EUGENE MANDELCORN - The Solution Filmmaker (Part 1)

Hi, I'm Tammy Gross, the scriptpreneur. Welcome to Reel Life stories where difference makers come to share their Hollywood worthy transformation stories. I love interviewing people who faced a mountain overcome it the hard way, and figured out a solution to help the rest of us conquer that same mountain. Because when we share our stories, we change lives.

All right, so I have got a wonderful, wonderful guest with me today. His name is Eugene Mandel Cor. Now he goes, he goes by a few things, but I call him the solution filmmaker. And he is, he is kind of the king of have a very brand new idea in filmmaking, that I think you're gonna love. But I'm not gonna tell you too much about him. Because really, he's been in the biz, in the whole Hollywood is in the industry of filmmaking for a few decades. And that takes, that's actually, his story is how he got into this, how we got to where he's at now. And first, before we get into all that, I just want to say welcome, Eugene.

Hi

And you can see by your background, that you've got a very interesting background, and I'm hoping it's got a lot of curiosity going for people who have not seen you in the past, and who are seeing you for the first time, they're gonna, they're gonna be blown away by some of the stuff that you do. But I want to kind of take us back in time, because you have been in the biz for so long. And I always call it the biz. And you've been doing it for so long. And you've been doing it from, from so many different angles. And, and it's just a real testament to how much you obviously love the film industry. So I want to take you back to what gave you that love in the first place. And I know it kind of takes you pretty far back to like, you know, before you were born. And I'll let you take that away.

Okay. Well, I was introduced to the film industry by my father, because my father was a silent film actor. He was born in the 1800s. And he used to take me to the, to the studios and introduced me to people. But I wasn't sure if that's what I wanted to do. You know, I felt a little bit of pressure to get in, but I wasn't sure that. So

yeah. Yeah. But, and, and you, you had to have been like just enthralled, though, by the fact that he had this whole life before you ever came along. You wanted to know a lot more about. So how did that affect you? And how did that get you to the point where you were starting to make decisions that yeah, this is for me.

Well, he was a great storyteller. You know, that was what I love. And he I kind of worship my father. But I didn't think I had the ability to be in this industry. And by the time I was a young man, I found myself living in a tent in the middle of the city. But I really didn't consider myself homeless. Because I was working in a restaurant washing dishes, I was a dishwasher, and I got free meals there. So I had food and shelter. So I didn't consider myself homeless. And and eventually I raised enough money to buy a red and white, an old red and white Volkswagen van. And I moved my cat into the van and my mattress. And that became my mobile home until I met some very interesting young people who were renting a two story house. And I didn't have enough money to rent a room in the house. But they were nice enough to let me rent the garage. And I moved my mattress into the garage and I was kind of on top of the world den

wheels under you.

And I was actually in a house, you know, but I was in the garage of the house. But I Oh, I love that I was like moving up in the world I felt and I was crazy about this young lady that that stayed in one of the upstairs bedrooms. But every time I met her I was like, tongue tied. I couldn't even speak you know. So finally I got up the nerve to ask her out here And to my amazement, she said yes. So we were on our first date. We're driving to this new night club called Finnegans Wake. And on the way I couldn't concentrate on the road completely, I was always glancing over at her because I couldn't believe that this beautiful woman was in my van. And then I noticed suddenly that there were no other cars on the road. It was no lights behind me, no lights in front. And then I heard then I saw lights, and all the lanes behind me. And I could hear the sirens. I thought, Oh, they must be after somebody, maybe I should pull over and let them get past me. Then I noticed that there were lights and all the lanes in front of me, coming towards me, and more silence. And I finally pulled over, stopped. And I was surrounded by police cars with the lights. In my eyes, I couldn't even see where I was at. And they were calling they were announcing exit the vehicle, exit the vehicle. And the lady next to me, the young lady was going into hysterics, she must have thought she was on this date with public enemy number one. I got out of the car. And I still was hard to see. But I could see now that all these police cars have their doors open. And hiding behind those doors were the policemen with their guns pointed at me. And I heard counter demands. One, one of the policeman said freeze and another one said Get your hands up, you know, and I didn't know what to do. And I heard this raking sound behind me. And I turned to the side. And I saw a double barreled shotgun staring me in the face. And I dropped the keys to the car I had a bad habit of putting my keys in my pocket. When I got out of the van. I dropped the keys to the ground. And they must have saw the flash of metal, you know, in my hand and they thought I had a gun or something. But anyway, Oh, wow. Um, they they they had me up against the van. They searched me and they searched the van and they pulled the woman out of the van. And she was still in hysterics. She was going crazy. She didn't know what was going on. And anyway, to make a long story short, that guy who almost shot me that breaking was the gun before they discharge, you know, before they discharge it. So he was telling me for half an hour, they kept us there. And he was yelling at me never exit a vehicle like that ever again. I came a fraction of a second from ending your life, your insights would have been splattered all over the freeway. And that's when I made the decision. I had a revelation that I was going to write the greatest screenplay ever written. And I was going to solve this problem that almost ended my life. So I made a screenplay, and I got it into all the major studios, partially because of my father is you know, connections. And also because I have a lot of books, but you know, yeah. So I cut it to the top producers at the studios. And amazingly, they actually read the screenplay, because they invited me to meetings with them to talk it over to talk over my script. And they all said pretty much the same thing. They said, Well, I've never in my life read a script like this before. I don't even know what genre it is.

