The one reason you probably bought this book was to learn was where you can find money to make your movie, and that’s the one thing I can’t teach you. There are so many ways to get financing and none of them are wrong, except maybe robbing a 7-Eleven. Here, briefly, are your options:
Some producers like to use combinations of all of the above, and to draw their financing from two or three different sources. They think this gives them more control. After all, it’s hard to argue with a studio when it’s all their money. It’s true that if you use a mix of, say, private investors, foreign distributors, and a finance company, you can sometimes divide and conquer.
On the other hand, that combination has a house-of-cards quality: If one entity pulls out, the whole thing can collapse. Safe, for example, had four sources of funding: a limited partnership; the now-defunct American Playhouse; Great Britain’s Channel 4; and a German distributor. The film was shot in Southern California, and as I arrived in Los Angeles—literally, as I walked through the door of our new production office—a fax was coming in from the Germans announcing that they were pulling out.
The Germans’ share amounted to twenty percent of the budget, which might not sound like a fatal loss, but none of the other investors were going to cash-flow a movie that couldn’t be finished. I needed to prove that the film could be made for considerably less than I had told them it could, or else find the money somewhere else—and all of this eight weeks before production and with a payroll going. I called David Aukin at Channel 4 and, without telling him the problem, tried to squeeze more funds out of the station. He smelled what was happening immediately, which was probably a good thing. “You know,” he said, “I just met some very successful theatrical producers who want to get into movies.” That’s how I hooked up with John Hart, a producer of such smash revivals as Guys and Dolls and Tommy, who put in what we needed on Safe and who has gone on to work with us on Office Killer and Dark Harbor. At this writing, we even share office space.
The moral of this story is that while you might lessen your risk if you diversify your financing, you’ll also have a harder time going to a source—as I can go to, say, October Films, which bankrolled Happiness—and convince them to enhance your budget. When the costs are spread out among several different parties, it’s more difficult to reach them psychologically. Think of it this way: If you owned twenty-five percent of an apartment and three other guys owned it, too, how would you feel about springing for a new oven all by yourself?
DAVID LINDE
President of International Sales, Good Machine, Inc.
What has happened in the marketplace today is that distributors are more in the prebuying business than they used to be.
Why? They want to secure their release schedules and create assets; when you prebuy a movie you tend to get it for a long time, which creates an asset base. And it’s hugely competitive out there. So how do you get the movies? You get them either by a) overpaying, or b) getting them first. Companies such as Miramax and Polygram and even Fox try to get them first.
Let’s use Todd Solondz’s movie to talk about international financing. There were two different ways we tried to finance it, and the way we did was ultimately an amalgamation of the two. Scenario A was to sell North America for about fifty percent of the budget, then go out and sell two major territories (say. Japan and Germany), and then get a bank to “gap” the rest, which means making up the difference in return for interest payments and some back-end participation. Scenario B was to get four major territories—Japan, Italy, Germany, and either France or the UK—to put up forty percent of the budget and then get each of those countries to put up an additional 2.5% as equity in the picture after the talent is hired. That way we’d have fifty percent of the budget, North America open, and a bank willing to give us a good rate on the other fifty percent.
What we eventually did was get several territories to commit to buying the picture, which we then used to convince a North American distributor, October Films, to fully finance it. So October gets a big piece of the foreign presales, though that’s not so great, to have the world rights cross-collaterized like that. But the advantage is that we avoided all bank costs, which could have been as high as $350,000. The reason you want to sell such high percentages before going to banks is that the rates are unbelievably better if you can cover seventy or seventy-five percent of the budget yourself. Otherwise, interest and fees can rack up to as much as twenty-five percent more.
Internationally, the market is really changing. It has become very theatrical-driven because the home video marketplace is declining at a rapid rate—in certain territories, revenue from home video has dropped as much as fifty percent just in the last two years. And the value of television for any motion picture is defined by how it does theatrically, or by what the perceived theatrical potential is. So the way you presell a Todd Solondz movie is based upon two perceptions: first, that Todd is one of the most interesting young filmmakers working today, which gives distributors a certain amount of security because they know it will be original and it will have a theatrical life; and second, that the producers, Christine Vachon and Good Machine’s Ted Hope, are not in the business of making anything other than original theatrical motion pictures, and ones that important critics will pay attention to.
