The Amateur Pornographer

AVI: Today we have two guests. The first one needs no introduction. Ted Hope, renowned film producer, also of his most famous and growing Substack, Hope for Film, and former executive at Amazon.
AMY: Our other guest is Christopher Monger. Chris is probably best known for directing the Hugh Grant film, The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain, which was based on a novel and premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. He also wrote the amazing Temple Grandin film that was on HBO that I loved, and many other things.
CHRIS: I'm blushing now.
AMY: Okay, right. Here today to talk about a project that was never made, that the two of you worked on together, called The Amateur Photographer. 
AVI: Yeah, Chris, what would be like the one-sentence pitch for the film now?
CHRIS: I don't think there is one sentence. I can probably do it in three.
AMY: Okay, we'll take three.
AVI: Do it.
CHRIS: This is based on the true story of my experience going to work in a timber mill in South Wales, where the men had two terms for photographs. There were photographics and snaps. Back then, a snap was something you had processed at the local chemist, or you sent back to Kodak. A photographic was something you processed at home. And they were usually nude pictures.
AMY: That's a good tease. I love that.
TED: Oh, I think I'd do it a little differently.
AMY: Okay. Ted, how are you?
CHRIS: Yeah, please, Ted, please. I'm hoping.
AMY: What's Ted? I need to hear Ted's.
TED: Upon getting thrown out of art school, long-haired hippie freak Billy is forced to work at the local mill, and through his experiences there stumbles into the true transformative power of art — taking nudie photos of the locals for their own personal enjoyment.
CHRIS: That's much better. Much better.
AVI: Very pro style.
CHRIS: Pro style.
AMY: Chris, when you first had the idea to write the script, or started putting pen to paper, or whatever, or typing away on your typewriter — where were you in your life and career? Was this before the Hugh Grant film? Where were you?
CHRIS: This was '95, '96, immediately after The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain with Hugh Grant. That was a movie which I had done under UK contract, so I'd made literally nothing to write and direct it. It was pathetic how much I got. But luckily my British literary agent — I had a screenwriting agent and a literary agent — called me up.
She's fantastic. She's the epitome of the British literary agent. Glass of scotch, cigarette, darling. Darling.
"Do you think you could novelize The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain? I think I could sell that." And I went, "Yeah, sure." And she said, "Do you want to write it, do you want me to get a ghost?" And I said, "Well, I'll do it." She said, "Okay."
And while I'm in prep and shooting, these contracts were arriving, which I was blithely signing. I sold the novel to the USA, to Canada, Germany, France, England, Australia, China, Japan, Poland. I would just look at how much they were paying me and go, "Fantastic, sign it. Great."
Right, now I'm in the editing room and we're going to go to Cannes. Christmas is coming up. We're behind — a lot of pressure. And I go — one of the few times I went out, thank God — I went to a Christmas party and there was my agent. "Darling, how's the book going?"
I went, "Oh, shit, yeah, I should do that sometime." And she said, "You haven't read the contracts, have you?" And I went, "No. Why?" She said, "It's not like screenwriting. There's an absolute deadline. They charge you, they take money back every day afterwards. The book has to come out with the film."
I was like, well, this is December 20th. I said, "When's the deadline?" She said, "January 1st." So I wrote 7,000 words a day for 10 days. I can literally say I wrote that book but did not read it. And I'm in the editing room, trying to carve out frames, just tighten this thing. Tighten it, tighten it. And I'm doing the exact opposite at night, where I have to stretch the story longer and longer. There are so many adjectives and adverbs. It's embarrassing.
AMY: I'm definitely gonna find a copy of that.
CHRIS: Actually, I quite enjoyed it. I read it recently, I quite enjoyed it. But what was interesting was that in having to fill it out, creating backstories for all these people and subplots up the wazoo — I thought, "Geez, I'd like some of this in the film. I really should do it the other way around next time." And I had this idea for The Amateur Photographer slash The Amateur Pornographer — and I'll explain that in a minute.
I thought, you know what, I'm going to write the novel first. Which I did. And I'd forgotten that I had it. I found it in the garage.
AMY: Holy shit.
CHRIS: This week. Yeah, it's 350 pages.
AVI: For those of us just listening, Chris held up a tome that had "AP" on the spine of it.
CHRIS: Yeah, we had two titles for it. One was The Amateur Photographer. Back in the '50s and '60s, there was a photography magazine called The Amateur Photographer. And it was what people bought if they wanted a nudie magazine but weren't buying Playboy, because there were always some nudes in it. So it was like a joke magazine. You see a man buying Amateur — "Oh, yes, I'm very keen. I've just bought a new Leica." Yeah, right. So it was a pun on that. But also we called it The Amateur Pornographer, because that's what he becomes.
AMY: And it was after you came back from Cannes?
CHRIS: Yeah.
AMY: Were you on a high and you're like, this is the project, or—
CHRIS: I very much thought it was going to be the next project. I think I'd mentioned it to Ted and Ted had gone, "Yeah, that sounds fun. Let's do that."
TED: We'll set it up right away. Your invitation to come on the show has made me remember the different projects Chris and I have collaborated on, and the fact that he stayed with me — despite my lack of success to get... I did succeed in getting Chris paid a couple of times. I feel such deep affinity. They're very different projects that we worked on together. And even the ones, like the psychedelic western, that I didn't get involved with have just stayed with me always. When someone says to me, "What are one of those projects?" — "Oh God, this guy Chris has this fantastic psychedelic western that I've always wanted to do, that is like a little bit of a Groundhog Day type scenario." So I just felt an affinity.
But Chris got started in an early stage of true indie coming out of the UK — a true no-budget approach. You know, there's a fine tradition out of the UK that America has never figured out how to do well, which I call the community uprising genre, where the community comes together to change the things that are wrong through a series of small little improvements that leads to great transformation. America, for whatever reason, bought into the myth of the individual hero — which actually nothing gets done that way. The UK makes many more movies about labor movements than we do, partially because I think, for the last 30 or 40 years, the powers that be have been trying to kill off labor movements in America the best they can.
