shaun:
You're right about that. I used mandy.com to recruit most of the crew on my first feature. Most of the time, I wasn't happy. But that's because the entire budget of my first feature was only 20K, so nobody got paid anything.

Now that I have a little more money to play with, I'm wondering whether or not it's smart to even try. The best ones obviously won't work on a 250K budget. So I'm still stuck with semi-professionals out of work. This is a scary thought.

Eventually, when production is on, all hiring will be taken care of by the line producer anyway. Right now, having knowledge of the rough boundaries of the budget will allow me the luxury of writing to a tight budget. I really don't want to give anyone the false impression that the project is 'on' yet. It's not.