I am talking to you. Or at least 98% of you folks who are trying to raise money to make a film.
You know how in poker it always pays to look for other players’ “tell”? A “tell” is the subconscious gesture most people make when they are not sure of themselves. The “tell” helps to show when people are bluffing — or in everyday terms, when they are lying. The most common ”tell” is
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
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
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.
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
It’s pretty simple. When people make money doing something, more money enters that system. And it is pretty simple in the reverse: when some people make a bucketload and those that invested in it make virtually nothing, less money flows into the system.
If distributors don’t pay creators their fair share of the profits, their won’t be movies made. Or maybe the investors will get wise and stop selling the distributors the film. After all we are at a time that you can really do it yourself (by doing it with others). And to be clear, “fair share” doesn’t mean paying them what contract swindles them out of — it means paying them an ethical cut. And that sure in hell ain’t 12.8% of the profits — which is what happened on one of the most successful indie films of recent times.
Producers pride themselves in sourcing new financing sources. There generally is not a large supply of eager new money to leap into film biz. One agency has even taken to refusing to share with the producers they are representing the sources they are submitting to, for fear that they won’t be the new financiers’ preferred suppliers. Knowledge is power, but transparency is progress. Which is why I am excited to share this list with you…
You almost would expect a financier list to be the sort of thing that is found on Wikileaks. I do think we are entering a period when free culture moles inside the agency world (yes, they have been planted and are digging away furiously), will start to drop documents on the Deadline desks, but this list did not come from such a source.
The Film Biz is always a bit obsessed with lists. Box Office. Highest Paid. Most Powerful. Most Number Of Twitter Followers &Facebook Friends. You’d think ability to get movies made would always be something that Industry-ites would track a bit more thoroughly. Well, until we start do this, I am pretty thrilled to be offered THIS LIST annually. So who on it do you already know? What can we do to get them into this world a bit more thoroughly? I don’t know about you, but I am going to head off to China next month. Isn’t that what any self-respecting film producer should do? Let me know if you have anyone over there you think I should meet.
