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 that (albeit I am equating love with passion here).
Filmmaking is hard. The work expands to fit the time and budget allotted. The business and art of film both attract extreme personalities that can be difficult to collaborate with. Aspects of the infrastructure can be difficult to enhance or even deviate from. Yet we keep trying to get it right and make it better. As much as we work together, the struggle often feels solitary.
Production managers, line producers, producers, and even some directors know how important it is to make all collaborators feel like you are working for them — and not just providing them with the right tools, time, and environment — but creating a structure that also delivers pleasure to the team. Every neophyte producer now knows enough to make sure the catering is decent and both craft service healthy and tempting. Most will also try to plan some events, parties, and the like that allow the team to blow off steam and celebrate. Everyone wants to have fun.
Producers may be skilled at looking out for their cast and crew, but they often lag when it comes to the investors. We think because someone has money they can do whatever they want and thus are probably doing it. Even worse, we often take a snobbish attitude and act like we have given the investors the privilege of investing in our work, and shrug them off then and there thinking it is enough to stop there. We haven’t built a structure that allows the true pleasure of investing in a film to bubble up and become positively infectious. All investment should beget more investment.
The missing component is often fun. When you look at ROI we often forget to look at the ROIOE — the return on investment of engagement. It never is just about the money. It is also about what you make, about doing good in addition to doing well. And it is also very much about the experience, about the joy you make in making what you make. The experience we remember is what allows us to do it again — or stops us from proceeding another time. Isn’t it time we started to program more fun into our P&Ls?
It is an incredible feeling to be responsible — to any degree — for a work of art. Think of it, you know you have made the world a better place. You improved our mindscape. And the chances are that thing, the art you helped bring into being, will never go away. It’s going to be discovered again and again by those that need it most. A friend once told me that you haven’t lived if someone hasn’t written a song for or about you. I want us all to sing those songs and I want them to be about what we have all done together. They are songs of victory and love, triumph and courage. And they are most fun when we all do more than just hum along.
Okay, so singing may not be your bag. Or your investors’. But it is still a good tune to keep in your head. We have to make it fun. We have to make it so everyone wants to come back for more. It better not be gruel we are serving. And we can’t just slop down in a bowl and expect to spoon feed them again next time.
Read:
Towards A Sustainable Investor Class For Film Culture And Business
Staged Financing MUST Become Film BIz’s Immediate Goal
Towards A Sustainable Investor Class: A Portfolio Approach
TASIC: Accessing Quality Projects
TASIC: Deliver Risk Appropriate Rewards
