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[0:00] Robert Bannon: This is Robert Bannon, and before I hit the theme song and introduce the show, I want to tell you about some exciting Roundtable news. The Roundtable has a brand new website. You can go to robertbannon.com, find out all about me, find out all about the show, brand new and now up and running with brand new Roundtable merchandise. Go to robertbannon.com, follow me on Instagram, and make sure you're subscribing to us wherever you listen to podcasts or on YouTube. Now let's do a show. Are you ready? It's The Roundtable with me, Robert Bannon.

[0:31] Robert Bannon: Well, welcome to The Roundtable, everybody. My name is Robert Bannon. You're listening to us on Broadway World, the Broadway Podcast Network, iHeart, Spotify. We have two incredible filmmakers here to talk about a documentary, a movie, about a movie, about selling your house to make a movie. Would I sell my house to make a movie? Yes. Would my husband be happy about it? Hell no. We didn't even get past the minute. We got the whole story. Eric and Brandon are here to tell us all about it. The doc is called Sell Your House. Congratulations.

[1:00] Eric Foss: Thank you, Robert. That was the best intro I've ever heard.

[1:00] Robert Bannon: Yeah, I know. Wait, get your husband on the line. I want to hear why he's not selling the house.

[1:08] Eric Foss: We're selling the house. We can live in your house.

[1:08] Robert Bannon: That's exactly right. That's the attitude we're looking for. Because you both are artists, so you understand about going without for the sake of art.

[1:16] Brandon Pickering: That's right. We'll be poor forever.

[1:16] Eric Foss: Yeah, whatever. We will be poor forever. We already know that.

[1:22] Robert Bannon: We'll be rich in here.

[1:22] Eric Foss: Yeah, or maybe not if you're making a documentary.

[1:28] Robert Bannon: Eric, is this documentary funny, sad, touching?

[1:28] Eric Foss: It's just underneath the humor of a funny movie, of a documentary of a movie that's funny.

[1:39] Brandon Pickering: I, my approach to making a documentary is to be as serious as possible. And Brandon's approach to making a documentary is to take everything that I'm serious about and make it into a joke. So we're a great team. And there's a lot of comedy in this. But that's mostly because Brandon's making fun of me the whole time.

[1:59] Eric Foss: You have to laugh. Don't cry. You know what I'm saying? Or it's just funny to laugh at Eric Foss, whichever one you want to, whichever way you want to look at it.

[2:12] Robert Bannon: When did you realize, how do you describe this documentary? What is this documentary about?

[2:17] Eric Foss: Um, I mean, ultimately it's a documentary about friendship. And it's about the true cost of making art. And I don't know, I think it's having worked with a lot of the credits of this movie are filled with my friends and names of my friends and people that I love. And I think without real, if you don't have a relationship with the people that you're working on it with, it's not going to be nearly as special, anything you're doing with art, you know, and films are inherently collaborative. So you have to be working with people all the time. So I think that it's incredibly important to work with people that you love making these things, but also, you know, when you're working so closely, shit happens, you know, issues pop up and whatever. So I think it's just, it's a movie about navigating that and navigating, you know, the true cost of getting art made. And then you don't have a house, Eric.

[3:18] Brandon Pickering: That was my mom's fear when I told her I wanted to be an actor.

[3:18] Robert Bannon: Eric, when you're here, when we're talking about this, you follow a film, the film's called The Last Stop in Yuma County, right? And what, when at some point there is a home, I'm stuck on this, I'm sorry. There's a home. It's not the person who convinces to sell their own home. It is not the husband or wife of the people who live in the home. It's a friend who's convinced to, when did you first hear this story and think there's a documentary to be told? When did the idea start that there's a movie to be made?

[3:53] Eric Foss: So, yeah, Francis had been developing The Last Stop in Yuma County for a couple years with James and some other people before James decided to sell his house. And so I'd been hearing about it along the way, because me and Francis were friends. And there was a point where they were kind of stuck in development hell. Somebody had bought the script, they really kind of like, they didn't do too well with it. There's a lot of things that happened that may or may not have been the production company's fault. So they bought it back. And they were kind of like, they had the thing again, they had, they owned the rights again. And James was joking about selling his house to Francis. And it kind of got to a point where it's like, is this the only option we have now?

And so Francis called James and was like, Hey, man, what would that actually look like? And then James hung up the phone and literally put his house on the market that day. So the way Francis tells it, and maybe the way James tells it too, is he might have just been waiting for Francis to give him permission to sell his house.

[5:04] Brandon Pickering: I'm a bad friend, Brandon. I would tell my friend, I'll help you sell your own damn house. What the hell?

[5:14] Eric Foss: Well, Francis didn't have a house to sell.

[5:14] Brandon Pickering: Also, yeah, James is a very, he's a very special guy. And I think he, you know, he will go to bat for his friends, almost to the point where it hurts himself. And not even almost to the point, it ended up, you know, he hurt during this process.

[5:39] Robert Bannon: What did you sell, Brandon? What did you give up to get this film made?

[5:44] Brandon Pickering: Well, so me and Foss met working on a show called Naked and Afraid for the Discovery Channel.

[5:51] Robert Bannon: What did you do there?

[5:53] Brandon Pickering: We both shoot that show. I met him as a PA, he was a DP, and eventually I...

[5:59] Robert Bannon: Hold on. Wait, you both were out there with the people, Naked and Afraid, sleeping with the cougars and the no clothes and the whole shebang?

