Jump to content

My New Video: The Time I Made Madonna Laugh


Reid Rosefelt

Recommended Posts

2 hours ago, Reid Rosefelt said:

What you see is me trying to hide all the wrinkly stuff in my neck.

Reid, we love you just the way you are, man. Don't sweat that stuff! Just look at how people in this community care and offer helpful advice. You're likeable. It comes across. I already know from your other videos that you're  only going to get more comfortable with doing these videos as time goes on -- like anything, more experience will lead to refinements. I think Jesse, above, has some really good advice -- especially that you should put a link in your sig file here and at other forums. And the advice about the importance of titling your videos can't be overstated. It is really important and you should consider doing some keyword research before you decide on titles of your videos to try to tailor the title around what the audience you're trying to reach searches for. Anyhow, like everyone else here, I just want to see you succeed. 

  • Like 3
Link to comment
Share on other sites

15 hours ago, Reid Rosefelt said:

Now  I am pursuing music which was the thing I always loved and kept for myself. 

Good. Then we can hear some more material like that “Abingdon Square” song (which is on the way to completion, yes?).

re the movie recollections: you have a great memory and background Reid. Revelations such as yours puts things on record properly, from one who knows and was there. So much misinformation gets put out by people who weren’t there, don’t know, are guessing or just making it up.

Keep going!

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

16 hours ago, Reid Rosefelt said:

First, I think the Rolling Stone cover was their own shoot, so... my bad.  I better post that on my video. 😄

You ask a lot of questions.  The involvement of Orion during the shoot was nil.  I am still good friends with Nina Baron, who was at Orion at that time, but I don't remember her or her boss Fred Skidmore ever visiting the set once.  I don't think they saw this as a big film.  I don't think many people working on the film did either. There will be more videos and you'll understand.  But this was a movie where somebody got conked on the head and got amnesia.  One major member of the production team once said to me that the film had a plot "too ridiculous to be filmed."

My PR firm handled the release and they trusted me and gave me free rein. I can't think of anything they told me to do or told me not to do.   Fred and Nina were super supportive.  And afterwards, when I closed my company, they gave me the unit publicist job on F/X, which was my second job as an on-set publicist.  They were great.  Fred just didn't think it would do well because A) he didn't think Madonna's fame would last and B)  HONEYSUCKLE ROSE with Willie Nelson was not successful.  It's too easy in retrospect to look at what he thought because nobody thought it would do as well as it did.  But I believed because I was around her so much and knew all the things she had planned. 

STRANGER THAN PARADISE came out around the same time as this was shooting. It's been a long time, so I don't remember what other projects I was on, but I know I did ERENDIRA around that time., which was the first foreign film Miramax ever released.  That was a big job.   My company was just me and one other person working out of my apartment, so I didn't need a lot of clients. 

The focus of the channel is my entire career, so we're talking the 70s all the way until I turned in my last pressbook, Woody Allen's RIFKIN'S FESTIVAL, in May of 2020. It really depends on how interested people are.  I definitely want to talk about the movie I wrote and directed with the late Adrienne Shelly in 2003, because that starred a rubber frog named Tiger.  And yeah, New York City in the late 70s and early 80s was a very interesting time, and I became friends with a lot of people like Kathy Bigelow who became famous later. 

I worked with Redford on his film THE MILAGRO BEANFIELD WAR so he brought me in now and then on Sundance Institute matters.  Eventually he asked me to be the Publicity Consultant for the Institute.  I lasted a year before I was deservedly fired, because I was so bad at that job.  A learning experience. My publicity firm, Magic Lantern, took a lot of films to Sundance so I will talk about this, but also other  festivals like Cannes, Toronto, Venice, and others. 

And yeah, if I don't get sick and tired of doing this and quit (very likely) then it will show the many ways that marketing specialty films changed from my start in NYC in 1976 and when I closed Magic Lantern in 2003.  I do have opinions about what came after that, so who knows.  I mainly did publicity writing from 2004 to 2020, so that's the only way I kept my hand in.  Now I'm just happy to be out of it.   I am pursuing music which was the thing I always loved and kept for myself.  I never wanted to make money out of it, because making money out of my love for movies was really painful.

 

Those are great stories and experiences. I am sure there would be lots of people interested in tuning it to get insight and perspective. I totally forgot the plot of Susan. Its been yeas since I saw it. Vague memories of seeing it in theaters. Lots of great stuff out there these days on 80s films. I think its a rich market for an audience.

It is strange how Arquette didn't become a bigger name star. I thought she retired but then recall she was in the Georg Harrison My Sweet Lord video.

Subscribed -- look forward to hearing about Milargo. That was a film I totally loved.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Ric said:

Good. Then we can hear some more material like that “Abingdon Square” song (which is on the way to completion, yes?).

re the movie recollections: you have a great memory and background Reid. Revelations such as yours puts things on record properly, from one who knows and was there. So much misinformation gets put out by people who weren’t there, don’t know, are guessing or just making it up.

