Brian Herzlinger Talks About "My Date With Drew"
from Fred Topel
Man, I could have been in a movie. If only I’d covered the premiere for “Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle,” I would have been in the background of “My Date with Drew.” The documentary of one man’s quest to ask his childhood dream girl on a date features the film’s premiere, and shows him scamming his way into the after party. I could have been background extra #4.
Brian Herzlinger decided to pursue a date with Drew Barrymore after he won $1,100 on a game show pilot with Barrymore’s name as the answer to the final question. Using the six degrees of separation policy, he got friends of friends to connect him to people in Barrymore’s circle. But this isn’t an inside Hollywood tale. In fact, it’s an outside Hollywood tale.
Herzlinger worked temp jobs in the industry but couldn’t move up.
So he decided to make a film using a video camera bought from Circuit City, to be completed within the store’s 30 day return window. Along the way his friends, family and several celebrities chime in on his plan. His ex-girlfriend even calls, only to get jealous of his pursuit of an unattainable star.
I had my own six degrees moment with Brian during our phone interview. When he revealed he went to Ithaca College, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t found that out before. Not only did we share an alma mater, but he was only a year ahead of me. While we still haven’t figured out what class or extracurricular we had together, we bonded over the film school experience.
Was “20 Dates” an influence at all?
“No, not at all actually. None of us had seen it until we had just started shooting, and we decided to watch it just to see what he had done. We found out afterwards actually after that movie came out that a lot of the stuff that happened in that movie was fabricated. But we were very dead set on making sure that everything that happened in our movie was real and true. We were going to have the audience go along on the roller coaster ride that we went on.”
Should anybody with a video camera make a film?
“Well, if you want to make a movie, the technology is available to do it. There’s no excuse now. We shot this home movie on a video camera that fits in the palm of your hand. We didn’t have a microphone, didn’t have lighting equipment, didn’t have a tripod. We cut the whole movie on a laptop computer, so if you have a story that you want to tell, then there’s no excuse to not do it.”
Have you met a lot of aspiring filmmakers with big ideas like this?
“Yeah, [director/producer/editor Jon Gunn], [director/producer/editor Brett Winn] and myself went to film school together, so there’s a whole flock of us who moved out to LA to pursue the dream of being filmmakers. The thing we found out very quickly is that there is no set road that defines how you can actually go and become a filmmaker.
If you go to law school, you come out, you go to a law firm and you’re hired after they check you out. Same thing with a doctor. You go to medical school, you have a residency and then you’re a doctor. For a filmmaker, there’s no set road. That’s what happened with me, that’s what happened with Jon, that’s what happened with Brett. None of us expected this little movie to be the one that’s getting a worldwide theatrical release. The movie was a side effect of this journey of me just trying to make this lifelong dream come true. The only other filmmakers that we’ve talked to about the concept is friends of ours who went to Ithaca College with us.”
What does writer/director Bill D’Elia think of the finished film, since he’s a little down on your idea in the beginning?
“Bill D’Elia was the first person to stand up and cheer at the very first screening of the movie. He’s a really good guy. He’s got his opinions but the thing is that he got the journey. That’s the same response we’ve had actually with audiences around the country who’ve seen the movie, where they come up and they feel inspired by our journey. They come up to me and say, ‘Thank you for making the movie. You’ve inspired me to follow my own lifelong dream.’
The movie is about me trying to get this dream date with Drew, but more than just whether or not I got the date, it’s about the journey, about the ride. And people identify with the quest because it’s a universal theme. Everybody’s had a crush on somebody that’s seemingly unattainable, that somebody that was on the poster on your bedroom wall growing up that you dreamed about meeting. Even Bill D’Elia I’m sure has that, so once they see it they love it.”
What’s been your experience meeting journalists who’ve interviewed Drew Barrymore?
“Every journalist that’s interviewed Drew has said to me that if she’s not the best interview they’ve ever had, she’s the nicest person they’ve ever had to interview. She is what she puts out there.
I first saw her when I was six years old when I saw ‘E.T.’ It’s not creepy because she was six and it’s age appropriate. The reason I’ve had a crush on her for so long is because when you see what she’s gone through, she’s lived like seven lifetimes and could have gone down very many different paths. She could have gone down the regular child actor road like Corey Haim or something where you wind up like Gary Coleman as a security guard in a mall.
She came through all of that with such flying colors. For her to have such a positive outlook on life and spread that around, that more than any reason is why I respect and admire her so much. She just comes across so great.”
Why did you decide to embark on this while she wasn’t single?
“Well, that all stemmed from the game show. When I went on that game show and won the $1100, the fact that her name won me that money, that was my little inciting incident if you will. That was the moment of, ‘You know what? I’m going to go for it. I’m going to do it. I’m going to take this 1100 bucks and put it towards making this dream come true because she won me the money.’ So it’s all from that. That started the ball rolling.
Coincidentally during the 30 days, we knew that the ‘Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle’ premiere was going to be happening. That’s the one thing we knew that was happening for sure during our travels, because we had no idea what was going to happen from day to day. That’s why it’s such a roller coaster ride. Like I said, we didn’t do any prep. We got the camera on Monday morning and started shooting and just trying everything we could using the six degrees of separation to meet Drew.”
