On The Lot Winner: Will Bigham

Will Bigham
After over 70 films from the contestants, the big winner of On The Lot was Will Bigham, a 31-year old film editor from Glendale, CA. I thought Nick Zach had a lock on the whole show from the get-go, but after making the decision to make a sequel to one of his worst efforts, things really changed.

I liked Will from the beginning, since this was what he called his “make it or break it” year. He was going to give this whole film making thing another shot, and it turns out it was a good decision.

He has a million dollar deal with Dreamworks and got to meet Steven Spielberg. Pretty darn cool.

I really liked one of his last films, the very funny “The Yes Men”.

If you missed On The Lot, (and nearly everyone did) you can see the episodes and films at the On The Lot website.

On The Lot

I really liked Project Greenlight when it was on, and was happy to see a show that’s very similar to that is now on Fox: On The Lot.

The premise of this reality show: Gather 50 directors together that were picked from the films the submitted. Have them do various tasks, and kick them off until the final contestant wins a job as a director for Dreamworks.

Last night they started with having everyone do a “Hollywood Pitch” for a movie, but they had to use a premise that they were randomly assigned. I was really surprised how many people seemed to have a big problem with this task, but quite a few did. It was really hard to watch them struggle. The pitches ranged from “He completely forgot what he was going to say” to “Much too enthusiastic”. Fourteen people were cut, so 36 remain.

For the second task, they organized themselves into groups of three and had to come up with a two and half minute film. Each director had a scene to director. The short film had to be completely written, filmed and edited in 24 hours. They didn’t show the final results (that’s Thursday), but they did show how everyone started. Big egos galore, and some fights between groups about filming locations.

I was disappointed to see that they grouped everyone together for this task, since a bad group member can bring down a whole group. We’ll see how that works out.

I liked the show, but it looks like a lot of people didn’t tune in.