"Remembering AMNESIA": Or How a 23-Year-Old Filmmaker Shot an Apacolyptic Thiller for $6,000 and Gained the Attention of Media Outlets.

PART ONE
By: John Wayne Bosley

The story of AMNESIA started four months after 9/11, when I was just 22 years old. I had bought the book, "Rebel without a Crew: Or How a 23-Year-Old Filmmaker With $7,000 Became a Hollywood Player" by writer/director Robert Rodriguez. His book is considered a "must-read" by most independent filmmakers. (For those who don't know Rodriguez, he produced recent hits like SPY KIDS and SIN CITY.) After reading it, I did what many other aspiring filmmakers did: I decided to produce my first feature film... The one main difference between "us aspiring filmmakers" was that I was going to attempt an Apacolyptic Science Fiction Thriller, which would ultimately need more editing and special effects than many would think.

Rodriguez's book may have inspired me to produce a film, but it was the combination of the events of 9/11 along with the 1968 film THE PLANET OF THE APES that inspired the script. I envisioned what the world would look like if something even worse than 9/11 had happened and what would unfold afterwards. Then I envisioned the main character, Allan Carter, waking up sometime after "the event" with amnesia. The audience would be forced to learn his past as his memories slowly returned and follow his adventure into the unknown world.

AMNESIA wasn't my first screenplay, or even my second. I started writing when I was 7, but didn't write my first screenplay until I was 12. What was unique about AMNESIA was it's apacolyptic-like world, but I knew going into production that I would have a very limited budget. How would it all get done? And, get done the right way?

The book, "Rebel Without A Crew," wasn't the first book I had read about a filmmaker's journey. It was the finale of a series of books I had found along the way and had been reading for around a year about filmmakers. Before "Rebel Without A Crew" one of the books was called, "Titanic and the Making of James Cameron" which it told how he became the filmmaker who created the famous TERMINATOR movie which launch his career and eventually led to his mega-budget film TITANIC.

Cameron created TERMINATOR because he knew that sci-fi was the genre that was "hot" at the time, but knew that for the budget he would be pursuing he couldn't create an entire science-fictional world. What he did was to instead set it in a modern-day setting and have the sci-fi element be the Terminator character so that the special effects would be limited to key moments.

Applying the concept of minimizing the science fiction elements to key moments, I wrote a screenplay that would reveal the world in small dosages, but would keep the effects to a minimum. At least, that was the plan...

To Be Continued...