparent to everyone but yourself.
Passionate, like visionary, is when the potential for collision is more apparent to you than anyone, and you decide to go forward anyway… Something like that…
I’ve become quite good at telling one from the other, over 2 decades…Frederic was definitely concealing “crazed” while munching on his scrambled eggs.
Still, my options for the year were uninspiring. I needed to travel.
I hate what I do enough at this point, to look for excitement wherever I can find it.
The mere possibility of boarding an airplane and living in a posh hotel for a few months, away from my own walls, seems like therapy enough…
I nodded in the right places, and finally said: “sure”!
I enjoy working for people who have no idea what they’re doing, because after years of working for people who do, I can safely say that the former option is easier by a long shot.
Less “best behavior” stuff, less fear of falling from grace, none of that “living on artistic pins and needles, waiting for someone to come along and make you look bad”.
When you are ready to change your line of work forever, you tend to look for the least painful of all options.
Then, there’s the money.
When someone thinks they need you – “need” is a lubricant in life – “want not” said Jesus Christ, good man – when they think they need you, they do not argue with your fee. In this climate, shunning this fact would qualify as “crazed”.
I spent 2 months in Argentina working for Frederic, and a short trip to Alicante, Spain, before the hemorrhaging was finally cauterized, nearly a month after I predicted the flat-line on Caesar's Flag.
How much money was thrown away? Who knows…
$1 million, 2…?
World wide trips, location scouts, hiring of art departments in Alicante, multiple trips to Argentina, meaningless script re-writes, a producer quitting – saying:
“Even I can’t do this”!
At the core of it all is a child in a grown person’s body. An adult rich kid, wishing to make his first movie, without ever having wondered “how”.
Charming as he may be, his house receives no subscription to photography or style publications, and much less technical journals on the tools of the craft -- his film collection is minute, his knowledge of who’s who is dismal…
He has little or no knowledge of the complexity of the job, but like many “Hit and Runners”, seems to coast on his unconsciousness. He gets meetings with actors all over Hollywood and London, and wonders for months on end why, despite handing them money, all refuse to be caught dead with him.

I hadn’t heard from Frederic in a while, but when he found out I was in Los Angeles, he emailed to say he wanted to speak to me.
I asked Stewart, my professionally psychic advisor: “You think he wants to start this up again”?

“Don’t discount this guy”, Stewart replies, “This situation is so insane, he might yet Forest Gump his way through this movie”.
I know what he means.