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"What the hell was I doing here?" I had taken another concept that was simply a idea rolling around in my head and a couple of years later I am making a feature film. This is crazy and yet not unusual.
I had a knack of tacking a idea, an invention or product and running with it. I once was approached by a banker friend of mine in 1990 who had a cardboard chair. Seriously, a cardboard chair and he spent like a bunch of money on it and hadn't sold any. He asked me if I could help him figure out a way to sell it. Of course! I shouted, not knowing anything about cardboard chairs or why anyone would want to buy one.
Well, within 6 months I had cardboard chairs being sold at Amphitheaters, Concerts and Outdoor Venues across the Country at $5.00 a piece. At the peak we were working hundreds of concerts selling tens of thousands of chairs and even landed a contract with the New York City Parks Department selling them at outdoor concerts in Central Park and all over Manhattan.
The chairs are just one of many examples. I had gotten myself or the products I created into major newspapers: Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and many more TV Shows, Magazines etc, They even had a story about me in the Japanese Stock Exchange about entrepreneurs in America. . Even with all the Media I got it still wouldn't put me at a level of having a feature film made about my life. Fact was, I was more a musician then a piano play and I just learned to take the creativity and use the business world as my sheet music.
I wrote Manic Ride from the eyes of my children, specifically my 10 year old daughter at the time, watching all of this go on, in the end the character creates a big idea and rides off into the sunset. (Shoot, I wrote it.. what do you think the dude was going to do?) Well, it was all pretty cool except the fact that the script wasn't complete and I knew it. There was no big sustained success, no final venture to ride off into the sunset in and since it was told by my kids eyes I didn't want them to lie. I knew then, at that moment in that meeting that the story wasn't done yet and I had work to do, I had to do something film worthy!
After dealing with the bizarre world of film financing getting my project made I spent the next couple of years focusing on the film financing aspect of my website. I filed a design patent for the model, worked with top producers getting advice and launched a website to make it happen. All seemed to be running together, with everything together and all kinds of people counting on me I ran into one of the most painful of human decisions: Divorce.
The next two years I dealt with Custody, Child Support and all the other finer things associated with Divorce. They say that 50% of the population will get divorced, I think what we should do before anyone gets married is make them wrestle a porcupine in a cage for like an hour and then make them jump in a pool of alcohol, then say to them "remember this, if you get a divorce it's like doing this each day for the rest of your lives". sorry, got away from focus, with the divorce going on I couldn't keep focus and just kept making mistake after mistake with hiring, launching, planning and eventually had to dissolve the project, for a while I felt that not only did I lose my "once in a lifetime" opportunity to make a film, I also began to feel like my concept of a self sustained financing model for the arts would also fall by the wayside.
It was July of 2008 that I started reading about many successful people like Robert Murdoch, Milton Hershey, Abraham Lincoln, PT Barnum, Francis Ford Coppola, Walt Disney, and Mark Twain, who all had overcome total financial collapse to reinvent themselves, adjust the situation, and move on to great success. I got inspired, got back on my feet and put my head down and started running forward again.
As I constantly update this, at this writing it is June of 2009, I have build the site www.howudewin.com, creating a feature film to promote it in theatres nationwide and with a college tour, and not only ready to finish my story it will also usher in a new generation of financing for the arts.
John DeTitta | Sitemap
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