NOT LETTING GO OF YOUR DREAM

I have a dream, of getting one of my screenplays made into a movie.

The sad part of it is that I don't actually want to make the movie myself. I have a director's degree and would have loved to do this years ago when I had the time and less commitments, but now life took over for so many years, I can no longer get the same enthusiasm for making a movie.

I belong to the excellent Raindance, an organisation that makes filmmakers not movies. I learned a lot from them and try every year to keep up with their Raindance Film Festival, a celebration of all things Indie. many good directors have passed through Raindance, the most notable being Christopher Nolan.

However, my dream is to actually to make some money from the numerous screenplays I have written and have copyrighted at WGA, and finally, when my real self-imposed retirement is nigh (October 2018) I am ready to make that dream happen. My little story is called "Angel in the Park" and you first heard it here.

Yesterday I attended a seminar on "Movie Money" at Raindance and it was excellently presented by a young a pretty producer from South Africa. She not only explained film finance well, she answered any question that was thrown at her in a clear manner and she is still enthusiastic about making movies. Mostly she has made short films of her own, but is happy to take on anything as long as it is film.

My story is unique, it is one of my babies and I am determined that a romantic comedy is well due in this day and age of very serious and worrying living. So my premise means that I have "the ear" of a Hollywood agent. I hope that his ear is amenable to my latest screenplay (he once called me about one I'd sent him) provided it has funding.

So where will I get my funding? There are so many ways, but I will try first to get one of the film organisations in the UK to fund my movie or to start me off. Once I feel I have something tangible behind me, I will go back to my person in Hollywood and I believe he'll like this one, as he did the one I sent all those years ago when I first began writing screenplays. If I had known the criteria back then that he only ever read scripts that had a backer, this may well have been my umpteenth movie.

Ambitious? Yes, however if it's doing something you love and are quite good at, one literary agent, a lovely lady called Gina Pollinger, once told me I should write movies as I was a "visual" writer. So I began. This year let's hope it will be the one when I break through. Wish me luck. JV