Another Local Filmmaker Heads to Los Angeles

Local filmmaker, occasional pub trivia host, and friend of Seattlest Dom Zook blogged on September 19 that he's moving to LA.

I’ve been a stalwart Seattle fan for most of my adult life. I love this town, even though some of the people who govern it are slightly “challenged”. I love making movies in this town… but I think I’ve gone in depth about my issues here. Many have wondered why I’ve stayed so long in a town that’s only moderately supportive of its filmmakers. Why I’ve stayed in a town where actual, paying film gigs are about as scarce as tumbleweeds on Pike St. Why I’ve stayed for nearly five years at a job that’s been both good and bad to me just so I could make movies in this town.

Last week, he explained in more detail why he's given up on making movies locally. In short, he can't get financing for his films. In longer:

If you scroll back through the last couple of years’ worth of posts you’ll see the trials and tribulations. I did it all. Cast negotiations, legal paperwork, business plans, investor talks, budget write-ups, etc. And frankly I had a great plan with a fantastic script (written by Faye Hoerauf and Jessica Baxter) and I knew it would be a hit. Modest hit, maybe, but a hit. Unfortunately no one was buying. No one of influence believed the script would go far. Despite at least one major name in the cast and several more just waiting for an investor to come forward, despite several awards for the script alone, despite a rock-solid business plan with proven talent (and I’m not even talking about me, Faye or Jessica here!), we were denied.

Meanwhile a lot of other movies got made in this town. Many with large budgets. Some with budgets much larger than our’s. Some with budgets much smaller. My job prevented me from ever volunteering or even working on these sets but from the horror stories I’ve heard I’m not sure that was a bad thing. But in Seattle you learn quickly that you either drop everything to work on free shit to build up your name or you hope that gravy train will eventually stop on your terms. It doesn’t. There are no entry level film positions in this town. No one wants to hire a producer who actually demands you add insurance to the budget. Auteurs don’t like to hear their script is unfilmable for the budget they can afford. They also don’t like to hear a plan for raising the money they need when they just want to shoot now and “gee, all I want are 50 extras, a bunch of copyrighted songs, cinematography like that last Ridley Scott feature and Jake Gyllenhaal.” They always end that with “I already know 50 people who’d do it, too.” Yeah, but see, it always sounds great until you tell those 50 people they have to get up at 6am and there’s a strong likelihood we won’t get to them till 4pm, and since you’re a cheapskate all they have are cheese and Nalley’s Beef Stew out of the can. Movies can’t get made that way. Rather, movies SHOULDN’T get made that way.

He concludes, "I'm moving to LA. Not because the industry is any easier down there, but it’s THE industry down there.

We love the movies, but Seattlest hasn't seriously considered working in the film industry since that time we wrote a spec script for Saved By the Bell: The College Years with a friend of ours.

We vividly remember, back when we read scriptwriting books by the crate, the omnipresent question: Do you have to move to LA? Given that the optimistic answer we got was "well, you don't have to..." we eventually realized we loved not living in LA more than we loved the idea of writing screenplays for other people to revise.

Dom's making the other decision -- he wants to make movies for a living. (Also, he likes the weather in SoCal, which doesn't hurt.) But it makes us wonder: How are the rest of our local filmmakers doing -- and what's keeping them local?