Today we’d like to introduce you to Joseph McGovern.
So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
My journey began growing up watching Disney movies – the stories and characters amazed me. In my teens, I performed on stage in small community theaters and began watching PG-13, and R rated dramas, actions, thrillers, and horror genre movies while my parents were at work. I enjoyed every form of storytelling for different reasons with each genre, but the drama genre truly fascinated me.
I found the writing to be exquisite and the actors relatable. My family was more into mainstream movies, which is entertaining, but I began to grow tiresome of the same types of stories and predictable endings which followed. I took it upon myself to dig deeper into the film world where storytelling took more risks not only on a dialogue and writing level but more elaborate set designs or less elaborate depending on the story being told; less known actors or the actors I preferred to watch less known pieces which provided more artistic liberty to their performance, different forms of lighting between mixing colors and shadows for noir vibes, etcetera. During this time diving into independent film, I felt alive watching these stories and I re-discovered the fascination I once found when I was younger.
When I transferred to Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia area, PA from King’s College in Wilkes-Barre, PA I auditioned for the mask and foil theater production “Rumors” didn’t receive a role, so I dived into production and behind the scenes and did a lot of gaffing work understanding the importance of lighting within a production. When the student musical “Godspell” came around I auditioned and received the role of the comedian, the most dialogue next to Jesus in the musical, I was excited! After a successful run for the college and community around Philadelphia, I auditioned and received more roles in theater productions to follow. I loved acting in theater; however, my true passion, and I wanted to learn film acting and creating my own projects mainly as a writer/actor.
During the last semester and final theater production, “Once on this Island” I would take part acting in the midst of preparing my final reports from my internship working in ovarian cancer research under Diane and Kenneth Soprano at Temple Medical Research Center, and finishing up my last finals for Inorganic Chemistry, Quantum Mechanics, Thermodynamics, and Instrumental Analysis courses, I was publishing my first multi-collaboration art book, “Perception”, with fifteen other artists I brought together and making the final touches on my first screenplay, “Before You’re Lost”.
This was a very taxing moment in my life and learning how exhausting and overwhelming ambitions can be. Once the semester was over, and I passed my courses, the production was a success, the book was sent to the publisher, and my screenplay was ready to go into production I linked up with the college television department and they instantly found interest in the project. We took about one year to produce the short film, but there were so many errors I chalked it up as a learning experience and didn’t want this particular project to be my first one on the film festival circuit. Through constant research every day I learned it’s best to come out strong with your first project and that was my goal.
This team and I worked on an anti-bully short film, “Stand Up,” with a local school where I lived at the time. I set my sights really high with this project, probably a little too high with the fact the cast of children with the project was between twenty to thirty kids and most of them had at least three lines or more. The shoot probably took about two weeks working every night filming Monday through Friday. When production was completed, and hit the editing board we had to make a difficult decision and throw the film in the can due to continuity errors. This film taught me the importance of small intimate casts and completing one scene at a time, so inconsistencies with wardrobe don’t occur. When you’re a novice, self-teaching the filmmaking process, the errors can be painful. But I moved on and persevered.
After this project my team and I split up, each person traveling down different paths and going in different directions. I was ok with the outcome because I just met up with a film student and we decided to link up and work on projects and eventually led to a creative partnership. Between working on freelance producing with other filmmaker’s projects including my partner’s project, “Time Goes By,” I steadily worked on the script to my next short film, “All Over Again,” and continued writing poetry and publishing for independent literary magazines, and writing song lyrics for different musicians I worked with. Once I linked my partner and myself up with my executive producers: Constance Reshey, Joseph Fuoco, and Frank Formica; we were able to pick up a RED One camera and other equipment, and we went into production at the Bus Stop Music Cafe in Pitman, NJ for “All Over Again.”
The owner was very laid back and allowed us to stay and film as late as we wanted after closing. Production lasted about two weeks in the cafe, about two months later we wrapped with pick up shots and finding locations for other scenes. Another six months passed, the company was wrapping up shooting a client’s feature film “The Finders,” and I finished writing “Hush.” Arguments began arising due to the subject matter of “Hush” with the film’s story involving the #metoo movement and taking it a step further with a pro-life/pro-choice decision to follow. I started preparing production and already cast the entire film and intended on producing it myself, a separate entity from my film company, but my team decided to jump on board at the last minute. This was the most hostile environment I’ve experienced on a film set – with the controversial content and everyone’s emotions including myself fighting for my original creative control, which I was able to maintain through the entire production. The project was exhausting and taxing physically, mentally, and emotionally. I wasn’t sure if I would do another film like this after I called a wrap on set.
