The Jon Stokes Blog

Sun Tzu says a battle is won in the preparations.
Chuck DeRosa (Cinematographer), Phil Napolitano (2nd AD), and I are blocking the movie, start to finish. We have to block it and rehearse it like crazy before a single actor sets foot on set. There’s nothing worse than actors standing around bored while the director [...]

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I’ve told Chuck (Cinematographer) my strategy for blocking and rehearsing The Last Hurrah is the “General Patton.”
Basically, we’re going to drive straight to Berlin without stopping. George S. Patton’s genius as a World War II general is that he didn’t pause to clean out every Nazi battalion between Normandy and Berlin. He skirted [...]

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I’ve done six script rewrites in the past two and half weeks. Because we are shooting in one take, there will be no room to make changes in the editing room. I’ve got one chance to get it right.
Our producer table read two weeks ago timed out at 67 minutes, which was terrifying. [...]

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I am so happy we have found Zack Bennett to play the lead role of Will. Special thanks to Gary Cairns for the introduction.
Zack is 19, and from what I can tell, some sort of prodigy. He is incredibly natural - a completely unselfconscious actor. When he delivers lines, I see the [...]

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Socrates had a number of useful things to say. Know thyself and whatnot. But perhaps his most important message was to constantly keep in mind how little you know. As a new director, I’m constantly doing my best not to B.S. anyone, over-represent my knowledge, or generally make the mistake of assuming [...]

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It’s as though the characters are stepping out of my psyche and into the real world.
I took one look at Gary Cairns’ headshot and said: “there’s The Trip.”

Gary blew my mind in his audition. We were reading lines, and I fed him the set up, “Trip, maybe you should be on Ritalin, like, prescribed [...]

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When I decided to write my own movie, I set it entirely in one house, because that was the single cheapest location I could think of. Now, after a lot of searching, and three houses that were really, really close, I think we’ve found a winner.
It’s a beautiful multi-million dollar home, and perfect to [...]

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Tonight we had our first pre-production meeting for The Last Hurrah. From my corporate days, I set my watch on the table and begin the meeting at 09:00:00 - regardless of if everyone has arrived. This trains Los Angelinos to arrive on time.
I pass out typed agendas because I know that nearly every [...]

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I sent the script to some friends interested in Producing.  Three out of five of them agreed to come onboard.  Together, my team has a combined producing experience of zero years.  But we are all good friends, nice people, and let’s face it - working for free.
Having signed on the producers, I was surprised when [...]

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I met Chuck DeRosa (Cinematographer) at a friend’s birthday party at The Dresden. We had similar taste in movies and I liked him from the start. Chuck mentioned he was a DP, so I told him I wrote a script in one take. I asked him if he thought it would be [...]

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