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Truly Free Film

Towards A Sustainable Investor Class: Diverse And Deep Industry Knowledge

Potential film investors need to be educated about what is working and what is not, where it works, and what could be done. No one likes to look foolish, but most film investors come to the industry having made their wealth in other fields (or having not actually generated it themselves) and thus often start with a paucity of the necessary and a surplus of the inapplicable.

Investments should be made based on educated choice, not an impulsive or biased guess — and certainly not on the advice of conflicted advisors.

The problem here is

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Truly Free Film

Towards A Sustainable Investor Class: Have A Good Time

If you don’t enjoy what you do you won’t stay with it.  

Freud and The Ancient Greeks all recognized that you need a balance between work, love, and play.  For a system to be sustaining, it should have an equal balance between all three. It has be something you care about, that your labor and time can improve and produce just rewards, and it has to deliver joy. Film investment can be

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Truly Free Film

Towards A Sustainable Investor Class: Deliver Risk Appropriate Returns

The Film Industry has historically sought out “dumb money”, people willing to make the sucker bet.  This is akin to basing the global transportation system on fossil fuel — at a given time ,you run out the resource and have the joy of having destroyed your planet or culture in the process.  Why are we doing this? Isn’t it time this process stopped? Can we just find the photos of those responsible now, put them on the wall, and say “These people destroyed what we once loved?”

It is as if The Studios make sport of trying to make sure that the creators and their supporters don’t earn their fair share.  By now everyone knows both the tales of

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Truly Free Film

Towards A Sustainable Investor Class: Pre-set Backstop Risk Mitigation

Your parents taught you to cover your ass didn’t they?  You like to be prepared, right?  You can’t expect to have dinner if you haven’t put food in the refrigerator, right?  How come then we make films and don’t have any distribution options lined up in advance?  Are we expecting others to always take us for dinner?

When someone is encouraged to make a movie and bring it to market without having any backstop distribution or marketing plans in place, that advisor clearly has another agenda at hand than the investors’ (or filmmakers’) best interest.

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Truly Free Film

Towards A Sustainable Investor Class: Group Learning And Lift

Surround yourself with smart people who know different things than you do.

That’s good advice, isn’t it?  Common sense, really.  Other than changing environments, nothing else will spark creativity so well. It will help you in everything you do, from making better decisions to discovering new passions.

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Truly Free Film

Towards A Sustainable Investor Class: Make Numerous Small Bets

It is highly regarded as common sense to “not put all your eggs in one basket”. Yet most film investors, win or lose, get out after just one or two investments. This is not good for them and it is not good for the creators, either.

Just like the filmmakers, investors in Indie Film tend to

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Truly Free Film

Towards A Sustainable Investor Class: Vetted 3rd Party Affirmed Projects

Let’s say you were one of Twitter’s initial hires.  The IPO has made you a multi-millionaire.  Being in the Bay Area you’ve had a front row seat (courtesy of The San Francisco Film Society) how strategic film investments at critical times can make great cinema live (BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD, FRUITVALE STATION, SHORT TERM 12, TEST, and so on).  You have an idea that if contribute a bit here and there you can help bring the Bay Area Cinema Renaissance into being.  Now you are trying to figure all you need to know about investing in film.  Where are you at? What more do you need to know?