Once “Hush” production was completed I took about a month off from filmmaking, I didn’t love it anymore like I used to. I still absolutely loved film – I watch films every day, and if I miss a day I make it up in double the following day. But the project destroyed my creative vibe for filmmaking – not the project itself, the atmosphere and people I once felt were family now turmoil. I began growing distant and tried to teach myself editing only on a cutting level. I wanted to complete projects and was tired of doing all the work producing films from concept and pre-production through production and finding excuses at the end of the road to why it couldn’t be completed. I walked into work one day, was called into my bosses office and together they told me I was being “let go” with smiles.
I found out later many workers lost their jobs due to budget cuts on the hospital end being affiliated with the university and its football program needing more money; since I was only three months in with no seniority, I was the first to go. I decided to sit down with my first partner, the company was a three-way partnership now, and asked the status of editing and completing “All Over Again” and in short he informed me three months prior to filming “Hush” he hadn’t had a chance in four years now to look at the film and during a power outage we lost half of the project. When I asked how bad it was, he brought me an external drive with all the remaining footage and audio files. When I opened up the external drive in the office alone on a Friday night after dropping my girlfriend off at work, I fell to pieces on the office floor crying. All my hard work gone in the blink of a power outage and no backup files were made.
Angry! Discouraged! Devastated! The Bus Stop Music Cafe went out of business, so I couldn’t reshoot there again. Reminiscing old projects in the back of my mind I thought to myself – I would have to chalk this project up like the anti-bully film as a loss and have to make another round of phone calls to give the disappointing news to everyone involved. Having to tell children who were excited to be in a movie that there isn’t going to be a movie is the hardest experience I ever had to do in my life. Once I calmed myself down, I sat back in my chair and decided to try to see if I could piece together this mess. Nothing arranged in folders, it took the entire first evening just to get the footage and audio organized and when I laid in bed that night I couldn’t sleep. Not a moment.
I walked into the office the next day alone again sat at my desk and began piecing together a story not as I originally intended but it was a start. I spent the next twelve hours cutting up between the footage nothing to eat or drink just a couple bathroom breaks and back to editing. When night hit, and it was just about time to head home I looked through my progress, and I had something here. I pieced together everything needed from the Bus Stop Music Cafe and the flashback sequences but had to trash everything else. But I knew I could work with this new story and I didn’t have to throw the entire project away. I could salvage and rescue this piece! I made a game plan to finish the film, called my actors I needed and over the next three months I set three dates to finish production. I asked my partners to help me finish the project, but when it came time to film no one showed up, so I did all the set jobs myself. My actors did assist where they could, hold sound while I worked the camera and directed the others. Most of the time I was filming with the camera, even moving the camera while taking sound and holding the boom mic at the same time. With this project, I learned you can’t trust anyone to see your vision like yourself. Motivation is the key and mixed with inspiration can create timeless moments. This was a timeless moment.
After I wrapped “All Over Again” and brought it back to the editing board, I cut the missing pieces together and finally had a film. There was still a lot of work to do, but my actors, executive producers, and even partners were amazed a rough cut was created. My one partner offered to finish the movie, and I told him I would handle it. I had one more project to complete, “Inside Jonathan Fox.” I planned production for this film to be completed two months after I wrapped “All Over Again.” During these two months emotions over money, rent, and jobs not coming in from distancing myself from the business rose, and tension grew worse. There were about four months remaining with the lease and every moment free I lived in the office – when I wasn’t working my three different jobs: construction, concrete, and catering.
When the production dates came to film “Inside Jonathan Fox” I figured since I did everything myself for “All Over Again” I would do the same for this project. Aside from a close friend, family member, and my girlfriend helping me off and on through the month of shooting on weekend mornings to nights most of the time I was filming and taking sound myself. When I called wrap on the project and brought it back to the office on the editing board my partners were infuriated with me and since there were only a few weeks remaining for the lease I purchased a couple of external hard drives, backed up every file from all of my projects, gave my last month rent money, and some extra money for the computer and equipment I took with me and left the company. I felt an array of mixed feelings on the ride back to the apartment: sadness, anger, frustration, relief, and happiness – most of all liberation. I was sad that I knew I would never see any of them again, I considered them family, but I found out in the last few weeks the feelings weren’t mutual through the entire working relationship. I mainly felt liberated not having to watch my back all the time with my footage and audio files and progress on the office computer being tampered with, explain myself, or deal with false promises any longer.
