Author: Andrea Adams

Hollywood avoids change. This is not news to anyone familiar with the history of talkies disrupting silent films, broadcast television disrupting film, cable disrupting broadcast and now the internet disrupting … well, everything (particularly content distribution). One of the most amazing things about this love of the status quo is how ingrained it is – everyone is busy and few take the time to learn about new ways of doing things. Even if the new way may save money/time/their job in the long run. However, there is a long standing view of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” However,…

I am the sort of person who always wants to say “yes.” I think women in particular have a hard time saying “no” to people. There are a number of reasons that contribute to this, but for me, a lot of it has to do with my worry that if I say no, I might be turning down an opportunity that could have had great impact on my career. I also worry (unnecessarily) that my saying no will change the perception of the person who has asked me to read their script/board their project/help fundraise for their charity and that…

Now that we have moved into 2014 I thought I would share one of my resolutions which is simple in theory, but hard in practice. It’s more of a goal, really. (In my head, goal is less scary of a word than resolution). What is it? Well, I’m applying the phrase pura vida to all aspects of my life. Literally translated, pura vida means pure life. However, in Costa Rica, it is used to say hello, good bye, thank you or basically, that things are going well. Having just recently spent some time with a true Costa Rican family (gotta…

No matter what area of the business you work in, you likely have times where your motivation has disappeared and you aren’t sure when (or if) it’s going to return. Perhaps you are avidly avoiding reading all of the scripts that piled up while you were in production. Maybe you are having trouble writing for more than a paragraph or two, even though you’re not lacking for ideas or projects. There are a million ways to distract ourselves, but you don’t need to run away to a cabin in the woods without internet to get things done. Whether you are…

Once our film was acquired, I (for a brief second) suffered from the naïve notion that acquisition was close to the end. In fact, your film being acquired is just one more stop on the filmmaker’s journey. Some may actually decide to self-distribute their film. Through the proliferating distribution avenues across the many devices and screens now available, there are more chances than ever of getting your project in front of an audience. In success, self distributed films are likely to be more profitable for the filmmaking team; however, it is extremely time-consuming and requires constant vigilance and hustle. In…

Waiting to hear back from film festivals about your film’s acceptance or rejection into their program is full of all of the fear and anticipation that high school juniors are well acquainted with; the closest approximation to the terror affiliated with your independent film’s premiere is that associated with which of your chosen universities you will be matriculating at as an eager college freshman. The big festivals like Sundance or Toronto can be as difficult to get into as the Ivies and the ratio of rejections to acceptances is only increasing with the constant cheapening of the technology we use…

If you have ever been in production on a project of any length and thought “I can’t wait until we’re in post; at least then it’ll be a little bit easier”, then, like me, you were probably very surprised by how that dream of an easy post production period would prove to be so inherently and completely unrealized. Or perhaps, unlike me, you had the budget and wherewithal to hire an editor that is independent of the director and yourself. I’ll be honest. The burden of editing MY AMITYVILLE HORROR  predominantly lay with the director Eric. We were not able…

Where I last left you was getting on the plane to New York heading towards the second round of principal photography for the documentary I produced called MY AMITYVILLE HORROR. If you want to jump ahead and check out the film now so that you can follow along with the next three blog entries after having seen the end result, it’s available on Netflix and many other streaming outlets as well as on DVD. As I mentioned last month, during our flight to NY,  director Eric, the other producer John and I spent the entire time discussing our production plans.…

I am a producer. I have produced a documentary completely independently, with just a few key people and a skeleton production crew which we then sold to a major independent distributor without premiering at any of the major market festivals. We had no major stars and a limited budget, but the film played theatrically in limited release throughout the country. It was featured in most major press outlets as well as hit somewhere in the top 25 of iTunes. The DVD comes out in August. You can preorder MY AMITYVILLE HORROR on Amazon now or search it on Google to…