I’ve just done another round of film festivals and conferences where the topic of multiple panels was “the state of the industry,” and there was a recurrent theme for what we need – a billionaire and/or brands to save the day. This is understandable, given that we do need a savior of some kind. Brands became important to the entertainment ecosystem years ago, and this year’s Cannes Lions seemed almost as important as Cannes to the film world. And a billionaire did just back one of our most famous documentarians, so maybe another will want to save the rest of us. And I did just mention last week, that another one has patiently funded the entire right-wing media ecosystem, so we just need one from the left, right? But as you can already tell from my headline, I find these solutions to be bullshit. We need better ideas.
Don’t get me wrong – I have nothing against billionaires or brands. I’ve worked with both in the film world. My entire company is based around working with brands, and I do believe they’re a strong part of our future. And if more billionaires – or foundations funded by them decades ago, or more recently – want to support good filmmaking, I won’t be standing in the way. In fact, I want more of both to be involved, and to even collaborate to bring more great films to the world. But neither will be our saviors as a sector, nor will they save the kinds of films most people are talking about when they suggest these solutions – independent films, emerging filmmakers, diverse filmmaking, truth-to-power-films, films for democracy, and the others not getting funded now.
The simple fact is – brands and billionaires generally want to fund things that will be a success. Even when they want to be patrons of the arts, they want these films to be seen and have some kind of impact (however you might measure that impact). They also generally like flashy new ideas, not tried and true practices that get things done, but aren’t super sexy. Or they like to fund their “new” way of doing things – they became successful brands or billionaires because they did something smart, so surely, they can figure out this morass we call filmmaking. They’re also usually pretty hard to find for the average filmmaker, and they don’t make themselves readily available for a pitch. And even when you do find your way in – that helps one or two filmmakers, not the entire field.
This kind of talk also scares me, because what usually happens is that the wrong person finds their way to the brand or the billionaire (or both), and ruins it for the rest of us, by pitching the worst idea possible. I’ve seen this happen again and again. Producer X finds their way to the investor, pitches them a slate of terrible films which perform horribly, and that investor, and all their friends, are turned off from filmmaking forever. And more than one brand has been lured into the Hollywood routine of “finding the next sucker” as a source of funds, which then ruins that brand’s studio dreams for years (until a new CMO gets hired, at minimum).
But my bigger point here is that when I’ve heard people say this – we need a billionaire and some brands – and I’ve heard it a lot, it tends to foreclose any imaginative thinking about what might really build a new future for the field. We need to acknowledge that things have changed and they’re not going back to the way they were. We need new directions that acknowledge the new reality. But this doesn’t mean we can’t learn from the past. I was reminded of this during DC/DOX when Patricia Aufderheide had a conversation with Gordon Quinn, the founder of Kartemquin (there isn’t a recording). He repeatedly brought up getting rejections but refusing to accept a no, and plowing forward and forcing the system to change. This is what led to many of their best films getting distributed and seen, and it’s what led to the creation of ITVS. It was about filmmakers coming together to build something that the public needed, despite the system telling them no. The idea for an entirely new system for funding independent films and getting them seen on public media came from the filmmakers (and a distributor and an activist), and it was opposed by the public media system. But they fought hard, and had a vision for something new. Then, the money came from a version of the billionaires – the foundations – but they didn’t wait for that savior, they painstakingly built something that became so inevitable that others had to join their cause.
That’s what we need again. In my last newsletter, I called it “evil genius thinking,” referring to the way the right has been thinking and building for years. Luckily, I’ve been catching wind of more than a few new ideas being built behind the scenes. As I mentioned on my panel at DC/DOX, some of these new schemes will fail, and only a few will succeed. But the ideas I’m hearing about don’t rely on brands or billionaires to save the day. But if they work, both will want to be part of their success, because good ideas tend to attract both, mainly because they bring better art to a wider audience. Re-focusing on what the filmmakers need and the audience wants is where we’ll find success, but that’s a post for next time.
Note: my new newsletter format is wonky, and seems to be making the text show up center justified. I’m working on some format changes, please have patience.
