DutchCheez in LA – Lessons learned

So we’re back in good old Amsterdam, after a great week in California and Los Angeles! It was very interesting to learn more about the film industry in the US, which was our main goal for this trip.

We got to talk to a scriptwriter and cg-specialist, Brady Doyle, who could tell us about how things work in and outside of Hollywood. He confirmed some of the things we had already heard from contacts in the Netherlands, but he also provided us with useful contacts and information: for instance about how American filmmakers can profit from tax advantages by shooting in Canada and in the UK, as filming in the US is very expensive. In a way this is similar to Dutch filmmakers who go to Belgium to avoid high pay rolling costs. As he is a Hollywood veteran who has read thousands of scripts and is a scriptwriter himself, we also wanted his advice on how to get our story written and what language to use in our production ‘Oskar’, because the story is mainly set in the US (should it be partly Dutch/English spoken with subtitling or rather completely English spoken?). Because it is an international story and we are aiming for a broad and international audience, Brady advised us to write the script in English or have it translated.

Although he thinks it is a challenge to become successful in the movie business, he liked the DutchCheez initiative very much and we had aroused his curiosity with our film outline. Also we were glad to hear that he was very positive about the professionalism of our teaser, blog and website.

Unfortunately our contact at 20th Century Fox was too busy – preparing for the 2014 Cannes Film Festival – to meet with us. Hopefully we can meet via Skype soon.

Our next step in the process: the script… Follow us the coming months how our story will become a screenplay and how we find a passionate scriptwriter who is challenged by this international filmmaking adventure.