25
Let’s rewind the clock just one more time.
NOVEMBER 2024
Driving down the now too familiar 101 freeway, I took an early exit off Barham Blvd., cruising past the Universal and Warner lots. Winding down the road towards Burbank, I was on my way to meet with a friend from college, Vee Bruno, an ambitious and enthusiastic creative who had taken a step away from the industry after our commencement ceremony in ’22 and had recently decided to dive back into the world of independent film production.
At the time, I really had no idea what Vee’s new endeavor would actually entail, with this initial Pizza Party gathering pitched only as a brainstorming session among likeminded creatives. But I was intrigued. After all, Vee had always been more than supportive of all of my own creative projects and ideas and I always admired their unrelenting creativity and ambition.
However, I must admit that at the time I was more than little hesitant to fully delve into the world of independent film production.
Don’t get me wrong, while I’d always dreamed of being an independent filmmaker, economic realities made it quite difficult for me to fully engage with independent film. With limited hours and budget, the idea of creating independent films seemed so daunting and uncertain. At the time, I figured that if I was to create independently, I needed to create cheaply. And writing is certainly cheaper than making films.
So, I wrote.
Across the hundreds of dead hours behind the register, I would develop numerous script ideas or simple bits of conversations to keep my mind engaged. Every night after closing out the store, I would return home with pocketsful of schizophrenic scribblings jotted down on register paper and sticky notes.
Miscellaneous bits of dialogue. Scene summaries. Outlines. Loglilnes. Character descriptions.
These notes were often nonsensical and nearly impossible to read by anyone but myself. But I knew what they meant and that was enough. Simple reminders to re-trigger a half lucid idea for a plotline, conversation, or monologue. While these scripts were really only intended to build out my portfolio for a potential writer’s room position, these projects were also enough to satiate my hunger to create as an independent filmmaker.
By the time I was driving out to Vee’s apartment, I had compiled a fairly solid draft of a feature script, a half-hour comedy script, and a hour-long sci-fi horror pilot along with an accompanying pitch deck.
As more and more industry opportunities continued to stall out, these three scripts began to symbolize my only tangible hope to break into the industry. But even with each completed draft, I realized the real challenge of being a writer wasn’t the writing itself but rather getting anyone to read your shit in the first place.
Unsurprisingly, Los Angeles is overflowing with wanna be screenwriters and creatives. To stand out in any way, your work has to either be leaps and bounds ahead of the competition OR you have to have the right connections. And as mentioned, my list of internship connections was slowly diminishing.
Festivals and competitions can do a lot to create visibility, of course. But with limited income, most top festivals are quite simply out of the question. And so, for a while, it seemed impossible for my work to get past my inner circle. And sure, the few friends or mentors that read it were receptive and positive, but never provided substantial enough criticism to help me elevate my work to that “undeniable” level. And the few festivals I did submit to offered similarly positive but unspecific constructive feedback
After dumping hundreds of dollars into competitions and festivals, I was continuously met with the same boiler-plate “this is very well written and has a strong voice, which could be slightly improved by generic advice x, y, z” yet still not placing in the festival.
“Please apply again!”
(For only $59.99)
Submission after submission, I was left abandoned in a pool of my own mediocrity.
Because truth of the matter was, my work was simply not good enough.
I can sit here and blame the industry. Blame festivals. Blame everyone and their mothers for my failure to break through but at the end of the day, my work was simply not standing out. There was no way around it.
And of course I wanted to improve. I needed to improve. But even if I did, the same problem remained.
Who the fuck was going to read my script?
At some point of another, I heard of a team of screenwriters who successfully sold their spec script after recording a reading of it as a podcast and sending the audio file to executives across Hollywood.
It seemed simple enough.
Executives don’t want to read your script, so if you read it for them you’re doing half their job already. All one needed was to direct a few actors to read the lines out loud, edit the performances with some compelling piece of music, and viola, you had a package that was sure to stand out from the crowd.
