That Time I Was Going To Jail - Part 2

Or, How I Started Taking SSRIs

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If you didn’t read Part 1 - I’d recommend reading that first. You can find it here.

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So, I had made a feature-length movie and now I had to figure out what to do with it.

I submitted it to a few festivals and started showing it to friends, friends of friends, friends of friends of friends… really, anyone who might be interested.

And then, next thing I knew…

Someone wanted to buy it.

And they were going to distribute it through a major studio.

I know it sounds like I’m skipping some steps there… but I’m really not. It just sort of happened.

A friend of a friend who saw the trailer put me in contact with a company looking to acquire films. The company watched the movie, which was surprising in and of itself, but then, even more surprisingly, they wanted to buy it.

(Without getting into the specifics of micro budget distro deals, let it be known that this was not a life-changing amount of money. Often, getting any distribution at all is the real reward in these scenarios.)

(Un)reality Sets In

My mind was blown in so many ways. That I managed to make a feature more or less by myself, that it had cost me less than 1,000 bucks, and then that someone actually thought people would like it… I couldn’t wrap my head around it.

I made the deal not ever really believing it was real.

But it was.

The reality finally hit when it came time to hand everything over.

They call everything you give to a distributor after you sell them your film “deliverables.” This includes high quality versions of the film, mixes of the film with the dialogue separated out for foreign markets, still photos for publicity, and mountains and mountains of paperwork.

I had 30 days to turn in my deliverables.

I chugged away creating all the items on the list (I had to call up my actress and stage some ‘on set’ photos since we had none), but when it came to filling out the paperwork… that’s where I ran into trouble.

I realized, I didn't have all the things I should.

Namely, location releases. I had just been making this film for fun, to see if I could, location releases had hardly seemed necessary when we were running around grabbing shots wherever and whenever. And now here I was, with this incredible opportunity to have the movie distributed, and I didn’t have this very important item.

I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t just call up Union station and explain that I had no money but I needed them to retroactively sign a location release for my film.

I asked everyone I knew (and lots that I didn’t) what I should do. The vast majority told me not to worry about it. These were experienced people who had been working in film for a long time. Ultimately, they said to just ignore it. After all, it was just a few shots. Not a big deal.

But.

The form asked me!

I had to tell the truth!

I couldn’t get around that part. It actually literally said on the form that if you provided any incorrect information you would be committing perjury.

PERJURY!

So. My solution? Reshoot and re-edit and re-mix the whole film before I have to turn it in and make sure to get releases this time. Yeah.

At this point, I had even less than 30 days because I had wasted the first two weeks spiraling into a puddle of despair.

And yet… somehow… I pulled it off. I turned everything in on the last day. I hadn’t slept in God knows how long, but I did it. I remember showing up to the office with my hard drives and stacks of papers and no one even knowing who I was or what I was doing there. What had felt like the biggest, most important deadline of my life clearly wasn’t. What I had taken as etched in stone had actually been much more flexible.

You would think that after seeing this, I would have calmed down about the whole thing. You would think I would have realized that I was blowing everything out of proportion.

But, That’s When I Got Crazy

Even though it was over, even though I’d reshot and redone everything and turned it all in, I still thought I was going to get in trouble. Worse, actually. I thought I was going to go to jail.

The thing is, I was convinced that I had missed something. They were going to find a mistake and then that would be it. They were going to come after me, sue me, and when I couldn't pay, I'd end up jail.

Yes, literal jail. ¹

Part of me knew this was nuts, but it was a very small part.

The larger, much louder part, truly believed this was going to happen.

I became obsessed. It was all I could think about. It was all I could talk about with EVERYONE (sorry, everybody).

I'd see an ad for Orange is the New Black on the side of a bus and freak out (yes, really).

If I was watching a movie and suddenly there was a scene about someone getting arrested, I broke out into a sweat.

I started to get paranoid.

I was finding it difficult to function in my everyday life.

When I spent a whole day at work talking to AT&T and Apple about whether or not someone could hack into my phone, I knew that I needed help (if anything, so that when I went to jail I’d be mentally healthy).

Prozac, FTW

I saw a psychiatrist and that’s when I finally went on SSRIs. In just a few months, I felt much better. While I could still definitely get triggered, (any email regarding my movie showing up in my inbox made me physically ill) I was able to move on.

As I began to process everything in therapy and look at what had brought me to that breaking point, I finally saw the thread of anxiety that had run through my entire life and never noticed. I knew I ‘worried’. I knew I got ‘stressed.’ But I didn’t know that my level of anxiety was outsized. That it was constant. That it could build into a Bay of Pigs level of tension that was truly existential.

Now

All of this was years ago and I’m much better now, although I still take medication and see a therapist.

However, there’s still even a small twinge of anxiety as I write this. In the back of my mind is the question, ‘Will someone read this and get me in trouble?’

That said, I don’t think I’m going to go jail anymore.

Mostly.

1. I’m guessing the whole mention of ‘perjury’ on one of the forms had really planted a seed deep in the anxiety fountains of my mind.