I grew up in a strict all-boys boarding school in East Germany in the 1990s. There was only one TV in the whole house. It was rolled out on Saturday nights for the poor shlubs who lived too far away to spend the weekend with their parents at home. I was one of the poor shlubs. Two boys were selected who were allowed to accompany an adult staff to the video store to rent a movie. What they came back with was usually James Bond or some Hollywood blockbuster like Jurassic Park or Con Air. Other than on Saturday nights, TV or movies weren’t allowed, the lone television set locked away.
I wasn’t terribly interested in movies anyway. They were a fine distraction on occasion but I was a bookish kid. Instead of Steven Spielberg I was filling my head with Patrick Süskind, Michael Ondaatje and Stephen King. That didn’t change when I was kicked out of boarding school after repeatedly being caught smoking weed at age 15. I was living with my parents again, and instead of watching TV with them I would retreat to my own room and read Christian Kracht or John Irving.
During my first year of college, I was at home by myself one night. For some reason, I had turned on the TV and was listlessly flicking through the channels until I caught the beginning of Pulp Fiction in a German dub on an Austrian public broadcasting channel. I had heard of Pulp Fiction. Over the years, many of my male friends had raved about it. Despite their insistance to the contrary, I had filed it away in my head as more mindless Hollywood shlock. But when I happened upon it that night, I figured I’d give it a shot to see what all the fuss was about.
When the ending came around, and I started to realize the movie had bent time and space without me realizing it, my mind was blown. I was 19 years old and had no idea movies could do that. I didn’t know movies could be art. I was instantly hooked.
I quickly watched every Tarantino movie I could get my hands on, of course, but pretty soon I was deep down the rabbit hole, torrenting obscure movies by Andrzej Żuławski, František Vláčil, Hou Hsiao Hsien and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Some of what I experienced in these movies was so influencial on me as a creative, it’s almost as if it altered my DNA: the heightened drama in Possession, the use of house music in Millenium Mambo, the poetic tone in Wings of Desire— they are present in every creative project I make to this day.
At the time, I wanted to be a journalist. That’s what I went to college for. My goal was to one day be a political correspondent for a prestigious publication like Die Zeit. In my second year of college, I had a summer job tracing the white lines on the municipal stadium’s soccer field in my parents’ small Swiss town. I remember being out on the fields one day, pushing the noisy paint spraying machine in front of me like a lawn mower. The sun was beating down on me. I was craving a beer for lunch and thinking of a movie I had watched for the first time the night before, Fight Club. Suddenly, a thought came into my head: “that’s what I want to do with my life.”
As Germans would say, it instantly became “clear as dumpling broth” to me that my calling in life was to write for the movies. Why not direct? It hadn’t even occured to me. I was made of words— a voracious reader, an incipient writer. As Jean-Paul Sartre puts it in his memoir Les mots: “It was in books that I encountered the universe: assimilated, classified, labeled, pondered, still formidable; and I confused the disorder of my bookish experiences with the random course of real events.”
So I turned to the written word again. I needed this sudden urge to write for the screen “classified, labeled, pondered”. I bought Robert McKee’s Story and Syd Field’s The Screenwriter’s Workbook. I read every screenwriting blog I could find online. I listened to podcasts, read interviews. But when it came time for me to write a screenplay, to tell a good story, to entertain the world… I failed miserably. I made four or five attempts at writing a full-length screenplay that I abandoned within a few pages.
Through all my readings online, I quickly learned that it wasn’t movies but television that was considered a “writer’s medium”. At the time, I had already watched most of The Sopranos and was just starting to appreciate Mad Men. I became TV curious. The more I listened to showrunners talk, the more their approach made sense to me. TV shows don’t work this way anymore, but back then the advice was to identify a specific world in which the show would take place, make it as detailed as possible, create characters that are both emblamatic of that world but also clash with it, then come up with 100 stories that could take place in that world with those characters. Each one of those stories could be an episode. In short, find a sandbox, build a bunch of sand castles.
As a sociology and journalism major, this approach appealed to me. It was almost as if I could identify a study object, then illuminate it journalistically from every possible angle over the course of five seasons. So I bought Larry Brody’s Television Writing From The Inside Out and went to work.