The surest way to have complete autonomy over what you shoot is to use your own cash, which is more common than you’d think in these days of government arts phobia. Around the Independent Feature Project, you’ll find a lot of moneyed people, the sort of entrepreneurs who used to invest in computer businesses, hot dog franchises, and other get-rich-quick schemes. Now they’re making independent movies because they think they’ll get the brass ring.
MOVIES FROM NOWHERE?
You ask: What about those mythical Films that Come from Nowhere, the ones made by little geniuses working in a vacuum? Alas, that’s not usually how it works. First, there is no vacuum. Every company has trackers who keep tabs on every piece of production, so most of the time those people have sniffed around, read the script, and already formed an opinion on the project. Then there are the films like Go Fish, which do originate in the Land of Nowhere, but by the time you see them in theaters they have been guided into port by experienced hands. Edward Burns’ first feature, The Brothers McMullen, arrived from Nowhere as a shapeless mess in which the head of Twentieth Century Fox, Tom Rothman, somehow glimpsed a movie and asked Ted Hope and James Schamus of Good Machine to step in and unearth it. The film released to theaters did not emerge, fully formed, from the mind of Edward Burns. There were real pros laboring to make it a hit.
Many of the independent films that get plucked out of obscurity at the Sundance independent film festival are made with money from people’s credit cards, or with bank loans or college loans or bingo games or garage sales or bake sales. Or else they’re financed by people who all have the same last name as the director. They often take a long time to shoot—months or even years, in spurts. (The Brothers McMullen was shot on weekends over eight months.) No book can really tell you how to finance a movie like Go Fish or Clerks or She’s Gotta Have It. They just kind of happen. They tend to grow organically out of something in the filmmaker’s life and are dependent on odd circumstances:
“Hey, I’m working in a film equipment rental house and I got all this film from a movie that just wrapped!”
“My father says we can use his restaurant at night. Let’s make a movie about a restaurant!”
They usually don’t have any actors to speak of, so they don’t have to deal with the Screen Actors Guild. And they don’t play by the rules that say: Never put your own money into a movie; never mortgage your house to make a movie; never think you can make a movie with nonactors. All those things go out the window, and when they work it’s because of some weird, magical zymurgy of charm and ignorance, and a freshness that makes them seem totally new (even when their stories are old-fashioned). Of course, the media doesn’t write up the thousands of people who do go into bankruptcy, lose their houses, etc. For every Go Fish, there’s a hundred Go Brokes, Go Crazys and even Go to Jails.
SHAKING THE TREE
If the money doesn’t come from your own pocket, make sure that you understand the implications of convincing people to invest what they can’t afford to lose in a venture that will almost certainly lose it. (I know that you, personally, are the Great Exception, but I’m addressing the Statistical You.)
Occasionally, you can also find people who are passionately interested in the subject of your film. Postcards from America was partially financed by a rock musician, Jimmy Somerville, who was a big fan of the stories on which the movie was based. As I wrote in the first chapter, my partner and I were contacted by a wealthy ex-Nebraskan when he heard we were developing a film based on a murder that happened near where he grew up. And when Bill Sherwood made Parting Glances, he raised money in dribs and drabs from gay men who wanted a movie about their actual lives instead of the fist-fucking serial killers of pictures like Cruising (although I loved Cruising).
A limited partnership, in which you have many investors, is a huge undertaking; an agreement can run to hundreds of pages and drawing it up can cost tens of thousands in legal fees. Ten or twenty years ago there were tax incentives for that kind of investment, and all those plastic surgeons and orthodontists didn’t mind as much if the money went down the drain. The tax laws have changed, however, and people who lose it really lose it. You must (for reasons both moral and legal) let them know that an investment in a film is incredibly risky. That doesn’t mean, however, that you can’t pitch them hard about how talented you are, how glamorous the movie business is, and how exhilarating it is to see their names in print in the end credits.
