Desperation

I went out to Los Angeles for the Regent film showings. By this time, the technical issues with my film had been corrected, so at least that wasn’t a distraction. Unfortunately, it still didn’t correct any of the directing  flaws. Regent brought in some second or third-tier industry professionals to the showings and Bill Brown, once again, laughed in all the right spots. I am not good at schmoozing, so I didn’t know how to work the crowd. The female director of the other summer film, however, seemed well at ease. I heard that she later moved to Los Angeles so I hope something came of it for her.

Of course, Los Angeles is where it’s at for filmmaking. I did think about just moving there to try find an in. But if you don’t get some notice from a film you’ve made, you pretty much have to try start from the bottom as an assistant and work your way up as you gain experience and connections. The problem with that is that it doesn’t pay much or anything at all in a very expensive city.

There is another dilemma that a Christian faces in filmmaking. The industry has no moral conscience. Even if you do find a way in, you will probably be asked to work on something in which there are things that you believe are wrong. It is up to each individual to decide, according to their conscience, whether that would be something that they should work on or not. But if you say no, you will get less work or none at all. At that point, you have to decide if your faith or working in film is more important. The best place to be is having the power to choose your projects but there are very few in that position.

I went back to Virginia to work on getting my film out to as many film festivals as I could. Because of the budget mistake during production I had plenty of money to work with for the entry fees and I sent it out to as many as would take it. I even won first prize at a very small festival. It came with a small cash reward, which went back to Regent. 

Meanwhile, it was back to the taxi. Driving a cab was an interesting job. You got to meet all kinds of people and have interesting conversations. But it was long hours and didn’t pay much. Friends and relatives helped us financially but I couldn’t keep this up indefinitely. I started looking into more stable jobs and decided that if nothing happened with the film by September 1st, it was time to move on.

The deadline approached and I was done. Once again, it was time to give up the dream. I felt very inadequate, very useless. Even when I got to do the very thing I had been wanting to do all these years, it didn’t turn out very well and it hadn’t gone anywhere. All around me I saw people who had real talent and I didn’t seem to be really good at anything.

But then I began to wonder to myself if it was really that important to be great at something. I realized that I just had to do the best with what I had. I should also just appreciate and enjoy the talents and abilities that other people had rather than be jealous.

Again, my main responsibility was to support and raise my family as well as I could. My challenge was how just an average person like me, with no particular talent, was going to find a job to do that. I looked into television production work but the only possibilities were in other places and we wanted to stay where our church was. I looked into anything there might be back at CBN but the only thing was in security. That included handling a gun. I’m scared of guns so that wouldn’t work out.

There was a guy at church who ran the local office for a large financial investment company and he was hiring. With my lack of schmoozing skills and therefore, lack of sales ability, I had much trepidation about the job. But I was getting into desperation mode. I went for an interview and he was willing to hire me.

The only other possibility I found was with another church-connected business. Eric Hughes’s father ran a company called Integrity Auto Specialists. They did mobile automotive paint and scratch repair for customers and car lots. Over the years, some of my closest friends from church worked for Integrity and while there were some guys that did well, my friends did not. I heard a lot about the drawbacks.

However, Integrity had also started doing paintless dent removal which one of my new friends, Chris Parsons oversaw. I hadn’t even considered Integrity because of the bad feedback I got from my other friends. But Chris started talking to me about the potential income and suddenly I got a whole new perspective on the business.

I went ahead and applied and interviewed with the big boss. Integrity invests a lot into a new employee with paid training so he wanted to make sure I was going to make a commitment and not run off if some film opportunity came up. I assured him that the dream was dead.

Spring and Summer are the best seasons for Integrity when it’s warmer and dealerships are selling the most cars. Winter is the worst. Training takes three months so if I had started at that time, I would have come out of training in December. So just when I felt like I was down to my last straw, he decided we needed to wait six months. I was deeply disappointed but what else could I do?