Ivy McLemore as Angie in Savage County

On August 1st, I wrote a blog post “Three Days to Savage County” announcing that I’d keep a production diary.** It’s October 16th and (obviously) that didn’t happen. And then, I was going to talk about the many, many, many lessons I learned on Savage County during the “Sneak Peak” at Indie Memphis… But, unfortunately, that didn’t happen either. ***

Why didn’t I keep that diary? Savage County was nuts. It was harder than we thought it would be. The first day was what my boss (David Gale, who produced everything from “Election” to “Aeon Flux”) called “The worst first day of shooting I’ve heard of in my entire career.” We had no food, we worked long hours, we endured heat, cold, and plagues of mosquitoes. The little bit of free time I had went to sleeping, not to teh internets.

The good news is – it’s coming together really well. There’s an adage that bad shoots make for good movies. This is probably true for webseries-ish-movies-for-the-net also. Watching the footage, I’m really stoked that it looks much more expensive than it was (we had a $250,000 budget – which from a webseries perspective is a ton of money, but goes fast when you start killing people in the ways we did), and every time a new member of our ensemble cast takes center screen I find myself thinking “Oh, look, it’s him/her! I love that gal/guy! I love when he/she says (whatever their line is)!” These are good signs. It’s also pretty incredible that so many people held fast and worked with us after it became apparent that Savage County wasn’t going to be what would be conventionally called “fun.”

All that said, I think I still learned enough to make it worth writing down before I’ve totally blocked it out (my UCLA professor Rory Kelly said that the only reason anyone makes more than one film or has more than one child is amnesia). I’m a big believer that new media is providing opportunities for “emerging” filmmakers. Independent film is drying up (be honest – when’s the last time you went to your local arthouse?), but there’s a level of openness in the media that I don’t think has existed since the 70’s (when today’s A-list directors were making B movies for Roger Corman). The few times I’ve gotten to talk at film schools, I’ve pretty enthusiastically banged this drum: “It’s like the 70’s all over again! You can make today’s Boxcar Bertha!”

Making today’s low-budget genre movies as web “content” is a great idea, in theory. It’s also a great, but very different idea in practice. So, to compensate for not keeping a production diary and for not doing the Q&A and panel at Indie Memphis, I decided to write: 66.6 Lessons Learned on Savage County. (I added the decimal to the devil’s number because while I learned a ton, I don’t know that I can get all the way to 666 lessons learned, and I know you don’t want to read that many).

Here’s the first:

66.6 Lessons of Savage County: Lesson .1 Bring a Flashlight on Location Scouts
We scouted abandoned houses, an abandoned hospital, morgue and crematorium. We always, always forget the damn flashlight. Every single scout we did was like a mini-horror-movie. Standing ankle-deep in murky water in a basement morgue, illuminated by keychain lights, when the location guy shows you the autopsy table and asks if you want to try it out – you start to feel like something bad is going to happen. When you walk into a completely dark house in the middle of a field in the middle of nowhere in Arkansas that has clearly been a recent squat, and you’re saying “We’re just checking the place out for a movie!” – you feel like something bad is going to happen. When you walk face-first into your umpteenth spider web – you feel like something bad is going to happen.

Bring a flashlight. It will improve your life, vastly. If you’re going to make something scary for cheap, you’re going to have to go to scary places. You’re going to be thinking about all the horrible things you want to do to your characters and how the place you’re in would be a terrific place for those horrible things to happen to you.

* See you in Mass on Sunday.

*** Why no IndieMemphis? Boring reasons: money/time. Our post-production process has been plagued with technical issues, so we’ve already lost a lot of the days we hoped to have for the edit. I was very disappointed I couldn’t be there – it’s one of my favorite festivals and the first festival to show my work and the first film festival to honor my work with a “best” anything. I’ll still do some kind of Savage County premiere there, just not during the actual festival. If you live in Memphis or if you want to screen at IndieMemphis (you should, it’s awesome) – you should BECOME AN INDIEMEMPHIS MEMBER by CLICKING HERE.