[6:05] Brandon Pickering: For many years, for many years. And especially, you know, during the process of this film, that show, we would, we'd have to pause making the movie and then go out and do that. And, you know, I'd be, me and Foss both editing parts of this movie, while out there doing that. So I would say, you know, I, both of us injured ourselves, and I got E. coli, and I got tick bite fever, and ticks were biting my eyeball. So I would say we sold our bodies to make this movie.

[6:38] Eric Foss: Which is not quite as good as a house, but, you know, whatever.

[6:42] Brandon Pickering: Sell your skin.

[6:43] Eric Foss: Yeah.

[6:44] Robert Bannon: Diego, I'm sorry. Diego's behind the scenes watching this right now. There's a whole other movie in this movie. Firstly, you got to support them, because they literally went to, I don't know, some Zimbabwe and all around the world to make sure that you, they made money to make this film. Eric, do you wear clothes? Are, is the crew clothed?

[7:03] Eric Foss: I never-

[7:04] Brandon Pickering: Depends on the day.

[7:05] Eric Foss: Depends on the day. I have a great picture of Foss in very few clothes, except for a snorkel.

[7:10] Brandon Pickering: Yeah, my-

[7:14] Eric Foss: That's a good, good-

[7:16] Brandon Pickering: He has a snorkel and a camera, and a dream.

[7:18] Eric Foss: Yeah, you can find it on the internet if you look hard enough.

[7:22] Robert Bannon: And the dream has now come true, because all of this hard work has created, so you're, you don't do that anymore. You're not out with the tigers and the tarantulas anymore.

[7:29] Brandon Pickering: Oh, we still do it.

[7:31] Eric Foss: Yeah, we still, I, we had to turn it down, actually, to go to the Sigis Film Festival and DocsMX, so-

[7:37] Brandon Pickering: We could be in, we could be in South America right now.

[7:40] Eric Foss: Yeah.

[7:41] Robert Bannon: But you're in a hotel, so that means that you're not naked and afraid to-

[7:44] Brandon Pickering: Yeah, we're kind of out of our element right now, honestly.

[7:47] Eric Foss: Yeah, it's very strange. I have clothes on, and I'm inside, there's no bugs, I'm not getting rained on. It's weird.

[7:52] Brandon Pickering: Yeah, I'm not sad.

[7:54] Robert Bannon: Look, I want everyone to know that right now, this film is racking it up in film festivals all across this country, Santa Barbara Film Festival, Sidewalk Film Festival, Dance With Films, Film Invasion, it has been all over, and how do we support this film? How can we see it? How can we support it? How can we follow it? Tell me something, Eric, now that you've got your scuba down and clothes on.

[8:18] Eric Foss: The biggest thing is, there's a few, there's two things. One, if you're a film student and or a film school administrator, or you have a film organization of some kind, send us an email at sellyourhousefilm at gmail.com, and we will set up a free screening for you with a distribution seminar. We learned a lot about distribution while making this movie, and we want to help people learn about it who may not know anything about it. So that's a big thing that we're pushing really hard right now, we're trying to give back. The other thing is, interact with us on social media.

[8:56] Eric Foss: We're really active on social media, and one comment does go a long way. One share, tell your friends, help us get this thing out there, because we're grassroots right now. We don't have the power of any studio or anything behind us, and the only way this is going to work is if other people are so nice as to give us a little like or share all that annoying bullshit.

[9:25] Eric Foss: But it does help a lot. So those are two things that we humbly ask for as we try to get this thing out one eyeball at a time.

[9:36] Robert Bannon: And I know I've kept way too long, so I'm in trouble. But Brandon, for you, for you all, who do you hope watches this? And is there plans that maybe we'll see it streaming or wider distribution in the future?

[9:48] Brandon Pickering: I hope everyone in the world watches this movie, whether they want to or not.

[9:56] Eric Foss: Especially WellGo USA.

[9:59] Brandon Pickering: Okay, yeah.

[10:01] Eric Foss: Yeah, I would love that.

[10:03] Brandon Pickering: And yes, that is who I...

[10:04] Eric Foss: Yeah, if we're going to get a distributor, I would love it to be WellGo USA. Shout out.

[10:12] Brandon Pickering: Yeah, I don't know. We're working on distribution right now.

[10:14] Eric Foss: We have...

[10:16] Brandon Pickering: We're potentially going to be signing very soon.

[10:19] Eric Foss: So looking forward to that. More to come.

[10:22] Robert Bannon: So follow them on social media. Follow them on social media. Look for it. Email them if you're a film student or film administrator. And congrats. They've sold their house. They sold their clothes. They have no possessions. They have a film. It's called Sell Your House. And you need to make sure you support it and share it and tell somebody about it. Thanks for hanging out with me. Congratulations. This inspiring story. And I'm a big fan of your... I watch you. We watch you all the time on Saturday.

[10:43] Brandon Pickering: Rainy Saturdays.

[10:44] Robert Bannon: Stuck in the jungle. It scares me.

[10:48] Eric Foss: Thank you, Robert.

[10:49] Brandon Pickering: You're a fan of all of our...

[10:51] Eric Foss: Every side of our lives.

[10:53] Brandon Pickering: You basically financed this movie.

[10:55] Robert Bannon: Pretty much.

[10:56] Eric Foss: So thank you.

[10:56] Robert Bannon: I love it. Thanks for being here.