Wrote and directed a feature film that has made me very poor for the last 4 years but is getting in several film festivals
Back in late 2022 a producer and I filmed the first movie script I wrote and it was my first time directing a film.
It’s a gay romantic farce instead of being romantic comedy, loosely based on the classic French play Cyrano de Bergerac.
We budget it at 100,000 and all told spent about 105k after reshoots, festival submissions fees, and so on.
The first 15k was a beer company buying product placement. The next 45k or so came from fundraising. The remaining 45k was a loan from the producer of 20k which I paid out monthly and is paid off. The last 25k was two frat brothers investing at 10k each and me paying the last 5k. The two frat brothers are the only people who haven’t been paid back yet.
We won best narrative feature which is like winning best picture at our first festival here in NYC. Thursday we had our second festival which was our NYC premiere. Next month we are in festivals in Chicago and Palm Springs, Quintana Roo in Mexico in November, and today I found out we got into a festival in LA.
I have been broke as fuck because of the movie for 4 years, and it’s gonna stay that way for a while as the travel and hotels for the festivals is EXPENSIVE.
But today I splurged and spent the last 10 in my account and treated myself to the Subway 5 dollar 6” sub of the day combo plus tip. The sub of the day was sweet onion teriyaki chicken, which is my least favorite at Subway, but it was what I could afford to celebrate with.
EDIT: while it scares the hell out of me to name the film, thus me losing my anonymity and opening myself up to homophobes review bombing the trailer and such: the movie is named Glitterbaited. You can see the trailer below: