March 8 at 7:44am

Invest in Artists, Not Art; in Individuals, Not Projects

, , , ,

MCN tipped me to this article in Barrons on Creative Capital’s practice of investing in the artist, and not the project.

BRENT GREEN WAS 25 AND ABOUT to relinquish his dream of becoming a filmmaker when he discovered Creative Capital.

Green had been looking high and low for a $14,000 grant to finish an animated film. Creative Capital, a nonprofit based in New York, sized him up and offered something entirely different: $43,000 to help support his career over the next three years. It would go toward everything from equipment to transportation to the cost of a publicist. In return, Green would give Creative Capital a small cut of any profits.

In the five years since then, Green’s work has been shown at the Sundance Festival and a number of museums and film festivals in North America and Europe. He has even found himself turning down galleries eager to represent his work.

Borrowing ideas from the venture capital industry, Creative Capital is encouraging their grant recipients to become Artrepreneurs, and it is literally paying off.  Out in in the general world of every-day entrepreneurs, several folks have joined together to create Thrust Fund, an online marketplace precisely for such personal investments.

There’s only so much creative work any of can do without funding.  Sure, I can cut my overhead and take jobs for hire, but I know that my best work comes when I am collaborating creatively at the earliest stages.  The difficulty with this approach is I DON’T GET PAID FOR IT.  I can not keep doing development because I can’t afford to do it.

Producers these days are forced to look for ready to go projects that they can earn a quick production fee on.  Sometimes you can get lucky and find those projects that are aligned with your sensibilities, but that is nothing more than good fortune.  This approach used to work under the idea of “one for them, one for me”, but as an agent recently said to me in an effort to explain why I should be happy to receive less than half of my regular fee for similarly budgeted projects “precedent is not even a word we know anymore”.  When rates are dropping, what’s one to do?  Take more jobs.  When one is forced to work on project after project that they did not development, what happens to the quality of the work?  It gets worse, a great deal worse.

VentureBeat has a good profile on the Thrust Fund including their involvement with at least one filmmaker.  The film biz should take notice of these new investment strategies pioneered by both Creative Capital and the Thrust Fund.  Filmmakers should move off of the one project at a time approach and start looking for investment in the ongoing conversation.

Suffice it say, I am open for offers…  although I do think this sort of thing can move us even closer to a world of indentured servitude.  For better or worse, I have always avoided any debt beyond my mortgage and single picture finance, but hey, there still is such things as good deals.

Share
  • Digg
  • Google Bookmarks
  • email
  • Print
  • John Sagoe
    Filming is business, like any other economic activity. May be the indie film maker is like the small scale one man shop owner except that that indie film maker has more responsibilities and much more overheads but fewer assets than the his counterpart in commerce. And that is perhaps what makes investment in him or his project riskier. A production house is a bigger and could be hustled through the courts if it fails an investor whereas an indie in a similar situation only needs to file for bankruptcy to get away with it and so it would always be difficult for indies to access financing.

    How to break the jinx without reach now as the competition for funding gets keener between indies and established production houses. May be alternating co-productions of indies coupled with some amount of patience could offer some hope and exchange of ideas be a somewhat solution to poor quality of indie productions what a fundamental requisite for extensive marketing.

    John Sagoe, Accra Ghana
  • doghouse
    Ted, you must realize that this lost world where indie producers collected substantial fees, and the pricier indie films were routinely acquired, was accessible to only a handful of productions, and provoked a good deal of resentment at the time, because indie films of the 1990s and early 2000s never represented world-class art-house cinema. Correct me if I'm wrong, but these films didn't make much money at the box office either -- a fact which apparently caught up with the business.

    In an ideal world, all meritorious individuals would be able to make a fine living in the movie business, including producers. But, frankly, it's hard to mourn with the plight of the indie producer, when virtually nobody else could make a living from independent film, even during the boom.

    In countries with genuine art-house traditions, filmmakers typically graduate from tuition-free state-subsidized film schools, make their early films with state subsidies and eventually move on to co-productions in which public and private funds are intermingled. The last thing on anyone's mind is the producer, or the plight of the producer.

    I guess I'm trying to say that the trouble with independent film in the U.S. isn't the lack of adequate producer's fees.
  • Adam
    Among the most debilitating factors affecting independent film is the lack of financial resources, talent, and knowledge that would allow filmmakers to not only get their films made, but get them enough exposure to have a chance at recouping their budgets.

    An independent film must find the resources and proper handling it needs to gain exposure and recoup the money invested. Like it or not, this is a business. It doesn't matter if you are a storyboard artist, investor or PR Agent, nobody can afford to work for free. There needs to be a concerted effort within the industry to pool knowledge and resources together in order to make independent film competitive once again.
  • jdslat
    You need to consider, Ted, that most of your readers here have never had access to a production which could support a producer's fee. And no need to point out that most non-Hollywood writers and directors have no prospect of ever earning a living from their work.

    If by independent film we simply mean a subset of commercial moviemaking, such as that represented by Hurt Locker, then maybe we should drop the claims of individuality of vision, high artistic purpose, etc., claims which haven't been well supported over the years and simply talk about money and finance instead.

    Or, if we're talking about an art form, maybe we need to drop the talk about making money. The claim that we can somehow navigate the demands of art and commerce was, for this moviegoer, thoroughly debunked years ago.
blog comments powered by Disqus

This site could not have been built without the help and insight of Michael Morgenstern. My thanks go out to him.

Help save indie film and give this guy a job in web design or film!