German television is much different from American television. There is a large public broadcasting apparatus with dozens of channels that, at the time, produced almost all original programming. Public broadcasting produced “serious” news, “serious” made-for-TV movies, “serious” shows. The private channels were bringing about the end of civilization with garish game shows, gossip news and endless American sit-com reruns. The original programming on public broadcasting was mostly multi-part historical epics or social dramas that examined the bourgois anxiety du jour.
And krimis. Germans love their crime shows. One of the longest-running and most successful TV shows in Germany is called Tatort in which rotating detective teams from different towns solve murders. What German television did not produce in the mid-aughts was American-style “sandbox with a bunch of sand castles” shows. I had the bright idea to be the first person to make one. I started writing pilots for crime shows in German with an American 5-act structure. I obssessively studied CSI, Criminal Minds and Without A Trace to nail the twist to tearjerker ratio so endemic to these shows. Combined with the German krimi sensibility, the results were truly bizarre. But I was determined to graduate college and take over the German TV industry thanks to my Hollywood-style writing. Never mind that I wasn’t able to finish any of my attempts at writing a TV script either.
What really prevented me from achieving German TV domination, though, was resentment. One day, I was sitting with a few friends in the college cafeteria in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. A goateed guy I had seen in a few of my classes (fedora, vest, several bracelets and rings, perpetual creamy smile on his face) sat down with us and started flirting with the girl I was also interested in. He told us he had just come back from living in New York City for a few months. He regaled us with tall tales of life in the Big Apple. My romantic interest was very impressed. I hated him instantly.
In retrospect, I should be thankful to him because this encounter eventually lead me to Los Angeles. My father is American, I was a US citizen from birth, we used to visit my grandparents in the New Jersey suburbs every summer. I had even been to New York several times and fantasized about living there. It was only when my nemesis started talking about his experience that it occured to me that I could simply move to New York. And if I could move to New York, I could move to Los Angeles. The scales fell from my eyes. I could now see my future clear as day: instead of writing American-style shows for German television, I would simply go to the source and become a TV writer in Hollywood. I had, at that point, completed zero screenplays in my life.
When you live in Switzerland, and you tell people you want to move to New York and eventually Los Angeles, they look at you like you have three heads. I had my doubts as well but the more I thought about it, the more determined I became. The only problem was that my parents had no idea about my screenwriting aspirations. They still thought I was trying to be a journalist. For some reason, I was too scared to tell them about my true motivations. So I came up with a plan: find an internship in New York, convince my parents it would be beneficial for me to go, work my ass off in order to find some kind of permanent position that would allow me to stay long term, then eventually move to Los Angeles.
That’s what I did.
Three months after moving to New York, I got a job as a production assistant on a movie called Margin Call starring Kevin Spacey. Let’s just say the accusations against him that surfaced years later came as no surprise to me. But I was, all due respect to his victims, terrified for a different reason: the idioms of the English language. I had never spoken English before my move to New York. Most Europeans understand it after a fashion and can hold a basic conversation, and that’s as far as it went with me as well. Back in Europe, once I had my mind set on the move, my bookish instinct was to only read American novels in their original English: Denis Johnson, William Faulkner, Richard Yates. The books I bought on Amazon UK back then are still on my book shelf to this day. When I read them for the first time, though, I was able to grasp a third of the writing at most.
In New York, I quickly realized that reading Light in August with an English-to-German dictionary next to me is of no practical use when I’m being yelled at by my boss on a walkie-talkie on a movie set. I had just learned how to correctly pronounce and order a Bass beer at the bar (buh-ss not bay-ss) and here I was being maltreated with incomprehensible walkie-speak 12 hours a day. I did not know what the lingo meant (“what’s your 20?”) and didn’t dare to ask. I was in a constant panic, I never quite knew what was going on. I once gave my lunch order over the walkie-talkie and what I got back was pasta without sauce and a side of salad without dressing. “It’s what you ordered”, I was told with a shrug.
