by Stephen Eyer
For the past five years, my wife and producing partner, Daneen Akers, and I have been working full-time on a social documentary film called Seventh-Gay Adventists (http://www.sgamovie.com) about three gay and lesbian members of a conservative church and their challenge to reconcile their faith and sexuality. We spent the last year on the road traveling with the film in the U.S., Canada, and Australia at film festivals, churches, and community centers. Our last major festival screening will be on Dec. 5th as part of Frameline’s Encore series (http://www.frameline.org/now-showing/events/frameline-encore-seventh-gay-adventists) in San Francisco. Although we’ve been asked at filmmaker gatherings before if we’re selling marijuana on the side to make rent, we’ve actually been making enough to both pay for our expenses and fund the film primarily through cultivating an engaged and motivated grassroots community that believe in this film.
The following are 10 things we learned about how to sustain yourself as a filmmaker while making films that can have a positive impact on the world.
A little background
Daneen and I grew up in the Seventh-day Adventist church with family ties that go back generations. We joke at screenings that because she was a fifth-generation Adventist and I was only a fourth-generation Adventist, she clearly is more holy than I am. While the question of whether or not we currently identify as Adventists depends very much on the definition the inquirer has in mind, this is a world we know and understand. The film Seventh-Gay Adventists happened because we were attending a small, progressive church in San Francisco that wasn’t Adventist, but it met on Saturdays and was led by former Adventist pastors, so it felt familiar. When Prop 8 came through California in 2008 and stirred up a great deal of anti-gay religious rhetoric, it became a refuge for LGBT Adventists in the Bay Area who had been made to feel unwelcome–or were even kicked out–of their congregations. We decided after witnessing the marginalization that our friends were experiencing, that we needed to do something about it. We couldn’t stand by with our hands in our pockets, and film and stories were the tools we knew how to use. So we packed our things, put our nine-month-old daughter in the back of the car, and set off on a journey to see what we could do to change stereotypes and provoke conversation.
1. Good stories will find you. We would never have just picked this topic if we were sitting down trying to come up with a film project that we could devote five years to. It catapulted itself into our lives. We started asking questions that demanded answers. Questions like, “How can a people who claim to believe in a loving God treat their members this way?”, “Do we want our daughter to be part of a denomination that marginalizes people like this?”, and “How can we break through stereotypes and help people see the common humanity in all of this?” Francis Ford Coppola once said, “Making a movie is like asking a question, and when you finish, the movie itself is the answer.” We needed answers, so we set out to make a movie.
2. Choose a project with a motived audience. The challenge with a small niche documentary like ours is that it doesn’t have mass market appeal. You do not make a living by selling thousands of copies of a film like this on the back end. The revenue model is actually flipped in this type of filmmaking. The money comes during the process of making the film by those who believe in the film’s vision. And really, in the early days before we had a clear idea what the film would be, people just believed in us, which is why our credibility within this community mattered so much. I wouldn’t want to leave the impression that it wasn’t hard financially–we haven’t had consistent healthcare in several years, our buffer is practically non-existent, and once when we were filming in Atlanta we realized that after the babysitter cashed a check we were going to have $2 to our name–but we have made it. This film taps into a motivated audience whose voices haven’t been heard. The vast majority of LGBT Adventists we’ve met would say they feel as on the margins of the gay community because of their deep faith, particularly as part of a church not known for tolerance much less acceptance, as they do in their church because of their LGBT identity. So these are voices little heard, and a growing grassroots community began to support this film throughout the process of making it.
3. Engage with your audience authentically. As Ted Hope has written in this space frequently, engaging with your audience very early on is crucial. Daneen is a natural communicator and has moderated our Facebook page for years with a tone our fans have come to trust. She’s open, honest, vulnerable, and personable, sometimes sharing things that feel too vulnerable to me, but it’s resulted in a very engaged fan base that she’s constantly dialoguing with. The key reason why it’s worked is that she’s genuine in her deep passion for the conversations this film is sparking and our audience knows that.
4. People give when they see you actually doing something. When we set out on our first filming trip (a three-month, 11,000 mile road trip where we set up story booths in major Adventist population centers around the country to just start to deeply listen to this community), we had very little money. Yet, our first significant donation (enough to fund that whole trip) came while we were on the road, 1,000 miles from home. This seemed to happen over and over on this project. The funding came when we actually did something. Taking a risk created momentum, and it showed our audience that we could be trusted to act and not just talk about an idea.