CHRIS: They're trying pretty well in the UK too.
AMY: So you wrote a novel. You're back from Cannes. This is going to be your sophomore American effort, right?
CHRIS: Yeah.
AMY: You'd made films before, but it was going to be the follow-up. And Ted, you write this novel, you adapt it to a script — at what point did you send it to Ted? Was he the first person you sent it to? Or who was the first person?
TED: Now we get the truth.
CHRIS: The great thing about AP — as I call it, The Amateur Photographer — is that it's based on a conglomeration of true things. I went to art school in London. I'm from South Wales, from a small place in South Wales, and I went to art school in London. I would come back to Wales every summer to get a job, to make some money. The only job I could get was in the local mill.
Almost the first day I was there, these guys were like, "You do the photographics in that art school of yours?" And I was like, "Yeah." I didn't know what photographics meant. "Yeah, sure." Two things were fascinating. One — that I drew naked women. The idea that their tax dollars — remember, British colleges were free at that time — the idea that their tax dollars went for me to draw naked women, they could... that was mind-blowing to them. "Did you get a boner?" It's like, no.
And then they were like, "You do photographics?" I went, "Yeah." "Oh, bloody hell. You do photographics." It turned out that, as I said, a snap was a photograph you got processed by the pharmacy usually in those days, or you sent them back to Kodak. But a photographic was something you processed yourself. And there was a guy who'd been doing the photographics and he'd lost his hand in a saw accident.
This mill, by the way, had no safety equipment at all back then. I nearly lost a hand on my first day because I saw what looked like a heat haze above a table, and I was about to put my hand into it when a guy grabbed me and hit the off button. And this saw then came to a stop. It was a blade that big, with these huge — when it was moving, it was invisible. And I was about to put my hand into it.
TED: That scene's not only in the script — when I reread it for the podcast, it gave me chills. It gave me chills because I remember where its origins were.
CHRIS: Yeah. So they asked me, would I take over the photographics? Would I take pictures of their wives? It was all for private consumption. It was all they wanted — their own pictures. And some of them would not show them around. Others were like, if you got really close to them, they'd go, "Look, there's Doris, you know. Oh, wow, thanks. It's great. It's a lot of woman, Doris."
AMY: It's great inspiration for setting, and for a screenplay. And so the novel was set in Wales, presumably, and the first draft of the script, too?
TED: Yeah.
CHRIS: And we got into prep at one point with what — it was one of those—
AMY: So wait, just for our audience — you go in to talk to Ted. What happens next? Ted, like, how does it — where do you pitch it? Because remember, it's like the '90s. Maybe some of our listeners don't remember the '90s or were born in the '90s. What do you do? You're like, "Yeah, we're gonna go—" What happens next?
TED: I just thought it was such a sure thing. Sometimes I read a beautiful script that has all these values and I'm like, "I love it. I have no idea how to get it made." This was the opposite in that I loved it and I was like, "We're just going to be swatting them like flies. We're going to have the actors we want. We are going to have the funders we want. We're going to start really, really quick." And there are just numerous reasons why I felt that. It's a funny, heartfelt script. It's warm and cuddly. But it's not safe by any means. It captures a period of time in transition with great specificity, but also recognition. You know, this is the moment. It's predicated on the moment before Playboy hits the stands. But Playboy is able to hit the stands because the sexual revolution is happening.
AMY: When is the script set? Can you—
CHRIS: '69.
AMY: Oh, right. So right on the turn of the decade. 
TED: A big one. Because it was originally The Amateur Pornographer, and we were having trouble — we'd send the script out and then I'd call somebody back. That's what we use phones for. I'd say, "So have you read the script?" And they're like, "We haven't got it." And we started finding out that it was getting stopped in people's spam because we had such rudimentary filters. If it said "pornographer" anywhere in the body of the email, at most of the corporate places, it wasn't coming through. Chris wasn't too precious. But also it had that double meaning that he mentioned earlier.
CHRIS: Well, we got quite far in setting up the version in Britain, and we got as far as casting. And Matthew Rhys, who was this unknown young actor, came in — and I loved it. And we've become firm friends because of it. Matthew still talks about it. But there was supposedly money coming from the UK Arts Council or the Welsh Arts Council — I can't remember.
TED: Yeah. Wales.
CHRIS: But it was this funny thing — BBC, these people would get a few toes in, and at the very last minute you could just see that they couldn't report to their boards. And oh, by the way, when we're making — they would all back out. And the Welsh one collapsed, and it was dead for a while. And then Ted came to me and said, "Look, I want you to go and pitch this to Colin Callender at HBO."
TED: This was the time — I had several projects they had yet to make. Real Women Have Curves. And they were flirting with the idea of making movies for the big screen first and foremost and distributing them, but they hadn't done it. And I had a project with another director that — because we couldn't get it in the contract, all around the same time, that they would distribute it theatrically. But they would tell us they would. That was the intent. They just couldn't put it in writing. He walked away. Like a financed movie, never got made. It was all of that.
But we had a good relationship with HBO, and Colin, who ran it in those days, was British, came out of art cinema himself, and was bold — but was also under pressure to find the kind of films that could satisfy both sides of HBO. HBO had Taxicab Confessions and Real Sex and different late-night offerings — the Skin-emax experience — but they also were prestige. They'd yet to come into the Sopranos and all of that yet.
AMY: This is like a perfect project then, right? You've got the perfectly—
TED: Yeah. When I was just starting out, back when I was a PA and trying to get movies produced, I was also a script reader and I was able to read for virtually everyone in town, and kind of organize other people — like James Schamus and Scott McGehee and Anne Carey — into becoming this readers brigade. And one of the people I read for was Colin Callender. He had an assistant at the time named Kerry Putnam and an executive, Brian Siberell. Kerry was who I handed my coverage into, and talked to about scripts, because she was in the process of becoming Kerry.  So I knew Colin pretty well and I knew his tastes. And sure enough, they responded right away to the script. But they had a note.
