Backtracking here a bit, we weren't always so cheap. Frugal yes, but certainly not cheap. My partner Mary and I had made another indie film called Beautysleep Symphony which had a respectable budget. We even spent some big bucks for some famous actors. Dee Wallace was the biggest! And lots of fun! Dee really commits to a film when she chooses to be involved.
We even spent some of our hard-found funds in having it budgeted. The man from Budget Bone told us it was going to cost $2.2 million, but we tightened our belts and did the film for considerably less. But by the time we had finished post-production on it, distributors were not giving much out in the way of advances, and we'd have to sign the rights off for 5-7 years and most filmmakers weren't getting a penny back from that.
So we came up with the idea of really paring down the budget for our next one. I had had this idea for some time about two morons who don't know much about making films on their quest to film the cheapest superhero movie ever. It was meant to be a spoof on the superhero movies, and yes that was achieved, but it succeeded on another level as well. We seemed to even spoof ourselves.
In order to get this one done, we found a warehouse where we could shoot 90% of the film and shot the first two days on location at my house. We allowed only 10 days to do the film and although the film had over 50 characters, we limited ourselves to six actors--four men and two gorgeous women. I had to play five characters myself. Mary got her usual 2 seconds of screen time. Most of the rest of the xtras came from the crew or the generous volunteers who helped out. We even went to the pathetic practice of making the xtras out of cardboard.
(In a side note: I was an extra on the film Ali, even sitting in the front row during the Sonny Liston fight. The production assistants had us spread out and put cardboard extras on the seats between us. I turned to the young man from Montana sitting nearly next to me, who was experiencing his first movie experience and said that we were in trouble, because no one was ever going to see us. I was right!)
We figured we'd make a movie so cheap, that it couldn't fail to pay for itself. And that was the genesis of Pathetically Cheap. For your information, we haven't reached our goal yet, but we are thinking of an even lower budget drama about a former CIA agent trading jabs with his psychiatrists who specialize in role-playing. It's a thriller that just might put us on the map! What's the word for a step beyond pathetically cheap?
