Delays, Changes, and more Patience…
Those of you who have been following this blog for quite some time are likely aware that my feature film “40 Miles” was scheduled to begin production in September. Well, as you may have guessed from my lack of posts over the last few weeks, we’ve run into a yet another hitch with the financing of the film (the film, while it is financed, has run into issues with getting the funds released on our planned timetable for production), in other words, while we were literally ready to go, my entire production staff had dates scheduled to fly out to setup our local production office– we’ve been forced to push back principle photography on “40 Miles” yet again. Due to winter setting in in Cincinnati (where we’re slated to shoot the film) and given that this film is not set during the dead of winter, we’ve been forced to set new start dates for early spring on the production.
That being said, and as frustrating as it is to have the production delayed yet again, it is a very, very common thing in this business (neither indies nor $100+mill studio films are immune to these same kind of delays), it’s actually such a common occurrence that many production companies all but expect the delays to happen. These delays can happen for any number of reasons, ranging from contract delays to any studio exec or even one producer or even an actor changing their mind, to the investors or financiers changing their minds at the last minute… in our case it comes down to a rather complicated mix of industry deals and financing agreements that didn’t come through on the time table stated in our contracts due to a completely different multi-million project we are co-producers on being delayed by two of the top talent agencies (who’s names I will not list… but you can probably guess them) whose contract negotiations are taking too long to resolve. In other words, “40 Miles” was delayed because it’s getting financed as a part of a “package” deal that was delayed because one of its larger project’s budgets are being re-negotiated. If that seems really confusing to you, then you’re on the same page as us. These deals, no matter how simple they seem, are anything but… in our case at least it appears as though it’s just another delay, and all our projects are still on track to be made, just now on a new time table. – Yeah, welcome to the world of Hollywood filmmaking, every project is in a constant state of flux, nothing is ever set in stone. If you want to get a movie made (and you’re not paying for it yourself) it’s patience or nothing.
So, while it sucks that “40 Miles” is now not able to be shot this year, it has given me a great deal of time I was not expecting to have to work on many of my other projects, and yes, even develop a few more. So, while I’m extremely frustrated that the film got pushed back, one thing you can’t accuse me of is being lazy, I now have 4 more new projects I’m working on in addition to continuing to push several of my existing features and tv shows. More on this to come in future posts.
Lastly, for those of you wondering how this delay in production affects the release of “40 Miles”, yes, it obviously pushes back the time-table by at least 6-10 months, but our distributor(s) are still on board 100% (again, these delays are common, we haven’t actually lost anyone on our production team or cast) so right now we’re just in a holding pattern, we’ll set new release dates once we confirm the new production dates this spring. Stay tuned.
Regular “up to the minute” production updates on “40 Miles” are also still available on facebook HERE.