I spent the next two to three years teaching myself the filmmaking process, editing, and color grading and I would eventually meet my good friend and longstanding sound designer Matthew Amadio out of Shake Audio Post at Milk Boy in Philadelphia. Matt providing his experience, expertise, and skillset helped me bring these three projects to life with sound design and composing scores. When we released “All Over Again” into the festival circuit, it was accepted into its first film festival within two weeks and would go on to garner multiple nominations and win multiple awards! It would be about three years before I would go into production again for my newest short film, “Is this the bed we lie in?” With a nice push to have the project produced from one of my executive producers: Christine J. Noble and my two executive producers: Constance Reshey and Joseph Fuoco returned to help me launch this production. I’ve kept in touch with a cinematographer, Daniel Graham, for about a year discussing projects, lighting and shooting styles.
January 2019 Daniel Graham and his crew: Yves Armand Albaret and Joey Lorimer, and I teamed up to film and produce “Is this the bed we lie in?” When the Saturday arrived to shoot the film, my actors: Constance Reshey and Joel Blanco were ready from about three months prior of rehearsals. I was nervous. I’ve only had experiences producing work on my own since I left the film company and when I worked with them after the first film the process wasn’t as enjoyable. When Danny and his crew arrived, everyone was professional, kind, and ready to work. Together we accomplished completing production with wonderful results! It was honestly one of the best experiences I’ve had producing and directing a film – for once I was able to focus on directing and the actor’s performances and the spark I always had with filmmaking returned. It felt wonderful to be back!
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
This journey has contained many ups and downs leading to where I am today – one major component to this filmmaking journey was coming up to the question most filmmakers ask themselves at different stages in their careers – what’s the purpose. The art within film for self-fulfillment or monetary compensation?
I was fresh out of college with my first project completed (not a very good film technically, but it had its moments of comedy and was completed nonetheless, I felt accomplished) I was searching for artists to work with. I met with actors, producers, other directors, and writers around the South Jersey area; however, nothing amounted. I was sitting down in the Gloucester County Library reading “The Bridge” by Hart Crane, one of my favorite poets still brainstorming my anti-bully short film I was creating, and it hit me – I’m an independent filmmaker. When you come to the realization it’s very enlightening because I was just about $120K in debt from college at that point and struggling to make payments on student loans; none of my projects were financed anywhere else but out of my pocket. It was a real struggle, and no one could understand this dream and harsh reality but myself. I knew I had to keep pushing.
After a string of more failed attempts with other short films, including my anti-bully project left on the editing board due to major continuity errors, I went back to writing and working on scripts and publishing my poetry while I was entering into a three-way partnership. In the midst of this three-way partnership I was the founder of the company, my sole intent was to create short films to practice leading up to my first feature film. My partners together joined the notion for the first couple of years until we landed a couple paid jobs I found to purchase equipment aside from out of pocket financing: a RED One Camera at the time, canon lenses, a crane, etcetera; aside from putting our money together, mostly on my end skipping bills and using credit cards, to obtain the equipment, a couple executive producers I linked up with lent to the company for the cause we were striving for.
Finally able to purchase a RED Epic Dragon camera, ARRI lighting kits, dolly, flag kits, rokinon lens set, etcetera but when we landed our first feature film and tackled my controversial thriller drama “Hush.” Between money and maturity levels, with the #metoo movement subject matter, we shot the film and I would work to release; I watched our original intentions we’re changing over the course of those final two years and started going in different directions. “Hush” and “All Over Again” still a mess on the editing board, I was able to wrap one last short film, “Inside Jonathan Fox,” I took all three projects with me, all of the credit card debt and money to pay back the executive producers, about $80K further in debt separate from student loans, and left the company.
My executive producers were patient and felt it was the best move for me and the projects – they knew the films would be lost and remain a standstill if I didn’t take them with me, what mattered was the project’s completion. I will be the first to tell you when I left I was not an editor in the slightest. I could cut up a film, but I didn’t know the first thing about color grading, sound design, and etcetera. While I was driving back to my apartment with the equipment and computer I bought out with the little money I had left from my office – many emotions of shame, failure, disappointment, anger, wanting to quit arose. I was personally devastated.
