Titles Mean Everything & Nothing

Never Trust Your Life to Someone Else’s Business “Title”

When I produced my first (and only) feature film at the tender age of 20, I pictured that life would be like that described in Robert Evans’ The Kid Stays in the Picture. Never mind that the film had only cost $30-40k and was made by college kids staying at a house I rented in the middle of Roseland, a small community just outside of Sebastian, FL, and Fellsmere, FL, where we filmed. We pictured that we would make this movie, giving us experience, fame, and fortune beyond our wildest dreams.

I was right about one of the three, it gave me plenty of experience (and headaches), but the fame and the fortune remained a chasing-the-wind sort of thing.

The experience of making that film remains one of the seminal moments of my life because of what I learned during it. During this process, I first experienced the reality that Titles Mean Nothing.

Our film, The Prodigal Guns, fancied itself a “modern Western.” The name we had landed on was a play on the Biblical story of the prodigal son, where a boy takes his inheritance early and goes and wastes it, only to come back home to be the least of servants in his father’s house. In the biblical story, the father welcomes him home and celebrates his return. As a Western, our film was about people returning home to face their sins. It also had a pun, of which I remain a lifelong fan.

The entire production process took five years. If my co-writer and director Vitor Santos and I hadn’t been rescued by the brilliant talents of Michael Carr, who edited the picture and called in countless favors, I don’t know if we would have finished it. To make matters worse, during this production, I became addicted to painkillers, sedatives, and alcohol. The stress of college, trying to make the film, and maintaining the American dream had pulverized me into a fine powder.

But we did finish the film, locked the picture, and readied it for distribution. That in itself was a fantastic feat.

“Never go into a business you don’t understand” isn’t bad advice. It’s unlikely you won’t end up in something you don’t know. If you’re trying hard enough, you should be in places you don’t know. The issue isn’t the business you’re in. It’s the people that’ll get you in the end.

As we readied The Prodigal Guns for distribution, I set about finding a distributor. I had a few friends in LA who would be at AFM (American Film Market) and offered to share our information. My first mistake was letting my social anxiety and imposter syndrome keep me from going and representing the film myself. I knew what it was about, its pros and cons, and could speak to it cogently. I delegated something I should have handled myself.

During AFM, a potential buyer from a company at the time called BLECH Pictures (name changed to protect the awful) showed interest. I spoke to the interested BLECH rep, who sent over a deal memo. I was excited to see a legal contract, and I’d never heard of the term boilerplate.

During this process, the guy over at Unitard and his “brilliant” art director told me that for us to be successful, I had to change the movie title from The Prodigal Guns. The guy at this company was their “head of distribution,” and his “art director” all comforted me. Yet again, I decided to trust where I should have stuck to my guns (pun intended). I didn’t understand film distribution, and I still don’t (if I’m being candid).

So I went to my team and parroted the talking points fed to me, convincing them to change the movie’s name from The Prodigal Guns to “Kill Zone.”

I was like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, delivering the order of my execution. I’m being hyperbolic, but looking back, one of the things that made the film unique was that it was different. It was a modern Western, and I’d created the tagline: “The Western Never Died… It was Just Reloading.”

I trusted the guys telling me what to do because of their email signatures and business card—a big mistake.

You can feel people out and understand their character even if you don’t know a business fully. I was afraid to push back at the time, and I didn’t want to seem “difficult.”

It later turned out that the one dude had major legal problems and disappeared from the scene, the film was resold to another company, and it never did any real business other than give us tremendous experience and a few laughs. We held a premiere event at Sony Pictures Culver City Studios, and I’m still proud of what we did. And the score by Assaf Rinde was remarkable.

The Prodigal Guns was a title I was proud of, and Kill Zone felt like a rip-off of a bad Steven Seagal movie. But I trusted some random dude because he had legal documents and a fancy title.

So how could I have avoided this predicament, and how can you?

1. Develop trust with potential business partners. The number one determination for business relationships is trust. Seek out someone’s character and ask for witnesses and references. Call them all and then research the person. If anyone threatens to pull a deal because of due diligence, that’s a sign that you should RUN. A business partnership is more like a marriage than making friends.
2. If you feel scared or nervous, bring your posse. When you cannot make good decisions, disperse the weight amongst trusted allies. Bringing more voices into the mix makes you more likely to be protected from a poor decision.
3. Be ready to negotiate AND say no. Build a list of negotiables and hold firm to what you’re unwilling to budge on.
4. Don’t delegate things that only you can decide. It’s hard making decisions, and sometimes it seems easier to assume that the other person knows what he’s doing. But unless you’re willing to trust your teenage kid alone in a house with them, don’t assume they will be in any better position to make a difficult decision than you.

It doesn’t matter what business you’re in; remember that plenty of idiots get into high positions with fancy titles (And hey, you may even be one of those idiots at some point).

Because I trusted a person’s meaningless title, I lost a title that meant more to me.

Let’s do a 15th-anniversary release and change it back. 😉

Special Thanks to:

• Vitor Santos
• Michael Carr
• Assaf Rinde
• Dan Deentremont
• Seth C. Bell
• Peter Arata