As Flickering Myth steps into the world of indie filmmaking, Tom Jolliffe details how and why The Baby in the Basket was born…
As a screenwriter working in the indie filmmaking world for five years, I made a conscious decision late last year to pull away from hired commissions (slightly) and shift my focus more to producing. Why? Well, I’ll tell you.
Making waves in the industry is incredmega ibly difficult, particularly for screenwriters outside the US. It’s hard enough there of course in a landscape where 99% of the money is funnelled to a very small 1% of the movies being made. You know, the Disney output where screenwriters tend to be an indie darling given a leg up, a mate of Kevin Feige or someone with a long-established track record.
Like most things, being in the club usually gives you an advantage over everyone standing outside the club in the rain looking in. The point is, the days of enormous amounts of money being splurged on scec scripts and newbie writers are long gone. The glamourous classic era of Hollywood had the screenwriter treated like royalty but it’s less so these days, and when you look at product mentality in what certain studios deliver, it’s also clear that the artistic intent of big studio films is secondary to a focus group checked formula that writers must adhere to. Thus what tends to happen, is the best movies with the “best writing” can often be auteur works where a director has been given autonomy to give their vision (often from their own script). Although even auteur cinema is becoming rarer. Likewise, there’s the potential pitfall that many have deemed Ari Aster and Damien Chazelle have fallen into in their latest works… overindulgence.
As an aspiring writer and generally just a lifetime film buff, I just wanted a chance to write movies. My initial screenwriting aspiration was as simple as having a film released that I could wander into a shop and pick up on DVD (and see my name on the cover), born of my younger days frequenting the video store aisles. Getting that first feature commission came after around 7-8 years of bashing out spec scripts and almost selling a couple. Those frustrations, which extended to a number of short projects falling by the wayside saw me move into producing my own shorts. That way, only I was responsible if something didn’t hit the screen, so it was initially a happenstance that I added producer, casting director and a load of other roles to my CV (prepare to multitask as a microbudget filmmaker). The short films did well in festivals but more importantly filled a previously bare IMDB page.
That lead me to get trusted enough to write a first feature, Scarecrow’s Revenge. It’s exactly as bad as it sounds, but hell, I had fun writing it and love crazy concepts. This started a snowball effect and launched me careering into four years of back-to-back, non-stop feature commissions of films with titles like Cyber Bride (awful), Amityville Witches (it’s campy, it’s fun), Jack and Jill (which is at least better than the Adam Sandler film) and Firenado (which is a lot of fun).
Then came the fanboy moments where stars I grew up watching appeared in films I’d written, with Danny Trejo, Lee Majors, Michael Pare and Louis Mandylor appearing in the action throwback Renegades (which one reviewer aptly described as a Ronseal movie, it does exactly what it says on the tin). There was Vincent Regan in the recently released War of the Worlds: The Attack and coming next year is a horror adaptation of Cinderella, produced by a director who has made some of my all-time favourites (Mark L. Lester of Commando fame) and starring Natasha Henstridge who was Miss 1995-98 for a teenage me. All these films have a common ground though and they’re formula-driven genre films made for the market. I get the paragraph of an idea in many cases, sometimes an extended outline, and then run with it from there. Sometimes they’re rushed out (Mega Lightning, which was to my delight savaged on Red Letter Media), other times there’s more care (War of the Worlds: The Attack was honed in post).
You never, as a writer of low-budget (micro up to a lavish moderate low) genre films, expect to be blessed with universal praise by any means, but you have to deal with the negative and skewed landscape of IMDB which can be a point of frustration for many filmmakers. The weighted average has a clear bias against lower budget films, particular distributors, non-US and more. We’re not privy to the kind of voting numbers and fandom that would see five thousand or more voters showing their adoration, even if (to my surprise even) some of these films have a fanbase. People watch a fire twister film that entertains as you’d expect something that silly and Asylum-esque to but aren’t inclined to vote or review. However, in this internet age people can’t wait to share their vitriol for a film.
Renegades got hit with a surge of 1/10 votes within a day of it being pirated (which is another frustrating aspect). The weighted system will ignore a high proportion of 9s and 10s and pull the score down rather than up. However the opposite, for a high proportion of 1 ratings isn’t the case seemingly. Some of the differentials between the median average and weighted averages for many filmmakers are incredibly harsh. An IMDB rating might say 3/10, but the actual mathematical average is 5-6. There’s a definite move to maintain a clear distinction between micro-budget cinema, many of which struggle to top 4-5/10, and the more fashionable indies or big studio films. This also leads to an odd anomaly, my critic reviews tend to average out better than the IMDB rating would suggest. It’s usually the opposite in concept horror films, especially at a higher budget level.
Even knowing of a rigged system that makes it even harder for indie filmmakers, I still had the desire to return to producing something more reflective of what I’d make. This brings us to The Baby in the Basket. I’ve known Nathan Shepka (co-producer and director) for over a decade, beginning as passing ships on the message boards of action star fan forums. A shared love of cinema and many of a similar ilk, and both having begun our filmmaking careers making home movies with siblings, it seemed natural we’d end up making a film together. There was a time whilst shooting a concept teaser for a film that remains in development when I found myself on a precarious high walkway mounting Nathan and groaning at him with an axe in my hand. That I didn’t need too much makeup to play a backwood-dwelling inbred hillbilly cult member was slightly concerning. It was hours after we’d first met in person. Hell of a first date.
A couple of years later we did make a feature, though with other projects on the go, I was only unofficially helping with the production side, mostly with casting but Nathan took my script, based on an idea we both developed, and ran with it. The result was When Darkness Falls, which in spite of being the cheapest film that I’ve had hit the market, is probably the best (and certainly looks way beyond its budget). We also got a really great response from indie film critics who really got what we were going for in spite of the imperfections you can’t escape on such a small budget.
