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Truly Free Film

You Will Never Make Any REAL Money With Hollywood

how do you expect to get your money from Hollywood?
how do you expect to get your money from Hollywood?

Why did Mike DeLuca leave an incredibly successful producing career to return to the executive suite at Sony? After leaving the reigns of New Line, he produced Moneyball, The Social Network, and Captain Phillips among others.  It’s hard to match his track record.  Yet he too has given up producing.  Why?

One can only assume the autonomy of producing is more pleasurable than the pressures of running a studio.  One can also assume the confines of Sony are a hell of a lot more secure.  Rarely does one gets paid their value for producing a film, and if it is a project you love and is even a wee bit challenging you are going to watch that diminished fee take another cut or five. If you want financial security or wealth, don’t be a producer.

But there’s always the back end, right?

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Truly Free Film

Brave Thinkers and Doers 2013 (Indie Film Division)

A Field In England” – The whole team behind Ben Wheatley’s movie deserves a big shout out.  They did something truly different and structured their business to do so from the start.  Day and Date? check.  Transparency? check.  Enhanced value beyond the feature film product? check. Sharing of knowledge for community benefit? check.  Social media engagement? check.  Revenue sharing? check. Read all about this truly innovative strategy here, courtesy of BFI (see below). I look forward to seeing how you apply it to your own practice.

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The British Film Institute (BFI) – This institution makes the list of individuals not because I think corporations are at all like people (Repeal Citizens United!), but because they are taking the lead in heeding the call for greater transparency in film revenue reporting. We will not be able to build a sustainable global indie film culture or enterprise without such facts.  The BFI’s GREAT listing of films & case studies of how distribs are using new ways of reaching audiences, such as using new marketing techniques, new distribution platforms or innovative exhibition models is a must read for anyone interested in finding a way to support themselves or others by making films and taking responsibility for them. bit.ly/18p4i8M

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Shane CaruthShane Carruth – Shane probably should make this list just for making another one of his movies.  

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Truly Free Film

10 Must Read Or Watch Film Biz Articles Of 2013

  1. Steven Soderbergh’s “State Of Cinema” Address at SFIFF56: http://vimeo.com/65060864. This served as the framing for AO Scott’s 2013 Cinema overview.
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Truly Free Film

How Are We Supposed to Make Exciting Content when “Content” is Such a Boring Word?

By Reid Rosefelt

Content-Graphic 1Who was the person who decided that the plain vanilla word “content” was going to stand for all the stuff that gets put up on social media?

Whoever it was should hang their head in shame.

If the history of human experience is an empty vessel, I suppose if you were a dullard you could opine that “content” is what fills it up: literature, music, movies, religion, politics, sex, joke-telling, criticism, talk show hosting, blogging, Power Point presentations, tweeting, posting, and pinteresting–it’s all content.

But I don’t think that Steven Spielberg, Kathryn Bigelow, Steve McQueen, Lorde, Vince Gilligan, Banksy, Jim Jarmusch, Louis C.K., Jane Campion, Jay-Z, Guillermo del Toro, Zadie Smith, Dave Eggers, Jony Ive, Park Chan-wook and Sara Bareilles, woke up this morning and said, “I can’t wait to start making content!” There is no poetry in “content.” There is no transcendence in “content.” There is no glory in a life devoted to content.

People who live to make beautiful things know that language is a glorious stew–spicy, subtle, sweet, sour, creamy, crunchy, familiar and foreign–so they aren’t aroused by the bland mush of words like “content.”

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Issues and Actions Truly Free Film

Filmonomics: Thinking in Teams

By Colin Brown
It has been ten years since the publication of Moneyball: The Art of Winning An Unfair Game and still the quest goes on to find those hidden signals and data points that might do for the film industry what Billy Beane and his bean-counters did for professional baseball – namely, unlock the secrets of success in a business distorted by old wisdoms. There is much to be gained from such a statistical treasure trove. In film entertainment, as in sports, the scouting establishment has shown a habit of undervaluing those most often responsible for winning results. A costly obsession with conventional star performers has blinded both industries to what really makes teams tick. To borrow both baseball and cinema parlance, it all comes down to finding those players who can truly “produce”.

 moneyball

For those who haven’t read Michael Lewis’ book, or seen the subsequent film adaptation Moneyball in which he was portrayed by Brad Pitt, Beane was the irrepressible general manager of the Oakland A’s who defied the traditional benchmarks that had long been used to gauge baseball players. Instead of relying on stolen basesruns batted in and batting averages as the surefire measures of offensive success, Beane’s front office came to realize that on-base percentage and slugging percentage were more meaningful indicators – overlooked qualities that were hence cheaper to acquire on the open market than those based around speed and contact. That insight allowed him to assemble a team of basement-bargain players that was able to compete successfully against far richer competitors in Major League Baseball, or at least until those giants caught on and started mirroring Beane’s strategies.

In the collective wisdom of the movie business, the stars of the game have historically been both the actors and the auteurs that coach them. Much of the value system for independent movies is still predicated on the need to attract a recognizable calibre of acting and directing talent in order to unlock the necessary finance, specifically foreign pre-sales and a distribution deal in the US. This is no economic accident. Ever since the days of the star system, film audiences have been media-conditioned to idolize celebrities from their bleachers. And much as we all know that filmmaking is an elaborate act of collaboration, we instinctively see cinema as a personal expression of a director’s creative vision. European law goes so far as to enshrine this godly status by designating the film director as the movie’s “author”. Attend any film festival and you’ll fall soon enough under the spell of directors’ names and actors’ faces. They are what excite audiences and move markets.

But it doesn’t take particularly rigorous statistical analysis to see the flaws in this starry-eyed system. As an industry, we place inordinate financial stock on a handful of top performers. Isolate the film names on Forbes most recent list of highest paid entertainers and compare them with, say, The Numbers’ own assessments for how much industry players contribute in value to an average non-franchise film and you will see remarkably little correlation in their top tens. They share just one filmmaker – Steven Spielberg, who tops both film lists – and also the name of Robert Downey Jr.

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Truly Free Film

Smash The Box! 10 Things I Wrote In 2013 I Think You Should Read

Working Away To Build A Better MousetrapNote: If you’d like to share this post, please use this shortened link: http://bit.ly/1cFNHfs

It’s not enough any more to think outside the box. I think we need to smash the box to bits.

We need a total systems reboot of the indie film infrastructure.  And I don’t think we can continue to wait and hope someone else is going to build it for us either.

I have been trying to help however I can help best.  Perhaps these posts can be your guide:

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Truly Free Film

IndieStreet Post #8: Screen Wars “Episode IV: Revenge of the Tele”

By Jay Webb

Screen shot 2013-08-19 at 4.51.06 PM

Previously: Navigating Potholes

How many haunted junkyards are filled with huge televisions that are not even worth their weight in coal.  How many??

Does it matter?  Do we mourn for these things?  Why is this spreading genocide and waste being overlooked?  “Things are better now, things are faster now, and if they can make TV look this good, than I am sure as hell they can figure out the landfill problem…fuck it.”

Humans have had dynamic relationships with every piece of content, quality or not, that came through the TV screen, but deemed the screen itself inconsequential and now have neglected them to a point of no return.  The screens of this generation are taking their revenge, and it has been quicker and fiercer than even they could have imagined.  I am only here as a messenger to warn the humans of the wars that have already began, and to discuss how we as human filmmakers and content creators can live in a mental world that they may already have taken control over.