Reaper Inc. — Part 8-Misc 1

AKA Being a show runner is hard.

Look, I’m not complaining, I got the job I wanted. Back in film school show runner was the number one job I wanted followed by writer, followed by cinematographer. While it’s not 100% relevant yet but it will be sooner or later director wasn’t even in my top 5 dream film jobs back then.

I wound up spending a lot of time as cinematographer, roughly 12 years and counting (I still do and look for interesting cinematography gigs). I also pretty much spent no time writing or trying to create a web series/tv series during the past decade.

The web series part isn’t 100% true. During a break I took from looking for paid work and I created “Mad Mitch’s Trash Laboratory”. While I’m proud of it I can admit that it’s okay at best. It was more a chance to see that if I had 100% control and worked with friends if I still loved film and wanted to give it a real try again. If you're reading this the answer to that is obviously yes.

Most of those introduction paragraphs are not relevant to the issue at hand — being a show runner is hard. It is, at the end of the day every major decision, every key crew hire (or even every crew hire if you’re that anal), every cast member, and approval for each script falls to you. If the series is great you’ll get most of the credit and if it’s awful you’ll get all of the blame.

It’s stressful. It’s only going to get harder as we are still in our infancy. I’m looking forward to the challenge though. In all seriousness, looking at the task ahead, I’m not sure if a younger, less experienced me, could pull this off.

Maybe but I don’t have a time machine.

Hopefully the next piece I write will be that we got the green light and it’s off to casting!

See you in the next installment!

Want to follow this whole journey from beginning? Start here!

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P.S. Filmaka didn’t directly sponsor this blog other than giving me 35,000 to make a webseries.