So if you follow a traditional three-act structure in your documentary and follow a dramatic narrative, you can possibly make a big payday from selling the remake rights. And you can even get a shot at directing the theatrical version of your documentary, like Gordon is doing.

Q: You learned a lot of the lessons in your book the hard way, didn't you?

A: A lot of people who want to make films come across an interval -- some down time between jobs, a severance package, some money their grandfather bequeathed them -- and they decide ``OK, I'm going to go for it.''

But the problem of making your film in this compressed time is that you tend to cut a lot of corners. You start thinking ''It doesn't matter if I have to pay triple or quadruple for this, because it's now or never.'' You feel that if you don't seize the opportunity, you'll miss your window, and so you fall into this anything-goes trap. As a result, the cost of what is supposed to be a low-budget independent film quadruples or quintuples.

In my case, I had a great idea for a short film I wanted to sell as a commercial to Coca-Cola. So I started making this short. The costs just kept going up and up. For a two-minute short film I ended up spending $30,000. And along the way, every possible thing that could have gone wrong, went wrong. It was unbelievable.

When I decided to write the book, I turned to the pros, because I figured no one was going to believe it if it was just me, a civilian, saying, ''Here's what you have to look out for.'' And the shocking thing was that all these famous directors everybody knows, like Danny Boyle or Darren Aronofsky or Christopher Nolan, were all like, ''Oh, yeah, the same thing happened to me.'' In writing the book, I discovered that meteoric success and blazing failure are a hair's breadth apart. The only thing that prevents a lot of people from becoming successes is not avoiding some incredibly stupid and avoidable mistakes.

Q: Did writing the book whet your appetite for giving filmmaking another shot?

A: It has, because now I know what to avoid and what to do differently. More importantly, it has also shown me that even though there are fewer theatrical independent distributors nowadays, there have never been more opportunities to get your work seen by people. Jet Blue has this thing now where you can credit card swipe every individual screen below the headrest on the seat in front of you. That's an opportunity for content providers to monetize video content. With Internet access on planes, you have people on a five-hour flight who can access BitTorrent on their laptops, which is now redesigned as a pay service.

Before, you'd enter your film in a festival and hope it got selected, screen it for a couple of hundred people, and then go home with nothing to show for it. But now anyone can get their films out on YouTube in front of people, and if it's something that is professional and can really tell a story, and it hasn't been felled by the same mistakes that felled some of the biggest names in the industry, they can take it to the next level and become the shining stars of tomorrow.

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