$7k budget. I'm not so interested in time travel but I have an unlimited appetite for normal people inventing things in garages. I don't need super-stars, exotic locations or special effects, just good ideas and good dialogue.
The disbelief, the checking and checking again. The "this must be wrong" feeling.
I can't think of another attempt that I have seen that has quite captured it in the same way – other portrayals seem to feel inauthentic.
Does anybody have any suggestions for things that explore this theme well?
They can work for minimum scale, and get a percentage of profits (Sandra Bullock and Gravity). The trick with Hollywood accounting is to know to ask for a percentage of the rights-owning entity, since the production entity is a loss vehicle that earns no income, and the licensing entity only earns a small markup for its "work" licensing the movie.
The distribution entity is frequently a third-party company or parent company. Distribution entities might get paid a % of revenue (most common if third-party distributor), a fixed or calculated fee for distributing the movie (i.e., Fox and Star Wars), or it might effectively own the rights altogether and get all of the revenues (Disney and other parent-company distributors, otherwise unncommon). In rare situations, the rights-holding entity is the distribution entity (i.e. Blumhouse).
And even for those, working for a minimum fee, non representative of their actual asking price, for indy productions or movies they believe in and want a share of profits, is common, and is more or less the same.
(If you get normally $5 million per movie, doing one for e.g. $200k plus part of profits is not that different from doing it for profits only).
[1] He tells the Daily Mirror newspaper, "I said right off, 'Don't give me anything, you are taking a risk, let's make the movie for $16.5 million, let's keep it cheap, no one takes a salary. Let's just get a certain percentage, the back end, and then we'll split that.'"
The gamble paid off and Twins went on to gross $216 million at the worldwide box office, making a lot of money for the two lead actors. Schwarzenegger adds, "In the end, we made more money than we ever made on anything else we've done."
There are more details about the deal in his autobiography, I recall that Arnold became much more involved in the marketing of the movie than he had been in the past, scheduling press junkets, public appearances etc.
[1]https://www.express.co.uk/celebrity-news/373216/Arnold-Schwa...