He’s Dead & So Am I gets the green light!
Or, more appropriately, we gave ourselves the “green light” to make it. Our first feature and we’re making it together… pretty rad. Gabe Casdorph and I have been friends since 2003 and talked about making a movie together about a month into that friendship. But making movies is serious business and we were very stupid back then.
Gabe was determined to make movies and went on to become a powerhouse on the production side, doing everything imaginable on set (even directing some shorts, web series, TV Shows, and commercials). Whereas so many actors say “but what I’d really like to do is direct”, Casdorph wanted the opposite. He watched a particularly strange episode of Happy Days and decided that Ron Howard (although an incredible director) was a fool. Acting is where it’s at, baby! In no time at all, Gabe found himself acting for the likes of Kevin Costner (Yellowstone), Steven Soderbergh (Mosaic), and Taylor Sheridan (Wind River).
While Casdorph was establishing himself as a staple of the Utah film industry, I was hard at work honing my skills as a writer. From my post-college early days working in development with Dick Clark Productions & Zucker Productions, I learned what it takes to get a project off the ground. I also learned that you can write for TV shows & movies in development but you don’t get money OR a credit unless they get made! But writing over 40 scripts and having a few optioned had a wonderful effect on me; it made me a much better writer than I was back when Gabe and I were dumb guys in our early 20s.
When the film that we had initially desired to make in early 2019 fell apart due to financing, we were determined to reassess and make something on our own- something totally self-financed. The script we had, was just too expensive. Taking a look at what we had in the bank and what the bank was willing to give us, it was clear that we needed to make something sub-$500K if we wanted that kind of freedom. He’d Dead was an idea I had transferred from one notebook to another over the course of fifteen+ years and for some reason, it seemed to call to me to write it.
Maybe it’s because the theme spoke to me; redemption. You can mess up and be stuck in “purgatory”, but by your own actions along with some help from The Man Upstairs, you can get yourself out. I mean, maybe… no spoilers.
Over the course of three days, the ghosts went from being Seth Rogan & Jonah Hill-types to something we thought hadn’t been seen before; a nervous Chevy Chase (minus the alleged personal issues) and a foul-mouthed, female Marty McFly. Best friends. Very much dead. Sick of being stuck in purgatory, finally ready to try to break out. Sorta. Thirty days later, we had our shooting script and with the help of some truly wonderful people, we were on our way to getting a feature MADE.
UPDATED August 30, 2019
The script is done, budget secured, actors on-board, crew culled from the deep recesses of Utah, Idaho, and California, and the United States Forest Service is willing to grant our permit request- we are making He’s Dead & So Am I in two weeks.