Keep going!

yes. very impressed you can remember this stuff. i can barely  remember what I did in the 00s, let alone 80s.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

17 hours ago, Reid Rosefelt said:

Do you think that's okay?   I've never once gone on any of the other Cakewalk forums. (Maybe I should.)    Wouldn't it just seem like I was some random guy from nowhere posting his YouTube video?   Is it "music-related"?

But I guess you guys think it's okay or you wouldn't be recommending it.  I guess I can just do it and see if people get mad.   I will wait until I have two though.,

Maybe I should start paying more attention to The Coffee House.

"

It would be just fine to post in the coffee house forum the people are good-natured.

Jesse Screed has a good idea about the song forum but your post would probably get buried,

Just my two cents.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 2/18/2022 at 1:29 PM, Reid Rosefelt said:

I'm not getting anywhere as a YouTuber.  Sure, I'll have 1000 subscribers by March or April (currently 953) , but you need 4000 yearly hours and I only have 3000 hours.  And even if I had 4000 hours, it might make me a YouTube partner, but I'd still be nowhere.

The problem is that I spend weeks making videos.  So I'm switching to something I can do effortlessly so I can do more of them. 

So yes, it's not music software, but maybe you will find my behind-the-scenes showbiz stories interesting.  I'll also be talking about movie marketing, which may be helpful to some musicians trying to figure out how to promote themselves.

Let me know Larry, if it's out of line for me to put future ones here.  But I feel like everybody here is a friend and they might be willing to follow me even into non-musical activities.

Subscribed, but you might want to take a look at what the goal of being a youtuber is.

I have one account with under 1000 subs and about 400K views.  This content of 200+ videos generated zero income and took a whole lot of work to create.  If the goal of being a Youtuber is to make money figure out what that looks like, if it is simply to create entertainment becuase you enjoy it, focus on that.  

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Okay, here is THE MOSQUITO COAST.    I did a lot of things to address the technical issues people had here with the DESPERATELY video.  Let me know what you think.  In general I'm still figuring out what it will be.  I'm less focused on it being a performance where I don't stop talking.  I don't think anybody but me cares about it.  Using pictures allowed me to do a lot of editing on this.

There's even a bit of Elysion at the end. 

 

 

Edited by Reid Rosefelt
  • Like 4
  • Thanks 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

7 hours ago, telecode 101 said:

It is strange how Arquette didn't become a bigger name star. I thought she retired but then recall she was in the Georg Harrison My Sweet Lord video.

I loved her, but she wasn't the easiest person to deal with. i will probably dance around that in future videos about DSS.    She claims that Harvey Weinstein ruined her career... but one of her most memorable parts after her heyday was in PULP FICTION. 

7 hours ago, telecode 101 said:

yes. very impressed you can remember this stuff. i can barely  remember what I did in the 00s, let alone 80s.

  I was very impressed with John Gielgud's  memory about stuff that happened decades before.  (I will do a video on him.)  He said, "I remember everything up until the warrr...  then it all becomes a blurrrrr."   I think it's that way with all of us.  I can remember all the lyrics to "Mr. Tambourine Man," but I forget what I had for breakfast.

33 minutes ago, Brian Walton said:

Subscribed, but you might want to take a look at what the goal of being a youtuber is.

I have one account with under 1000 subs and about 400K views.  This content of 200+ videos generated zero income and took a whole lot of work to create.  If the goal of being a Youtuber is to make money figure out what that looks like, if it is simply to create entertainment becuase you enjoy it, focus on that.  

I think I have clarity about that.  I'm doing it to do it.  If climate change doesn't wipe out the world too soon, then maybe there will still be a YouTube twenty years after I'm gone who will listen to one of my stories and  be amused by it--or it might even mean something to them.  Doing these videos means my stories have the chance to live on after I do.  And I've lived through times like New York City in the 70s that are kind of interesting.  

Making the music videos was torture.  Cubase! Voicemeeter! OBS! Funky software!  Arggh!  Making these is a lot more fun.  It's just me and the camera. 

Also, I have a thousand subs now, and am making progress on the 4000 hours.  I'm now at 3100.  So if I keep knocking these out, and invest a little time promoting them on social media,  I'll get there. I don't know when, but I hope by sometime this summer.  I didn't even want to be a YouTube partner in the old days, because I liked that you could just click on my videos and they would play.  But now, YouTube puts ads there anyway.   For me, it's the principle.  Even if I only get five cents, I should get something.  All my work shouldn't go to them. 

Edited by Reid Rosefelt
  • Like 3
Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Reid Rosefelt said:

I didn't even want to be a YouTube partner in the old days, because I liked that you could just click on my videos and they would play.  But now, YouTube puts ads there anyway.   For me, it's the principle.  Even if I only get five cents, I should get something.  All my work shouldn't go to them. 

Go for it. You can be the Rick Beato of film marketing.

  • Haha 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 minutes ago, telecode 101 said:

Go for it. You can be the Rick Beato of film marketing.

It is really a super-rare thing for anybody to become successful on YouTube.  I would consider 10,000 subscribers to be success. 100,000 is beyond imagining.   Rick B has almost 3 million.