It used to be that you could get federal or state money to make independent movies, but government grants have mostly dried up, and the National Endowment for the Arts—the folks who helped bring you that infamous piece of homosexual backwash, Poison—continues to get hacked at and pilloried. There’s no point in moaning about not having access to that money anymore because you don’t and that’s that. Anyway, does the world owe every Generation X twenty-five-year-old $500,000 to make his or her first film? In Canada and Britain they seem to think so. I can argue both sides of the fence quite easily. Yes, I’ve benefited from government grants and probably wouldn’t have made some of my movies without them. Filmmakers such as Atom Egoyan wouldn’t be as accomplished as they are now without the opportunity to sharpen their craft on small, uncommercial, well-subsidized art movies. On the other hand, I once met a non-U.S. filmmaker who’d received from his government a considerable sum (more than I’d ever had at that point) to make what I thought (although I didn’t say) was a lousy movie, and I was genuinely offended by his indifference to the prospective audience. “I don’t give a damn who sees my movies,” he said. “That’s not why I make them. I make them to express myself, and if nobody sees them, so what?” I responded that I don’t think a film is really alive until people see it. If there’s no audience, all you have is a celluloid trophy.
PACKAGING ON A SHOESTRING
What should you show a potential financier? A script and a budget, certainly, and perhaps a cinematographer and designer, which will always make the package stronger. Some people think it’s wisest not to send out a script until elements are attached, since you don’t get too many shots to pitch your sale. But no distributor will give you the green light simply on the basis of a cinematographer. For a film we’re developing now, the writer-director Josh Goldin has a good shot at getting Philip Glass to do the music. “Isn’t that good?” he asked Pam, hopefully. Yes, of course, it’s good—it’s great—but in terms of financing, it’s absolutely meaningless. In the end, what matters most is who’s in front of the camera. Casting has come to play an increasingly large role in preselling a film both to foreign markets and distributors.
When should you go out? How wide? I suggest you do it systematically, that you choose two or three companies you think will understand what the project’s about, and if all of them pass, go wider, to more long-shot companies. A script is only new once, so you shouldn’t go out too often. All those junior executives at all those companies go to the same free parties. Junior Exec A says, “Did you read that pedophile script? It’s entertaining, but my boss won’t touch a film about a pedophile with a ten-foot pole.” So Junior Exec B goes back to his or her office and says, “You know, Junior Exec A’s company passed on that script.” Of course, people pass on things all the time, so it doesn’t always mean the project’s doomed. But after a while your currency gets devalued.
The hardest thing can be getting people to say no. No one quite wants to. They want to leave that door open just a little bit. So they say, “Welllll, if you do a tiiiny bit more work on the script…”—when usually, with those kinds of projects, it doesn’t matter how much work you do on the script, it’s not going to change what they don’t like. But that door is open in case…in case…You’re dealing with a world of professional bet-hedgers.
Remember, though, they’re all hungry, all looking to get a bead on the zeitgeist. That knowledge comes in handy when it’s time to do the Pitch.
A FIT OF PITCHING
In a sense, pitching should begin from the first moment the director communicates with the producer. When Todd Haynes says to me, “I have this idea about a woman whose environment starts actually to kill her,” I’m instantly mulling over its life in the marketplace: “Environmental poison…untraceable…all these support groups for people with undefined maladies like chronic fatigue syndrome…the horror of modern society…” I have to get distributors and finance people to see its potential. And it’s important that the directors you work with are capable of articulating their visions, too: If they can’t do it with a financier, they probably won’t be able to do it on the set.
Even at this stage, financing entities are scrutinizing your project for marketable elements that will distinguish it from the morass of independent films. They want a director about whom good copy can be written: A black teenager like Matty Rich, who made Straight Out of Brooklyn on a shoestring. Someone who acquired fifty credit cards and ran each of them to the limit. Someone who used film they stole while being a production assistant at the Today Show. It helps if they’re attractive. And it helps if they’re male. I’m usually reluctant to spout stuff like: “If you’re a female it’s so much harder; if you’re a male it’s so much easier”—I hope it’s a little more complicated than that. But I do think that the machine works better with boys. People are more familiar with the whole idea of a male director, especially when he’s a maverick who’s bucking the system. We did, however, get lots of ink for Rose and Guin from Go Fish because they were extremely presentable and very articulate.
