Part 5: Movie Financing 101

I had been back to New York and failed to raise the money I needed to complete the documentary on weed smuggling. What was I going to do? I had a clear vision at this point of the finished film. I had inadvertently discovered the perfect subject material and filmed enough to know that I had all the elements I needed to make a compelling movie, but I was out of cash. Well, not completely, but down to the last $5,000. When that was gone, there would be no more. At least not from the usual suspects.

Then it hit me. I now knew droves of participants in the weed game. From the campesino/farmers in Nayarit to the buyers in the States, the contacts I had made over the course of the year researching and filming the growing, harvesting, transporting and distributing of weed put me in position to smuggle a load. If they could do it, I could do it. It would mean no more kissing ass in order to get the money. All I had to do was finance one load and it would be smooth sailing. Lesson Number One: in the smuggling business, Murphy’s Law goes empirical. Not that “if it can happen it will happen”, but rather, “if it can’t possibly happen, it will for sure.”

The old adage “stick to what you know” applies doubly to smuggling. In this game, you can not only fail and lose your investment, you can end up in jail and lose your investment. Even worse, you might end up dead, never understand why, and lose your investment. Suffice to say that if I knew then what I know now, I still would have done it. Just a little differently.

In the end, the trip failed, I lost the last bit of money I had and the film I had shot ended up with my old mentor, Bernie Hirschensen at Fucci-Stone Productions in NYC. Thanks to Bernie and Billy Fucci that footage was still there and somewhat salvageable twenty-five years later when I got around to looking for it. But at that moment in 1972, the movie was forgotten. I was bitten and, although I have no proof of this, I suspect that many lives that eventually are consumed by an obsession are launched by an initial failure. The failure stung, it stuck in my craw. I had come so close. Why, I had already spent a good deal of my take (in my mind at least). I turned to the friends, all of whom were absolutely enchanted with the movie concept, within the smuggling community that I had made over the course of the six months prior for help. The next thing I knew I found myself sitting in a limo at midnight fifty yards off a Nevada state highway under a full moon waiting for a radio signal that would indicate the imminent arrival of an unmarked aircraft loaded with kilos of high grade Mexican weed. And the rest, as they say, is history.

If you want to know more about that part and what followed, read SmokeScreen by Robert Sabbag. For our purposes, all you need to know at this point is that, despite the success of that scam and the many that followed, I never finished that documentary. Oh, it occurred to me, more in the beginning than subsequently, that I really did get involved in smuggling to make enough to complete the movie. But, not unlike a few others before me, I was diverted from my dream by that other thing….what was it again? Oh yeah, ………..money! I realized, as soon as I began to make a lot of it, that I’d never had much to speak of and that life seemed to offer considerably more options when I had it. Move over Tiger! The view through the camera viewfinder was supplanted by a glorious narcissism in which I played the lead role. Aided by strong mood elevators of the organic variety and the fawning supercilious attention I was receiving by virtue of my new found wealth, I became the star of my own internal movie and wrote my part to compliment myself regardless of the true nature of my existence. I forgot about the real movie for five years.

It wasn’t until I read the final page of the New York Times bestseller, Snow Blind by Robert Sabbag in the summer of 1978 did my dream and all the attendant angst come flooding back to me. I was by myself in my luxury high rise in New York, high on cocaine, and, as I put down the hardcover copy of the book I had just finished, I decided that, whoever he might turn out to be, Bob Sabbag had articulated, in a way no one had been able to before, the unique atmosphere and culture of the world of the 70’s drug smuggler and I wanted to talk to him to share my long forgotten dream. Most people would have contacted the book publisher and his agent and begun the normal process required to meet the author. Not my style. Instead, I picked up the Manhattan telephone directory and looked up the Sabbags. There were only five or six and in short order I had located the right one and invited him to visit me, piquing his interest by offering him the cash contents of a Halliburton briefcase containing $200,000 in hundreds. Despite the late hour, Mr. Sabbag was able to find the time, even in the middle of a date with a young lady who went on to become a Rolling Stone editor, to stop whatever he was doing, grab a cab on the West Side and hightail it over to my place on the corner of 68th and 2nd. Isn’t that how all great collaborations got started?

In the future we will examine the results of this encounter, not the least of which was the book SmokeScreen twenty years later. Close to the final entry in this journal will recount how, after decades of dreams, meetings, promises, dashed hopes and chasing wild geese, I met someone who shared my dream and did what they said they were going to do. No matter what. Without Donnie Bell of Belltower Films, I would just be another aging “wannabe” making the Hollywood rounds and rounds and rounds in ever decreasing circles until, like a dog chasing his tail, I found a good place to lie down.

I once heard a fellow smuggler years ago recite his credo, his rules to live by. They make the Ten Commandments seem positively wordy:

Number One – Don’t Lie to Yourself (this struck a chord in me, since every mistake I ultimately made in my life started with me convincing myself that it would turn out “OK” despite my internal misgivings. i.e. – lying to myself).

Number Two – Don’t Lie to Others (pretty much a given if you adhere to Number One).

Number Three – Do What You Say You Are Going To Do.

It took a long time, but I finally found a Producer/Partner who operates by the same standards. Thank you, Donnie. For more info on Belltower Entertainment (BTOW) and current film projects go to www.belltowerfilms.com.

NEXT WEEK: Club Fed. Or how I learned the error of my ways and decided to return to my film-making aspirations.