After graduating in December of last year, Lance Pototschnik struggled to find employment. With the country in a deepening recession at the time, Pototschnik quickly realized that the job market's lack of opportunities meant that he had to make his own opportunities. So, the young college grad decided to transform his misfortune into an idea - in fact, into several ideas.
The first of Pototschnik's ideas was brainstorming and writing his own movie, "Quarter-Life Crisis." The second idea was a documentary about the process of selling the script to a movie studio. Now, Pototschnik is bringing his ideas to the University. Next Thursday, he will set up a tent on the South Lawn, inviting students to try out for parts in his film.
The idea for Pototschnik's script started when he found himself stuck in his own "quarter-life crisis" after graduating from McDaniel College in Westminster, Md.
"Like so many recent grads, I had trouble finding work in the months following my December graduation," he said. "I sent out application after application without any luck."
Pototschnik moved to Tennessee to try to find a job on his brother's military base but was unsuccessful. He then applied for a cashier position at Target but was offered the 4 a.m. truck-unloading position instead. He declined, and his situation became more dire.
"Even though I was living with family free of charge, my car was broken down and money was running short," he said.
So, Pototschnik - unemployed but not dejected - chose to pursue a "childhood dream." He decided to write a movie script detailing the struggles that accompany the transition from life as a student to life in the real world.
Following the age-old adage of "write what you know," Pototschnik, with the help of his brother Luke - a Darden school alumnus - wrote a script that draws on his feelings and outlook on finding work after college. In addition to his own experiences, Pototschnik also contacted friends and family asking about their experiences entering the job market, which helped inspire parts of the script.
Although he finished the script around mid-May and was able to have it copyrighted and registered with the New York writers' guild fairly quickly, Pototschnik was soon faced with another challenge: selling it to a movie company. Realizing that he probably was not going to get any attention from Hollywood producers without first generating some interest, the two brothers conceived an idea to promote the script through grassroots efforts. The pair began travelling to different college campuses, promoting the script and getting students to try out for parts in the film.
Pototschnik recently met with the University's FilmMakers Society, which is sponsoring his visit Sept. 24.
"We like to promote any student filmmaking, even if they're fresh out of college," the FilmMakers Society President Dan Quinn said.
What makes Pototschnik's approach unique, however, is that he is using footage of this process to create a documentary of his efforts. The concept for the documentary came about, Pototschnik said, when he asked himself the question, "How am I going to drum up interest [about the script] if I can't show what I'm doing?"
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