As I wrote in the second chapter, one thing I don’t like is when people describe a project as, say, “It’s a cross between Go Fish and Pulp Fiction with a touch of The Full Monty.” I don’t want to do that arithmetic. When I said as much on a Sundance panel about “pitching” recently, the other speakers—studio executives, producers, and distributors—laughed in agreement, but went on to direct the audience of aspiring filmmakers to cite as many successful movies in their pitches as they could. It’s a way of life in Hollywood—a bum’s shorthand. The films I produce tend to be, for better or worse, sui generis. Comparisons are rarely tempting. Trying to raise money for Safe, Todd Haynes and I enthused to prospective financiers that he wanted the movie to evoke the same kind of claustrophobic dread as Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman. This sounded bad if they hadn’t seen that film—three and a half hours of a housewife’s lonely domestic rituals—and even worse if they had. Jeanne Dielman is a masterpiece, but it’s difficult to imagine someone giving you three million dollars to make a picture just like it.
Besides, there are much more compelling techniques for putting across the originality of your vision. For Velvet Goldmine, Todd assembled a book of images from the glam-rock era: David Bowie, Bryan Ferry, T. Rex. The pictures were outrageous and enticing; they conjured up the wild energy and wayward allure of that period in a way that no glib comparisons (“It’s sort of Citizen Kane meets The Man Who Fell to Earth!”) ever could.
While we’re on the subject of pitching, I feel compelled to caution you about pushing a script on producers or distributors at festivals or conferences or anywhere else you find them suddenly accessible. I never accept a script that way, which might be my loss. But I have good reasons: first, I’m usually busy and distracted; second, they’re heavy, and no one wants to lug extra weight on a plane; third, I might lose one, and I don’t want to have to feel guilty about it; and fourth, there are people in my office who’ll give them a much less impatient first read. As a rule, I think it’s smarter to cultivate a relationship with someone on the bottom of the totem pole—someone who’ll pay more attention to you and perhaps become an energetic advocate.
Sometimes you can convince an established filmmaker to serve as “executive producer,” an elastic function that is often ceremonial. People like Oliver Stone and Sydney Pollack often take this role. David Cronenberg is helping to get I’m Losing You, Bruce Wagner’s tumultuous Hollywood tragicomedy, financed, and it needs him. The project came about because I wrote a review of Bruce’s novel in the magazine The Advocate. (I’d never done a book review, so I was flattered when they asked me.) The review was a rave, and the fact that it came from a producer must have been, for Bruce, a sign from on high. He called and asked if I’d produce the movie, and I said no, I’m too busy. But Bruce can be persistent. The script was incredibly dark and difficult to finance, like everything else I seem to have my name on these days; so I said, “What the hell,” and Pam and I took it on. When David Cronenberg, who’s friends with Bruce, agreed to serve as executive producer, his relationship with a couple of Canadian companies meant that financing in the two-to-three million-dollar range was suddenly possible. I can call him up and say, “David, will you make this call on our behalf?” and he will. He’s being a good godfather.
On Velvet Goldmine, one of our executive producers was Michael Stipe of R.E.M., and he did a bit more. Michael was on set about half the time. If we were shooting a difficult scene and Todd Haynes was preoccupied and some bigwigs decided to pay us a visit, I could say, “Michael, these people are coming to set. I want to keep them away from Todd, but I also want them to feel looked after.” He was surprisingly comfortable with my exploiting his celebrity for the film’s benefit, and sensitive about helping to protect Todd.
INDIE DEPENDENTS
In a conversation with me that was hosted by and written up in the New York Times, the big-deal Hollywood producer Lawrence Gordon (48 HRS, Waterworld) defined an independent film as purely and simply a film that’s for sale, financed in such a way that it doesn’t have any distribution deals attached, so you make it the way you want and then take it to the market. I haven’t worked that way in a while, although I had some exciting times in that position. There’s nothing better than taking a movie to a market and having it become the object of a bidding war. But there’s nothing worse than taking a movie to a market and not having someone want to buy it.
