So, I have a friend who is awesome but does not think things through and sometimes makes insane arbitrary decisions out of nowhere. To give you an example of how impulsive and big-hearted he is, he bicycled across the country to raise money for kids who have cancer.
He asked me to film the whole thing with the idea that we were going to make a documentary. I was fresh out of film school and his promises of fame and fortune sounded decent. They were in a band as well and played for food and donations to the charity.
So, and this is important, there was four of us. Him, his wife, a guitar player and me filming. So we were filming him cycling, his band playing, some charity functions (which were part of the band playing) and basic interactions with all of us.
I put a whole lot of time and effort into this…and much of my own money. Basically, I bought a fast laptop so I could edit on the road and a bunch of hard drives and some equipment and took a month off of my life to do this.
Long story short, we made zero money – meaning I’d spent about $5000 dollars (all my savings) of my own money to do this.
When we got back I was going to insanely start editing this massive amount of footage. That’s when my friend gave me a few stipulations: 1) Leave his wife out of the documentary because he did not want her to be harassed by fans. 2) Leave the band part out of it because he did not want to look like he was trying to get famous by using the charity.
His wife was in mostly 90% of the footage. The band was in 80%… including the 10% of the footage where his wife didn’t appear.
There was no budget and I was not going to try to make a documentary about nothing so the project died. Live and learn; just because your friend is rad doesn’t mean he’s going to be great to work with. We raised some money for charity.