When you’re a PA on a film set, you’re at the bottom of the totem pole. When it’s your first time PAing, you’re in a hole you have to dig yourself out of. I was buried alive and slowly suffocating. But the shoot did end with a breath of fresh air. The last day of principal photography was an overnight shoot in upstate New York. When we came back to base camp in the wee hours of the morning, I found myself the only PA left with the director JC Chandor, his cinematographer Frank DeMarco and one of the producers. They sent me to the corner to buy beers. When I returned, the four of us snuck onto the roof of One Penn Plaza where the main set and base camp were located. As the sun rose over New York City, we drank beers and I eavesdropped reverently as those three titans of industry, as I perceived them, shot the shit, gossiped about the shoot, and talked about their future plans. I couldn’t believe they allowed me to stick around. I felt like I was being told secrets people in my position weren’t supposed to know. This was what I had moved to New York for.
I PAed for another year on various shoots but my heart was never in it. Production folk intimidated me. The low pay and long hours wore me down. I experienced for the first time the harsh realities of American capitalism, making a $7.25 an hour minimum wage while having to pay close to $1000 a month for a moving box-sized room. I was barely able to get by, let alone do any writing.
Eventually, I took a data entry job at a law firm. I wanted something stable that paid enough for me to subsist and allowed me time to write after hours. Call it the Kafka stratagem. Going from the pressure cooker-environment of high octane film sets to the languid quiet of the air conditioned office bullpen was a culture shock. Oversight was so lax, I started loading up on G&Ts at lunch, then spent the rest of my work day watching movies in my cubicle on illegal streaming websites.
But my ploy worked. I finished my first feature script (horrible) and my first television pilot. (Passable for the time.) I wrote and produced a webseries that a friend of mine directed. I met a woman and fell in love. She read my work and became convinced of my talent. She wanted to work in film production, so together we decided to move to Los Angeles. When I told my parents about it, I could point to the webseries as evidence that I wasn’t just a fabulist. At long last, it looked like my long-term plan to become the German Ryan Murphy was coming to fruition.
Within a year of moving to Los Angeles, my relationship shattered, my writing career was in shambles, and I fell into a deep and prolonged depression. I was in my early 30s and thought of myself as a complete failure. A sensible person would have packed up and gone back home but I was too stubborn for that. And thank God, because it was through the process of piecing my life back together and learning who I really was as a person that I also finally learned how to tell a meaningful story. I eventually found myself pitching an autobiographical pilot to one of the major networks. They liked it enough to pair me up with a showrunner in order to develop the idea further. We worked on it for six months— by far the most rewarding creative work I had done up to that point.
The project fell apart which sent me into another deep funk. But the work on it had unlocked something in me. Up until that point, I had held my writing at arm’s length because of my essentially academic approach to it. People who read my work encountered competent writing without any emotional resonance. But I had found a new approach now: I was using my writing to process my emotions and the events around me. It might seem like the most obvious thing in the world but up until that point, writing had been simply a daily compulsion of mine. I knew I was a writer because I loved the written word and needed to write every day. But I was like a flower seedling growing towards the sun simply because it must, unaware of its purpose. It was through much emotional turmoil in my first few years of being in Los Angeles that the seedling started to bud. It was during Covid lockdown that it finally bloomed.
After about three months of wasting away in lockdown, I decided I couldn’t let this time go by without working on a creative project. I wrote, directed, produced, edited and scored a fictional “true crime” podcast called Silent Run. (Rear Window meets Serial was my pitch.) It was recorded almosy entirely with actors over Zoom. It was an intense and stressful experience as I was a one-man crew dealing with all aspects of an audio production while one million Americans died of an infectious decease, wild fires turned the Southern California sky orange, and LAPD waged psychological warfare against Angelenos by hovering helicopters over central LA all day long during the George Floyd protests. But I remember one moment, sitting over-caffeinated at my laptop editing audio, worried that my hard work wouldn’t pay off, juggling the recording schedule with a bunch of unreliable actors while still holding down a work-from-home day job, I suddenly had a thought that pierced the haze of stress and anxiety. Clear as dumpling broth: “this is what I’m supposed to do with my life.”
Silent Run was by far the most meaningful work I had ever done. Everything in the writing was personal to me in some way. The response to it by a small but dedicated audience was overwhelming to me, used to my work rarely seeing the light of day, let alone being praised. What was once a seedling has finally found its purpose. Collaborators new and old buzzed around, cross-pollinating ideas and projects. It was exciting and rewarding.
This was when the idea for the movie was born.