What does it mean when a company puts money into a movie? What kind of creative control do they have? How do you protect yourself? If you’re a neophyte with a long-shot film, you’re pretty much at their mercy. I have a track record, but the thing I argue most about with the companies bankrolling my movies—distributors, investors, studios, whatever—is approvals. I have the right as a producer to approve all creative choices: the actors, the cinematographer, the production designer. And they, of course, have the right as financiers to approve them, too, right? Sure. But what happens if we disagree? Who breaks the tie? It gets sticky.
I don’t want to overemphasize the importance of autonomy. The other day I was shanghaied by a European filmmaker who went on and on about how he was finishing his movie with his own resources because he didn’t want any dumb investors or distributors telling him what to do. Now, maybe he’s sitting on a masterpiece. But he should be so lucky if some dumb distributor wants to buy his film and give him advice on how to edit it. One reason Kevin Smith was delighted when Miramax bought Clerks was that he had the chance to make it better, to fine-tune it on the company’s dollar.
One of the biggest problems with being accountable to one entity is that most people, even in the business, don’t know how to look at dailies, rough cuts, or assemblies and make any kind of real assessment. I’ve seen financiers become concerned about actors’ performances based on dailies, not realizing that if you look at seven takes of any actor doing a scene, he or she will be trying different things, and the director will be asking for different things. Maybe only one of those takes is good, but one is all you need. I’m always nervous about financiers seeing dailies. But it is absolutely their right, and all you can do is let them see the footage and have their say and try to talk them out of any wrongheaded ideas.
JOHN SLOSS
Entertainment Lawyer
People who are lawyers in the studio world have a much narrower set of issues to address each day than lawyers who work for independent filmmakers. It’s still all about contracts, but for independent film lawyers the issues that come up within the context of getting films financed from around the world, and obtaining the kind of control that indies seem to prize more than people who work in the studio system, bring additional complexities.
You’d think that independent distributors who finance independent movies would be more sensitive to the desire of filmmakers to control their projects, but the paradox is that they can often be less sensitive and more obtrusive; they have more at stake in any given film than, say, a large studio that is financing a film at a low budget. Some of the best experiences I’ve had with independent-type films have been at studios where the budget is sufficiently below the radar that they trust the directors and producers enough to let them go off and make their movie. To Fox or Warner, $2.5 million—that’s interest on interest. That’s tips. But at, say, October Films, that’s their bottom line, so they’re going to make sure the project comes out right—often by trying to retain more control than someone else might.
If you do have a situation like that, a fairly common legal strategy would be to make your filmmaker “pay and play” for a couple of weeks of photography. Let’s say that he or she has written the script and wants to direct for the first time. There’s motivation on the part of financiers and distrubutors to say, “We already have the script, so let’s get someone who really knows how to direct, who has experience.” For the writer, that’s one of the worst things in the world: here’s something that has sprung from your head, that you’ve developed, that you’ve fashioned into a script worthy of being green-lit, all so you’d be able to direct it—and you’re fired. The compromise that the lawyer can now propose is that the writer be “pay and play,” meaning they can’t get fired during the first two weeks of photography—which gives them a fair opportunity to show they’re either competent or incompetent. What you’re saying is, “You can’t treat me like a hired hack.”
Another thing that independent film lawyers oversee is optioning properties, especially books. The challenge there is that the producers don’t have much money, so they can’t pay a lot up front. Whereas if someone who works for a studio buys a book, you know they’re paying retail. What you have to do is convince the people whose properties you want to option that they’re not going to get rich from granting the option, but they have a chance to get rich from what’s made. Since there’s a wildly varying potential range of budgets on independent films, the best way to approach those options is to pay low up front for the option, and then an option-exercise price that is tied to a percentage of the budget, so that it can slide up and down.
The earlier the money comes in, the more you have to compromise down the line. I dedicate a lot of my career to keeping people from selling a disproportionate amount of what they have for relatively little in times of need at the beginning of a project. I know that sometimes that need is great, and that there are a lot of struggling would-be filmmakers who can’t pay their rent or buy groceries. So I find myself saying, “Look, I’m not in a position to pass judgment on how much you need this money. I’m a lawyer. If you need this money, I’ll take you at your word. But this is what you’re giving up….”