5. Making a documentary film takes a long time. Technically this is our second feature documentary, but it’s far more ambitious in scope and form than our first film, and while we knew good documentaries take time, I don’t think we really had any idea how long it would take us to get this film made, screened, and distributed. From idea to delivery, it’s been nearly five years! And I know that’s quick for some docs. Yet, you can’t rush a good story. Unlike for our fictional filmmaking friends, there is no script. So we had to be patient to see a character arc happen, to get to know the essence of our stories well enough to do them justice. Communicating with our core supporters and the growing grassroots community throughout all of this was crucial.
6. Find a fiscal sponsor like the SFFS who can make donations to your film tax-deductible. When it came to funding, this film has always been a bit on the margins, much like our film subjects. We aren’t big name directors with Ivy-league networks, and we only ever got a modest grant from the Pacific Pioneer Fund (bless them). At first we imagined that the new era of crowdfunding would be our answer. And crowdfunding has helped us–we just finished a very successful Kickstarter campaign (http://www.sgamovie.com/kickstarter) to fund the wide release, and an early IndieGoGo was helpful. However, the vast majority of our funding came from personal asks, and having the tax-deductible route for contributions through SFFS was vital. Not only did this give the project oversight and credibility, but working with the SFFS also meant we were able to have access to their amazing filmmaking services and mentorship. They gave us the framework to make our film happen.
7. Hire people better than you. I edited our first feature, and I was pretty set on editing this film to save on funds. But Michele Turnure-Salleo, the director of filmmaker services at the SFFS, strongly suggested (repeatedly) that we really should hire an editor. We were too close to our footage (at that point we had almost 150 hours). We finally agreed, and we worked with Richard Levien, an incredible Bay Area editor whom I met at a SFFS master’s editing class with Walter Murch (and we also saw the last feature doc he’d edited, D-Tour at the SF Intl where it won an award). He was a fantastic collaborator and could ask the questions from the outside that Daneen and I had stopped noticing since we were so deeply immersed in the film subject’s stories. If I had to point to one decision that was significant, I’d choose working with Richard as our editor as the one that brought out the best of this film.
8. Theatrical screenings still matter. It gradually dawned on us just as we were celebrating finishing post that we were only half done. Except for the rarified few, most filmmakers have to spend as much time and energy promoting their films as they do making it. (We spent two years filming, and we’re going to be going on three for post, screenings, and distribution soon). We spent 18 months screening the film at over 70 screenings for diverse audiences. We went from LGBT film festivals with sophisticated film audiences to small churches in the heart of Texas where it was clear watching this film was the first time many in the audience had ever engaged in this conversation at all. Everywhere we went, we were amazed by the conversations paradigm shifts, and willingness to listen. We sold out at almost every festival, and festival programmers kept commenting that their audiences were highly engaged with the film. Particularly with a young child with an early bedtime and the challenge (and expense) of childcare, I consume most of my media on my laptop or iPad, and so I can forget the power of coming together for a community event.
Our screenings were powerful community spaces of connection and genuine engagement around a topic that has often been contentious, but the more conservative the area, the more profound the before/after looks on our audience faces (see: “When a Redneck Loved a Queer” http://www.believeoutloud.com/latest/when-redneck-loved-queer). As one audience member said, “Who would have thought a theater would become a sacred space?” Isn’t this why filmmakers create? To move audiences? Creating an event out of our film allowed our audiences to come together in ways that previously had never happened before. It was exhausting and exhilarating all at the same time. And at every screening we continued to grow that motivated community that wanted to get this film out there. (Also, except for the festival screenings that we didn’t host, we did free screenings through Eventbrite and asked for donations after the screening. We grew our newsletter list that way, and we almost always got more in contributions than we would have gotten if we’d charged for tickets, and our fans appreciated us keeping a non-profit spirit at our screenings.)
9. Like your movie, because you’ll see it a lot of times. We screened our film over 70 times, but I’ve probably seen it over 300 times by now. The thing is…I still like it, and I can even still be moved by it. In the end, I think this is what matters most.
10. It’s a movement, not just a movie. A niche social doc like this one isn’t going to ever get the attention of a breakout Sundance film, but it has an enormous capacity to cause waves and create conversations within its niche precisely because it’s not a big film. People walk away from it changed–and they can’t wait to share it with everyone in their life. That has been enormously gratifying to see happen, and it’s been why we have been able to sustain ourselves while making this film. It’s a film that matters enough to our community to actually fund.
Stephen Eyer is the producer/director of “Seventh-Gay Adventists” (http://www.sgamovie.com) which was recently released digitally via VHX and will be available on DVD/Blu-ray and iTunes shortly. The film is also being featured as a Frameline Encore event with a free screening at the Roxie in San Francisco on Thurs., Dec. 5 at 7 PM. Stephen lives in San Francisco with this wife Daneen Akers and their almost five-year-old daughter.