AVI: A note! Wait a minute.
AMY: Can the pigs fly?
CHRIS: Well, it was kind of a pretty big note. It was: can we set it in America? For me, all the humor, all the relationships — it was based on real experience and it was set in this place I knew. And the idea of moving it to America, which is what he asked for — I just couldn't see it. And I went in to actually try and talk him into doing it in Wales. And what he said was, "Look, I'll pay you to go and drive around for a few weeks. Go and find a place that is the geopolitical equivalent of where you grew up in Wales. I'm sure it exists, and I'm sure it exists in the Northeast, and you'll find it and you'll feel at home." And I thought, "This guy's an idiot. But if you'll pay for me—"
AMY: No, but that's actually really smart, right?
CHRIS: Yeah.
AMY: You would go and fall in love with some—
TED: And you can't imagine that happening to this day, like right now. People are so eager to find the reasons to pass. They're not telling you, "Let me spend some money to help you find the way. Let me help you."
AMY: Let me help you to a green light. I can't imagine that.
TED: And I grew up on the New Hampshire border on a river that was surrounded by mill towns. I can picture this place in my head. We only would buy our shoes and our boots at the factory outlets because it was a mill area. So you'd drive into Andover, Massachusetts to go to the Converse sneaker factory store, because Converse were so expensive in those days we had to get the extra $3 off. And you'd drive up to Durham, New Hampshire to get the Timberland boots. Hip hop hadn't been invented yet, so Timberland boots were a thing for people that lived in New Hampshire where it snowed, or people who worked outside.
AMY: They were not cool, really.
TED: They were not yet cool. But they had already filtered down into my family's awareness — not because they were cool, but because they're practical shoes. And the Timberland shoe outlet is an amazing thing. It's built on an island in a river, and there are four exit ramps, and each of those ramps exits to two bars. So at lunchtime, the bell rings, the bars open the doors — you can see in like 10 minutes the entire factory empty out and fill the eight bars.
AMY: They have to hit the emergency thing so they don't cut their hand off.
TED: Exactly. As they're drunk. And Chris went and looked and started to find where we could actually tell this story.
CHRIS: It was so similar to the area I'm from, because everything was in transition. A lot of this industry was closing down. Union problems.
TED: It was — right. When you went, it was in the midst of the factory shutting down.
AMY: That era. Yeah, that era is when the steel mills were closing. I made a film outside Pittsburgh and it was just depressing in that way, because the factories were closing down.
CHRIS: You felt terrible because you'd see these factories closing down and go, "Oh my God, that's terrible." But then — "Oh, what a great location. We can use this as a location."
AMY: So you have the script. You nearly have a green light. You go back to Colin and HBO and you're like, "Thank you for helping us towards this green light. Here's a new script. It's set in New Hampshire. We're ready to go."
AVI: Yeah. What happened? How come it — I think I have a movie.
CHRIS: Ted will have a different take on it. My take was that the real problem all the way along is that it relies on a 19-year-old being the lead, and there are no glamorous parts. All the working men and women in it have to look real. You can't have some gorgeous star in the middle of it or some handsome guy.
AMY: Were you a pain in the ass about the casting, Chris? You're like, "I can't—"
CHRIS: No, it wasn't that. I think people recognized that that was the only way it would work.
AMY: It had to have a certain discovery.
TED: Right.
AMY: That fresh—
CHRIS: Yeah. And a certain amount of verisimilitude about it. Or it would just be lame. It would suddenly become exploitative. But if you believe these people as real people, then you could get away with murder, I think.
AMY: So did Colin have an idea of what cast would green-light it? You come back with the script — and then you need a — Ted, do you have a better memory than Chris on this?
CHRIS: Do you have a better memory than me on this?
TED: There were no demands that you have to get this person, because there was no one who could quite justify it. Independent film was getting secure — starting to be noticed at the Oscars, working at the box office. But once Pulp Fiction came around — which I think was '94 [UNCERTAIN: Ted says "'97, '98" in the original — see Footnote 1] — everything started shifting. And we were caught up in that, and people — I think one of the main truths of the film business is people don't care about looking smart. They don't need to be smart. They care about not looking stupid. And so when a popular wisdom takes place, you can get Bruce Willis, Uma Thurman, John Travolta to be in your whatever-it-was $8 million movie. You're not going to make a $5 million movie with a long-haired 19-year-old kid that nobody knows. It wasn't that people had demands. It wasn't fitting the common status quo model. And people at the moment were worried about looking stupid. Yeah, that was it.
The Good Machine model — which was really fully driven by David Linde, who ran our international sales and could time and time again deliver the impossible — was essentially to get 120% of our budget from international pre-sales. And we were able to do that for this period of time in the '90s. And as we started moving into the 2000s, having a US distributor in place became a necessity to make the international side still work. To do that, HBO entering this field was an unknown. It wasn't necessarily an asset yet in that way. So it didn't goose us to get us over the hump. Everyone wanted this movie to get made. Nobody set barriers in front of us.
AMY: The barrier was the changing business model.
TED: Right.
AMY: The rapidly changing business model. And I always felt like—
TED: That moment I first read the script — even reading it again for this — I was like, "Oh, I can get this made. It's perfect."
AVI: Before we came on, we got all your original materials — the script and photos and everything — and we put it through our AI pipeline. And what we're going to show you now is a new pitch deck, and then a trailer, and then we're going to have a conversation at the end with a film executive who joins us.
AMY: He's gonna drop in.
AVI: Yeah, Meredith is with us today. And now for our disclosures. Films Not Made uses AI to reimagine movies that were never produced. All development materials — pitch decks, trailers, and posters — are AI-generated. Any likenesses of people are speculative and synthetic. No real actors participated in their creation. This is not endorsed by any individual or studio referenced.