That success just compelled us to want to do more and The Baby in the Basket is the first in a run of films we’ll undoubtedly make between our respective solo projects. Having written for years for Flickering Myth and after passing a convo with the main man Gary Collinson, it turned out he had aspirations of venturing into new film avenues which could include production. It didn’t take long to come to the conclusion that the upcoming film in development with Nathan might be the perfect place to start, particularly being a gothic horror firmly in the style of films which get a lot of interest on site. It’s a chance to put our money where our mouths are and for me, aspiring to maybe write films with more creative control and directly influence the final outcome a bit more. Particularly, in the hope of making better films which are a bit more creatively ambitious (as honestly of my CV thus far I have maybe five I’d recommend to people out of about 20 released).
As with When Darkness Falls, Nate and I began with some brainstorming. He had the notion of a film about a baby being left at a monastery and then taking it into The Omen and Rosemary’s Baby territory. My ambition was always to write something layered. Generally, distributors of disposable micro horror just want one-dimensional. It sells (to a point) and is undemanding Tubi viewing. Do distributors sometimes undervalue the quality of a product? Or an audience’s willingness to watch something with a bit more to it? Perhaps.
Thus we knew we’d try to find a way to make the film first, rather than going through a distributor from the beginning to pre-sell the film. As ultimately, many notes I’ve had over the years, aside from budget-conscious cuts, have been cuts to drama, humour, subtext and more. They might be right, but we want to make something that’s great, not just the next product. So we launched into developing our ode to classic gothic horror given that we had a shared loved of atmospheric horrors of a bygone time.
With a treatment fleshed out as my blueprint, I wrote the script. It was a well-stuffed first draft with a few too many layers. Sometimes in trying to put in a lot of setups and payoffs or hiding deeper meaning in plain sight, you might lose the through-line. After a little slice and dice, we had a good script that felt like there was still enough ambiguity to make audiences interpret or analyse the film and most importantly, watch it more than once.
It was written with some people in mind too. We loved working with Michaela Longden and Elle O’Hara on When Darkness Falls so almost by the time that one was picture locked we’d been toying with ideas to bring them back in something again. Then Amber Doig-Thorne and Alexandra Faye Sadeghian were known to us through the casting process on When Darkness Falls, having both applied in casting for that. They’d remained in mind for future reference as ultimately as much as you might love someone in the casting process, you can’t always find room. There’s always next time though.
With a script in place, I also decided to test the waters with it at some film festivals. I felt like I’d nailed it but until you get an objective gaze outside of your circle, you just don’t know. So far the script in its current form has won an award, another third place award and is nominated as Best Horror Screenplay at another festival too. Additionally, it’s had a great response from talent agents during our process of casting a couple of senior roles in the film. Everyone has loved the script, even when the project wasn’t quite them ultimately (or when they were way out of budget). It just felt like validation that I hadn’t forgotten how to write after a number of paint-by-numbers works last year. Although often great fun to write, you do so knowing the budget will never take some things far enough.
We then come to a process that has been absolutely excruciating. Yes, anyone who has run a Kickstarter will know this. It’s a perfect storm of stress, anxiety, obsession and with absolutely no rhyme or reason to what works or doesn’t. You question your sanity and end up swamped with offers from specialists whose primary tactic is firing out emails to a mailing list you’ll never see. Everyone is a crowdfunding expert ready to bring you millions, but ultimately your best strength is the project and perseverance. Between the three of us running the campaign and annoying the hell out of our respective Facebook friends lists with yet another Baby in the Basket post, we’ve slowly gone insane and this is despite the campaign going well.
Never again…until the next time. You also find yourself frustrated at the lack of response from people you would have assumed might at least like or share at the very least. It can be tough, particularly when you’ve worked pro-bono for people who’ve not even given so much as a passing like, or you’ve listened to people in your realm champion the indie film brethren and helping others but haven’t given your project a second look (even after contributing and/or sharing theirs) and yet, the very nature of crowdfunding means you can’t really hold a grudge (some may fear the snowball of publicly backing one) and times are tough. At the same time, you get unexpected support or more-than-anticipated from some folk.
The light at the end of the tunnel is in sight. We’re gonna make a movie but if we hit that target we can make it without any compromises. We’ve been champing at the bit to announce our latest cast additions Annabelle Lanyon and Paul Barber who will both add so much to the project. We’ve had a casting call up which received over 600 applicants which I’ve sifted through and genuinely, seen 50-60 excellent self-tapes. With the campaign coming up to halfway and now two-thirds funded we’re in good shape but it has been hard work.
Indie filmmaking is a tough landscape, especially when it comes to making a film you want to make, the way you want to make it. We’re not just hired hands now, we’re orchestrating and with that comes pressure, more work and unlike commissions, no upfront pay. In the end, would I rather be known for The Baby in the Basket or Mega Lightning? The work is only just beginning.
By reading this post, you’ve already contributed to helping us make The Baby in the Basket a reality, but if you’d like to get involved further please check out our Kickstarter campaign page which you can find here.
Tom Jolliffe is an award winning screenwriter and passionate cinephile. He has a number of films out around the world, including When Darkness Falls and several releases due out soon, including big-screen releases for Renegades (Lee Majors, Danny Trejo, Michael Pare, Tiny Lister, Nick Moran, Patsy Kensit, Ian Ogilvy and Billy Murray) and War of The Worlds: The Attack (Vincent Regan). Find more info at the best personal site you’ll ever see here.
