Jake Forgotten

In the late part of 2006, I started polishing a screenplay - based on a novel I had written - for a film called Jake Forgotten. In January of 2007, we started scouting locations and looking for actors. The film takes place in the 80s in New York, but ... for budget and resources... we decided to set the film in ¨The City¨in the 90s.

The idea is a simple one: A normal guy (Jake) works as a cab driver and finds himself in a situation where he helps out a mob boss. Eight years later, he is working for the mob, in over his head and trying to get out. It is a character study and a film about Jake, his best friend Rick and Jake's desire to get out of a bad situation.

I had this idea that, because we all know what the mob is (especially after seeing The Sopranos for so many years), the mafia would just be a backdrop. No need to explain it to death or really delve into it. I also thought, because the story is about Jake and his longtime friend, Rick, we could spend most of the time dealing with their relationship, as well as Jake's relationship with his childhood girlfriend, Becky.

For budget reasons, we chose to shoot the film in and around Kansas City, where I was living at the time (and where I met my wife, Laraley). We called around, drove around, found all the locations and started putting a crew together.

We did casting calls. We had people read the script. We had over 100 people read for various parts, of which about 25 people made it into the final film, in one form or another. We originally had a LA actor set to play Jake, but this guy (JP Matthews) came in and read for the part and just blew me away with his sensitivity and passion for the role. He ended up getting the part of Jake.

Rick ended up being played by Doug Kisgen, who I personally cannot say enough good things about. He is literally, just a fucking talented actor.

The total budget for the film, in hard costs, was somewhere around $65,000. I put up the majority of this money myself and several of my friends put up about $15,000 or so for the film. We all knew going in it would be an experiment - as all indie films are - and that we were taking a risk on making a film at all.

I managed to find a great crew, especially our Director of Photography, Stewart H. Redwine and our Assistant Director, Brandon. Several people worked very, very hard - from the three weeks of rehearsals to the 20 days of shooting, working about 10-12 hours a day.

We rented three JVC GY-HD100 cameras, which shoot 720p onto tape and did a three camera shoot for the entire film. We rented a 1 ton truck, loaded with gear, and drove that to locations in and around Kansas City, showing up and ... frankly... surprising nearly every location with our giant amount of equipment.

We shot in May and June of 2007 and had over 50 hours of footage, most from multiple angles.

In late 2007, I personally finished an assembly of the film. The assembly (or rough cut) had temporary sound, temporary effects, no establishing shots (those were shot later). The dialogue is off in some places, but overall ... for a 3 month edit... I was pleased with the assembly.

Since then, I have been busy traveling, teaching and working on a ton of other films. I haven't had the time or money to finish this feature film, which runs about 84 minutes in length, but I hope to finish it someday... or, with any luck, get a decent budget and reshoot the damn thing.

It was my first time as a writer/director/editor and I made plenty of mistakes, but ... for the money ... I think we made a hell of a good looking film.

We spent countless soft dollars and hard hours doing work for free to edit, color correct and add effects and sound to the film. Overall, it was a labor of love and we still haven't finished it, three years later. I think this is failry typical for first-time writer/directors and for indie film. It just takes forever to get done, somehow. And, it is never really finished, as they say.

Warning: The film contains violence, nudity, profanity and just about everything else you don't want to show your children. It is an R-Rated movie about a guy in the mafia, so you can imagine how much swearing there is in it.

Download and watch the full assembly here

Update: My DropBox account was suspended because of too much traffic. I am assuming this is a good thing! I will have Jake available on Blip.tv (thanks to a Twitter follower) in high definition 720p in the next day or so. Thanks for being patient while I resolve this problem. (further update: turns out that Blip.Tv did not work either, so I am exploring alternative solutions)

Updated again: Rob Maxwell graciously and generously offered to host the 1GB file.

(Warning: This file is slightly over 1GB in size and is full-quality 720p. It might take a while to download).

Download the full Rough Cut of Jake Forgotten here 

OR

Download the Zipped Version (slightly smaller) here

OR

Watch Jake Forgotten online (lower quality!)

And, for those of you who are torrent crazy, the .torrent file is here 
(which requires a bittorrent client, like uTorrent)

Thanks to Brad Hagen, Rob Maxwell and all the other folks on Twitter who helped me get this file online while I was traveling through Central America.

P.S. If you are in hollywood, be sure to let me know what you think of this film. For under $100k, I think we did a pretty great job and made a movie that looks like a million bucks.

Comments

[Nick G.]

Hey John just a heads up, but the dl link is broken.

-- Yep. DropBox suspended me for too much bandwidth usage. I am moving it to another place today. Thanks!