An open letter addressed to my family, friends, collaborators, and to the many strangers who have contributed so much support to my 15 year filmmaking career.
Back in 2018, I retained the consulting services of one Ms. Joanne Butcher, the founder of a dynamic enterprise called Filmmakers Success that is based here in San Francisco and in Miami, Florida. You should know that I have known Joanne for well over fifteen years and took notice quite early of her insights and intuition when discussing ‘the business’ of being a creative, as well as how all we humans have the capacity to reinvent our lives to mirror what we once imagined they could be. What’s not to love about that?
Once Joanne had signed-on as my mentor and coach, I took my foot off the metaphorical brake and stumped on the accelerator to develop the idea of an anthology film called CA Shorts that is now quickly becoming my first feature film. I have taken the necessary deep breath required and jumped into what has proved to require a lot of ambition, work and daring. Wasn’t it was Goethe who wrote about the unconscious impulses underlying our mental creations. He advised that, “Whatever we can do, or dream we can do, we should begin it.”
My first step into the world of being a businessman who makes films was to beg and borrow $15,000 from family, friends, collaborators and a great many strangers who took note of my mission statement and funded the first two stages of a for-profit business called GMCo LLC (G. Maselli Company). Thank you all again everyone. I will forever be grateful.
In order to explain why I chose to set all my stories in and about California, I must confess that I was born and raised for the first 18 years of my life in Porterville, California. Thanks to my parents, Babe and Juanita, I managed to, somehow, find my way through the maze of growing up in a very small town in California’s Central Valley nestled in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. CA Shorts is my very personal expression of the love that I have for the great state.
As I grew older and my travels took me further and further away from home, I discovered that around the world anything is considered possible in California. I learned that the California has earned a reputation of the quickness with which something new can be devised and that that points to a willingness of the population to abandon the old ways for the new. It was the likes of Sam Clemens and his friends that informed me that by well before the monumental Gold Rush of 1949, California had already developed its distinctive reputation as a place where anything is considered to attainable.
My compilation of short films will be packaged together and released as a feature film with a strong thematic glue that suggests that we all have the aforementioned capacity to start again. You will experience that California’s strongest magnet of all is the possibility of reinvention.
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