Here we are, we've got the title page. The Amateur Photographer, produced by Ted Hope, written and directed by Christopher Monger. Again, we ask our AI models to come up with a style and a look and create prompts for the images. This look to me is like a New Hampshire small mill town, Main Street. There's a photo — like a drugstore, like you said, where you would have gotten your photos developed. It's very moody and wetted down.
AMY: Yeah, there's a wet-down. AI loves a wet-down.
AVI: Loves a wet-down.
TED: And I think it's where I grew up.
AVI: Okay, looks familiar. And an old pickup truck parked—
AMY: There's no one in the truck even though the lights are on.
AVI: It's very desolate. But you can see a factory in the background also, which is very evocative. And then we ask it for copy as well. So the logline here is: "A draft-dodging teen photographer's secret erotic photo business collides with a crusading cop, forcing him to expose the small town's darkest hypocrisy." And the elevator pitch: Billy Grate, a broke 19-year-old New York photography student dodging the draft, slinks back to Milltown, New Hampshire, and accidentally becomes the town's secret private erotic photographer — until a hypocritical cop and a bungled drug scheme turns his tender side hustle into a high-stakes act of exposure.
AMY: We have a tagline.
AVI: Think American Graffiti meets Boogie Nights. Ted, give me a hug.
CHRIS: Ted, why didn't you come up with that?
AMY: Yeah, we need a hot take on American Graffiti meets Boogie Nights.
TED: I think it's pretty right. There's a lot of nostalgic love in Chris's script, by all means — like American Graffiti. And American Graffiti and Boogie Nights are some of the only examples we have of American community uprising movies, which is right on with what Chris has. I think you see why, when I read it, I was like, "This is gonna happen right away. We're going to make this happen." The AI's "small town's darkest hypocrisy" might be a little over the top. The film has — it's a joyful film.
CHRIS: I was going to say that the small-town cop who is out to get everyone is actually based on where I grew up. We used to have a cop who everybody knew, and if you got in trouble, you'd just come and tell your parents. And then we suddenly got a new cop. He started giving things like traffic tickets, which would never happen, and closed the bars. The bars were supposed to close at 11, but the tradition was you just went in the back door after 11. This guy started arresting people. And the village drove him out.
CHRIS: He'd come out of his house every morning and his car would have flat tires all the time. And everywhere he walked, people would go, "Plod, plod, plod."
AVI: I love that.
AMY: We asked it to make a suggested style for the film. And so what we have here is — well, it's a genre I've never heard of. It's "acid rock small-town naturalism."
AVI: I mean, talk about sub-genres. It's a micro-genre. But it's just for the style.
TED: It reminds me of the early days of Netflix, where they would be like four sentences long.
AVI: Genres. Starring so-and-so.
AMY: Yeah. This is a collision of two vibes.
TED: Yeah.
AMY: "Jittery, kinetic, late-'60s New York City prologue — high contrast, neon pops, collage energy — followed by grounded New Hampshire mill-town realism, exemplified by sodium street lights, fluorescence, wood smoke, shadows, 35-millimeter grain. Intimate scenes are shot like domestic anthropology. It's not documentary — funny, awkward, tender. So the final act of exposure lands as catharsis, not sleaze."
CHRIS: I like that. I like that.
TED: When Chris was talking about it, I always thought this was also a movie that we would be able to do all sorts of interesting extensions with. And it was happening during this time of a new wave of British photography too, where people were doing photographs of their families and parents and winning Turner Prizes.
AMY: Great idea, even for now.
TED: And I always felt like it was a movie for me because it was so close to where I grew up. You could smell the film. You could smell the wood shop, the mill, the weed.
AVI: Yeah.
AMY: I hope so.
CHRIS: It drives me nuts in movies when you don't know what people's jobs are, or their job title is referred to once and you see this fantastic place where they live. I've always wanted to make films where you see where people work, you see how they live.
TED: And there were towns like that. It was ending, I think, in the '90s. But everyone I grew up with — parents worked at General Electric. Ninety percent of the people worked for a single employer in the town.
AVI: The next step — we ask it to cast the film. So now we're going to go through the principal cast it provides.
AMY: Three choices. We ask it to provide three good options.
AVI: We start with Billy Grate, a talented and cocky photography student dodging the draft. The first choice — who's in the photo here — is Dominic Sessa from The Holdovers, described as "volatile and soulful." And we have a shot of him in a makeshift—
AMY: It's a very tiny darkroom because—
AVI: —he has to crouch down, with tongs and a roll of 35 millimeter.
TED: I like the size of the door to get in there too.
AVI: It's like a garden shed, I think.
AMY: Oh, maybe. Maybe AI picked up on the shed.
AVI: Yeah, 100%. Other choices — other ideas?
AMY: Yeah. We have Cooper Hoffman — Phil [UNCERTAIN: "Phil" — likely short for "Philip Seymour Hoffman," his late father] Hoffman's kid, who was in Licorice Pizza. He's described as "unguarded."
TED: He was fantastic in The Long Walk [UNCERTAIN: this may refer to The Long Game or another title — could not verify a film called The Long Walk starring Cooper Hoffman] this year too. He's well beyond being someone's kid.
AMY: Yeah, exactly. And Gabriel LaBelle from The Fabelmans. I don't really know him so well. "Nimble."
CHRIS: Yeah.
AVI: For the role of Penny — the photo shop girl with a sharp guard up — Daisy Edgar-Jones. I picked Twisters as the—
AMY: That makes no sense. But she's also known for Normal People. I wonder if AI picked up, in scraping the internet, that she's dating a pretty well-known photographer. An art photographer.
AVI: Other choices: Sydney Sweeney and Jessie Buckley.
TED: Yes.
AMY: Sydney Sweeney, of American Eagle fame.
AVI: Yeah. White Lotus Super Bowl commercial fame now.
AMY: Yeah.