You sometimes make wrenching sacrifices for the kind of cash a company will give you. On one of my films, for which the financing was in a state of near-collapse, the principal backer decided that a condition for giving money was to make the director and the star “essential elements.” That means that if something happened to them—if, say, in the second week of shooting, one of them got hit by a truck and died—the film would cease production, and they’d get all their money back.
The problem was the insurance exam, which is more complex for those deemed essential elements. The company wants to know: “Will this person live for the next ten weeks?” It wants X-rays, an EKG—and something else, which we didn’t know about in advance. I got the news from one of those essential elements, who called me from the hospital in a panic: “They’re making me take a drug test! And I’m not going to pass.”
The person smokes pot. Little alcohol, no hard drugs, but more than an occasional toke—although never while working: only at home, before bed. “Are you sure it shows up in your blood?” I asked, innocently.
Ha. I’m an authority now. It stays in your bloodstream for six weeks.
I called the executive producer, who said: “That can’t be what they’re testing for. It must be hard drugs.” Ironically, though, if you’re a cokehead or a heroin addict, relax: Those things go right out of you, a few days and they’re gone. And you can also be the biggest alcoholic on the planet, but they won’t test for that.
The insurance company called the executive producer and said, “One of your essential elements failed the drug test. We’ll only insure the movie if a drug test is administered every two weeks.” The executive producer informed me in no uncertain terms that the person would have to stop smoking pot. “It’s four weeks before the start of a major film,” I said, “and you’re telling me you want to eliminate this person’s one source of relaxation?” The executive producer—a chain smoker who can drink to a state of near-blackout—tsk-tsked: “Well, you know, Christine, it’s not legal.”
So I went and found a Dutch underwriter. In the Netherlands, marijuana is legal.
The insurers blew a gasket when they thought they’d lose all our money over what was clearly a trivial issue. “Hold on, hold on, hold on,” they said, suddenly ready to bargain. “Okay, the essential element doesn’t have to take any tests. But we’ll need a deductible against drugs.” A lot of this person’s salary ended up being withheld until the picture was completed, although everyone—eventually—got paid. I know, marijuana is illegal, and I’m not advocating its regular use. But hassles like that are the reason filmmakers swear off making big-budget movies.
FOREIGN AFFAIRS
Another way to go is to do a couple of foreign sales, and then get a bank to finance you based on the strength of those sales. You can worry about an American distributor later—if you can prove you’ll make your budget back on the foreign sales, then North America’s gravy. Or you can attract foreign distributors on the strength of one investor. On Kiss Me Guido, which had a budget of around $800,000, we found a guy who was willing to give us some money against the North American rights, and then we managed to convince a foreign sales company—partly on the strength of my and Ira Deutchman’s reputation—that putting up fifty percent wasn’t going to bust them.
Who buys foreign sales? For the most part, you can name the two or three people in each country who will be interested in an American independent movie. For each country, a sales agent makes an estimate of what the film will be worth, then shows the estimate to the company you hope will finance the picture, saying: “See, this is how you’ll make your money.” Actors are a key factor in predicting foreign sales. You always hear people saying, “That actor means nothing foreign.” Or: “That actor’s not so big here, but he’s really big foreign.” Because Velvet Goldmine has a bona fide international star in Ewan McGregor, the prices it has fetched in foreign markets have been higher than anything we’ve gotten before.
You can cobble together your production costs out of foreign presales, but you need to know what you’re doing. You can’t walk into a foreign sales office and say, “I want to make this movie, this is who’s going to be in it. Can I have $50,000, please?” You usually don’t get the money until you give them the film. So how are you going to handle your cash-flow in the meantime? You get a bank to do it. Or you get an investor who charges you a financing fee in order to “cash-flow” your contracts.
