My Bumpy Road Through “Hollywood” – My 2003 Business Plan & Financial Projection for EVERYBODY SAYS GOODBYE

The indie film world was very different than it is today. This was before the near destruction of indie film caused by the triple disasters of the Writers Strike, Digital Disruption, and the Great Recession a few years later. The excitement around "cheap digital filmmaking" was centered on the Canon XL1 mini-DV standard definition camera. If you were cool in Hollywood in those days, you had to carry around an XL-1.

My bumpy road through “Hollywood” – PALLION THE YOUNG STALLION spec script for BoJack Horseman

My favorite show on Netflix is BoJack Horseman, which reveals a lot about me, since it’s a show about an emotionally dysfunctional has-been in Hollywood. So, back in January 2018, I was motivated to write a spec script for the show. I thought maybe I could replay the events decades earlier, described in “My Bumpy …

My bumpy road through “Hollywood” – That time I designed the Hollywood sign

I worked on a Paramount Television production from the team responsible for the hit 1980s series MIAMI VICE. It was a pilot starring Edward James Olmos for a proposed TV series called “Hollywood Confidential.”

My Bumpy Road Through “Hollywood” — On set for LAW & ORDER TRUE CRIME: THE MENENDEZ MURDERS

This is my stream-of-consciousness report about production experience these days.

My Bumpy Road Through “Hollywood” — Starting Over. Again.

Since Middle School, I have been a writer, and was the editor of my school paper in Ninth Grade. I began in television in high school and became producer and writer for the New Year’s Eve variety program “CELEBRATION” which aired on network affiliate TV stations in Minneapolis for several years. I then helped build …

BARNARD’S LAWS

Observations of life.

My Bumpy Road Through “Hollywood” — A VENOM IN THE BLOOD

Two decades ago, I bought a book. In producer-speak, that means I acquired the rights via option to make a movie from a book. I knew a TV news reporter, and she had made contact with a reclusive author who wrote a book she thought I might be interested in. Actually, “reclusive” is too weak …

My Bumpy Road Through “Hollywood” — CONSUMED BY A PASSION PROJECT

  How Is a Filmmaker Consumed by a Passion Project? The following is a guest post from Michael R. Barnard, who is in the final days of an Indiegogo campaign for his film, Everybody Says Goodbye: The Story of a Father and Son. For many years, I have been chasing a motion picture project that …

My Bumpy Road Through “Hollywood” — THE MEAN STREETS

I spent a lot of time on the mean streets of Hollywood. I lived there, worked there, had friends there, I walked them a lot. My screenplay for the feature film EVERYBODY SAYS GOODBYE—The Story of a Father and Son is set there, in 1998. The sketchy stretch of Santa Monica Boulevard between La Brea …

My Bumpy Road Through “Hollywood” — THERE WAS A RECESSION IN 1991

(originally published April 22, 2010) There was a recession in 1991. Not as big as this Great Recession, but big nonetheless. A hallmark of the 1991 recession was that, for the first time ever, a recession had a negative impact on "Hollywood" [Entertainment Weekly, 2/22/91: "How will the recession affect Hollywood?"], [Den of Geek, 8/18/14: …

My Bumpy Road Through “Hollywood” — WHEN PRINCE WAS KING

[UPDATE: This was written long before my friend Prince passed away. I still miss him and am still shocked.] A friend just now found and sent to me this post from  Prince.org, the Prince fan site that described how I pulled off the production of Prince's ALPHABET STREET video on impossible notice! It is from …

My Bumpy Road Through “Hollywood” — CROWDFUNDING SUCKS.

CROWDFUNDING SUCKS. In the past two days, I've had some conversations that remind me that there is no "fun" in crowdfund. It is a necessary evil, borne of the collapse of the economy, possibly the only chance for the art of filmmaking to continue. That's versus the marketing channel that is the current Hollywood studio …

You’ll enjoy reading NATE AND KELLY

If anything I've written has informed or inspired you, you will enjoy reading my novel NATE AND KELLY. Read the many reviews!

My Bumpy Road Through “Hollywood” — THE MOVIE THAT NEEDS TO BE MADE

After working in television, radio, and video since high school, I eventually pushed myself into the indie film biz, which suited my creative and entrepreneurial nature. That involved me acquiring scripts and novels of other writers and trying to make them into movies. [UPDATED, see end of blog posting.] For instance, I acquired a New …

My Bumpy Road Through “Hollywood” — Is the INDIE FILM BIZ dead or not?

Did the Pythons have the indie film biz in mind when creating their masterpiece, Monty Python and the Holy Grail? Aside from the buffoonery of this so-called business, what else could have inspired the great scene, "I’m not dead"? It says a great deal about the flux of the indie film biz that yesterday, on …

My Bumpy Road Through “Hollywood” — The battle to make an independent movie

One of the odd things about being an independent filmmaker is the battle to get into production. Those of us who don't have well-to-do families or impressive connections to powerful people have to cultivate other ways to fund the production. This is especially true today with all the turmoil in the indie film biz and …