AVI: There's a shot of her at the photo counter at the drugstore. Not sure they would have had that many cameras, but—
AMY: I want to point out that Jessie Buckley is unavailable because she's in another episode of ours. She's the lead in another unmade project directed by Heidi Ewing. So she's been cast in another unmade project of hers.
TED: I love how AI is as guilty as Hollywood. Let's not forget these characters are 19. So generally speaking — the men, it's almost reversed here. The men I think exceed the age limit by about seven or eight years on average. The women I think exceed it closer to 15.
AMY: Exactly.
CHRIS: Yeah.
TED: And again, this is the problem of getting the movie made. You want a 19-year-old. It was the same problem we had when we did The Ice Storm. [UNCERTAIN: Ted says "we" — his involvement in The Ice Storm as a producer is not confirmed from context; the film was produced by Good Machine but Ted's specific credit is unclear] We had to cast someone who felt like an innocent — Tobey Maguire at that time. And it was very hard to find actors who felt innocent. And this is true. Billy has to be innocent. Despite all of his going-down, it's the first time he's ever seen a woman naked before.
AMY: Yeah, these actors don't feel like there are naked women—
CHRIS: Yeah. You've got to really feel that he's horrified when he's suddenly in the presence of mature women. He thinks of himself as mature, but he's suddenly reduced to a boy.
AMY: Yeah.
AVI: Here's the foil — Officer Dowd, crusading small-town cop with a license and bully's appetite. Yeah, Chris, you named it right away: Josh Brolin. From Dune: Part Two, I'm sure he'll—
AMY: He's chomping at the bit to play—
AVI: "Commanding."
AMY: He looks pretty commanding. Supporting role?
AVI: He's got a clipboard. He's standing in front of a bar with a "Closed" sign on it — like he just shut it down.
TED: Clipboards always scare me. You come at me with a clipboard, I'm gonna cower.
AVI: Yeah.
CHRIS: Wow.
AMY: I just want you to sign my petition, Ted.
TED: Yeah. But again — so funny. I think they only scaled up by about 30 years.
AMY: Right.
TED: AI is recognizing the challenge of finding age-appropriate character actors who can get you financed.
AVI: Yeah.
TED: Broken system.
AVI: Perhaps the character of Mike — the mill-town ringleader with a good heart and bad ideas.
AMY: Yeah.
AVI: We've got Holt McCallany, star of The Iron Claw.
AMY: The Iron Claw — I didn't see that. About wrestlers.
TED: Yeah. Dad. A dad of grown-up kids.
AVI: A dad. Exactly. We see him at the mill, lunch pail in hand. He's got kind of a "I've got a great idea for you" expression on his face while he's smoking a cigarette.
CHRIS: I like the fact he's got a cigarette.
AVI: Yeah, absolutely. On the job. Mike's partner in crime we might recognize as Gene — his fast-talking, hustling, always-pitching-the-next-brilliant-scheme friend. First choice: Jeremy Allen White, also known for The Iron Claw. When I think of Jeremy Allen White, I think of The Iron Claw and I think of underwear and I think of — well, The Bear and Bruce Springsteen.
CHRIS: Yeah, yeah.
AVI: In that order. We have a female role.
AMY: Alice — anxious, lovingly socially alert, desperate to keep the family "normal." Amy Adams from Night Bitch, who AI says is "unfiltered." Amy Adams is in the photo — I guess she's washing some dishes in an old kitchen. She's concerned, looking out the window. We also have Carrie Coon or Laura Linney.
CHRIS: All of that — that's like Billy's sister, not his mom.
AVI: Young mom. And then we have Billy's father, Howard — a proud working man who equates order with love. And we see our first choice is Paul Giamatti, also from The Holdovers, described as "thorny."
AMY: I mean — yeah. AI's latched onto The Holdovers and The Iron Claw films to find cast.
AVI: And Night Bitch. Because the third choice here is Scoot McNairy from Night Bitch. And also somewhat of a perennial choice — for whatever reason — in our AI casting cinematic universe.
AMY: Yeah, Scoot comes up on the casting list.
TED: I love AI's description of him as "grounded." Often people say of an actor: "That's a little off. That's a little nuts." Oh, that grounded guy. Scoot.
AMY: That grounded guy.
CHRIS: Yeah, give me a grounded guy, for God's sake.
AVI: The casting in this is like a Venn diagram between Night Bitch and The Iron Claw, and you guys are right in the middle there somehow.
AMY: Yeah.
TED: I'll tell you what it did do really, really well though — it put all my favorite actors in. I love them all. I wouldn't say they're necessarily appropriate for the movie, but it definitely got my flavor.
AVI: Okay. And Anne—
AMY: Oh, yeah, Cate Blanchett is definitely gonna play this role.
AVI: "Unsentimental affair." Cate Blanchett.
TED: Cate Blanchett, who wants to be known for Tár or Carol, most known for Tár.
CHRIS: She's got, you know, three scenes in the film.
TED: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
AVI: Or Julianne Moore or Laura Linney. Again.
TED: Yeah.
AMY: This is also where AI is acting just like a studio exec. We have someone that has about a minute and a half of screen time, the character has no essential arc, and we're gonna do it — but you just have to get one of these three great actors.
TED: Yeah, exactly.
AVI: And then you're greenlit. So you could just put her on the poster.
CHRIS: I don't think she's described anything like that in the — my teacher was actually the sister of the editor of The Times of London.
TED: Oh, my God.
CHRIS: William Rees-Mogg. She was Anne Rees-Mogg. She was like the black sheep of the family. And she was this astonishing — she was tall, astonishingly austere lesbian who was — at the time when she wanted to let everybody know she was a lesbian, but at the same time was so upset about it — just nervous all the time. It was delightful. She only dressed in black and white, and all her purses were transparent.
TED: Blanchett here is in great character.
CHRIS: No, she's not in black — 
TED: She's pointing at some — I don't know — contact sheets or—
AVI: Yeah, it's a crit for class.
