Moviemaking at 49

I'm about to turn forty-nine years old.

I kind of like this. It's a great time, in principle, to ignore the idea of focusing on your career and put more energy into the things you enjoy. Play guitar, take up woodworking, paint or just start walking or doing yoga.

It's the main reason I like the idea of writing prose instead of screenplays. It feels like on of those activities you can retire to. Do for the sake of doing it.

Now, if moviemaking is what you love, that's harder.

Moviemaking inevitably costs money, but that's mostly true of the other things, too. You have to buy a guitar, you have to buy paints and supplies, wood, whatever. I've certainly known plenty of people who sank plenty of money into any of these.

But movies generally need people and people inevitably have their own needs, their own dreams. This can be one of the best, most inspiring parts of the process, under the right circumstances, don't get me wrong.

It is, however, the opposite of what you want with making stuff in your garage and seeing how it turns out.

I have a sidenote here. I had an idea to do a Conan the Cimmerian story in a similar style to what The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society had done with Call of Cthulhu and The Whisperer in Darkness.

While, after some research at the time, I decided that the story I was looking to do, Beyond the Black River, was in the public domain, I reached out to the legal department of the Conan properties and found that, as I suspected, they didn't hold that position and, while they would support, or not fight, any non-commercial movies, the specific Call of Cthulhu reference was a point they noted would be too commercial for them to avoid legal action.

So, I decided the whole thing wasn't worth my time and effort. Mind you, I'd have been happy for the whole thing to be a money pit that just led to me meeting some like-minded folks, collaborate and work on our craft. It's really what I hoped for out of it. Just like a guy going to his garage to make furniture on his weekends. And in the same way that guy can enjoy making his furniture in his garage for love of doing, finding out he'd be in legal trouble if he tried selling it, it just dampened my enthusiasm.

I'd still like to do something like that. Not a retro-Conan movie, but something that I could do for the pleasure of doing it. The grown-up version of going out with your friends with a Super 8 camera, as all the stories go.

Can kids even do that now or is it ruined by everyone wondering if they can get it up on Vimeo or starting a Patreon and monetizing it or even just putting it up on YouTube for the "likes"? I'm sure that's great for a certain personality, but I'm betting someone is really missing the opportunity to find their strengths or is giving it rather than deal with that.

I'll say that the reason I don't have that kind of experience from my childhood is because there was a general feeling of discouragement from the adults in my life. Nothing exceptional. No one exactly forbidding me.

And, I know, lots of the stories of successful moviemakers involves them overcoming that by pure force of their will. Indeed, the fact that our most popular storytelling media demand very specific personality types is another subject that needs to be addressed.

Indeed, and I don't think I've told anyone this before, but not for any particular reason, my friend and I were deep in planning a remake of Star Wars in the same vein as Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation, which ended when we couldn't answer in any kind of concrete purpose to make it. I'm not sorry in the least that we never made it, but I wish we'd continued planning. Maybe even shooting a couple of little sequences would have been good for us, I think.

I always come back to animation as a way I could do something on my own, and I can't rule out the chance I'll go back to that plan.

I'm also considering going back to school, which would be something interesting in that regard.

On the other hand, more people who are young and fresh are more likely to bring the "Let's get this into festivals! Let's turn that festival appearance into a chance to make a big studio whatever!" energy that I don't want to be part of.

We'll see where all of this thought goes.