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Free advice is something we've always welcomed. Major free advice flowed from various local professionals who'd been around the entertainment business.

The most outspoken free advisor was this guy Barclay, a producer who had just moved from Southern California to Colorado.

Barclay was bitter about the evils of Hollywood, and gave us warnings about everything we could and couldn't imagine about making movies in LA. "They'll fuck their mothers for a dime!" was his refrain when describing Hollywood executives and the like.

Barclay was convinced that we were totally nuts for doing what we were doing. He was continually surprised by our ability to pull off our plans, whether it was raising money, working within our shoestring budget, or bringing together the crew and cast we had. He loved to tell us that "God protects fools and drunks." That was encouraging, because we had a good combination of both on board.

Certainly the most alarming words of advice came from Jim Leclair, a local Assistant Director who had worked on many professional low budget features. Jim looked over the script and shooting schedule and asked us some hard questions about the logistics of our production.

Questions ranged from: How do you plan to cross a large river in the middle of winter? How are you going to plan for snow-storm scenes? What kind of bathroom facilities will you have in the woods with a large crew? etc.

We had some untested strategies for dealing with all these problems, but for the budget we were working with, there were certain things that we could not properly plan for -- only hope for. We left these things to the gods of guerilla film making, and they usually worked out one way or another.

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