CHRIS: Just love the idea of Cate Blanchett in two scenes. Let's do it.
AMY: Here's a couple of just storyboard frames. The high-concept tag in there is "The Graduate meets Zodiac" — which is not quite American Graffiti meets Boogie Nights.
CHRIS: But—
AVI: You know, we asked for stuff and it gave it to us. And we've got a couple — there are about six frames in here. We see Paul Giamatti looking very constipated at the breakfast table with fluorescent lights. Billy in the midst of an anti-war demonstration — this must be in the beginning, in New York, in the city — that sets him on his course. Also with Cate Blanchett at art school, I imagine. We see Mike and Billy at the mill — I believe Mike's pitching him his idea. There we see Officer Dowd eyeballing negatives. And there's Amy Adams looking concerned.
AMY: Where did Zodiac come from?
AVI: I don't know.
AMY: The color palette. It clearly likes the Zodiac color palette.
TED: Yeah. The Graduate is grainy, saturated. Look.
CHRIS: And Billy out in the street at an anti-war protest — no, no, he's too lazy for that.
AMY: I don't remember your color palette for all this, Chris, but somehow I remember this being much more poppy — you know.
CHRIS: Yeah.
AMY: Than melancholy.
CHRIS: Absolutely.
AVI: We asked it for its idea for the most sellable poster mock-ups. We have the streamer one on the left.
TED: Netflix. Oh, good work, Ted. You sold it to Netflix? Yeah. "A bracing, darkly funny American awakening." Says the New York Times.
AVI: We have the middle one, which is more of a festival prestige kind of—
AMY: That one went to Cannes.
AVI: It's a shot—
TED: Yeah, back to Cannes. You're back to Cannes there.
AVI: It's got Billy on the hood of a car, and behind him, his parents. And even further behind, in the shop window, we see Penny.
AMY: They're framed within a frame.
AVI: And then the last one is — I don't know — more like a Sundance poster. Scrappy, rough-edged thing.
TED: Who would see that? Look, there's not even a person in the poster. It's like some muddy—
AVI: —room there.
AMY: It looks like a crime scene.
TED: Definitely.
CHRIS: Yeah.
AMY: It does — the Zodiac part. I think, as the producer — AI, I'm gonna fire you as a marketing consultant. These don't sell the comedy. This is a funny movie. I want the classic version of Antonioni's Blowup poster meeting — you know — something that cues me in, meeting Tom Jones. I want the feeling of Richardson's Tom Jones. 100%.
TED: That's great.
CHRIS: See, I always thought the model was the poster for The Graduate. Something very sexy. And a guy who's afraid of what he's seeing.
AVI: Okay. Well, now the trailer.
TED: Yeah. Avi doesn't show me the trailer beforehand because I laugh harder that way.

[TRAILER PLAYS]
(V.O.): I wasn't running toward my future. I was running away from it.
(V.O.): You come home looking like that, people talk.
(V.O.): Let them.
(V.O.): We got a way you can make real money. Quiet money. It started as pictures.
(V.O.): You didn't get that from me.
(V.O.): Talent doesn't excuse damage.
(V.O.): Then it stopped being about money. If he finds out—
(V.O.): —he'll ruin you. 
[End Trailer]
CHRIS: Could someone explain to me "talent doesn't excuse damage"?
AVI: Is that not in the script?
AMY: I had that on a T-shirt. That's been my life motto.
TED: I see a merch opportunity for you guys.
CHRIS: The weird thing that AI missed is that one of the big plot points is that his hair is down to his waist and he stands out — he's really a freak compared to everybody else.
TED: Do you think it captures the tone? Because—
CHRIS: No.
TED: Chris, you're so funny in this light-hearted way. You know, I know some of your work and I feel like it's — this version's a little more serious, maybe melodramatic.
CHRIS: All the humor comes out of real situations. There isn't a mood to it at all.
AMY: Is it way too dark?
TED: Yeah.
AMY: You know, the look is all wrong.
CHRIS: It should be very light and frothy.
AMY: But I love seeing it though, I have to say. Because it's like one of those things where I imagine we made it for Harvey and he gave us a trailer — so different from our movie.
TED: Exactly, right?
AVI: Oh my God.
TED: I was making a film for Miramax and I was talking to an executive and they said, "We have your dailies, and we are actually having another editor secretly cutting our cut of the film." And I was — yeah, I was like a young producer. I was like, no.
AVI: Well, now AI is secretly cutting your trailers.
CHRIS: Just before The Englishman got released, Harvey did a final test screening secretly. And it came in a few points lower than he'd imagined. And I got a call from one of the kids at Miramax: "Your film's gone up to the fifth floor" — which is where they— And I called Harvey. I couldn't reach him. So I called Hugh Grant, I called the producer, I called everybody who I thought could exercise some pressure on Harvey. And failing to get a hold of anyone, I left a message with Harvey's assistant saying, "Every cut you put in the movie, I'll put a cut in you."
TED: And the next morning — "You'll never work in this town again."
CHRIS: Next morning I was here in LA. I got a call at 6 o'clock in the morning — I knew it was going to be. I picked up the phone. It was Harvey screaming: "I'm gonna cut your nuts off and stick them up your ass." And I hung up and made myself a cup of coffee. And I called back and I said to his assistant, "Will you tell Harvey, when he's ready to have a conversation, I'm ready to have one?" He got on the phone. He said, "You never threaten my assistants." And I said, "I didn't threaten your assistant, I threatened you." And he went, "Oh, okay, I'm sending a car. Come on over."
TED: So old school. I can't. That's so amazing. Wow. Good for you. Okay, well, now that you've seen the trailer, we're really prepped and ready. You know the casting. And we are going to invite an executive in to chat with us for a few minutes.
AVI: Hopefully this goes better than that conversation with Harvey. There's often some communications issues, so just be patient.