But these people are kind of chained to it.  They are obliged to keep churning it out for their "fans."  I think Mary Spender has been doing one every day lately.  😮

I have worked long and hard for the privilege of doing nothing if I want to.  And I want to save time for myself for composing and other stuff.

One a week sounds good to me.  Let's see if I can even keep that pace. 

By the way, I did put up my videos in the Coffee House.

  • Like 4
Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 hours ago, Reid Rosefelt said:

Also, I have a thousand subs now, and am making progress on the 4000 hours.  I'm now at 3100.  So if I keep knocking these out, and invest a little time promoting them on social media,  I'll get there. I don't know when, but I hope by sometime this summer.

Keep at it! The industrious Cakewalk YouTuber, "Creative Sauce" is celebrating his 100,000 subscriber milestone!

You can do it!

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCESNxzJHzDnCIuRO0RhQLeA

 

Edited by abacab
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I watched the rest of the video, Reid, and enjoyed it -- gave it a like and commented positively (hopefully others in this thread will give it a like and a positive comment too). As I wrote, it was like sitting at a coffee shop listening to you reminisce, which I think works very well. While I'm very much not knowledgeable on actors, my wife is, so I'll share your video with her, and I'm certain she'll enjoy it. 

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Does anybody have any comments about technical issues with the MOSQUITO COAST video?   I tried to address issues like: 1) sound mainly coming out of right channel; 2) me not looking at the camera; 3) reflections of computer monitors on glasses.    Even if you don't feel like watching the whole video, can anybody give me some notes about improvements? 

I tried to lessen the overall reflections on the glasses.  I don't think I'll be able to get rid of the two lights, but I can get better at it by not moving so much.  But I did get rid of the computer monitor reflections by covering them with black foil. 

Other things I did was to cut to photos, so I could edit more and tighten it up.  I did use a bit of music, something I'll do more of in the future. 

Everything you guys say is helpful.

Thanks!

Working on Francis Ford Coppola now and will do another Madonna video after that. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 minutes ago, Reid Rosefelt said:

Does anybody have any comments about technical issues with the MOSQUITO COAST video?   I tried to address issues like: 1) sound mainly coming out of right channel; 2) me not looking at the camera; 3) reflections of computer monitors on glasses.    Even if you don't feel like watching the whole video, can anybody give me some notes about improvements? 

I thought that was very very much improved 'technically'.  It was excellent in my view.

Personally I wouldn't over do the music - it works really well with you just reminiscing with the photos to give it some 'context' - maybe the music gets a bid distracting and unnecessary ?  Not saying it's wrong, just saying I'd be happy to not have it :)

 

 

 

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, Reid Rosefelt said:

Does anybody have any comments about technical issues with the MOSQUITO COAST video?   I tried to address issues like: 1) sound mainly coming out of right channel; 2) me not looking at the camera; 3) reflections of computer monitors on glasses.    Even if you don't feel like watching the whole video, can anybody give me some notes about improvements? 

I tried to lessen the overall reflections on the glasses.  I don't think I'll be able to get rid of the two lights, but I can get better at it by not moving so much.  But I did get rid of the computer monitor reflections by covering them with black foil. 

Other things I did was to cut to photos, so I could edit more and tighten it up.  I did use a bit of music, something I'll do more of in the future. 

Everything you guys say is helpful.

Thanks!

Working on Francis Ford Coppola now and will do another Madonna video after that. 

This 2nd video was much better technically.  I can tell you changed things around quite a bit. The only thing I noticed was your use of the phrase "I found it.... interesting." I humbly suggest trying to find 2-3 different ways to say that. I heard it a few too many times. The "ums" and pauses didn't bother me in the slightest. That's what makes it sound like you're just talking, not presenting. I really enjoyed the extra effort you took in showing supportive material - pictures, music, etc. That is very, very nice. Keep doing that!

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 hours ago, simon said:

 

Personally I wouldn't over do the music - it works really well with you just reminiscing with the photos to give it some 'context' - maybe the music gets a bid distracting and unnecessary ?  Not saying it's wrong, just saying I'd be happy to not have it

 

It was meant to be funny.  Kind of making it seem like I was on to some kind of momentous epiphany before the punchline.  But maybe it takes away from the more direct storytelling.  Makes it look too "produced."   I'll think about it.   I still think there might be times when music might add something.

2 hours ago, fret_man said:

This 2nd video was much better technically.  I can tell you changed things around quite a bit. The only thing I noticed was your use of the phrase "I found it.... interesting." I humbly suggest trying to find 2-3 different ways to say that. I heard it a few too many times. The "ums" and pauses didn't bother me in the slightest. That's what makes it sound like you're just talking, not presenting. I really enjoyed the extra effort you took in showing supportive material - pictures, music, etc. That is very, very nice. Keep doing that!

This surprised me. You don't know what your personal cliches are until somebody points them out to you.   Thanks!  That's a good note.  I find it... interesting. 😄

I realize this will never get as much attention as  the DSS video, but I like it better.  I'll keep trying to make them better.

Edited by Reid Rosefelt
  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Reid Rosefelt changed the title to My New Video: The Time I Made Madonna Laugh

Please sign in to comment

You will be able to leave a comment after signing in



Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...