Hi friends!
I’m Lane, and I’m the writer/director of Addict Named Hal. I’ll be the primary writer on this blog, though we may have guest posts from time to time.
I’m here to tell you about our movie and our process. We are self-producing a feature film. We’ve got a team of great minds, but most of us are doing this for the first time, completely from the ground up. In this digital age, filmmaking is only becoming more accessible. We believe that accessibility means more, better stories, especially from marginalized voices.
Through this blog we’ll share with you how we’re making this film. A lot of the time we have more questions than answers, but if I’m sure of one thing, it’s that I know a hell of a lot more about self-producing on a microbudget than I did when I started asking questions a year ago, and I’ll know even more a year from now when we’re watching the first rough cut of this film. I want our choices and progress to be documented for us and also for any filmmakers out there who want to know what others did.
I’ll start today by introducing you more fully to Addict Named Hal.
Our story starts with my story.
On January 19, 2019, I found my fiance dead. We had been engaged and living in a house I bought for one month. We’d find out six weeks later that he died of a heart attack; there were no symptoms. After he died, my drinking spiraled completely out of control, to the point where my hands were shaking by 10:30 AM from withdrawal. I tried to be very Poetic and Dramatic and go to rehab on April 19, three months to the day after he died - and I ended up with my clean date being 4/20. That’s still my clean date and it’s also my favorite joke.
That’s where I used to think the story started - but the reality is that I was drinking alcoholically for a long time before that. It was just easy to shrug off as partying in my youth. After rehab, I went to a halfway house for six months, which saved my life. I’m now a third-year MFA student in Directing at the University of Texas at Austin, with over 3 years clean.
Addict Named Hal comes from a place of love and gratitude for the many heroin addicts I met while living in the halfway house. These people got me through the worst time in my life. They’re in a myriad of places now - still clean and working, relapsed and back in treatment, in prison, dead. Everyone has had their own path. There is not one addiction story; there are as many as there are addicts. Hal seeks to capture that and increase compassion for the difficulty of early recovery and the way systems are often not set up to help people succeed.
I first wrote the screenplay for Hal in 2017, about 4 months after moving out of the halfway house. My background was in theater and I had been trying and failing to write a play about recovery. As soon as I switched to screenwriting (at the suggestion of our producer, Lowell Blank), everything fell into place. In a movie, I could show the wide variety of characters and glimpses of their lives that I needed to show.
With Lowell’s insights, I revised and revised Hal through 2017. In 2018, we shot a short film version and tried on an aesthetic. Through that, we learned that a gritty, raw, intimate, emotional cinematic approach will serve us much better than the polished, composed shots that short started out with. After shooting the short (which we produced together), we decided that while we submitted it to festivals and hoped it would be noticed, we would also officially start moving on making our own picture our own way. I and so many others still struggle with and die from addiction - this is an urgent story and we can’t wait around to tell it. We gave ourselves permission, and it’s been terrifying, but we’re here.
At the time of this writing (July 22, 2019), we are entering our real preproduction stage. We have determined our production timeline, minimum and dream budgets, hired area heads, developed a lookbook, and applied for grants. We are now scouting locations, inviting sponsors, and at the end of this month, holding our first round of auditions in Austin.
Making this film feels both totally doable and totally overwhelming at the same time. I’m excited and terrified. Feature filmmaking, at least on this side of shooting, feels like equal parts perseverance and delusion. There’s nothing else I’d rather be doing.
I hope you keep checking out this blog to hear about updates, artistic conversations, and a window into our work! If you have any questions that you’d like to see addressed on this blog, feel free to drop us a line.
Yours,
Lane Michael Stanley | July 23, 2019
