While I was at Sundance, a friend pointed out that there seemed to be a shortage of great indie comedies in the last couple of years.

By my estimation, though, that isn’t quite true. Instead, I’d say there seems to have been a shortage of great indie films in general.

The difference is, if you make a dramatic film, and it doesn’t quite work, the audience leaves thinking, “maybe I didn’t get that.”

And if you make a comedy, and it doesn’t quite work, the audience leaves thinking, “I got that, and it sucked.”

A few months ago, we opened production offices for Keeper of the Pinstripes, taking over two floors of an older office building in the Garment District.

The listing for the space advertised a full-time doorman, which turned out to be at least technically correct. In the small, ten foot by ten foot lobby, there was a guy sitting at a little podium, all day long.

Strangely, though, he didn’t check IDs, direct visitor traffic, or coordinate freight elevator traffic. Mostly, he didn’t even acknowledge anyone else’s presence. He just stared into space, and slowly worked his way, for hours at a time, through the daily sudoku puzzle in AM New York.

When we first moved into the building, I thought, this guy has possibly the worst job in the entire world.

And now, neck deep in both films, as every problem with either winds up on my desk, I think, I wonder if the guy might be willing to switch with me.

I’ve been saying frequently over the past six months that it’s called ‘show business’, not ‘show friend’, that I care a lot about getting films made and released and much less about making friends along the way.

But while that’s partly true, from even a purely Machiavellian, ends-justify-means perspective, it turns out it’s far, far easier to get things done when people agree with you, and with what they’re doing. So, a lot of producing, like a lot of running a company in general, is about persuading. It’s about convincing. It’s about getting people to feed you back your own ideas as though they came up with them themselves. (As they say in Washington: you can get any bill passed, as long as you’re willing to let the other side take the credit.)

So, really, producing is a lot of diplomacy. Diplomacy in a world where few questions have objectively right and wrong answers, yet millions of dollars and lifetimes of reputations nonetheless hang in the balance. Diplomacy as defined by the old saw, “the fine art of telling someone to ‘go to hell’ in such a way that they look forward to the trip.”

To begin with, the number of details to wrangle, the number of moving parts, is staggering.

Then, there are hundreds of people to manage, each with different, strongly held creative opinions.

And then there are millions of dollars being spent at a rapid clip, with any chance of returns hanging speculatively on the line.

So perhaps it’s not strange that movie making is a study in controlled disaster, an act of frantically building sandcastles just as the tide rolls in.

Perhaps it’s stranger, in fact, that movies ever get made at all.

But, either way, our two little films, like any I’ve been involved with in the past, are total, ongoing disasters. They teeter on the edge, nearly falling apart completely, before, with diplomacy, fast-talking, and elbow grease, somehow coming back into place.

Which is to say, it’s about a month until principal photography starts on both Keeper of the Pinstripes and Yelling to the Sky, and, even though I’ve nearly stopped sleeping and going to the bathroom to free up time, even though I’m considering mainlining Peptid AC for the stress, both films are, actually, doing just about as well as we possibly could have hoped.

[And, even more amazingly, I think they might both end up really, really good.]

For anyone curious to see how the mini-shoot went this past week:

Faster than expected, and with much better weather than we could have hoped for, we made it through our stadium mini-shoot. The footage we’ve gotten back from the lab so far looks amazing – the swooping shots that pan up and across the old stadium to the new, for example, make nearly getting killed by oncoming traffic while we held cars to drive our crane through totally worthwhile.

Now it’s back to the office for eight weeks of pre-production (and, in parallel, eight weeks of pre-production for the other film we’re shooting this fall) before heading back to the trenches to shoot, shoot, shoot.

Old stadium on left, new on right, 4 train heading downtown in the foreground.

Old stadium, interior. The seats are gone, chunks of wall are missing, and the field is an uneven, muddy mess.

Our director, cinematographer, first camera assistant and visual effects supervisor, checking out potential shots.

Me, coordinating crew and rocking the hard hat.

Moving the crane from the old stadium to the new.

Looking into the empty new stadium.

Watching the crane shot on monitors.

The ‘skeleton crew’ shoot in and around the old Yankee Stadium scheduled for next week has now expanded to include a 100-foot crane, trucks and teamsters, about three times the head-count originally anticipated, and a plan to lay dolly track down a stretch of one of the South Bronx’s busiest thoroughfares.

As predicted, downhill indeed.

[Remember when I used to blog? Me too.]

The old Yankee Stadium is a crucial backdrop – nearly a character – in Keeper of the Pinstripes. So, we’d based much of our production plans around the demolition schedule we’d received from the Yankees’ management.

Turns out, there are actually four different crews working on the demolition, only one of which works for the Yankees. And the schedule we’d received was for the slowest, by far, of the crews. Stick to our original shooting plans, and by the time principal photography started, there wouldn’t be much stadium left.

So, very quickly, we’ve rejiggered our approach, throwing together a small four-day shoot to capture as much footage of the old stadium – during the day and at night, from the ground and from above, next to the new stadium and by itself – as possible.

That way, with the requisite footage in the can, no matter how those four teams’ schedules shift, we’ll be spared worrying about the ticking time bomb of stadium demolition as we shoot the rest of the film.

A week from Monday, then, our mini-shoot will be underway. We hope. So far, we’ve had to convince the City of New York (who now control access to the inside of the old stadium) that, though they denied similar permission to CBS and ABC, they should let our little crew in. We’ve had to convince agents that, though we’d already negotiated deals with department heads based on a specific number of pre-production and shooting weeks, they should let us tack on a few additional weeks at no further cost. And we’ve had to lock down decisions on things like lenses and film stock, set design and visual effects, that we’d otherwise have far, far longer to work our way through.

So, suffice it to say, we’ve been busy. And, frankly, I think it just goes downhill from here.

Production offices are open, and the shoot countdowns are on. Things are totally insane, though, fortunately, still in a good way.