Prelude to a Super Airplane (Chapter 6)

(The following is an excerpt from my book, Prelude to a Super Airplane. It can be purchased by clicking on any of the roughly 400 banners adorning this site, or by clicking here. It’s also available on Amazon.

I’ve posted the first 20 chapters (roughly 55 pages of PTSA) on this site. Links to each of those are at the end of this post, or you can download all of them as a pdf by clicking here.

Wearing my Producer Hat is the hardest, most complex thing I have to do when working in the entertainment industry.

Ironically, there’s a simple reason for this: answering the question “What does a producer actually do?” is nearly impossible, and it’s asked of me more than any other thing.

My dad will ask me this question at least once, without fail, on the rare occasion we speak. My usual answer is, “The producer makes the project happen. He gets it done. Goodbye.” It’s vague, but also the truth.

The Producer Hat is a “no matter what” hat, and usually involves either asking for money to get a project made, or screwing people over. Often both. For example, let’s say you needed a music track for a project, and knew of two composers who could do the job.

The first step is simple in concept, but difficult in execution: you have to get an investor to give you the money you need to fund the production of your project. (Without the project, you don’t need the music.)

Like I said, this part is a “one plus two equals three” procedure, and primarily involves telling your investor they’re all but guaranteed to make their money back, when in reality, there’s a 99.99% chance they’ll never see it again. (If that sounds risky to you, don’t worry – there are all kinds of lawyering tricks you can use to avoid getting sued.)

This part is especially hard for me, because the potential investor usually starts asking stupid questions like, “How do you plan to make money on this?” or “Do you have any sort of business plan I can look at?” It gets me all flustered and angry, because they’re blatantly trying to destroy my artistic vision.

Anyway, let’s assume you have your funding, because you found somebody smart enough not to mess with the details of why you need their money. Now you put on your Producer Hat, and deal with your two music composers, who you want to create an ominousy, impending-doomy track for the climax of your project.

This is where the fun starts. You might have both of them work on it, telling each that they have the job. Then, you may use subtle trickery to manipulate events, causing each composer to find out about the other one. This makes them both even more desperate to get the job.

In the end, you have two ominousy, impending-doomsy tracks, and you get to pick the one you like better, telling the other composer that “things are delayed a bit”.

Be sure to stress that you’ll be in touch, because this thing will get going again soon, and you have a lot of other things coming up, too. You say this even if you have nothing coming up.

I’m not sure how or why I became good at this, but I’ve always thought my older brother was wearing a metaphorical Producer Hat for most of his childhood. I’m man enough to admit I was, too. We were constantly screwing each other over.

In retrospect, this was probably our mom’s fault – she’d raised us as twins, even though he was older by four years. (I know what you’re thinking, and yes, the whole family eventually agreed she was crazy.)

My brother’s name is Tim, and growing up, Tim had two loves – airplanes and Star Treck. How and if these two loves connect to one another, I’ll never know, but his love of them was equal.

A third love was pencil sketching, a skill in which Tim had singularly unique talent, yet no desire to pursue beyond the recreational level, which I always thought was a shame.

When Tim learned he would never be able to command his own fictional starship, he turned his career attentions to his other love, airplanes.

This is skipping ahead a bit, but today, Tim is a Colonel in the Airplane Riding Marshall Taskforce Agency, or ARMTA, where he makes both his peers and his underlings refer to him as “Colonel T”.

(ARMTA is an important part of how our country’s airplane rides run safely. I read one study that said without ARMTA, airplane rides would be +/-4000% more at risk of crashes, resulting in a vastly increased number of fiery, crashy, airplaney fireballs falling to the Earth. These fireballs would be full of dead airplane riders, who died from being on fire.)

Like I said, our mother raised Tim and I as twins, which always made things awkward for my actual twin sister, Kristin. There’s not much to say about her, really. It seems in the twins-gestation process, I received what looks, personality, and talent were available to be gestated.

Maybe this contributed to my mom’s madness – this dual-twins game she’d set up. She’d often have to tell people we were triplets, while focusing on the fact that Tim and I were twins, when really Kristin and I were the twins.

Back to my big brother – Tim and I were close, which meant I learned a lot about Star Treck, and even more about airplanes, since the continuity and mythology of Star Treck baffled me. For example – how could Mr. Spok talk if he had pointed ears and he was an alien?

Colonel T and I haven’t spoken for years – in fact, I haven’t seen Tim since I was 12, when he ran away forever.

When Tim ran away, I stayed behind, substituting “playing with my brother” with “thinking about airplanes” in my little kid daily planner.

Wow.

That was supposed to be all about wearing a Producing Hat, and it turned into a story about my estranged brother. It appears I’ll need to acquire an Editoring Hat.

“And oh! What a fine hat it would be!” he declared, feeling it was a very literary thing to write in his airplane book.

Brad Radby’s Foreward, Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7, Chapter 8, Chapter 9, Chapter 10, Chapter 11, Chapter 12, Chapter 13, Chapter 14, Chapter 15, Chapter 16, Chapter 17, Chapter 18, Chapter 19, Chapter 20, Chapter 31