[AI EXECUTIVE SEGMENT — "MEREDITH"] 
DANI: Hey everyone, it's Dani. Meredith's finishing up another call, but she asked me to kick us off so we don't burn your window. Quick heads up — she has to step out to deal with a truly glamorous situation involving a plumber and a home renovation. So tight window, hard stop. But she's very keyed up about The Amateur Photographer. She'll jump straight into character, tone, packaging the second she joins, so feel free to start anywhere you want. She'll be on in a moment.
Meredith: Hey, Amy. Hey, Avi. Hi, Ted. Hi, Chris. Good to see you all. Give me one second — I'm pulling up the pages and the deck.
AVI: Let's just get your hot take on the script. First impressions.
Meredith: All right, quick take on the script for The Amateur Photographer. The tone lands. Billy's underground photo hustle feels real, and the small-town hypocrisy is sharp, not preachy. The thing is, the escalation between Billy and Officer Dowd sometimes gets too procedural, which risks losing the darkly funny edge. What if you dial up the moments where Billy's choices are driven by desire and rebellion? Does that push the story closer to a true coming-of-age versus a crime procedural?
TED: Great idea, Meredith. We love that.
Meredith: Okay, not sure I'm tracking — are we still talking The Amateur Photographer, or did you mean something else? Which scene or character should I jump to?
AVI: Well, what do you think of Billy and his arc? Is it working for today's market? They had a really hard time getting it greenlit — it's kind of a casting and market issue. So thinking about it today and the kind of films that you like to greenlight, how is Billy's character for today?
Meredith: Yeah, so Billy absolutely works for today's market. He's a cocky, broke art student dodging the draft, and the script puts him right up against authority — Officer Dowd and small-town hypocrisy. That outsider energy feels modern. Think The Holdovers or Licorice Pizza type leads. The challenge is his arc sometimes leans reactive — he's often responding to trouble, not actively pushing forward. For greenlight, I'd want him to take bigger risks, drive the moral showdown, and maybe lean more into authorship than just curiosity. Do you see Billy as a driver or a survivor? What kind of actor would spark the most with Penny and Dowd for a streamer audience?
CHRIS: I'll let Ted take that one.
TED: We are thinking it's a theatrical film, not a streaming film.
Meredith: Yeah. For a theatrical film, Billy's arc has to feel bigger, more cinematic, more urgent. The audience needs to see him take real risks, make choices that change his world — not just react to it. What's the one moment where Billy truly steps out of his comfort zone, visually and emotionally? Could you push that scene so it's the heartbeat of the film?
TED: Yes, absolutely. We could do that. I'm wondering, Meredith — what do you see as a good budget, and what do you think it would do at the box office as a result?
Meredith: I'd expect budget in the low single digits, maybe creeping toward mid if you get a name. The box office depends on who's playing Billy and how festival-friendly it feels. If you can get buzz, it could be a sleeper hit. But it'll need a strong lead and a sharp campaign. Who are you thinking for Billy casting?
TED: We think Dominic — that you suggested — is a really good idea, and The Holdovers is a very good comp.
Meredith: Yeah, Dominic's got that mix of vulnerability and trouble that pops on screen. He'd anchor the film and draw in a younger crowd. Using The Holdovers as a comp, you'd want to lean into the generational conflict and the humor, and market it as a character-driven, slightly subversive comedy. Are you considering pairing Dominic with a recognizable actor for Officer Dowd or Penny to drive pre-sales?
TED: Yes, we're looking for people that would have great foreign value to help with that. Do you have any suggestions of other folks that you haven't mentioned? We are really open. We're very good collaborators, as you know from our other work with you, Meredith.
Meredith: Yeah, that's great to hear. For Officer Dowd, someone like Mark Rylance brings instant credibility and international pull — plus he can play nuance and menace. For Penny, maybe Jessie Buckley — she's got indie cachet and foreign value, and she'd give the role bite. Would you want a slightly comic or a more dramatic vibe opposite Dominic?
TED: Comic.
CHRIS: Absolutely comic, yes.
Meredith: Alright, sounds like you're leaning toward a playful tone with Penny. Maybe someone like Jodie Comer or Emma Mackey, who can do wit and chemistry without losing depth. Do you see Penny and Billy's dynamic as flirtatious or more oddball partners in crime?
CHRIS: Oddball partners in crime. They start off as adversaries and end up as friends.
Meredith: Yeah. That lands. The adversary-to-allies arc works well, especially if Penny brings comic energy and challenges Billy. Their scenes — like the one at the photo studio — could use more playful tension. What's the one moment where Penny risks something big for Billy? Should that happen earlier or later?
TED: She gives him a discount. She gives him that 10% discount, Chris — that's a pretty big risk.
CHRIS: Yeah. Yeah, it's a big risk.
Meredith: That's a nice touch. Her giving Billy the discount shows she's willing to bend the rules. The thing is, for a theatrical audience, that moment needs to feel a bit bigger — maybe she covers for him with Dowd, or helps him sneak into a forbidden event. Could you scale up Penny's risk so it's more than financial? Something that changes her standing in town?
TED: Well, he's rescuing all those refugees that he has hidden in the basement. She's pretty good at keeping quiet about that. You know, maybe she has to do a little bit more.
AMY: I think the police officer — we could rewrite him as an ICE agent, maybe.
CHRIS: Yes, it—
AMY: If we want to modernize it. Yeah, we could update it. Yeah. What do you think about that, Meredith?
Meredith: Yeah. Updating Officer Dowd to an ICE agent instantly amps up the stakes and brings real urgency, especially for a theatrical audience. That makes Billy's actions more dangerous and Penny's complicity much riskier. The win is it gives the story sharper relevance and opens up new tension. Are you comfortable pushing the political angle to the forefront, or do you want it woven in subtly through character choices?
CHRIS: I'd always go for weaving it in through character choices.
Meredith: If Penny covers for Billy, it's about the risk to her job and relationships — not a big monologue. Do you want to see that shift in tone happen early, or let it creep up as the story unfolds?
