LUCIDMEDIA

Walker’s inspiration was Alex Tew’s Million Dollar Homepage concept, where a 21-year-old student from England raised money for university by selling pixels on his homepage to advertisers. Ultimately, Tew raised a total of $1,037,100 US over a period of about six months with the final pixel being sold for about $38,000 on eBay. The idea fit Walker’s sensibilities about how he’d like to raise the money to make his feature directorial debut, “I wanted to open it up to the public, and I liked the idea of basing it on frames as a kind of setting or basis for investment,” said Walker about his site, “it then became about how I was going to get it out there.”

Walker began by consulting Tew’s publicist to get advice and tips. He then talked to lawyers and business people to establish the nuts and bolts of the site: how the website would work and how to get it started. Walker spent a couple of months trying to get private investment to launch the site in a big way, but people wanted too much control and Walker wanted to maintain as much of that control as possible. The point of the sight was to go completely grassroots by selling each frame of film for $10 a piece, making it an affordable investment for even the most frugal supporter of the arts. “The people that buy frames are my bosses now. A lot of people have been asking me about what it’s like to work for myself and I say, I don’t work for myself. I work for everybody that sends me ten bucks.”

Walker doesn’t think badly of the grant brokers in government or the studio system; he just wasn’t willing to go through it. “In a way, this is ‘beg, borrow and steal’, it’s just that I’m not ‘stealing’ in any way. I’m not really a traditional person, and I don’t have the most patience ever, so to go through the grant system of the studio system, you kind of have to have a certain amount of patience being a first-time filmmaker. The government institutions are put there to help, but I have friends I’ve seen go through the process and it was a nightmare for them and in the end, they got their projects made, but it took a long time.”

In less than a year, the website went from bright idea to coming into Internet reality, all done in Walker&rsquos spare time as he continued his work on the YTV hidden camera show Prank Patrol. By the end of August, MyMillionDollarMovie.com was up and running and ready for visitors. “We put out a press release, sent out 2000 e-mails working the grassroots approach through independent media as well as our contacts in the industry. I went to bed at 11 on Monday night and at 11:05, unbeknownst to me, the site crashed.”

But technical difficulties are just par for the course; despite the initial fear and shock, the site just went over its bandwidth from being bombarded the day before—business had tripled in a single 24-hour period. There was also some confusion as to the purchasing procedure, but Walker’s intention was clear: visitors could either buy a single frame for ten dollars or buy as many frames as they liked. Everybody that buys a frame gets an associate producer credit on the movie but if an individual buys enough frames or encourages others to buy frames, then there may be an opportunity for them to be promoted to co-producer. As it stands now, a little more than 15,000 frames have been sold leaving about 135,000 for potential investors. Walker promises that it is possible for people to earn a return on their investment, but he adds that there’s no magic formula to know how the movie is going to do.

By now you&rsquore probably wondering about the plot behind the Million Dollar Movie. On the website, Walker compares Free For All...But You to modern comedy staples like There&rsquos Something About Mary, Chasing Amy, and Bottle Rocket. Initially, that was all we were going to get plot-wise about the movie, but since the beginning of September, Walker has been lifting the veil of secrecy and posting a new page from the script every Monday. “The publicist from Million Dollar Homepage made it very clear that we were going to lose the interest of people who might otherwise buy in larger numbers because they&rsquoll be a little more hesitant about what they were buying into; [we did this] so they could know what they&rsquore associating themselves with.”

Free For All...But You follows the unlikely love triangle of the buttoned-up Martin, the buttoned-down Berry, and their new love interest, Jennifer. Both men hope to woo Jennifer, but they then find out that she&rsquos part of a group of eight friends who are all exclusive to each other in some kind of wacky love cult;mdash;the key is that no one in the group is allowed to enter a relationship with anyone outside the group. Walker wrote the screenplay from a story he wrote with former writing partner Jon Tucker (not the one that Must Die). Walker’s hope with releasing pages of script was to show potential investors what they were buying into and to create another level of buzz as people would be encouraged to keep coming back to see new pages and speculate about where the story is going and what actor might play certain characters.

Walker is glad to be finally making progress on this film, one that was, for too long, in production limbo as the rights changed hands from one producer to another. &dlquo;Rights are a tricky thing,&rlquo; says Walker, &dlquo;I&rsquom in the first year of a three-year option phase, so I&rsquom comfortable with the amount of time I have, but it was a bit of an ordeal to get it back—not on the part of any one individual, but because that&rsquos just the way circumstances work.&drquo;

Walker had been looking for another avenue to get back into directing; he ended up finding it in Prank Patrol, but he still wanted to buckle down and do a movie. For years he had used Free For All...But You as a spec script to get him writing jobs, doing treatments for other projects, but he found this rather unfulfilling as his creative input in the final product was rather limited. Frustrated over lack of creative control, Walker jumped at the opportunity to reclaim the rights of the script that started his movie writing odyssey, and although all the scut work paid the bills for over a year, Walker can live without ever having to talk about all the projects he had to slave on to put food on the table. “I’ve done a lot of work that will probably never see the light of day and I’m probably under some kind of legal obligation to never talk about it.”

If My Million Dollar Movie website is successful in raising the capital to make Free For All...But Me, Walker will use it to help others buck the system and get started on their own film dreams. He doesn’t anticipate having to go guerilla for his next movie and believes in giving back to those that help. So while the website was in the planning stages, Walker was thinking ahead, because he himself knows how difficult it is to break into the movie business, especially if you don’t know anyone. Walker got lucky and was discovered in Ottawa by a woman in the industry who suggested he make the journey to Montreal and get into TV. “Luck is where opportunity meets preparation. I’d been preparing my whole life to get there and I just hit that opportunity. But a lot of people never get that opportunity and they can be insanely talented, so I’d like to give that next writer, director, or even producer the opportunity to go through this process.”

Most of all, Walker would like people to know that this is a serious endeavor; helping that is the fact that he&rsquos pretty transparent about the process and letting people know everything that’s going on. “We want people to know that we’re here to stay and that we’re not ripping people off. We want this to work for everyone, and even when people just make their money back, that’s a success. If you make a dollar off a ten-dollar investment, that’s a ten-percent return and not a lot of people get that.”

If Free For All...But You turns out to be a box office success, its investors will be given the first right of refusal on investing in the next movie project from an all new director. For more information on the movie and how you can buy a frame or frames, visit www.mymilliondollarmovie.com.