Is the film being used by studios as an exposé on premiere security?
It is not being used as an exposé, thank goodness. Some of the best reactions, when we put up our website, mydatewithdrew.com, it was originally to try and get Drew to see the trailer, to give her immediate access wherever she was in the world. She was traveling around the world promoting ‘Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle’ at the time. So we just wanted to make it easy for her to see the trailer.
When we put that up, we told a couple of friends and within two weeks we have over 150,000 hits on that website. It was just unbelievable, reaching as far as Spain, Greece, Portugal, Brazil. It was everybody saying, ‘Hey, go for it, Brian. Get that date with Drew and if you do, can you get me a date with Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt or Meg Ryan?’
Again, because everybody relates to the quest. But one of the best guestbook entries we got was from a guy who worked at Circuit City. He said, ‘As a Circuit City employee, you’re my worst nightmare. But as a man, you’re my hero.’ And security guys, people who for a living work these premieres and do security for them, they’ve written to the website and too and say, ‘You’re my worst nightmare, but I love the movie.’ That kind of thing.”
How much did the music rights cost to all the songs you sing in your car?
“Oh my God, all the music in our movie, we just decided to take our favorite songs growing up, or whatever happened to be on the radio that I was singing to because you sing in the car I’m sure. Everybody does. So when we were doing that, we were never thinking, ‘Oh wow, we’re going to have to pay thousands and thousands of dollars for these songs.’
They were very expensive and the only reason why we were able to use them is because after the movie was done and had won all the film festivals and was finally picked up by a distributor, in order to put it in theaters, the distributor had to pay for them.”
What took so long between “Charlie’s Angels 2” and now to get this finished?
“We edited the whole movie on Brett’s laptop computer. We spent a couple months doing that. We’d also been editing the movie while we were shooting because we had no idea how the movie was going to end, but we figured we’d edit the rest of the movie accordingly.
What we did was after we got the movie finished, we wound up going to do the film festival circuit because we wanted a distributor. It’s hard to sell a movie that you have $1,100 dollars on a DV camera that there hasn’t been a movie like this in existence before. This is the first of its kind. It’s a hybrid date romantic comedy that was shot like a documentary. And there was no blueprint on how to successfully market this movie, so it was hard to sell it.
All the studios who saw the movie loved the movie, but they were scared to take the risk in promoting it and marketing it and getting people into theaters. So we’ve spent a long time.
It was a long road to get this movie sold and to get it into theaters. We turned down offers to turn this movie into an eight episode reality TV show. We turned down a lot of money to put this on television. We really banded together and believed in our project enough to say, ‘No, this belongs in a theater. We cut it like a movie, it’s our dream to get this into theaters, we’re going to go for it.’ You know, if you don’t take risks, you have a wasted soul. So it took a long time to get the distributors interested, and then they saw how it played at the film festivals. We won all the film festivals we played at beating movies like ‘Napoleon Dynamite,’ ‘Garden State’ and ‘Super Size Me’ for the audience award for best feature. These are movies that we adored, so when we beat them out for that award, we were just freaking out. And so were the distributors. So it was just a long time coming and here we are, two years later.”
Are you afraid this might typecast you for your future career?
“Nah, no, no, not at all. I’m not somebody who ever wanted to be in front of a camera. I have been getting a lot of oncamera offers, but for me, anything I did in front of the camera would be to further my career behind the camera as a director. Kerry and Jon have their own production company called Lucky Crow Films and Brett and myself have our own production company called Rusty Bear Entertainment. Between all of us, we have a lot of projects that we have in development that are feature films with a budget much bigger than $1,100 dollars. We want to make some fiction films, get it out there.
The next thing that the four of us are going to do together is that we’re executive producing a TV series based on the movie and inspired by the whole quest in ‘My Date with Drew’ where we follow somebody else trying to make their own lifelong dreams come true in 30 days. We’re going to executive produce that and I’m going to host that and just keep moving along.”
What other types of features do you want to do?
“The ones that Spielberg makes. I want to make movies that inspire, uplift and just are very positive movies for people. That really stemmed from the experience we had with ‘My Date With Drew’ because when you’re playing this movie for audiences and you have them coming up to you and telling you that you inspired them to follow their dreams, that’s a hard high to match. It’s just the best feeling in the world so I want to keep doing that.”
What’s your daily income now?
“I get no money. All the money we got from the movie, we put right back into the movie to promote it and for the marketing, so it has to do well in the theaters for us to see something. And I wouldn’t change anything about this ride for any money amount. It’s been an amazing ride.”
But for money? Do you still work at E?
“I worked at E for a month. I couldn’t do it after that. It was driving me crazy. Then I wound up temping at a company that Brett cuts trailers for, a company called Trailer Park. So I was temp PAing for a while but then I had to stop so I could start this press tour. They give you a per diem, so you can eat and that’s what I’ve got.”
― gear (gear), Wednesday, 10 August 2005 20:06 (twenty years ago)
one year passes...