I marinated this idea for months, thinking perhaps THIS was the secret to breaking through. Hoping that the ambition of creating such an unusual asset to a pitch deck could compensate my sub-par writing. And why not give it a shot? After all, if I ever had hopes of directing again, my ability to work with actors had to continue to be fine-tuned and improved just as much as my writing.
So, by the end of 2023, I sent out a casting call and narrowed down a list of four actors I believed were capable of voicing the entire cast of characters from this script. By early in 2024, I gathered these actors around my living room table and recorded the entirety of my 1-hour spec script, The Zero Hour.
This production would be the first time I collaborated with Vee since our share time at USC, as I reached out to her to help me produce the audio drama and aide me in coordinating our small cast as we came together for this rather bizarre production idea.
Despite the small scale of the production, I was immediately reenergized by directing this project. Though I had spent what little savings I had to compensate our four actors, the experience was an overall fruitful exercise in both directing and writing. Throughout the casting process alone, I was able to find small ways to improve my writing, as hearing these scenes play out in person was the best stress-test I had put my writing under.
However, out of some perhaps unreasonable frustration with how little attention this audio-version of my script seemed to cultivate in my writing, I eventually shelved the project after only editing the first act of the recording. While I was excited by the project and proud of what we had achieved, I was ultimately disappointed, realizing that the recording samples I sent out hadn’t really gained any more attention than the script itself. I was still at square one.
Soon after, I felt that my limited time and energy was once again better suited in continuing to expand my writing portfolio. So, by the end of Summer of ’24, I returned to writing and finished writing my feature spec and half-hour pilot.
It was undeniable, however, that The Zero Hour had left me hungry for more. To direct. To experiment. To create anything to help remind me what this was all for. To shepherd these stories beyond the simple page and onto real life.
With all this running through my mind, I pulled up to Vee’s apartment that November night.
Only three of us turned up to Vee’s brainstorming event, where Vee expressed a growing desire to jump head first into the world of independent film production. More specifically, Vee wanted to create an independent production ecosystem that supported up and coming artists while giving them the production opportunities that just didn’t seem to come along.
I was interested of course, though still cautious. While I was already itching to direct and edit again after The Zero Hour, I also wanted to be careful about what I chose to produce next.
After all, my main energies were still set on writing for features and TV. Not shorts. At the time I feared that this sudden change in format had the danger of becoming a lateral move of where I was headed in my career.
But then again, it’s not like my career WAS heading anywhere.
Despite the countless hours writing and networking, even the most entry-level opportunities I was looking for seemed forever out of reach. Across endless industry events and mixers, recruiters shook my hand, asked my name, looked over my resume, and assured me I was doing things the right way. They even asked me to connect.
“We’ll stay in touch Jose!”
Why was it always Jose?
Whatever. No need to burn bridges this early. I’d share my information, they’d find their mistake when I contact them within the next few days.
“Hey its JESUS, thank you so much for looking over my resume and offering to connect.”
Left on read.
Maybe they were waiting for an email from Jose?
I clearly needed to find a way to stand out. And perhaps a series of short films could do just that. But if directing shorts was to be the next step I took in my career, I knew that there was really only one type of short films I would have any interest in creating.
While at USC, a professor had once urged us to watch commercials as a study of short form storytelling. I found in this exercise that often the most impactful shorts were those that engaged in a single, highly specific concept. A short based around a single scare, punchline, visual, or situation was often more memorable or impactful than shorts that attempted to cram complex relationships and perfect 3 act structures within 25-30 minutes.
This is not to say that there aren’t incredible short films which pursue this more ambitious structure. But in my mind, if we were going to pursue no-budget productions I wanted them to truly take advantage of the short medium. Short, punchy, memorable. Simple.