They said, Well, you know we're in the business of making money. I'm afraid we can't take a chance on this script. Because we don't know that it will make money if we'll make money. And so that's what's my first exposure to the film business. Yeah can continue if you mad or you

keep going, keep going to take us on continue on this journey. I know there's a lot Moses

told me most of those producers that told me learn the craft, perfect the craft and they said you've got to you know, study screenwriting. So I decided I was going to try to get into UCLA or USC. Because I live in Southern California. And I couldn't get into either one. Even if I had gotten in though, I realized I didn't have the money to pay for tuition. For those schools, even if they had accepted me, my grades were not good enough in high school. So it was very hard, okay to get in. So I was very depressed. But I lived in Hollywood, which was like, the place I wanted to be. And I was walking down Hollywood Boulevard one day, and I was very depressed. I was looking down, I had my head down below. And I saw the stars and Hollywood Boulevard. And suddenly I looked up from the stars. And I saw a sign. And the sign said, new film school opening. So obviously, I walked in. And I talked to who apparently was the person in charge. And I said, Can I start taking courses in this school? Can I sign up? And they said, Well, we're not gonna be open for a few months. But if you want to be a member of the staff, you can take our classes for free. I said, Wow. So Well, obviously, I said yes. And when I started signing up people for the course, as I said, this school is not like others. Because I saw if you wanted to take comedy, you could study with Lucille Ball. If you wanted to study directing, you could take a class from Orson Welles. So I said, Wow, I just locked myself into a school. I haven't gotten to meet the people who have their stars. Yeah, that's where I went to school. Okay. And then when I finished my training there, I studied both producing and writing and screenwriting. Then I thought, Oh, I'm gonna make it big in the industry. And especially after I saw some of the other students who went to the school, were doing very well, like, you know, people like Sylvester Stallone, and James Cameron. They were all students at the school. Okay. So I thought, Wow, I'm gonna make it big. And I wasn't how nothing was happening, you know? So I thought, What am I going to do? So I came up with a plan. I said, I'm going to invite some of the other students, some who are still wannabes, who haven't made that big, you know, event in their life to break into. Yeah, I said, I'm going to invite them into my living room. And we're going to talk about what we're going to do together, we're going to brainstorm. So I had only five people show up of the people I invited. So were six of us. And I said, write down on a piece of paper, what credit you want, on your first feature film, what credit people through all wrote it down. And then once we had that in place, where I said, Let's brainstorm, what is that film going to be that feature film. So we brainstormed. 18 months later, we screened at film during the Cannes Film Festival in France. And that was the beginning. Because filmmakers from all over the world at that festival gravitated to us and film artists network fan and international organization of filmmakers became into being. So that's how I roll into the industry. Next with you have time I can tell you how we got into distribution. And keep going.

But I'll give a little hint of how it's going full circle a little bit. Right? Because you're about to go to Canada. You're about to go to Cannes right now, aren't you? Yes,

I'm going for my 33rd trip to can right. I will be

Wow. So I just thought I just like make that little connection. But yes, please keep going. What is going on next for

all these filmmakers from all around the world? And they were saying we're not making enough money on our film. Okay, right. How can we do it? So I said we had an international brainstorming session. Another meeting like that first one, but this time was already accomplished filmmakers. Okay, great. And we decided we've got to do is cut out the middleman, get rid of the gatekeepers. What we're going to do is we're going to sell our own films around the world. So we form film artists distribution, fad for sure. Okay, what? In fad, and we started selling our films. We have offices at Cannes on the French Riviera. We had offices at AFM and Santa Monica. We had offices at all the major festivals around the world festivals, I should say market somewhere not festival.

Not all festivals. Yeah, not Yeah.

But yeah, so we were selling our films around the world. And we offered our filmmakers we said, you can get 100% of the profit on your film, if you're the one who sells it. Wow. So the other companies, other sales companies, when we are first year at Cannes, they were all talking about who is this film fan film on this network? Who do they think they are thinking they can sell their own films, you know? And so they said, well, there if someone were saying, well, they're only be here for a year, then they will be gone. They're not going to make it. So then we were there two years, three years, four years. And they said, Oh my god, we're gonna have to deal with these people. They're stealing makers away from us. We're not getting our 35%. So that's how I got into distribution. So then now with this left is what I'm doing now.

And what you're doing now is pretty incredible. I mean, tell us okay, so bring us up to date then with what's what's going on behind you. Because we the way is such a fascinating thing.

Okay, I was writing for 50 years, over 50 years. Yeah, I told you how I started. And I was so depressed that I couldn't even when we made this film, the first one that I was telling you about, okay. 30, over 30 years ago, I submitted it was all democratic. I submitted three scripts, I was the only one who submitted three scripts, and it was democratic month, none of my scripts got accepted, to be named. Okay. This was the group that I had organized, okay, oh, my goodness, I thought they're wrong, something is wrong. And I realized I'm writing and I, this is not a known genre. I'm writing in a new genre, one that doesn't exist. And so then I came up with a detailed description of what this genre Yes, most films that you go to see, they mainly entertain, but they also are an escape from your problems from your daily life, you know, escape from what's going on. So I realized what my films were, were possible solutions to the problems we face every day, and was a whole new genre.

I've got to stop you there. I have a reason to stop you there. Because I'm thinking, there's more to talk about here. And it's up to you if you want to do this. But I kind of want to stop you there and kind of leave it hanging. And can we turn this into two parts? Sure we could. You need to stay tuned and calm for part two for this.