The many of you who read this are probably wondering what’s really been going on in Life’s Waltz Land the past number of weeks. There hasn’t been much reporting from the frontlines, there’s been a substantial amount of fluff posted to the blog and it’s felt like you’ve just been checking up on, essentially, a spree of forwarded emails posted to a blog, and you don’t really have much of a clue what’s going on except that you think we’re editing.
Well, while you’ve been left to wonder, many things have happened over here that beg reportage. But let me start off with the story of how we got to this point before I get into the meat of what’s happened in the past few weeks in my next post.
Once upon a time, Ashley and Jared made a 17-minute short-subject documentary called Life’s Waltz, about life, love, and loss in old age in their final semester at the University of Southern California. Though there were definitely some hitches along the way, they emerged with an overall wonderful learning experience and a solid, very enjoyable, professional product on their hands, screening it to a theater of over 400 people who hooted and hollered in applause for two filmmakers that the vast majority of them didn’t even know when they entered that landmark Norris theater that May 3. On the heels of this small but substantial success, the high-as-kites Ashley and Jared submitted their short film to a number of film festivals. It was rejected by every single one of the 15 or so that they submitted to, except that they’re still to this day waiting to hear from 3 or 4 more. No matter. Esteem untarnished, they kept their heads high. Who cares? Not they. In the meantime, they continued to show the film to friends, family, and absolute strangers the world over, as they each departed for 3 months to opposite ends of the Earth on backpacking trips.
When Jared returned to New York at the end of July, he walked around Times Square and made a couple of phone calls. One of them turned out to be fate-sealing: the one to none other than Ashley. “Yo, doozle. I’ve been thinking. The entire time I was traveling and meeting all of these amazing people, I had the growing compulsion to do a feature documentary. It’s what I want to do. What do ya say, pardna?” And so it was that Ashley and Jared committed to making a feature version of Life’s Waltz, one that would go deeper, hit harder, mean more, and defy all expectations. Jared hit the ground in LA in mid-August while Ashley was finishing up her job at her beloved ranch. They went through 9 drafts of a treatment (film summary, outline, plan and proposal) and got to work approaching various retirement communities in Bend (Oregon), Los Angeles, and Dallas to see where they could seal the deal on an opportunity to shoot their full-length documentary at an amenable retirement community of active, independent seniors.
Of course, things always take longer than one expects them to in film, and so finally, Jared went back to Dallas in mid-October, and it was then that they finally struck the golden deal at TVND (though other communities made themselves available in Dallas and Bend, as well). After a lot of time spent researching equipment, research, and how to create and run a company, signing some business and financial agreements, and a lot more planning (and with innumerable, crucial, and invaluable help from some key players in the business and legal departments), Ashley booked a ticket for Dallas. That brings us to late November, when we actually started filming Life’s Waltz. You see, originally Ashley and I had estimated that we’d shoot for about a month while also editing to see how our film was shaping up, then edit for a little bit, go back and shoot some more based on whatever story was emerging, and then wrap the entire film after a total of 3 months. We thought, “Hey, even if nothing comes of it, at least it will have been a great learning experience and we’ll have a feature film under our belts in 3 months, and we can part ways and go about our lives, nothing lost, and a lot of experience gained.” Well, remember how I said that things always take longer than one expects?
To be continued soon…
