I’m back from the Bahamas.  I gotta say, L.A. actually feels a little chilly.  Perspective is a funny thing.  Typing reminds me that one of the fingers on my right hand hurts slightly.  I bent it back catching myself on a table, when I lost my balance standing on a chair to watch a Caribbean rhythm band that surprised the wedding guests.  My falling had nothing to do with the drink in my left hand, but my attempt not to spill said drink did make the fall worse.  It was an awesome moment, my foot twisted in the seat back, behind me a ledge with an 8-foot drop.  I actually remember thinking, during those several seconds of struggling for equilibrium, that I needed to do more things like this.  They would, undoubtedly, make me a better writer.  That means the whole weekend in the Bahamas a tax write-off, doesn’t it?

In the time I was gone, a whole lot of actors and other mediamakers have responded to the craigslist postings I renewed before I left.  I need to sort through those.  Cool that so many people are interested.

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When I was in college, I trained myself to sleep on airplanes.  It’s easy, really.  You just do an all-nighter before your flight.  Now I have a Pavlovian response to flying, such that as soon as I lean back on that unyielding headrest with the circulated air pumping in my face, I’m out.  It doesn’t always last, though, so I’ll sometimes still do the all-nighter before in order to make sure I can sleep through most of a flight.

Tonight I’m taking a red-eye to the Bahamas for a friend’s wedding, so I slept only two hours.  Should be perfect.

It’s tough, though, to get yourself when you don’t have to.  My technique?  I use some important task that I MUST get done before I leave, and I procrastinate that task juuuuust enough.  After you’ve done lots of time-wasting and feel like going to sleep, you can’t, because you still have to do the important task.  For example, my to-do list last night included working on a client’s web site for a few hours, contacting the people involved in the spec commercial we’ll be shooting, and buying some pants to wear to the wedding.

Faced with that work to do, what did I do when I got home?  Watched Mythbusters, then Lost, then last night’s The Shield, then the new South Park.  Then I dove in to several episodes of season seven of The West Wing.  That lasted me until about 4 a.m., at which point I felt like falling asleep.  But I couldn’t, because I still needed to work on the web page.  Brilliant.  So I built web stuff until about 8 a.m., and finally let myself sleep.  But I had to set an alarm for a couple hours later, and I couldn’t sleep through it, because I still had to send e-mail and buy clothes.)  The trick, of course, is knowing just how many West Wing episodes to watch before you start your work.  It’s a science.  Few people accuse me of making healthy choices when it comes to sleep, but at least I will arrive in the Bahamas well rested from a night of plane sleep.

More from me when I’m back next week.  I’m about to spend 3.5 days away from the internet, which I’m not sure I’ve done since there was an internet.

Perhaps the best job description for “producer” I’ve ever heard was exemplified for me in a college improv group. Upon discovering that another group was using our rehearsal space, the director said to his colleague, “You’re the producer. Produce us a room.”

It’s difficult to describe what a producer does, especially since the specific responsibilities can vary so much from project to project. Adding to the complication, some producers are very hands-on in every phase, and some stand back doing almost nothing. Some are so good that they make it look like they’re doing nothing, when actually their work load is monumental. (How to tell the ones who just make it look easy from the ones who do nothing? That’s another matter.) But that “produce us a room” mentality has always informed my thinking on a producer’s role. A producer or a producing team needs to provide anything and everything, from a business or creative or logistics perspective, so that the rest of the people in a creative project might need in order to do their jobs effectively. All while staying on budget, of course.

After meeting with a dozen or so of the different video/filmmakers who have responded to my advertisements, I had a good group of people I wanted to work with. And each of them had people they could bring on board, too. This is L.A. You can’t swing a stick. The only things in short supply are good ideas and people with the initiative to execute them. With great people lined up, I knew that if I was going to move forward with my moviemaking army, I needed to select a project for us to work on, and just do it.

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You know how we frequently go see a movie not because of its genre, or who made it or what it’s about, but because of who’s in it? I’ve been thinking about which performers have earned my trust, such that their involvement alone is enough for me to believe I will see a great movie.

Now, today’s Top 10 list does not necessarily include my favorite actors, or the people I think deliver the best performances. Michael Caine is fantastic, but you never know when he might make a Bewitched or a Miss Congeniality. As much as I’ll expect to like his performance in anything he does, I can’t trust John Malkovich to pass on scripts like Eragon or Art School Confidential. Steve Martin is one of my favorite entertainers, but he has also made some real duds.

And there are, of course, eye candy performers whose movies I will catch no matter what. I admit to you here and now to watching both Underworld and its atrocious sequel for a chance to see Kate Beckinsale in vinyl. But that hardly makes her a performer whose taste in movies I trust.

Qualifiers have few sell-outs picture in their career, and overall have good taste in what projects they should take on. I haven’t seen every movie ever, so I’m sure I’ll mess up on somebody, but here’s my list:

#10

Johnny Depp–This guy was my favorite actor since long before it was cool to have Johnny Depp as your favorite actor. We’re talking Jump Street early He brings so much to every project he touches that they may or may not be great before he comes on board. Maybe it is a self-fulfilling prophesy that movies he choses will be good. Would you have trusted a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory remake if he hadn’t been in it? And his career has pretty much been great project after great project, all the way back to the first Nightmare on Elm Street. So why not further up on this list? Well, there’s the fact that he seems to want to play a pirate for the rest of his life, for one thing. And then he has stinkers like Sleepy Hollow, From Hell, and The Corpse Bride to answer for. But I have to be forgiving, chalking those films up to his willingness to risk-take, realizing that that same risk-taking brought us Blow, Chocolat, and Benny & Joon. Can’t wait to see his Sweeny Todd.

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This is the first year I haven’t done my own taxes. Given a stack of receipts from various writerly and less writerly expenses, the fact that I donated away most of my stuff when I moved to L.A., and a pile of 1090s from nine different employers over the course of the year, I figured the time had come to pay someone else to deal. I knew that I hadn’t paid in as much in as normal, since most of the work I did this year was contract labor. I was expecting to owe, rather than to get a refund. So I was disappointed, but not surprised, when my tax preparer’s initial report was that I would need to pay about a thousand dollars on my federal claim. D’oh.

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I admit that my years in sketch comedy left me a little burnt out. I am not the dynamo I once when it comes to producing, directing, acting, editing, publicizing, sound designing, ticket-taking, and doing whatever else it takes to get my writing made. I had refocused my energy on TV writing, a light having come on for me that this was my ultimate career path. And so, I thought, I’ll just keep writing. Eventually someone ELSE will do the producing.

So far, not so much.

I’ve realized, though, that this is not just some signal from the gods that my writing isn’t good enough to get made. (I hope.) But the fact is that during the time I was focusing on just writing, other people weren’t getting to see that writing. So it’s time to don the producer hat once again and make my work visible

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