As the dumbest crop of entertainment CEOs in the history of Hollywood started to systemtically dismantle this once glorious and prosperous industry, it became clear to me that a new path forward needed to be found. The types of stories I wanted to tell, the kinds of ideas I wanted to explore were no longer in demand by the studios. So-called “independent” film with its irrelevant festivals and limited theatre runs was just as outdated and atrophied. But I also knew that there is an audience out there passionate about storytelling, passionate about filmmaking, craving the revival of Hollywood entertainment. Not endless retreads of corporate IP that exist solely to placate shareholders, but meaningful stories about the world around us. Thought-provoking stories with an attitude, with an edge. Movies with style, with a visual grammar that makes sense. In short, both a revolution and a return to basics. My contention is that the way to do it is to work outside of the system entirely, and go to the audience directly. I describe this in more detail in last week’s “manifesto”.
It’s not even that I’m some sort of disgruntled loser who wants to stick it to the system that wronged him. I love Hollywood. I want nothing more than to see it succeed and thrive again. But it won’t happen in the current bean counter-led austerity regime. What is sorely needed is a Hollwood grassroots, a bottom-up indie scene comprised of truly passionate creatives in a media environment transforming before our very eyes into a creator-led ecosystem. We need a New New Hollywood in form and function. Grandiose, I know. But if we shoot for the moon, we’ll at least have to turn the engines on. And once we launch, God knows how far it can take us.
So this is what it all led to. I’m writing and directing my first movie this year. It is called The Big Pay Off. It is a thriller about a high school sophomore called Amin, a middle-class kid who dreams of living the luxurious life of his rich class mates at his fancy private high school. He starts pretending to be the heir to a Mexican fortune and manages to con his way into the world of entrepreneurs and financiers. But when he’s outed as a pretender and conman, Amin finds himself in a deadly situation.
The Big Pay Off is a movie about modern-day America. A movie about how corrupted the American dream has become. A movie about ambition, about how the pursuit of monetary success can warp our humanity. It is a movie about Los Angeles, about technology and social media, about masculinity and its false promises, about how we are failing the younger generations. I am so excited to share it with the world.
Our budget is $15,000. The movie is independently financed and produced which means that I am pouring all my savings into it, as well as getting some investments from family members. I am profoundly privileged in that way. In order to avoid financial calamity for myself while I make the movie, I decided to make a sacrifice I always swore to myself I’d never do: I gave up my apartment in Los Feliz that I loved, and temporarily moved in with a friend who had a spare bedroom. I am now saving over $1000 a month on rent, money that will be sorely needed.
I want to be fully transparent here: when I say our budget is $15,000, that is all the money we have for pre-production, the shoot, and post production. Anyone who’s had experience with movie productions knows that budgets rarely suffice. In our case, we will need to be very frugal and disciplined, but if the need arises for whatever reason to inject some more cash into the production, the money will have to come out of my pocket. Since all my savings by that time will already be gone, it will have to come from my daily cash flow.
I am also not only financing a movie, I am building a business from the ground up. Umlaut Productions is the imprint through which The Big Pay Off will be released, an investment that is not included in the movie budget. Money is already going fast. The smallest PO box costs $250 for a year. Filing for an LLC costs about $100 in fees plus the yearly $800 franchise tax. I had to get a decent printer and paper for the office, which ran me another $200. None of these expenses would have ruined me, but it shows how easy it is to spend all the money I’ve saved on rent this month in a couple of days on various admin tasks, and we’re not even in pre-production yet.
I’ll be honest, it doesn’t feel great to have a roommate again in my late 30s, but it is a sacrifice that is not only worth making, it is necessary. Maybe sacrifice is too harsh a word. Maybe I should call it an inconvenience. But as I piled moving boxes into my room which will be my base of operations for the next year and a half, I couldn’t help but feel like I was making a mistake. What a crazy idea! Leaving the home I had made for myself for the last five years and putting most of my belongings in storage felt like I had crashed out somehow and needed to start over again. Change is scary and uncomfortable. I had to sit with that feeling for a while.
But I also always knew I was doing this for the best of all reasons: I am directing my first movie this year! The Big Pay Off. The next year and a half will be fun and challenging and scary and rewarding, and I can’t wait to get to it. To borrow from Normal Mailer, I have a vision of treasure, blood, sweat and tears, accomplishment,. This is what I moved to Los Angeles for.
