Hollywood Scripts That Could Have Been No-Budget Movies

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combatentropy

Veteran
What are Hollywood movies that you like that could have been made for a fistful of dollars? I'm thinking of The Sixth Sense --- many of M. Night Shyamalan's movies actually. Probably not Star Wars.

Make sure you're understanding what I'm saying. I am not saying that it would likely be as good. I'm just saying it's possible, and if you have some talented director and actors and you work really, really hard, it might turn out --- watchable. Movies with:

1. Just two or three actors per scene
2. Scenes in ordinary places, like homes, maybe restaurants or something that you could get permission for if you know someone
3. Little or no special effects

There are in fact some great low-budget shorts on Youtube with great special effects. So maybe don't rule that out. But in my attempts at least, it is very hard to shoot something with more than a few people in the scene if you're not paying them. It seems harder to shoot a dinner party than a space fight.

Anyway, just to be clear, this is not knocking professional crews. They will get you more consistent results. And it would be hard to shoot a two-hour movie of anything. Things so easily fizzle out when people have jobs and kids and other obligations, to get them to keep showing up at night or on the weekends until you get the film in the can.

Hopefully this would be a long-running thread of movies that may inspire those of us who think we can never make an entertaining movie until we make it to Hollywood.

If you want, you could also post films you like that you don't think could be translated into a low-budget movie --- as like a word of warning, like "Don't even try, it would be way too cheesy." For example, I don't think Back to the Future could have a watchable low-budget version. It's not just the special effects but the costumes and sets and crowd scenes.

Here's a couple more: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Maltese Falcon.
 
Probably most romantic comedies...Most of the money in those goes to star salaries. James L Brooks's romcom How Do You Know had a ridiculous budget of 120 million dollars.
 
American Beauty springs to mind.
"Probably not Star Wars." - by the standards of other big movies released in 1977 Star Wars's budget wasn't exceptional - less than half of A Bridge Too Far, less than The Spy Who Loved Me; about half of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and just a little bit more than The Deep. The other top grossing films were mainly much smaller affairs - Annie Hall, Smokey & The Bandit, The Goodbye Girl, Saturday Night Fever at much lower budgets (although funnily, I can't seem to find any information about that last one's costs). Kinda makes you think though, doesn't it - out of the 10 top grossing films that year, more than half were enduring works that will probably still be watched in some form or other a century from now (assuming we haven't all been vapourised before then).
 
combatentropy said:
...

1. Just two or three actors per scene
2. Scenes in ordinary places, like homes, maybe restaurants or something that you could get permission for if you know someone
3. Little or no special effects

...
Click to expand...


Napoleon Dynamite

*Edit*
It was made for just a fistful of dollars. $400K was the budget.
 
A little sideways, however did anyone watch Locke with Thomas Hardy (2013). Budget was $2M. Watch the movie. I think most of that money spent went to Thomas Hardy. 95% of the movie is him in a car talking on a phone. Directed and written by Steven Knight.
 
The question hinges on what constitutes a Hollywood movie but I suppose if they would have cut the waiter from the script "My Dinner with Andre" could have been done with an ever smaller budget :)
 
Batutta said:
Probably most romantic comedies...
Click to expand...
That's right. And beyond that - I have long thought that, with proper planning and rehearsal, one could shoot "How Harry met Sally" in a single day. One would have to sacrifice some location (such as the airport and move it inside a cab for a shared cab ride, as an example) and hairdo choices but it should be doable. For comparisons, soap operas can shoot upward of 100 pages of dialog per day. The big difference here is that soaps share both the directors and the acting ensemble workloads, whereas most romantic comedies devote a large percentage of screen time to two leads. On the other hand, film actors can rehearse every line while the director can rehearse every shot beforehand.

As can be seen from this opening scene, soap rehearsals take minutes, not hours.

http://www.cbs.com/shows/the_young_...Zzakmn4/the-young-and-the-restless-3-14-2017/ (the link probably won't work after a week)
 
The Squid and the Whale.

Brilliant movie, and would take extraordinary talent to pull it off, but I think it's the type that's fairly easy on the budget and technical side.

edit: Good Will Hunting maybe? Have to re-watch, might have some big budget scenes.
 
Well when you say Hollywood movies... I think of studio stuff...

I throw out Passengers... really just 2 people with a few other characters..
 
I was thinking the other day that a film like the original Friday the 13th, or one of the earlier sequels, could be re-made quite cheaply if a suitable location could be found.
 
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