CHRIS: Always go for creep up as the story unfolds.
Meredith: That's the right call. The tension builds as Dowd's presence gets heavier and Penny's choices get riskier. The audience stays invested because they feel the stakes rising — not being told.
TED: Chris, I'm so sorry to cut in — Meredith just got pulled into the leak situation and had to drop for a hard stop.
AVI: Something about the pool's heating system now. Anyway, thank you both for making the time and walking us through The Amateur Photographer.
TED: Super helpful.
DANI: If you want a next step, send the two or three pages you feel best capture that tonal pivot into the end game. We'll make sure Meredith reads them immediately and reacts with notes. Thanks again. 
AMY: Really appreciate you. Welcome to the future.
CHRIS: What are you talking about? It felt so much like the past. Oh, God.
TED: Exactly.
CHRIS: I also failed to make a film about Dylan Thomas, the Welsh poet.
AMY: I love that script.
CHRIS: Thank you. Thank you. I'm gonna drop a name. I had the wonderful privilege — my executive producer on that was Mick Jagger. Mick would come to meetings, and Mick was actually in a meeting where an executive said, "Does Dylan Thomas have to be a poet? Do he and his wife have to drink so much? And does he have to die at the end?" And Mick just got up and went, "Well, this isn't the right place."
TED: When we did Sense and Sensibility, I got a call from a junior agent who asked me if the novelist had been signed to anybody yet.
AVI: Amazing.
AMY: Okay. Well, it's a chance to look back and to look forward.
CHRIS: Yeah.
TED: Very impressive. Very realistic.
AMY: Yeah. She's very slow at first, as you can tell. We've been working on that. She gains speed towards the end of the meeting, and then she always has to go.
TED: She's quicker than many executives that I've met.
AMY: Exactly. Exactly.
CHRIS: During COVID I hadn't driven around LA very much. And after months and months, I went over the hill into the Valley — to turn onto Barham — and suddenly was filled with this nausea. And I realized it was the reminder of the fear of going to pitch.
AMY: Yeah, yeah. I know exactly that road.
CHRIS: Yeah. And it's not — I like pitching. I think I'm not bad at it. But it's the questions afterwards. You just go — just, what? What scene?
AMY: Are you serious?
AVI: Maybe that's the use case for our AI executives — just practicing pitching, Ted.
CHRIS: You're brilliant at it. I was just fuming as some of those questions were being asked. It's like, what—
AVI: So I guess the big question is—
CHRIS: When can we start shooting?
AVI: Yeah. You still want to make it right now?
AMY: Do you wish you made it? Do you have regret? Or how do you feel about this project now?
TED: Well, I just want to quickly point out that she wants us to keep it at the budget it was 25 years ago and refused to give us any thought of what it might make at the box office.
AMY: Yeah, that's—
AVI: That seems realistic. On brand.
CHRIS: It's one of the ones that broke my heart. I've got maybe three scripts that I'm like, "Oh—" And when I read it, it still seems to work.
AMY: Yeah.
TED: Once the episode publishes, we're gonna send a link to it and the script to Dominic's agent.
AMY: Amazing.
TED: Said in the contract — we have to give you 10% of our fee if we follow through.
AVI: Exactly.
AMY: And a presentation card.
AVI: It's true. Yes.
AMY: Films Not Made presents FM Studios. Well, thank you for coming on the show, and thank you so much for telling us about the project and playing our little game. Look, it's great to hear these stories. I'm sure lots of people are gonna learn a lot. And yeah, I loved it. I love seeing you again, Chris.
CHRIS: It's lovely to see you. And when you're in LA, drop in — please come over for supper. Meet the dog.
AMY: Yeah. Bye, guys.
CHRIS: Thank you very, very much. Thank you.
AVI: You've been listening to Films Not Made. But if you want an even better experience, check us out on YouTube where you can see all the new materials, including the pitch deck and trailer.
AMY: And subscribe to our Substack for show notes, more about our guests, and industry insights.
AVI: And please follow us on Instagram and TikTok as Films Not Made. And of course, we have merch — check that out. And all things Films Not Made at filmsnotmade.com. Thanks again for listening and watching. We'll see you next time.
[Upbeat music]
#
END

Footnotes
Footnote 1 — Pulp Fiction release date: Ted dates Pulp Fiction to "'97, '98" in the context of it changing the independent film market. Pulp Fiction was released in October 1994, premiering at Cannes in May 1994 where it won the Palme d'Or. It is possible Ted is referring to the period of impact the film had on the market rather than the release date itself, or this is a misremembering.
Footnote 2 — Cooper Hoffman's father: Amy refers to Cooper Hoffman as "Phil Hoffman's kid." His father is Philip Seymour Hoffman, who died in February 2014. The shortened "Phil" is an informal reference consistent with how he was known to industry colleagues.
Footnote 3 — Ted and The Ice Storm: Ted refers to casting on The Ice Storm using the word "we." The Ice Storm (1997) was directed by Ang Lee and produced by Good Machine (James Schamus and Ted Hope). Ted Hope is indeed a producer on The Ice Storm, so this is consistent — though it should be noted for clarity.
Footnote 4 — Ted and Sense and Sensibility: Ted's reference to "when we did Sense and Sensibility" is ambiguous. The 1995 Ang Lee film Sense and Sensibility was produced by Lindsay Doran for Mirage Enterprises/Columbia Pictures. Good Machine handled some international co-productions with Ang Lee, but Ted Hope's producing credit on Sense and Sensibility specifically is not confirmed. This may be a loose reference to his broader relationship with Ang Lee rather than a direct producing credit.
Footnote 5 — The Long Walk / Cooper Hoffman: Ted praises Cooper Hoffman's work in what he calls The Long Walk "this year." This title could not be verified as a Cooper Hoffman film. He may be referring to a different title, or a film not yet widely known at time of recording.