Films like David F. Sandberg’s viral short Lights Out symbolized in my mind the epitome of what short film should be, taking a single concept and ensuring maximum impact. This simplicity also empowers filmmakers to truly hone in on a single discipline of their craft throughout the production. Taking this approach, I felt I would also be allowing myself to grow and learn as an artist while still creating memorable short form content that could draw attention.
During this same time at USC, I also came to the realization that I had often stopped myself from making short films out of a naïve desire to make these shorts “perfect”. Throughout the years, I’ve met countless young creatives who become paralyzed with fear that they can’t produce their material until everything is perfect. Perfect script. Perfect location. Perfect budget. Perfect cast. Perfect gear.
It was this fear that stopped me from pursuing more ambitious projects throughout High School.
But when I began making shorts at SC, I realized that waiting for the perfect conditions was the number one killer of these independent productions. I realized that if I had any hope of getting these projects made, I had to shift how I viewed these deeply personal passion projects. Instead of viewing these films as the ultimate expression of my creativity, a magnus opus that should not be wasted by budgetary restrictions, I had to start viewing these films more like practice sketches in a notebook.
During a semester studying the works of Leonardo Davinci, I was particularly drawn to his posthumously exhibited sketch works. What attracted me about these sketches, was that they illustrated the number of hours of an artists practice hyper specific disciplines that would ultimately encompass only a fraction of the skills required to achieve major works.
Da Vinci’s “Study of Hands” was never meant to be viewed as a completed work of art, but merely as a part of his creative process. Studies of light and and anatomy which would culminate in masterpieces like the “Mona Lisa” and “The Last Supper.”
It was from these two philosophies that I agreed to delve into producing short films.
To be simple and imperfect.
I expressed this creative ethos among our small group, who all seemed to resonate with the core of these ideas. Thus we agreed that any short script we produced should try to be as small, self-contained, and simple as possible. Focused on clearly defined concepts that push forward both our artistic studies and the memorability of our shorts.
We ended that meeting agreeing to develop our pitches for this first batch of projects and reconvene at a later date.
December 2024
My pitch was simple.
A long time ago, before even graduating from USC, I was writing an uncomfortably personal script about my anxieties as a struggling artist. Dealing with extended periods of no motivation and lack of ideas, I conceived of a story of a musician who, in a desperate attempt to motive themselves into finally writing an original song, made a half-earnest promise that he would kill himself if he didn’t have a song written by the time he turned 25.
Believing that this harsh deadline would motivate him to finish his song, the musician found himself waking up on the eve of his 25th birthday, with still no motivation or inspiration to finally finish his song. Having realized months ago that not even the fear of death could push them to write, they found that something much more profound was broken within them. The script would then follow this character across their apparent last 12 hours of life.
I never moved forward with writing that script (the irony is not lost on me).
But in truth, the subject felt a little too dark in a way that ultimately felt somewhat inauthentic. Or perhaps I was scared it was too authentic. Whatever the reason, I simply felt I couldn’t crack the darkly comedic tone of the script and decided, perhaps cowardly, to move forward with writing my less emotionally charged pilot scripts.
For months, however, there persisted in my mind an early scene from this screenplay where our unnamed protagonist was listening to his friends arguing about the runtime of films. While lost in his own existential dread, his friends kept arguing whether it was worth it to keep watching a terrible film past a certain point. The friends would continue this argument over our silent protagonist, who would be contemplating quietly over the arbitrary timecode deadlines his friends threw out. At the end of the scene, his two friends would settle on a 25-minute limit for bad films, the same number he had placed as a limit for him to finally write his song or end his life.
This small scene was the only scene that survived past the original idea, eventually making its way into another script I was working on at the time; a more broadly comedic coming of age story heavily inspired by my time at Universal.
Seeing as I was already working on this scene for a feature script, I figured an isolated version of this conversation could make for a pretty interesting short. Combining this idea with a strong desire to focus on my directorial ability to block out a scene, I decided to use this scene as a study in film composition.
And of course, now 24 years old, soon to be 25, well, it only seemed appropriate.
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