Like Napoleon Dynamite and Reservoir Dogs before it, 
Machiavelli Hangman is already being hailed by many as a triumph 
in low-budget independent filmmaking in American cinema. 
Shervin Youssefian who write and directed the film is a 
graduate of the University of Northridge. After completing the 
fifth draft of Machiavelli Hangman which was his fifth feature 
screenplay, he called up his producer friend Artin Nazarian to 
take a look at the script.

"As soon as I turned the script, I knew right away that this was 
going places. I called him back and I think he was excited to see 
my reaction. I don’t think even he had realized what great 
material this was," explains Nazarian.

After several months of extensive rewrites and polishing, the 
script was finally complete and the casting process began. "This 
was like Selznick looking for the perfect Scarlett O’Hara," says 
Youssefian. The amount of detail and requirements that were put 
in the casting process could equal any major studios. 

As the actors came in to audition, they were handed out two pages 
of the script, to prepare for a cold reading. Many noticed just 
from the few pages that this was not your everyday screenplay. "I 
was at first surprised that a major studio hadn’t picked it up 
yet... the fluidity and the wit of the dialogue jumped out of the 
page. It felt like auditioning for Pulp Fiction or something like 
The Usual Suspects," says Brian Cumberland, an actor in Los 
Angeles.

The team had such a strong confidence in its abilities that it 
immediately attracted the attention of investors and other well-
positioned industry professionals. Word of mouth spread and 
before the producers knew it Youssefian’s screenplay was being 
sent to the offices of some of the best known actors in the 
industry. 

"You find yourself in a whirlwind and things happen so fast that 
one minute, you’re sitting in your backyard thinking ‘what if’ 
and the other, you’re having lunch with the biggest stars in 
Hollywood in their backyard!" 

This comes to show that Hollywood is not as closed as many think 
it is. Studios and distribution companies seek out good material 
and when you have good material, they will come to you and make 
things happen. An advice to young filmmakers is to find a script 
and instead of submitting it to festivals, try to get as many 
people as possible to get excited about the project. When you 
have enough people on the team, it gets attention and just like 
a Reservoir Dogs and Machiavelli Hangman, more people will jump 
on the bandwagon. 

George Meryll is an entertainment columnist for various 
newspapers. He has done his homework and is happy to 
share with us what he has learned about the coming film, 
Machiavelli Hangman (http://www.hangmanmovie.com).