Diary of a Low-Budget Filmmaker

10 June 2007: Honeymoon is now available on DVD from CreateSpace.   A clip from Honeymoon and a short assemblage of snippets from the film are online at YouTube.

My name is Dan Sallitt. In the late nineties, I shot a feature film. The movie, which is called Honeymoon, is about a couple of long-time friends who marry suddenly without having had a physical relationship, and who proceed to have a nightmare honeymoon, with sexual incompatibilities and bitter conflict. No, the film is not a comedy. Shooting took place from June 28 to July 19, 1996. We shot in New York City, where I live, and in Northeastern Pennsylvania.

The money to make the film was my own, saved during the years I worked in the computer industry. The budget was somewhere in the vicinity of $60,000. Making a feature film with this amount of money is a task not to be undertaken lightly. It means begging for collaborators, supplies, and locations; working with a skeleton crew and limited technical resources; never knowing when one of the loosely-bound elements of the production will drift away.

Fortunately, a few of my friends clustered around the project. One of them--Bill Gerstel, the co-producer--came up with the idea of keeping this diary of the production. Whether this is an effective publicity stunt is open to question, but the concept of an on-line diary does have a certain scope and texture.

The most action-packed part of the diary starts around mid-May 1996 and proceeds through the end of shooting on July 19. Before and after that period, the diary entries are sparser and less urgent, though one hopes that the entire process is interesting in one way or another.

Click here to look at the most recent diary entry. To look at any other entry, select one of the following links.

Click here to see quotes from critics about Honeymoon.

Click here to see the Honeymoon press kit.

Please send comments, suggestions, etc. to sallitt at post dot harvard dot edu.



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