Adversity Can Be A New Beginning: How I Turned A Writers Strike Into My First Film Production

The writers’ strike of ’88 hit Hollywood not long after my literary management business had really begun to take off. Finally, I’d built what looked like a successful business. At that moment, the Writers Guild of America made a decision that would shut down all production, in fact the entire business of film and television. The talk on the street was the strike wasn’t going to end any time soon, and all our businesses were quickly shutting down. The strike lasted approximately ten months, which seemed an eternity.

As soon as the strike hit, I approached one of my screenwriting clients (J.F. Lawton, who wrote “Pretty Woman” among other amazing scripts) and told him it was time for him to direct his first ‘low budget’ indie film. I asked him to pick a script from his ‘stack’ at home, one that could be produced cheaper than cheap, and off I went to raise money.

Empire Pictures – a B minus minus company that went out of business several years later – offered $200,000 to finance our project “Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death”. I grabbed at the opportunity.

With that money in hand, J.F. directed and I produced our first ultra-low budget film with Bill Maher, Shannon Tweed (the only film where the producer – me – insisted she keep all her clothes on !), and Adrienne Barbeau. Two weeks of prep, eleven days of photography, and a couple of weeks of post-production and… voila ! We had our first film. It was guerilla filmmaking meets the keystone cops, but we learned more from that little film than I could ever have imagined. And I got the bug for producing. Humble beginnings…

By: Gary Goldstein

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