This wasn’t the first time I cleared my bank account and maxed out all my credit cards and couldn’t pay my bills (late on pretty much all of them with my credit score plunging) – although the first time you lose everything it feels liberating like nothing can harm you but others can be harmed and when you learn that part it sucked. Still, I felt ashamed because four years passed and I barely had anything to show from my own work besides three productions completed and barely any knowledge to see them through and deliver for film festivals. Film festivals had always been my number one goal. I was losing sight of that. It took a while to set up my station for editing, but when I finally got back on the computer I felt encouraged because I could take my time, I found a couple of online tutorials to begin self-teaching the arts of editing and color grading. I decided to start at the beginning and picked up “All Over Again,” two years later it was completed, on the festival circuit and garnering nominations and winning awards even an American Songwriting Award.
Finishing “All Over Again” was one of the greatest accomplishments I’ve experienced in my life – a film supposed to die on the editing board and I salvaged and rescued it. I finally felt whole again, some piece was missing, and it was completing something myself that was promised to be completed six years prior by my partner. While I submitted “All Over Again” I began editing “Hush” and “Inside Jonathan Fox.” The most important lesson I learned from those ups and downs in the journey within the independent film world is no one will ever care about your work as much as you, don’t trust anyone to finish your work and give it the time and nourishment required to grow. Only you can provide this.
Tell us about your company. What do you do, what do you specialize in, what are you known for, etc. What are you most proud of as a company? What sets you apart from others?
I’m the owner of JAM Productions, and I create independent short films preparing to produce my first independent feature film. I take films from the conception in pre-production through delivery in post-production. I have worked on commercial sets, independent short and feature film sets producing and leading each form through delivery. I provide guidance and support to independent filmmakers of all levels whether learning the process or searching for a better method and problem solving especially in post-production to deliver their films. Since I work primarily on my personal projects with filmmaking, I specialize in writing, producing, directing, editing, and color grading.
The greatest moment of my life was delivering “All Over Again” and submitting to film festivals – it was the first film I completed and the longest journey I’ve had in making a film – I cherish and look back on the experience all the time. The most proud moment so far for my productions is winning a Remi Award at WorldFEST Houston. One of the most proud moments personally for me was being able to win an American Songwriting Award for Folk Music with the title song of my short film “All Over Again” co-written and performed with my longtime friend and collaborator Joseph Fuoco.
What is “success” or “successful” for you?
Success can arrive in many forms depending on the interpretation. For some, success reflects financial gain and stability and others personal fulfillment. I believe in personal fulfillment. I don’t have specific criteria, I set goals and work very hard to obtain them which is leading to the dream.
In one way the dream is success; however, more important than the dream, another form of success is the accomplishments discovered along the journey. The tools and knowledge we strive with every ounce of energy and every shout at the computer or banging on the table next to the notebook we’re writing in or tear through a screenplay page because we throw it to the opposite side of the room and search for tape to put it together again. I’m very familiar with all of these moments. In concerns of markers – I believe my goals are set markers, but I do have small little markers I work to accomplish on a day to day basis.
My reflections have been every day I will accomplish something towards my art – not for success but to build my art. I will either write a line of poetry, write more lyrics in a song, work on a piece of my novel, color grade or edit a sequence, or research one more tutorial to help me grow as a filmmaker. I will accomplish something every day because if I don’t, no one will do it for me, but it will take longer to travel the path because the timing could have been right if I worked diligently in each moment.
But success has never been determined by the end goal (I’m certain it’s fruitful when you arrive) it’s the journey and the determination you teach yourself every day, training nonstop, sharpening your mind, tweaking new skills. One thing we need to keep in mind in terms of success it’s not about the accolades and recognition – we create art for ourselves and others have the opportunity to enjoy and relate to it but the fact you delivered the film or finished a painting or made the last edit for your publication means you attained success.
It’s funny – I was reading an article the other day, one of my favorite writers, Lawrence Ferlinghetti just turned 100: is bed bound, going blind, and has seen more in this life from co-owning his publishing house City Lights which discovered writers such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. He helped permanently change the course of modern literature, contemporary music and film in the manner of obscenity and producing work with a different intent from financial gain but for the passion behind art, because it deserves to be seen. Lawrence Ferlinghetti is 100 years old, bed-bound, going blind, and is publishing a new book, “Little Boy,” it’s incredible!
Contact Info:
- Phone: 856-470-8068
- Email: [email protected]
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/josephamcgovern/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/joseph_mcgovern
Image Credit:
Director Photo – Joseph McGovern, Actor Photo – Paul DuVilla, “All Over Again” Production Still – Joseph McGovern, “Hush” Production Still – Joseph McGovern and Paul DuVilla, “Inside Jonathan Fox” – Joseph McGovern, “Is this the bed we lie in?” – Daniel Graham, and Set Photo – Vincent Primavera
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