A few years ago, a lot of film distributors in various countries relied on television financing. The German and the English stations in particular were responsible for many American independent films being made. The process worked like this: In England, Metro Pictures negotiated to buy your movie. Meanwhile, they made sure that they could turn around and sell it to Channel 4, which offered them the equivalent of $60,000. So Metro offered you $40,000 for the U.K. theatrical and television rights. Their assumption was that even if the release was a total disaster, they’d still have their back end covered.
In that situation, you could always say, “Screw you! I’m going to sell it to TV myself.” But then you’d never see the film in theaters because it’s more difficult—especially with “challenging” indie movies—to sell theatrical rights if TV rights aren’t available.
The situation changes by the day, however. A lot of the stations that bought independent movies were government subsidized. They’re on their way out because of Skychannel and all the alternative cable channels. Channel 4—which now distributes theatrically—is thriving, but that’s because they’ve made some smart choices. A lot of the others are sinking fast.
PIECES OF THE ACTION
Should you shoot a film in pieces? Living in Oblivion was made in two chunks. So were Go Fish and Swoon and a lot of independent features you know and love. But I’m not sure I want to advocate this practice. It’s one of those things where if it works it’s a good idea, and if it doesn’t it’s a bad one (like putting your own money into movies). You don’t see the hundreds of films that were started that way, didn’t get finished, and never will. The scenario goes something like this: You run out of money; you lug what you have around to show people; you wait; you lose all your momentum; and the film becomes old news while people are looking to get excited about the next new thing. Plus, you can have serious continuity problems, the way we did when an actor in Swoon showed up after a hiatus twenty-five pounds heavier.
Let’s say then, here you are, trying to finish up your movie. You hit the What Do We Do Now? stage, in which the film is half-cut, but you don’t have the chunk of change you need to get it to that 16mm release print—anywhere from $10,000-20,000, depending on how much sound work needs to be done. That’s when you either hold another bake sale (or any other kind of fundraiser), go back to your parents for more money, or sometimes, start showing what you have to distributors. That’s when it gets tricky, because if you’re showing something to a distributor in that state, you’re a fire sale, and they know it. You pretty much have to accept what they offer.
The makers of Go Fish did one shoot on their own for maybe seven or eight thousand—no one knows for sure, because no one kept a careful accounting. Rose Troche, the cowriter, coproducer, and director was working at a school, which is where she got her equipment, and her cast was largely friends and neighbors, so her expenses were mainly 16mm film and processing. When she came to me with what she had, I put in about five thousand of my own money to keep it alive and meanwhile shopped the half hour or so to distributors. No one got it. One executive was so bored he started talking to me halfway through about the restaurant where he’d gone the night before.
I had told these girls that I was going to get the money for them, and I really believed I could. Much later, when I started to meet more monied lesbians, they’d say, “Oh, if you’d just come to us.” Yes, I could have tried to find those mythical lesbian accountants and lawyers and doctors, but at the time I didn’t know anyone. So I finally went to John Pierson, a successful producer’s rep who had a company of his own and a good-sized finishing fund. He was also skeptical, but to his credit, finally said, “It’s not that much money: Let’s just do it.” He bankrolled us $50,000 at that point to finish shooting, do the post, do the sound mix, and get the film to a release print. It wasn’t long before he knew he’d hit pay dirt.
What happens if you can’t raise the kind of money you need even to start your feature film? Make a short so you’ll have something to show. You can save up four or five thousand, borrow equipment, or find a “young filmmakers” organization (most cities have one) where you can rent it cheaply. If you shoot day exteriors only, you won’t need lights. You can buy short ends, leftover stock from other movies. It’s a good idea to have several shorts on your resume. Ted Hope of Good Machine won’t even consider doing a feature with a first-timer who hasn’t made a short film. I will, but I understand Ted’s point.
So start saving up. Hit on your parents. Cultivate rich friends. Find a big pool of investors who’ll each invest a little money. Convince some bankable star to be in your movie. Or come up with an idea that’s really commercial—and don’t say “Commercial? Moi?” because this is a commercial art form, even for people who fancy themselves the Last of the Independents. Most important, think about who your audience is and pitch your film accordingly. If that audience is Buddhist cello players, great, but maybe that’s a movie that shouldn’t be made for five million dollars.