Ok, so you got a great story to tell, and it's been turned into a great script properly copyrighted with the Library of Congress and registered with the Writer's Guild of America. You got talented people ready to jump in and help you make it. You've hired an entertainment lawyer, hired a business plan writer, formed a limited liability corporation, and set in motion every device you can think of to get people interested in your project. You've carefully thought through the dream cast, devised novel production strategies, worked out a realistic budget, and spend every moment of every day in a quest to have every detail as close to ready as you can possible make it. And then you come up against the same wall, every independent film maker must confront, which is persuading investors to trust you with their money while knowing that all you created, all of your plans, and all you have done still amounts to an extremely high risk investment. Unless your film is a niche market like horror or zombies, then the only tool you have to improve your chances a making money with your film is to show international distributors that you have someone in your cast they can sell to their audiences, that is to say a bankable actor's name. If you are one of those unfortunate people without a generous rich uncle or not an heir to the Getty, Rockefeller, Hilton, or Hormel fortune, then this brings you to the fundamental conundrum of independent film producing. The investors want to see who in the cast is bankable, and the actors want to see that you have the money in place to pay them their salary.
The unlocking of this puzzle is the entry through the pearly gates of filmmakers' heaven. Although, there have been scams around film funding, most people who have bothered to get all of the above pieces in place, are not scam artists, but simply artists or business people with strong resolves to make their films. There has been interest lately to connect filmmakers with more traditional investment institutions or clubs but with few exceptions, these traditional sources of entrepreneurial funds finds the film investment out of their bounds of risk taking. When an indie is funded, more often than not, it's because the filmmakers got a name talent interested enough in the film to put their name on it. Actors' agents work on commissions, and so like to have their clients assured of getting paid as much as possible. Actors out of necessity create an isolation bubble that closes off direct contact even though it costs them not being exposed to films they might actually like to do. But it does happen, either because the filmmakers have achieved some sort of notoriety or else a personal friend common to both the filmmaker and the actor introduces them to each other.
Occasionally, a story is so compelling for it's social importance that a philanthropist will fund it. Our "Drones, Clones and Pheromones" segment of "The Supremacy Project" is an early warning of the cultural implosion being brought on by amazing research into the fundamentals of life and reproduction. Humanity is already pulling evolution out of the domain of the natural selection of random mutations, and taking it in our hands to devise what future life form will be. Nothing before has been so profound a change, and equally profound is the magnitude of both benefits and disasters. Knowledge and technology have long ago outstripped our ability to anticipate their consequences socially, legally and ethically. Our lead character is best described as homoperfectus, the new species that descends from man and inherits the Earth from homosapiens. The love he shares with a regular human, may be the first cross species romance, since the extinction of the Neanderthals. It makes me wonder whether James Hormel or George Soros or Steve Jobs or Larry Page and Sergey Brin founders of Google would see the immense human value in a film that provoked thought about these and other issues facing humankind.
Returning to casting: There are cameo roles that can be shot in one day. I'd love to have Elizabeth Taylor play an Auntie to our homoperfectus boy Felix, sharing her wisdom with him from a wheel chair while potting orchids. I'd love to have Leonard Nimoy play the Ancient One who intrudes on Felix to both give him guidance, and find out for sure what he really is. I'd love to have San Francisco's mayor Gavin Newsom, play the liberal US Senator trying to bring fairness to Congressional treatment of human clones. There are a number of other roles, for whom I would seek to cast actors such as Mark Wahlberg, Amber Tamblyn and her father Russ, Catherine-Zeta Jones or Brad Pitts. The only actor I've seen yet who comes close to playing Felix is Justin Long, seen in the "I'm a Mac" TV ads, or the movies "Accepted", "Dodgeball", and "Jeepers Creepers". This listing is a mere sample of a much longer list.
There then is the question,
"Who do we know, who knows any of them?"
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