Ever miss a turn when you are driving… and your GPS says it’s recalculating your route? I feel like that a lot.
I’ve got this problem: I’m stretched awfully thin and I need help to get all my work done. But I don’t make enough money to afford to hire someone.
We’ve tried several ways to get more money in the door. The Dr. Film Pilot… bust. Selling stuff to TCM (they keep saying no for some reason). MeTV?: NO. Streaming… bust (so far). Selling DVDs (OK but not fantastic). Starting my own TV station… looked promising but I couldn’t even get Pluto to return my email.
The best idea was to start a non-profit and solicit for donations. This is a great idea, but I’m not a finance/business guy. I don’t even really know where to start. And doing too much of that work takes me away from the stuff that I need to be doing. I need a business-oriented person to keep me working on the restoration projects.
I have had one hell of a time trying to find someone to help me do this. I’ve been through almost 10 people so far, even some pretty heavy hitters. A couple just bailed on me and didn’t explain why. One got another job and ghosted me for months. One said I was crazy to do this work at all and hung up on me. Another told me that he’d need a contract for $50,000 for two years before he would even start.
I’d LOVE to make $50,000 for two years. My accountant would love it even more.
I had thought I was doomed to just be that guy who did a movie or two a year for life. And then came King of the Kongo.
Screenwriter Richard Maibaum was writing the screenplay for Goldfinger when he got to a point in the book in which Goldfinger’s men would load the gold into trucks and steal it from Fort Knox. It wasn’t described very clearly in the book, so Maibaum did some quick calculations and realized that it was impossible to load that much gold into any feasible number of trucks. The logistics were just not workable.
By the same token, I needed to restore 21 reels of King of the Kongo, which were taking me on average a month per reel, mostly computer run time. And I had to go through about 70 reels. That doesn’t count the sound, which we hadn’t even started. The logistics were just not workable.
A quick calculation told me that it would be up to 10 years before I could finish the project. In desperation, I turned to some friends. I got a grant to pay them a little (not much) and to buy them some computers.
I had such success recruiting victims, er, assistants, that I assumed that they’d stay on for the long haul, even if I couldn’t give them all steady work, at least part time. If you saw the Kickstarter video for Kongo, you saw me announce the grand plan to get things going and use the money to move forward. And they finished Kongo, but one guy buys houses and flips them, and he’s busy. Another is on the road photographing a roller derby team. I had a guy who was set to help me set up a new streaming site, and his heart exploded last year. Amazingly, he’s alive and OK now, but whew. And… and… and… you get the idea.
I’m not known for my optimism, but in this case I was overly optimistic. I worked with another assistant to get the non-profit started, and she filed the paperwork, but then nothing. Then she got another job. And got married, and didn’t answer my emails or phone calls for months, and didn’t get me an email I could use… and let’s not even go into how bad that was.
Meanwhile I’d started working on Little Mickey Grogan. If you’ve followed this, you’ll know that Little Mickey presented some new problems with restoration and I worked steadily on it for months, even with another assistant. It ultimately looks quite excellent, but it took forever.
And I didn’t have the time to sit and untangle the mess of bubblegum and knotted yarn that had become my 501(c)(3). Logistically, I don’t have the money to buy more pieces of restoration software.
The computers that we got that were so spiffy in 2020 are now kinda long in the tooth in 2026. And that’s more money. Add that to the guys who have other work.
So I came to the point where I began to think that maybe I had been way too optimistic, that I’d overshot my capabilities, and that I really would retreat and be that guy who sat in the corner and did one or two movies a year. I was pretty down on the whole experience. I’d expected that Little Mickey would be a breeze and it turned out to be anything but that, and I was kinda burnt out.
At the end of Kongo, I had engaged a guy to help me navigate through the maze of management. That was another issue. The people who are good at film restoration tend to be just on the edge of unmanageable, and I used to work in a place where the management was, well, awful. They’d had one consultant who was quite good, and they didn’t listen to him, but I did.
So I’d been talking to him. You see, I have some other problems. I’m kinda shy and I don’t have a lot of charisma. I would need to learn to be an effective manager who isn’t a jackass, a challenge these days. I’d noticed that most successful non-profits have a real charismatic go-getter at their helm. That just isn’t me.
But he’s had some really excellent advice: he told me that people don’t follow managers who are charismatic, but they follow people with a dream, one they can participate in, and that makes things fall into place. Apparently, I’d sold the dream of PLEASE GOD, LET’S FINISH KONGO, and I got some help.
However, I didn’t sell the dream of “Let’s continue to save abandoned films that no one else will release. Films that are important but being ignored.” And that led me to be ineffective going into the non-profit.
Eric’s fundamental law is as follows: “Whatever you expect, that’s not it.” This isn’t negative, and it isn’t positive, either. It simply reiterates that the universe is unpredictable and works in ways that even the best planners can’t foresee.
I have a friend who just retired and saw just how flustered I was with the non-profit process. He took the mess from me and got the process restarted again. I can’t even tell you the relief that is.
Another guy wrote me, remembered the name of the non-profit we hadn’t even finished activating, and said, “How do I donate to this?”
Several others have come to me and said, “I have XYXY film that I’d like you to work on and release.” Those have stacked up. Some are important.
There seems to be some idea that the market for MeTV has opened a little, even if not much.
I hate to name-drop, but in this case it’s necessary. Diane Baker spoke to me at the Chiller Theatre show and asked me why I wasn’t presenting at the TCM Fest. I told her that I’m not important enough. Baker disagreed (I told her the story behind The Haunted/The Ghost of Sierra de Cobre.) I’ve been working with Sara Karloff for some time and she agrees with Diane. I don’t know that it will lead anywhere, but I hope it does.
So maybe I was being pessimistic about being too optimistic. I have a lot of stuff on my plate at the moment, but most of it is good. As my friend Kevin Friedly says, “I sure am popular for someone so poor.”
As the wise Buddhist once said, “We’ll see.”