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 Harry Potter and Napoleon Dynamite — and they are truly horror stories. I don’t think anyone thinks 12.8% is a fair share of profits for the investors who fully finance a hit film to receive. If you make one of the biggest hits the world has ever seen, you must benefit significantly from it — or we must confess this system does not work (for investors).
We need to make Indie Film work for investors. Indie film can differ from the corporate studio work by making sure that investors receive an appropriate reward for their risk. We need to make sure that early stage capital in film can tell the same sort of story that its kind that invested in Facebook and Google now tell. Imagine a whole community that gets wealthy by supporting the local artists. Don’t you want to live in that world? I know I do.
Granted, individual film projects will rarely spit out the kind of returns that the now dominate former startups do or will or did, but occasionally a property comes along that does have that potential. And there certainly are talented individuals that have unique skills at developing that material into something phenomenal — yet I don’t see money lining up to help them with the acquisition and development of such properties. Similarly, there are a few folks out there in the film business that do have the potential to become the next George Lucas or Stan Lee, but again I don’t see the mechanism yet for the investment in the individual versus the project. But wouldn’t it be just one fantastic snowball, if you knew someone who had invested in the next Hunger Games, or Lucas or Spielberg, and they made a fortune, and told their friends how they made a fortune, and those friends invested in the next next and so on and so forth until we had this huge culture that had the confidence and capital invested in the ambitious and diverse?
People generally think they need to look out for themselves first. That is not the same thing as looking only at the short term, yet we seem to do a pretty good job of confusing them. We’d be far better of if we learned to take the long view. Our system, based on one-off product creation, is incredibly short sighted. If creators have their lawyers negotiate killer deals for them with their investors, that is precisely what it they are doing: killing off their allies. We should want our investors to truly benefit so that they not only stay in the space, but attract more people to the space. The more competition there is to get into a deal, the better options there are to structure the deal.
Getting in early is a real risk, and one should be paid well for it. It will bring more money into the field. Risk appropriate rewards will facilitate greater originality. It will make our system more sustainable.
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
